west west bad big bad very bad stalin good lenin good ignore starvation ignore deaths ignore everything just read state and revolution bro
Because social media is where nuance goes to die - and that applies to both MLs and us.
A lot of them overcorrect from falling for capitalist propaganda into falling for USSR propaganda
For example, about North Korea. Claims about it are probably exaggerated to some degree, but I sincerely doubt it’s secretly the success story at least one ML I had the displeasure of talking to seems to believe it to be.
The truth is nuanced. Nuance is hard. Blaming everything on the West is easy.
On the other hand, MLs themselves are also more nuanced than we often give them credit.
Unfortunately, like nuance, communication is also hard. Especially in hot-headed situations like this.
Because they somehow didn’t outgrow the cringe iamverysmart and iamverydifferent phase of young adulthood. Probably because they are well off and never had a struggle in their life which makes them such a bore.
iamverydifferent isnt that cringe tbh, and iamverysmart kinda is, because theres no one in the world that knows everything
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Tankies gonna tank. And those two instances constitute two thirds of the tankie triad.
“US bad, so every enemy of US must be good”
Basically it’s a lot of that, plus a bunch of authoritarian and contrarian bootlickers who think they’re leftists.
yep - it’s a cult
They have this quasi-religious cult vibe that makes them like this:
- Sacred texts that give answers to everything.
- Saints and prophets. I mean - they mostly identify themselves by someone else’s name - e.g. stalinists, trotskyists, maoists etc.
- Aggression to outsiders. Building a good sect requires that, it’s how you keep folks inside - just make them hate the outside.
That’s not a scientific conclusion on my part, rather vibe-based one, and some conspiracy theory communities can also be described in that way. Which also leads to next conclusion - they’re kept in by a sense of community, and since that community is built around fringe and often cringe ideas - it only leads to doubling down on ideas that seem stupid or dangerous or simply not thought through to any sensible person.
It seems to me like they take the wrong lesson from leftism, which is that the US is usually the bad guy in most situations and they represent oligarchy interests by default, then extrapolate that to other countries opposed to the US being the good guys by default. Nuance and taking the facts at face value for every situation is much harder to explain to others as an ideology.
They’ve also been infected with a cynicism that makes them open to grifts similar to the right. Our best fighters can’t be perfect, so they try and rip support off of them. Jimmy Dore, the Aussie green party, Jackson Hinkel, the Caleb sex pest dude, they all have criticism of everyone else while providing no real ideas of their own and how to get there. They’re just propped up as a distraction rather than a movement.
It’s the opposite. Most MLs in the West were raised to believe in the West inherent superiority and developed all the socialized habits of minimizing or excusing atrocities as errors in judgment or outright denying them as anti-West propaganda. We have spent many years dismantling this, and each step of the way we are faced with contradictions and nuance.
What eventually happens is that people need to find a worldview, a framework, a set of theories that can situate the facts as they discover them into a coherent picture. Marxism-Leninism is one such framework. Under that framework, we start to see that while nuance is critical and cannot be ignored, there are indeed overarching patterns that guide things and staying stuck in small scope details is insufficient.
For example, let’s take the nuance of the embargo on Cuba. First, I think everyone is now clear that the US is starving Cuba. This was not clear to many people until recently. Some still deny it. But it is also true that until recently the greatest amount of aid to Cuba was also provided by the US, particularly through Catholic Charities. We can stay mired in these nuances for a long time - did Cuba make bad decisions with their investment in their economy, why don’t other countries trade more with Cuba, how much does the US actually provide to Cuba, how much US wealth was appropriated by the revolution…
But the nuance, while real, is not important to communicating and articulating a position on what’s happening. The US is killing children, sick, and elderly all over Cuba through modern-day siege warfare and it needs to stop, it needed to stop 60 years ago, it was never justifiable, it was never reasonable.
We have to deal with nuance all the time, because we are constantly bombarded with specially crafted narratives that pull out all sorts of specifics that feed into the US State Dept narrative and we have to constantly research, analyze, situate, and integrate all sorts of phenomena into the world view. It’s exhausting just dealing with the constant stream of propaganda, but then on top of that we have the propaganda amplification done by true believers and by unexamined believers. We are constantly confronted with nuance and contradictions that are real or imaginary or exaggerated or understated and we process it. Becoming an ML in the West is a huge exercise in nuance. Nuance is how we get to the place where we are willing to be open-minded about potentially having our beliefs about the world changed. And then eventually some of us determine that we need a unifying theory and the MLism fits the bill. And then we turn around and try to communicate the overarching theory and conclusions and get told we don’t understand nuance.
I see a lot of agreement, not “the opposite” in this post. You talk a lot about nuance but didn’t cite an example when you’d use it to navigate a difficult subject to grasp, or what that might look like. You also lean into the America bad trope without showing you can do any different. If it is opposite then make that point, not the word salad of how hard it is to be a ML and be right all the time, btw on topics the left very broadly agrees about as your examples.
Cuba’s embargo is not supported by the left. If you’d like to expand more on my points, then what good does attacking AOC as AOCIA bring to the cause of Cuba’s starvation?
Just because you agree with me on my points doesn’t mean they aren’t nuance.
What good does deriding AOC do? Well, the ML strategy with electoralism is to demonstrate that electoralism doesn’t work. AOC has some history of working with CIA carve outs and she has a tendency to be quite performative in her politics. But we don’t really think individual Congress people have any real power to change anything. No one really cares if you vote for her or not. But if you try to use her as an example of how voting can change things, we’re going to point out her history and her record and sow the field with the ideas that honestly she’s just another sheepdog like Bernie is, attracting organizing power, labor and effort when it needs to be directed at revolution.
I don’t know why the standard should be that I can tie deriding individual politicians to the Cuba situation. That doesn’t make a lot of sense. That’s less “nuance” and more “arbitrary bullshit”.
