u/HistoricalCC

Hi, I'm a socialist from Algeria myself and wanna know how broad is this sub's definition. I am myself a Marxist-Leninist or a scientific socialist. My definition of socialism is a transitional phase characterized by the abolition of private property and the governance of a dictatorship of the proletariat. Socialism is a transitional period to communism which is a stateless, classless and moneyless society that has only been achieved in history in its primitive form thousands of years ago.

How many of you subscribe to this and how many are other variations like democratic socialism?

I just hope no one mentions social democracy because it's just capitalism with welfare and it was invented by western europe during the cold war to prevent a worker's revolution.

What I was wrong about was making a strawman of an argument in my head and criticized it here without even telling you guys that argument. This shrouded my thinking while I was debating you which lead to escalation instead of reasoning, so my bad to doubling down on a wrong perception.

A few days after that post, I got "sober" again and I realized that I agree with most of your defenses. Russia, and most other anti-communist anti-western nations, are absolutely deserving of support while the US and NATO empires are still standing. I can't believe I was nearly doing "both sides" liberal horseshit. I don't care if liberals, both inside and outside Russia, want to see it gone because they're clearly only serving the empire.

I think it's a unique historical phase where the vanguard parties in countries like Russia need to balance supporting the current government strategically while building dual power (without sabotaging the government's ability to fend off NATO).

I said "for the most part" because there many global south countries that seem anti-western or at least neutral from outside, but are backstabbing governments destined to sell the global resistance for some friendly points with the West. Those absolutely deserve sabotaging and revolting against. They're better served as DotPs than capitalists, anyway.

The reason is that the global left (not just the Western one, take this from a global southerner) has fallen into the trap of capitalist concessions. The capitalist class knows that the reason why the Russian and Chinese communist revolutions succeeded was because the alternative was complete feudal rot. That's the entire reason why social democracy became a thing, to give the masses a larger portion of the bread and circuses.

These concessions from the bourgeoisies have been very effective. They gave a more comfortable life to the working class in the global north and, with enough propaganda, convinced the global south that the same comfort can be applied in their formerly colonized nations.

I think our mission now as Marxists have been made much harder than even the Bolsheviks. It was easier for Lenin to convince the peasants to industrialize than for us to convince the average middle class worker to achieve full emancipation.

This resulted in the international communist movement moving from a revolutionary line to a electoralist/reformist one.

Most self-proclaimed ML parties nowadays with the exception of one in power are no more than a shell trying so hard to survive by participating in local or national elections (this is atleast true in USA and some Middle Eastern countries)

There are countries now with more Communist Parties than communists.

And when you ask the members or supporters of these parties, they always justify their incompetence by associating revolutionary action with "accelerationism" or they say that the masses aren't ready yet for a revolution.

This was a Menshevik stance, who accused Lenin of pre-mature action. Even the German communists accused him of such until they realized their errors when it was too late.

The Bolsheviks didn't believe that we need to convince every single person in the country to start a revolution. That was a pre-Leninist Marxist notion of spontaneous revolution.

The entire point of Lenin's vanguard party theory is that the masses won't move on their own unless given way to by the revolutionary vanguard. The role of the vanguard is to take power no matter the morality of the method then, and only then, persuade the people.

The October Revolution was not a mass movement in any means, it was literally a coup perpetrated by the Soviets of Workers, Soldiers and Peasants who were not even majority communist.

They didn't overthrow the provisional government because they believed in communism or class struggle, but because Lenin promised them the end of the war and a just redistribution of land.

Lenin won because he understood the political reality of the world and wasn't operating based on ideological purity or morality.