this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2026
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Claiming Leninists aren't communist is a bit like claiming Jeffersonians aren't capitalist. "No no! He purchased Louisiana with state money! Adam Smith explicitly said you shouldn't do this!"
Leninist created a government with a extremwly powerful class, that owned all means of production. Please explain us how's that communism
The... proletariat class? Are you suggesting a working class in Russia didn't exist prior to 1917?
That user is suggesting that the Party administration, by virtue of controlling the means of production was definitionally not proletariat, but in fact the most concentrated group of bourgeois administrators.
Before the Russian Civil War was even over? An incredible feat of administrative enginuity.
The Soviet Bureaucracy was 5.4M people strong by 1920. Even assuming you dismiss the existence of Communes as autonomous self-governing bodies, that's 4% of the total population.
This is what we're describing as highly concentrated bourgeois wealth?
And we're comparing it to King George V who - as a singular person - controlled 37% of the entire national economy through his titles, lands, and equity in various British conglomerates?
No, it's what that commentator was. I'd also assume they meant post-Red Vs. White wars...
I don't know enough about the facts of Soviet Russia, so I'm just soaking up info (I will engage personally more when China or Britain are topics), the 5.4 million bureaucracy by 1920 is a nice statistic.
(You are, of course, comparing Apples to Oranges. How much of the economy the wealthiest person controls doesn't compare in a meaningful way to number of administrators (and also, obviously Imperial Britain was much less equal than the USSR. One would hope that any region post a communist revolution would be more equal and an empire.)
I just hoped to end a communications issue, and thus learn more.
The workers didn't own the means of production!
They literally do.
Administration is not a class in Marxist understanding. Classes are relations to ownership of the means of production and distribution. Principals and teachers are both proletarian, despite having different managerial levels.
While I accept that may have some degree of merit RE the Soviet Union at least; so the post may as well be meaningless. Multiple countries and their variation of economics fall under capitalism. Seemingly none fall under communism. So the picture is essentially claiming “communism, a supposedly purely hypothetical system of governing/economics has never done anything bad” which ok so? By the same logic it’s never done anything good either, because it’s allegedly never really been implemented. It’s comparing real life to ideals/fiction.
You're ALMOST getting it.
The point isn't that communism is great. It's that the communist threat that capitalist demagogues love to bandy about is purely hypothetical, unlike the very real and present harms of capitalism.
To add to this I'm pretty sure the early capitalist thinkers like Locke didn't aim for the late stage capitalism society that America had become. If we are comparing ideology that's what we should compare with but if we are comparing actual real life scenarios communism is stuck with Soviet, China and Cuba.
And Catalonia and Australia
Oh, I can point to a historical example of communism. Australia. Australia has 60,000 years of classless, stateless, moneyless history. And it was great!
Primitive communism[^1], meaning pre-primitive accumulation, pre-capitalism, and pre-industrial revolution, is a vastly different mode of production from post-capitalist, post-industrial revolution socialism or communism.
[^1]: inb4 the inevitable bad-faith reading of primitive in this context: also called previous accumulation, original accumulation
There is, after all, no true communist.
Marxist-Leninists are the most widely adopted school of communist theory and practice. You're horribly butchering your understanding of Marxism when you conflate class with administration. Classes are relations to ownership of the means of production. In the USSR, industry and the land were collectively owned (for the most part, there were cooperatives called Artels under Stalin that were abolished under Khrushchev, etc.), and administrators received their pay in wages. They did not own capital and did not profit off of capitalism.
As for the DPRK, their model of democracy is based on approval voting. As of 2024, they have begun to roll out multi-candidate primaries, but prior to 2024 they had a Democratic Front which decided on what candidates to put to the vote, and then you can vote to approve or not. It's a very different democratic model from western countries, but it's inaccurate to call it non-democratic.
Just because groups like the Nazis have used names for their own advantage does not actually mean all groups are the opposite of their claimed ideology. I think it would do you good to study Marxism a bit more, both in theory and practice.
I wish you people would bother to learn at least as basic a thing as what a fucking class is before you spout off.