-
Ever wanted an RSS feed of all your favorite gaming news sites? Go check out our new Gaming Headlines feed! Read more about it here.
Yeah, Lenin's... well, I lean WAY more anarchist so "fine" is the last word I'd use to describe him, but his writings are useful and he was willing to admit the Russian experiment was not socialism.
The reason for the Lenin reaction meme is because Dual Power is a term that Lenin used (Proudhon used it too, but it meant a different thing for him).
I think it's pretty bold for any socialist org to directly reference dual power. Especially for a minority socialist org. I kind of appreciate the language.
EDIT: Huh. This seems to be way more about Proudhon-esque dual power than it is about Lenin dual power. I pretty well like this one. Though I'm not sure how legitimate worker co-ops are as a dual power strategy in the Proudhon sense. I suppose you can't build an agorist map without making the FBI very, very, very happy though, so this is the best you can do.
The reason for the Lenin reaction meme is because Dual Power is a term that Lenin used (Proudhon used it too, but it meant a different thing for him).
I think it's pretty bold for any socialist org to directly reference dual power. Especially for a minority socialist org. I kind of appreciate the language.
EDIT: Huh. This seems to be way more about Proudhon-esque dual power than it is about Lenin dual power. I pretty well like this one. Though I'm not sure how legitimate worker co-ops are as a dual power strategy in the Proudhon sense. I suppose you can't build an agorist map without making the FBI very, very, very happy though, so this is the best you can do.
BSA seems pretty legit. These are the first guys I've seen* that are currently taking a crack at dual power. How big are they?
*I haven't seen many socialist organizations at all, to be fair. Mostly just the DSA, IWW, small ML groups that are probably 90% feds, and forums for leftist shitposters.
*I haven't seen many socialist organizations at all, to be fair. Mostly just the DSA, IWW, small ML groups that are probably 90% feds, and forums for leftist shitposters.
Last edited:
Deleted member 37235
Guest
I am absolutely a Leninist, in the sense that I would argue that socialism can only ever become a reality if working people consciously organize themselves to achieve it and do so without subordinating themselves ideologically or politically to the capitalist class. But that doesn't mean we accept everything Lenin and the Bolsheviks ever did without question, they made mistakes.
One big mistake I would argue was banning factions within the party, banning the Mensheviks and repressing anarchists in 1921. This was a reaction to the Kronstadt uprising but was also a big overreaction.
But Lenin proved in practice the necessity of a consciously revolutionary worker's party preparing itself and it's class to seize power.
One big mistake I would argue was banning factions within the party, banning the Mensheviks and repressing anarchists in 1921. This was a reaction to the Kronstadt uprising but was also a big overreaction.
But Lenin proved in practice the necessity of a consciously revolutionary worker's party preparing itself and it's class to seize power.
Deleted member 37235
Guest
I'm somewhat familiar with BSA, they're not very big (how many socialist orgs in the US are?) and despite the name actually derive a lot of their influence from anarchism generally and Proudhon particularly. They're cool folks, we have some theoretical differences (aforementioned Leninism) but they have talented organizers and are actually willing to work with other people.
Well, you picked a good one! It could stand to see some improvements, though.
I definitely went too far in a few places. But this is a good meme.
Why would the BSA support Marxism? Marx seemed pretty racist in his views of Africa, at least that's what I gathered from his readings.
OP
OP
Because Marxism isn't Marx. Marxism is a method of analysis. Marx is a fallible individual.
How can you deviate from Marx and still be Marxist? Might as well just call it something else not named after a specific individual. Then again, I've never liked the idea of ideologies being named after people.
OP
OP
1. If Marx was racist, it has nothing to do with his economic analysis other than potentially his analysis not being robust enough. But do you really think that the numerous black Marxists, or Latin Marxists, or Chinese Marxists etc. who have applied Marxist analysis to their own conditions aren't Marxist?
2. Marxism isn't about Marx. It's not a religion. It's not a dogma. Marxism requires being ruthlessly critical, and that applies to Marxism itself.
If they apply it to their own conditions, why bother calling themselves something when the person in question probably never even anywhere near where they are? And a racist person will almost surely have that effect his economic views. Of course, we are all racially prejudiced to varying extents, which would influence us too. One may argue that Marxism isn't about Marx, but it's pretty hard to separate Marx from Marxism when his name is the namesake.
It refers to his writings.
Like how "Cartesian space" refers to the mathematical work of Rene Descartes and not his social attitudes or his philosophical work.
The legacies of a person's ideas outgrow their originators with time.
That answer isn't satisfactory when we know even things like AI's can become racist. Even more so when we know that the economic goes into identity. Marx is hereby officially cancelled.
Well okay, to be fair, he's been cancelled for a while since we're all capitalists.
Last edited:
OP
OP
This is honestly just a very strange thought process to me. Do you think that the idea of constitutional republicanism is bad because Jefferson was a hypocrite who owned slaves?
