Sorry if the title is a bit weird, I’m curious about what made you believe what you do. Mainstream leftism usually doesn’t go any further than trans rights or maybe UBI in some places, at least from what I know, so what made you go beyond that? You can answer generally or talk about a specific belief, just wanna see what caused the more radical opinions in you
I’m particularly curious about what changed your opinions about the USSR and China, most people think they’re awful, but in here they’re really liked and defended, I’ve even seen a lot of posts denying the Tiananmen massacre and the Holodomor and stuff like that, what made you go to such lengths?
what’s the difference between a regular marxist and a marxist-leninist?
from what you told me, I assume regular socialists want centralized systems, while “libertarian socialists” want decentralized ones? and anarchists want like, no systems at all?
any Marxist-Leninist should be a Marxist, it’s kind of a squares and rectangles situation. declaring yourself a Marxist-Leninist is to my understanding a statement that Lenin and the ML states after him advanced Marxism through theory and practice and their findings are applicable and necessary to Marxist practice now. Some people go further into being Marxist-Leninist-Maoists, claiming Mao advanced Marxism and learned lessons broadly applicable outside of the context of China.
Saying anarchists want no systems at all is unfair to them i think, although it’s such a decentralized ideology that some anarchists certainly would say that. There’s a fundamental agreement on working towards communism as a classless, stateless society between marxism and anarchism. The fundamental disagreement in my view is that marxism views communism and socialism as the result of proletarian political self consciousness and actualization by becoming aware of their own interests and ultimately taking state power (this is Lenin’s big contribution, and why it’s easy to find anarchists trying to reclaim Marx for anarchism but never Lenin), whereas anarchism has more of a “the classless stateless society was inside us the whole time” thing, where the state and hierarchy are abridging our natural tendency towards communism. You can kinda see this in contemporary anarchist’s affinity for David Graeber, but it goes way back to Kropotkin’s work on mutual aid and probably even older. A lot of popular anarchist arguments point out that people often organize themselves without the threat of violence, e.g. queueing.
i don’t think i could really tell you what libertarian socialists want exactly, i think they’re generally motivated by self interest (wanting health care, to be exploited less, you know the good kind of self interest) so sort of like the marxist class interest thing, but are also suspicious of the discipline and to be honest, repression (of the bourgeois) implied by ML which is where the anarchist influence comes in. Usually manifests in wanting socialist systems that are explicitly democratic, in contrast to the socialist systems that have already been tried, and a really common critique is that those systems were not democratic bc they were too centralized, bc more decentral = more democracy is an ideological proposition that’s just kind of accepted in the west. Arguing over whether the USSR, PRC, and so on was really democratic and what democracy actually means is ofc the usual response.
thanks a lot for the answers
so… do marxists that aren’t marxists leninists do not agree with lenin? or do not see his methods as something that should be repeated or taken into account?
also, you say “more decentral = more democracy is an ideological proposition that’s just kind of accepted in the west” kinda implying you think that’s not true? Can you elaborate on that a bit if you can?
Marxists that aren’t ML might not agree with Lenin, they might agree with Lenin but think his ideas were distorted, they might not be particularly interested in Lenin, they might still be working out their opinion on him. It’s also entirely possible that they’re choosing to id as a Marxist bc that’s less risky in their situation. Talking about tendencies can be a lot like talking abt gender or sexuality; language is a strategy.
i think what people are usually talking about when they talk about wanting democracy is a combination of having input on decisions, and leaders being accountable to democratically decided decisions. Since we’re so thoroughly disempowered under liberal bourgeois democracy it’s very attractive to insist on everyone having a say and having power, but that creates a problem with the second part of democracy, accountability. What good is having the ability to be heard and influence decision making when those decisions aren’t all that binding? And how is accountability supposed to work without some degree of centralization? While our present system certainly does use centralization to disempower us, it’s important to note how the decentralized aspects subvert people’s will too. The United States system is very influenced by a desire to maintain minority rule, and decentralization is a very important tool for accomplishing that by removing powers from ostensibly democratically accountable bodies (supreme court), and granting a certain level of independence to states and abridging the central govts ability to impose on state governments.
I know wanting more accountability to central power is kind of strange, especially coming when i’m a member of a minority group that the majority is allegedly prejudiced against, but i’ve come to the point of having full faith that my interests are the same as the proletariat’s class interests. It’s easy to get caught up in an elitist fear of the masses at first, but i don’t think a true dictatorship of the proletariat has any real reason oppress me in any way that i’d care about, while a dictatorship of the bourgeois would. This is of course rests on the idea that state power itself or certain ways of doing democracy don’t have a class character, which is where anarchists will disagree, but i’d say look up anarchist style consensus decision making and the liberum veto and compare.
