Hey MLs

...

This is a stupid fucking line of argumentation. The existence of Rojava doesn't mean that Bookchin is right about everything, the existance of the Naxalites doesn't mean that Abimael Guzman is the fourth "sword of communism". Just because something is successful doesn't mean it's good, or even that it's right, by that logic Capitalism is actually really good because it's able to survive so many of it's crises and literal implosions.

Well, Leftcoms don't really update their theory so they are irrelevant. They are like classic liberals who never moved past Adam Smith. Except liberals actually do something, Leftcoms are waiting for a spontaneous revolution which might never occur. They are going to abandon it anyway once a council member clips his nails in a different fashion than Marx.

Marxism-Leninism has brought us the Soviet Union, a superpower with a population bigger than the USA, where the workers controlled the means of production, where there was no poverty, no economic recession, no surplus extraction, where there was space exploration, education for everybody - and this all from scratch working with feudal, backwards Russia. Leftcoms get massive triggered by that and resort to the argument that they didn't achieved full communism, which is obvious, and they couldn't abolish the value form.

Think and decide for yourself.

THEY'RE BOTH WORSE

no they didn't
yes there was

tankies drink bleach please

about that …

You're both shit.
Leninism and Luxembourgism are the only options.

this

If you're going to make of a tendency based on a theorist, at least get her name right

Wikipedia meme.

Pick one: "Leninism" either a portmanteau term for "that which Lenin believed and did" or a synonym for ML ("Leninism" itself in this way of use being coined by the same Comintern propagandists who simultaneously coined "Marxism-Leninism" as the true(tm) line as well, mind you).

Luxemburg was a very generic Second International orthodox Marxist and there is literally no such thing as "Luxemburgism" outside of the minds of leftoid internet spaces that don't know what the fuck they're talking about.

Right, and it's cool that they did, but besides Cuba every Marxist-Leninist state has regressed into some kind of liberalism. Moreover, none of them did anything more than nationalize capital under a red flag. This is not a seriously revolutionary transition, more similar to a bourgeois revolution like what happened in France than a real transition to socialism.

While I don't believe failures in implementation should condemn an ideology, Marxism-Leninism does not have a good track record. 20th century revolutions were Marxist-Leninist only because that was the overwhelmingly prevailing socialist tendency at this time. Proletarians 70 years ago did not have the same access to a marketplace of ideas that we modern LARPers enjoy. Neither the theoretical problems or practical dangers of the Leninist tradition were yet understood.

The world needs a new socialist movement distinguished from past socialist projects. Lenin gave us a huge and valuable theoretical body to analyze, but we can't be beholden to his work.

Stop shilling your comic you fucking faggot.

It's not my comic and I'll never stop posting it.

Hmm

Marxist-Leninist states were pretty shitty but that's true of all extant states. Under their interpretation of socialism, 20th century Marxist-Leninists lifted a lot of people out of horrifying social conditions, even if they could not lift them very high. It's impressive that the Soviet Union and China and contemporary Cuba could establish social democratic societies without a prerequisite basis of industrial capitalism or the need for the exploitation of the third world. In nearly every socialist state, education and women's rights and healthcare and life expectancy and infant mortality and GDP per capita rose dramatically.

Stalin and Mao killed horrific amounts of people, but they also oversaw significant accomplishments that need to be mentioned, even if their states never abandoned the capitalist mode of production.

Haha this made me laugh, that's a good analogy

aren't the CPI(M) pretty much leftcoms?

Just because people still write about it doesn't mean the theory is updated. Especially if it's such a dogmatic circlejerk. Leftcoms are reviewers of orthodox Marxism, and as such, they have their place as reference points. I can read Gilles Dauve (your newest leftcom meme after Bordiga wore itself out) and take out some ideas and inspirations from it, it's just not anything that has any practical relevance for the world. You after all should know that Marx wasn't advocating for sitting on your ass. Leftcoms dislodged the revolutionary theory from the revolution which makes the whole thing absurd.

I'm sorry to tell you: The factories the Soviet Union built and industrialized the country with were real and not imaginary. You are fucking spooked if you think that I'm not allowed to change my material reality because I'd violate the concept of superstructure and base.

