Marxism

[Zottistan]

It comes from the death tolls of the Holodomor, the Cultural Revolution, and every other heinous genocide, war, and massacre committed under a Red Flag.

Stop trying to rewrite history because it doesn't support your narrative. Communism is a con that has left over half the world in devastating poverty.

While India's democratic institutions prevented famines, its excess of mortality over China—potentially attributable to the latter's more equal distribution of medical and other resources—was nonetheless close to 4 million per year for non-famine years. Supposing we now apply the methodology of the Black Book" to India, "the democratic capitalist 'experiment' has caused more deaths than in the entire history of [...] Communism everywhere since 1917: over 100 million deaths by 1979, and tens of millions more since, in India alone.

The general rule of thumb is that everything bad that ever happened under a nominally socialist government can be attributed directly to leftist politics, while anything bad that ever happens under liberal-democratic capitalism is a blip, the product of individual bad people and can in no way be attributed to liberalism or capitalism.

[Cisairse]

• Do you believe that Marx's views on the class dichotomy are valid, or reductionist? Some modern authors have claimed that Marx downplayed the role of intersectionality in oppression, but Marx himself wrote about gender roles etc often, including in the Manifesto.
• Is Marxism—Leninism revisionist, or is it merely an extension of Marx's views?
• Do you believe that Marx has been vindicated or damned by the more than 170 years since he began to publish his theories?

I believe Marx's views on class have held true since the dawn of civilization. Almost every modern society has had an upper class that often held more rights than the lower class, and in today's society that upper class consists of those who own capital. Class revisionism is a word made up by people with no interest in real progress posing as progressives. They focus on their own ethnic group or gender instead of focusing on the improvement of conditions for all people everywhere because they only care about their own group and no one else. Seriously, what kind of person says "what about black people?" When someone says "free healthcare for the poor." Like yes you stupid prick, black people will get free healthcare too if they can't afford healthcare. What, did you think we meant "free healthcare for everyone except blacks." Come on. We talk about getting workers rights for all workers and someone says "well what about latino immigrant farm workers." Uh, yeah? If we get rights for all workers then latino immigrant farm workers get rights too. Why is this concept so hard to grasp? If we help all poor people, your specific subset of poor people will be helped. You should frankly be happy we're helping all of the downtrodden instead of constantly making it about your group and yourself. At this point, the same people make the claim that left wingers think LGBT rights and women's rights are viewed as less important. They aren't. Once again, from the top, all human beings deserve equal rights. Everyone. I just think that class inequality is a more nagging issue in this current time than gender inequality. It doesn't mean I don't think gender inequality exists or that I approve of it. We can fight for the rights of more than one group of people without having to pick and choose who we fight for. You can walk and chew gum.

Okay now that I'm done ranting about why class reduction accusers are full of it, I think Marxist-Leninism is slightly revisionist. Marx observed society's ills of class conflict, and he explained his idea of what a better society looked like. Lenin put this into practice and showed what he thought was the way to create Marx's ideal society. He didn't create it of course, but marxist-leninists thought they would. Maybe revision isn't a good term for it. Maybe "an expanded philosophy" or "add on" is a better way to view Marxist-Leninism. Lastly, I think just the last 20 years alone have vindicated Marx's worldview. We're basically a world of workers and owners of profit. Some workers make more money than others and have better working conditions, but all workers share one thing in common. You're at the mercy of your employer. You don't have a choice but to work so you can eat, and whatever your employer decides to do is more often than not what ends up going down. Some of us are fortunate enough to he unionized like myself, but unions are a dying concept in America and to this day, even jobs that have unions often try to go around the unions anyhow. Even a top notch lawyer is relying on his boss for the means to buy food and keep a roof over head. If he gets fired, it's a pipeline to a tent city in San Francisco. There's a slippery slope down to the streets. The owners of capital don't have to worry about "losing their job." They have far more control over the way they acquire their money and while they may fall on hard times, only the total collapse of their business will damage them in a significant way. A simple recession could put you or I out of a job, onto the street. Think about that. I don't agree completely with Marx's solution to the problem, but I think Marx was correct in pointing out that there is a problem, and it seems to be getting worse nowadays.

I agree strongly with the idea that ML is an "add-on" to Marxism — a sort of filling of the blanks of the fill-in-the-blank parts of the Manifesto. In the same way that Хлeбъ и воля was a filling-of-the-blanks for an anarchist society based on mutual aid, ML fills in the blanks by extending the Marx-era ideas of vanguardism and proletarian dictatorship to cover more aspects of society than Marx had originally wrote about.

