I’m talking about both before and after revolution, such as in this comment where I talk about democratic systems in post-revolutionary socialist states. This was 2 comments ago, either you forgot about it already or didn’t read it, neither of which shows any real sense of care for truth on your part.

Secondly, as I explained in my last comment, “intellectuals” are not a class. They belong to broader classes. Vanguards are indeed supposed to teach the rest of the working classes how to correctly struggle. Are you going to tell me that teachers in schools are an “elite class” too? This is just anti-intellectualism. Not everyone is going to be dedicated to studying revolutionary theory and history, not everyone is going to be a labor organizer, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have people dedicated to doing so.

Classes are social relations to production. The vanguard party and non-vanguard working class both have the same ownership over the means of production, just like your manager at whatever job you have likely isn’t an owner either.

Where are you getting all of these confused ideas about class, socialist democracy, and vanguards from? It certainly isn’t from Marx, Engels, Lenin, etc, nor is it from historical documentation.

Both .ml instances are extremely broadly federated. Grad is defederated by more instances, but nevertheless remains federated on their end, meaning Grad accounts see pretty much everything except a few instances.

“Intellectuals,” or whatever term you wish to describe them as, are not a class, but a subsection of every class. Each class has its own “intellectuals,” there are proletarian intellectuals and there are capitalist intellectuals. What the vanguard is, is a group of the working classes dedicated to revolution, professional revolutionaries. They are not “elites.” Here’s a diagram from Lady Izdihar, with the “organized core” being the vanguard:

Classes are not simply any way you can categorize people, but specific social relations to production. Yes, steel workers are often members of vanguard parties. I organize with a communist party and have a full-time job. I’m not “acting” like you’re mistaken, you are mistaken, you do not know how vanguards function nor how democracy works within vanguards and socialist countries with vanguard parties, otherwise you wouldn’t be acting like vanguards are a “class” and that they aren’t democratic.

Vanguards are both worker run and democratic. Vanguards are a subsection of the working classes, not a class of their own or outside class struggle, and are both democratic internally, as well as establishing systems of democracy externally. I’m really not sure where you’re getting the idea that believing the working class needs to be organized for revolution means democracy is suddenly off the table.

For example, in the USSR, first-hand accounts from Statesian journalist Anna Louise Strong in her book This Soviet World describe soviet elections and factory councils in action. Statesian Pat Sloan even wrote Soviet Democracy to describe in detail the system the soviets had built for curious Statesians to read about. Today we have Professor Roland Boer’s Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance to reference for other socialist countries, with their own forms of democracy.

So again, why lie about what I believe? I’m not responsible for you not knowing what a vanguard is or how socialist democracy works, but you feel very confident in telling me that I’m lying about it.

I’m certainly not an “expert,” but it does appear that way, yes. The global south is rising in development, which is breaking down the system of super-exploitation the west has relied on. Without a strong industrial base, austerity is forced, which breeds discontent. Something is always rising, and something is always dying away. Dialectics at work.

Nope, not what I believe at all, and the fact that you have to invent my beliefs proves you can’t actually argue against my real ones.

You are indeed correct. Lemmy.world is less democratic than dbzer0.

Ah, gotcha. They are employing more draconian measures as they are forced into austerity politics by imperialist decay, because they need to exert a tighter grip on a population that does not want austerity. This, of course, breeds more resistance, as you pointed out.

I’m not defending mass murder, I’m defending the right of the working classes of Russia to overthrow the brutally violent Tsarist regime, and their right to defend the new socialist system they created. I’m defending the revolutionary leader that helped organize and facilitate that progressive movement that freed the working classes of Russia from conditions so brutal they died at an average age of 33, in wooden shack houses with minimal heating, all while the Tsar and capitalists made vast quantities of money and colonized the surrounding areas.

You’re batting for the Tsar. The Russian working classes killed the Tsarists and capitalists that had been terrorizing them for centuries.