Wouldn’t a full fledged abandonment of electoralism, the kind that would be required to look at AOC as an enemy, just be excellerationism? I guess if your loyalties are always strictly dismantling* US stability then you’d just view it as starving the beast. In this way you’d be pretty well aligned with incompetent fascists, since the US is in a spiraling decline that will now inevitably result in us losing our authority on the world stage. Just for different reasons than they would use I guess.
In that way, how can leftists take MLs seriously, when their world view is largely agreement, but their actions and attacks are directly opposed to democratic socialists a lot of the time. You also have to couple in that while you may attack fascists too, any division amongst the left is multiplied by 100x over divisions in the center or right since billionaires hold the microphone.
It’s not really arbitrary when those you agree most with are also in your crosshairs on actions of substance. It’s also very telling that most situation here on Lemmy that at least I see ML presence it’s on these edge cases, rather than things like Rick Scott almost single handedly showing a failure of electoral politics when he created the nations biggest organized Medicaid fraud ring, something people being polled seem to care about, and then was elected into office anyways as an equal to Bernie Sanders. Is this a blind spot on my part or do you feel calling out the best representatives as more impact for your message that the system sucks? What we see is us working and you complaining.
Edit: word missing.
Before I dig in, I just wanted to express gratitude for the discourse.
Wouldn’t a full fledged abandonment of electoralism, the kind that would be required to look at AOC as an enemy, just be excellerationism?
Let’s separate out voting from electoralism. Is refusing to campaign, door knock, and labor for AOC accelerationism? I don’t think it is. Especially if that energy is instead put towards building a mass movement to prepare for revolution. Revolution is not accelerationism. Accelerationism is the process of deliberately making things worse in the hopes that people will become more desperate. As we’ve seen, people are becoming more desperate regardless of whether AOC is in office.
I guess if your loyalties are always strictly dismantling* US stability then you’d just view it as starving the beast.
This phrasing is a little strange, potentially telling. My loyalties are not dismantling US stability. They are dismantling the US as an entity entirely. The US, as a settler state, is a genocidal occupation of lands with the only legal basis being the papal doctrine of discovery and the use of military violence. I don’t want the US to be unstable, I want it to be dissolved and for a new state to be created in a process led by a coalition of indigenous and black people, primarily women, with white people playing an important but well structured role in their self-governance. There’s a big difference. You can’t really starve this beast. The US is not going to be starved by anyone and not organizing for AOC or other Ds is not going to starve the beast either.
The only “starve the beast” mentality that makes sense here is telling Ds that just because they’re the only other option to the Rs doesn’t mean they automatically get our votes. The Ds actually have to do something positive, not merely avoid doing some of the negative things the Rs do. And the Ds can’t even do that. 100+ Ds voted with Rs to expand the ability of DHS and ICE to use customer data from retailers to aid in their operations. We’re not talking about Ds that make things better here. We’re talking about Ds that position themselves as opposed to Rs and then don’t actually have any proactive lasting positive impact.
In this way you’d be pretty well aligned with incompetent fascists, since the US is in a spiraling decline that will now inevitably result in us losing our authority on the world stage
The US is in a spiraling decline for reasons that have nothing to do with voting. The primary reason the US is in decline is because the US is a contradictory construction, founded in genocide and chattel slavery, claiming to be driven by values while being at war for 99% of its existence, killing millions around the world regardless of which party is in power, and always and forever expanding the prison-industrial complex making it the most authoritarian construct in the world today with 300% more of our population being managed by the criminal justice system than any other country. It’s economy, like the European economy that birthed it, is fundamentally reliant on a process of unequal exchange and cannot actually function when a large enough part of the world begins to develop sustainable economies on their own. The spiraling decline is ALSO part of the contradiction of white supremacist patriarchal capitalist leadership, resulting in worse and worse leaders over time, with fewer and fewer options for continuing the genocidal gravy train. Electing the right people can never fix this problem. It is, in essence, entirely unfixable. The US was doomed to fail. The European colonial project was doomed to fail. They are unsustainable projects and they were always on a collision course with the consequences of their actions. We don’t need to accelerate it. We need to organize a response to it. Voting is primarily about choosing which enemies are in office, which is useful for organizing, but the people in the institutions are bound by the institutions and the institutions are fundamentally in a death spiral. The representatives can’t save it.
how can leftists take MLs seriously, when their world view is largely agreement
I don’t think your world view is largely in agreement with MLs. I might be wrong. But this remains to be seen.
their actions and attacks are directly opposed to democratic socialists a lot of the time
Democratic socialists and MLs have a very specific point of contention in their world view - namely the ML analysis is that it’s not possible to vote your way into socialism. This is because of the way reaction works and the experience of revolutionary movements for the last 100+ years. DemSocs disagree, but they haven’t put forth an argument that I understand other than to believe really hard against all evidence that it’s possible. That’s not to say the DemSoc movement isn’t useful. It can mobilize the masses. It can create operating space for more revolutionary organizations, etc. But if it’s just a DemSoc movement and nothing else? It’s not going anywhere. History has shown us that.
any division amongst the left is multiplied by 100x over divisions in the center or right since billionaires hold the microphone.
Then it would make sense to stick with the most historically grounded and historically effective movement instead of splitting into other movements. The only successful socialist movements have been ML movements. There has never been a successful socialist transition led by a DemSoc movement. So I agree with you. Division among the left can be problematic and I encourage DemSocs to take up a more ML position and do not allow the reactionaries, compradors, and collaborators to continue their divide and conquer approach to maintaining their power.
It’s not really arbitrary when those you agree most with are also in your crosshairs on actions of substance
I disagree that electing people like AOC is an action of substance. It’s an electoral action that has almost zero material impact on war, policing, prisons, and capitalism. Corporate profits are highest under Democrat administrations. Democrats have continued the imperial project without abatement, whether is mass bombing, mass deaths from sanctions, neoliberal policies increasing corporate profits, unequal trade agreements, regime change operations, fucking over unions, or just simply expanding all of the tools of oppression for the Rs to use on the next swing of the pendulum. I would not say that electoralism is an action of substance. Actions of substance would be shutting downs weapons plants, shutting down prisons, shutting down corporate offices, shutting down banks, building and mobilizing a mass movement, educating the masses on how white supremacist patriarchal capitalism harms them and what to do about it, etc.
