Marxism-Leninism thread

This is good. The whole 'tankie' thing has really gotten out of hand, even reaching cult-like status at times. Often if you even dare to suggest that maybe, just maybe the Stalin-era USSR didn't operate exactly like what Western propaganda claimed it did you'll be shunned. ML is the most radical of anti-capitalisms, the failure of the left to accept it is nothing more than a sign of it's pathetic weakness and lack of self-confidence. It's rehabilitation is a necessity if we don't want to see workers led in the wrong direction by pro-capitalist elements in red paint like demsocs and socdems.

State ownership is not antithetical to worker ownership or even to worker's self-management. Which are not the same thing by the way, despite what this board would have you believe.

Socialism is unthinkable without democracy. If the state is not firmly in the hands of the working class then there's no reason for whatever political faction ruling it to not revert to a capitalist mode of production. And yes, this applies to the Stalin-era USSR.

no it is not, under Stalin's administration the economy became fully nationalized, no party officials owned anything, furthermore there was a planned economy in place and goods were produced as needed.
If you had 100 million people production would be turned to producing enough yearly output of food to feed the 100 million people. There was no room for profiteering in this because there was no surplus labor to exploit.

I never said anything about local workers control, but the people in charge of managing the economy of the oblasts were elected by the workers there, the men elected were also workers.

It is worst than that, various Trotskyite or leftcom organizations pull away class conscious people, and most of these parties don't really do anything. In my country there are eight communist parties, and only two ever do anything. What is more troubling many of these organizations are funded by large capital. It is a troubling state of affairs.

Honestly I never expected such an informative post on a chan style board.

What's your opinion of the communist party if the russian federation, do you consider them a party that is a lazy lapdog of the Kremlin or is there still something resembling a communist party in them?

isn't that exactly what i was saying? i didn't say 'stalin personally owned everything'

they are revisionists and hold many reactionary views. Honestly from what I heard from my party in Russia (The party of my country has a branch in Russia as well, we are even of the same administration) is that they are controlled opposition and that they are even funded by Putin's lobby at times. They are religious and have nationalist deviations from what I heard. If they are not puppets, they would be a far more progressive force to be at the administration of Russia than putin, especially with promises of partial nationalization of the economy. There are better parties to be voting for, much better parties.

you are right, my apologies. It is 5:19AM here. Your point is still moot however as the state was run by the people.

I would also like to hear if you are a member of some party yourself, comrade.

Lenin also said you shouldn't apply the theory of "What is to be Done?" outside of Russia, but like his corpse it was turned into a idol and a doctrine.

Dude, Stalinism was definitely a phenomena of it's own.

only it wasn't, Stalin collectivized and industrialized the economy, he administrated differently because circumstances were different, but other than that he was only continuing Lenins work. Other than industrialization you also had the factor of the third reich, which was considerably different than the second reich.
You need to be clearer. Tell me where it was applied outside the USSR and how. You must consider the material conditions in place.

One of the necessities to join the Comintern was to adhere to the vanguard party and central democracy theories. How do you not know this as a ML?

Dude, Lenin was much more fond of social-democratic method as espoused by Bukharin (which is likely why Stalin executed him) since he knew that with the revolution not spreading to industrialized countries their only option was a state capitalist economy.

Now, Stalins central planning continued that (although in a form vastly different from that imagined by Lenin) - the entire point of the USSR economy was to accumulate surplus-value and capital, and expand industrialization.

What colours the Stalinist ideology is a lack of faith in the communist project, the purges where not so much a endless paranoiac search for traitors, but an desire to maintain a façade of revolution.

You can't blame the fucking Nazis for the problems of the Stalinist state which existed before and after them, especially since Hitler's entire war in the west hinged on a non-aggression treaty with the USSR.

