Ideologies

This sounds good. Why so much hate for Trotskyists on here?

imperialism is dumb my trot friend pretending to be someone else

LeftComs are basically very orthodox Marxists. The name originated from the Third International, where the term referred to those people critical of the Bolsheviks and the USSR.Many of them take cues from Amadeo Bordiga and his Italian Communist Party. Essentially, they believe that revolution must genuinely come from below on the masses' own initiative as a response to the degeneration of the material conditions of their lives thanks to capitalism, with the party being little more than a guiding hand. They also reject the USSR and all previous Marxists states as being essentially capitalist, in regards to such things as the continued existence of the law of value as expressed by prices and wages, and the continued alienation of labor as optimizing productivity and driving down the costs of labor remained essential goals whilst the state took over the role of the capitalists.

Anarcho-Communists are essentially socialists who do not believe the state is capable of bringing about communism and seek its immediate abolition along with capitalism in favor of local self-management in the form of a network of democratic communes. I generally don't trust Anarchists which aren't explicitly Anarcho-Communists, as anarchist / an-nihilist flags on this board seem to indicate marketfaggotry. Along with Mutualists, these are essentially just capitalists with a coop fetish who would still see you subjected to the dictates of capital accumulation and essentially organize your own exploitation, and are therefore not comrades.

why

Dont you have some sort of neocon and or pro Israel to attend moshe?

Reminder that ancoms are the Trotskyists of anarchism: dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/malatesta/ForgottenPrinciples.html.

It's short, read it you stupid nigger
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/10/authority.htm

That is a total misrepresentation of Socialism in One Country. Bukharin and Stalin essentially argued that the USSR was weak and should be on the defensive, but that it was nevertheless possible for Russia on its own to achieve a socialist (not communist) society even though the Revolutions in the rest of Europe had failed. This did not mean that foreign worker's movement should not be supported or any such thing - merely that their successful revolutions were not required for there to be socialism in Russia. Contrary to this, Trotsky argued that it would not be possible to create a worker's state in Russia alone and that all the rest of Europe had to turn red as well for there to be any hope to achieve socialism.

Not an argument

Thanks for this post. It actually answered my question instead of the useless posts instead of calling me a Trot. Now I see I side with Stalin over Trotsky on that issue.

*instead of useless posts above calling me a trot

they've never lead a revolution or even any reformist movement

Several reasons I can think of for why trots get so much hate on Leftypol. I'm in Socialist Alternative here in burgerland, and most American trot groups, us included unfortunately, have newspapers that they push aggressively. Nobody likes that shit. On top of that, most trots are in insane, obnoxious cults like the Sparts(support ISIS and kiddie fiddling), SWP, and Workers World. Also, Socialist Alternative and the ISO are the only trots I know that don't take a blind doctrinaire attitude towards Trotsky. We read his theory as we read all theory, not just to learn what he did right, but to learn from his mistakes.

Trotsky was a pretty mediocre theoretician, his real strength was applying Marxist thought in practical ways as a speaker, and as a general during the revolution and civil war. Personally, I don't identify as a trot, seems a bit pointless this being the current year, but I respect his internationalism and democratic emphasis. Leftypol is home to a significant amount of armchair-dwelling leftcoms, who only like theory and never do anything, and detest Trotsky for his activity, and ability to kill bourgies. We also have a bunch of dipshit Tankies who think Trotsky was counter-revolutionary. Everyone else is pretty chill here tho.

This is a pretty good start at describing permanent revolution, but could use some expansion. Inherent to the idea of permanent revolution is that many economically backwards countries during the "era of imperialism" (i.e era when the great powers of Europe were doing the old style imperialism, not the neoimperialism we have today) cannot have bourgeois revolutions. Trotsky thought the Bourgeois class of Russia was too weak and dependent on foreign powers such as France and Britain to ever self-consciously take control of the country and institute bourgeois democracy. Thus the Russian proletariat must take the course of history into their own hands.

