I’m a Marxist-Leninist, but I did used to be an anarchist, and from my time as an anarchist I cannot recall any anarchists opposed to revolution as a means to establish anarchism, which is something anarchists and Marxists share in common. Further, Marxists are not “pro-dictatorship,” not in the sense of an individual with immense power, but in favor of the working class taking control, in favor of radical and genuine democracy.
Marxism-Leninism is not “pro-dictatorship.” This is a simplistic framing of unitary forms of democracy that focus on policy changes as the primary issue of political engagement, rather than party changes. States like Cuba, that are guided by Marxism-Leninism, have complex systems of delegate-based democracy.
Nations are just arbitrarily formed social groups in the meta sense, and concerning yourself with the well being of a ‘nation’ rather than individuals or simply the maximum number of people (globally or by citizenship) is a reactionary waste of time.
I grew up in an American irish & german catholic family. If I could obliterate my own families “national”, cultural, and religious identity to replace it with one of overall human solidarity and rational sciences I would without hesitation. And I don’t entirely trust anyone who wouldn’t do the same for their own culture, no matter the sort.
Just because people within a nation are historically oppressed doesn’t mean the nation itself is worth saving: the people within it need rights. They need material well being. They need education.
As a tool, using nationalism can have short term gains for leftwing movements, but often benefits nationalism more strongly in the long term, a rightwing ideology.
So why embrace such a short sighted and irrational thing bolted onto Marxism and Leninism? Why not just call yourself a Leninist?
Genuine internationalism stems from equal footing and the right to self-determination of all communities of people, or all “nations.” To quote the relevant bit from Stalin, “a nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life and culture.” When I say that the self-determination of all nations is critical for internationalism, I mean this in a similar reason for why I support the working class. I am not opposed to the individuals within them, it’s a recognition of the struggle for national liberation, such as the ongoing struggle for self-determination in Palestine.
In Marxist philosophy, there are primary and secondary contradictions. Combatting secondary contradictions that rest on the primary contradiction also combats the primary contradiction. The struggle for national liberation is like the struggle for women’s liberation, for queer liberation: secondary contradictions that rest upon the primary contradiction of class struggle. They are all inter-linked, and as such when we fight for self-determination against colonialism, we also fight capitalism at the same time. Nationalism switches from being progressive to being reactionary when it is used to justify support for colonizers and imperialists.
I call myself a Marxist-Leninist because I am an internationalist, a follower of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. Stalin did not invent the national question, he did work on it that Lenin acknowledged as correct, and whose views they sharpened against each other. The nation was not invented by Stalin, it was understood by Marx in his support of Ireland and Poland against colonialism, refined by Lenin in his support for self-determination of all peoples, and further codified and studied by Stalin, who was a national minority within the Russian Empire himself as a Georgian.
So, in essense, Stalin did not invent anything new, he merely extended and theorized upon Lenin’s advancements. It is for the same reason that we do not always tack on any individual theorist as an “-ism,” for example Marxist-Leninists appreciate Mao’s contributions, but do not believe them to represent a universal or new advancement upon Marxism-Leninism.
Nationalism switches from being progressive to being reactionary when it is used to justify support for colonizers and imperialists.
Which indeed can happen and has. National groups who were once oppressed can simply become the oppressor. Begin their own colonization and imperialism using historical ethnic grievance as justification. You have brought up an example of one.
One reason nationalism is not like the other forms of identity, gender/sex or LGBT, is that of the capacity to mutate in this way. The idea of, say, people within the LGBT forming some kind of imperial force against straight cis people is absurd for a reason.
Further, for my own personal critique being an atheist, those other examples do not have united religious or spiritual associations. I do not want the religious unifying as a practical matter as a leftist and anti-theist.
It’s quite possible for formerly oppressed people to become oppressors along the lines of queer supremacy, matriarchy, etc. These ideas are only ridiculous in the context of the present state of things, class society set up to where queer folk and women are oppressed. The working class will become the new oppressor class over the capitalist class, and this will be a good thing.
Understanding the right of nations to self-determination does not mean blind acceptance of any nationalism. This is a reductive take. Nationalism is not simply “my people are superior,” it’s the struggle for self-determination, for sovereignty from colonialism and imperialism. This, again, finds its basis in Marx, advanced by Lenin and Stalin but at heart Marx.
For genuine internationalism, there must be no colonialism. We must fight colonialism, neocolonialism, and imperialism so that all nations may be free of oppression by other nations, as a necessary step towards eradicating capitalism and establishing socialism.
