Funny thing about grand revolutions: they begin with street chants and barricades and end with incense and rulebooks. The same people who promised to smash the old order end up arguing over footnotes and purity tests, reciting doctrine like a prayer and measuring virtue by who can perform the greatest act of renunciation.
If you follow that logic to its inevitable, slightly absurd conclusion, you don’t get a workers’ paradise so much as a monastery — think Mount Athos, but with manifestos. All the fire and fury collapses into cloistered doctrinal debates, and the big promise of changing the world becomes an elaborate exercise in proving who can renounce it best.
Maybe that’s the real future of communism: a bunch of terminally-onlines holed up on some island mountain — hell, maybe even Cuba — navel-gazing for eternity.
You won't be around to see the end.
read Max Stirner's Art and Religion and then apply that to the topic at hand.
>>2501544You do it for me
Having studied both bourgeois and proletarian revolutions from the 1600s to now I think the general pattern is not what OP is saying. The pattern is more like:
>General decline of an old system
< Some elements of that old system try and reform it from the inside
> They either fail to reform it or don't go far enough to satisfy the masses
< The masses get educated, agitated, organized, and militant, usually under some vanguard leadership
> they smash and overthrow the old order, and they seize the machinery of governance, or make their own new machinery
< having won, the most ideologically pure members of the vanguard of the revolution immediately begin fighting one another, and purge internal elements of the vanguard that are accused of being either inadequately revolutionary, or secretly reactionary
> meanwhile, outside reactionary forces try to overthrow the revolution by arming and training reactionaries
< the most conservative forces of the revolution take power from the most ideologically pure and try to stabilize the situation, while at the same time dealing with the fragility of the revolutionary state by trying to actually govern society normally, and handle the counter revolutionary forces on the outside who are trying to overthrow the revolution. sometimes they handle the counter revolutionaries through war, other times through clever diplomacy and trade.
> the revolutionary forces are either overthrown or they succeed and become a stable government. if they are overthrown, go back to step 1. if they succeed…
< there is a period of stability and good governance, but systems tend to ossify and become corrupt, leading back to the beginning, but in a new age, and under new conditions, new class relations, a new mode of production, etc.
>>2501885So Whats the point of being an a communist member before and right after the revolution? Just wait to jump in the moment they succeed and just went they start ossifying. Otherwise its too risky.
>>2501911because otherwise it wont happen. and internal purges and factionalism, why they might be a near inevitability to some extent, dont need to be nearly as extensive as many historical examples. the PRC e.g., even with the chaos and instability of the cultural revolution, still managed major shifts in political leadership and ideology without major ruptures in continuity of governance and maintained experienced cadre through those crises.
Mounta Athos is based and you are cringe.