From Philosophical Research
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- 2181
Workers don't control Bolshevism
/ There is no effective way for the working class as a whole to control a central government, as would exist in a workers' state [1] -> correct, but misleading. the point of a Communist party is to operate on the really large-scale stuff at national and international scales and work together to solve it until those questions are solved and go away and basically you don't need the central Communist party any more. you know how Liberal-republicanism just, totally runs out of policies at a certain point and doesn't want any more policies or elections and hardly wants democracy? when that happens to Bolshevism, there's supposed to be a day where the republic per se, as such, starts fading away and you just have a bunch of regions of people mysteriously connected into a country just because they are but there are just no more national-scale policies any more. realistically, this is probably an on-and-off thing where like, the Communist Party will not meet for 50 years and then suddenly there's a new issue and oops the previous stages have to come back for just a second so everything can be solved and go back to normal. just like how I imagine that money doesn't go away forever, it just becomes irrelevant for particular periods of time when particular things are free but they aren't free constantly and forever because that isn't how material reality works. the smallest scales of societal structure are inherently more unstable and harder to keep solid than the big scales but you could still get them to a high level of stability that would be sufficient for people, where the little periodic problems would all be manageable. upper-phase communism looks a hell of a lot like what anarchists want in my mind but, you know, it actually makes sense. it actually has a sensible account of politics and the idea of taking a sea of chaotic clashes between nations and populations and turning it into something that efficiently solves all the problems in question and just reaches a point where they're all solved. can you imagine that. can you imagine Liberal-republicanism actually deciding that all the policy questions were finished so it was okay to shut down the government and not have elections for 20 years because all the regional structures were already handling things? that's an absolutely crazy thought today; whenever the government shuts down we get terrified because we know that corporate owners that barely pay people enough to eat would be the ones administering everything. that's exactly what anarchism currently has to deal with if it tries to dismantle anything. whenever you try to create anarchism the gaps between separate free-floating corporations and the need to add people to conflicting islands that are constantly trying to get rid of each other to add them to the population ruin everything. you need to actually smash all the floating tectonic plates into each other and make them one really big thing. if you can do that without a State, wonderful, but I have no idea how you're going to pull off keeping a population the size of China or Russia unified enough to fight off external aggressors without effectively having a central government. there are some possibilities already but some of them are terrifying — if you're Alexander Dugin, you can just tell everybody to believe in a bigoted religion or join together around hating outside ethnic groups for what they've done to the Russian Empire, and sure, you can have them all unified together without a State, but it's not going to be fun for everyone else that's about to get violently attacked by Russia. it's chilling how both Russia and the United States resent central power but then after getting everyone together to agree not to "dominate" each other they immediately replace central authority with outgoing imperialist violence. just like the Roman empire — inside everyone's nominally Roman, inside some people are doing philosophy and art and just existing and enjoying life instead of worrying about "labor" or "democracy", outside other groups of people are being panned for material wealth and getting turned into slaves.
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