Afaik this happened with every single instance of a communist country. Communism seems like a pretty good idea on the surface, but then why does it always become autocratic?
I don’t think that is exclusive to communism. I rather assume that this has more to do with how the government is structured. Long-running politicians tend to being more open to corruption.
I can easily see Trump going the same way. He has assembled enough power within the system to break it from within like most dictators did.
Ideologically, Leninism supported vanguardism, a variation on Marxism that said that the Communist party was supposed to drag the early-20th-century proletariat into the revolution, instead of waiting for late capitalism where the proletariat would (according to Marx) naturally become revolutionary. This, and the notion of “false consciousness”, authorized Communist parties to go against the expressed (democratic) will of the proletariat, on the theory that the proletariat’s judgment was clouded by false consciousness, while still claiming to act in the interests of the proletariat.
Basically, “we (the party) know better than you (the people)” was ingrained into Leninism from the beginning, and the major communist revolutions either were or became Leninist. Maoism was a branch off of Leninism as well.
Keep in mind that it wasn’t even the proletariat that accomplished the Revolutions, it was the peasantry. Marx wasn’t against the idea but he would have been surprised.
Marx wasn’t against the idea but he would have been surprised
Towards the end, Marx actually expected Russia to go through a communist revolution, and that it may even be the start of the revolutionary wave in Europe. See the preface for the 1882 Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto for reference.
I love learning new things that had just never occurred to me before. It happens a lot more here than it ever did back on Reddit.
Lots of reasons, but here’s one:
Because one of, if not the main purpose of money is to provide a decentralized way of transferring information about economic needs and capabilities. Without that mechanism in place, the only way of determining where goods can be created and where they need to go (a massive problem that it is a daily miracle we don’t generally have to deal with) is by an overbearing authoritarian state.
Spoken like someone that hasn’t paid attention to the supply chains of places like Walmart.
We already have command economies. They exist and are functional. The owners are simply siphoning away the surplus value.
As large as Walmart is, it is still absolute peanuts compared to the scale and (especially) dynamism of global production and consumption as a whole. Global supply chains have to change much faster and in arbitrary ways, compared to the centralized chains of something like Walmart, which in turn is also still subject to the external pressures of competition – even just hypothetical competition based on some hypothetical course of action is a powerful constraint.
So you’re saying you agree?
Walmart is absolutely a result of capitalism, those intricate supply chains are in place to make money. Maybe we could do it without a common way to track needs for a while, but would it adapt? Would the alternative resist corruption better? The invention of Money almost seems an inevitable consequence from one perspective.
I don’t think this answers the original question, but it’s an interesting side topic.
The invention of Money almost seems an inevitable consequence from one perspective.
That really depends on what you mean by money and how it’s used in the economy. David Graeber wrote a really great book covering this called “Debt: The First 5,000 Years” that I highly recommend.
Attempts to implement communism at the scale of a nation state have always involved significant concentration of power. It may be impossible to do otherwise.
Power corrupts, and concentrations of power attract the corrupt.
So you’re saying with enough checks and balances that distribute power widely enough through legal offices and separations of power, some sort of democratic socialism would in theory be possible (assuming a peaceful transition via pre-deternend legislative changes were in place and ready to be followed)?
For a real Marxist revolution to take place, the entire populace has to stand up at once and decide to make this change. This requires humanity to do some pretty broad and general evolution before we, as a race, are nearly ready. Checks and balances won’t fix the fundamental problem that humans are selfish and want more for themselves at the expense of others.
It’s odd that humans being selfish and wanting more for themselves is an argument for a system where stamping on people to make your share bigger and keeping others down is encouraged rather than trying to dampen those impulses.
Or on the flip side, maybe they seem so much of that philosophical/ethical black hole “Human Nature” in a system where they’re encouraged because our current economic mode strongly encourages them, rather than them being immutable fact?
I wouldn’t say it’s human nature, more like nature nature, as everything here seems to revolve around getting something at the expense of others. We’re just doing that at a larger/deeper/ a tad mo intelligent scale.
People forget that humans are evolutionarily based on familial groups above all else. People like to act like humans in the past were all sharing and helping each other for funsies when in reality you’d be slaughtering your neighbors children for their food if it meant your children got to eat.