[Rojava Free State]

I believe Marx's views on class have held true since the dawn of civilization. Almost every modern society has had an upper class that often held more rights than the lower class, and in today's society that upper class consists of those who own capital. Class revisionism is a word made up by people with no interest in real progress posing as progressives. They focus on their own ethnic group or gender instead of focusing on the improvement of conditions for all people everywhere because they only care about their own group and no one else. Seriously, what kind of person says "what about black people?" When someone says "free healthcare for the poor." Like yes you stupid prick, black people will get free healthcare too if they can't afford healthcare. What, did you think we meant "free healthcare for everyone except blacks." Come on. We talk about getting workers rights for all workers and someone says "well what about latino immigrant farm workers." Uh, yeah? If we get rights for all workers then latino immigrant farm workers get rights too. Why is this concept so hard to grasp? If we help all poor people, your specific subset of poor people will be helped. You should frankly be happy we're helping all of the downtrodden instead of constantly making it about your group and yourself. At this point, the same people make the claim that left wingers think LGBT rights and women's rights are viewed as less important. They aren't. Once again, from the top, all human beings deserve equal rights. Everyone. I just think that class inequality is a more nagging issue in this current time than gender inequality. It doesn't mean I don't think gender inequality exists or that I approve of it. We can fight for the rights of more than one group of people without having to pick and choose who we fight for. You can walk and chew gum.

Okay now that I'm done ranting about why class reduction accusers are full of it, I think Marxist-Leninism is slightly revisionist. Marx observed society's ills of class conflict, and he explained his idea of what a better society looked like. Lenin put this into practice and showed what he thought was the way to create Marx's ideal society. He didn't create it of course, but marxist-leninists thought they would. Maybe revision isn't a good term for it. Maybe "an expanded philosophy" or "add on" is a better way to view Marxist-Leninism. Lastly, I think just the last 20 years alone have vindicated Marx's worldview. We're basically a world of workers and owners of profit. Some workers make more money than others and have better working conditions, but all workers share one thing in common. You're at the mercy of your employer. You don't have a choice but to work so you can eat, and whatever your employer decides to do is more often than not what ends up going down. Some of us are fortunate enough to he unionized like myself, but unions are a dying concept in America and to this day, even jobs that have unions often try to go around the unions anyhow. Even a top notch lawyer is relying on his boss for the means to buy food and keep a roof over head. If he gets fired, it's a pipeline to a tent city in San Francisco. There's a slippery slope down to the streets. The owners of capital don't have to worry about "losing their job." They have far more control over the way they acquire their money and while they may fall on hard times, only the total collapse of their business will damage them in a significant way. A simple recession could put you or I out of a job, onto the street. Think about that. I don't agree completely with Marx's solution to the problem, but I think Marx was correct in pointing out that there is a problem, and it seems to be getting worse nowadays.

I agree strongly with the idea that ML is an "add-on" to Marxism — a sort of filling of the blanks of the fill-in-the-blank parts of the Manifesto. In the same way that Хлeбъ и воля was a filling-of-the-blanks for an anarchist society based on mutual aid, ML fills in the blanks by extending the Marx-era ideas of vanguardism and proletarian dictatorship to cover more aspects of society than Marx had originally wrote about.

Marx saw the problem and imagined a world without said problem. The MLs tried to solve the problem to get to Marx's ideal world. They arent really different. It's just the answer to Marx's question, which was "how do we end the capitalist system?"

[Duvniask]

Crypto-Marxists are one of the major reasons society is coming apart at the seams at the moment.

What the fuck are "crypto-Marxists?"

It's the same old bitching about "cultural Marxism", reformulated anew.

[Joohan]

I disagree, though. History isn't shaped by exceptional events, really. When I say history of course I don't mean the contents of a textbook, I mean how human society is organized and how those organizations have changed over time.
Those changes have nearly exclusively come from class conflict. The dictatorship of the aristocracy looked very similar for non-aristocratic members of society in mostly every country in which it occurred. The dictatorship of the bourgeois looks very similar for members of the proletariat in mostly every country in which it occurs.

I agree, but again, if we are going by how people interact with the organizations which they are apart of, then class isn't really the driving force here. Take the Church for example, something which was in the daily lives of nearly every person living in Europe for the entirety of the Medieval period. Though certainly it had it's share of rich individuals involved in it, poverty sworn men and women were extremely common throughout every rank and field of the Church. The driving force of history isn't class. Class and change are both just byproducts of drive.



I wouldn't say that eg the crusades really had any effect on the greater history of humanity, except that in a sense the 4th Crusade hastened the rise of the merchant class in Italy, which in turn hastened the rise of the bourgeois as a competitor for power against the aristocracy which, some hundreds of years later, led to the downfall of aristocratic dictatorships across the globe.[/quote]

I'm not going to get too much into it - but it actually had a huge affect. It pretty much set up the next five hundred years of politics, diplomacy, economics, and warfare for Europe and the near east.

