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Comment by non-chalad | Hacker News Reader

Isn't communism supposed to be achieved through authoritarianism, after which the state "withers away" [sic]?

AFAIK (“Seeing like a State”), that’s specific to the Leninist modality. I very well could be misinformed, but, the book mentions essentially a moment where democratic-socialism was co-opted by authoritarian communism (Leninism), so that’s what the world ended up with.

That's not even in Leninism, no. Read Lenin's "State & Revolution" and you will definitely come away with a different impression -- he speaks openly about the abolition of the authoritarian state and a radical democracy... just not a parliamentary one.

Though clearly what happened in the USSR in the 20s was something different from what he wrote. What you saw in Russia in that period was a response to an ongoing civil war, followed by the rise of Stalin.. who, yes, really did believe in brutal authoritarianism.

All these Stalinist states (and I would classify China this way too) will pay lip service to Leninism as a way to seek ideological legitimacy. But their "official" readings of Marx and Lenin are very... creative... shall we say.

But it's 1:30am and I should no be getting into this argument.

For sure, there is more nuance that happens here. Some of what the early Soviet government authorized during the Russian Civil War with the Whites was not all that different from what Lincoln authorized for the Union during the American civil war. So I give some leeway to Lenin on that. For sure, Lenin never intended Stalin to get power. After all, Lenin made Stalin party secretary general or something like that, which was supposed to be a joke position with no real authority or minimal amount of power. Pretty much after the Russian Civil War, Lenin was pretty much perpetually sick and pretty much couldn't see his interpretation to the end. So, I do think had Lenin lived, the USSR would have been much different than what we saw, however I don't know if it would been much better, a little better or worst. That would take engaging in too many hypothetical of history. But I think it is fair to say, we can't graft what the USSR became under Stalin as to what the USSR would have been if Lenin would have lived.

I personally subscribe to the Trotskyist analysis that the root cause of the rot that led to Stalinism was the isolation of the revolution in one country, and nothing Lenin could have personally have done would have made a difference once the German revolution failed. They were politically and economically isolated, and unable to effectively administer governance, and if it hadn't been Stalin's brutal form of dictatorship, the state would have either fallen apart or some other "Socialism In One Country" dogma + authoritarianism would have entered the fray.

Stalin rose through the ranks by being a seemingly "competent" administrator who restored the power of the old Tsarist bureaucracy to "get things done."

But in general, Lenin gets a bad rap for the awful things his successor did.

You'll note that Putin admires Stalin but loathes Lenin. Even bizarrely singling Lenin out for his positions on Ukraine and the national question etc in his crazy speech justifying their aggression on the eve of their invasion.

It's a horrible tragedy of history in which millions died and all of eastern Europe fell under a terrible dark iron curtain which took the name "communism" but the name is effectively irrelevant. What it really was was a broken down highly authoritarian single party state that used the badge of "socialism" to lend itself legitimacy while doing very awful things in the name of Russian nationalism, certain individuals, the Party, etc. etc. Kleptocratic clique under the guise of a revolutionary state.

As we can see in China today the actual economic political model doesn't even matter. They'll use the name "communism" even when what they're doing is absolutely savagely market driven, or something else, like the quasi-theocracy in North Korea.

What they labelled as socialism in the East bears almost no resemblance to what socialists in the West advocated. But the label of "communism" will forever be marred by what these people did.

EDIT: A good classic book on this topic is "Leninism under Lenin" by Marcel Liebmann (https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/908-leninism-under-leni...) -- now, whether that old book can stand the test of time now that more historical records from that period are open, I don't know. I'd be curious to see a (non-ideologically motivated) Russian historian with access to records from the Revolution take it apart.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/mandel/1975/xx/liebman.html

Thanks for the book recommendation, I will definitely check it out! I personally enjoy reading Russian history, it is fascinating and highly complex. It is also just revealing on how much society ideologically focuses on certain sets of history. Like in Russia, focusing on Stalin as the ultimate baddie of Russia. While Stalin sure as hell wasn't a good guy. There isn't a whole unique to his form of brutal-ism compared to the Tsarists before the USSR. The KGB of the time were doing essentially the same things the Tsarist secret police were doing before them. Many of the Tsars were also extremely brutal. Russia really just had gotten a bad hand of leadership for most of the past 1,000 years.

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