And as it turned out, Trotsky was right. Capitalism is a global system, and as long as the Soviet Union relied on trade with capitalist countries to supply inputs for its economy, at least part of the Soviet economy was reliant on producing for profit. The USSR was a failed experiment in socialism.

A simple rule: the less it has to do with maoism, the better. Not always 100% true, but a good approximation for left ideologies.

To be honest it's more like the people who use the Trotskyst flag here are hated, especially since they often regurgitate neoliberal talking points and sometimes happen to be Holla Forums false-flagging. It's not really a critique of the theoretical body of Trotskyism itself of even the man himself - who was a competent analyst and devoted communist but not really clever politically.

Yeah so what is your guide to action? MLs are well aware that Socialism in one country which isn't 100% autarkical will never be dislodged from global capitalist trade - even so some countries may have the potential to do so, like the USA.

Your argument eventually leads to the leftcom armchair stance.

why?

A surprisingly frank admission, from a Tankie.

My guide to action? What am I, Lenin? All I know is, the revolution will be truly global or it will not succeed.

try not being a tankie

...

He addresses the idea of "justified" authority derived from democratic committees but scoffs at the idea that this is somehow intrinsically different from any other sort of authority to the ones who are subjected to it. Unless you're going for literal consensus decision making - which has always been a disastrous failure - the minority will still be forced to subject themselves to the authority of whichever faction wields the majority in any committee. Therefore, anti-authoritarianism is either just a fancy word for a normal, coercive democracy which just happens to be somewhat decentralized or a utopian dream.
The stupidity of the anarchist demand that the state be abolished right off the bat ended up being demonstrated by the anarchists themselves, as "anarchist" Catalonia employed forced labor, prisons, laws, violent coercion and all other methods of the state to safeguard their revolution, thus demonstrating that getting rid of the state before material conditions are right for such a thing is impossible.

You forgot Hoxhaists, Posadists and Nazbols

that's just M-L isn't it?

No, it's absolutely different from that revisionist trash

yes yes, Bakunin on Authority is linked at the bottom of that page

Dumb marxist

Stop listening only to Anarkiddies.

its tru tho

It's getting really lame after a while. Like suggests, its a catch-phrase for normies. "I'm a commie, but not that evil authoritarian type like the Bolsheviks."

Same thing happened with Makhno. To trigger you further: can you name a single instance of revolutionary anarchism that wasn't >authoritarian?

Basically MLs whose master "lost", their entire theory is based around this fact and thus their critique of Stalinism is very non-Marxist. "Degenerate workers' state" literally just means "it's socialism, but not really bc we're not in power" - thus their obsession with "revolutionary leadership".

In my experience they're the only "flags" who read around here, but I don't post that often (cause I read) meaning that it might have turned into a new fad while I was gone.

Basically nationalism in reality (and a weird jumble of post-colonial theory and Stalinism in '1st world' high schools), historically it's more been a symbol of political alliance (like Hoxahism) rather than any coherent theory.

As for Leninism I got to agree with

Sure there are individual "Leninists" like Zizek, but there is no tendency. At best it just means the person aren't aware of how much of their interpretation he's taken from Stalin (or more rarely Trotsky).

Well that's why you're literally just "ML", you're talking geopolitics not theory.

I dont need to, arguing with retarded marxists that cant understand the historical context of the ukraine and spain, and that is only capable of citing those two events as the only anarchist movements is obviously illiterate

This guy is without a doubt the single worst poster on the board. I'm convinced the only reason he adopted the annil flag and label (let alone his marketfaggotry and Stirner) is to soften people's suspicions of his mental retardation as "just trolling" or his acting out of some nihilist ethos. In truth though, there's nothing to salvage in him whatsoever and he shits up the board so much that he's one of the few cases where a ban would be more than justified.

I generally agree with this, but I raise you this: dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/malatesta/ForgottenPrinciples.html.

I don't have time to read that text now. Can you copy the related parts?

