Why dont MLs understand Marx?

Why dont MLs understand Marx?

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theredstarvanguard.wordpress.com/2011/06/20/a-marxist-leninist-view-of-bureaucracy/
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/letters/83_04_18.htm
marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1951/economic-problems/index.htm
ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/socialism_book/new_socialism.pdf
twitter.com/AnonBabble

if they did, they wouldnt be MLs, so

Honestly, I think they deliberately misunderstand Marx so they can hold onto their position of power.

your point is weak, the state can't wither away if the revolution isn't worldwide
but then again you are an anarkiddie

isnt socialism in one country a ml staple though

His point being that unless there's a worldwide anarchist/communist revolution then the state can't whither away because the nation(s) where the revolution occurred first will be targeted by capitalists all over the world.

And since a simultaneous revolution worldwide is unlikely to occur due to basic materialism, anarchists would prefer not to deal with the issue. Inevitably they focus on the next failed revolution.

It's the calling card of the Western anti-communist left as Parenti pointed out to support every revolution except the ones that succeed.

Check your muh privilege', able-minded first-worldist scum!!! Telling people to read is ableist and settler colonialist. Reading Marx is for fascists.

So, you basically believe communism is impossible and instead want a massive, lumbering bureaucratic state apparatus that claims to speak for the workers that it doesn't let vote.

That's a very incisive reading of Marx, my friend.

Even if the revolution was worldwide I doubt you scumsuckers would give up your seat either way.

as a former ML, i can tell you it's more lifestylism than theory, so you better don't expect much from them.

Communism is absolutely possible, just not while scarcity still exists. So you've gotta get rid of that, but you really should shift to an ML/Socdem/Nazbol (they're the same thing with different names) state in the places you can do so to get rid of scarcity because capitalism makes development take longer than it ought to. Of course, your ML/Socdem/Nazbol society ought to be extremely transparent and democratic so your leaders are held accountable whenever they make decisions that slow down or hinder development, but being transparent and democratic can absolutely be consistent with being powerful.

This board has become so shit that I can't really decide whether this shitpost is genuine or not. Either way, kill yourself.

read a book or kys

Nod an argumend

Never said that but I think if you believe that the whole world is going to convulse in one grand 1848-style global revolution or nothing then you're really betting the farm on something totally unprecedented. Capitalist contradictions aren't of the same nature or intensity everywhere, so it makes sense that the consciousness to build revolution will be more or less developed in certain countries depending on their contradictions.

The whole world will one day become communist (though probably not all at once) but its still necessary to defend the gains of the revolution when and where it happens.

Where did I say I wanted some state that won't let workers vote?

Bureaucracy is a problem but as Lenin pointed out:
theredstarvanguard.wordpress.com/2011/06/20/a-marxist-leninist-view-of-bureaucracy/

In a way, I think bureaucracy and "statism" while important to combat obscure just as much as they reveal. For instance, the men who ruined the USSR under Khrushchev were more like American CEOs then they were DMV-style bureaucrats, to simply adopt the capitalist hatred for "red-tape" which itself ignores the fact that bureaucracy is found in every capitalist country on earth and bureaucracy is itself a weakness for any leftist looking to make a thoroughgoing analysis.

I really hope you're not an anarchist and saying this.

marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/letters/83_04_18.htm

Because of the L, duh.

Not a socialist :^)

this post couldn't be any more inaccurate

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Ismail-sama please marry me.

It's not that they "misunderstood" Marx as much as there was no room for the development of theory and praxis in the Soviet Union. Tankies are paranoid that the open discussion of ideas will lead to the resurgence of bourgeois ideologies, even though capitalists sound like occultists and sociopaths when they can't use their ideological dominance as a cudgel to beat people into arguing only on their terms.

Political theory only has use when it is constantly being refined and built upon, not lazily rationalized (an example of this being Lysenkoism, which was ironic given that Marx was a huge supporter of Charles Darwin). Otherwise, your state will just get sucked into realpolitik and become another extension of the preexisting status quo.

This is why I still respect anarchists, even if I find their theory largely utopian. They see "pragmatic" politics for what they are and understand the importance of intellectual honesty in the real world.

