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I definitely didn't get my understanding of socioeconomics from Mao or militaristic dictators in general. Marx? Sure. Engels? Sure. Lenin? I mean, as an example of how to use workers' rights as a veil for the promotion of authoritarianism I guess. Reading the State and Revolution is an exercise in seeing how someone can take a good idea and use it to justify terrible shit.
Personally, I take a view of Marx and Engels as descriptivists. Reading works like the Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital, my takeaway is that these are describing a natural process whereby hoarding of wealth and influence inevitably leads to an overthrowing of power in a cycle that culminates in capitalism and the eventual seizing of the means of production in response by workers. When I read Lenin I see an accelerationist who wants to jump start this process and doesn't care how many people suffer and die in the interem.
To me, that's a form of interference that slows progress in the long run. If you start burning rocket fuel as soon as possible before acquiring enough to reach escape velocity, all you do is cause your rocket to crash back down to Earth if it gets moving at all. Do it hard enough or enough times without a controlled landing, hitting cities full of people with the wreckage, and you're just going to make people skeptical of rocketry.
That's not to say no one should do anything to bolster workers' rights, we absolutely should. It's a natural part of the process for people to be informed by theory and try to advance things. But that's far different from purging large portions of the population in order to shift the system in the span of a single generation before there's widespread support. The Dictatorship of the Proletariat is, to me, about the most anti-proletarian measure you can take. It slows things down and harms a lot of people with poor results. For evidence, literally look at Russia today. Look at the reputation communism has in Eastern Europe. Lenin and Stalin forestalled any possibility of a worker's uprising by at least a couple of generations. The same can be said of Mao.
And the reactions this post is going to get? I'm guessing many will be much more in line with the knee-jerk thoughtless mockery of South Park and Rick Sanchez than the considered and careful words of Marx and Engels. That also functions as a sort of steam valve letting off the required pressure to achieve meaningful results in favor of mindless posturing, which is why I often question its motivation. It serves the bourgeoisie, not the people.
Personally, I take a view of Marx and Engels as descriptivists.
Those are literally the words carved on his tombstone.
If only someone could explain why people like you want to defang Marx's writings with this blatant revisionism...
What is now happening to Marx’s theory has, in the course of history, happened repeatedly to the theories of revolutionary thinkers and leaders of oppressed classes fighting for emancipation. During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it. Today, the bourgeoisie and the opportunists within the labor movement concur in this doctoring of Marxism. They omit, obscure, or distort the revolutionary side of this theory, its revolutionary soul. They push to the foreground and extol what is or seems acceptable to the bourgeoisie. All the social-chauvinists are now “Marxists” (don’t laugh!). And more and more frequently German bourgeois scholars, only yesterday specialists in the annihilation of Marxism, are speaking of the “national-German” Marx, who, they claim, educated the labor unions which are so splendidly organized for the purpose of waging a predatory war!
That quote comes from The State and Revolution, which you claim to have read. A claim I find hard to believe considering that the author proceeds to painstakingly refute your exact line of thought and interpretation of Marx, by extensively citing, "the considered and careful words of Marx and Engels."
Lenin had contemporary critiques.
When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called "the People's Stick".
- Statism and Anarchy by Mikhail Bakunin
A concern is the vanguard party ruling over the prolitariate thereby exchanging capital ownership from one minority to another.
Engels argued the imbalance of ownership is natural because a mill is subject to the authority of the water to operate. There is a lack of imagination in justifying a ruling minority after the revolution by saying that's how capitalist technology works.
What good are my electric tools if I am unable to get electricity from the centralized power plant of the vanguard party? I will need to subject myself to the minority and pay rents. How does Lenin's vanguard party differ from capitalism in terms of ownership? Does it only work if the vanguard party are benevolent towards the prolitariat?
Then you agree with me.
What we are discussing here is not whether Lenin was correct but rather whether he had an accurate interpretation of Marx and Engles. If you want to argue that Marx and Engles were wrong, and that Lenin was wrong because he was following in that tradition, that's a completely different position from that of the person I replied to, that Marx and Engles were right and that Lenin was wrong because he deviated from that position.
I'm not really interested in getting sidetracked here from this point into this much broader discussion. I'd be happy to discuss it another time, but for now, we're talking about whether Lenin correctly interpreted Marx's writings and followed in his tradition or not.
I realize I expanded the scope by bringing Engels' "On Authority" into the conversation. I want to remain focused on Lenin's vanguard party as an implementation of the "dictatorship of the prolitariat". I agree that Lenin's ideas were informed by the writings of Marx.
Marx's "dictatorship of the prolitariat" could be implemented as a vanguard party as per Lenin. Lenin's iteration could be construed as accurate to Marx's definition.
However, Marx also referred to the Paris Commune as a "dictatorship of the prolitariat" even without a vanguard party. Therefore my qualm, similar to the original comment, is that Lenin's vanguard party is a method to extract rents from the prolitariat.
Trotsky argued for The Permanent Revolution as a counter to the vanguard. Might be interesting to read.
I haven't read much Trotsky. Thank you for the recommendation. I will give it a read. My fault with Lenin has been the mechanism by which the vanguard party relinquishes power to the prolitariat.
Stalin had Trotsky killed for how out spoken he had been on the USSR and its devolution from socialism to deformed communist state. one of his books FASCISM What It Is and How To Fight It is a great read, it explains the necessity for a party.
you might also be interested in Council Communism, it side steps the vanguard for a more transparent workers' democracy.
How dare I disagree with Lenin! Oh no!
You're not just "disagreeing with Lenin" (and characterizing my response that way is an obvious strawman/bad faith), you are disagreeing with Marx, and claiming he said the opposite of what he actually said. The only reason I cited Lenin is because he did a very through job of proving you are wrong, using the exact standard that you said you wanted, "the considered and careful words of Marx and Engels." It's not as though I'm expecting you to accept him as an authority.