Humans are 9 meals away from anarchy at all times. The minute things go south it’s every family for themselves. This is a fact for the majority of the human population. That fact extends to periods of prosperity as well because why would I share with a stranger when I could stockpile for my family?
I wouldn’t say it’s human nature, more like nature nature, as everything here seems to revolve around getting something at the expense of others. We’re just doing that at a larger/deeper/ a tad mo intelligent scale.
If you do the thing and you do it right and you don’t fuck it up. Then it might work.
Eventually, “our” pretty much always becomes “my”.
Why? I’m not clear, but power corrupts regardless of the political system surrounding it (e.g. look at pretty much any HOA).
Regimes tend to change with violent revolution, as it’s rare for a person to willingly give up their own power. Revolutions have leaders, and those leaders are the ones responsible for distributing the power to the masses. But it’s rare for a person to willingly give up their own power.
Even in the rare instance where a person does give up their power, all you need is for one person to take advantage of the system. Communism rewards people for their labours, but someone will need to judge how much people should be rewarded. One corrupt judge slips in, and the system corrupts with them.
They had no communist intentions to begin with. The benefits of communism are just an easy way to market any nefarious movement with anticommunist intentions
The core principles of communism are basically an antithesis of these authoritarians/totalitarians/autocratics/oligarchs (how ever you want to describe them). Such a shift isn’t accidental
They had no communist intentions to begin with.
All (>30 countries) of them (1)?
Which ones aligned with the principles?
First, and above all else, there are assholes (US) who will prevent you from having nice things. Democracy is the easiest vector to let CIA/money get a corrupt asshole into power. Democracy tends to be a fiction anyway. Money/CIA/Media control is just part of the reason. Should you let corrupt assholes vote or run for power?
A country that has an army has dictatorial power, whether there is a theater of elections or not. An autocratic chain of command controls it, and if you don’t behave, regardless of your constitution, you get smacked by the army.
In the US, there is communism for the corporatist oligarchy. Government they own will protect them from competition and bail them out when they fail. The CIA/media defines the communists as anyone who is not as pro business as the most pro business corporatist oligarch. US is a pure dictatorship in that Israel first corporatist oligarchy is guaranteed to win every seat/election, or 95%+ of the seats anyway. Every NATO country has a CIA allegiant party leader is also guaranteed to produce a CIA allegiant government. CIA vets all appointments to EU government to be pro US dictatorial NATO. IMF has 50%+ of votes all from US colonies.
Celebrating media simplifications of Democracy vs. non-US-compliant is the wrong metric to apply to nations. Industrial policy meant to promote equitable prosperity or defense from Imperialist forces determined to subjugate them are more important to a nation than what US media describes them as. “Everyone” loved Russia when they had Yeltsin as a puppet privatizing everything cheaply to US interests, just as they love Zelensky for the same. Ukraine, since US coup, is an apartheid ethnostate, which cannot qualify for any objective definition of democracy (we praise it for it anyway), and recently has suspended all elections.
Because it was spread by a totalitarian communist dictatorship. if the USSR were democratic , they wouldve spread democracy.
In modern communist societies the government has an insane amount of power and control over just about everything. This power and control attracts a certain type of person who thirsts for power and control. People usually develop a bloodthirsty desire for power and control due to underlying psychological issues. These issues influence the person to think they ALWAYS need more power (think anorexic person who weighs 95lbs but still insists they are overweight).
It’s a human nature problem imo.
My take on it from the theory is that most advocates say that you have to go through a period of single party socialism before the state somewhat fades away and it becomes communism.
I don’t think it’s actually possible in reality for a single party state to cede the power back to the people afterwards.
This is kinda off topic so I’m putting it in a reply to myself like a weirdo, but despite being something of an anarchist / left-libertarian in mindset… I don’t actually think most people are capable of living in a world where someone isn’t ordering them around. Many people need and crave a power hierarchy, and if they were ever gifted some kind of anarchist utopia by way of magic they’d likely form up another hierarchy based system all over again from scratch.
That’s a type. It’s what Russian Communism developed into. Not all Communist theory says you need to get rid of the state either, that’s Chinese Communism.
There’s even Communist theory that includes a thriving democracy.
Not all Communist theory says you need to get rid of the state either, that’s Chinese Communism.
…
And?