Discounting the geopolitical consequences of reviving Marxism-Leninism in the modern world (which no one is willing to seriously discuss), do M-Ls really believe that once capitalism has been toppled and they possess the dominant forms of social and political organization, that the apparatus of sustaining state socialism, i.e. single party rule, the party bureaucracy, the military-security state, etc. can and will "wither away" as Marx describes them?

It seems far more likely to me that even if capitalist nation-states are toppled and socialist states succeed, there will need to be another revolution to dissolve the military and party apparatus. What if those institutions are so entwined with society and the state that they cannot be abolished, without undoing the technical and social progress necessary for a global post-scarcity communist society?

nice post, but have you considered MUH BUREAUCRACY? JK. I guess anarkiddies would rather unilaterally disarm and have a wonderful stateless society that the imperialists can invade and convert back to capitalism

Stop posting this retarded meme, plenty of MLs read Marx, in fact most of us used to be Ancoms until we read some actual theory. No ML says communism is when the government does stuff u twat, we also agree with abolishing the state, hierarchy, and capitalism. You simply cannot unilaterally disarm when some parts of the world are still capitalist and will use force to overthrow you. If you have an armed group in charge of defense with tanks and missles and shit, you can wank over idealist anarchist class analysis whether thats a state or not, but in reality it is, whether you want to call it one or not.

Implying that isnt exactly what happened historically.
Modern Marxists do adjust their theories to the modern world, what do you think everyone just wants to LARP historical re-enactment of the USSR? we respect the contributions of the ussr and dont buy into burger propaganda about how it was hell on earth, that doesn't mean people dont adjust their ideology to the 21st century
Yes, eventually. Once the whole world is socialist and porky has been crushed there will be no more reason to have authoritarianism.

So what are the hot new developments in Marxist-Leninist theory? What would make the average prole adopt it?

Since when have capitalists promoted open discussion in a way that wasn't a thinly veiled endorsement of their own ideological dominance? Lolberts claim to hate liberals yet the sole reason they aren't completely irrelevant is because they ride on their coattails.
Without this dominance, capitalists are utterly feckless. Why else would they drop the pretense and resort to violence as soon as a real challenge to their dogma surfaces?
The problem wasn't that they were theorizing, it was that they refused to listen to other theories. You cannot simply reject any dissenting opinion as "bourgeois propaganda" if you expect to maintain power through merit. It entirely eliminates the point of a system of theory that is built on rationalism. A
Don't get me wrong, the USSR wasn't the dystopian hellhole that burgers think it was, but this is partially because they hold the USSR to an unfair standard when they don't know how fucked up the history of the United States really is. Opportunists tend to be useful idiots for the existing mode of production, because they do not care about politics beyond who is holding the gun to whose head.

Possibly one of the most misunderstood quotes of all time

I'm not sure that's really relevant because worldwide revolution won't happen in the way ML's imagine or want it if it ever does happen.

if you did, you did not read him well, my fella.

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that sounds challenging

I dont understand the comic. socialism is the abolition of commodity production

even ML's could argue that the ussr had abolished commodity production if they wanted to

Wait, is that idiot seriously trying to imply that commodity production is an element of socialism?

Socialism literally never reached this stage. As long as there was global bourgeois hegemony, the state was a necessity.


No, it's a strategic retreat.

How can you come to this conclusion when the state of the USSR withered away even without having fulfilled its objective? If the next proletarian dictatorship manages to smash global capitalism, it would easily wither away within a generation or two.

What the fuck is the M-L lifestyle?

Like skinheads but with nostalgic grandmothers.

what

At least in Eastern Europe ML groups are full of grandmas who are nostalgic for their childhood.

No.

GMIL is XKCD for movement wreckers.

