All memes aside, let's have the unpopular opinion thread now...

I don't think we should approve of these actions. Some of it can be boiled down to the material circumstances that the Soviet Union faced, but some of it was incompetence or just a disregard for the value of human life.

Stalin is amoral. He is an ideologue only interested in advancing his ideological goals, regardless of the costs.

we should focus on creating a system of direct democracy first and then about socialising the means of production

To be honest, I think that revolution is not feasible anymore. We should introduce market socialism instead and encourage cooperatives to engage with each other. If those coops would cooperate a lot, then you have basically a bottom-up planned economy. Without bloodshed.

The only problem is that multinational corporations and the like are very hard to turn into coops because they are so huge.

Unpopular opinion: ML is unironically good. Most anti-ML posters are history brainlets and really know nothing about ML post-1960 or 1976. Leftbook and reddit ML is cancerous because Maoism is cancer but Maoism itself is as much a deviation from ML as Khruschevism, Brezhnevhism etc.

I've been here several years and the up-tick in anti-ML shitposting always comes when anarchists, soc dems, and ultras start fearing they might be losing hegemony. So it is pleasing to see it start up once again.

Richard Wolff had a pretty good idea. He said that whenever a company tried to sell itself to another company, we pass a law where they HAVE to put it up for sale to the workers too. We can even take it a step further and use Government savings to buy the company and pass the ownership to the workers of that company.
I think that's what Corbyn was planning on doing iirc.

Even if that's shit it's still preferable to having people get their entire lives ruined over something as harmless as smoking a joint. (By harmless I mean harmless to others and to society. There might be health concerns related to smoking weed but you're not harming anyone else than yourself.)

That's a very good idea.

hot takes incoming
1)It doesnt matter if Stalin was good or not, its not useful for us to endlessly debate it. The 20th century is over, lets move on.
2)Bookchin is worth reading
3)Engels had a better beard then Marx
4)identifying as a Marxist, Anarchist, etc is silly. Non sectarian anti capitalism forever.

forgot shitposting flag

I dont really care if we ever reach late stage utopia, I just want to implement a democratic, fair economic and governmental system with production for use, no more wars and needless suffering and all that.

Also we should try to combine cockshotts economics with anarchist orginisation somehow.

What a strange turn of phrase. The 'costs' you mention are also based on ideology. Preserving human lives or minimising suffering is based on one ideology or another just like whatever ideology you think Stalin was motivated by. IMO Stalin's problem was that he held (geopolitical) power as an end to itself. Understandable based on his circumstances but it killed off the Soviet Union as a fundamentally socialist project if you ask me.

Arguing that Stalinism is bad is only necessary because there are unironic Stalinists making the rest of the left look bad.

The left is worthless as a political unit. Any discussion on revolution and future societies is pure LARP exercised by people who don't have a firm grasp on reality - no-one supports the left, you have no need of such theory and you won't for decades.

Idpol leftism is worse than neoliberalism, which shouldn't be surprised as most /r/socialism types voted for hillary clinton. Letting the SJW left succeed would be the equivalent of letting the alt-right dictate policy. You'll notice that most SJW dimwits are ML losers salivating over authoritarian violence against white people and men, not landlords, bankers, genuine bourgeois but just people who like anime and engage in heterosexuality.

The only focus of the left should be purging these people, non-sectarian anti-capitalism, and becoming inviting and welcoming to working class people everywhere, especially rural american whites and blacks usually discounted as being too reactionary and culturally inferior.

Humans are social beings. By smoking and changing your mental state you in turn affect other people. I say this having dealt with pot smokers firsthand.
whether it's harmless now is irrelevant. the point is that putting it out into the free market effectively condemns any drug to being manipulated to produce negative health affects. this can be seen in tobacco where a once harmless leaf now has lethal effects. even if you grow it in your home nowadays you are still using plant genes produced and artificially selected by private companies.

What does the vast majority of the Left even have that needs to be protected from da ebul Stalinists?

Look at this poll: twitter.com/nebel_gewehr/status/901260891173171200. Everyone hates you guys, even the people who hold the same theoretical positions that you do.

PolPot is /myguy/
He pretended to be alliance with the cia so he could slaughter the ching chongs and then implement anarcho-anti-industrialism

Feminism isn't complete shit.

This board's hostile opinions of feminism of any sort is left over resentment and has no real ideological grounding.

