Marxism-Leninism can never be legitimised and Stalin can never be seen as a revolutionary hero - this is what all Left-AntiCommunists and Intelligence Services agree on
Because Marxism-Leninism has been adaptable and agile enough to build socialism in Russia, Eastern Europe, Cuba, Korea, Vietnam, Laos and China
This is despite the fact in the land of Russia - where the descendants of the people who lived under Stalin lived - see Stalin as a better figure than Lenin and routinely rate him the best Russian leader and currently have a 70% approval rating of him
Even today statues of Com Stalin are going up all over Russia.
Because Lenin died in the mid 1920s after World War, Civil war and all capitalist invasion and then a famine in 1921 was the start of reconstruction of Soviet industry. When Lenin died Russia was still a very miserable and war torn place
Whereas Stalin led the Soviet Union during Socialist construction which (from the memoirs of working people) was like a grounds swell of human liberation and flowering.
The truth is if Lenin had lived instead and made the necessary decisions to ensure Soviet survival (collectivisation, smashing the fifth column in the 1930s) then they'd hate Lenin today as much as they did Stalin because bourgeois propaganda would've been levelled at Lenin instead
Which is why they pushed the faked "Lenins Testament" for almost a century. As if Trotsky (a guy that joined the Bolshevik party a few months before the Oct Revolution) was usurped by evil Stalin who stole the Communist crown off Lenins head.
Instead, of you know, like having a vote on who the leader should be as you would expect in a Communist party and what was done
It's why Trotsky was hailed as the "true bolshevik" by Hearst press - which was run by a fascist William Randolph Hearst who spent the entire time making shit up about the Soviet Union and providing Goering and Mussolini columns in their newspapers.
To quote our beloved trash panda:
One of the most devious traps which lurk in wait for Marxists is the search for the moment of the Fall, when things took the wrong turn in the history of Marxism: was it already the late Engels with his more positivist-evolutionist understanding of historical materialism? Was it the revisionism and the orthodoxy of the Second International? Was it Lenin? Or was it Marx himself in his late work, after he abandoned his youthful humanism (as some 'humanist Marxists' claimed decades ago)? This entire topic has to be rejected: there is no opposition here, the Fall is to be inscribed into the very origins. (To put it even more pointedly. such a search for the intruder who infected the original model and set in motion its degeneration cannot but reproduce the logic of anti-Semitism.) What this means is that, even if - or, rather, especially if - one submits the Marxist past to a ruthless critique, one has to first acknowledge it as 'one's own', taking full responsibility for it, not to comfortably get rid of the 'bad' turn of things by way of attributing to a foreign intruder (the 'bad' Engles who was too stupid to understand Marx's dialectics, the 'bad' Lenin who didn't get the core of Marx's theory, the 'bad' Stalin who spoils the noble plans of the 'good' Lenin, etc.).
Is that Zizek? I used to really like him when I was a shitlib (in fact, tbh I still do)
But he's not a Marxist and fought against socialism in Yugoslavia as a Yugoslav dissident
With the fall of Socialism in Yugoslavia and US/German hegemony stealing all their markets the time of Socialism in Yugoslavia is now looked at as a golden period
https://balkaninsight.com/2010/12/24/for-simon-poll-serbians-unsure-who-runs-their-country/
https://news.gallup.com/poll/210866/balkans-harm-yugoslavia-breakup.aspx
You can only possibly look at the previous Socialist experiments as "failed monstrosities" if you are a Western chauvinist (as Zizek is and one of the many Slovene intellectuals that wanted to turn West to the EU to receive IMF loans at the promise of breaking away.. while Western capital balkanised Yugoslavia)
There is a newspaper clipping (though I can't for the life of me find it right now) where Marx is being interviewed and even in his day they're pulling the "billion deaths!" when asking him about the Civil war in France and his support for it
To which he cooly replies that there is a factor of 100x that death every day in capitalist society and you can't begrudge the revolutionary fervour to end that cycle of death
To quote our beloved trash panda
I'm curious; did you already think of him that way, or did you say that because you saw my drawing?
Looks like it's been a low-key meme since at least 2018. I honestly can't remember whether I had the idea independently, or I saw the meme somewhere.
I'd be interested in hearing some as well. This quote is from the introduction to Mao's "On Practice and Contradiction" as published by Verso, but I've only watched Zizek give speeches, I've never read any of his actual books.
cool it on the ad hominems, you're the kind of dork who Ben Burgis wrote that book on leftist logic for lol
Stalin can never be seen as a revolutionary hero - this is what all Left-AntiCommunists and Intelligence Services agree on
Mussolini thought hes a revolutionary hero for his similar policies to fascism. It's funny how you call people who don't want to crush the proletariat "anti-communsts" lol
Because Marxism-Leninism has been adaptable and agile enough to build socialism in Russia, Eastern Europe, Cuba, Korea, Vietnam, Laos and China
Aren't all of those countries are in early development of capital lol it's not a coincidence that all tankies are ignorant and don't know the most basic Marxism 101.
made the necessary decisions to ensure Soviet survival
[insert nazi talking point about deportation]
Aren’t all of those countries are in early development of capital lol it’s not a coincidence that all tankies are ignorant and don’t know the most basic Marxism 101.
MLs state that socialism was constructed in the USSR from 1933-1956 when Kruschev started privatising State owned assets and pressed further MLs would state this was still the era of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat and that this would be a lower level of Socialism .
"The historic conditions of its existence are by no means given with the mere circulation of money and commodities. It [capitalism] can spring into life only when the owner of the means of production and subsistence meets in the market with the free laborer selling his labor power."
Marx - (Capital, Vol. I, International ed., p. 170.)
It is this communist society, which has just emerged into the light of day out of the womb of capitalism and which is in every respect stamped with the birthmarks of the old society, that Marx terms the “first”, or lower, phase of communist society.
