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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
"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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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"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.
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Yeah exactly.