Communism requires no state, no class, and no money. So, yes, all communist theory calls for the abolishment of the state.
Lmao. No.
That’s literally the definition of communism.
That’s the definition of one kind of communism.
Its literally the communism described by Marx, which, is, by nature, THE Definition of what communism is: https://web.archive.org/web/20090605001014/http://www.economictheories.org/2009/05/full-communism-ultimate-goal.html
This might be news to you but it’s not the mid to late 1800’s anymore. Marx is about as relevant as Locke.
The Marxist theory of the State is as an instrument of class oppression, not all forms of government. The idea is that the Proletariat, after destroying the Capitalist State and replacing it with a Proletarian State, this “dictatorship of the proletariat” will gradually fold Private Property into the Public Sector after markets cease to be an effective tool for developing and Public Ownership and Central Planning becomes more effective.
This happens unevenly, and there are different points where some sectors can be publicly owned much earlier than others, so this doesn’t happen overnight. Once all property is in the Public Sector, there are no more classes, and thus all instruments that protected against the bourgeoisie become superfluous and “dies out,” leaving a stateless, classless society with central planning. Engels calls this the “administration of things.”
This is what actually got me banned from lemmy.ml. I said that although Communism can be done in a ML way, it has never actually happened because it has never actually be a revolution by the people. In the case of Russia and the places they influenced, it was a group of self-appointed elites that did the actual revolting, and then they imposed a new system on the populace.
In the case of Russia and the places they influenced, it was a group of self-appointed elites that did the actual revolting, and then they imposed a new system on the populace.
What on earth are you talking about? How would “a group of self-appointed elites” even be enough to overthrow the government? That fundamentally doesn’t make any sense.
It’s also whitewashing the Tsar. As if the Russian people were happy and content while they were starving and subject to serfdom and being fed into the meat grinder of WWI.
Hell, Lenin is even on record saying that Russia wasn’t going to have a revolution, before it did, and by the time he arrived in Russia, the Tsar had already been forced to abdicate!
In all of my debates with those types they always see shadowy conspiracies preventing Americans from having real actual communism…whereas I see that nobody in this country – especially in this country – would vote for a communist.
The US spent 60 years actively treating Communists as enemies of the state and propagandizing against them. There’s no need to talk about shadows and conspiracies. The capitalist and political elite were very open about it.
There’s multiple elements to why people won’t vote for a communist, but they still won’t.
Certainly state actions play a role, and communists were victims of free speech violations in a much realer sense than victims of “cancel culture” ever were.
Yea its called vanguardism, where a “vanguard party” takes total control and then tries to estsblish communism, and once that is acheived, the state “withers away”.
Yea thats not gonna work in real life. Why ever give up power once you have it?
Because there was never anything communist about these states in any way whatsoever.
Communism is a state (as in a social, political and economic condition, not a government). None of these states ever reached this condition, and, therefore, was never communist. And, one could argue, that their development literally went the opposite way to what could be called communist with a straight face. As the anarchist Bakunin famously said, “the people’s boot is still a boot.”
This is why the Maoist-types call this shit “democratic centralism,” which is essentially just double-speak for “what the party says goes.”
This does not make the idea of communism invalid - but it’s still as perfectly vague as ever, unfortunately.
slight correction, you have state and government backwards.
Communism is a stateless, classless, currencyless society in which the workers own the means of production.
The word “communism” means a specific social arrangement, but is misused to denounce things people don’t like. Similar to the word “slavery” today.
What makes sense to me, is that unlike capitalism, communism requires a government to function. Well, and how do governments fail? By turning into a dictatorship.
lol… imagine capitalism without police
imagine any regime with out monopoly on violence…
Capitalism requires a State to enshrine Private Property Rights, neither can exist without a form of government.
Because, at a high level, communism requires that a leader or group of leaders get things on track and then give up all of their power over time. Instead, the type of people who tend to lead revolutions are the same type of people who are unlikely to want to give up power and instead end up wanting more power. So no true communism has ever existed because it never gets to that phase.
This is an incorrect interpretation of the phrase “withering away of the state,” which I elaborated on here.
I’m not really talking about Marxist communism. See my other comment, but in any realistic scenarios, communism is unlikely to form spontaneously as the first form of government in a new society.