And what would you call this social democratic method when it was Lenin who first represented the ideals of democratic centralism?
Bukharin was a traitor to the revolution, not only did he sabotage the party because his faction was outvoted at the party congress and didn't get his way but his method would have lead to the establishment of a red bourgeois or even worse, unregulated capitalism. It is unscientific to build capitalism when industrialization is a feasible option, this is why the NEP was ended so progress could be made towards socialism.
Bukharin was executed for being a sectarian cunt that was sabotaging the party and even had his sect within the party plot to murder other party members.
that wasn't necessary when the soviet union industrialized and had a powerful enough economic basis to offer material support to other revolutions. Typically with soviet goods/resources backing them up they industrialized very very quickly, and state capitalism wasn't necessary. It was literally only necessary in the case of China and the soviet union early on.

You are right about the USSR being specifically aimed at industrialization, however post industrialization there was no aim to accumulate capital and the economy was turned to a planned economic model where goods were made as needed, as I mentioned above. If there was a necessity for something the economy would be geared to filling that necessity, not for profit.

Now this is just blatant idealism, and is plain baseless. Lack of faith my ass, I guess that is why revolutionary governments were supported economically world wide, even if they did not adhere to marxism-leninism.
also
read Lenin
marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/sep/20.htm

I can blame the nazis for the economic problems of the USSR since they waged class war on the USSR from the outside, you can't just vaguely denounce material forces at work in the grand scheme of things. Not only were there fascist collaborators within the ranks of the army during the war but before it as well.
I swear there are so many accusations that I will have to start capping more of my posts because I am too tired to type everything up all the time

He was literally loyal to Stalin until his last breath.
I'm sad you can't see the irony of this statement.
Like, I dunno, the Nomenclature?
This is a meme statement and you know it. Industrialization and capitalism are by necessity intertwined, because to continue industrialization you need to produce capital.

>marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/sep/20.htm
Jesus, how can one argue with you when you don't even understand the critique.

It's not about Stalin killing people, it's about him purging the party to maintain his own power. Now, even this I don't actually give a shit about, I don't care about sincerity, but as I mentioned, Stalin did produce the bureaucratic machine that would grind the revolution to halt, and leave behind a state that was equally hostile to internal communism as the West Bloc.

What, in the fucking 20s?
The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact is hardly an "accusation". Your image made no sense before and it makes no sense now, because it directly contradicts itself:

Stalin's legacy is not communism, but rather the expansion of industrialization and state capitalism under ML regimes to colonized countries - which was a good thing. Because that was the duty to communism in the 20th century, to produce the material conditions for communism, i.e. capitalism. I'd suggest crisiscritique.org/ccmarch/losurdo.pdf on the topic, you'll like it I'm sure.

Also, on the topic of Stalinism as an actual ideology distinct from later ML theory, read chapter 3.

i remember an anecdote about how they stopped teaching capital in soviet economics classes because students couldn't tell the difference between marx's description of capitalism and the economic mode of production in the USSR

Oh boy, it's the vanguardism meme again. Sorry you fell for an anarchist strawman.

I was really hoping I wouldn't have to come into this thread to explain why the party didn't own the MoP for the millionth time, but I'll do it again if I have to. I'll just post Mandel's article again right now because it's convenient.

marxists.org/archive/mandel/1979/xx/sovbur.htm

i'm basically a kautskyist, to the extent that it can be called a distinct "ism"

i'll read that piece by mandel when i have the time

I'm of thr perhaps uninformed opinion that the existence of capital is the greatest force acting to produce class difference. Capital is the way that things are produced in our present society but it is also the greatest limitation on the use of the products of labor. As long as capital exists a proletariat can only get as much bread as he can pay for, no matter if he will starve otherwise. In other words for communism to be successful capital itself must be abolished

no he wasn't, they agreed on the economic principles of the NEP, that was literally the only thing they agreed on. Once the NEP was out of use, and Bukharin was expelled from his political position for both not following the decisions of the congress and fostering right wing sectarianism within the party. After this he plotted counter-revolutionary activity and was summarily executed.
Bukharin was executed based on his testimony, and the testimony of many others, that he was involved in plots to overthrow the Soviet government and Party leadership. He already spoke of the possibility of assassinating Stalin with his supporters at an earlier date, see:
revolutionarydemocracy.org/rdv8n1/bukharin.htm

except that's completely wrong, every purge that took place was ridding the SKP(b) of right wingers within the party. He literally did everything to uphold the tenants of socialism, and if you knew anything than propaganda you'd know that his purges were committed against the bureaucracy. Read this
bookzz.org/book/989260/2309c7

