Take the Tankiepill

Im not sure how I've acted like a Stalinoid itt tbh other than posting a few pictures of Stalin. I recommended that user read 3 of Lenin's works, 1 work by stalin, and a historical work by Michael Parenti who is not an open Marxist Leninist, defends tito (which I agree with him on despite many online ☭TANKIE☭s disliking tito) and who in the very work I recommended has a long section devoted to Stalin's actual pitfalls

I also encouraged criticism of Stalin as a figure myself. Where's the Stalin boner or whatever? Kind of seems like you two are having this weird knee jerk reaction cuz Twitter ☭TANKIE☭s are either sjws or edgy contrarians who make anyone who defends Stalin and the Soviet union at all look bad. If I came off that way I genuinely apologize but it wasn't my intention at all.

I've been here since 2015 and I believe leftypol has only existed since 2014? I used to be an ancom as,well so idk, I was around when yui and anfem poster were still here. I haven't seen any stats though so maybe ur right about most mls being newfags

Nah fam but check out pic related

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M-Ls are unironically some of the most big brained leftists. Their assesments of actually existing socialism are a lot more impartial and unbiased than you'd think. The problem is that many left critiques of the USSR and such are drenched in capitalist propaganda and thus "tankies" are forced to engage only in defense. When you're not forcing them to play defensively all the time you can actually get solid critiques and materialist analysis of AES from them. People are just salty that M-Ls call them out on buying capitalist propaganda wholesale and thinking they can repurpose it in favor of socialism.

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I agree with this

What do you think about the Soviets failure to give adequate support to the anarchists in Spain during the civil war? I always kind of thought it was a pretty big misstep personally along with the alienation of Yugoslavia (although I understand the reasons for the latter a bit better)

In the UK the only proper M-L party genuinely do have 'freaky Stalin boners'.

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there is something very progressive about that picture

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A question for fellow MLs, from someone that considers themselves an ML also:
What place do soviets have in the 21st century? I see plenty of reasoned critique of existing socialism from MLs, but I've never really seen anyone critique the specific organisational form that is the soviet itself except for Paul Cockshott, who, I believe, is an ML.

Will we perhaps discover new forms in the course of things, like how the 1905 revolution created the soviets for the first time? Will soviets be used instead as a transitory stage to some radically new form, as Cockshott seems to imply in pic related? I don't know. I was just kinda curious, as I said, as to whether there existed any other ML critiques of the soviet system.

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I mean I think something like what Cockshott proposes or cybersyn is an obvious next step for Communists who believe in following Lenin's path to revolution. A Stalin stage is mostly obsolete in the first world so it's obvious that even if a Leninist vanguard or party forms and takes power it wouldn't literally look like the USSR

Oh CPGB-ML, the autists that will never die.

They even have meetings with the DPRK ambassador to the UK.

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this
(Centralizers
Of the centralizers, Hoxie observes,
The centralizers believe that the actual building up of the industrial organization will train and educate the workers in the conduct, not only of industry, but of all social affairs, so that when the organization has become universalized it can perform all the necessary functions of social control now exercised by the state in its legislative, executive and judicial capacities. This universal organization of the workers will then displace the state, government and politics in the present sense; private ownership, privilege and exploitation will be forever abolished. The one big union will have become the state, the government, the supreme organic and functional expression of society; its rules and decisions will be the law.
Decentralizers
Hoxie explains the decentralizers,
The decentralizers look forward to what they call a free industrial society. Each local group of workers is to be a law to itself. They are to organize as they please. The present industrial and social arrangements are to be overthrown simply by making it unprofitable for the employing class to own and operate industries. Future society is to consist of independent groups of workers freely exchanging their products. The proper proportions of investments and production, the ratio of exchange of goods, etc., will automatically be determined, just as they are under competitive industry, only then the competition will be between groups of workers, instead of between individuals. Universal knowledge and a superior morality, which will spring up as soon as capitalist society is abolished, will take the place of our present complicated system of social control and do away with the necessity of government in the present sense.
Beyond the described differences, Hoxie concludes, the theories, methods, and policies of the centralizers and the decentralizers were much the same)

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Also I believe that a workers state in the first world's primary function would be the suppression of counter revolution. For instance a while back I was discussing with Stalinstache in /leftytrash/ what a Leninist state in the USA might look like and we agrees it would keep the security apparatuses developed my capitalism to suppress dissent but use them instead as a mechanism to monitor and suppress porky. In a country like the USA you'd have a lot of rich people to keep at bay as well so the massive amount of private prisons after being nationalized and the majority of their populations freed (insofar as they weren't serial murderers or rapists or something like that) they could be used to contain folks scheming against the State and so on. Ideally while this is happening the intelligence and productive forces of stem types could be mobilized to develop the technology necessary to provide necessities while forming more communal spaces and so on.

