polydigm
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Saving The World
The title is tongue in cheek. I certainly don't believe I can save the world and I'm not even sure it's saveable. I'm probably not as optimistic as
Caputh, although some kind of optimism meter would be required to be sure.
Anyway, this is a place for discussion about ways in which the world could become a better place.
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polydigm
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The Truth about Lenin
A lot of people consider the failure of the Russian revolution as proof that socialism cannot work, failing to acknowledge the blatantly obvious fact
that capitalism gets to keep on trying and failing miserably over and over again.
Anyway, the purpose of this post is to initiate a discussion about how many people actually know the full story of the Russian revolution and where it
went wrong. Marxism-Leninism comes in for a lot of criticism due to the failure of the Russian revolution, but few people know that Lenin didn't
really have a lot to do with it. He survived an assassination attempt on 30 August 1918 and eventually died of complications from his two bullet
wounds on 21 January 1924.
There is even a theory that Stalin poisoned him, but Lenin was in very poor health. Whether or not Stalin had anything to do with the original
assassination attempt has also not been established.
Lenin wanted a decentralised Soviet Union, whereas Stalin wanted the opposite. Lenin was very critical of Stalin. Stalin basically used Lenin's name
as a mask for his own bullshit. Whatever was going in the Soviet Union after Lenin died, it wasn't Marism-Leninism. I believe that Lenin was a genuine
revolutionary and what happened to him is what generally happens to genuine revolutionaries.
Just be clear, I am not a Marxist-Leninist. If I wanted to be it would require a huge amount of work which I'm not willing to do. I'm basically a self
indulgent musician, but my eyes are wide open and the world is being run by thugs and sociopaths.
I'm not sure what form it would take, but if a new and better system is to replace the current one, some of its key features would have to be based
around decentralisation. A system in which it is impossible for individuals to become obscenely wealthy and powerful. I'm not quite sure how to
explain it, but there would have to be smaller "economic" units that would trade with each other, but not in the historical sense of the word.
Mutually share, or some such term. Some areas would be based around farming or mining projects, some would be based around factories. Working would be
compulsory. For example, if a large number of people were available to run a factory and because of their number they only needed to work three days a
week each then so be it.
There's a lot of bullshit spoken about freedom, without really understanding what it is. Engels said: Freedom lies within the recognition of
necessity. A quote often misattributed to Lenin because he used it a lot. Anyway, a proper understanding of that statement is the crux of the
biscuit.
I remember this "discussion" I had with another student in an adult education school I went to back in 1981. The topic was Marxism and she was saying
that it had been disproven. So I asked her what she knew about it. Unlike me, who had already studied hundreds of pages on the subject, she actually
had read nothing, had a very naive view of what it was and was content to just be told it was garbage. Hilarious.
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Caputh
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My basic problem with Lenin is his inability to see Russians, or indeed humans, as individuals - not only in terms of differing points of view, but in
terms of the right to life, e.g under the policy of war communism and the NEP, in which mass-famine was an inescapable result and to which Lenin
refused to react, because he believed that the ideology was more important than peoples' lives.
This policy effectively provided a blueprint for Stalin's treatment of his own population, but on a larger scale. Let's also not forget that Marx saw
Russia as the last country capable of producing a Communist revolution.
It is Lenin's attempts to square that circle that led to the misery of repression that infected the revolution from the beginning IMHO. Stalin just
carried on the "good work".
I think it went wrong pretty early, therefore - basically because they were attempting to adapt an ideology for Russia that was not conceived to
operate there.
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polydigm
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So they were between a rock and a very hard place. Russia was a pretty miserable place for most people before the revolution. Having the rest of the
western world club together and try to smash their revolution didn’t help much either. They clearly weren’t in a good position to build a new type of
society. I probably should do a bit more reading about Lenin - I’m not sure about the details of what you’re referring to.
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polydigm
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My point about the Russian revolution - and socialism in general - is that many people are either misinformed or just plain completely uninformed and
too happy to leap to conclusions. What I get from Marx is what is basically a materialist or science based philosophy about history and social
organisation - I don't subscribe to his applications, most of which are way out of date by now. For example, two fundamental glaring mistakes were his
attitude to resources, that was basically viewing them as infinite relative to our needs for them and his attitude to people, that they're just blank
slates. The former is highlighted by the current global resources crisis and environmental situation and the latter is just completely debunked by
modern psychology.
It also doesn't pay to interpret too literally just exactly what the stages of history were in his view, but, I'm equally annoyed by people who use
his mistakes to discredit his philosophical basis, which is, to use a favourite phrase of his, throwing the baby out with the bathwater - a
materialist or science based philosophy about history and social organisation.
And, just because Marx indicated that Russia was one of the least likely places for a socialist revolution to work, doesn't mean it was therefore
impossible. What led to the failure, I believe, is the basic problem of how to build a social system that prevents corruption. A lot of people, will
just claim that you can't, because it's the human condition, but that's not a scientifically proven assertion. At worst it's a convenient and cynical
straw man for maintaining the status quo or at best, just pessimistic and defeatist resignation in my opinion. I believe that the current major social
organisation on this planet actually promotes the worst in people and that's why it seems so prevalent and unavoidable.
When early human beings were living a primitive life, hunting and gathering in the wild, they could not have had any inkling about barbarian life in
villages subsisting on agriculture and animal husbandry. These human beings in turn could not have had much of an inkling about civilian/slave life in
early slave based civilisations. And so on through feudalism and capitalism. None the less, as social systems have developed, accumulating knowledge
has enabled humans to better predict new possibilities, so whereas the historical revolutions from ancient slave based civilisations to feudalism were
unconscious ones, the revolutions from feudalism to capitalism were relatively conscious.
None the less, even in the latter case, it was largely instinctive and didn't occur until after many gradual modifications of the feudal way of life.
It's basically always just now. It's always hard to see very far beyond what's happening now. What I look for when I listen to anyone's ideas about
the world's problems and how to fix them is whether or not they are really and truly forward thinking. Anything that includes maintaining the current
situation with a tiny and obscenely wealthy and powerful ruling class is just bullshit as far as I'm concerned.
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