(It's bad for other reasons)
Would "Marxism" be better if it was just called Scientific Socialism? It's the same thing. The content would be no different. People just called it Marxism because Marx is the one who wrote about it.
Eating my tabletop Marx portrait right now tbh.
Also, fun story:
Last edited:
well im just kind of frustrated by some posters on this site when it comes to politics especially in poli-era. I need a break from this site probably
Ah yes, the anarchist who somehow thought that the subjugation of women was compatible with liberation of humanity.
Is your Avatar Mai Shiranui?
Anyways, how many of these men had any sort of intersectionality in mind?
And wasn't Kropotkin an anti-semite? Or was that another big anarchist thinker.
Kill your idols, etc., etc.
Yes. Someone else commissioned a user on here (not sure which user though) to draw a picture of her for me, so I am using it as my avy. And I'm assuming not very many, but there had to have been at least someone who did.
Maybe, in any case it's why we need to focus on ideas rather than people, because people are imperfect (well, so are ideas but ideas are nothing without people).
isn't this the discussion that took place above?
I feel like this applies to Proudhon as well. He was sexist and anti-semitic as well. But those seem to me like failures on him as an individual, not stemming from his political philosophy or economic analysis. If anything, because those views are inconsistent with his anarchism; we can conclude that he probably should've been able to see that and we don't have to repeat his mistakes.
But I'm not really a mutualist anymore. I think I became a lot more interested in DSA anyway and probably there's less of a contradiction being democratic socialist with my support of a large welfare state (and religion).
And as I said before, I do not believe at all that your views can somehow not be influenced by your bigotry. Political/economic analysis will be influenced by bigoted views.
I think you can just avoid Poli-Era but a break isn't bad. Frozenprince is on a break from this place as well.
OP
OP
How is Marxist analysis, as an example, influenced by bigoted views?
To be clear, like I mentioned, I think it can be argued that it is not robust enough. See for example the "Asiatic mode of production" which just kind of seems to me like Marx being Eurocentric and not taking the time to read about non-European economic structures, though, to be fair, he also wouldn't have had nearly as many resources about that in the mid-19th century. But that's fine. We can take the analytical method he developed and tweak it, expand it, incorporate new elements into it. Just as many have done over the last two centuries.
Well, the only Marxist analysis is really reading Marx directly and trying to understand the context of his life. If you make any of your own analyses it stops being Marxist analysis and becomes your own analysis. The only reason why I can see people calling their own interpretations as "Marxist" is because Marx is revered and thus it's an attempt to gain more clout.
At that point we would have to get into specifics, you know? And while it's been years since I've read any Proudhon's work, it's not immediately obvious which part of "What is Property?" or whatever else, necessitates anti-semitism or sexism. This applies to a lot of philosophers (off the top of my head: Heidegger, Schopenhauer) who wrote really great stuff, but had terrible reactionary politics (in part or whole).
I also don't think we disagree on the "read the theory but don't repeat their mistakes" part.
My academic specialization is (sort of) in the history of philosophy, and this isn't really true. You can apply as a hermeneutic to the text a view that grounds it as a secondary expression of an individual's own proclivities or temperament (William James thought this), but even if you'll never have the basic motivating essence behind why they believe what they do (because that object in question is essentially implicit temperamental bias) regardless of that you're still left with their arguments, which is something like the inorganic structure left after a living person has tried to articulate reasons why their given perspective is worth considering. And that's just one hermeneutic, honestly if all history of philosophy was yolked to an individual's character, we'd be screwed. Aristotle? Hated women and thought some people were 'natural slaves'. Kant also hated women and was an incredible racist. Both these dudes are basically the two you'd pick out as the foundational figures of literally the foundational discipline of western civilization, and philosophy doesn't really make much of it, and in reading these texts that information does often seem more biographical than immediately relevant. Though it's always worth knowing, and you probably would take it as a means of critically interrogating their work in some areas. Though philosophy is admittedly a bit old and dusty in terms of its repertoire of hermeneutics, at least relative to some other more modern humanist disciplines, but generally philosophers spend a lot of time trying to reduce their thought to bare ideas, and so it's no surprise that that's what philosophers primarily see themselves as engaging with as their trade.
Personally I think that anyone drawing heavy influence from Marx and/or consciously adopting significant elements of Marx's style can claim to follow in that tradition. If you're capturing the same heart or essence (which is to say, you're not ostensibly creating your own holistic or systematic work), it would be very natural or to claim your project "Marxist" or 'Marxian' or whatever. But these claims are always self assumed and can always be (and often are) contested. I remember a question on a final about whether or not Heidegger was an existentialist, and he sure didn't think so, but imo he was at least partially wrong.
