There's only one thing worse than tankies. Trots

Not true. NEP actually was reducing monopoly and thus liberalization. As Russia was an agricultural country, more feudal than capitalist, Lenin had to first build a normal capitalism before it turned him into a total state monopoly. Stalin, although initially pretended rightist wanting to continue the NEP, fully realized ideas of Lenin - and in fact, also Trotsky, who differed from Lenin only lesser realism and greater willingness to sacrifice human life.

Later, Trotsky- most likely a complete psychopath - pretended democrat, only to gain back authority and respect in the labor movement.

None of your hot opinions letter because your economic theory is inconsistent and shit :).

True. Also - that's why I think totalitarianism is due to the ideology of Marx himself. Mutualism, however, is the attempt to do Marxism again, only worse.

*matter
Whoops!

"Mutualism is the attempt to Marxism"
Wut.

I know exactly what kind of intentional misdirection is behind this post

Mutualism is basically the logical conclusion of the classical economic theory - and labour theory of value, but without marxist insight and proper class analysis.

I prefer a tanky to a leftcom. At least a tanky would do something to get rid of the capitalists.

and then promptly toss you in the gulag

Does Proudhon reject Say? How can you advocate for markets without absorbing Say?

Are there more than one anarcho-edgy posters on this chan? Are you the English teacher who said Walras was compatible with Marx?

marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/dec/30.htm
Lenin regarded the NEP as state capitalism.

I'm hoping for Castro rather than Mao

For me it's a compliment to be taken as English teacher, so thank you. :)

marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/ichtci/
1917 - 4 years before NEP

They're ready to get rid of people, in general. In this they're very simillar to trots and many of ancoms.

I wonder when being against mass masacre and critisicm of mass murderers became 'edgy'.

So you aren't the Pirate poster who switched to anarcho-edginess, who was an English teacher?

no :(

My bad, there is another poster I very much dislike who is an English teacher who spouts off bullshit about how mutualism is post-leftism and how Marx is a special snowflake meanie.

Anyway, I think the State Capitalism critique of the SU only works in a certain context, in a Marxian one. I'm not sure what your personal views on the matter are, but would you consider yourself a Marxian economist?

risky hope there

Not only. My criticism of SU as state capitalism is based on leninist self-claims, and actually on opposition to marxism.

In fact, both marx and many other thinkers of his time imagined that the ideal system as a state dictatorship, consequence of the capitalist accumulation process - accumulation of capital in the hands of one of the great capitalist - state, but the state controlled by the proletariat.

Moreover, there was not to be a liberal, democratic government but a dictatorship - dictatorship of proletariat. This is consistent with zeitgeist of the time, when many philosophers distanced themelves from democracy, and moved to dictatorship.

This applies not only to Marx and Engels, but also to Russian nihilists, Bakunin or Sorel. Only few socialists / communists break away, one of them was Kropotkin, and, under his influence, anarchist communists.

And, criticism of Soviet Union as a capitalist, can be drawn also from those positions.

And, returning to Trotsky - concept of omnipotent, total state, had incredibly attracted this type of personality: very intelligent, very ambitious and ruthless psychopaths. That's why so many them were in the ranks of the Bolsheviks - and the victory of Stalin was probably more accidental than people usually suspect. the competition was a whole series of equally ruthless, and equally ambitious persons, only with a little bit different concepts and views on marxist state.

In a fundamental level there is not so much difference between totalizing tendency in Marxism-Leninism and the Ntational Socialism - both ideologies were form of fascism, and thus a form of organization of capital in capitalist conditions.

This is really dishonest. Engels and Marx repeatedly talked about the importance of Democracy. I recommend you read Marx, but I'll post a few quotes:

"As we have seen, the state exists merely as political state. The totality of the political state is the legislature. To participate in the legislature is thus to participate in the political state and to prove and actualise one's existence as member of the political state, as member of the state. That all as individuals want to participate integrally in the legislature is nothing but the will of all to be actual (active) members of the state, or to give themselves a political existence, or to prove their existence as political and to effect it as such. We have further seen that the Estates are civil society as legislature, that they are its political existence. The fact, therefore, that civil society invades the sphere of legislative power en masse, and where possible totally, that actual civil society wishes to substitute itself for the fictional civil society of the legislature, is nothing but the drive of civil society to give itself political existence, or to make political existence its actual existence. The drive of civil society to transform itself into political society, or to make political society into the actual society, shows itself as the drive for the most fully possible universal participation in legislative power.
— Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, 1843