And since revolution on a large scale requires centralized coordination and leadership, there will always be someone or some group given centralized power that is unlikely to allow for decentralization to happen on a large scale and is actually more likely to grab the power of the previous government system and keep it centralized, “for the good of the people” or “to defend the people” or whatever. Even well meaning revolutionaries are highly likely to crave control and be unlikely to want to allow “someone else” to change what they put in place. This then leaves in place the centralization indefinitely and never leads to communism.
Communism is centralized. Central Planning and Public Ownership are the core foundations of the economy in Communism. You’re talking about Anarchism as though Marxists were trying to achieve that, and you’re calling Anarchism “Communism.”
But communism is less centralized than representative democracy or dictatorship or whatever the pre-revolution government likely was. These portions of the government must decentralize as part of the process of moving between government types. That decentralization is essential or it’s not true communism, it’s the fake things that pretend to be communism like PRC, USSR, DPRK, etc.
The only way that some amount of decentralization doesn’t need to happen is if were talking about a society with no previous need for government forming into a communist state, which is what I mentioned was extremely unlikely, even if there were societies isolated enough to still exist without any form of centralized government.
No, Communism is centralization. It isn’t less decentralized than pre-revolution government, but more. That’s the point, to fold the entire private sector eventually into the Public, with Central Planning. You keep saying “decentralization is essential for Communism” but that’s Anarchism. AES are examples of Socialist States trying to work towards Communism.
Where on Earth are you getting your ideas? It certainly isn’t Marx.
No, now you’re talking only about Marxist communism. Communism as a whole does not state that a single central power owns everything or that individuals can’t own property. Marx was very much against almost all personal property, but communism is simply about making the means of production owned by the people doing the production and not a small subset of individuals. That doesn’t mean ownership by a single entity. That very much could be local community governments that own each factory or power plant or whatever. And it’s only about the “means of production” not the products necessarily. People can still own the products in many forms of communism. Communism doesn’t necessarily dictate a specific economic theory beyond the idea that entities that produce goods that are to be owned by the people, should be owned by the people making the goods, not individuals, and especially not individuals who don’t participate in the production, only in the sale and profit of the goods they don’t produce.
You’re conflsting Communism, which refers in 99% of cases to Marxism, with Socialism, which is more broad.
That’s Leninist “Communism”.
As a reminder, Lenin lost the 1917 election and then seized power to make himself a dictator, then wrote about how dictators are essential to communism.
The Truth is that Dictators are anathema to communism. A dictator who seizes the means of production is called a king, and the people are then called serfs. It’s a full step backwards in the pursuit of the communist dream.
Theoretically, one could spontaneously be created from scratch starting with a small group of people on a new world who have never experienced a centralized form of government. Formal governing is not required if the society is small enough and there are no outside forces at work to create a threat. But once governing is required, there will generally be forces at work that will centralize it. The only exception might be in a society with very limited need for cooperation due to plentiful resources available to all, such as a utopia like Star Trek’s Earth.
In all other, realistic scenarios, there will need to be a revolution. That will always be led by a person or group of people to organize the overthrow and coordinate the changes. This group will inevitably be in search of power themselves, corrupted by the power they are given, or infiltrated by those in search of such power and are unlikely to give up that power.
That village that talks out their problems and thus needs no government is A, a fiction, and B, a form of extreme democracy. Every decision is discussed and agreed upon by the group. That’s extreme democracy.
And if you push for more democracy, you can get it. But you have to resist the revolutionaries and the fascists. All while prepping to be a revolutionary if required.
Work within the system as much as possible, because when it’s gone, when that fragile peace is broken, nothing good can come out. As you said, the revolution is inevitably betrayed.
Now if we could actually teach people what a Tariff is. Fuckers voting for Trump wanting to bring prices down, when that’s exactly the opposite of what happens with a Tariff. And Democrats abandoning their base to chase a mythical center that just does not exist…
I understand the push for revolution. I just know that in order for things to get better, the transition to communism needs to happen slowly and democratically.
Which is why I was emphasizing that theoretically it is possible, but that it’s not realistic. The realistic scenario is revolution which would require centralized leadership which then never actually gives up the power and money they were put there to redistribute and decentralize. Thus it’s never been done. The only way for communism to exist without the need for a group of people to give up power would be in that theoretical world where no elite-run government ever existed to need to take the power and wealth away from and that only historically has existed in very small communities prior to them having regular contact with hostile outsiders. Currently only a few “untouched” tribal societies exist in that way.