[Conterale]

1. I think Marx is correct on class warfare
2. no, but revisionism isn't necessarily a bad thing, since Marx's political theory was made for the mid-1800's, not 2020.

[Conterale]

... What?

Homosexuality was legalized in the Soviet Union in 1917. Homosexuality was legalized in Cuba since 1979 (though it was still discriminated against.)

Women obtained the right to vote in the USSR in 1917. They were the first country to do so. Discrimination against blacks was not nearly as strong as it was in Soviet Russia as it was in the U.S., however this could be due to the fact there were very few blacks in the USSR.

The USSR had an extremely similar diet and calorie consumption, and at one time, had higher calorie consumption daily then the U.S. (that is from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization by the way.)

Cuba has practically eliminated hunger:
https://www.wfpusa.org/countries/cuba/#

But yeah, maybe Marxism sucks because the CIA written textbook you were given in school tells you so.

i mean, people were still murdered for being gay.
Also of course it's because there were less blacks. You don't see blacks in eastern europe much, mdue to the fact that they weren't enslaved, and so the rich didn't really need to spread the idea that black people were inferior.

[Nevertopia]

Marxism has failed every time its been tried.

And so it was, since Ancient times, we were once again made to hear the screeching of people who get their politics from memes, thinking they sound clever when they say Marxism has failed every time its been tried.

Never mind that Marxism is not something you "try", as if the materialist conception of history is disproven by people who tried to will socialism into existence without the necessary development of productive forces and social relations which historical materialism suggests you need in the first place (!).

Yet here we are, and it has failed every time.

[Philjia]

I agree with the Labour Theory of Value in general, and some of Marx's analysis of the relationships between the classes, but his conclusions about how society will progress through socialism into communism are highly suspect and haven't really been borne out by history. I have more of a problem with Lenin, who I consider to be the architect of the authoritarianism which pervaded 20th century socialist states. Personally, I'm a reformist and utopian at heart, and have very little trust in the viability or safety of insurrectionist revolutions.

[Nevertopia]

I agree with the Labour Theory of Value in general, and some of Marx's analysis of the relationships between the classes, but his conclusions about how society will progress through socialism into communism are highly suspect and haven't really been borne out by history. I have more of a problem with Lenin, who I consider to be the architect of the authoritarianism which pervaded 20th century socialist states. Personally, I'm a reformist and utopian at heart, and have very little trust in the viability or safety of insurrectionist revolutions.

From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs sounds nice and all until you realize sometimes people need more than they can produce.

[Zottistan]

I agree with the Labour Theory of Value in general, and some of Marx's analysis of the relationships between the classes, but his conclusions about how society will progress through socialism into communism are highly suspect and haven't really been borne out by history. I have more of a problem with Lenin, who I consider to be the architect of the authoritarianism which pervaded 20th century socialist states. Personally, I'm a reformist and utopian at heart, and have very little trust in the viability or safety of insurrectionist revolutions.

From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs sounds nice and all until you realize sometimes people need more than they can produce.

What, you mean like, disabled people, children, the sick and the elderly?

[Cisairse]

I agree with the Labour Theory of Value in general, and some of Marx's analysis of the relationships between the classes, but his conclusions about how society will progress through socialism into communism are highly suspect and haven't really been borne out by history. I have more of a problem with Lenin, who I consider to be the architect of the authoritarianism which pervaded 20th century socialist states. Personally, I'm a reformist and utopian at heart, and have very little trust in the viability or safety of insurrectionist revolutions.

From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs sounds nice and all until you realize sometimes people need more than they can produce.

Which doesn't really happen in industrial societies.

[Kubra]

... What?

Homosexuality was legalized in the Soviet Union in 1917. Homosexuality was legalized in Cuba since 1979 (though it was still discriminated against.)

Women obtained the right to vote in the USSR in 1917. They were the first country to do so. Discrimination against blacks was not nearly as strong as it was in Soviet Russia as it was in the U.S., however this could be due to the fact there were very few blacks in the USSR.

The USSR had an extremely similar diet and calorie consumption, and at one time, had higher calorie consumption daily then the U.S. (that is from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization by the way.)

Cuba has practically eliminated hunger:
https://www.wfpusa.org/countries/cuba/#

But yeah, maybe Marxism sucks because the CIA written textbook you were given in school tells you so.

but then homosexuality was recriminalised.