What happens to the working class after they take control? History says they don’t stay the working class. They become the new rich or the new military leaders. They do their dance just to fall back into the same shit patterns they worked to overthrow. Their revolutions mean nothing because they just use violence as a response to violence rather than taking a holistic proactive approach to the advancement of mankind.
There is no such thing as genuine democracy; each individual must be taught how to control themselves, take responsibility for their actions, and move beyond the ways that failed us so many times. A tyranny by majority vote is still tyranny.
What happens to the working class after they take control? History says they don’t stay the working class. They become the new rich or the new military leaders.
First of all class in the Marxist sense refers to your relation to the means of production. Getting a higher paying jobs doesn’t change your class.
And sure some do become military leaders, because they literally lead a revolution. They proved they were capable military leaders, why wouldn’t they stay a military leader?
And no, they don’t become the new rich. You can look up how much people in government positions in communist governments were paid. They didn’t all become overnight billionaires. And working for the government is a job.
Their revolutions mean nothing because they just use violence as a response to violence rather than taking a holistic proactive approach to the advancement of mankind.
Communism has been successful everywhere they’ve been tried. They all improved the material conditions of their people, improved literacy, and health outcomes. There’s a reason polls show most people who experienced communism preferred it to capitalism.
What happens after the working class takes control, is that the working class begins to transform society into its own direction. Administration is a job, not a class, nor is class a level of wealth. Classes are relations to ownership of the means of production. Here’s a snapshot from the early USSR, taken from This Soviet World:
A leading Russian Communist said to me a year ago “The mind of our people is changing so fast under the conditions of socialism that it is becoming increasingly difficult for us to speak to the rest of the world. We find it harder to understand them, and they us.”
We who go back and forth between the Soviet world and the world of capitalism—not only in space from New York to Moscow but also in spirit from intimate life with Soviet people to intimate life in America—feel keenly this difficulty. Important words like freedom, democracy, dictatorship have different meanings on different sides of the border. The Soviet world is sharply conscious of planning its future; the capitalist world is always arriving where it hadn’t intended. And Soviet officials are not always helpful in making their acts intelligible; they often assume that only deliberate malice can doubt them and that the only needed explanation is the appropriate citation from Marx.
To explain the swiftly growing Soviet world to that other world out of which it was born is a task that becomes steadily more complex. For if its outer achievements are every year more able to speak for themselves, its inner life more and diverges from that of capitalism in a hundred subtle ways.
In the Berlin station a giant sign greets me with three-foot letters: “Think of your hair!” My mind flashes back to the world I have left. What are Soviet people thinking of? The Stakhanov drive, the Moscow city plan, Marie and her sugar beets, the conquest of the north. And hair and perfume, O yes, of course. Everyone knows of the rising standard of living and firmly believes in a cultural life—more bath-tubs, radios, books and dramatic clubs and doubtless more hair. But their individuality is expressed not by possessions and polish but by the various ways in which men create. Dynamic is the word; their civilization is dynamic.
The regimentation of life by property is my next shock in the capitalist world. The obscene phrases “damages for alienation of affections” or “a $50,000 man” or the remark: “I do it only for the money that is in it”—what degradation they imply of human life and work! I see able engineers spending creative power on little models in a government relief job just to keep alive. I see a journal of high standard, the life-work of an able editor submerged by a new owner’s wish for quick profit. Lives are conditioned in the Soviet world also, by trends and sages of organization, but not by the profits of a boss.
The difference appears in the use of pronouns. People under capitalism are contrasting “I” and “they.” “Too bad it couldn’t have been on my land,” a man remarks of a California oil-strike. Soviet folk would be hailing “our new oil-wells”; to them the idea of a private oil-well is already as quaint as a private postal system. I note a remark about American unemployment: “If it gets any worse, they’ll have to do something.” Who is this ultimate, uncontrollable “they”? The term betrays the class society of which the speakers are unconscious; they are waiting for some boss to act. To hear a debate: “Is America going fascist?” and think how much less passively Soviet folk would word it. “Shall we go fascist? No. Then exactly how shall we prevent it?” Soviet folk say “we” of one-sixth of the earth’s surface. Uzbek cotton-pickers, toiling under the sun of Central Asia, say: “We are conquering the Arctic; we rescued the Chelyuskinites.” Ukrainian farmers who never went up in an airplane talk of “our stratosphere records” and “the loss of our Maxim Gorky airplane” as they take up collections to build ten new ones. But even Mrs. Roosevelt asks me: “Are Russian peasants getting more reconciled to accepting direction?” I feel the hopelessness of language as I answer: “No, they are learning better to organize and direct themselves.”