It’s also very telling that most situation here on Lemmy that at least I see ML presence it’s on these edge cases
The reason is because there were 2 purges of communists in the US and survival took priority over organizing for a while. There is no strong long standing ML community or movement in the US because the US deported, black balled, and assassinated people to disrupt it. There’s a reason why they haven’t done anything so nearly as violent to the DemSocs and instead just chose to infiltrate it.
rather than things like Rick Scott almost single handedly showing a failure of electoral politics when he created the nations biggest organized Medicaid fraud ring, something people being polled seem to care about, and then was elected into office anyways as an equal to Bernie Sanders
So I want to point out that you’ve taken this primarily from an electoral angle. People care about their lives and they care about abstract financial crimes only in so far as they believe it impacts their lives. Could they have been convinced to vote in a D? Yes. But it wouldn’t have improved their lives. Scott still would have gotten away with it, Medicare fraud will continue to happen because of the incentives, and health care will continue to be abysmal for Americans because of the way society is organized, not because of who is in office.
Is this a blind spot on my part or do you feel calling out the best representatives as more impact for your message that the system sucks?
MLs calling out AOC has zero impact on the system. It has an impact on consciousness. If you really think electoralism is the way to go, then you’re going to need to figure out a way for the voters to stop being lied to by grifters. The Democrats, including AOC, have failed at pretty much everything. The party itself is fundamentally rotten and unreformable and will in no way lead the masses to resolving the contradictions of this white supremacist capitalist patriarchal settler state. Until the masses understand that, they will continue to waste their energy in electoralism only to become fully disillusioned and drop out of the voting pool altogether. It’s not a mistake that 40%- 50% of the people who could vote don’t. It’s because it doesn’t work. What MLs do with respect to electoralism is attempt to raise consciousness about the fact that electoralism doesn’t work in an effort to get people to ask the question “Well, then, what is to be done?”
What we see is us working and you complaining.
And what we see is you being corralled by the sheep dogs and the MLs organizing primarily through the PSL, which is still very small, and the rest producing propaganda to raise consciousness about what is to be done.
and the MLs organizing primarily through the PSL
A group that is quite problematic.
Anarchists would, of course, have problems with any ML group simply because it’s ML, and this is a historical pattern that goes back over a century. One either recognizes that vanguardism has been the only formation that has overturned capitalism and that vanguardism is the only path we know of to liberate the masses or one does not recognize this.
Yes, PSL is made of humans and humans in PSL have done bad things. It’s also true that a few PSL chapters have failed to manage themselves appropriately and local organizers have had meaningful problems because of that. These are not unique problems to PSL. I personally witnessed an organized character assassination of a black organized in my local DSA. I don’t think that makes DSA problematic. I think DSA is problematic because it has an ineffective theory of action.
I think the defense of Stalin comes at the end of a particular path that can be very appealing to people for various reasons.
One potential driver of it is that ML/Stalinist groups are not too dissimilar from a secular religion; it has a group of people ready to welcome you as a friend and ally as long as you agree to a certain worldview and a very specific reading of history from approved texts that always pose historical Maxrist-Leninists as righteous figures who didn’t really do anything that bad, and if they did, it was for the greater good, and justified.
Those texts can even make a certain amount of sense if you’re disillusioned with the status quo, and distrust western media. It’s also likely extremely comforting to believe that while the western world is fucked up and exploitative, there are at the same time powerful allies elsewhere in the form of the AES states, which in their view are making steady progress towards the promised socialist utopia.
So ML groups can offer a feeling of belonging, friendship, a comforting worldview, and the belief that if we just follow the directions of long dead prophet-like historical figures (like Lenin or Stalin), then we will someday have heaven on earth. These are extremely appealing aspects to someone who may be very lonely, or who may have suffered a severe trauma and may not have their basic needs met (which may also be what leads to some people being attracted to the MAGA cult)
To someone well versed in history and a desire to find multiple viewpoints for a historical event to avoid propaganda bubbles, the true nature of ML/Stalinism and its authoritarianism becomes self-evident. But for those who never went down that path and are in a vulnerable state, a ‘scientific’ cult offering you hope, meaning, and companionship is very easy to fall into, and thus willingly self-delude themselves to attain in-group status.
Just like with normal religions/cults, once they are deep inside it, they are heavily encouraged by the in-group to suspect any outside information that challenges their narratives or isn’t approved by the group, and thus the cognitive dissonance they could create if looked at more objectively can mostly be avoided.
Also similar to religions; a ML member is strongly encouraged not to have doubts about the validity of the approved sources/texts/history. If doubts are voiced, the group will attempt to re-affirm the validity of the texts (keep the faith). But if that fails and the member continues to voice doubts, they are likely to be ejected from the group, which is very traumatic for most people, but especially so if there is no other support groups to lean on. This likely results in many keeping doubts to themselves, or convincing themselves those doubts are just CIA lies, similar to how Christians try to reject their own doubts with the concept of Satan spreading lies to tempt a Christian from their faith through logic or archeology.
a ML member is strongly encouraged not to have doubts about the validity of the approved sources/texts/history
Source: it is known
I’m an ML. I have NEVER been encouraged to not have doubts about the validity of texts and there is no such things a list of approved sources. The entire foundation of the philosophy is evidence-based systems analysis. The approach is so thorough it’s been used for a century in academic contexts for analyzing everything from economics and politics to art and literature. It’s not a dogma. It’s a theoretical framework of analysis.
