I’m not a Marxist, but I know that what Marx believed changed over his lifetime, expressing new ideas in his letters while rejecting old ones, and removing and altering sections of his works in later editions. So being ‘Marxist’ doesn’t necessitate incorporating all of his ideas on authoritarianism. Typically the Marxists I meet do philosophically adapt to new information, though admittedly in many parts of the world ‘Marxist-Leninist Thought’ is a canonical set of ideas meant to be memorized from a textbook.
people’s unwillingness to admit that the Soviet Union and CCP weren’t just “unlucky” attempts
To claim the USSR was inevitably authoritarian ignores the nature of the revolution that created it. The Tsar was defeated by a coalition of groups, which in turn were cannibalized by the authoritarian Bolsheviks. There is no guarantee that the result of that battle royale would end with Lenin the victor. It’s an erasure of the Black Guards, the Krondstat Navy, and the Makhnovshchina to name a few.
No-one is claiming the PRC was an “unlucky” attempt. Mao admired some aspects of anarchist thought, but he and his comrades based their revolutionary goals on the already existing Soviet state.
I’m not a Marxist, but I know that what Marx believed changed over his lifetime, expressing new ideas in his letters while rejecting old ones, and removing and altering sections of his works in later editions. So being ‘Marxist’ doesn’t necessitate incorporating all of his ideas on authoritarianism. Typically the Marxists I meet do philosophically adapt to new information, though admittedly in many parts of the world ‘Marxist-Leninist Thought’ is a canonical set of ideas meant to be memorized from a textbook.
To claim the USSR was inevitably authoritarian ignores the nature of the revolution that created it. The Tsar was defeated by a coalition of groups, which in turn were cannibalized by the authoritarian Bolsheviks. There is no guarantee that the result of that battle royale would end with Lenin the victor. It’s an erasure of the Black Guards, the Krondstat Navy, and the Makhnovshchina to name a few.
No-one is claiming the PRC was an “unlucky” attempt. Mao admired some aspects of anarchist thought, but he and his comrades based their revolutionary goals on the already existing Soviet state.