How do you respond to this? It’s not something I’ve done a lot of research into, but it seems like one of the few critiques where you just say “critical support for the USSR, we need to learn from the past mistakes the soviets made and do better the next time around.”

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[–] purpleworm@hexbear.net 12 points 1 day ago

I'll respond to this comment and also where you wrote:

Doesn’t like communism bc “hierarchy”

elsewhere to not ping you twice.

The problem here seems to not truly have anything to do with communism. The problem seems to be that she is writing off all forms of democratic republic as inherently bureaucratic (i.e. that statesmen function as there own class with independent power, not as representatives), but it could be that she just doesn't believe in democracy at all. I have a scenario for her:

At a village assembly, a group puts forward a proposition that "due to recent destruction of food stocks, we must have everyone engage in some amount of agricultural labor or otherwise support the effort of food production so we may safely make it through the winter" and puts it to a vote, where everyone in the village agrees except one person. The resolution is passed and everyone follows it except that one person (who admits they are able to help but simply doesn't want to) and that person is subjected to a fine for violating the resolution, which incidentally at least partly economically makes up for their non-contribution. Has an injustice been done?

Any Marxist says no, some anarchists might say no, many anarchists say yes.

If she says yes, then this probably cuts through a huge amount of litigation about issues that ultimately aren't relevant to reaching a resolution on the question of communism, because it makes it clear that what you need to argue for is the necessity of democracy over liberalism, that autonomy is great and should be protected but is not fundamental, human welfare is, and we have no better mechanism for benefiting human welfare (on average) than having democracy as the bedrock mechanism of social organization. I wrote a lengthy argument, but I don't want to risk shadowboxing, and wasting the reader's time excessively, so I'll just say that there are two likely responses: Some equivalent of the classical liberal's yeomen fantasy of a society with no government, which is just a completely impractical fantasy that will devolve into something horrible, or you still have a government, but you just call it something else, which I think requires no explanation for refutation.

If she says no, then it seems like her issue is a mistrust of republicanism as being bureaucratic. I think this argument is more complex but it might also be easier, because what you do at this point is engage critically with the idea of bureaucratization and with how representatives can effectively become aristocrats, because there is no inherent reason that you can't take various legal measures to fix this issue, including several that Lenin outlined in State and Rev, the most important ones including that they don't get exorbitant pay, that there is a right to stage recall elections if the representative is not doing what they said, and of course universal sufferage. Lenin didn't really outline it there, but there are also many measures you can take to prevent moneyed groups from buying political bodies, e.g. making lobbying illegal, having stringent conflict of interest laws, and so on.

I can expand on any of these points, but I didn't want to write an essay over my speculation of the broader meaning of a snippet of information.