If you did start to voice that maybe the CCP did unnecessarily massacre some people at Tienanmen Square, or that maybe Lenin and Trotsky really didn’t need to slaughter all the Kronstadt sailors, or that maybe Lenin did betray Makhno just to consolidate power, or that the Stalinists who killed the Anarchists in the Spanish Civil War might have been making up reasons to again take power…
Then you’ll be assured by any ML friends you have, that all those things are either CIA propaganda or justified, and if you don’t follow that line, and if you bring it up regularly to others as a reason to suggest maybe this stuff isn’t so scientific despite the name, instead of keeping that to yourself, you will eventually be regarded as a ‘shitlib’.
You may be speaking from your experience. Your experience is not my experience. Then again, you seem to have anarchist leanings, so I think that accounts for a lot of it.
I have researched these events and I don’t think that they are imaginary fairy tales made up by the CIA, though I do recognize the CIA’s role in building false narratives around many of these real events. The problem is when you try to use these as gotchas as though whatever version of events you believe in is somehow relevant to building communism.
The issue is history shows that ML, due to its very nature as a hierarchical state, is unable to achieve the claimed goal of communism, and instead only brings permanent authoritarian rule by the new vanguard class, eventually resulting in state capitalism.
It also shows that when ML groups achieve power, they will violently kill any other socialist following what they perceive as an incorrect doctrine.
Both of those are pretty massive roadblocks to building communism.
What are your own thoughts of the events I linked to previously? Do you think it was necessary and wise to kill the Anarchists during the Russian Revolution and Spanish Civil War? If so, what was objective and scientific about murdering their allies?
The issue is history shows that ML, due to its very nature as a hierarchical state
Which is literally all states ever.
is unable to achieve the claimed goal of communism
Considering there’s never been an ML state that has existed longer than 100 years, I would say this is a pretty bold claim when it takes quite a long time for any form of governance to develop over time. I know as an American it’s difficult to imagine that 100 years is not that long, considering the USA is only 250 years old, but there are civilizations still around today that are 5000 years old. 100 years is not enough time to make this claim.
instead only brings permanent authoritarian rule
Literally all states are authoritarian, essentially by definition. This is not an ML problem.
by the new vanguard class
The vanguard is not a class. It’s a group of people. There’s a significant difference. I know anarchists like to throw the word class around like it just means “group of people” but the vanguard is not a class.
eventually resulting in state capitalism
State capitalism is literally the first sign that you’re on the path to socialism. Capitalism is a mode of production that, as far as we know, is necessary to the development of societies. Every single state will go through a period of capitalism. When a communist vanguard has led a revolution and the people’s army has established a dictatorship of the proletariat to subordinate bourgeois interests to the state, the result will ALWAYS be state capitalism. It is from state capitalism that it becomes possible to move beyond capitalism entirely, but it will take a long time of developing the productive forces and inventing all new forms of governance, contention resolution, and contradiction analysis. It’s not a choice. It’s a historical process determined by the real conditions of society.
It also shows that when ML groups achieve power, they will violently kill any other socialist following what they perceive as an incorrect doctrine.
This is ridiculous. They will violently kill any group that raises arms against them or threatens to organize a movement to contest their power. There were obviously living breathing organized factions in the USSR. There are multiple parties in China. They debate. The ONLY thing they have to agree to is democratic centralism, which means they will abide by the voting process of that has been put in place. Attempts to undermine that process will be met with authority. Attempts to undermine that process by collaborating with enemies or raising a militia will absolutely result in violent repression. That’s pretty much true of ANY revolutionary period of ANY ideology. It would have to be. If an anarchist group dismantled the state violently and then a group of people tried to raise a militia to attack the anarchists, the anarchists would absolutely attempt to stop them, with violence.
Both of those are pretty massive roadblocks to building communism.
No. They’re really not. State capitalism is a prerequisite to building communism. Violently repressing reactionaries who would literally fight the state is necessary to build communism.
Do you think it was necessary and wise to kill the Anarchists during the Russian Revolution?
Absolutely. Makhno literally collaborated with anti-communist forces during the Russian Revolution. He only ever allied with the Bolsheviks when he was at risk of being destroyed by the Whites. He was fiercely anti-communist and had an army and showed that he was willing to collaborate with anyone to achieve his goals. He was a massive strategic threat to the revolution.
Do you think it was necessary and wise to kill the Anarchists during the Spanish Civil War?
No. I think that was probably a mistake. I haven’t seen any evidence that the anarchists were a real threat to the revolution there. My understanding is that the Spanish MLs believed that they could only win through superior arms, and since they were getting arms from the Soviets, that they were the only chance of success. The anarchists had a severe shortage of weapons and ammunition, so I assume the thinking at that time was that the only way to win was with arms from the USSR and since the MLs had them and the anarchists were building a coalition against the MLs, that the MLs thought the only chance of revolution was through them.
In hindsight, it was an incorrect theory. At the time? I don’t know. Every revolution, including the American, French, and Russian were all fought with conventional armies in standard European-style head-on warfare. I can understand why they thought it. It turned out to be wrong and they couldn’t win with their numbers. Had this happened post Ho Chi Minh maybe they would have a more correct assessment of revolutionary conflict, the way MLs do now, and they wouldn’t have purged the non-MLs.
You see. That’s the thing about science. Just because you use science doesn’t mean you’re correct. It means you learn from your mistakes. For example, the Spanish ML purge, I think, was a mistake. A dogmatic ideology would say “You must always purge anyone who doesn’t believe what you believe” but a scientific ideology says “You must always learn from your mistakes, but you must always be willing to make mistakes”. There’s nothing scientific about a single action. The science is in the application of theory to your action (in the case of the Spanish, it was a theory of how to fight a revolutionary war) and then you must observe the results of actions and incorporate them into your theory. Mao learned lessons from all the failures and success and developed a new form of warfare. Ho learned more lessons than Mao, because Ho got to learn from Mao, and Ho invented new theories and then put them into action. Revolutionaries of today have more lessons than Ho did, because we get to analyze how the Vietnamese beat both the French and the Americans. And in fact, MLs do exactly that. They update their theories based on evidence. That’s what science is. Science isn’t being correct. Science is a process of adapting your theories to the evidence.
Which is literally all states ever.
That’s the problem.
