>>40780>When you reduce ‘proletarian’ to a moral category equivalent to ‘good’, the obvious impulse is to depict yourself as a proletarian no matter what and people you dislike as middle-class. Even Lenin fell into this trap at times in his essays and moralized against the petit-bourgeois.Yes. There is no contradiction between being a communist and not proletarian by this definition, in fact that is the historical tendency. Neither Marx, nor Engels, nor Lenin, nor a whole bunch of theorists and revolutionaries, are proletarian by this definition.
And it comes full circle. I begin to understand now, the so-called Trotsky-Stalin split is missing the point gravely. Socialism in backwards peasant states was doomed from the start, because either the peasants owned homes, or acquired homes in the wake of the revolution. No wonder then that the peasantry is reactionary, for it either owns capital or is a vestige of feudalism with all the backwards cultural assumptions. No wonder that the Soviet Union already in Lenin's time realized the problem with letting backwards citizens participate in politics outside local and workplace affairs was literal political suicide for the Soviet Union.
And then, of course, the issue of commodity production in socialist countries, which just ended up reinventing capitalism, put the leadership in a position where they used increasingly unsustainable state force to suppress the contradiction, the inevitable reactionary superstructure, and the socialist countries either imploded like the Warsaw Pact and Yugoslavia, or virtually gave up like China and Vietnam, or hyper-isolated like the DPRK.
I wish someone smarter than me would start spreading the word. Because I feel like if the misunderstandings and mistakes repeat, there will be no more chances for humanity.