Silly boy. The Soviet Union wasn't idealist or utopian at all since they openly admitted to have to build up the material base for socialism first. Your defining of idealism is just vulgar materialism ignoring the fact that superstructure and base have a reciprocal relationship.

No you

I love how you always resort to semantics. Yes Marx used Socialism and Communism interchangeably. But that's because Marx expected the revolution to happen in the most developed capitalist countries, which means there would be no transitional stage to socialism or at least a very short one. It's just fucking rational to assume that once revolution happened in the least developed countries, to admit that there would be a transitional stage, and it's widely established among communists that socialism usually describes the latter. Don't call it socialism then, I don't really give a fuck. It's clearly not Social Democracy though unless you go by the definition of 19th century SocDems who were Marxists.

Terrible. Economics don't work like that. Social Democracy doesn't solve the problem of capital accumulation or any contradiction of capitalism, it is always unstable in the long term, caused recessions, etc. If a welfare state is the fucking same to you like public ownership of the means of production with economic planning you are detached from reality.

Is that a fucking joke?

Every fucking development in Marxist ideology since the 1950s has been in the left communist tradition.

Leftcoms aren't orthodox Marxists tho

luxemburgism is a praxis, not a theoretical tradition

Yet none of it has been put to praxis. Not even in the slightest. Really activates my almonds

Just because you write more theological literature doesn't mean there is an increased chance Jesus will descend from heaven

I'd say they are Orthodox Marxists with expansion packs. I'd agree with you insofar as there are Orthodox Marxists out there who aren't considering themselves leftcoms

holy shit lmao

this was my reaction to the Rojava comic

Not at all

What does this mean?

Top fucking kek, leftcoms wish they were. You could be assure if this was true, they'd talk your fucking ear off about it. Let's look at their manifesto:

The Soviet Union had wage labor, the state, and commodity production. It also gave a lot of cool benefits to the citizens, like healthcare and education.

How is that not social democracy?

I'm not sure a close reading of Marx constitutes an Orthodox Marxist. They deviate from Marx in their rejection of parlimentary participation and parties (German-Dutch) which I think is pretty fundamental to Orthodox Marxism or at least what came out of the Second International.

How the fuck can ideology be put into praxis if the masses are not revolutionary?

You MLs always bash us for "not doing anything" but your own praxis is just dressing up in black and holding up protest signs in naive hopes of inculcating revolutionary sentiment in a population who currently has no collective interest to make revolution.

"Luxemburgism" as a specific socialist tradition just means adding some democracy to your revolutionary transition.

But historical review clearly shows that there were situations where they would be revolutionary and honestly neoliberalism isn't doing very well right now. I mean, what are yoh trying to tell me? Should we become fascists because fascism might be more accessible for the masses now?

Materialism doesn't contradict the fact that there would have been no revolution in Russia without Lenin. Just because you get a penalty doesn't mean you don't have to kick the ball into the goal yourself.

Can you refute Bordiga's claim that the USSR was State Capitalist though? Was there not wage labor? Was there not surplus value extraction? Was there not currency? How is this not just Social Democracy and a welfare state? How does a nationalized economy equal Socialism? And if these things are true why doesn't it just make more sense to criticize the USSR and try to figure out why they failed and how we can avoid their mistakes, because obviously waving our hands and saying "revisionists" isn't really all that convincing, especially when you can't explain how exactly revisionists emerge in the first place.

So it's basically meaningless then? Everyone from anarchists to leninists claim to be democratic, the only leftists who say they aren't are leftcoms.

Yeah but nobody would extort surplus value from it. It's not wage labor in the classical capitalist sense, there were wages but that's not necessarily implying that there was wage labor as the latter didn't have the context of a capitalist socio-economic system.

So what? The state was intertwined with the party and the proletariat. It wasn't just a state as a separate entity that imposes authority over civilians. Now, I'm not saying that there weren't institions asserting authority, but the 'state as a whole' didn't impose authority, at least in the sense that it would simultaneously impose authority over its very self.