Read a book please

Ok, regarding the point of your image, and not the massive bait
Commodity production and commodity exchange still exist in socialist society, and a commodity system is still practised. This is mainly because two kinds of socialist ownership, namely, ownership by the whole people and collective ownership, exist side by side. No unpaid allocation of products between different ownerships of the public economy can be practised. Their economic relations can only be commodity exchange, and hence commodity production. State distribution of consumer goods among workers and staff also utilizes the form of commodity exchange through money. However, the socialist type of commodity production differs from the capitalist type. This is manifested chiefly by the fact that there no longer is the economic relation of exploitation of workers by the capitalists, anarchism in production has been eliminated and the scope of commodity exchange has been reduced. Yet it must be noted that bourgeois right unavoidably exists in distribution and exchange in socialist society. The principle of exchange of equal values is still carried out in commodity exchange. If bourgeois right in distribution and exchange is developed and extended at will, capitalist ideas of amassing fortunes and craving for profits will spread unchecked; such phenomena as turning public property into private property, graft and corruption, theft and bribery, and speculation will arise, and there will be a change in the nature of the system of ownership in certain departments and units which follow the revisionist line. The inevitable result will be polarization, i.e., a small number of people will acquire an increasing quantity of commodities and money and convert them into capital. These people will turn out to be new bourgeois elements. The labouring people, on the other hand, once again will become oppressed and exploited wage-slaves. Therefore, bourgeois right as regards distribution and exchange has to be restricted under the dictatorship of the proletariat and conditions for finally eliminating the commodity system must gradually be created.
So commodity production is still practised under socialism, but in order to achieve communism it needs to be eliminated.

If you are genuinely interested in the topic and this is not just to piss off some people.
I suggest you read:

Economic problems of socialism in the USSR

marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1951/economic-problems/index.htm

And the 1st and second chapter of "Towards a new Socialism" (that include a fair critique of the first work refered)

ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/socialism_book/new_socialism.pdf

This book is often cited/misinterpreted as defending the idea of commodity production socialism, but after having read it I can't say it does. Cockshott largely criticizes the USSR for retaining commodity production, in fact the phrase commodity production only appears once in TANS, in the last chapter refuting market socialism. I think you are confusing Cockshott's description of historical/actually existing socialism of the USSR with his prescription for a future system. for example:
That was the case in the USSR, because they had partial market socialism/capitalism with private agriculture that needed a market to sell their goods in. However under Cockshott's scheme the labor voucher system Marx describes in Critique of the Gotha Programme would be implemented and there would be no collective or private industry, every industry would be subordinated to the central plan and have its commodities priced in terms of labor content/labor vouchers.

I agree with what you said about Cockshott thats why after giving Stalins books , I give Cockshott as a fair critique of it,
And I never said the book defended commodity production thats why I said it was a crtique,
Also the part im refering is in page 37 and 38 (of the pdf I linked) when he makes an analysis of Stalin though about this matter, not the last part of the book.

"We were not foolish enough to try to make a currency [backed by] gold of which we had none, but for every mark that was issued we required the equivalent of a mark's worth of work done or goods produced. . . .we laugh at the time our national financiers held the view that the value of a currency is regulated by the gold and securities lying in the vaults of a state bank."
–Adolf H to the Itler.

The state can't "wither away" period, regardless of worldwide revolution or not. It's borderline religious faith to believe otherwise.

Learn how the dialectic works user.

What movement have they wrecked? A book club?


Literally capitalism.

opinion discarded

Well thats the kind of bait you should not fall into,of course opinion discarded, but not for coming from a leftcom, opinion discarded because it does not have any argument.
I don't understand whats the point of responding to someone who clearly does not want real debate, just wants to trigger people, and probably has not read anything an actual leftcom has to say about the theme in question.
This is a good response to the point that deserves a response, not the shitty comment.

am I the only one who wishes the whites won during the russian civil war ?

if there was no leninism communism wouldn't be seen as evil and we'd eventually see real communists rise up though less violent more revolutionary means

I mean, I don't think the reds needed to lose. They could have won and then not fucked up, that would have been just as beneficial in the long run possibly.

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are you retarded desu

And they wonder why we see leftcoms as counter-revolutionary…

People who try to speak for an entire board usually have the shittiest opinions.

I wasn't. But at some point you gotta admit that "trots and ultralefts are fascist collaborators" becomes more than stalinist propaganda looking at posts like this. Trotskyst openly sided with anti-communist powers out of pure contrarianism to the USSR.