Of course, we’re ignoring the European Social democracies, many of which are well on their way to true communism.
It’s a slow process, but they’re doing the work to get there. But they don’t count? for reasons?
Seriously. The blueprint of how to get to communism from democracy is right there in the European Social Democracies.
Universal healthcare and efforts to make food and housing basic rights. That’s like 90% of what you need.
Social Democracies cannot get to Communism without revolution and replacement with Socialism. This is because the dominant system in Social Democracy, especially the nordic countries, is Capitalism and Imperialism. They fund their safety nets from massive exploitation of the Global South with brutal IMF loans, exporting Capital for outsourcing production, and more, they are parasitic.
Further, European Social Democracies are seeing sliding worker protections and social safety nets. Because the Capitalists are in control, they wear down the safety nets via austerity politics to further their profits. This is due to the Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall, Capitalists are forced to expand internationally and seek further and further exploitation due to competition forcing rates of profit down, so they counteract by expanding to raise absolute profits. Austerity measures are one example of Capitalists lowering their expenditures.
Next, Socialism is democratic. Whether it be the Soviet Model (for more in-depth accounting of it, Soviet Democracy by American Pat Sloan who participated in and observed it directly in the 1930s), or otherwise, Socialism has always been democratic. The Dictatorship of the Proletariat is the dictatorship by the proletarian class as a whole against the bourgeois clasd as a whole, as a direct contrast to liberal democratic dictatorships of the bourgeoisie found in the world over, including European Social Democracy.
Social Safety Nets alone are not Worker supremacy over Capital, hence why the US saw the erosion of social safety nets from FDR to complete obliteration, and why we are seeing the same trend in European countries. This is unavoidable as long as Capital is the dominant factor in the economy and humans are not, due to the Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall. In 1900, Rosa Luxemburg already proved why this is the case in Reform or Revolution. Reformism has never worked, because it cannot work. Even when a Communist does get in via existing democratic systems, such as Salvadore Allende in Chile, they get couped by the national bourgeoisie with the aid of Imperialist countries like the United States or EU.
Finally, there is no “true communism.” Every country will have a different path to Communism, but certain factors will remain the same, such as the necessity of revolution. The idea of a pure, untainted “true communism” that has never been actually tried is a western-chauvanistic attitude that necessitates that workers in AES countries are simply “too dumb” to understand what communism is or how to build it, despite their real, practical work. The only Communism is the kind that exists in the real world, not in the figments of imagination alone.
You would do well to watch Dr. Michael Parenti’s 1986 lecture and read his seminal historical book Blackshirts and Reds.
In 1917, there were 2 governments, the Worker and Peasant supported Soviet Government, and the Bourgeoisie and Petite Bourgeoisie supported liberal Provisional Government. Lenin was elected via the Soviet system, and the Socialist Revolutionaries were elected in the bourgeois controlled Provisional Government. After the election, the Soviet Government disbanded the Provisional Government via revolution, the same measures proposed by Marx the entire time.
Secondly, Lenin never once wrote about how dictators are essential to Communism. Lenin fully believed in Soviet Democracy, ie workers councils, and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, a term coined by Karl Marx to describe a Socialist State that had not fully absorbed all Capital into the Public Sector, and thus had to suppress the still existing Bourgeoisie. The reason for this is that Capital can only be wrested by the degree to which it develops! Per Engels:
Question 17 : Will it be possible to abolish private property at one stroke?
Answer : No, no more than the existing productive forces can at one stroke be multiplied to the extent necessary for the creation of a communal society. Hence, the proletarian revolution, which in all probability is approaching, will be able gradually to transform existing society and abolish private property only when the necessary means of production have been created in sufficient quantity.
Dictators are indeed antithetical to Communism, but you’ve entirely misframed Marx, Lenin, the USSR, and the October Revolution. The Soviet Republic in control of a largely Publicly Owned, Centrally Planned economy is in no way comparable to feudalism, but is actually existing Socialism.