This is not an ML problem.
It is, because while they claim to want the workers to control the state, they never do, and they never will willingly ‘wither away’ as the vanguard claims.
The vanguard is not a class. It’s a group of people.
The Vanguard enjoy a vastly different quality of life compared to the average worker. The Vanguard are not assembling iPhones for western capitalists for subsistence wages while the factory builds suicide nets around the building due to how poor the working conditions are. The Vanguard are in practice a new state-Bourgeoisie.
It’s not a choice. It’s a historical process determined by the real conditions of society.
“Trust me bro, we just need another 100 years of wage slavery before we can do the real communism, Marx said so, so it must be true, and the only way.”
The ONLY thing they have to agree to is democratic centralism
Yeah, they just need to agree to submit themselves to the will of the Vanguard, and *everything will be fine!
(* results not guaranteed)
If an anarchist group dismantled the state violently and then a group of people tried to raise a militia to attack the anarchists, the anarchists would absolutely attempt to stop them, with violence.
I’m not aware of an instance where Anarchists were the aggressor against ML’s, unlike the reverse.
If the Anarchists succeeded in creating Communism immediately without a transitional state, ML’s probably would raise a militia to end it in favor of authoritarian state capitalism, since they’re not in charge of it.
Absolutely. Makhno literally collaborated with anti-communist forces during the Russian Revolution.
Have any non-Bolshevik sources (which are the source of many myths against Makhno, since, ya know, they betrayed him and had to make up with some legit-sounding reasons for doing it) to back up that claim?
I’m guessing you’re referring to when he took in some conscripts from Petliura’s nationalists after he defeated them? The same conscripts that would’ve then been offered to join the Bolsheviks before they turned on Makhno?
No. I think that was probably a mistake. I haven’t seen any evidence that the anarchists were a real threat to the revolution there.
I have to give you your due here, you’re the first ML I’ve spoken to who thinks that was a mistake.
and the anarchists were building a coalition against the MLs
I’ve never seen any evidence for that.
You see. That’s the thing about science. Just because you use science doesn’t mean you’re correct. It means you learn from your mistakes. For example, the Spanish ML purge, I think, was a mistake. A dogmatic ideology would say “You must always purge anyone who doesn’t believe what you believe” but a scientific ideology says “You must always learn from your mistakes, but you must always be willing to make mistakes”. There’s nothing scientific about a single action. The science is in the application of theory to your action (in the case of the Spanish, it was a theory of how to fight a revolutionary war) and then you must observe the results of actions and incorporate them into your theory.
I’m glad you see it as a mistake, but it is highly worrying to see it framed as “Killing all those people unnecessarily was a mistake, a big oopsie, if you will. But you see, when ML’s commit massacres against the only other group vocally wanting communism, it’s just a scientific learning experience! :D”
Like… Ech. It should be a clear example of the ends not justifying the means, which is one lesson that doesn’t ever seem to make it into modern ML offshoot theories, and many MLs I’ve interacted with still think all of the purging Stalin did was justified and based.
wrong analogy doubts r good they make you research Christianity and dive deeper into faith
Wasn’t how it worked for me. I had doubts, and seeing atheists in debates with Christians unable to answer those doubts at all adequately only strengthened those doubts until I looked into it enough to realize it was all BS.
Most people leave cults because of doubts. Why would a cultist ever leave if they still fully believe the teachings?
can you tell me one of the questions they were asked?
it was over a decade ago that I watched those debates, most of which were with Christopher Hitchens, though which ones specifically I wouldn’t be able to say besides this one, which stands out in memory since it had both Hitchens and Stephen Fry arguing against religion. I also recall watching a lot of ‘Hitchslap’ videos which were snippets of Hitchens giving quick-witted responses to religious arguments.
For context, the doubts I had as a teenager were:
What could God possibly be achieving by giving children cancer and dying slowly and horrificly?
If those children all go to heaven, why not kill all children at birth to ensure they don’t go to hell?
What’s the point of this whole game, anyway? Why create this planetary diorama to fill it with people just to see if they believe in a capricious God that doesn’t answer prayers and seemingly makes itself as difficult to believe in as possible? Why has Jesus/God never spoken to me directly, like so many other people claim to be able to do? Why did God allow thousands of other religions throughout the world and various points of time, each one claiming they alone are the true path to Heaven, how does one pick the correct needle of salvation in a haystack of religions? The only reason I was my specific flavor of Christian was because it’s what my parents believed, what research did they do before choosing this one specifically (virtually none, just vibes).
When I looked to the Bible for answers, I was struck by how awful God was to Job, killing his entire family and giving him unhealing sores, all to win a bet with Satan. God’s response to Job asking why the fuck this was being done to him was to basically say “Don’t fucking question me, Job, look at how powerful I am boy, look, I can control leviathan or some shit!”, which was astonishing to read, as it made God seem like a child ranting at Job for being rightfully upset at him, and with no reasonable answer for all the suffering, just a hand wave from God. Needless to say that didn’t help bolster my belief.
At the end it was simply too much that didn’t make sense, too much doubt in the foundations of the whole thing, too many failures of religion to make any impact whatsoever when I prayed.
The debates with Hitchens touched on at least some of those doubts, which made me realize all those doubts weren’t from the devil, they were well founded and others shared them. At that point I’d finally had enough and said fuck the whole thing.
1 It takes immense wisdom to understand God’s plan for yourselves, so, it is almost impossible to understand God’s plan for the world.
2 Heaven depends on Faith in Christ and the fact that He died for your sin, not age. And they are still born with Original Sin.
3 Frater, God will always speak to you, but not in the ways you expect. It will be subtle, not a voice in your head. You need to listen and notice. And God answers your prayers, if they align with his will. Lies will always exist, it is your duty to see through them.
4 What denomination were you?
Ah, I didn’t realize you yourself were religious. I thought you were just curious how doubt could lead to leaving a cult. I understand now why you think it wasn’t an apt comparison with ML.