The political revolution which overthrew this sovereign power (feudalism) and raised state affairs to become affairs of the people, which constituted the political state as a matter of general concern, that is, as a real state, necessarily smashed all estates, corporations, guilds, and muh privileges, since they were all manifestations of the separation of the people from the community. The political revolution thereby abolished the political character of civil society. It broke up civil society into its simple component parts; on the one hand, the individuals; on the other hand, the material and spiritual elements constituting the content of the life and social position of these individuals. It set free the political spirit, which had been, as it were, split up, partitioned, and dispersed in the various blind alleys of feudal society. It gathered the dispersed parts of the political spirit, freed it from its intermixture with civil life, and established it as the sphere of the community, the general concern of the nation, ideally independent of those particular elements of civil life. A person’s distinct activity and distinct situation in life were reduced to a merely individual significance. They no longer constituted the general relation of the individual to the state as a whole. Public affairs as such, on the other hand, became the general affair of each individual, and the political function became the individual’s general function. But, the completion of the idealism of the state was at the same time the completion of the materialism of civil society. Throwing off the political yoke meant at the same time throwing off the bonds which restrained the egoistic spirit of civil society. Political emancipation was, at the same time, the emancipation of civil society from politics, from having even the semblance of a universal content. Feudal society was resolved into its basic element – man, but man as he really formed its basis – egoistic man.
— Karl Marx, On The Jewish Question
(Marx spends a long time in "On the Jewish Question" talking about how Capitalism has soiled legitimate democracy.

We are not among those communists who are out to destroy personal liberty, who wish to turn the world into one huge barrack or into a gigantic workhouse. There certainly are some communists who, with an easy conscience, refuse to countenance personal liberty and would like to shuffle it out of the world because they consider that it is a hindrance to complete harmony. But we have no desire to exchange freedom for equality. We are convinced that in no social order will freedom be assured as in a society based upon communal ownership.
— Marx, Engel, et al., Communist Journal

Thinking men of all classes begin to see that a new line must be struck out, and that this line can only be in the direction of democracy. But in England, where the industrial and agricultural working class forms the immense majority of the people, democracy means the dominion of the working class, neither more nor less. Let, then, that working class prepare itself for the task in store for it, – the ruling of this great empire; let them understand the responsibilities which inevitably will fall to their share. And the best way to do this is to use the power already in their hands, the actual majority they possess in every large town in the kingdom, to send to Parliament men of their own order. […] Moreover, in England a real democratic party is impossible unless it be a working men's party.
— Engels

Read Marx before spreading lies. You're interpreting Marx's concept of a class dictatoship (which the bourgeoisie possesses at the moment) with a literal dictatorship. That's very dishonest.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAH
Have you seriously not read any fascist literature? Are you saying an ideology, where one of its key building blocks is "anti-communism" could be even remotely related to Communism? Are the mystical, and irrational elements present in Mussolini or Codenreau and Hitler completely lost on you?

Marxism-Leninism isn't mystical, of course, but it's irrational, and it's form of secular religion.

SU had all aspects of being religious state they practiced even some version of liturgy-rituals and confession in the Party (self-ctiricism), they had their prophets - Marx and Lenin, they had their symbol, on flag which symbol is martyrdom of proletarians. They were also waiting for the Apocalypse, and tried to create the Kingdom of God on Earth, the End of history, the ultimate order.

They completely rejected science, if it was heretical (they called it 'bourgeois' then) and clung to the orthodox doctrine.

They and fascists fought each other as Christians is fought with Muslims, fiercely, but in fact they were the same.

This is an absolutely abhorrent post written by, I assume, an illiterate high schooler.

I read them (Marx and Engels) actually. They exactly explicate that the state need to be ruled by dictatorship. This is not hyperbole, or metaphor.

I guess they got to space by dumb luck.

Horseshoe theory is bad for your mental health.

It's no horseshoe theory. Even Kropotkin had written that Marxism is uscientific.

Marx was in strong inspiration of Hegel's work. Although, he outright rejected theism, and accepted materialism, he preserved dialectical method of Hegel - which is of course unscientific.

It doesn't mean a literal dictatorship. It's meant to convey the domination of one class over another. Liberal democracy is a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie but it's still functionally a pluralistic representative democracy.

Not according to Hegel.
I don't give a fuck about Kropotkin, Marxism-Leninism is an adaptation of Marxism for the specific economic conditions that existed in Russia during the revolutionary period there.
You're equating Not Socialism and Stalinism/Christianity and Islam because you're illiterate or simply can't be bothered to read a book.

A class dictatorship. Again, if we can have a class dictatorship right now with democratic institutions, why would that not be the case in a DoTP? They say "the State can act as nothing else but the dictatorship of the proletariat". It's a distortion of Marx's jargon, just like when people who "read" Marx distort his use of "value" to mean price rather than the way we allocate labour in our society.

No they were not the same. You are drawing up a comparison based on the fact that a cult of personality developed around Marx, to extrapolate "they were da same guiz!". I could do the same thing with the Liberal United States government and their veneration of the founding fathers and fighting for "freedom" in oil rich countries. You can obfuscate the differences and crudely emphasize the similarity, but that doesn't mean "they are the same".