Americans often ask me whether Russians are not naturally more altruistic than Americans, more fit for communism, they imply. No, it is something quite different. Russians at the time of Revolution were more medieval than Americans, which means “naturally” more petty, unreliable, inefficient, given to bargaining and cheating. Traits of the Asiatic market-place were widespread and occasionally still annoy the visitor. But these traits are disappearing under the fact of joint ownership, which brings identity of individual with community good.
Joint possession of the country’s resources and productive mechanism is the economic reality which unifies Soviet life and makes it dynamic. It is this that washes out the antagonism between personal and public good, that makes men say “we.” It is this that makes men conscious planners of the future; for owners plan but non-owners can only fight or drift. The chief quality of Soviet civilization is the sense that the world is “ours,” to seize, understand and make over.
This Soviet world is my theme; I give scant space to those fast disintegrating forces that fought it. I tell not the “whole truth,” for truth is never “whole”; there are always at least two truths in conflict: the truth that is dying and the truth that is coming into existence. American Tories who intrigued for King George had their truth also, but it remains only as piquant sauce to romance; the truth of the Continental armies remained to build the modern republic. They themselves recalled the frozen feet of Valley Forge less as suffering than as heroism; their raids on hungry farms passed into memory not as banditry but as necessity and daring. History’s greatest gift to victors is that not only they, but their truth survives.
Yet I do no injustice to those many lives which in greater or less degree were wrenched or broken by the coming of the new Soviet order. Even for them the new years obliterate the past. They also change to seek their new future in the new system; Lives broken in terms of property are being remade in terms of work. Saboteurs reform and win posts of honor; kulaks come back from exile to factories and farms; children have an equal start now regardless of fathers. For this war differs from other battles in that all men, even the conquered foes, are absorbed into the ranks of the conquerors—joint heirs to all the fruits of victory.
Anna Louise Strong was a Statesian radical and journalist that traveled back and forth between the USSR and the US, and later the PRC as well.
I already explained using my own words, when the working class takes power we can use it to reshape the world. Socialist countries have already done so throughout the world. Linking Anna Louise Strong’s work was just to show historical evidence. I don’t think it’s a secret that I’m a Marxist-Leninist, I made that abundantly clear already.
I’m a Marxist-Leninist, but I did used to be an anarchist, and from my time as an anarchist I cannot recall any anarchists opposed to revolution as a means to establish anarchism, which is something anarchists and Marxists share in common. Further, Marxists are not “pro-dictatorship,” not in the sense of an individual with immense power, but in favor of the working class taking control, in favor of radical and genuine democracy.
Marx-Leninism is literally just another word for Stalinism (as in, the term was first used by Joseph Stalin to refer to his own ideology).
So, while you’re correct that Marxism is not pro-dictatorship, Marx-Leninism definitely is.
Marxism-Leninism was synthesized by Stalin, but Stalin himself did not add much of anything to Marx, Engels, or Lenin, aside form sharpening Lenin’s analysis of the national question, which is particularly important for indigenous struggles (and also partially why a group of indigenous American tribes named Stalin an honorary chief in 1942, presenting him with a headdress).
Marxism-Leninism is not “pro-dictatorship.” This is a simplistic framing of unitary forms of democracy that focus on policy changes as the primary issue of political engagement, rather than party changes. States like Cuba, that are guided by Marxism-Leninism, have complex systems of delegate-based democracy.
Nations are just arbitrarily formed social groups in the meta sense, and concerning yourself with the well being of a ‘nation’ rather than individuals or simply the maximum number of people (globally or by citizenship) is a reactionary waste of time.
I grew up in an American irish & german catholic family. If I could obliterate my own families “national”, cultural, and religious identity to replace it with one of overall human solidarity and rational sciences I would without hesitation. And I don’t entirely trust anyone who wouldn’t do the same for their own culture, no matter the sort.
Just because people within a nation are historically oppressed doesn’t mean the nation itself is worth saving: the people within it need rights. They need material well being. They need education.
As a tool, using nationalism can have short term gains for leftwing movements, but often benefits nationalism more strongly in the long term, a rightwing ideology.
So why embrace such a short sighted and irrational thing bolted onto Marxism and Leninism? Why not just call yourself a Leninist?
Genuine internationalism stems from equal footing and the right to self-determination of all communities of people, or all “nations.” To quote the relevant bit from Stalin, “a nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life and culture.” When I say that the self-determination of all nations is critical for internationalism, I mean this in a similar reason for why I support the working class. I am not opposed to the individuals within them, it’s a recognition of the struggle for national liberation, such as the ongoing struggle for self-determination in Palestine.
