My family and I are in Holland on a visit

[Fantastic Anarchist]

53. I totally get what you're saying.

The theoretical idea of communism is a beautiful thing. I understand your rejection to calling Putin a communist, because he most certainly is not (except his fondness for Bolshevik-style authoritarianism). In the USSR's case, neither was Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, or anyone that followed. The October Revolution was almost dead on arrival when the Bolsheviks gerry-mannered the Soviets, and suppressed those Soviets that couldn't be co-opted by the party. Lenin, in his reactionary zeal, proclaimed, "All power to the Soviets!" ...while he was undermining or outright destroying them. He put down workers' rebellions, trade unionists, syndicalists, anarchists, socialists (even the equally reactionary Left SRs (Socialist Revolutionaries), the Right SRs, the Left Opposition, Council Communists - anyone that got in the way of Bolshevik power. Lenin, the Marxist, wasn't even following Marx, who had his flaws about the theory of revolution (proving the anarchist, Bakunin, correct some fifty years earlier during the First International)! Even Marx amended his views somewhat on the use of the State and Vanguard Party to foment a revolution, when he saw the events that transpired with the Paris and Lyon Communes - an organic workers uprising that took over the factories and proved an anarchist revolution and society was possible without having used the machinations of the State, or some elite Vanguard to take the lead. It was a successful revolutionary communist society governed by and for the workers/people.

Sadly, even though the beginning stages showed great promise with workers overthrowing their bosses, establishing communes, socialists, communists overthrowing the government and the bourgeoisie, the nascent revolution was destroyed by the Bolsheviks and their allies. Bolshevism did more to destroy communism than the White Armies, and eventually the West ever could have.

I do get your point, nonetheless.

*I use the term Bolshevism because until then the term communism was an umbrella term that captured most of the left-wing labor movement; the Marxists, anarchists, trade unionists, etc. Marx, having borrowed heavily from the scientific-socialism work by the anarchist, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (System of Economic Contradictions), formulated his own scientific socialism with his work, The Communist Manifesto. The term was not his, however. The Bolsheviks, seizing a propaganda victory, employed the use to their "Revolution" and Party, which now is forever tied with the abomination that was the Soviet Union, no matter how potentially historically positive for the international labor movement (and its associated liberty movements) the initial Revolution was. Oh, what could have been.

We, at least, have an important historical lesson to learn from.

**My post may seem irrelevant and overly polemical in favor of anarchist philosophy, but the opening thread asks why we can't have a more cooperative society, and I believe that one day, a society built on anarchist principles would be a just and cooperative type of society.