The comparison to "Muslims v Christians" is apples to oranges as well. If one were to entertain your notion, I could point out how they are both of the abrahamic-faith and closely intertwined with each other on a number of details whereas the opposite is true for fascism and communism. Sorel's slight influence on fascist ideology was lost in Hitler and other Axis puppets, and lost in practice by Mussolini. Not that this would matter, as Sorel's theory is a vulgarization of Marx. The horseshoe theory is really, a terrible terrible political theory.

Marx's science is the adaptation of Hegels logic, a dialectical logic to investigate Capitalism. He was quite successful, as his Hegellian approach coupled with the advances of Smith and Ricardo led to him finding flaws in their theory that had previously led the Ricardian school to collapse (the big one I can think of is the puzzle of how we value labour power).

Bob Black is a meme theorist and you should feel bad.

Soviet Union had ideological problem with many field of science that wasn't on the way with their peculiar materialistic religion. For example, they rejected darwinist evolution and accepted neo-lamarckian lysenkoism, even without empirical data supporting Lysenko's theories, only because he was in accordance with the doctrine. They rejected also cybernetics. Over time, Eastern Bloc became technologically open-air museum, almost all technologies they stolen or bought from the West. This is not surprising, because there was no freedom of scientific research in Soviet Union and universities were full of pseudoscietist, whose only 'advantages' were political correctness.

You know that Darwin's formulation of evolution is not the one that's widely accepted today, right? Rejecting classical Darwinism in favor of a theory of evolution that can account for 150 years of new data on the subject isn't a sign of rejecting empirical research.
I'm pretty sure, as has been pointed out, that the USSR made it into space. How is that not a sign of legitimate and functional scientific institutions?

I'm not a fan of Lysenko but if you actually read him he didn't reject evolution he theorized that genetic information was stored in other places besides the nucleus and affected by the environment. cough*epigenetics*cough. Just because he had a couple meme theories about the agriculture doesn't mean the Soviet Union was opposed to science.

Now, while I agree that the SU was mostly shit I am angry you are purposely distortion Marx and conveniently ignored everything I quoted related to Marx and Engels attitudes towards democracy in and .

Because anarcho-edginess posters pride themselves on a self-aggrandizing rejection of "the left" while offering no feasible alternatives and likening themselves with philosophical kooks like primitivist.

In reality, Marxists had increasing problem with empiricism over the time. Development of history didn't agree with the predictions of Marx and Engels, the price of labor steadly grow instead being fixed at a minimum level. Their commitment to the cause and ardent faith, however, prevented the acceptance of the revisionists.

That's why they still don't agree on empirical testing, preferring scholastic, philosophical reasoning.

To whom specifically are you referring?

Most part of modern Marxists.

Oh go on, I haven't hard this one before. Please tell me how Marx and Engels thought there could be no revolution in Russia, or how the revolution was inevitable no matter what happens.

Tell that to Anwar Shaikh who spent 15 years trying to ground new theories in the Marxian tradition using a wealth of empirical evidence. There are lots of Marxian scholars who do empirical research, but like any economic school there are disagreements over theory and the way Marx was distorted by both the SU and liberal propagandist hasn't helped us.

I used the word 'specifically' before.

Also
What is hard to understand about an accumulation of capital theory of wages? Do you seriously think Marx accepted the Iron Law of Wages, even though he spends pages in Capital railing against it for being incoherent and unrealistic? You can explain the growth of wages following WW2 easily, using the historical and material conditions as a guideline (lack of labour force, Keynesians policies to drive up demand and business opportunities). Maybe if Walras hadn't dominated western institutions it could've happened sooner. While I do agree Marxian school is prone to ad-hoc explanations the reason for the growth of real wages (and the subsequent stagnation) is not a contentious issue and not in conflict but anything but a poor reading of Marx's theory of wages laid out in Part 5 of Capital V 1.

Your move.

so all of this empirical data says that Kronstad sailors should die, humgarian uprising was fascist counterrevolution and people should be forced to work in concentration camps? yes?

The state as a coercive apparatus can be abolished and replaced with bottom-up power structures. What cannot be abolished is power, and that is a lesson anarchists have never learned.

Give the full quote, will you?

> For socialism is merely the next step forward from state-capitalist monopoly. Or, in other words, socialism is merely state-capitalist monopoly which is made to serve the interests of the whole people and has to that extent ceased to be capitalist monopoly.

Everything is quite obvious:
Capitalism -> State-Capitalist Monopoly (under control of Proletarian State) -> Socialism (Central Planning) -> Communism (Post-Scarcity)

Yes, except the last bit which is your wishful thinking.