This is all really abstract and none of it would be this easy though which is why I kind of take the line that fantasizing about the role a party would play post revolution is a bit useless and instead we should focus on how to actually get there

Where is this from? It's reminiscent of Lenin in the State and revolution but more sober and concise

Agreed, it's cybercommunism or bust. As you said, there's no need for rapid industrialisation per se, though I do wonder about the fact that a lot of production is outsourced today making some sort of "re-industrialisation drive" necessary - needless to say I wouldn't expect it to be anything like what the USSR had to do, though. And yeah, definitely agreed on the last part.

Well, as with any worker's state, no? Can't say I really disagree with any of this post either though; the tools exist, and it would be foolish to discard them.

Right I just meant that in the third world the State might have to industrialized of rendustrialize parts of the country while in the 1st we could pretty much just focus on suppression of and resolution of class antagonism.

Robert F. Hoxie

Not that guy, but I found it on Wikipedia after Googling a few lines:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Industrial_Workers_of_the_World#Centralizers
Appears to be from this book:
archive.org/details/tradeunionisminu00hoxi/page/n6

Fair enough, I was thinking more of how some countries in the first world, as I understand it, don't have all that much industry left in them due to shifting it overseas/to the third world. I dunno, I might be talking out of my ass here.

Page 167 in specific, even.

In the early-mid 1920s Stalin was seen as on the more "moderate" side, allied with Bukharin against Trotsky who claimed both men were afraid to move against kulaks and other exploiting elements.

If you mean "brutal" in regard to industrialization and collectivization, it's debatable, but at the same time Stalin did point out in 1931 that the USSR had ten years to catch up to the advanced countries or else be crushed.

If you mean the purges i think Stalin was just retarded.

ML parties' complete top down structure led to the demise of the USSR and the fall to revisionism in China because once people chasing power got to the higher up positions there was nothing stopping them from ruining everything.

Change my mind.

yes, like i said, i recognise the material pressures put on the soviet union, especially during WW2 - but my crucial point was that these constraints do not exist in such a way today that a leader in the fashion of Stalin could emerge as he did. So a marxist-leninist leadership would be much more 'libertarian' in regard to overall autonomy.

The history of the Soviet union is actually hardly relevant in consideration to contemporary western abundance, but many on the left are afraid of another failed communist project, or a scary dictator. I think the 'tankie' role in his propaganda must be to teach of the safeties and exceeding benefits of continuing the leninist approach.

USSR was smashed because of US hegemony.

The burden of proof is on you

This is a pretty bad misreading of the purges. It's a know fact that the number of people purged, like nearly every other statistic people always talk about from Stalin's era, are often inflated. When it comes to the fact that Stalin took the purges too far that doesn't make it okay but to say he shouldn't have done the purges at all and he only did them out of ignorance or paranoia completely misrepresents the situation. It reminds me of when people act like the Cultural Revolution was a psyop from the start and not a necessary attempt to try and quell revisionism that started as a legitimate bottom up movement which Mao than later used to salvage his name after he fucked up the great leap forward.

Explain how Gorbechev and Deng got to power then.

Yeah, I agree. The party's structure was ultimately very flawed. I think another attempt should have been made toward a more democratic system, but I'm not sure how that would have been best accomplished. I mean, ultimately the Soviet Union wouldn't have been abolished if it were actually democratic as most still wanted it.

I would smash the girl in the middle.

Gorby was a reformer who, while being retarded, had his heart in the right place when he started collaborating more with washington and the west in general. He rose to power because the ussr was in a recession, partially thanks to large amounts or military spending in Afghanistan throughout the last decade, a war they got involved in only because the cia invented a crisis which wasn't there. That combined with sanctions and tarriffs that had existed for decades really put a boot on the back of the ussrs neck and opened the door to Gorby who in turn opened the door to the US to come inn and wreck his nations shit

Now to be sure there was a level of corruption that allowed certain self interested individuals into positions of the party that had various levels of influence and yeah, this was partially because of kruschev and Brezhnev blowing it, but to say that within the heart of Leninism itself is some guarantee of its own decimation is a total exaggeration that is firmly ahistorical

I don't know much about China after Mao so idk maybe a mlm fag can give their take

youtube.com/watch?v=fgm14D1jHUw
This ad sums up the entirety of Gorbacheff's presidency. I can't believe that faggot got to be the last president of the USSR.