No, I can blame them for burdening the soviet economy in the 1940's, and for killing thirty million of their people, twenty million civilians and ten million soldiers.

where did I say he was the 'winner' of the 'collaboration'? I said he got the most out of the pact, are you implying it would have been better if he refused to sign the pact and the nazis took all of Poland, and the baltics (minus Finland) as they originally planned? Because that is idealism. Poland was literally the landbridge to the soviet union.

also, here is more on Bukharin since you think he was on the party line. He was everything but on the party line, he was a sectarian from the start to the very end.

Trotsky and Bukharin both cooed this, especially Trotsky in his books, and yet the USSR was industrialized without a capitalist economy in place post NEP. Both Bukharin and Trotsky cried about how the soviet economy was doomed to fail industrialization due to not accepting the right wing reforms they upheld, yet it didn't.

If you want to see what a truly state-capitalist country looks like refer to the soviet union post Hruschevs coup d'etat, he upheld Bukharin's plans and rehabilitated him. Now you tell me how Hruschev was better for the soviet union, despite his cancerous policies being the cause of bread lines

oh wait Hruschev was a stalinist amirite? :^)

The very fact that they needed a confession by the victim is proof enough that they where false. If one has evidence there is no need for such a spectacle.

If this is going to be your main source of arguments there is no need to continue this, it's like talking to a creationist that keep referring to the bible.

You're missing the critique again, I'm not saying they needed capitalism, I'm saying they where.

No he wasn't a Stalinist, he was the one who cleaned up after the excess and self-destructive behaviour of the Stalin regime. Did he ever speak of objective truths and healthy symptoms?
That was under late Brezhnev and onwards though, Khrushchev was quite adamant about restructuring and increased efficiency, which would have stopped the years of stagnation.

you have no understanding of socialist economy.
no, that started under Hruschev
wew lad, to think I took you seriously.

What's your view on Mao Zedong and New Democracy? And on Enver Hoxha?

Mao Zedong was a good communist but didn't have the best understanding of marxism which lead to many errors within his regime. He fucked up worst when he disbanded the party post cultural revolution, thinking the people would lead the rest of the revolution. It only lead to capitalist usurpation and the overthrow of proletariat dictatorship. I can elaborate if you are interested.
I have too little knowledge to say anything on him, but it is sad that his country was the only one that managed to defend itself from the rampant reformism that followed after the 1952's coup d'etat. Hoxa had a very good understanding of marxism from what I have read on him.

Why is ML gay shit for homo nerd faggots? Why are MLs LARPers who don't understand theory?

Because the fiction novel you've read said so.

Based thread, comrade.

Keeping this board from going full-blown liberal.

Daily reminder when normies say "communism no werk" they mean Leninism and they're right.

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normies and anarchists are kind of mutually exclusive

also, intellectual discourse with MLs would be easier if they didn't kill/gulag everyone who tried and then erased them from history :^)

Most normies don't even know what political anarchism is.

and most anarchists I know, are essentialy normies.

Daily reminder that marxism-leninism has been the only revolutionary leftist ideology who has succeed in doing a revolution and seizing power.

I don't know what that makes of your special snowflake true leftism, whatever that is.

Seizing power and taking it AWAY from the people in controlled "representative" democracies except it's not really representative either because they don't get to choose the guy OOPS HAHA yeah ML is shit faggot and ML collapsed without foreign intervention so :^) meanwhile libsoc Spain only fell due to foreign intervention and libsoc EZLN and Kurdistan are doing fine.
MLs, dogmatic anarchists and any other spookily ideologized dogmatic group need to fall in line with the clear consensus in the left- Libsoc is the way forward. We'll start with something a step past social democracy and when the conditions are right move go mutualism, etc etc until eventually we're at communism assuming it's possible. ML isn't anywhere in that process, and anarchists are jumping the gun.

Well anarchists are libsocs so they already are with the "clear consensus" of the left.

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faggot

Tomoko is an anarchist.