[Duvniask]

I agree with the Labour Theory of Value in general, and some of Marx's analysis of the relationships between the classes, but his conclusions about how society will progress through socialism into communism are highly suspect and haven't really been borne out by history. I have more of a problem with Lenin, who I consider to be the architect of the authoritarianism which pervaded 20th century socialist states. Personally, I'm a reformist and utopian at heart, and have very little trust in the viability or safety of insurrectionist revolutions.

From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs sounds nice and all until you realize sometimes people need more than they can produce.

"From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" literally means people contribute according to their ability and receive according to their needs. You've misunderstood the entire point of the phrase.

It's the most straightforward thing imaginable.

[Names Are Too Hard]

Marxism has failed every time its been tried.

How? The USSR lasted 60+ years, Cuba, Vietnam, DPRK and Laos still exist. I leave out China because i am not educated on China to know whether it is communist or not. Mao's China however, basically achieved full communism.

The DPRK is not completely Marxist. It, if I remember correctly, has formed its own ideology.

[Duvniask]

And so it was, since Ancient times, we were once again made to hear the screeching of people who get their politics from memes, thinking they sound clever when they say Marxism has failed every time its been tried.

Never mind that Marxism is not something you "try", as if the materialist conception of history is disproven by people who tried to will socialism into existence without the necessary development of productive forces and social relations which historical materialism suggests you need in the first place (!).

Yet here we are, and it has failed every time.

Yet here we are, you reiterating the same exact thing, having learned nothing. Maybe craft an actual response next time.

[The New California Republic]

Marxism has failed every time its been tried.

Marxism is a critique of capitalism. It can't be "tried" because it's not a programmatic ideology. Specific programmes subscribing to Marxist critiques might be described as having failed, but that's a failing on the part of those programmes, not of Marxist critique.

And that was the main economic problem with "Marxist" governments, that Marxism gave very little in the way of what economic forms and methods a post-capitalist socialist economy should use.

[Zottistan]

How? The USSR lasted 60+ years, Cuba, Vietnam, DPRK and Laos still exist. I leave out China because i am not educated on China to know whether it is communist or not. Mao's China however, basically achieved full communism.

The DPRK is not completely Marxist. It, if I remember correctly, has formed its own ideology.

Kim Jong-Un emphasized way back in the day that the DPRK couldn't follow ML principles, as they were too predicated on a culture of European capitalism that didn't exist in Korea and so would have an entirely different historical trajectory. They're doing they're own thing as far as they're concerned.

[Cisairse]

juche is nazbol gang

[Duvniask]

Marxism is a critique of capitalism. It can't be "tried" because it's not a programmatic ideology. Specific programmes subscribing to Marxist critiques might be described as having failed, but that's a failing on the part of those programmes, not of Marxist critique.

And that was the main economic problem with "Marxist" governments, that Marxism gave very little in the way of what economic forms and methods a post-capitalist socialist economy should use.

What Marx sketched/outlined for the transitory period and the socialist mode of production was not followed, either.

[Alcala-Cordel]

And so it was, since Ancient times, we were once again made to hear the screeching of people who get their politics from memes, thinking they sound clever when they say Marxism has failed every time its been tried.

Never mind that Marxism is not something you "try", as if the materialist conception of history is disproven by people who tried to will socialism into existence without the necessary development of productive forces and social relations which historical materialism suggests you need in the first place (!).

Yet here we are, and it has failed every time.

The Zapatistas, the Rojava, and the Paris Commune would like a word.

[Conterale]

Yet here we are, and it has failed every time.

The Zapatistas, the Rojava, and the Paris Commune would like a word.

2 out of 3 of them were sucessful, but as far as i know, wasn't the PC destroyed by imperialists soon after it';s founding?

[Joohan]

Yet here we are, and it has failed every time.

The Zapatistas, the Rojava, and the Paris Commune would like a word.

One of those failed, Rojava is about to fail, and i'm not sure how successful we can call the Zapatistas. They do exercise autonomy of a few of their local communities - but this is as the behest of a greater foreign power. I'm not sure that you would be able to call the Zap's a successful example, seeing as their survival is dependent upon a capitalist narco-state electing not to kill them.

[Cisairse]

The Zapatistas, the Rojava, and the Paris Commune would like a word.

2 out of 3 of them were sucessful, but as far as i know, wasn't the PC destroyed by imperialists soon after it';s founding?

Yes; Marx wrote about the causes of their failure extensively.

[Alcala-Cordel]

The Zapatistas, the Rojava, and the Paris Commune would like a word.

2 out of 3 of them were sucessful, but as far as i know, wasn't the PC destroyed by imperialists soon after it';s founding?

It was, but there are still lessons to he learned from it