Funilly enough, Lenin described exactly what you’re now doing in The State and Revolution:
What is now happening to Marx’s teaching has, in the course of history, happened repeatedly to the teachings of revolutionary thinkers and leaders of oppressed classes struggling for emancipation. During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their teachings with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to surround their names with a certain halo for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time emasculating the essence of the revolutionary teaching, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it. At the present time, the bourgeoisie and the opportunists within the working-class movement concur in this “doctoring” of Marxism. They omit, obliterate and distort the revolutionary side of this teaching, its revolutionary soul. They push to the foreground and extol what is or seems acceptable to the bourgeoisie. All the social-chauvinists are now “Marxists” (don’t laugh!). And more and more frequently, German bourgeois scholars, but yesterday specialists in the annihilation of Marxism, are speaking of the “national-German” Marx, who, they aver, educated the workers’ unions which are so splendidly organized for the purpose of conducting a predatory war!
It’s funny that you describe Communism as a “dream,” it accurately depicts your idealistic understanding of it, along with your “reminder.”
That’s an interesting reading of history… I’m sure.
But the truth is that Lenin lost the 1917 election, threw a hissy fit and demanded that the newly elected assembly cede all power to him, or else.
The Bolsheviks seized power and banned all opposition parties, and then Lenin justified his coup by claiming that “Vanguard Parties” are part of communism, when all they actually are is a dictatorship.
Stalin wasn’t the first Soviet Dictator. He was just more honest about being a monster. Well, to himself, anyway.
It isn’t an “interesting reading of history,” it’s what literally happened. The fact that you’re placing such importance on the vestigial Provisional Government’s election when the Workers had already embraced the Soviet Government and used it for all intents and purposes as their only government is liberalism, and anti-revolutionary.
Secondly, the Dictatorship of the Proletariat as envisioned by Marx is fully compatible with a One-Party system. Multi-party systems are not more democratic, just more divided. Within the Soviet system, there was more democratic control than in the liberal Provisional Government system.
Finally, the idea that a mass worker party can be a dictatorship, as in the modern, single-person autocracy, is absurd. Vanguard Parties, moreover, are a proven method to establish Socialism. They aren’t unaccountable cabals, but large worker parties made up of the most politically experienced of the Proletariat, which has been successfully replicated in countries like Cuba and the PRC in establishing Socialism.
You seriously need to read Marx, it’s desparately obvious that you are working off of Wikipedia articles and not actual Marxist theory. I suggest my intro to Marxism list.
Lenin was a monster. He just had slightly better PR after his death because Stalin was so much worse.
Because one party bullshit dictatorships are not the proletariat.
They are the new feudal lords, who then need the guillotine.
The Bolsheviks were a minority party overall, if they hadn’t been they would have won Russia’s only free and fair election. But they lost and launched a coup.
Then the tankies come in and pretend the new lords are still part of the people.
One Party democratic systems are not dictatorships. I don’t know how else to explain this in clearer and more simple terms, moreover the Bolsheviks were made up of the Proletariat, and countless workers joined their ranks.
Further, the economic system of the USSR was based on Public Ownership and Central Planning, not agrarian feudalism. You keep using words that have specific meanings to elicit an emotional response despite having no actual bearing in reality.
Finally, the Bolsheviks were the majority, that’s what the name “Bolshevik” stems from. Why is it that you rely on the muddy results of a vestigial illegitimate government that had already been abandoned by the Workers, and not the Soviet Government that existed alongside it and had already elected Lenin and the Bolsheviks prior to the disbanding of the Constituent Assembly? You are calling liberal dictatorships of the bourgeoisie “free and fair elections,” this is the level you stoop to in order to piss on Marx’s grave one last time.
Additionally, it was a revolution, not a coup, as the majority of people supported the Soviet Government over the liberal Provisional Government. The Bolsheviks enjoyed the power they had because they were real representatives of the Working Class, even Kropotkin recognized this.
Your idea of “Marxism” doesn’t follow any strain of Marxism historically, it’s so confused and self-contradictory that you end up praising liberalism and calling Socialism “feudalism.” Again, read Marx.
Keep telling yourself that.
But no, the truth is single party “communism” is just a new form of nobility and peasants. How many millions did Stalin and Mao kill? All because they had totalitarian control.
If Leninism worked, the Soviet Union wouldn’t have fallen. But no, Leninism led directly to Stalinism. There were no guardrails, no protections, because Lenin had already banned opposition, Which is dictator 101.