This is vulgar class reductionism. The US and Germany are both imperialist countries that bribe their proletarians with a share of the spoils of international plunder. Israel is a genocidal settler-colony that serves as a forward base for imperialist countries in West Asia. Not only is this vulgar class reductionism, but it’s intentional misinterpretation. Saying “death to xyz country” means elimination of the state and the system, not genocide on the people of said country.

What do you mean? The state acts depending on the circumstances it finds itself in, and the stage of class struggle. States prohibit more as class struggle heightens and from external and internal pressures, that’s what drives it.

I don’t think it’s particularly interesting that anarchists defederated from Zionists.

You’re arguing against the people wielding their power against Zionists and in favor of Zionists being able to speak freely. You moved to an instance with stricter defederation, showing you don’t care about defederation in the abstract, but what was being defederated.

Yet another example of why the abstract concept of “authoritarianism” is useless. In this case, the people of dbzer0 decided democratically to wield their authority to defederate from an instance with an explicit Zionist problem. It isn’t the defederation that’s the problem in the abstract, or the authority, it’s the fact that this authority was used against Zionists.

Yep, or they realize it means democratic control by the proletariat, dictatorship against capitalists and fascists, as Marx intended, but then think socialist countries all misunderstood Marx and established capitalist-style dictatorships of the few. This is a deeply chauvanist attitude though, that assumes people in socialist countries too stupid to understand basic Marxist concepts (despite having higher functional literacy rates than the US Empire).

Lemmy.ml has a lot of communists, and dbzer0 is mainly anarchists with some communists as well. We have a lot more in common with each other than with feddit.org, which as we can see has a bad history with Zionism at the admin level. It’s entirely consistent to defederate feddit.org, which dbzer0 voted for as an instance, while remaining federated with Lemmy.ml.

Liberalism arose as a bourgeois ideology to use against the feudalist systems, the equivalent in feudalism being the clergy and the church. The mode of production capitalism is based on individual ownership of capital, and claiming the labor-power sold by workers is equal in position to the capitalists buying the labor-power and selling commodoties.

Liberalism was left when feudalism was dominant. Putting it in its historical context, it helped overthrow feudalism. However, there is no “Absolute Idea” of Hegel, what was progressive at one point is still reactionary at a later point. In the era of capitalist decay, socialism is on the left, the progressive ideology.

The bolsheviks never targeted the cultural Cossack people, nomadic Steppe horse riders, but instead “Cossacks,” Tsarist troops that ran down peasants on horseback. They had the same name because the Tsar relied heavily on recruiting the Cossack people, but it wasn’t a random decision to commit genocide like you’re framing. That’s why your own link says information on the subject is highly blurred and contested:

Several scholars have categorised this as a form of genocide,[6][7][8][9][10] whilst other historians have highly disputed this classification due to the contentious figures involved, which range from “a few thousand to incredible claims of hundreds of thousands”.[11][12][13]

Lenin didn’t order the deaths of random people. Lenin led a revolution, one which overturned the incredibly brutal Tsarist system. Lenin did not unilaterally impose socialism, it was something fought for by the working classes. The White Army (the Tsarist forces), the fourteen capitalist nations that invaded Russia during its revolution, and the former ruling classes were all fought by the revolutionary peoples led by Lenin. In eliminating Tsarism, and establishing socialism, the transition from pure squalor resulted in doubling of life expectancy, tripling of literacy rates to 99.9%, free and high quality healthcare and education for all, the right to a job, certified home ownership, and much more.

Mark Twain spoke this of the French Revolution:

THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.

The Russian Revolution was much the same. Hundreds of millions of lives were uplifted and saved by it. That is why Lenin is remembered as a hero even in post-socialist Russia.

I assume so, but you never know 🤷

Why not? Marx supported the Paris Commune, and was critical of them for not going far enough to solidify the revolution. Marx supported communists and revolutionaries, he was an organizer himself.