Get a stroke tripfag.

suck my big lady dick, faggots

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My face as I see the potential of this thread go down in smoke.

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yeah, not under the watch of anarchofags shitting up threads on pretty much Holla Forumsack levels of arguing

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You know this is an anarchist board, right?

Kek

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>>>/anarcho/

Useless bullshit, weakest link. Needs to be purged from theory.

Not detailed enough. Fundamental question about the role of the law of value in soviet economy is not answered clearly.

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After achieving state power party form must be abolished. Vanguard will have state apparatus at their disposal, there will be no need for parrallel structure.

ML's be like "Hey! We're going to switch out your capitalist bosses with bureaucrats! You won't have any more control over your working environment than you did, but you totes won't be exploited :')))"

Pft, no thank you. It's debatable whether or not Stalinist Russia was "state-capitalist", but even if that term isn't accurate it still isn't a society I would want emulated in the future.

It doesn't matter what anyone wants. There is no freedom of choice, only historical necessity.
For USSR to industrialise, there was only one way, way of forced collectivisation and directive planned economy, which ignored idea of equilibrium and fully embraced imbalance.

For the future societies "choice" will be the same, meaning no choice at all.

True, but I more meant the dogmatic people that haven't read even a little theory and don't give a shit about conditions and want anarchy here and now.

Exactly. All ML does is centralize the profit motive and have the profit distributed among the people (except not really) instead of in the pockets of the rich (except this happened anyway). Literally the only improvement over capitalism is that lmao I don't even know how to finish this post it's the same shit or worse in every way. Like even only in theory without taking what actually happened into consideration it's still shit.
Also @MLs who are pissy that libsocs are le pwning you- read a book nigger.

I want to believe it's a coincidence that this is the same sort of shit reactionaries say, but..

I wonder why you all care so much.
There's a greater change of George Carlin rising from the grave, then there is in another revival of a ML society. And why would normies want to live in a ML society, and not an anarchist one?

Because normies would prefer to have a police force around for when lumpens behave like lumpens

Cause everyone has to live in a L (Leninist) society first.

Jesus fucking Christ you people are nuts. Anti-tankieism, this board's version of anti-communism, has become a religion. Every time I see someone here try to debunk ML I'm only reminded of how right I am for adopting it.

Just look at this shit.

You've created a strawman of ML. None of us think what existed in the USSR was the ultimate ideal, we just make no apologies for thinking it was better than what existed in the West. This is why I said earlier that ML is the most radical socialism, we're the only ones that make no concessions to capitalism whatsoever.

Utterly baseless comment. In former socialist countries the top economic authorities only recognized plans as their guideline, endless capital accumulation wasn't even a factor.

Seriously, where was this class of mega-rich capitalists in the USSR? Proper millionaires didn't start showing up by the thousands until the 70's and no Marxist-Leninist would question that capitalism was already restored by then. This is pure insanity.

Dude, if you're participating in a global economy you're on the market. That's why it was called state capitalism, because the entire country just became one massive state-run enterprise doing trade on the global market. The bureaucrats ran away with all the money because they were making money and weren't being held accountable to anything, so they gave themselves raises as they pleased and lived the pampered lives of the equally unelected bourgeoisie pre-revolution.
Tell ya what, the Holodomor's effects were not felt in Moscow.

So in your hypothetical ML society, how would it be different than it was in Stalinist Russia? With regards to the means of production.

Keep fighting the good fight, comrade. I swear the anarchists on this board would rather no revolution at all than a ML one and that is to be on the side of capital.

Correct. As I've elaborated ML is definitely worse than social democracy and might be worse than capitalism.
Also I'm hardly an anarchist or at least not an anarkiddie, it's not a duopoly.

except that is wrong, there is still a need for soviets as a means of the workers to own the means of production and to have better hold of administration over the MOP.
Under Lenin and Stalin the soviets were the supreme organs of state power. Each soviet oversaw industry, agriculture, education, health, etc. in its own area.
* drive.google.com/file/d/0B1ZP6ZurgOg-R1pjc2NVQkQxYmM/view ("Soviet Democracy" by Pat Sloan)
* archive.org/details/TheNewSovietConstitution (Anna Louise Strong on what changed with the Stalin Constitution)
* unz.org/Pub/AmQSovietUnion-1938oct-00059 (an analysis of the first elections held after the new constitution was adopted)
marxists.org/archive/reed/1918/soviets.htm
marxists.org/history/archive/brailsford/1927/soviets-work/intro.htm
except that is completely wrong since the bureaucracy does not own the MOP, the state does, and the state is run by workers. read links I posted above. Management of the means of production=/=ownership of the means of production, factory managers have a roll in society just as workers do.