I don't need to admit that any more than you need to admit that maoism stands as an obstacle to the revolution.
Anyways, people were sucking leftcom dick not that long ago, it was the big meme ideology.

Why, exactly? Right fucking now Maoist groups are the most active in terms of militant insurrection all over the world. And most of them do so because they aren't edgy teenagers like you but are immediately faced with unchecked predatory capitalist imperialism and exploitation.

Yeah and it was cancer. Most of them thought that they were some sort of intellectual after reading two articles on libcom.org.

Because we don't need to agree on leftcoms?

But Cockshott's not an ML, and his (mistaken) choice of calling the USSR socialist does not make him one. We've been over this.

Nice LARP. Have you ever noticed how everyone argues on the basis of theory and what exists in the world right now - everyone but tankies. Instead, you point to "muh glorious motherland" and make the dumbest arguments such as "we're actually doing something!", at which point someone points out Rojava (which does have a few MLs participating, btw, and is still not socialism - it does, however, at least help your dumb point of "doing something"), at which point you start screeching "muh imperialism!" because it's not the right kind of "real socialism". Like clockwork.
You're even more opposed to action than leftcoms because you're so tied up in meaningless 20th century disputes and nostalgia that you're infantile and incapable of doing anything. I always see MLs say that they're not like MTWs, that they support action. Well, in practice, you angrily screech at anyone who proposes any sort of action tailored to existing modern conditions and reject the ability of people in what you define as the 1st world to move towards socialism because of a bunch of idealistic nonsense, "anti-imperialism" in practice being the villification of an imagined "side" to prevent its proper criticism and dissection in order to facilitate a scientific program of its abolition. For Holla Forums, it is race - rather than examine the underlying material causes of unjust race relations, they villify "the other side" (Jews) and ascribe to them all woes, thus precluding an investigation of the concept's emergence and possible, liberatory paradigms to be worked towards given the existing circumstances. For you, it's nations and "the other side" is "the West". You'll never meaningfully address the problems of state and imperialism so long as you cling to your outdated "anti-imperialist" dogma, Mao be damned.
You're quintessentially utopian, and not even so with the merits of a self-conscious utopianism such as Fourier's socialism (its uncompromising orientation towards the creation of a liberatory and pleasurable society within one's own lifetime). You might as well be a red-colored technocrat high on capitalist ideology, except for that you want to kill all the STEMlords because you're a self-hating art student who spends their time protesting for Palestine and calls Chomsky an imperialist (even though he's consistently one of the most pro-Palestine voices in the mainstream discourse) and would therefore fail at that. And now you want the rest of this board to yourself because r/fullcommunism and r/socialism aren't enough, because you can't stand the idea of people pointing this out to you. Kill yourself, you idealistic reactionary.

Take your meds buddy.

I'm actively involved in supporting maoist groups in the world, and have even been involved in sending help to Rojava before they had an US-base in their territory and were annexing non-kurdish areas.

This has nothing to do with the "right" kind of socialism (which is a pretty fucking disingenuous statement considering you claimed that the USSR wasn't socialist just before, because I guess le ebul Stalin hurts your fee-fees) but the fact that Mao's dialectic of primary and secondary contraction is the logical conclusion of Marx' historical materialism. I know that you've never bothered to read anything about Maoism or even the basic tenets of Marxism-Leninism because you keep throwing the dumbest of strawmen against me:
If you actually understood Marx' method on critique and read Mao and the developments based on him consistently, you'd maybe understand that most of the conclusions Maoism does follow naturally out of historical materialism and later Lenins conception of dialectical materialism as they are based on a materialist analysis of one's conditions of existence and economic reality. Did you get all your knowledge of Maoism from Althusser? You claim to want a scientific program to abolish the current state of things but all you advocate for are a priori statements based on an outdated view on anthropology, which, when put into practice, result in lethargy and agony - something that is inherently anti-marxist. Meanwhile you are not short to viciously lash out against tendencies you don't like, while being an absolute useless slob yourself, who isn't taken seriously in academic circles because your circular reasoning is righteously seen as a cheap cop-out that can not be falsified.

