Anti-Leninists, what is something you'd like to tell tankies that we actually never heard?
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I won't downvote anything
Marx never said centrally plan the economy.
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Lenin was a mushroom
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History does matter. In the same way mass parties wouldn't have worked in 15th century Europe, they won't work now. Learning history is useful to understand how entire system of thought and action survived way past their relevance, doomed and incapable of understanding their own demise.
How are you defining mass parties?
When did they stop working, and why?
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How are you defining mass parties?
When did they stop working, and why?
Both questions would deserve a book each to really answer, but I will try.
How are you defining mass parties?
Relatively large participatory base, strategy decided democratically, presence on the local territory and ties with communities. Here though I was more framing them as "parties designed for a mass society", where their strategy relies on the possibility to reduce the individual to mass, as in the case of workers parties. A one-size-fits-all organization, where one strategy, one identity and one theory of change is shared by millions of people.When did they stop working, and why?
There are at least two big elements: the first is the end of mass society. Once we became all individuals, the mechanism of identification in a collective entity became harder. It got even harder over time, when most young people have no examples or memory of anybody around them ever acting collectively.
The second element is informational: mass parties are incredibly slow. The analysis-synthesis-action-assessment most ML parties are based on is predicated on the assumption that the social and political phenomena you're working with don't change too fast and between the analysis phase and the action phase, the underlying phenomenon is relatively stable. If the analysis is too slow or the phenomenon (i.e. specific industries, specific political landscapes, etc etc) change too fast, your analysis is always late. Correct, but useless. This renders anybody involved in such ecosystems (not just mass parties), very aware of the motivations of their own failure, but completely incapable of escaping them.
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Lennin's "state and revolution" and accepting China as a communist country are in conflict with each other. Most tankies or "Marxist-Lenninist" are distorting both Marx and Lennin. Communism in one country can not exists for long without a global overthrow of the capitalist class. Yes, the state in these various countries control the economy more or less, but who controls the state? My assertion, and most other Trotskyists, is that its not the workers.
I have never seen a Trotskyist on Lemmy before now.
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Marx never said centrally plan the economy.
True, but we know that one. He also never had a plan to achieve communism either. The devil's in the details of HOW we get there.
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True, but we know that one. He also never had a plan to achieve communism either. The devil's in the details of HOW we get there.
How about this one to make Leninists mad: Marx and Engels said ad nauseum for 40 years that the democratic republic is the political form in which the class struggle can be fought and won.
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Marx never said centrally plan the economy.
In Critique of the Gotha Programme:
What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally and intellectually, still stamped with the birth marks of the old society from whose womb it emerges. Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society -- after the deductions have been made -- exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labour. For example, the social working day consists of the sum of the individual hours of work; the individual labour time of the individual producer is the part of the social working day contributed by him, his share in it. He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such and such an amount of labour (after deducting his labour for the common funds), and with this certificate he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labour costs. The same amount of labour which he has given to society in one form he receives back in another.
Such a system requires centralized planning, Marx's entire reason for predicting Socialism to overtake Capitalism came from Marx's analysis of Capitalism's centralizing factor. As industry gets more complex, it grows, until everything is owned in common after revolution and gradual expropriation from Capitalists.
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How about this one to make Leninists mad: Marx and Engels said ad nauseum for 40 years that the democratic republic is the political form in which the class struggle can be fought and won.
Are you meaning that Marx and Engels were reformist? That's frankly wrong, Marx and Engels were thoroughly revolutionary, and this has been proven correct in practice as revolution has been the only successful way to implement Socialism thus far.
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Lennin's "state and revolution" and accepting China as a communist country are in conflict with each other. Most tankies or "Marxist-Lenninist" are distorting both Marx and Lennin. Communism in one country can not exists for long without a global overthrow of the capitalist class. Yes, the state in these various countries control the economy more or less, but who controls the state? My assertion, and most other Trotskyists, is that its not the workers.
Socialism in one country is certainly possible, Communism must be global. This has always been the case, and historical practice affirms this. The Trotskyist assertion needs to actually be backed by analysis, in the time of Trotsky support for Permanent Revolution came because of a lack of faith in the Peasantry, such issues are not the same in the PRC and moreover the Peasantry has been shown to authentically align with the Proletariat.
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In Critique of the Gotha Programme:
What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally and intellectually, still stamped with the birth marks of the old society from whose womb it emerges. Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society -- after the deductions have been made -- exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labour. For example, the social working day consists of the sum of the individual hours of work; the individual labour time of the individual producer is the part of the social working day contributed by him, his share in it. He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such and such an amount of labour (after deducting his labour for the common funds), and with this certificate he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labour costs. The same amount of labour which he has given to society in one form he receives back in another.
Such a system requires centralized planning, Marx's entire reason for predicting Socialism to overtake Capitalism came from Marx's analysis of Capitalism's centralizing factor. As industry gets more complex, it grows, until everything is owned in common after revolution and gradual expropriation from Capitalists.
The long quote is about the Principle of Equivalence, not about central planning.
You present a case for Principle of Equivalence, and declare "therefore central planning!" Your conclusion doesn't follow from your line of reasoning.
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The long quote is about the Principle of Equivalence, not about central planning.
You present a case for Principle of Equivalence, and declare "therefore central planning!" Your conclusion doesn't follow from your line of reasoning.
Marx's observations of Capitalism and markets indicated that as they grow more complex and advanced, they centralize and require more advanced administration. The quote I am specifically referencing is indeed about attacking notions of equivalence, but in the background he very clearly mentions "deductions for social funds," etc etc.
In order to abolish class, all ownership must be equal over all industry. Decentralized networks of communes that trade with each other doesn't accomplish this, it makes everyone a petite-bourgeois owner of that which is within their commune, as they do not control other communes. There must be some form of centralized planning to make ownership equal across all of society.
Abolition of private property can only truly be made possible through a single world government. There can be units for local control, but these must be subservient to the whole in order for class to truly be abolished.
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For a while, that's probably how I would have sorted myself, but how are the anarcho-syndicalists on taking power from capital and wielding it? How does that differ from Lenin's guidance? (Part of why I don't call myself an anti-Leninist is that I haven't read any Lenin lol.)
Allow me to shamelessly plug my introductory Marxist-Leninist reading list, if you don't mind! Lenin is a phenomenal author and is critical to modern theory. You can come to your own conclusions, but the works of Lenin I cite in my list I would consider the "essentials," and the works preceding them in the reading order to be helpful in contextualizing them.
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