I’m not really well read on all this theory, so excuse me if I say something dumb or that you’ve heard a lot of times before, but I still think this conversation is really interesting
The way I’ve thought about it, I think a system of accountability is very important… If I recall correctly even the first liberals, when initially theorizing about a “modern” democratic system, were very explicit in that the people need mechanisms to keep those they voted for accountable, otherwise we’re only really choosing the flavour of a despot. If someone you voted for lied to you you genuinely can’t do anything except suffer the consequences for years and then vote someone else… who may also be lying. Some countries let people make their own referendums but I don’t think it’s enough
I think we could erradicate the risk of being lied to or putting the wrong person into power if there isn’t a position of power they can usurp. I think voting should be done on individual laws and policies and their implementations, and the position of an elected representative should only involve the job of seeing what we voted for get done, nothing more nothing less, and we should be able to at any point remove them if they aren’t doing that
whereas, in a system where we give power and trust to certain positions and just let them do their thing, it feels like change is always at a disadvantage, because we have to keep putting effort to keep the change but they only have to be able to revert it once, see abortion in the USA for example
So i think it’s important to remember that the people voting those early liberals were envisioning were all white male landowners, and if there’s any group of people the system is actually accountable to, what do they tend to have in common?
The most powerful politicians rarely have to be disciplined by capital either, because it’s not as simple as just lying, getting into the position to even try for those elections requires working your way through a political system designed to produce liberal capitalist politicians. The more powerful a position, the more impossible it is to simply hide who you are and come out unchanged. It’s really quite solid for maintaining the interests of a certain class.
Why not have a similar system but for a communist party? I think requiring years to decades of consistent accomplishment within an explicitly communist and worker centric party that you’re accountable to is a pretty good way to select people for powerful and important jobs. Sure some rightists could lie their way through, but they shouldn’t ever get that far without going mask off, and like leftists in the democratic party someone going against the ideals in a lower level position can only do so much before getting purged or brought in line.
Eliminating positions of power does sound nice, and it should be done as much as feasible, but outright eliminating formally structured power doesn’t eliminate social power. I think it’s more practical and realistic to intentionally design a system of power to minimize the effect of historical oppressions and biases than it is to abolish formalized power and rely on everyone being self aware enough to not immediately reinvent the oppressions we’ve been taught.
oh yeah I’m not denying that, I just mean even when liberalism was being conceived the people conceiving it wanted mechanisms to control the power we gave to representatives, which we don’t currently have, we just kinda completely ignored that part of the original theory
as for what you suggest, it… I think I understand what you are saying, and it does make sense to me, but correct me if I’m wrong, didn’t it really… not work? Like, the USSR purges did happen because a faction in the government that was fully anti communist and nazi supporting had formed and were controlling very key parts of it, right? then as far as I understand the next leaders after Stalin started following the original doctrine way less until the last leaders were straight up trying to do free market stuff again, and that led to the collapse. most communists I’ve talked to have said that the reformist period was an usurpation of the original idea and it started a process of decay
I guess what I’m trying to say is, I don’t think it’s ideal to put a lot of trust in a huge position of power, even if the process of getting to it is heavily vetted, because regardless it gives the whole system a very strong and single failure point, that can have disastrous consequences. I think a big fault of the democracies we have today is that so much of our fate is determined by so little. the big issue is, the people that want to progress and improve our lives have to keep doing so forever, but to regress and worsen them, a single time is enough to deal irreparable or extremely lasting damage. I think it’d be overall less risky if we had more of a choice in things
honestly not versed enough in the history of the USSR to get into it, although the PRC uses a similar system and they haven’t collapsed like that. i’ve heard a big issue the USSR faced was failing to transition power to a younger generation, in part because the october revolutionaries were just that popular. socialism is under constant threat, and in a revolution or being encircled by capitalist imperialism there’s a lot of very important, high stakes decisions to make. someone has to make those calls. if we kick it down to direct referendums, someone’s got to write the options. can kind of just keep going down the line until we get to the point of everyone responds to the issue how they see fit, and yeah that’s a lot of choice but is the choice even meaningful at that point? it’s the accountability problem again. being bound by authority doesn’t always feel great but if it goes both ways that’s a type of power. that’s kind of the point of representatives to me, if there isn’t authority somewhere then that authority retreats into social dynamics, and if that authority isn’t being responsible you’ve got to navigate a much more opaque system without clear rules.
sorry for taking so long to respond! felt awful
I would say, It’s not that I mind being bound by authority, I’m more just concerned about how we can make sure we keep getting a “righteous authority”, that uses their power for good and pursues our interests, that does things to benefit us and not to benefit itself, and I’m not sure what kind of screening process could reliably and constantly keep generating that kind of authority without corruption, opportunism, hijacking etc etc happening for prolonged periods of time. If an “authority screening” system fails even just once, it can have disastrous consequences, and I think if it exists throughout the years it’s just innevitable it will fail at some point, we’re all humans after all. But I don’t see how the same problem could happen decentrally, as no position would have enough power to propagate the failure to the rest of the system - and furthermore, the rest of the system would have the authority to intervene and fix the failures, whereas in a centralized system it’s a lot harder for the bottom to stop a failure at the top
“Marxist” is a vague term deployed by people who don’t want to tell you their explicit ideology because it inevitably alienates some group of people, or because they don’t know what their explicit ideology is yet.
I’m trade unionist sometimes. I’m a marxist at others. I’m an ML at others. I’m even a socdem when I was still doing work in the labour party (or else I’d have been purged).
In some situations I might say socialist instead of communist because it’s just more useful to use that term.
right, so it’s more of a “catch all” term, I see
Yeah exactly.