WEW LAD

The NEP was cancelled because there was no longer a need for it, saying the USSR under Stalin was state capitalist because it was under Lenin is redundant and historically and economically illiterate.

this only happened after the coup d'etat of 1952 when Hruschev and his cronies got into power, it is also the source of the bread lines and the disparity that is heard about within the soviet union. Before the coup d'etat the party didn't own the means of production and was only in charge of administration, Hruschev literally had to re-establish private ownership for there to be a profit for the administration, and you can literally read up on this, It's not like Hruschev and his thugs were hiding it, they just put a coat of paint over it.

sectarianism like this is why party purges have to happen, because you always have that one element that'd rather have capitalism than socialism that is hindering the progress from the inside.
also
social democracy is literally the side effect of proletariat revolution. It is a useless movement out of the context of an international communist movement pressuring capitalists to give up the means of production. Social democracy was created by the capitalist classes to ease the pressure of the spectre of communism and to lessen the massively rising class consciousness among the proletarian. You had no social democracy anywhere before you had communism, your ideology is literally just a side effect that cannot exist without a communist threat upon capitalist society, and yet you claim you can accomplish anything, you are just a parasite.

SOLIDARITY
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I sure as hell would rather have capitalism where the system knows I'm getting tired of it and can't just assassinate me because I'm not important enough to be worth the effort, plus laws and other things, than a society where government can basically kill me for thinking or doing anything they don't like at all, and someone's like "wtf??" and they just go "oh, enemy of the state" and the person's like "oh". You fucking authoritarian fascist cunts always like to whine about sectarianism and revisionism, despite being the worst of both. We have to be sectarian now so you freaks won't co-opt the Revolution and silence our dissent later.
See, more proof you can't into reading comprehension on spooky pixel arrays transmitted telephonically pertaining to foreign animation, much less theory. Nowhere did I advocate Socdem, just said that it's preferable to Fauxism-LARPingism.

Your post is nothing but more proof how much this board has deteriorated, and much more how nobody bothers to read theory anymore, or bothers to put it to practice.

Come on Holla Forums, nobody wants to discuss the significance of the party? This should be of interest to anybody even anarchists

Well, that's more general Leninism (including Bordiga and Trotskyists) than Marxism-Leninism specifically.

That was his point, little sage warrior.

They were part of the state apparatus.

When i mean parrallel structures, i mean supreme soviet on the one hand, and central commitee on the other as sources of state power.
Anyway, in the SU ultimate source was politburo, which is evident if you look at the process of decision making right after Stalin's death. It's all comes down to directives of politburo.
In the end, it was party that betrayed the revolution, no amount of purges can change that.

I appreciate what progress was done in the SU under Stalin, but please cut this bullshit.
State was run for the workers, not by the workers. One can say that state is run by workers, when economic plans can only be authorised by supreme soviet.

Yeah, WeW

Now show me where Marx, Lenin, or Stalin uses dialectics as an actual logical method, by which one comes to conclusions, and not applies it post factum.

It was cancelled because there was need for SU to rapidly industrialise, and because there was economic crisis on the horizon.
All major economic discussions of the time come down to the question about the way to idustrialise SU (as is the case with economic discussions in Cuba).

Here we go again…
It was not just some cronies, it was the party as a whole. Stalin at the end made some moves to distance party from state power, I'm talking about the 19th congress of CPSU, which freaked party the fuck out. Seriously, can it be coincidence that Stalin died not long after said congress, and the first thing politburo did was to cancel decisions of the congress?