Wow someone got his feefees hurt

It's Errico Malatesta, one of the first anarchists, and their take on where a lot of 20th century anarchists started going wrong because they abandoned their principles.

On the subject of authority and the inherent need for some form of violence or power to make any change:
I think the whole text is an important read for anyone that fancies themselves an anarchist today, especially the anarchist communists, because it highlights many points against them especially.

While I'm not that poster, Maoism is pretty dang flawed. I like that he learned from the Bolsheviks and realized you needed agrarian support, but his anti-intellectualism went too far such that he did a bunch of stupid shit that was totally avoidable (Four Pest Campaign, those scrap metal furnaces or w/e).

idk, fam, I'd chose 1 ancom over 100 individualist anarchists to work with. Where did ancoms go wrong according to you?

I just finished reading it, you are full of shit

Tbh I think "Leninist" is going to grow as a label, as it's an easy way to distance yourself from Stalin's legacy without getting tied up in the whole newspaper cult of Trotskyism. I've had a fair amount of success getting Bernouts to consider Lenin as a positive figure, but Stalin is a much bigger jump.

Malatesta was not an individualist, he was simply an anarchist (or "anarchist without adjectives"), and in text such as: theanarchistlibrary.org/library/errico-malatesta-note-to-the-article-individualism-and-anarchism-by-adamas he clearly recognizes that "individualist anarchism" is bourgeois bullshit that imagines man capable of being an atomized agent, when anarchism is the recognition of men as brothers who precisely do not need delusions of ego first to find individual self-fulfillment in the human community.

Supporting the first world war, for one. Malatesta heavily taps Kropotkin on his support for that and, while at the time Kropotkin's faction was not the larget, it went on to be, and we can see what disastrous results this bred.

He's still too individualistic for my taste. He opposed the platformists.

Can you hit me up with the source on that?

Note that I'm far from saying Malatesta was ideal, just that he never fell for the "that's authoritarian, man!" meme that was bubbling in his time, and that he had very good criticisms of anarcho-communism.

Read from p.497 (¶: "Earlier articles…") to 503.
You might be interested in the whole chapter, or the whole book.

...

I disagree fam it's the unironic tankposters and Nazbols who do nothing but talk geopolitics. The unironic tanks are basically just reverse Trots, whereas the Trots see Brezhnev and Gorby as continuers of Stalin's legacy, the unironic tanks agree with the Trots and conclude that's a good thing. In reality quite a lot changed in the socialist bloc after Stalin's death.

Vanguard, yes. It usually means they accept the Bolshevik organizational format (a more closed, disciplined party where every members has to be active, as opposed to a broader mass party) and Lenin's (and many other russian Marxist's) idea that Russia, although not a developed capitalist country (which Marx considered essential for the development of socialism) could have a proletarian revolution where the major institutions of bourgeois liberalism, included capitalism and democratic institutions, would be achieved without the consent of the bourgeois classes themselves, which Lenin and others considered too dependent on the Tsar, the feudal aristocracy and foreign capital to have the same initiative that the western capitalists had in the 18th/19th century. It's Marxism adapted to the conditions of underdeveloped and periphery countries in theory, and Socialism adapted to the conditions of a pre-capitalist autocratic shithole where socialists could not engage in legal, mass-based politics.

Yes and no. It's usually stereotyped as Leninism if Lenin had, like the Narodniks before him, seen the peasantry and not the industrial, urban proles as the main revolutionary force of the country (some orthodox Marxists would say that, just like Russia, it's not the proles or the peasants but the capitalists and the middle-classes who should take revolutionary initiative in a pre-capitalist country). I've seen some people debate this, but the fact is that Mao also adapted Marxist theory to a situation where neither the capitalist/feudal or the proletariat/capitalist cleavages were the decisive ones. Considering the state that China was in, the messed up class character it inherited from the imperial order and semi-colonialism, and its underdevelopment, Mao thought that a broad coalition of progressive elements from all classes, including lumpens, proles, peasants and the "national bourgeoisie" and so on, unified by a party instead of class consciousness, was best way to organize a revolution. Of course, because of that many countries that were also semi-feudal, semi-colonial, semi-whatever, considered this approach better than the traditional one designed for developed capitalist countries, and nowadays Maoists are usually cultists who think the Third World should nuke the First World.