Unpopular opinions?
There is little to no hope to the left anymore, the socialist dream died with the USSR
Anarchists can screech all they want, but they will never have any major sucess with their flawed views on how the real world and real people works
Maybe in the next decade or so WW3 will finally happen, and after 90% of humanity is cleansed by nuclear fire, perhaps the new world will be something worth living, and the new society, something worth fighting for

You sound like you've been huffing some spray paint

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Marxism is fine, feminism as we commonly use it is not. Feminism as we commonly use it is "an act of charity" or "a surge of human compassion".

RMMT

Left twitter is better than this hell hole. Or what's become of it.

Feminism is literally a single ideology with no historic ties to Marxism.

INB4 you bring up the First Internationale

I'm an unironic Posadist.

People here (and on the left in general) treat Marx' writings too much like holy scriptures. I see this shit here every day and it's just dumb:

there is nothing wrong with systematic genocide of your enemies tbh

Pure projection
You'll have a penis one day hoochie :(

I don't understand why people here care about the common meaning of feminism, when they don't seem to care about the common meaning of 'socialism' or 'liberal'.

Not really.

You misunderstand. I say "I dont like this concept", and this concept is commonly called feminism.
Im not saying "Litterally any use of the word feminism to describe something makes that something wrong".
Marxist-feminism is pretty fucking cool.

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Although I did misunderstand you, I was speaking in general terms. Marxist feminism is indeed pretty cool (at least from what I've read about it), but people still seem hostile to anything relating to feminism as Hoochie already pointed out.

Helllloooooooo Kuru and related Prions

Can I get a source on that?

This. "Revisionist!" being thrown as an expletive is strange to me, do these people think the world and capitalism hasn't changed in the last 150 years? Dogmatism helps nobody.

Taken literally, sure. But this is not actually what is meant by the term 'revisionism', but the introduction of bourgeois ideology into a communist organization.

this is a mostly meme board, what are you expecting.

the problem is that "thing I don't like" very easily becomes "bourgeois ideology".

Has anyone else noticed that female leftists are much more likely to participate in idpol then their male counterparts?
Also it's not resentment, it's consistency. We condemn all forms of idpol. Most of us overwhelmingly just want an equal social society.
If you truly believe that then you are delusional. First wave feminism was about equality. Third wave feminism is about supremacy.

Maintaining the Law of Value is not socialism.
Production for exchange and wage labor is not socialism.
Subjecting workers to managers and external production quotas is not socialism.

marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1951/economic-problems/ch04.htm

Capitalism =/= Communism

There's a difference between critiquing Marx, and trying to pass off run-of-the-mill capitalism as socialism/communism.

Because right wing idpol isnt that swell for women, so the idpol women go left.

I think labor vouchers aren't Socialism, and aren't ideal as a transitionary phase to Socialism.
I have. I just disagree.

This would require masculine counter parts to also engage in idpol for it to be viable.

You came to this board, don't know the historic association with feminism and the radical left in the late 19th, early 20th century, and the civil rights movement, and associate it all with people with blue hair. Not just in America, but Asia, etc.

And you expect me to be convinced by you. Because you posted blue hair.

I wouldn't call you delusional, though I would call you severely ill read

We had thread a month ago. Anyways.
Land shouldn’t be nationalized.
Peasants > Prols.
Culture isn’t a spook.
Agrarianism is cool.
Traditionalism is good.

Read Marx until you understand why you're wrong then.

Although I personally think there are still gains to be made in the first world, they are not that important. Outside of the first world, however, there are still many gains to be made in terms of women's rights. There's a reason why I posted the Sankara quote and Kurdish YPJ flag earlier in this thread, these are undeniably patriarchal societies.

there really are no "waves of feminism". there is revolutionary, class concious feminism for the proletariat and there is bourgeois feminism.
latter one is utterly retarded, useless and cancerous and has always been rejected by socialists. none of these things happening today are really that new or different to the dumb shit even Marx or Lenin had to put up with.

Unpopular opinion: Historical Materialism is flawed and the left needs to adopt certain postmodern idealist stances in order to foment revolution

Sure, but that is what dialectic and investigation is for. This however doesn't preclude abuse.

wew

Labor vouchers help undermine capitalism, but on their own they don't abolish it.
You still end up with production for exchange and workers being alienated from the products of their labor. But the key is that it helps undermine capitalism in the spirit of being the "real movement which abolishes the present state of things".