No, democratic centralism effectifly prevents this, by having elections from bottom up and- this is important- by having every legislative body be accountable to the lower one, meaning that people who would be power greedy and this resulting in breaking promises or bad handling of issues in power, were stripped of their ranks when the bottom legislative body reported them to the responsible comitee. This combined with a regular report on the work of each body/high positioned leader and a critical and self critical evaluation of the work oneself has done, safeguarded the vanguard from those power hungry careerists.

The downfall of these socialsits state where not the fault of a few "bad apples" that where "overseen" by "good" Communists and destroyed the Socialist states, this is an inherently idealist analyis of the demise of socialist states

If we analyse the counterrevolution of 89' through a materialist lense, meaning that we look at the economic and cultural changes that led people develop a specific trail of thought and act in a counterrevolutionairy way, we see that primarly there where mistakes that the communist parties did that led to revisionist ideas grow inside the party and creat apathy from the masses to the party.

Namely this would be communist partíes losing connections to the people,the same old people inside the party congresses, not much change in the country, a state apparteus that wasn't a dynamic between state and people rather an apparetus that just guarded the status quo and didn'T change much else.

This combined with an influence in western idealism inside the GDR for example gave fire for people that were tired of the current political crusted system and wanted *new* things, fancy western fruits, coca-cola etc.

Revisionist tendecies also grew inside the SED with people like Gregor Gysi and others advocating for "democratic socialism" losing connection with Marxism-Leninism, even many SED politicians filled the streets and protested for an end of the "SED Dictatorship"

In the Soviet union I would probably say that stalins neglegtic of keeping the Socialist democracy vivid with increasingly infrequent meetings of the Central Committee and Politburo and a long delay from the 18th Congress in 1939 to the 19th in 1952.

This lead to revisionist like khrushchev coming to power and his unmarxist evaluation of stalins mistakes gave further growth to revisionist tendencies, Breshnev, while not revisionist in policies or else, kept things at a status quo, not keeping party life vivid and not working on the socialist state, helped revisionist grow further. This ended in Gorbachev who threw all of Marxist-Leninist thought and theory in the trashbin and proposed social democracy and killed the soviet union

In conclusion we see that democratic centralism wasn't at fault for the demise of socialist states, rather its usefulness wasn't exerciced enough and this enabled traitors to rise to power.

Democratic centralism by itself is the most effective tactical tool Marxist-Leninist have. It enbodies freedom of discussion and unity of action, it combines the power of Marxist-Leninist thought and puts it into praxis, with a vanguard party at its top. Without it communist parties wouldn't be more than movements, mere loose connections of communists, without a competent leadership, without unity of action, resulting in a uncoherent praxis without direction. No Socialist state has ever been achived without a vanguard party and democratic centralism

You know I've never actually watched this commercial before and god damn. They literally equate pizza hut with freedom lol

Oh, shut the fuck up. A reformer who had his heart in the right place was Andropov. Not fucking westernboo Gorby who showed being a cocksucker for the west before and during his reign.

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this

le free market

Fair enough I was just trying to give that guy a sober answer so he didn't accuse me of having some illogical hatred of Gorby or something, I agree he was a retard.

The pizza hut commercial is unforgivable

After that pizza hut commercial he should be put to the wall and be re-educated, of course. Not that it would have helped much at that point.

SHUT THE FUCK UP STALINIST
Socialism with Vuitton characteristics is the only path to communism. Dissenters will be sentenced to wage labour for life or, if the offense severe enough, to death by lethal injection of Krokodil

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lib

DISSENTER DETECTED. SENTENCED TO MANDATORY RE-EDUCATION
A COPY OF THE PEER-REVIEWED HISTORICAL ACCOUNT "THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO" HAS BEEN DISPATCHED TO YOUR PLACE OF RESIDENCE

How inhumane. Heroine lethal injections are better.

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And yet people try to debunk the nostalgia for the ussr by saying it's just young kids trying to be cool and if you talk to the old people it drops off

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THis addresses my other issue with ML states: the parties eventually becoming a Blanquist-like disconnected ruling class. I see this as an inherent danger in the existence of a party post-siezure of the state apparatus tbh.