Trotskyism was really just a codeword for the people who liked Lenin but didn't like Stalin. In the 20's, their conflict made some sense because it was about a matter of practical policy for the Soviet Union: the pace of industrialization, its intensity, how it should be executed and the agrarian question. Trotsky favored a fast, planned, large-scale industrialization while Stalin allied himself with Bukharin and the Right, who believed that a policy favoring the peasantry, including the "upper" peasantry, was a better choice, because as they got wealthier they would consume more and improve their tools of production by purchasing new machinery, and with government control over foreign trade they could only buy from the industrial sector, and so Soviet industry would gradually be developed in a more organic manner. Yada yada yada, Stalin was forced to revise that and push for some rural collectivitization and for an accelerated pace of industrialization, this was after Trotskyists had gotten BTFO so he could just tip-toe without anyone to complain about it. The reaction from the kulaks and further economic difficulties forced him to go even further on those questions than he (and probably even Trotsky, who still considered the NEP to be the framework that should guide Soviet economy) wanted. So in the end, the theoretical conflict between them is meaningless. They also beefed over how their International should coordinate Communist parties outside the Soviet Union, but that's too boring to get into now.

Because Trotsky, in the struggle against to Stalin, had to create some type of left-wing, worker's opposition to him, he paid more lip service to questions of democracy and mass participation in politics, which make some see him as the Democratic one, but he was at many times prone to repression himself. Since his exile he created many Trotskyist groups everywhere, and there was never a cohesive political line in them other than a vague anti-Stalinism, and he fought with many people from this "school". People tend to hate Trots because after his and Stalin's death, the remainings of those were often used and manipulated by western intelligence in an effort to push for an anti-Soviet consensus among the Left. Some were probably conscious agents who later turned to the Right (hence the reputation of Trots becoming Neocons) while others were just honest Marxists who were unaware of the fact that their publications often received secret government funding and the media often put them on the spotlight because they wanted these anti-Soviet people to be perceived as the main voice of the Left. One of the horseshit Trotskyist groups became known for was splitting every left-wing group or movement into irrelevance.

Trotsky himself often warned against splitting, defended a coalition with Stalinists when attacking the forces of conservatism or reaction, and defended the Soviet Union when it invaded Finland, when it got into a beef with China over the Chinese Eastern Railway, and he even suggested the Soviet Union should attack Germany while it was still busy with France and the UK. He was obviously really concerned with the survival of the first revolutionary state. His followers, on the other hand, were often cheerleaders in any military or security action against the Soviet Union, even when he was still alive.

This is correct

This too

There's also Communalism, it's basically the natural synthesis of three traditons Marxism, Anarchism, and Syndicalism. With the dialectical hindsight of the 20th century

However it focuses not on the proletarian but on the citizen of a polis. Citizens should control the cities they live in forming an organic confederate of communes.

This is also the primary ideology of Rojava.

Wow, this thread sure picked up when I left.

Thank you for the in-depth answers!
What are your thoughts on Rosa Luxembourg? I came across this article (marxists.org/archive/mattick-paul/1935/luxemburg-lenin.htm) from another user, and it seems like my ideas on her wavelength. Supporting the Russian Revolution, but having criticism of the Bolsheviks. I really liked this part:

If you substitute "self-determination" with "anti-imperialism", then this is basically what tankies believe about Assad, North Korea, etc.

So how do you feel about her?

Yeah, I'm aware of Bookchin. I didn't list everything.

Some kurds get butthurt at this. Perhaps it's just the cult of Apo, but I'm sure they'll tell you that Apo's Democratic Confederalism is a completely separate ideology from communalism (when in reality it's an offshoot heavily inspired by it).