As long as you have scarcity, there is commodity production. You may not call it socialism then. But to bind your definition to an utopian checkpoint is a little childish.

See

Bordiga didn't coin the term state capitalism, it was coined by Lenin to describe the NEP. Honestly it wasn't a very smart move to call whatever he criticized about the USSR state capitalism, as it clearly has an absence of most elements of capitalism and secondly it's already used in a different context. You can clearly see how he chose it for propaganda, there is nothing more commies hate than capitalism, so it's an effective smear. If he'd use something something bureaucracy instead he would have been more genuine.

Social Democracy as we understand it now is a capitalist welfare state with taxation. I mean, if you wanna accuse me of being a Social Democrat by sticking to the 19th century definition of Social Democracy, your accusation has almost no weight, as they were communists just as well. Hell, the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks were the Social Democratic party.

And the Soviet Union didn't just nationalize the economy. That's a ridiculous oversimplification. They completely dismantled the old state, build dual power, and constructed something new.

They literally fucking did though, just because it was redistributed evenly among the population doesn't mean it was surplus value extraction or a mode of production for value.

The whole point of Communism is the inevitable negation of both the State, and the Proletariat itself. DoTP isn't the endgoal of Socialism, it's just a stepping stone in order to create the circumstances of proletarian class warfare, but it isn't engoal, what you're describing here, once again, is Social Democracy at gunpoint.

I'm not that user, but I assume what he meant was that not only did the USSR fail to transition to production for use, very few attempts were even made to do so.

Yeah, no shit genius, Bordiga was an extremely faithful Leninist,, his whole point was that the USSR never grew out of the NEP, that's kind of the whole Leftcom critique of the USSR in a nutshell tbh, the Revolution was betrayed by 1921.

Leftcoms are accusing MLs of being Social Democrats in this thread because you don't want to meaningfully consider what the actual negation of Capitalism would look like, you just want to create a zero growth welfare worker's state, Which I agree would be nicer then Capitalism, but it isn't Communism, not by a long shot.

Industrialization was accomplished under Stalin by squeezing wages and employing bourgeois techniques.

It was social democracy at the barrel of a gun

Reddit meme

Fair point, but the value which was extracted was invested back into society. It's more about the coordination of value distribution which you seem have a problem with - but as long as we don't have a communist society of free association and post-scarcity, specialization of labor will have society putting the tractor you built on the acre on which it is needed. The problem with capitalism is that it produces value for the sake of producing value - this isn't the case in a planned economy. I don't really see how my surplus is being extracted when the street I helped building is now open to the public, and there is not a single Rubel going into the pockets of somebody else. As for production for value per se, I think this has something to do with the fact that the USSR was forced to compete with the capitalist world. If they didn't have to, production for value would start to wither away.

Secondly, in a lot of coops, like the Kolkhoz, workers would decide about their own wage. Workplace democracy was a thing in the USSR as long as you sold a part of your fruits to the state.

Nobody ever fucking claimed that.

Stop with this shitty meme. The USSR wasn't as oppressive as you think it was. American visitors would report great enthusiasm und incentive from the workers building the factories in the 30s. "We work and sweat now for a greater tomorrow for humanity" was a common notion amongst workers at that time.

By hijacking Lenins term he apperently fucking wasn't.

What would you have done? Who was the betrayer? The word betrayal sounds very fucking Trotskyst.

Then show me a better negation of capitalism than the Stalinist USSR.

You need post-scarcity for that. The USSR never claimed to have achieved communism.

Oh you means besides a theory and analysis of global capital accumulation that debunks turd worldism, a truly marxist critique of leninism/vanguards, a principled stand for proletarian democracy, and a proper historical understanding of reform & revolution.

READ NIGGAS READ

The Russian Revolution
marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1918/russian-revolution/

Reform or revolution
marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1900/reform-revolution/

The Accumulaiton of Capital
marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1913/accumulation-capital/accumulation.pdf

I agree… .. But am still a Leninist.

Leninism always stops at Lenin.

ML =/= Leninism.

