>>17249>Why do tankies need to misrepresent people they respond to?I'm not familiar with Dunayevskaya's work, but the edgiest MLs online do this because otherwise they would be forced to face the absurdity of their ideology.
They prefer to pretend everyone who criticized the USSR was basically a liberal or a fascist, even though a Marxian critique of the Soviets already started with Rosa Luxemburg right when the USSR was founded.
The Marxian critique of AES took many different forms over the 20th century, and some who formulated it eventually became liberals for sure, but many became more radical than official communist parties due to their critique of bureaucracy, and ended up having little trouble applying it to the West later on, as neoliberalism involves heavy state intervention despite what its proponents might say.
It's like when they post On Authority every time someone use the word "authoritarian". Have they even read the actual text?
>All Socialists are agreed that the political state, and with it political authority, will disappear as a result of the coming social revolution, that is, that public functions will lose their political character and will be transformed into the simple administrative functions of watching over the true interests of society.If the USSR shall be judged by these standards, well the Marxist-Leninist project failed completely.
I wouldn't call the purge of Old Soviets like Bukharin a "simple administrative function", well after after the October Revolution. I wouldn't use anything like the Cultural Revolution or the Great Firewall of China as an example of "public functions [losing] their political character", on the contrary, this tendency only intensified under ML regimes.
And it's not a question of "abolishing [the political state] at one stroke", the Soviets almost had a whole century to do so, but by Brezhnev the high ranking officials of the CPSU were a rapidly declining gerontocracy.
Sure, if the Germans communists would have won the revolution in 1919, things would have been much easier, but in the end, capitalism was more resilient than Marxism-Leninism, who lost its
raison d'être after initial heavy industrialization and proletarianization of peasants, during the 1970s, deal with it.
The thing is, tw*tter tankies won't listen to any critique, to them it's all myths made up by the CIA and fascists, so I don't really want to bother arguing with them – btw not all MLs are like this, some have good arguments in their favor and are more willing to recognize historical mistakes.
I just hope some of them will eventually join a ML micro-org as unapologetic and intransigent as they are, and inevitably burnout when they realize it's not terribly epic to do praxis in the rigid old-school way in the 21st century – unless they live somewhere like in the Philippines, again not all MLs are bad – but I hope that instead of quitting politics or becoming a liberal, they will instead read the Marxists who unashamedly described the USSR as "state capitalist" or something among those lines during these years, and correctly diagnosed that bureaucracy
de facto replaced capitalists as the ruling class in the USSR, to finally develop new ideas relevant to our current material conditions instead of clinging to the ghosts of the past.