Bullshit, he decentralised economy (which screwed up planning), and made means of production into commodities, but he did not established private ownership.

Purges didn't save SU from restoration of capitalism.

what does you thinks bout my waifu?

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Does this trigger you?

Why would it?

Please, try harder.
Purged from party means expelled from party (with a few exemptions :), not killed, or send to gulag.

So basically you can't prove me wrong.

it stopped the immediate threat of capitalist restoration, a literal military coup had to be performed for capitalism to be established, that is like saying purges against communist elements within capitalist society did nothing to stop a communist coup d'etat, the purges certainly did as they were supposed to, however the soviet administration failed from defending against outside influence as many party members still remained in contact with those removed from the party. You see, killing people was on nobodies priority list, only when these people started committing to counter revolutionary action were they actually tried and executed.

it was not the whole party, the party consensus only changed at the 20th congress and that was after Hruschev committed purges of his own against the party leadership.
ooof, there is a lot of speculation in this case, it is likely he was killed by the testimony of Molotov no other but so are many other things
Wasn't this after the coup d'etat however?

All major economic discussions of the time come down to the question about the way to idustrialise SU (as is the case with economic discussions in Cuba).
I have no argument here, but I never argued against this point either.

can't you comprehend the difference between administrating the means of production and owning it? The state apparatus, ie the soviets, were run by workers who were elected by workers, who elected members of the soviet among themselves to the CC. Simply put at every level of the state there was worker management, which was voted for by the workers, and you can see that they were replacing the old dying out bureaucracy.

of course they were because they made up most of the state apparatus, they were the state. As for your argument about the politburo you must consider that people among the soviets were elected to and rose to the positions of the politburo, it was not entirely made of old hands.

You have good points about the reformists getting into power being an inevitability at the time, the conditions of the time are to be taken into consideration and changes are to be made to the party structure for future generations. I like your post because it is well thought out, although I do not agree with everything.

cheers.

Nah, I just ain't going to bother answering such an array of buzzwords and apolitical crap. There is no substance in your post, only ML=Fascism, which shows just how much you know about anything.

also, to clarify, the supreme soviet's economic role was more along the lines of making a general plan, calculating the needed production for a years worth and so on; the soviets were still the one that had to manage the practical work of the economy, the how of what has to be done, while the supreme soviet calculated the what, ie how much was required/needed to keep running.

So why did he?

Except creating a capitalist, class society of course.

It literally is though. We've seen the end result of Leninism like a dozen times and it's always a class society with unelected technocrats on the top living well and rightsless commoners toiling away for the good of the state and not themselves
Even in Russia. The end result of Leninism meets every definition of fascism. It's what happens when your ideology revolves around censoring people you disagree with.
Kill yourself OP.

define fascism.

yeah, thought so.

Again you throw insults around like a kiddie without actually knowing the definition of the word.

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Uncompelling arguments. I don't know what I expected though.

Seriously nigga? Even I realize the bullshit there.

C'mon, tell me more about private property in the USSR before 20th congress of CPSU.

departments.bucknell.edu/russian/const/36cons01.html

State property is private property, whether you like it or not.

I threw you a bone and left this part out too

pick one. You have to understand the material basis for craftsmen, some jobs much like today required craftsmen and not laborers. I'll give a banal example, I am sure there are much better ones: A shoemaker. These were petit bourgeois businesses heavily regulated by the soviets, and the soviets were ran by workers, so even these petit bourgeois institutions were controlled by the proletariat. Have an example of a country where socialism was much less evolved, but existed: Yugoslavia.
even trough the petit bourgeois notion of workers self management the proletariat massivley held on to their means of production, I could go into detail into this if you want, but it was basically the same principle as above: The party heavily regulated these businesses, the party was ran by workers, so the workers controlled the means of production. Socialism is distinct from communism because a class division still exists and class warfare is still waged.

Marx himself wrote about this. As for the collective farms, I don't know what you are trying to prove, it was simply a much more decentralized form of peoples ownership. It was necessary due to the peasants being distinct from the proletariat, but I am sure you know this much.

Than what kind of property is *not* private property?

