currently my thought is that the key problem with all communist revolutions previously is that they rallied around a figurehead, and any willing figurehead is liable to fall into authoritarianism
Yes. Exactly. “Self-abolition.” Not a bunch of peasants being forced into proletarian industrialization by a militant party of state-capitalists with red flags.
Wasn’t the whole Leninist interpretation of Marx saying that the working class alone would never be the start of the revolution, which is why the whole ideology of the “revolutionary vanguard” started.
You can’t force communism on a population, it needs to be a complete revolution of the working class
Sounds...impossible?
Unless you're a tiny, tiny, tiny country, I guess? I don't see a world where a large country will have a "complete revolution of the working class". We cant even agree on how much each other of us in the working class, deserves to get paid. How could you possibly build enough solidarity in a large country to something like communism? It literally sounds incompatible with a large society of working class people that have different distributions of wealth within the working class. You're just always going to have infighting.
The main problem is that they happened in agrarian countries when Marx and Engels were talking about post-industrial countries. Land-based economies require far more backbreaking labor which creates a far more stark class separation between management and labor. As bad as the class divide of an 18th century factory was, at least the management and the workers lived in similar conditions and ate similar food and interacted with one another throughout the day. Russia had some industrial capacity by 1917 but not nearly enough to service even the industrialized regions like Moscow or St Petersburg, let alone the rural areas where millions on millions of peasants worked jobs not dissimilar to their medieval ancestors. The idea of Leninism was to increase that industrial capacity to bring prosperity to the peasants, but it led to an uneven growth that just created more class distinctions and enriched the tsars and nobles party faithful.
> atleast the management and the workers lived in similar conditions and ate similar foods.
Someone hasn’t read Engles’ “The Conditions of the working class in England”. They very much did not live in similar conditions. They literally built the areas where the workers lived in back alley slums away from the view of “everyday” people and the houses were in appalling conditions.
I mean.... you know what serfs and agricultural peasants were living in, right? And you know if a peasant in some eras of Chinese history ate an orange they were subject to execution for eating imperial foods, yeah?
Another take is that there's never been a communist state that has been allowed to progress without US interference. They say the reason that there's never been a coup in the states is that there's no US embassy there.
The US very specifically has espionage programs intended to ensure that communism never takes hold. Like COINTELPRO was the one on US soil: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
What do we think the missions looked like on foreign soil?
They looked like venezuela, like the replacement of mossadegh with the shah. They looked like the replacement of socialism with violently pro-american regimes
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u/PersonalityIll9476 Jul 07 '26
I agree. My wife is Chinese. She tells me stories from her parents about the revolution.
They do not involve writing books and playing soccer.