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If God is real and has a plan, at this point I would argue that God is very much not equipped to be God, and contrary to the concept of being all-knowing, is very clearly making things up as He goes. I think Job is a good example of that, since God seems to realize that he actually fucked up pretty bad when Job rightly questions why his family was killed and why he had to suffer so arbitrarily despite believing in God fully, and God basically doesn’t have an answer besides “Cause I’m powerful, bro. Look at all these giant beasts I control”. Job’s challenge seemed to shake God up pretty good, and make him decide to see what it was actually like to be one of the Humans he fucked with so much, so he decides to make Jesus so he can experience human mortality, which gives him a whole new appreciation for how messed up he’d been before, causing him to turn over a new leaf, being way less brutal and far more caring instead of, ya know, letting his followers dash babies against rocks like in the old testament (which leads into our next point).
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That means every single baby and child not old enough to understand the concept of faith or Jesus went straight to hell, or, depending on your denomination, purgatory I guess.
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Many religious people have claimed to have literal conversations with Jesus or God as part of their 1 on 1 relationship, are you saying they are lying or suffer from delusions? God’s Will is an explanation to cope with the fact that praying is as good as a random coin flip; if the thing you prayed for happens, hurry! God answered your prayer! If it doesn’t, guess it just wasn’t his will, tough luck sport.
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Generic Protestantism that promoted belief in the Trinity. Why do you ask?
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Why not fedposter if fedposter shape??
How about Western , chinese amd russian imperialism is bad?
Well, let’s see. Western imperialism is an unbroken phenomenon of the last 600 years that, at its height, dominated 80% of the world’s population and today kills about 800k people in the developing world through trade sanctions alone. Since the fall of the USSR, the USA has made serious attacks on 14 countries, not including Venezuela and Cuba. Russia has attacked 3. China has attacked 0. China hasn’t dropped a bomb in conflict or fired upon an ocean vessel in almost 40 years.
So, sure. All imperialism is bad. But Western imperialism is the imperialism that needs to be resisted because it actually exists.
“China attacked 0”
Vietnam, korea, cambodia, india, mongolia (kinda), tibet, uygurs…
Also not easiest to attack others when you can rather attack your own people :)
Also…did you just leave out the ming, quing and yuan dynasies and once before for show of “no chinese imperialism”?
Edit 2: nvm .ml did not notice that. No wonder why you left it out ;)
All imperialism need to be resisted and you start with the worse which is the western imperialism. We just have a minor disagrement
It looks that way, for sure. The problem is that the big difference is in our definition of imperialism. I don’t believe China is engaged in imperialism, I believe it’s engaged in anti-imperialism against the West. I don’t believe Russia is engaged in imperialism, I believe it’s engaged in anti-imperialism against the West. You’ll have to make your case.
Putin literally talk like the Zionists talking about how Ukraine is an fake state and that they are all Russians. The difference is Russia want Ukraine russification and Israel claim Palestinians are just Arab invaders so they want to genocide them.
China claims over Taiwan is imperialistic too.
I think the points on Russia are good and they deserve to be assessed and monitored. I don’t think the case is that strong, but it’s worth arguing and evaluating.
Taiwan is China inhabited by Chinese people. Nearly every country in the world acknowledges this and had acknowledged it since before the revolution. The KMT government in the province of Taiwan stated unequivocally that it was part of China. The imperialism is actually the US getting involved in the civil war and deciding that the KMT should become a proxy of the West. That started back in the 50s. The US protected the KMT fascists while they committed mass murder of Chinese people who wanted to end the civil war and integrate with China. They ran that island under political terror for 40 years and the US protected them militarily and integrated them into the imperial economy. There are US soldiers stationed 4mi off the coast the mainland because the US treats Taiwan as a military base for war with China. China’s position on Taiwan is anti-imperialist
Only 10% of taiwanese want reunification . China is using economical cohersion to try to shift opinions and force reunification. That’s imprerialism. Only taiwanese should decide via a referendum.
That’s a very lopsided definition of imperialism. Of course only 10% want reunification. For 40 years, almost 3 generations, everyone that wanted reunification was imprisoned, tortured, or murdered. That’s why 60% want to retain the status quo - they do not want any punishments from the CPC or from the imperialists. In addition, the imperialists created an entire comprador class by funneling them money and privilege in exchange for their collaboration.
The reality is that as the empire falls, Taiwan’s alignment with the West will be less and less advantageous. Eventually it will make economic sense for the province to reintegrate its local government with the national government of China. Both for economics and for national security. It’s just not time yet.
All of lemmy is a gradual progression to the left. Starts at the average liberal and stretches all way down to them. Then because Republicans/right wing people don’t exist here they get to call liberals nazis. Someone always has to be a nazi and someone always has to be a good guy. They think they are the good guys.
Anyone who’s pro Western imperialism and disregards their culture’s involvement in the subjugation of the global South is right wing and of those there are many here. The only reason it’s such a craaaazy take is because most Americans/Westerners couldn’t give two shits about the death their elected governments push as long as gas at the pump is cheap and Netflix pumps specials.
Why is it only western imperialism that is bad, though? I hate to indulge in whataboutism, but it’s frankly naive and highly revisionist to believe that imperialism is all of the west and only in the west.
Western imperialism is the dominant geopolitical phenomenon of the last 600 years. At its height it dominated 80% of the world’s population. Today it still controls the majority of the world’s wealth. Every country in the world today currently exhibits some pathology that can be traced back to Western imperialism, and for most of them you don’t have to trace back at all because they’re currently subject to that imperialism.
What other imperialism are facing today? China? The country that hasn’t dropped a bomb in conflict or fired upon a vessel in almost 40 years? Russia who has engaged in 3 conflicts, all border conflicts, since 1992, while the US has engaged in several dozen, invading and bombing over a dozen countries in that same time frame?
Maybe you’re worried about Brazilian imperialism? Burkinabe imperialism? Indonesian imperialism? What other imperialism are we dealing with today in the world that would lead you to believe it’s naive and highly revisionist to focus all of our efforts on defeating and repairing from Western imperialism?