In the economic problems Stalin mentions gradual transformation of cooperative sector into state sector. In fact, he openly admits that in the cooperative sector the law of value is the regulator of production, not economic plan.

Now you tell me ratio of individual sector and state planned sector in soviet economy.

Important point, don't you think?

Anyway, plan at the time was not advanced enough to cover all demand. Because of this reason service sector was left partially to individuals and cooperatives.
Technical limitations is the cause.

but why did Stalin kill them?

daily reminder to browse >>>/marx/

I claimed neither of those things, which is why I said I threw you a bone and left it out. If I wanted to contradict the strict claim that there was no private property in the USSR before the 20th Congress, as was stated, I could have merely pointed to that and have been done with it, even though such artisan businesses were a small minority.

Outright false. The party was explicitly apart from the workers. That is the entire doctrine of vanguardism. This strata in the party heirarchy and the party's control over state property and economic planning is precisely why the USSR deformed into a capitalist society.

I wasn't pointing to that part, rather the preceding line (state property).

Propety that is owned by society as a whole. Not by a select group at the top of society.

See above

Excuses, excuses.

m8, proles could get into the party, it was just heavily regulated. For an individual to get into the party he'd have to be approved by 4 other party members and he'd have to know his shit about theory. That's the way it should be. Also, if this was true the soviets wouldn't have been run by the people and they were, and the soviets and the party were heavily intertwined. It would only create economical inefficiency to divide the party and the soviets.
also, I mentioned before I don't know if you have read it, the party administrated the MOP but did not own it, ownership of the MOP was had by the soviets, who were compromised of officials elected by workers, and elections were held regularly. The party more or less set the quota of production based on their analysis of the countries needs, while it was the job of the soviets to fulfil and administrate those quotas.

Thank you for this discussion, honestly. The rampant funposting and lack of theory has been very sad for me, half the people here are using political orientations as identities without reading anything actually, and I love that there are still a few people that are actually discussing shit. Light speed comrade.

The biggest problem with Marxism-Leninism is its silly long hyphenated name

Democratic centralism then, with the supreme soviet at the top, and without the party?

But there are objective material conditions, which limit your choice.

Ownership suggests freedom to administrate.

WRT dialectics, I'm pretty sure Marx used dialectics (process-logic) in the very beginning of Capital Vol 1 in his analysis of the commodity and it's value.

marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1969/lenin-before-hegel.htm

"Lenin applies his materialist reading to this double thesis of Hegel’s. And that is why he is so fascinated by the Absolute Idea. He thus lays bare and refines this notion, too, retaining the Absolute, but rejecting the Idea, which amounts to saying that Lenin takes from Hegel the following proposition: there is only one thing in the world which is absolute, and that is the method or the concept of the process, itself absolute. And as Hegel himself suggested by the beginning of Logic, being = nothingness, and by the very place of Logic, origin negated as origin, Subject negated as Subject, Lenin finds in it a confirmation of the fact that it is absolutely essential (as he had learnt simply from a thorough-going reading of Capital) to suppress every origin and every subject, and to say: what is absolute is the process without a subject, both in reality and in scientific knowledge.

As this proposition breaks through, i.e. constantly touches the surface, or rather the skin, all that is needed is to lay it bare to obtain the Marxist-Leninist concept of the materialist dialectic, of the absoluteness of movement, of the absolute process of the reality of the method: to be precise, the concept of the fundamental scientific validity of the concept of a process without a subject, as it is to be found in Capital, and elsewhere, too, in Freud, for example."

Stalin I cannot comment on. Of course this all might not convince you since Althusser was an avowed ML but give it a try.

holly shit, Leninist are retarded.

:^)

But this very function of placing them into a select caste in control of society, property and workers transforms them from proletariat to bourgeoisie. This is aside from the very obvious openings for abuse the vetting method entails.

But the divide is there regardless of the background of the membership. Once you place any persons or group in political power over the society as a whole, they will always arrange the means of production and living around themselves, regardless of the purity of intentions.

You too lad. I'll look into M-L more.

