255
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rejoins DSA after membership lapse of seven years
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2026
255 points (98.1% liked)
Progressive Politics
4946 readers
441 users here now
Welcome to Progressive Politics! A place for news updates and political discussion from a left perspective. Conservatives and centrists are welcome just try and keep it civil :)
(Sidebar still a work in progress post recommendations if you have them such as reading lists)
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I used the term peasant because you did.
Anyway, I'm not going to continue this. This will be my last comment here.
The workers are not the ones in power. There's a party that supports them nomitively, but those in power are sitting in offices and wearing suits. They aren't workers, and they have more power than the workers do. I don't know how you don't understand this.
I didn't say Communism would remove hierarchy. I said the issue is that it won't dissolve itself, at least if it stays around this long and establishes itself. The hierarchy, as always, gives too much incentive to those in power to maintain their power. That's why I'm an Anarchist, because those incentives should never be allowed to exist. It'll require another revolution to dissolve them, and then we're in the same situation we started with.
Assuming they'll just hand over power puts you in the same category as people who believe in benevolent monarchies/dictators. Maybe it can work for a short time, but power will be cemented and it'll never naturally be dissolved.
China was predominantly a semi-feudal country in 1949, the workers and peasants worked together to establish socialism. Over time, China has developed out of having a peasantry, thus there is no longer a peasant class. I apologize for any confusion this may have caused.
The biggest problem is that you are explicitly rejecting Marxist class analysis in favor of an entirely different, idealist form of class analysis. Office workers, administrators, etc. are workers. What makes a worker isn't where they work, or how they work, but their social relations to ownership of the means of production and distribution.
For example, consider a shoemaker. Said shoemaker lives his entire life making shoes. Our shoemaker here inherited a shop, which he owned. This made him petty bourgeois, and his thinking gradually shifted towards individualism. Then, hardship fell upon his shop, and he had to join a factory. He was still making shoes, but his class changed to proletarian. He no longer sought individual powers as a business owner, but instead gradually came to join the shoemaker's union and agitate for collective ownership.
The job was effectively the same, but the class and thus the class ideology changed.
In China, the commanding heights of the economy are overwhelmingly publicly owned. The CPC is an overwhelmingly proletarian party. The fact that high administrators have more material benefits does not make them a class, as they share the same social relations as the rest of the proletariat, and thus are also emancipated by furthering collectivization.
This is Marxist class analysis.
Your analysis does fit anarchism. Your issue isn't with class, but with hierarchy. Socialism does not need a second revolution to abolish worker power, it will gradually develop into communism and class distinctions are gradually abolished. Your analysis returns to idealism, it lacks a materialist basis and thus runs into problems when applied to reality.