>socialist governments only go authoritarian because of U.S. meddlingWhen will this myth die out? They go authoritarian because Lenin was an explicit authoritarian who believed liberal democracy was a tool of capitalist oppression and that a vanguard party was necessary to achieve communism. Every socialist movement was laced with Soviet influence from the start and thus was bound to adopt Leninist ideas. Cuba was always going to be a dictatorship, Russia was always going to be a dictatorship, China, Vietnam, North Korea, etc were always going to be a dictatorship because up until the fall of the Soviet Union, Marxist-Leninism was the only form of socialism anyone gave a damn about. Ideologies like Anarcho-Communism and Democratic Socialism were completely irrelevant, they never held any real power or influence.
>>18756393>who believed liberal democracy was a tool of capitalist oppressionwas he wrong?it seems like liberal legislatures are either full of the super rich or openly bought by them
>>18756462yes, but that is, at least in an important sense, inevitable when a state governs a large enough mass of people in the modern/ contemporary age. Influence will always manifest itself in different ways, and in capitalist countries that's the way it does.
What about Marx? Was he an authoritarian? Was Lenin a genuine heir to Marx?
the ideology itself is rooted in authoritarianism. Communism is an ideology that rejects liberal democracy as a "rigged game" so they call for the seizure of state power through coups/revolutions/armed militias and then hold onto that power through violent means of authoritarian oppression. Its about absolute control of the state through the vanguard party and using the power of the state to crush anyone who protest this.
>>18756462>elected officials are richSo what? How is this even a valid criticism?
>>18756393They will be because they are leftists - people who got taught wrong as a joke.Western world got soft managerialism as a result of the revolution of mass and scale.Totalitarian state is hard managerialism. Soft managerialism = hedonism and indulgence in exchange for letting the managerial class construct panopticonHard managerialism = self sacrifice and deferred gratification or else the managers will break your skull.
>>18756393Communism is inherently authoritarian and every way to stopem are valid
>>18756393e-commies dont understand what communism actually is and cant comprehend second order of consequences. For example, communism is concerned with the STATE ownership of the means of production. e-commies often seem to misinterpret this as "worker" or "the people" owning the means of production, but you can look of the constitution of any communist country and it very clearly states that the STATE owns the land, factories, ect. on behalf of the people, so thats the first point. Second point is that cant comprehend the very obvious implication of what this means in terms of workers relationship to a factory for example in a communist vs an open market system. In the liberal west the factories are privatly owned so if a workers strike happens, this is a dispute between the workers and the factory owners, the state and various politicians are simply third party observers and not involved, although they can pick and choose to support either side depending on various factors. In a communist country if the workers strike, they are by extension going against the will of the state and are therefor behaving like reactionary trators.
communism is indistinguishable from fascism and nazism, all three should be shot. simple as.
>>18757098They buy office, anon.
>>18757274Basically, yes. Authoritarian. Will kill anybody in the way. All the big stuff tracks.
None of you have read Lenin, or Marx for that matter. Lenin was extremely interested in how a society could possibly become communist from capitalist conditions and formulated Leninism, which is less of a political philosophy than a framework for revolution and political rebuilding. Leninism actually had a lot of good criticisms of pre-WWI capitalism and there's a reason a lot of people venerate him as a "second marx" but the applicability of his framework has been passed by by history. It had its moment with the USSR but Stalin was a pants-on-head retard. When people say "real communism has never been tried" they mean "every communist state since 1918 has been stuck on stage 1 of leninism, nobody can get past it". IMO this means they should probably drop leninism but most will get mad at you if you tell them that
>>18757079Well Marx thought liberal democracies were dictatorships of the bourgeoisie, the obverse of this statement being that he sees no difference between an "authoritarian" state (a term invented in the 20th century) and a democracy. But he simply didn't see these things in terms of authoritarian or whatever. Additionally, Marx believed that Communism ie the final stage of human society, the state would exist as the "simple administrator of things". Essentially, that the state would be divorced from any political dimension, but would acquire a massive never before seen authority over material administration. This is sort of orthogonal to "authoritarianism" because on one hand this is obviously a much more powerful state in some ways, but in others it would be fairly benign and not really what you'd consider an authoritarian dictatorship.
>>18757091>rejects liberal democracy as a "rigged game"No, they recognize that "liberal democracy" end up resolving its contradictions by consolidating as a dictatorship of the capitalist class. The goal is to do the same thing with a proletariat class
>>18756393Materialist ideologies have zero explanation for why bread and circuses is a bad thing