The means of production are no longer the private property of individuals. The means of production belong to the whole of society. Every member of society, performing a certain part of the socially-necessary work, receives a certificate from society to the effect that he has done a certain amount of work. And with this certificate he receives from the public store of consumer goods a corresponding quantity of products. After a deduction is made of the amount of labor which goes to the public fund, every worker, therefore, receives from society as much as he has given to it.
The first phase of communism, therefore, cannot yet provide justice and equality; differences, and unjust differences, in wealth will still persist, but the exploitation of man by man will have become impossible because it will be impossible to seize the means of production--the factories, machines, land, etc.--and make them private property. In smashing Lassalle's petty-bourgeois, vague phrases about “equality” and “justice” in general, Marx shows the course of development of communist society, which is compelled to abolish at first only the “injustice” of the means of production seized by individuals, and which is unable at once to eliminate the other injustice, which consists in the distribution of consumer goods "according to the amount of labor performed" (and not according to needs).
-Lenin, State And Revolution, Chapter 5 Section 3
"In themselves money and commodities are no more capital than are the means of production and of subsistence. They want transforming into capital. But this transformation can only take place under certain circumstances that center in this, viz., that two very different kinds of commodity-possessors must come face to face and into contact; on the one hand, the owners of money, means of production, means of subsistence, who are eager to increase the sums of values they possess, by buying other people's labor power; on the other hand, free laborers, the sellers of their own labor power and therefore the sellers of labor.... With this polarization of the market for commodities, the fundamental conditions of capitalist production are given. The capitalist system presupposes the complete separation of the laborers from all property in the means by which they can realize their labor. As soon as capitalist production is once on its own legs, it not only maintains this separation, but reproduces it on a continually extending scale."
Marx (Capital, p. 714.)
the separation of the direct producer from the means of production, i.e., his expropriation, [signified] the transition from simple commodity production to capitalist production (and [constituted] the necessary condition for this transition).... The home market... spreads with the extension of commodity production from products to labor power, and only in proportion as the latter is transformed into a commodity does capitalism embrace the entire production of the country, developing mainly on account of means of production...."
Lenin - (Collected Works, Vol. 3, pp. 68-69.)
In order to demonstrate that a given society was capitalist, in the scientific sense of the term, it would be necessary to show not merely that articles of consumption were commodities (which was true but proves little), but also and principally that commodity exchange, based on expropriation of the direct producers, embraced and governed the means of production and labor power. If the direct producers, the workers, are not divorced from the means of production, and if consequently neither these means nor labor power function as commodities, then no survivals of "bourgeois right," nor any amount of other inequities and injustices, can allow of such a society being properly termed capitalist.
Given that there was no exploitation of man by man, industries were owned by the states and labourers in the USSR could not sell their labour power in a free market (their right to employment was enshrined in the constitution) to "owners of production" given that the centres of production were either collectively or state owned and there was no class that could make money of profiteering given that profits went back into production or investment I'd be interested in how you can tell me Capitalism, and not socialism, was the USSRs mode of production during this time period.
Ah we love making jokes about mental disabilities as well, stop this fucking IQ science shit already, it's one degree of speration away from calling people the R word and they know it.
Oh wow, I just realized it totally is in farenheit. I'm used to thinking in celsius and the insult just felt like absurdist exaggeration, but still basically the R word.
Honestly how is this shitty site already miles better than reddit? Maybe 4chan had a point the whole time
4chan is right surprisingly often, just always for the wrong reason - like how Trump was gonna win (not cause of meme magic but because fragile racists needed someone to tell them they weren't flaming piles of shit after a black man became president), or that "woke" bullshit coming from corporations is bad (not because social justice itself is bad but because corporations literally cannot care about good causes and thus only present the most shallow, surface level arguments while perpetuating a rotten status quo, which drives up support for bourgeois feminism and directs it away from true intersectionality which includes class analysis), or that Dorner deserved (critical) support (they liked him because he was a black guy that confirmed their biases and had a memeable name, not because he managed to hit the cops where it hurt)
Say what you will about 4chan, but at least they're highly distrustful of most forms of authority. I mean, they did get reeled in pretty hard by Trump's campaign, but even their enthusiasm in that is fading. Compare that to Reddit, where pretty much every political sub just spouts MSM takes, and saying something else is occasionally a bannable offense
Anarchism seeks more than amelioration of exploitation. I'd say it's the most demanding politics on the left, especially the strains that draw from the situationists and surrealists.
You're right. A lot of people legitimately believe this. I've just been seeing it crop up more and more over the past few weeks all over Reddit and Twitter. Not just the "MLs are fascists" shit though, but the inordinate amount of back slapping.
It's pretty much irrelevant. The people that act this way do not go outside. The people in the streets understand and they are the people that are going to make everything happen.
This would matter if it had an effect on people taking to the streets but it is not, and once people take to the streets they shed this attitude anyway.
All the cool people came here and left reddit became a ghost town
ShitLiberalsSay is alright, but the energy levels are fairly lukewarm.
Marxist Leninists: "we deserve to be in power because we're popular with the people"
the people: "what the fuck is this bullshit"
ML: "wtf how dare you insult daddy stalin, you belong in a gulag!!!"
Westerners: MLs were never popular! Russians hated the Soviet Union!
Russians: No I really miss the Soviet Union, everything went to shit when it fell
Westerner (You): Shut the fuck up tankie scum fash apologist how dare you disagree with me this is CIA propaganda somehow
It's almost like Marxism-leninism/maoism is an ideology born of revolution that uses practical knowledge gained during said revolutions to help expand on Marx's original concepts. I guess that's bad though, got to remain in idealist dreamland and not use tactics that have been tested and successful in dozens of countries works wide.
