So a bit of context, the EFF is a prominent pan-African, ostensibly ML leftist party in South Africa. This is an FAQ from early 2024, that same year the country had an election in late May. Personally, I don’t think the EFF arrived at these sentiments wanting to appeal to western liberals or whatever. If you know anything about Malema or the EFF, you’d know that they are not concerned with playing soft with right-wingers, much to the chagrin of the compromised ANC and white supremacist “Democratic” Alliance. Not sure who wrote it, but from the writing style I think it might have been written by either Shivambu or Malema himself.
Some quotes for those who don’t want to read:
Stalin and Mao were NOT Marxists, they were actually quite anti-Marxist in that they led regimes based not on democratic control of the state by the workers, but rather based on totalitarian control by an elite stratum of bureaucrats who were a parasite on the workers’ state.
The Stalinists were terrified of any potential opposition, and especially the intellectuals that they could not control. They were snuffed out, in many cases quite literally. Individual expression was portrayed as counter-revolutionary, even culture was subjugated to the “collective will” - not of society but of a handful of bureaucrats desperate to cling on to their power and privilege.
Had the Communist International remained firm on the positions of Lenin and Trotsky, the victory of the world revolution would have been ensured. Unfortunately, the Comintern’s formative years coincided with the Stalinist counter-revolution in Russia, which had a disastrous effect on the Communist Parties of the entire world.
What would be a good ML answer/response to the statement that Mao and Stalin ran bureucratic totalitarian regimes instead of just saying "you aren’t educated enough on the topic. I’m asking because this comes up a lot in my conversations.
You could point out the fact that totalitarianism borders on racist caricatures of how the systems actually worked (and how the term really does not describe anything outside of the vague description of excess authority combined with evilness); you could also show how it is hypocritically applied to supposedly “evil” countries with excessive authority that happened to have fought against America and compare it to evil countries with excessive authority that were in support of America.
Honestly, if they are not willing to deal with your evidence and claims, then do not bother. Talking to them about how they are actually complicit in whitewashing colonialism and destroying the movement for workers’ liberation will just get them to fall back to their racist tropes again.
My favored approach when I have the energy for it is to gently (not condescendingly) probe until I know what someone’s actual stance is. Otherwise, you’re playing guessing games trying to refute arguments they may not even understand, much less believe in fully.
For example, asking what they mean by:
Which is a word salad political descriptor. Any organization at scale has some kind of bureaucracy in order to make it go more smoothly and ensure things are compliant with social regulations (laws). And totalitarian is a meaningless word, on the level of saying extreme dictatorship or something. It needs to mean something concretely. A dictatorship of one individual seems like the closest real equivalent to total control and then we’re basically talking about a monarchy, no? But the west still likes monarchs sometimes, so calling AES states monarchies could go against their interests of continuing to promote monarchy as a legitimate power form.
And then total control via one individual does not make sense with extensive bureaucracy, since you’d have to be trusting that the bureaucrats do everything exactly as you want at all times.
Or if we look at it from the standpoint of total surveillance, the only way that would even be close to feasible is with automation that did not exist in that time period (and it still wouldn’t be total). You can’t just enlist the population to surveil the population, without having some of the population not be surveilled.
It’s pure nonsense when you break it down, so getting someone to delve into the actual thought process may on occasion deprogram them a bit just from getting them to actually reflect on what it means. It’s likely that often times these are borrowed terms they got from anti-communist media.
Neither were dictators and both were subject to democratic oversight. The CIA itself admitted as much, about Stalin at least