Obviously, making sure all prices and wages conform to socially necessary labor time isn't going to cut it on it's own, but the pursuit of profit is a big part of what fuels production for exchange in the first place.

Reals

Better opinion: postmodernism is also flawed because it can't provide a coherent, non-reflective view of the world. The only way out of this impasse is to generalize Historical Materialism to the point of being a more expressive and powerful framework than postmodernist deconstruction.

im disgusted at the fact that the modern left has abandonned any kind of attempt at reformism. they would rather have people suffer than try and establish better working conditions under capitalism because it goes against what a bunch of dead guys said.

You cant implement labour vouchers in a market system.

explain

I mean all I can really say is restate my last point, what is so great about the anti-Stalinist Left? What do they have that we should be envious of?

Let us take a look: voting for "lesser-evil" bourgeois candidates, riot porn, yellow trade union economism, idpol, tearing down statues and other symbols of oppression in order to compensate for a lack of real power.

Of these options, yellow trade unionism is the closest thing to real organized working class struggle; riot porn is okay I guess, a close second, but it often seems to be a violent lashing out of disgruntled petit-bourgeois and lumpen that alienates the working class almost as often as it draws them into the struggle. Either way people just go back to their jobs once the smashing is done, the structure of society is largely unaffected and these days it seems that the bourgeoisie realizes that if nothing else these events are a good way for people to blow off steam that might be manifest themselves in other perhaps more menacing ways.

Credit where credit is due, I'll say that YPG is okay, that's the anti-Stalinist Left's main accomplishment and not just in the 21st century, in a long time. Interestingly enough the PKK was at least nominally ML and struggling along time prior to switching to democratic confederalism. There are ML parties from the region fighting with them and Albania seems to be one of the biggest places of origin for foreign YPG fighters.

I have my criticisms of it primarily in that I don't believe a non-Marxist organization can effect workers liberation from capitalism and secondarily there seems to be a heavy focus of national and gender liberation and experiments with new styles of ultra-democratic politics instead of focusing on the effects of imperialism on the region as a whole. That is just my opinion of what I've read from them; I haven't made up my mind about the whole question of whether they are proxies of US imperialism or just using them but it is looking like the former.

By that metric, we have one modern day example of what it looks like when the anti/non-Stalinist Left takes up the gun while having three examples of major Maoist insurgencies in the Philippines, India, and Peru, two of which are ongoing.

Now, I don't really like Maoism and have criticisms of these groups but they do or did have tens of thousands of armed and millions of sympathizers. The Red Corridor in India affects around 200 million people and yet the anti-Stalinist Left has been completely silent about that development and said little of its oppression by the Indian state. Even here we've had stickies for the YPG and very, very few threads on the Naxalites. I only consider Maoists to be nominal Stalinists btw but I bring it up it is telling because it says a lot about the priorities of the Western anti-Stalinist left.

If this is so its really not due to us because this is still very much an ancom-leftcom board. MLs are still the minority here and I'd say they are a smaller one then when I started using the board several years ago when it was quite small.

Thanks for linking to a work where comrade Stalin deftly refutes left-com nonsense. Appreciated.

I hope you aren't surprised that a bunch of reactionary nonsense is unpopular on a leftist board.

Do you not count people like Corbyn, Sanders, Mélenchon as left? I think the experiences of the 70s and the 90s tells us quite a bit about the weakness of the reformist position.

I absolutely agree. In the first world it's largely nit picked issues now.
Rojava's feminist movement I completely support. The Middle East is a great example of an area that desperately needs feminism. The first world not so much.

I hate you more than words can express.

No, I don't expect you to be capable of reason.

Wouldn't that require utilizing postmodernist deconstruction in the first place?

feels>reals is honestly believing that Marx was 100% correct and political theory and praxis created for use in the late 19th century west can be applied now with no adjustment or critical examination.

unpopular opinion i have a crush on hoochie

im talking about the far left in general. People need to stop LARPing about being red guards and try to do something to improve the power of the working class. If revolution isn't coming in the near future, reformism will have to do. Don't you remember how socialism helped labour unions form and shortening the work week, etc.?

Posting a trap with blue hair and spitting out recycled talking points over what Feminism actually is without any knowledge of its international and national effects to our history for the positive, and its association with early collectivism, is pure concentrated reason.

