According to a statistic I’m making up right now, Americans conflate communism and fascism an average of 876 million times per day. The main reason is that fascists purposefully confuse people into believing that there’s absolutely no difference between their position (genocide) and the left’s position (preventing genocide), but there’s an important secondary reason: Communism is confusing. Since communism is the most well-publicized leftist ideology in the US, that confusion has rubbed off on every ideology left of Hitler.
In general, the left is in favor of democracy and the right is in favor of just a few people being in charge of everyone else. If you’re a smirking man who wears a trilby, you’re probably thinking, “If that’s true, then why is communism authoritarian?” The answer is that communist theory includes a two-step process for achieving communism — which is a world of full democracy. The first step is authoritarianism.
I can hear you scoffing.
But let’s review US history. There was this British colony, living under a liberal monarchy/parliamentary democracy which didn’t allow the colonists any political power. The colonists decided they wanted a more democratic society, so they all got together and voted and decided that they would be a representative democracy (for white men who owned land). The end.
No, wait! That’s not what happened at all! No, the colonists created a tyranny of the majority — a completely authoritarian nightmare — and wrested control of the colony away from British military forces and those colonists who were royal boot lickers. There were 7 long years of this authoritarian hell — nearly 24,000 colonists died and over 31,000 people died on the British side (including over 7500 Hessian mercenaries). The bootlickers were allowed to go to Canada — they were not allowed to participate in the new government — and the US became a significantly more democratic place than it was before.
Was there anything at all wrong about this? Seems A-OK to me.
Leninism is precisely this same strategy. First, you create a tyranny of the majority — a dictatorship of working people. Obviously, the ruling class assholes who created the situation you are rebelling against don’t get to participate. Then — in theory — after your dictatorship has ironed out the wrinkles — you slowly democratize everything until you’ve achieved communism.
Authoritarianism is an effective tool for getting rid of the ruling class, but it is a less effective tool for creating democracy — the tendency is to just replace one ruling class with another. Were you aware that some dingus proposed making George Washington into a king?
In Russia, the democratizing step didn’t really happen, and I blame the Bratva. The Bratva are the Russian mob. Lenin tried to get rid of them and failed, then Stalin took over and he was one of them. The Bratva remained in control of Russia and even today — with communism gone from the country — Russia is ruled by the Bratva. It’s almost as if the problem with Russian communism wasn’t the communism, but the Russians.
In Cuba, on the other hand, the switch between authoritarianism and democracy seems to have worked out just fine. Naturally, the Cuban ruling class (who were allowed to leave) doesn’t see it that way when they peer south from their homes in Florida, but that’s kind of like believing the drunk lying in the gutter outside of the club when he tells you that there was absolutely no justification for him getting kicked out.
This is a huge area of conversation on the left: How do we achieve the maximum possible democracy? There are certainly a lot of communists out there saying that we need to take power away from the ruling class, because they’re not going to just hand it over. And that’s certainly a very good point. There are also anarchists who say that we can lead by example and create a world that duplicates the functions of the corrupt state, and then the ruling class simply won’t have power anymore. Also a great point. The majority of leftists, however, are willing to do anything that works to increase the amount of democracy in their world — even voting — and do not see cruelty as an effective tool for progress.
The left is so wholeheartedly committed to democracy that it spends a lot of time internally trying to tweak processes to make sure that democracy is maximized. Leftists are constantly questioning their own assumptions about whether or not they are succeeding, and keep their eyes open for something going wrong. Things do go wrong sometimes — we’re all only human after all.
But unlike some people, leftists don’t just give up and say, “Well I guess we’re just going to have to choose the lesser evil.”