Is it odd for a socialist to not be keen on communism?

Hello, its my very first post on this subreddit. Ive seen a lot of people, if not all trying to defend communism in some way by calling it "not true socialism" or making some of the crimes caused by communist system sound very miniscule and missunderstood. And I can understand it, Ive been the same like you guys and still sometimes am, trying to defend some failures of the system. But recently I came to terms that communism as an political system would require pure miracles to succed. But that doesnt mean Im some kind of traitor, right guys? I simply prefer for more friendly social democracy or syndicalism. I would love for companies to be protected by the goverment and ruled by the people actually working there. Is it less efficient? Yup, it surely is less efficient than free market. Does it makes a way happier workplace? Imo it does. And thats what I stand for as a socialist, to make the working class have what they deserve and for those ridicolously rich billionaires to let go off their inifite money glitch and give their accumulated wealth back to the system, so it can go back to people or buisnesses. We really dont need milionaries, they give nothing to the system and only spread their web of influences. But yeah, to finish off my post and come back to the topic:

Is communism good in my opinion? No

Is capitalism good in my opinion? No

Can we achive better future by working together and for the common good? Hell yeah. And throw shit at me however much you want you angsty liberals, but Im pretty sure that we can achive it thanks to moderate socialism.

in CapitalismVSocialismby Happy_Ad7236

71%

19d

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Worried-Ad2325

Libertarian Socialist

19d

MLs are politically useless. They advocate for a system of state capitalism that manifests the worst possible abuses of capitalism without any sort of intervening democratic process. Who does that genuinely appeal to? Why would anyone want to go from a system of class antagonism to a system of class antagonism but red?

The idea of socialism writ large is the abolition of class and capital. You can't do that without democratic organization of the state, the economy, and any other lever of power.

thebigsteaks

19d

I don’t think MLs advocate against democracy as an ideal. Obviously the “worst abuses of capitalism without any sort of intervening democratic process” doesn’t appeal to anyone. It is however probably necessary to have a workers state post revolution, at least temporarily, and I don’t see why political opposition compromising the interests of the working class should be allowed to reverse any gains made and degenerate conditions.

Worried-Ad2325

Libertarian Socialist

19d

I've always been on the fence about Lenin as a person. My optimistic view is that he was naive, wanted democracy, but went about it in a way that collapsed things into autocracy. My pessimistic view is that he was an arrogant intellectual who thought that Marx was wrong about democracy and that the ignorant masses had to be guided like sheep towards a better life.

It is however probably necessary to have a workers state post revolution, at least temporarily, and I don’t see why political opposition compromising the interests of the working class should be allowed to reverse any gains made and degenerate conditions.

I think there's a line between defending the revolution and crushing political opposition. The Bolsheviks labeled basically all dissent as reactionary, and that's probably not what Marx meant by revolutionary terror.

When Marx wrote about democracy as the first step of the revolution, he did so recognizing that the state is an apparatus of political power between the ruling class and everyone else. He wanted everyone to have a say in the new state, because without that democratic mechanism you just get a rebranded ruling class.

LibertyLizard

Contrarianism

18d

Look into the way Lenin seized and maintained power during the Russian revolution. It is so far from democratic that I have a have a hard time anyone could be naive enough to believe this strategy would lead to any level of democracy.

Worried-Ad2325

Libertarian Socialist

17d

I don't think Lenin's actions disqualify literally all revolutionary action, and I was being pretty charitable in my earlier post when I discussed an optimistic view of Lenin.

There have been violent revolutions that have instilled more egalitarian governments pretty much throughout history. It's a matter of building up the initial movement around a pro-democracy ethic, rather than just LARPing as a revolutionary.

LibertyLizard

Contrarianism

17d

I was mainly pushing back against this charitable view of Lenin which I find ahistorical and far too widespread. The revolutionary movement in Russia actually had a strong democratic ethic but it was co-opted and then suppressed by Lenin rather than allowed to develop into an independent institution. If revolutions are to succeed in instituting substantially better societies, they need built in ethics and norms to prevent this type of seizure by authoritarian leaders. Abrupt transitions like this are particularly susceptible because there is often a lack of consensus among people about what the new system should look like—only that the old one should go. Lenin’s party wasn’t even particularly popular but through various schemes he was able to seize and maintain power by electoral chicanery and then violent repression.

How to avoid this problem is a bit of an unsolved question in my view, but I am curious which violent revolutions you would view as successful? Most that I can think of devolved, either quickly or slowly, into having a new ruling class, often enforced by even more violence than the old system.

Worried-Ad2325

Libertarian Socialist

16d

How to avoid this problem is a bit of an unsolved question in my view, but I am curious which violent revolutions you would view as successful? Most that I can think of devolved, either quickly or slowly, into having a new ruling class, often enforced by even more violence than the old system.

I think that resolving it starts with acknowledging that you can't build a revolution overnight. You need to foster a movement with your intended ethos and apply a degree of scrutiny on the factions that form. If ever a serious democratic socialist movement exists in the American political sphere, one of the first challenges we'll face will be excising groups like tankies and then winning the optics war as fox news uses Stalinists as straw men to represent our views.

Regarding which violent revolutions I'd consider successful, a pretty solid example right off the bat would be the American Revolution. I know a lot of people consider it a war of secession, and while it was it also involved a significant leftward jump away from monarchism. The French Revolution is a good example of one that was co-opted, and yet its ideas did spread in a way that led to positive outcomes (IN THE LONG RUN).

When I say "successful" here, I don't mean that the revolutionaries won. We technically have a ton of those. I refer to revolutions that resulted in better systems after the fact.