My native country suffered from Western imperialism back in the 1500s and still is at the very least “managed” by America today… when we (basically the rest of the world) have to fight the same main villain, that IMO is the result of culture, for over 500y and more even if you’re idk West Asian for example, I don’t really see how you could expect the world to think differently. If we ever have to suffer Chinese or idk Nigerian world control, I’m sure we’ll switch our tone.
hahaha you’re doing the thing that they just said you would
Yes, but if you can’t tell the difference between one person saying they do it for reason X (someone always has to be a good guy and they think they’re the good guys) and someone comes in and says they do it for reason Y (if you disregard the mass death toll caused your elected officials, you’re not a good guy), then maybe that’s part of your problem.
The fact that this perspective is e-boo’d in Western spaces is so depressing. Oh well.
I mean I’d like to believe I said something with a bit more sense, lol. IMO, all of it boils down to “waaaah I don’t like to hear West bad because I’m a Westerner and my identity is tied to this long-standing human cancer”. The smartest among them just wisely understand they can be good and guided even if their neighbours aren’t, that they don’t HAVE to go along with their countries’ crimes, and the other ones complain. 🤷
Yeah, that’s what I mean. Thank you, you’re a good guy, how do I know? You told me.
Are you not?
I’m an American liberal, so, no not according to where you put the goal posts. Especially considering how much I love guns.
What do you mean by liberal? Do you think those who don’t sow have the right to reap? Do you love the subjugation of the global South? Do you think America, despite things like slavery to the police forcen routinely murdering African Americans and now ICE kidnapping Latinos and Trump again, is anything but a white supremacist settler colony turned world hegemon and the culmination of Western imperialism?
Or are you just a not too racist capitalist who doesn’t think about politics that deeply? Liberals are either knowingly disguising their immorality or just too unaware to care or think about it. And idc about your hyperfixation and I assume you like them the way people like trains and not because it makes you feel strong and condone murder, ofc.
No thank you. I made a point, you illustrated it beautifully and stand to be my primary source. That’s good enough for me.
Second case, then. 🤷
I have conversed all the time onthe platforms and with users without it coming upt.
Don’t you think it’s a bit over the top representation of the MLs? They’re way more cohesive than that, and there’s no Stalin in the “Marxist-Leninist”.
It’s not about universal hate towards a particular nation - more about the idea how our current society is becoming progressively more unbearable by denying life basics to the common folk. Things like “earning a living wage” implies that below a certain threshold we don’t deserve to live. Real estate developers scalping the housing, making it unaffordable. All while a few hundred people owns a huge portion of wealth, constantly growing it and meddling into politics.
Other things like the reality of not actually being able to vote things away once totalitarian parties takeover a country’s legal systems using democratic means.
There’s plenty of that going as to why many like Karl Marx as a literary inspiration.
and there’s no Stalin in the “Marxist-Leninist”.
“Marxism-Leninism” is Stalinists’ preferred term for their political ideology. They endorse the genocidal tyranny of Stalin, while claiming that Stalin’s tyranny is justified by Lenin’s and Marx’s theory.
If someone calls themselves a “Marxist-Leninist”, just ask what they think of Stalin’s genocides (plural). Then stand back.
The ml multi-paragraph response under this is 🤌
Got them going like a top. The tldr is always the same
“When [bad country] commits an atrocity it’s obviously because they’re mustache twirling villains. When my dictator commits an atrocity, it’s really due to complex material conditions and the state of geopolitics and capitalist counter-revolutionaries and probably the CIA and Mercury was in retrograde and the sun was in his eyes and …”
If someone calls themselves a “Marxist-Leninist”, just ask what they think of Stalin’s genocides (plural). Then stand back.
What they’ll say is that the modern historical consensus is that Stalin did not commit genocides, that the Holodomor is widely regarded as a climate-caused famine, exacerbated by failures of governance, but without any evidence of deliberately causing mass death to a specific culture or ethnicity, as evidenced by the number of Russians, Georgians, and other ethnic groups also affected by the famine.
They’ll then pull up sources like The Years of Hunger by Davies/Wheatcroft, and Tauger’s subsequent critique of the numbers cited in Davies/Wheatcroft demonstrating that the harvest was actually substantially smaller than even what Davies/Wheatcroft used in their analysis.
So what they’ll say is that they can’t endorse the genocidal tyranny of Stalin because that is a constructed narrative and framing it that way is designed not to illuminate but to obfuscate. For example, Churchill openly made the decision to starve millions in Bengal in order to feed the British, particularly the occupying British forces, and they actively knew about the famine and deliberately refused to send any type of aid. So anyone who isn’t a staunch anti-Churchillist is now endorsing the genocidal tyranny of Churchill. Then there’s the genocidal tyranny of Europeans in the Americas and Africa. If you’re not a decolonialist, you’re now endorsing the genocidal tyranny of essentially all European power and many many of their citizens who became settlers.
Stalin’s tyranny isn’t justified by Marxism-Leninism. Stalin was a horrible person who did horrible things. He was also a great person who did great things. He was extremely paranoid that there was a counter-revolutionary movement that was trying to take power from him. When he died, Kruschev took power and proved that Stalin was correct to be paranoid. Stalin failed to address the very real problem. He was wrong about how he went about doing things. Even Lenin knew that Stalin shouldn’t be the next leader after him, but there was nobody more effective. All of the tragedies are tragic. But they aren’t indictments of Marxism, MLism, the Soviet project as a whole, or any aspect of the theories. Stalin was just bad at his job. Good enough to defeat the strongest European military ever fielded, mind you, but not good enough to secure the future of the revolutionary project.
I think OP pointed out Stalin because there’s a disturbing amount of Stalinism coming from there. I think you’d have to search very long to find someone on Lemmy as a whole who actually disagrees broadly with the philosophy of Marx. However, when it comes to turning this philosophy into an actual political system, that’s when things get a lot more iffy.
