Ask Lemmy

Realistically anybody who can take control of a country is a bit of a ruthless cunt, and ones that take over in an armed uprising especially so.

It's not a massive shock that some of them don't want to give up the crown once they've got it.

Even in so called democracies, we basically get to choose our "king" from a heavily vetted list. It ain't going to be people like me and you rising to the top.

Because people suck ass, and to successfully go from capitalism to socialism and then to communism, you need a whole population that puts the needs of the many above their own selfish desires. It's not impossible, but it's gonna be hard to truly accomplish.

The main reason is the Monroe Doctrine. The United States literally made it its business to terrorize any "communist" state, even if it's democratically elected. That breeds the conditions for paranoia, the desire for increased protection, etc.

But, in the context of endgame scenarios against dictators, the main factor usually is how the military responds, especially when asked to brutalize the population. If the military parts ways, they may start a coup of their own or they may (rarely) defer to the population.

So, by extrapolation, I imagine it's also true here: other powerful factions allow it because it opens opportunities for them to garner more power too. Business execs, politicians, and military officials alike are duking it out for influence amongst themselves as well.

Simple. Power corrupts. Even with a socialist government there is always gonna be power hungry people seeking authority over their constituents. Think of the majority as sheep, comfortable with being herded and the power hungerers as the wolves slavering to enslave them.

Even popular egalitarian movements face significant resistance to social and economic change. This will not only come from elites who stand to loose from social change, but also from common people who for one reason or another oppose that which benefits themselves. Beyond the social and economic connections to the elite, the social inertia to change is on the side of capital.

The solution, from Bolivar to Lenin to Castro has been to force the people to be free because you can't have socialist democracy if people would vote to return to capitalism or colonialism.

Leftists have long talked about "educating" the populace, but this is another tempting avenue for creeping totalitarianism. It's not like capital is innocent of coercion, but so long as it accommodates the ignorant, it has an overwhelming advantage over a system that requires an improved humanity.

I suppose we'll iron this out. Remember that the social anchors for capital are hundreds of years old and have their roots in feudalism and aristocracy. Socialism is young and her sins are close in our minds not because their failures are extraordinary but because they're recent.

Because at its very base it’s conceived in violation of consent.

“From each according to his capacity” is the absolute essence of exploitation. Like, there’s no more straightforward way of saying “You look like resources and we’re gonna take everything you have”.

It’s only a “good idea” if you don’t think of people as having free will and the ability to consent. Communism is a great idea if you’re playing Command & Conquer and all your little units exist only to act as pawns in your game.

Because nobody’s claiming all this stuff that’s now just freely lying around. Someone better claim it before it gets gone.

I'd ended up having a conversation with an archivist about the somewhat related question of "What was the Soviet Union's history of itself, absent the editorializing that the rest of the world has been doing?"

For example, Tamim Ansary wrote Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes that explained a lot of things about the middle east through that sort of lens, so I was hoping that someone would write a history of the USSR in a similar fashion, which I didn't find.

One of the problems we have when approaching the more successful world governments is understanding ... well, I guess good intentions? There's kinda two sides to the story of Dear Leader. On one side, the self-aggrandizement as the father of the country, on the other side the act of actually trying to be the father of the country. Obviously a strongman today is mostly running the show almost entirely for selfish reasons but what you kinda see in the USSR and modern day China is at the same time an attempt to make the state better off. Which, of course, falls prey to effective use of power. "Do this or you will be executed" doesn't work very well.. not with the US approach to the death penalty, not to the totalitarianism of the attempted Communist state.

But, even today, there's tons of "Good idea, bad implementation" things that the Chinese government does where the rest of the world governments just let things get worse.

The vibes I was getting in the days of Lenin from my reading was interesting. Lenin was the leader of the USSR but not in the way that Stalin was. The Bolsheviks of the time insisted that things be discussed and debated and worked through and not even Lenin was above that. And there was a very forward-looking idealistic sort of viewpoint. They could reject everything and do things right for once and many of them were new to power so they were freed of that worldview. And a lot of those things didn't pan out as well as they wanted it to and people started to need to be "convinced" to do the new thing. First the "useless" hereditary upper-class, but then everybody else. And then eventually Lenin died and Stalin didn't have that much patience for the Bolshevik old-guard and took over.

tl;dr: In a sense, it's as if a bunch of Star Trek fans had toppled a government and were trying to build the best government ever for the future, using whatever means necessary.

Bureaucratic systems world based on control of information and decision making. If there are insufficient mechanisms for maintaining checks on power accumulation, those systems can be abused by psychopaths and used to accumulate power. The same applies to capitalist structures.

My bro your lucky you didn't ask this in lemmy.ml,hexbears and lemmygrad.

ITT

On Authority by Engels, question answered almost 200 years ago

Let's look at it this way - they were already going to be dictatorships, the dictator picked what he told the people they'd get. Most of the big ones all say Power To The People as they're pushing their way to the top, but as soon as they get there they make themselves permanent. Some of them took a pretty good stab at it like Mao or Stalin, but they killed their people in droves to make it happen. Once that happens you gotta stay in power or they're going to kill you. And of course, with themselves at the top of the heap, they took everything for themselves and The Party, and The Party became the end all and be all instead of actually advancing the country.