Well, this is the function of the vanguard, to keep a new social caste from being created, by keeping the means of production collective ownership. Post NEP the party was structured in a way that no individual could exploit the surplus value of workers. This was done trough democratic centralism as I mentioned before, the workers may have had a general quota (to fulfill the needs of the proletariat throughout the soviet union) but it was by their administration, and their literal physical ownership of the MOP that they accomplished this. Simply speaking the supreme soviet was unable to directly control or hold factories but decided and managed the amount of articles produced and in what time, the quota I was talking about before.
The supreme soviet couldn't create this quota if the soviets, ran by the people, didn't provide analytical evidence of what was needed, if Oblast Rostov needed 7 million tons of bread for the next year that's how much there would be produced, because that's what the oblast (the soviet) calculated based on how much was being consumed per day. So the supreme soviet was a way to centralize the power of the soviets themselves, to better administrate their various needs. So in short the supreme soviet can't function without the soviets giving material information, and the soviets function far better and produce far more with the aid of the supreme soviet.

This was ended with Hruschev's coup d'etat of 1952, as I said before. Suddenly there was a seperation of the soviets and the supreme soviet, as the supreme soviet had different material interests to them. This caused the bread lines that are so infamous and the general lack of goods and disparity in the soviet union, the separation of the administrative organ of the workers state from the productive organ, in a strange horribly inefficient limbo between capitalism and socialism.

So, as any government, it works as it is meant to work, but only if it manages to defend itself from being overthrown.

read my first post, there are books there. How much of theory have you read so far, and what have you read? I am asking so I can recommend you a book.

How compatible is Zizek with M-L? On which areas are they compatible and which areas are they not?

I'm curious about your inclusion of "Anarchism and Socialism?" in the list of essential texts? I've read it a few years back and thought that it was a poorly written mess (though it could be because of the translation). For example:

The reduction of anarchism to pure individualism shows me that he posessed a rudimentary (if any) knowledge of anarchist theory.

No, it wasn't.
There was decision to rename politburo into presidium and expand its membership to 25 people, which obviously was cancelled not long after Stalins death. Molotov and Kaganovich, which called themselves stalinists in the old age, took first hand part in this as old members of politburo.
They also received back their minister positions.
Simonov, which was present on the closed plenum of the central commitee mentions that Stalin critisized Molotov, amongst other members of politburo, and suggested that the old bolsheviks step aside.

I have strong suspicion that politburo was just a viper's nest.

marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ot/zizek1.htm

let me check in the Serbian version of the book, some things change a lot with translation. The Serbian book is closer to home.

And I could see why it is called individualist by the structure of modern anarchist (dis)organizations, in my country at least. The direct democracy bogs down the anarchist movements in my country because it takes forever to plan anything, and any organization they seep into this happens as well. This direct democracy has produced nothing but petty squabbling and calling a vote over every thing that ever needs to be done. In these votes rarely anybody can agree on anything because everyone has their own agendas and wishes, they are hardly unified. It was unsurpressed individualism that lead to various votes for various shit, straying from the original issue.

I was at a protest anarchists organized 5 different times since all strikes/blocks are to be supported, and every time it was this way. They took 2 hours to decide upon the most arbitrary of decisions, and they decided shit on the spot. It was very disorganized compared to the protests we organized.

And whether they wish so or not, the decentralized structure of anarchist movements usually creates bouts of individualism because the whole of the movement isn't in direct workings with eachother, but works more like individual groups working under a similar goal, but with various deviations from the movement. I see all of these as aspects of individualism, and for what? to protect against hierarchy? But we can see how it created hierarchy intentionally or not, specifically in the Spanish civil war where even during the war petit bourgeois businesses were rising up, because the petit-bourgeois were selling their labor and their produce, and were hiring workers to work for them, paying them with produce.
This creates a new, unintentional hierarchy: A hierarchy of those that own the means of production and of workers, because there was no regulation of the individual and most of the people of the movement weren't that well ideologically versed this came to be, and since nobody opposed it eventually it would lead to a new social class, if not of capitalist, then of small bourgeois.

That is offhand my thought, knowledge and experience on anarchist individualism. Feel free to argue.

I'd mention Makhno but he was no anarchist, he was just a bandit.