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Meme at flippanarchy (lemmygrad.ml)

submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I thought the whole idea is that the state is also "owned" by those working in it, just as everything else. Isn't waiting for the perfect Utopia to sprout out of thin air and instead focusing on infighting kinda useless and beside the point? I'm confused whether it's me who doesn't understand or "them". So I wan't to ask a guestion here as I did there: how is any of this supposed to work if no state (no ruling authority) can exist? Say maintaining infrastructure in areas where no natural resources, industry for refining or skilled labor for extracting, refining and maintaining naturally exist? I don't believe that any human society can function without some level of authority (thinking legality in disputes and such) and in order to provide everything needed for infrastructure maintenance some authority must tell others where to go with everything.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Anarchists see state control as no different than private ownership control. Obviously this is not true, but we as communists know there are dangers to this kind of unchecked power. Ceausescu in Romania, for instance, and Pol Pot, we’re both different kinds of horrible for their people, although I’d argue that Pol Pot and his regime were communists in name only and did not really understand what Marxism was, and Ceausescu had no intention of being anything but a dictator who had insane ideas about building cheap televisions for the west and being the Romanian Mao Zedong.

That being said, anarchism is not a coherent ideology for the reasons you said. There needs to be hierarchies for dispute settling and a system for managing the economy and the direction of it at large. Also for things that are not profit motivated (or shouldn’t be) and are necessary in our society.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

No offense but you don't understand Romania's socialist period if you think it is remotely comparable to the Khmer Rouge period in Cambodia. Romania was not that different from the average socialist bloc eastern European country of the time. Far from making the lives of Romanians worse, the socialist period rapidly developed the country and greatly improved the lives of the people.

Ceausescu was not what he was painted to be by the anti-communist propaganda you appear to have internalized. Power was not unchecked in the form of one person, Romania had a similar political system to other socialist states, led by the communist party with varying degrees of political participation and decisions made at different levels from the lowest worker councils up to the central committee and politburo.

Mistakes were undoubtedly made and Ceausescu shared a good portion of the responsibility for those mistakes, but there is no evidence that he didn't genuinely believe in the socialist project. Some of the policies were misguided but certainly not "insane", especially since they were not that different from what other socialist countries were doing at the time.

The reasons why Romania aligned itself the way it did had more to do with the material conditions of the country, as well as the broader geopolitical situation and the revisionist course of the post-Stalin USSR than with any personal ambitions or "insanity". Leave the "Great Man Theory" to the liberals.

If you are going to criticize Romania for trading with the West then you should criticize every other socialist country too because they all did it to some extent, even the USSR. Also, it's not Maoist China that Romania was looking to for inspiration when it felt it needed to set itself apart from the other more Soviet influenced socialist states in Eastern Europe. It was actually the DPRK, with which Romania had among the best relations.

On the one hand this deserves to be criticized as it is idealistic and not good materialism to try and emulate a country with such different social and historical characteristics. On the other hand, the DPRK was and is a very good model of a self-reliant society that managed to rapidly recover from total devastation after a war and build a strong military and industrial base.

I'm sorry for going on such an extensive tangent on this topic which has little if anything to do with the content of the post itself, but the record needed to be set straight on this. We are a Marxist-Leninist instance here and we should not perpetuate anti-communist myths and misconceptions.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

The first thing I said was differentiating them. I also don’t think the failures of Romania under Ceausescu should be understated like this. Forcing people out of rural situations and forcing them to set their own houses on fire so that they wouldn’t return to force industrialization doesn’t exactly seem like sound socialist theory to me.