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Your whole argument hangs on equating despotism with totalitarianism. But it's not the same, these 2 characteristics are orthogonal.

For example European absolute monarchies were despotic but not totalitarian (mostly because there was no technology to exert absolute control over the society).

> That was just one of many calls Marx made for violent revolution rather than democratic means.

Again, violent revolution doesn't mean the state is totalitarian. Many democracies started with violent revolutions, many totalitarian states started with democratic elections.

> Marx didn't specify that as an end state per se

Thank you, that's my point. You're defining what is characteristic and accidental in communism arbitrarily.

It's not my distinction, it's the definition of totalitarianism (as opposed to other authoritarian forms of power).

> Totalitarian regimes are different from other authoritarian regimes. The latter denotes a state in which the single power holder – an individual "dictator", a committee or a junta or an otherwise small group of political elite – monopolizes political power. "[The] authoritarian state [...] is only concerned with political power and as long as that is not contested it gives society a certain degree of liberty". Authoritarianism "does not attempt to change the world and human nature". In contrast, a totalitarian regime attempts to control virtually all aspects of the social life, including the economy, education, art, science, private life and morals of citizens. [1]

Absolute monarch doesn't care what peasants think, what ethnicity or race they are, and in general it leads to much less cleansings and pogroms than totalitarianism.

> Yes, in theory a violent revolution which centralises all power in the hands of the revolutionaries could work out great and turn itself into a democracy, but in practice this never actually happens.

why all power? Where did you get that all from? Again, I hate to play the devil's advocate, but I find myself pushed to do it - Marx wanted to change the ownership of means of production. It's not all the power, and it's not unprecedented. Most revolutions change the top dogs. In very few cases in history that change led to totalitarian state.

Romania had a violent revolution. France had a violent revolution. USA had a violent revolution. Poland had violent revolutions every 20 years for over a century (BTW several of the Polish uprisings wanted to free the serfs and give them the land). All of them are now democracies :)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totalitarianism

We're discussing language here, maybe we're not making fine distinctions a political scientist would make, but let's check a thesaurus:

https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/totalitarianism?s=t

Synonyms for totalitarianism: despotism, authoritarianism. In common language they're the same thing.

Perhaps an English-speaking political scientist would be unhappy at those thesaurus entries and claim the differences are critical, I don't know, honestly, don't really care. If you wish to draw a distinction, and argue that it's really important that Marx was merely authoritarian and not totalitarian (or whatever), that's fine by me. I concede the point through apathy. Does Polish draw the same distinctions as English, I wonder?

Anyway. It's a distraction. The point is, communism always ends in being a dictatorship like the USSR or China, it must through its very foundational assumptions, and whatever you call the resulting system that will always yield very heavy state control of industry, information, etc. You can't have a Marxist system without it.

As for top dogs: that's one of the primary logic errors in Marxist philosophy. He divided the world into exactly two camps and then pitted them against each other: labour and owners, workers and capitalists, proles and bourgeoisie. But this world existed only in his mind. Even in the 1800s there were many people who didn't fit that neat classification, including himself. Marx spent his entire life producing words and ideas; his "means of production" was a pen and paper. He was able to do this because he was supported by a factory owning friend. So was Marx a top dog or oppressed prole? What would it mean to seize his own means of production? Have a government official steal his pens? Marx failed to notice that his own existence didn't fit his own theories, because he was an idiot whose thinking had no value due to his staggering lack of real world experience. Indeed in Das Kapital he was forced to engage in various kinds of fraud to make his own arguments work, for instance, by citing decades old English factory inspector reports as evidence of contemporary problems without observing that those same reports led to changes in the law and improvements in factory conditions. If he had remarked on that, it would have undermined his thesis that capitalism couldn't self-improve and needed violent revolution to improve worker conditions.

A good introduction to just how isolated from reality he was can be found in the book "Intellectuals" by Paul Johnson. The relevant chapter has been reproduced at this link (ignore the weird picture and lack of attribution, the words are the same):

http://thekbh.org/marx2.htm