Well, because they study history deeply and are motivated by universal justice and human dignity
Yes, Stalin, famous believer in justice and human dignity.
EDIT: You do understand that it’s possible to be a believer in those principles without becoming a revisionist who starts brown nosing autocrats?
It is difficult for me to imagine what “personal liberty” is enjoyed by an unemployed person, who goes about hungry, and cannot find employment.
Real liberty can exist only where exploitation has been abolished, where there is no oppression of some by others, where there is no unemployment and poverty, where a man is not haunted by the fear of being tomorrow deprived of work, of home and of bread. Only in such a society is real, and not paper, personal and every other liberty possible.
- Joseph Stalin
Advance towards socialism cannot but cause the exploiting elements to resist the advance, and the resistance of the exploiters cannot but lead to the inevitable sharpening of the class struggle.
- Joseph Stalin
The main features and requirements of the basic economic law of modern capitalism might be formulated roughly, in this way: the securing of the maximum capitalist profit through the exploitation, ruin and impoverishment of the majority of the population of the given country, through the enslavement and systematic robbery of the peoples of other countries, especially backward countries, and, lastly, through wars and militarization of the national economy, which are utilized for the obtaining of the highest profits.
- Joseph Stalin
So, since you claim to study history, how well do those quotes align with his actual actions? Or are you simply glossing over how the USSR leadership lived in luxury while the population were little more than mere serfs?
As for starvation, I’m sure you have an interesting take on the Holodomor and how the definition of “Kulak” meant basically anyone with a potato patch, and how the quotas that caused a genocide were totally reasonable.
Extracting big words from famous speeches is easy. Squaring propaganda with actual events and behaviors not so much.
Under Lenin and Stalin? MASSIVE improvements for the masses. To not understand this is the result of not studying ANY of the history of the project.
Besides the obvious defeat of the Nazis and liberation of the 100s of millions of occupied Europeans there’s the obvious number of the life expectancy growing massively. This ONLY happens when you address the issues of the masses. You can’t get life expectancy numbers only working for the minority wealthy. Incidentally, that’s why life expectancy in Russia was so bad pre-revolution, because the Tsarist government actually lived in luxury while the people were literally serfs.
There’s the food situation. Under the Tsarists they never invested in feeding the people and suffered famines every 4 - 7 years for over a century. Lenin and Stalin led the most rapid expansion of food production in the history of the world prior to the Chinese revolution. The famines ended after they got the whole system working, up until WW2, when they had one more induced by the war, and then that was it. Famines were gone. CIA analysis shows that the USSR was 2nd best fed country in the world, second to the USA.
Massive expansion of education, of literacy, of gender equality, elimination of homelessness, rents below 10% of wages, complete overhaul of the economy leading to serfs becoming highly paid workers. Innovations in medicine that are still used globally today. Massive reduction in health crises from preventable illnesses.
In short, it was a HUGE improvement under Lenin and Stalin, and that improvement continued under Kruschev for a long while until the 1970s under Brezhnev.
As for “living in luxury”, Stalin died owning almost nothing - some clothes, a couch, a couple weeks of savings. No, the USSR was not egalitarian, but it wasn’t egalitarian before the USSR and it wasn’t egalitarian after the USSR. What we can say is that it was WAY closer to egalitarian than what came before and what came after and that was because of the ideological commitment to the liberation of the working class from the oppression.
Most of those are fair points in a vacuum, but they all collapse when looking at the rest of the world: These weren’t Stalins improvements. Said improvements happened in many (most?) other countries too, as the industrialization of early 1900s improved life for basically everyone. The only real difference is the repression involved.
Anyway, we’re not going to change each other’s mind, so I see no point in continuing this conversation. Live long and prosper, provided that the state apparatus approves of you doing so.
Most of those are fair points in a vacuum, but they all collapse when looking at the rest of the world: These weren’t Stalins improvements. Said improvements happened in many (most?) other countries too, as the industrialization of early 1900s improved life for basically everyone. The only real difference is the repression involved.
In the early 1900s, the US was leasing black convicts back to their former plantations. In the 1950s, US doctors were lobotomizing women with ice picks to make them docile while not scarring their “pretty faces” for their husbands. In the 1900s there was MASSIVE domestic repression in the US with race riots (a.k.a. white people attacking non-white people) and huge labor repression including bombings and machine gunning of miners by the National Guard.
As it turns out, just because the green revolution happened in the US and changed agriculture doesn’t mean that it immediately became a thing elsewhere. China was still a serf-based agrarian system where NONE of the advances from the West had an impact until finally the communists came to power and they implemented a program to overhaul agriculture. It’s not enough for agriculture to be solved somewhere else. It requires a massive amount of effort to solve in each context. Lenin and Stalin led the USSR’s effort in this regard. I never said Stalin was a plant breeder that invented better agriculture, but it’s undeniable that without the communist party taking power the Tsarists would have let the cycle of famines and the serf economy continue to exist for decades.
It’s not even that you and I will never convince each other. It’s that your position is completely divorced from reality because it’s driven by an absolute need to establish the irredeemable evil of the Communist USSR up to and including making such obviously incorrect statements as to suggest that workers in the USSR were serfs, when that is literally exactly what the feudal system was and exactly what industrialization ended.
OK, I’ll bite one last time:
For starters, you don’t even know what my position is, as evident in you attacking US history, as if I have any interest in defending it.
Secondly, if the USSR population weren’t de facto serfs, why was travel so restricted? Why was the wall built? Why are there so few accounts of people fleeing to the soviet union? Are you really claiming that some dairy farmer in Turkmenistan could decide one day that he instead would like to serve borscht in Moscow for a living, and then just get up and do so?
Dumb kids, mentally challenged and weak ones who are fooling themselves. But mainly mentally challenged I guess. They hate everyone who doesn’t lick their spiritual leaders’ boots. They need a Führer like Nazis because they can’t think and they hate just like Nazis.
This doesn’t make capitalism good but they just don’t get it