Posting a blue hair girl, invalidated all my arguments.

Please. Even a ton of historical heroes in Vietnamese culture are women and speaking ill of them is looked down upon.

It's certainly idpol, but your cross cultural, pan wide view of feminism as this "cringe" unique to the Western world or immigrants within it, is completely wrong.

And for the record, I don't hate you : )

pics of hoochie?

I know, but the concept of production for exchange honestly repulses me. I feel that Communalism could be implemented instead.

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So would you consider yourself a feminist then?

no pics, its based purely on autism

There's pics of one user sperging out over my ass being too fat, face blotted out

What's so great about the Stalinist left? The left is already weak, why let the Stalinists make it even weaker? The anti-Stalinist left has done more than the Stalinist left in the last 3-4 decades by several orders of magnitude.
The YPG is Marxist, they're just not orthodox Marxists.
Come the fuck on, those are three of the best examples of how ineffective ML parties can be. How long have the ML parties in those countries been active for? And they've accomplished nothing substantial. The Red Corridor is a great example of how fucking useless the CPI is. Honestly, what a load of shit.

God damn you're a nice person. Nothing personal, namefagging just triggers me.
Okay, I'm willing to listen to reason, do you have a book you could recommend that I could read to educate myself on the topic further?

Very true

I don't like the stigma attached to the term. I would consider myself an Egalatarian if I was asked.

well now im curious, can you or another user show this to me

No, it requires a dialectical resolution of the interdependency between Deconstruction and the idea of a single authoritative historical narrative that is built up as time goes on. An analysis of how competing ideas and narratives become authoritative seems like a good place to start here.

Civil Rights movement era literature on black women, and particularly women during the Industrial Revolution. Can't name exact pieces off the top of my head at the moment, but women in the industrial revolution weren't stayed at home.

There's a long history of Western societies treating women as property, and it delves into racism.

It's taboos that are covered in identity politics, so they're alien to most of this board, but the fact is America is infected with identity so it becomes impossible to debate it without bringing it up. It's a tricky situation. It involves immigration, and the like.

I wouldn't usually discuss it on here but posters here have a naive view of Marxist Feminism.

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The idea of a stateless society with autonomous communities working together is stupid, delusional, and utopic.

The state isn't the same thing as the government, user. You only view anarchists as "stupid, delusional, and utopic" because you're not familiar with their ideas. Anarchists and communists have a lot to share with (and learn from) each other.

I might have the most unpopular opinion
behavioral genetics research currently going on in China will vindicate many of Holla Forums's claims about race within the next 5-10 years.

Maybe in some respects, but Holla Forums's ideas about race are based on cultural distinctions rather than on genetic distinctions, so I don't really think it'd lend them much credibility if this happened. It would likely end up dividing them on whether Italians, Armenians, Hiberians, etc. are white or not with the HBD crowd taking a harder stance than the culture crowd. But I don't think they'll be validated. There's currently a big body of evidence that suggests that most people from every race are just average. It'd be a really boring result if this were the case, but I think it's the most likely outcome tbh.

Maybe.

But very little Holla Forums ideology really necessarily follows from the science they trumpet.

Yeah these traits all exist on clines, and Holla Forums has a very crude understanding the whole subject, but that doesn't necessarily mean they are wrong about the some of the underlying reasons that Somalia is a shithole and Bhutan is not.

Perhaps most groups are close to average in regard to g, but the evidence seems to suggest that different groups have strengths in different areas (visual/spatial, verbal, etc). This whole field is super nuanced and only people who are neck deep in HBD really begin to grasp the complexity of it.

IMO the question isn't whether or not races will differ on average in different areas (they do. That's not really up for debate).

The question is to what extent.

Right, but I can't really see how you'd build a fascistic or even just a right-wing racial politics around this nuanced conception of race. Like maybe if you have a unscientific view of evolution along with social Darwinism, but why bother with the nuance at that point? Or you could pair it with a Heideggerian notion of race as spiritual, but then why bother with the science at that point? At most I see this path leading towards a kind of traditionalist leftism tbh.

Yes, and because liberal egalitarian dogma has made the relevant research taboo in west, we will have to wait for gene association studies to be conducted in China. These Chinese geneticists will succeed where western social scientists have failed.
I only hope that Beijing decides to share this information freely for the sake of humanity, instead of hoarding this research and genetically engineering their own people to be super human.

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