My question is why do you refer to democratic centralism as an exclusively ML thing when trots believe in it as well?

BASED BOOMERS

What do we think of this guy

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good for making clear the innumerable contestable claims of liberals, but his actual work that goes on and says "well, it was actually like this instead" is bullshit and he's an academic joke in this line of inquiry

tankies represent the opposite of MLs, stop using this word

Make me faggot

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gtfo, muke

LOL GET FUCKED KULAK
OLDEST TRICK IN DE BOOK

Back in the day ☭TANKIE☭ meant khrushchevite, something that most MLs hate.

Gorbachev admits he was not a communist but a social-democrat and wanted to destroy the Soviet system.
revolutionarydemocracy.org/rdv6n1/gorbach.htm
m.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-13855239.html

See

That's a nice link though. I have to admit I never knew a while lot about Gorby outside of the general story of his rise to power and then the fall. My knowledge of the union gets a bit fuzzy after kruschev particularly on the nuances of everyone after Stalin

How do we feel about Arab socialism

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Far better than what exists in most Middle Eastern/African countries now

why was lenin able to maintain party discipline without killing people, but Stalin was not

How long should the Vanguard party rule? When will the state devolve into higher stage communism?

Until there's world socialism

Now it seems to be used to refer to basically anyone who wants some sort of state structure to defend the revolution, or questions literally anything bourgeois media says about a force resisting its imperialism.

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Why wait until then? Does socialism need a state to expand?

Because Lenin died while the main focus of the party was purging remnant fuedalist/capitalist elements of the country writ large and not trying to maintain party discipline without a common enemy with which everyone agreed to fight at all costs

First, because if you don't you'll be crushed by the still existing capitalist powers. Second, because the state can only be abolished when the conditions for not needing a state are acquired, otherwise the state will simply reappear as a necessary force to address said conditions.

What are those conditions? The CNT and Zapatistas seemed to meet the needs of the people fairly well without a state.

The CNT got crushed by both the monarchist government and other reactionary forces, and the Zapatistas are relegated to their small sphere of influence and survive due to not being large enough to be a threat that would get other countries involved. The CNT also had somewhat of a state, and utilized work camps not so different from the USSR.

The state is the instrument by which one class suppresses another, antagonistic class. For as long as class struggle goes on one class will be compelled to wield state power against the other class in order to force it to submit even if they do not call it a state. When class society disappears, so too will the state.

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Do I need to have a solid grasp on Marxism to fully understand this, or am I good starting out with this?

Go for it, I'd say. Lenin writes well. It's one of the first Marxist things I read, back when I was an anarchist.

isreview.org/issues/53/makhno.shtml

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Is it really a good argument to say a single anarchist state (hehe) did exactly what a state would do, and thus all anarchists states would follow? isn't that like saying the problems of the USSR will follow every single socialist state to follow? the problem of democracy, of distribution?

MLs want to arrive to communism by creating a transitional socialist state and eventually when the world is socialist (or most of it), it will transition to communism. Ancoms want to create a socialist anarchy and directly transition to communism

In this video ( m.youtube.com/watch?v=jxhT9EVj9Kk ) Chomsky claims that Lenin destroyed worker’s councils and thus did not have the worker’s interests at heart. What is he referring to, and what are your thoughts on it?

Buhkarin was a Leninist
Lenin was fundamentally opposed to coercing the peasants in the way that Stalin did to extract the grain needed to rapidly industrialize.

Most MLs here aren't newfags, it's just that by 2017 many here converted to some strain of Leninism, because they realised Stirner posting and Žižek memes won't move anything forward. Just look at into what type or creatures Muke, Yui, Bat'ko or Rebel turned.

I joined Zig Forums in 2015 as a idiosyncratic Marxist but I always regarded the notion that the USSR was state-capitalist as incorrect (for example the argument that commodities existed is completely redundant considering that Marx himself wrote that the exchange of commodities and the distribution of goods under socialism organises itself amongst the same metric, e.g. labour in time units, this difference is that there is no market exchange in socialism by individual producers), and when I learned more about Leninist theory and read more about the historical aspects of Stalin, Mao, Ulbricht, etc. I came around as a ML. One negative example of maintaining false believes based on ideology are the anarchists who were populating this place, they didn't make a Leftcom argument but rather fell in line with the 100 gorillion/redfascism stuff, and now look what happened to them at Zig Forums, they went full circle and became NazBols. Such is the case when you are forced to use right-wing authors constantly if you want to cling to your outraged historical beliefs.