Somebody who engages in an naive eschatalogcial belief of a spontaneous worker uprising is not only contrary to materialism in general, it's also a crude, reductionist misinterpretation of historical materialism, as you entirely reject the human element - Alexander the Great conquered Persia without economic necessity, and the US pulled out of Vietnam without being militarily defeated. You're essentially what Marx hated: A pseudo-intellectual who merely observes the world, but does not aim to change it.

Also, give me an example of what you propose that isn't completely naive and infantile you tool.

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How? You specifically accused me personally of being a LARPer, and I told I'm not.

Then why even bringing up Rojava, you sperg? Isn't it just another corporate social democracy, this time with a left-libertarian face, sheer opportunism? You try to weasel yourself out of the fact that I pointed out your double standards, you shill for Rojava (which isn't real socialism), but the USSR was the devil for you (despite that they came closer to what you define as socialism than Rojava ever will). If you actually understood Marx (the way leftcoms see him too) you'd also know that he was opposed to "Weltanschauungsmarxismus", having dogmatic irrelevant definitions of what is socialism or not is useless. Fact is that the USSR at its height achieved production for use and worker control over the means of production, so I don't see reasons to utterly refuse to replicate this model under modern, different conditions, which would probably allow us to cure the deficit of democracy the USSR sometimes displayed.

That's more or less Marxist-Leninist praxis with computers your faggot. Read up your history on how the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia. However it doesn't account for modern economic conditions and is therefore idealistic: As long as the imperialist countries have access to exploitation, there is no reason for them to re-industrialize by returning productive forces to domestic areas. That's why anti-imperialism makes economically sense and is important. It's also extremely patronizing to pretend imperialism doesn't exist anymore when people all over the globe are faced with it, and unlike the west they don't have access to keynesian redistribution systems because wealth was never accumulated by a national bourgeoisie, but was instead extracted into other countries. So the only choice they actually have is to implement a state socialist Marxist-Leninist system which builds up their industry.

They have merely shifted in appearance and manifestation, not in their reality. Marxism-Leninism also is inherently permeable for the specific conditions under which revolution occurs, but the approach of it is not to autistically denounce every socialist project that was done before or still exists, but rather learn from its experience.

Not even leftcoms question that. You officially jumped the shark now.

I've read Hegel before I was even a leftist. Mao's dialectic of contradictions is orientated on praxis. I now actually urge you to read Althusser, particularly For Marx. On the Materialist Dialectic and Contradiction and Overdetermination.

Fuck off.

Also I should mention that's literally maoist protracted people's war as well

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Hes a western marxist academic with althusserian tendencies and ML sympathies + computer stuff

The leftcom meme isn't dead because Cockshott is a LEFTCOM

Pls someone find that Radek quote where he says the worst outcome might be them winning the Civil War but because they're fucked it will drive workers away from communism in the future

They think if they only read the 'L' part they can claim to have read and understood the 'M' part

There is a reason why there is an L in ML

Will you fucking stop posting this bullshit? This is at least the second time I've you make this exact post you false flagging piece of shit. Go back to reddit you crypto-tankie cunt.

It was an obvious false flag. In fact I'd put money on you being the same faggot.

