Let’s get a little concrete here, shall we?
Can we agree that “Democratic Socialists” like AOC (or George Orwell) are or were not “Communists.” Yes?
Surely you agree such Democratic Socialists are NOT and were not “Marxist-Leninists” in favor of building a “vanguard party” to lead a “dictatorship of the proletariat” over many generations, right?
How about you? Do you support any particular “vanguard party”? Or are you just making “general propaganda” for a futuresque “communism”? Do you at least agree with me that no such vanguard party exists at present? Do you think that a revolutionary party once in power cannot degenerate into a one party dictatorship or even a totalitarian bureaucratic collectivist class? Has there been even a single revolutionary “Marxist-Leninist” communist party that has not degenerated (or lost its revolutionary character) within a single generation or two?
I do not deny that under imperialist pressure “building socialism” in backward countries — or a single island like Cuba— is necessarily difficult, or impossible, or that today’s China may not one day evolve into a more democratic place. That is exactly what I would hope for, just as I want to see the U.S. end its half century economic sanctions against Cuba.
Earlier in your long comment #594, you seemed to accuse me of making excuses for vicious capitalists who wage bloody imperialist wars and use economic sanctions to attack their enemies. I am no “working-class apologist” for imperialism, nor do I “demonize socialists.” I also never argue that “capitalism will exist forever.”
I spent a lifetime trying to “raise the consciousness” of some of my “brainwashed” fellow workers. Unfortunately too many millions of them do support unrestrained capitalism, even admiring conmen like Donald Trump.
I’m a retired blue collar worker and ex-union activist, for many years I’ve been a radical social democrat and “internationalist.” I worked with REAL workers in a major integrated union. I’ve read all the Marxist-Leninist “classic” literature too. I lived in Communist China for eight years. I know a thing or two you clearly don’t.
I try to look at the world we live in realistically, and not with rose-colored glasses. I’m no nihilist, however. At the beginning of the 20th century many revolutionary Marxists believed there was an urgent imperative to choose “Socialism or Barbarism.” Two world wars and the development of nuclear weapons should show us all what capitalist “barbarism” — or even just arrogance, greed and miscalculation — can lead to. The weakening of the world socialist movement, the Cold War victory of the U.S., the collapse of the bureaucratic planned economy of the USSR, the economic emergence of “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” — with its one-party (now one-man) dictatorship — offers no obvious guarantees that civilization will get through even the next hundred years … in any form.
The only point I will grant you is that should we get through the next hundred years or so without a nuclear catastrophe, should we solve major ecological problems, should a new world government or association be established that administers a much more productive economy in the future, the possibilities for a long and relatively happy future for humanity improve dramatically. Without a true oligarchy of capitalists or a “Big Brother” dictatorship sitting on top of an impoverished mass of peons, call it what you will, I expect future generations will find life quite amazing.
I'm not going to answer a long wall of questions. Western European socialist parties are Marxist, but yes I agree, not Leninist. The Marxist Leninists, like myself, don't add the word "democratic" to socialism or socialist, because we find it unnecessarily redundant. The word socialism includes the idea of democracy, so from the Marxist-Leninist perspective, there's no reason to add the extra "democratic" label to it, as if to say that socialism isn't democratic and needs to be further defined as such.
All human organizations and institutions can fail or fall into corruption, including socialist and yes even capitalist-run organizations and institutions. Humans are flawed hence all of their efforts will be subject to error. Nonetheless, as I've already detailed, as advanced automation develops, the need for human labor is diminished and eventually eliminated, to the point that we can no longer sustain a marketplace with customers. Under capitalism, production is based on profits, which are paid by paying consumers who earn their money through their jobs. The more advanced our technology is, the more efficient and automated production becomes, reducing and eventually eliminating wage-labor. That entails the end of capitalism.
The capitalists and their brainwashed serfs will fight tooth and nail to avoid that from happening, so ironically what will occur is that the ruling elites will maintain ownership and control of the technology (patents, licenses. etc) and means of production (i.e. the facilities, machinery. etc), while the working-class that needs to sell its labor-power (its life) to capitalists, in order to live, will be unemployed and perhaps at best dependents of the capitalist-run state. It's the wealthy capitalist elites who will by necessity become communists among themselves, consigning the peasants, to the compost heap. That's the irony. The rich and powerful become the high-tech communists and the peasants or working class is dispatched.
How do the tech-lords eliminate their former, now worthless employees? Poverty, pandemics, lack of access to social services like an education and healthcare, crime, incarceration, and war. People will go hungry, like in the film Elysium. That's essentially what happens. The wealthy who were raving about the "evils of socialism", will become the socialists, among themselves, living in well-protected enclaves of opulence, luxury, and extreme abundance, while you and I and our children will be consigned to brutal austerities and poverty. Why should 94% of the population (the working-class) allow 6% of the population (the rich and powerful) to get away with that? You're defending a system, that is enslaving you and will eventually kill you.
What socialists are proposing is that we all own the means of production together, and organize the manufacturing and delivery of the products and services that we use, to meet our needs rather than for profit. We can have a democratic government (democracy in politics) with democracy in the workplace. Today we just have a semblance of democracy in politics and an absolute dictatorship in the workplace. Let's democratize not just politics but the workplace as well, where we spend most of our waking hours. This is a rational, reasonable request, but the contrarians want to pretend that this is impossible and that we should continue with the current state of affairs. No, we don't and we can't. We have to evolve or we will die.
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