I am trying to understand as much as possible about socialism as well as other leftist ideologies, and looking around i’ve seen many being critical about democratic socialism, but i honestly struggle to understand why that is such a bad idea as some say. I get that it’s incompatible with ML, but it doesn’t sound so unrealistic and unreasonable to me, so… can you explain? Excuse the ignorance, but as i said socialism is a new topic for me, i mean no offense to anybody
The Ethiopian Revolution offered a potential answer to state violence.
“As the state arose from the need to keep class antagonisms in check, but also arose in the thick of the fight between the classes, it is normally the state of the most powerful, economically ruling class, which by its means becomes also the politically ruling class, and so acquires new means of holding down and exploiting the oppressed class. The ancient state was, above all, the state of the slave-owners for holding down the slaves, just as the feudal state was the organ of the nobility for holding down the peasant serfs and bondsmen, and the modern representative state is the instrument for exploiting wage-labor by capital. Exceptional periods, however, occur when the warring classes are so nearly equal in forces that the state power, as apparent mediator, acquires for the moment a certain independence in relation to both.”
“It [the public power] grows stronger, however, in proportion as class antagonisms within the state become more acute, and as adjacent states become larger and more populous. We have only to look at our present-day Europe, where class struggle and rivalry in conquest have tuned up the public power to such a pitch that it threatens to swallow the whole of society and even the state." (Both quotes F. Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State – https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/ch09.htm. The brackets are Lenin’s.)
Such is what happened during Derg rule in Ethiopia. A section of the pre-existing police-state power created by the bourgeois regime actually used the class struggle to finance its personnel so heavily at the expense of capital that it crushed capitalism, financially and politically.
Oligarchs are notorious for paying as little as they can get away with paying, including to their police and military. Each act of class struggle, however, transfers oligarchical wealth from the ruling class to the state security apparatus – so insufficiently opposing or even, among some elements in it, secretly fomenting extreme class struggle is actually directly in the state apparatus’ interest, once it reaches that certain independence that Engels mentioned.