paranoid bordigist

You give some money. Plus, it means nothing to bring up how "successful" your ideology is or groups adhering to it are. Positing that your ideas have purchase because some real life groups or even entire states adhere to them is LARPing because it intends to shield them from criticism on shaky instrumentalist grounds. It just trashes the discussion. You're LARPing.
I specifically said that Rojava wasn't socialist, but that it would be useful to your case to become a communalist if you wanted to argue the "really existing" angle.
Nope.
The USSR was infamous for state-imposed Taylorism in enterprises controlled by a single manager.
I'm not opposed to soviets. Your focus on structure, however, is misguided. As soon as soviets become institutionalized as a system of management, the stage is set for a removal of agency from the masses themselves.
…and that's why we need to accept a praxis and theory of communization, in order to immediately build the fundamental relations of what will become a new society. Needs are left unmet in places where there was once industrial production which has now been shipped off. In fact, it would be immensely useful to our project to speed up what you call "imperialism" and allow the Western market to further penetrate where has not yet or is actively resisted. It is its continual self-destruction and dynamism which gives the broader contours to an immediately-realizable project of communization.
Currently, there's momentum behind the phenomena of globalization and outsourcing. We should capitalize on that and abandon what's clearly outdated. It was flawed from the beginning, and we now know that and that it doesn't even have the support of a """socialist""" bloc of states.
"The Coming Insurrection" makes the same mistake as you and DeLeuze, to view things in terms of territories as separate from the already-existing notion in all 3 frameworks of relations of power themselves, that which was originally broadly expounded by the likes of Proudhon, Bakunin, and Kropotkin, and mistakenly whittled down while also being usefully expanded by Marx. Notably, in all 4 of those thinkers' works and despite massive differences in epistemology and ontology, the concept of territory is absent. Certainly, what ideas of territory bring to the table are really-existing things, but the relation between territory and power should be understood more clearly before it's brought into analysis.
(cont)

The whole idea of territory is meaningless without power (both in the political and physical sense) to defend it as something which exists, which DeLeuze understood but did not take to its conclusion: that territory can only be understood as something which never exists as a subject differentiated from power, that it cannot be a distinctly immutable category shielded from transformations in other fields which have relations of power. It's an idealistic abstraction and resultant course of action to act as if "imperialism" is a cut-and-dry monolith of right side and wrong side. It's an economic relation and mechanism, one which intends to differentiate an undifferentiated and monolithic proletariat (abstracted as such when considering the "proletariat" as a power relation of its own) and in which both sides of the exchange are one and the same - statist centers of power which must be destroyed because they cannot allow men to be free by virtue of their existence, regardless of "name" or "side". An outright war between the Mughals and the Portuguese (or even the British in their first few decades of interference) would have resulted undoubtedly in the failure of the West to industrialize and therefore continued the survival of the supposedly "anti-imperialist" subject nation, and yet it happened anyways because "Mughal India" was an abstraction of a constellation of interconnected and interdependent but ultimately self-interested centers of power, a rhizomatic network being shoehorned into the faux-materialist framework of an arborescent statist idealism of "anti-imperialism" today under the name of "Brazil", "Russia", "India", "China".
A) yes they do, read Pannekoek
B) Marx's concept of the DoTP was rightly criticized as being a meaningless metaphysical construct papering over the state - no state dichotomy in the opening chapter of Bakunin's "Statism And Anarchy"

Hardly so. Maybe I'm being too general in what I'm describing? The aim is to, right now and without visibility if possible, create peer to peer relations based on production for use and defend the web of communistic relations by force if necessary. You will never seize state power, only ameliorate its worst excesses at most and use face to face interaction at its most devolved levels precisely to escape even those representations. If the goal of MPPW is the complete extension of state power to ever aspect of life via the mass line, this is its opposite - the erosion of state power by making exchange value pointless and subsequent defense against property's reaction to this, to try to eliminate newfound commons production by either fighting it off where the state is weak (deindustrialized backwaters) or integrating it into value production (in still-lively metropolises) in waiting for crises as chances to permanently recommunize the relations. Everything must be autonomous from state power, from state ideology.

But I would dispute that he's a Marxist in terms of what he professes. Among the first socialists were the Ricardian socialists, who made use of Ricardo's economics to develop ideas on cooperatives and banking mechanisms to make prices correspond exactly to use-values, aiming to establish their ideas through the creation of cooperatives. They were, however, unscientific and criticized as such by Proudhon, who called for a deeper analysis of both property and the historical trajectory which both brought us to it and could bring us beyond. Proudhon's earlier writings, before he apparently endorsed the fully collectivist system foreshadowing Bakunin's proto-syndicalism, espoused a number of positions based on a direct development from what exists within his framework of analysis.

Can this meme of Bakunin being an idealist die already?

What did he actually mean by it?

"A" state withering away is not "the" state withering away given the entire world is still governed by states!

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why is this in french?

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Reported for literal Imperialism.

french is one of the most widespread languages among muslims

Yes m'prole keep the good work

The COINTELPRO is strong in you man

wha…?