Ask Lemmy

In 1917, there were 2 governments, the Worker and Peasant supported Soviet Government, and the Bourgeoisie and Petite Bourgeoisie supported liberal Provisional Government. Lenin was elected via the Soviet system, and the Socialist Revolutionaries were elected in the bourgeois controlled Provisional Government. After the election, the Soviet Government disbanded the Provisional Government via revolution, the same measures proposed by Marx the entire time.

Secondly, Lenin never once wrote about how dictators are essential to Communism. Lenin fully believed in Soviet Democracy, ie workers councils, and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, a term coined by Karl Marx to describe a Socialist State that had not fully absorbed all Capital into the Public Sector, and thus had to suppress the still existing Bourgeoisie. The reason for this is that Capital can only be wrested by the degree to which it develops! Per Engels:

Question 17 : Will it be possible to abolish private property at one stroke?

Answer : No, no more than the existing productive forces can at one stroke be multiplied to the extent necessary for the creation of a communal society. Hence, the proletarian revolution, which in all probability is approaching, will be able gradually to transform existing society and abolish private property only when the necessary means of production have been created in sufficient quantity.

Dictators are indeed antithetical to Communism, but you've entirely misframed Marx, Lenin, the USSR, and the October Revolution. The Soviet Republic in control of a largely Publicly Owned, Centrally Planned economy is in no way comparable to feudalism, but is actually existing Socialism.

Funilly enough, Lenin described exactly what you're now doing in The State and Revolution:

What is now happening to Marx's teaching has, in the course of history, happened repeatedly to the teachings of revolutionary thinkers and leaders of oppressed classes struggling for emancipation. During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their teachings with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to surround their names with a certain halo for the "consolation" of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time emasculating the essence of the revolutionary teaching, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it. At the present time, the bourgeoisie and the opportunists within the working-class movement concur in this "doctoring" of Marxism. They omit, obliterate and distort the revolutionary side of this teaching, its revolutionary soul. They push to the foreground and extol what is or seems acceptable to the bourgeoisie. All the social-chauvinists are now "Marxists" (don't laugh!). And more and more frequently, German bourgeois scholars, but yesterday specialists in the annihilation of Marxism, are speaking of the "national-German" Marx, who, they aver, educated the workers' unions which are so splendidly organized for the purpose of conducting a predatory war!

It's funny that you describe Communism as a "dream," it accurately depicts your idealistic understanding of it, along with your "reminder."

Theoretically, one could spontaneously be created from scratch starting with a small group of people on a new world who have never experienced a centralized form of government. Formal governing is not required if the society is small enough and there are no outside forces at work to create a threat. But once governing is required, there will generally be forces at work that will centralize it. The only exception might be in a society with very limited need for cooperation due to plentiful resources available to all, such as a utopia like Star Trek's Earth.

In all other, realistic scenarios, there will need to be a revolution. That will always be led by a person or group of people to organize the overthrow and coordinate the changes. This group will inevitably be in search of power themselves, corrupted by the power they are given, or infiltrated by those in search of such power and are unlikely to give up that power.

I'm not really talking about Marxist communism. See my other comment, but in any realistic scenarios, communism is unlikely to form spontaneously as the first form of government in a new society.

And since revolution on a large scale requires centralized coordination and leadership, there will always be someone or some group given centralized power that is unlikely to allow for decentralization to happen on a large scale and is actually more likely to grab the power of the previous government system and keep it centralized, "for the good of the people" or "to defend the people" or whatever. Even well meaning revolutionaries are highly likely to crave control and be unlikely to want to allow "someone else" to change what they put in place. This then leaves in place the centralization indefinitely and never leads to communism.