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As a M-L, I believe the immediate stage of future would mirror the current capitalist three-level world system, a kind of "reflection"

The Core - "Centralizers"
There would be a single huge core country, or several core countries with Marxist-Leninist doctrine. Their centralised economic system would enable an advanced heavy industry and sophisticated large-scale infrastructure (other word, modern wonders compared to the ancient pyramids). They are responsible for carrying out the great missions of humanity, space exploration and nature preservation. In contrast with capitalist core state, socialist core state doesn't focus on consume, but investment.

The Semi-periphery - "Decentralizers"
There would be many of smaller decentralised socialist countries who would not adhere to Marxist-Leninist doctrine. However, they still live in peace with core countries and getting assistance in heavy industry investment from them. Their society would focus mainly on consuming and idyllic life, in harmony with nature.

The Periphery - "Barbarians"
There would be a remnant of capitalism and other old mode of production like feudalism or nomadic, agriculture tribes. But the principle of non-intervention in internal matters keeping us from exporting the revolution to them. The semi-periphery and core would keep a trading relation with them. The core may in need of raw materials, while the semi-periphery might need consumer products.

As socialism in the core and semi-periphery are different to each other, so are the people. People in the core state would live a simple, rustic material life. They consider labour as their greatest need, instead of consuming, the kind of human that Marx and Engels had envisaged in later communism stage. By contrast, people in semi-periphery would lead a "balanced" life in the same veins of the old mankind.

(cont.)
I predict there would a huge tendency for Marxist-Leninist revolution in the semi-periphery countries of capitalist system (a main example in history was Russia), because of their main focus on investment and low level of consuming. That's why Marx and Engels had huge hope for revolution in Britain, when it was still a semi-periphery capitalist country who focus on industrial investment, "the workshop of the World".

And on revisionism in USSR, the greatest fault of Khruschev and CC of Communist Party was not the denouncement of Stalin, but the denouncement of Stalin's policy. They want to manage a core state (USSR) like a semi-periphery socialist state. The main motivation of Soviet labour was not of consuming products, but seeing their great achievement of labour in own eyes and take pride in it. Stalin and previous Soviet managers understood it, while they still kept the wage rising each year, but they were never wavering on the matter of primary sector focus. They let the Stakhanovists had wage as same as the manager, or even higher, because it's not money that matter, but it's a statement that it's high skilled labourers who were the greatest honourable people in USSR. They "wasted" time and labour on "Stalin's excessiveness" in architecture, not for the sake of vanity, but to display the greatness of labour itself.

Khruschev and his managers, didn't understand that. They removed everything positive from the Stalin's era, but kept all the bureaucratic nature of it, which by then was unnecessary with the advancement in planning science. They switched focus from primary sector to the secondary sector, trying to race with USA in the tasteless consuming game. They declared better consuming than capitalism is the only criteria of socialism. This eventually created apathy in labour, generated instability and finally the destruction of USSR.

I'm sure Lenin would have let the double the people that needed to die die during the famine, ww2, and it's aftermath just so he wouldn't look "coercive" lol

It is a Leninist concept, non- MLs can adhere to it, wich is good, but utimately they are still a left or right deviation from ML wich leads to their demise eventualy

What do we think of this guy

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big brain

Based and redpilled

The based-est leader ever. He sacrificed himself for the proles.
We should steal his mummy from the mausoleum and revive him.

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breadpilled

It is really a tragedy how little Lenin gets counted in the pantheon of great men while absolute ghouls like Ghandi or mother Teresa get jerked off by liberals constantly

absolutely.
i was not even taught of the existence nor importance of Lenin while in school. I grew up not knowing an essential aspect of the world I lived in, so I grew up as a fractured, incomplete being.

Yeah, it's because he was a communist. If he didn't do what he did in the name of communism, he'd have been called one of the greatest, if not the greatest person to live (which he is, but he isn't recognized as such).
I'm so pissed at the hypocrisy of the society we live in, honestly.

would there be a lenin with karl marx though?

without*

Well no but Marx also gets trivialized

I think my idea was that lenin is great necessity of the communist continuity, so he should be celebrated for his role in this particular narrative rather than in this individual comparison of other "great men".

very small autistic point, i know.