Why pulling out before you cum

Cause I don't wanna have autistic children.

lol what? Hijacking? You mean using it in the same way he did to describe the same thing?

There was nothing to be done. Lenin was right in thinking that power had to be returned to the Soviets but was also correct in noting that they had lots their class charecter throughout the course of the civil war. By 1921 it was all over, the DoTP had fallen and failed.

no you don't you braindead fucking idiot. Marx said that the world was ready fro communism as early as the 1840s.

I'm well aware, and I know the Soviet arguments that currency didn't function exactly like currency, but this is what I'm getting at, the Soviet Union wasn't exactly Capitalist, but it also wasn't exactly Socialist either, it was in a strange sort of limbo, unable to sublate the vestiges of Capitalism, but a genuine DoTP. But as is the case in both the USSR and Yugoslavia, worker-run markets and workplaces is not the point of Socialism.

The creation of a completely classless and stateless society is the whole point of Socialism. I was actually surprised to see this response because the entire cornerstone of Marx's philosophy is that the light at the end of the tunnel of class warfare and revolution is Communism, a society in which the Proletariat has literally negated itself, literally ceased to exist. Communism isn't the proletarianization of society, that's what Capitalism does, this is a point that Marx made as early as the Manifesto, Communism is the moment that a working class does not need to exist, or any classes for that matter. What other forms of contradiction and what new antagonism will this Communist society have? Who knows, because every society that's taken a swing at Socialism so far has dropped the ball pretty hard.

I honestly don't think the USSR was really particularly oppressive at all, certainly not more opressive then any Capitalist state, and I do think it was a genuine DoTP, what I mean is that it's at gunpoint in the sense that it is a DoTP that engages in class warfare, it does enact the will of the Proletariat, it does use state violence against the bourgeoise, and even violence against proletarians if it's deemed they threatened the security of the state, but at the same time they never truly had any intention of pushing forward into the actual negation of the state or of the proletariat as a class, and the bureaucracy and the existence of the State as an apparatus did inevitably become something MLs thought was worth protecting and defending in and of itself, MLs don't just see the State as an ends to a means, you see it as an ends, bullshit realpolitik, edgy SucDem nonsense.

I don't really think there's too much Lenin could have done to be honest, I'm not trying to write alternate history fanfics here, I'm trying to criticize the USSR in order to learn from it, and I used that phrase specifically because I knew it would trigger a tankie, sorry fam. In all seriousness though, breaking up Dual Power and centralizing all power in the Central Committee was probably the single dumbest thing Lenin ever did within his own lifetime. Stalin's Purges also didn't help, I know he was trying to kill off Bolsheviks with Bourgeoise backgrounds, but all he did was kill off all the Party's best educated cadres and have them replaced with sycophantic fucks like Khrushchev who definitely did not give a fuck about Communism.

There isn't, including Stalin's USSR, that's why I think Marxists need to try a little harder this [current century].

I'd argue you don't, but even if you did, there's no use in arguing, because nowadays we're well beyond the point where industrialization couldn't feed, clothe, shelter, and sustain the global population. I also think the Soviet Union could have done this too, and the U.S., and Western Europe, since at least the mid-20th Century, but whatever, now we can do it and then some.

You can literally not see the difference between the NEP and Stalins collectivization and planned economy?

So there was no betrayer. Then drop Trotskyst jargon and go rot in your armchair.

I gave plenty of reasons of why I thought the USSR was existing socialism. It's you who constantly argues semantics. Political philosophy becomes a parody of itself once it starts arguing in a way in which attempts to bend the world to its own aedificium as if that has any inherent value instead of bending itself in the favor of the world. Some of you guys would profit from some Schopenhauer.

I don't think communism, as defined by Marx, could exist without post-scarcity. This means Marx was either contradicting himself (unlikely) or he implies that there is indeed a transitional phase towards building communism.

Cuba

I'm going to bed now. I'll answer the other post tomorrow

Alright fam, sleep tight, but you better respond to because this is just starting to get fun.

It's not

The last time MLs "did anything" they ruined the brand of communism for all eternity by killing workers left and right

Bravo
Braaavo