In Marxist philosophy, there are primary and secondary contradictions. Combatting secondary contradictions that rest on the primary contradiction also combats the primary contradiction. The struggle for national liberation is like the struggle for women’s liberation, for queer liberation: secondary contradictions that rest upon the primary contradiction of class struggle. They are all inter-linked, and as such when we fight for self-determination against colonialism, we also fight capitalism at the same time. Nationalism switches from being progressive to being reactionary when it is used to justify support for colonizers and imperialists.
I call myself a Marxist-Leninist because I am an internationalist, a follower of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. Stalin did not invent the national question, he did work on it that Lenin acknowledged as correct, and whose views they sharpened against each other. The nation was not invented by Stalin, it was understood by Marx in his support of Ireland and Poland against colonialism, refined by Lenin in his support for self-determination of all peoples, and further codified and studied by Stalin, who was a national minority within the Russian Empire himself as a Georgian.
So, in essense, Stalin did not invent anything new, he merely extended and theorized upon Lenin’s advancements. It is for the same reason that we do not always tack on any individual theorist as an “-ism,” for example Marxist-Leninists appreciate Mao’s contributions, but do not believe them to represent a universal or new advancement upon Marxism-Leninism.
Which indeed can happen and has. National groups who were once oppressed can simply become the oppressor. Begin their own colonization and imperialism using historical ethnic grievance as justification. You have brought up an example of one.
One reason nationalism is not like the other forms of identity, gender/sex or LGBT, is that of the capacity to mutate in this way. The idea of, say, people within the LGBT forming some kind of imperial force against straight cis people is absurd for a reason.
Further, for my own personal critique being an atheist, those other examples do not have united religious or spiritual associations. I do not want the religious unifying as a practical matter as a leftist and anti-theist.
It’s quite possible for formerly oppressed people to become oppressors along the lines of queer supremacy, matriarchy, etc. These ideas are only ridiculous in the context of the present state of things, class society set up to where queer folk and women are oppressed. The working class will become the new oppressor class over the capitalist class, and this will be a good thing.
Understanding the right of nations to self-determination does not mean blind acceptance of any nationalism. This is a reductive take. Nationalism is not simply “my people are superior,” it’s the struggle for self-determination, for sovereignty from colonialism and imperialism. This, again, finds its basis in Marx, advanced by Lenin and Stalin but at heart Marx.
For genuine internationalism, there must be no colonialism. We must fight colonialism, neocolonialism, and imperialism so that all nations may be free of oppression by other nations, as a necessary step towards eradicating capitalism and establishing socialism.
What happens to the working class after they take control? History says they don’t stay the working class. They become the new rich or the new military leaders. They do their dance just to fall back into the same shit patterns they worked to overthrow. Their revolutions mean nothing because they just use violence as a response to violence rather than taking a holistic proactive approach to the advancement of mankind.
There is no such thing as genuine democracy; each individual must be taught how to control themselves, take responsibility for their actions, and move beyond the ways that failed us so many times. A tyranny by majority vote is still tyranny.
First of all class in the Marxist sense refers to your relation to the means of production. Getting a higher paying jobs doesn’t change your class.
And sure some do become military leaders, because they literally lead a revolution. They proved they were capable military leaders, why wouldn’t they stay a military leader?
And no, they don’t become the new rich. You can look up how much people in government positions in communist governments were paid. They didn’t all become overnight billionaires. And working for the government is a job.
Communism has been successful everywhere they’ve been tried. They all improved the material conditions of their people, improved literacy, and health outcomes. There’s a reason polls show most people who experienced communism preferred it to capitalism.
What happens after the working class takes control, is that the working class begins to transform society into its own direction. Administration is a job, not a class, nor is class a level of wealth. Classes are relations to ownership of the means of production. Here’s a snapshot from the early USSR, taken from This Soviet World:
Anna Louise Strong was a Statesian radical and journalist that traveled back and forth between the USSR and the US, and later the PRC as well.
Try again, using your own words communicated conversationally. I will not be bullied by a wall of quoted text.
Actually nevermind, you’re clearly a tankie and I won’t humor that nonsense any further.
I already explained using my own words, when the working class takes power we can use it to reshape the world. Socialist countries have already done so throughout the world. Linking Anna Louise Strong’s work was just to show historical evidence. I don’t think it’s a secret that I’m a Marxist-Leninist, I made that abundantly clear already.