Last edited:
OP
OP
We're not talking about Marx's biography here, we're talking about the process of analyzing societal structures through dialectical and historical materialism, the LTV, class power, etc. That's what we mean by Marxist analysis - the system of theoretical tools developed by Marx (and Engels). You could know nothing about Marx's personal life and still use Marxist analysis in the same way that you could know nothing about Darwin's personal life and still utilize the concept of natural selection.
Again, we could rename it "Scientific Socialism" instead of calling it Marxism and it would be the exact same thing.
I honestly don't think you know what "Marxism" means, and I don't mean that as an attack.
No, It defends women rights and equality, but there's sexist marxists.
Any good books on hermeneutics? Never studied it and a quick search mentioned "Hermeneutic Communism" by Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala.
My background being philosophy, I find I more so know how to talk about 'hermeneutics' (like how the problem of interpretation might be characterized) more than I do hermeneutics with regards to anticapitalist philosophy or practice. So with that in mind, Gadamer would be a relevant figure, but it's not actually something I've studied very extensively. French philosophy in general tends to be a bit more concerned with the analysis of texts and appreciating their specific form or style or the embellishments possible within the medium itself, with the more analytic British philosophy occupying the other end of the spectrum ('just give me the basic ideas, ideally in symbolic notation'). Whereas German philosophy is somewhere in the middle and more associated with the history of philosophy, taking a lot from Hegel, and we sort of just have one hermeneutic, which is mostly regarding these figures as almost something like moments in a historical and cultural dialogue, and probably try to bring two moments into dialogue with each other for our analysis, at least ime. When I say this is my specialization, I mostly mean I was a pretty self-motivated undergrad student and my interests just sort of happened to fall here by coincidence or fortune.
I've read quite a lot from various science perspectives and to be honest this is the first time I hear this argument. Is it your own conclusion or are you drawing on Marx?
Also regarding personal traits/flaws of scientists - applying current moral standards looking back hundred years is always problematic. As has been mentioned, Aristotle and Jefferson supported slavery - Richard Rorty uses the thought experiment that if you could travel back in time with your 'superior' moral vocabulary you could not convince Aristotle/Jefferson otherwise because the moral imagination necessary (to imagine alternatives) was not in place.. Hume was a racist, many lauded suffragettes were by today's standards white supremacists, almost all philosophers pre-1900 had absolutely repulsive views of women and people of color... This is not to say these views are good/right but Edith Hall makes a good point, she said that rather than judge a scientist by today's standards a better approach is to ask whether the fundamentals of this person's way of thinking/philosophy would lead him/her to be prejudiced/racist today. So would Marx be a racist today considering the fundamentals of his thinking, when removed from his historical context?
Even in the cases were you could argue that these people can be fairly judged with modern views on morality it does not make full sense to cancel their body of scientific work; Schmitt and Heidegger were nazis, Althusser killed his wife etc.
This is not to say we should put the people behind ideas on a pedastal, what should stand the test of time are their ideas.
Last edited:
I think if we want to say "Marxist analysis has trends of racism", it bears an analysis of Marxist analysis for these trends. Simply saying Marx himself had racist ideas is not enough to say, therefore all Marxist analysis is corrupted by racist ideas.
It is a strange way to approach history where the worth of a person's ideas is how progressive they were in real life, progressive by modern standards mind you. Most people who were radicals in their day would be considered regressive today. Pretty much all the Enlightenment philosophers had very heteronormative, anglo-centric normative views of society.
For example, where is the racism in "the workers should seize the means of production"? If you applied this to the institution of slavery it would be obvious that it inherently challenges plantation owner power.
It is a strange way to approach history where the worth of a person's ideas is how progressive they were in real life, progressive by modern standards mind you. Most people who were radicals in their day would be considered regressive today. Pretty much all the Enlightenment philosophers had very heteronormative, anglo-centric normative views of society.
For example, where is the racism in "the workers should seize the means of production"? If you applied this to the institution of slavery it would be obvious that it inherently challenges plantation owner power.
I'd argue that Leninism's devolution into Stalinism is inevitable, because a dictatorship of the vanguard party, like any dictatorship, is going to inevitably become more interested in maintaining or enhancing its power rather than fulfilling the needs of the people.
Much like how you had Thermidor, followed by Napoleon. The full circle revolution (that is, that you snake back around to a system just about as oppressive as the one overthrown) will follow a society that is not significantly participatory.
It makes me follow the idea that the "stateless" revolution might be necessary, or that electoralism is the only path because an electoral gain, won fairly, forces reactionary elements to either acquiesce or revolt and be crushed by force, putting the onus of revolution on the fascists instead, which is more their natural domain.
Deleted member 37235
Guest
The "inevitability" of the degeneration of Leninism into Stalinism is no more the case than the assertion that the conditions for revolutionary consciousness spring spontaneously from the actual conditions of the working masses. The fact that we have seen such a degeneration is not evidence that such a thing was NECESSARILY the result from the onset. As Marxists (that is as historical materialists) we recognize the parametric (that is contingent nature) of the historical process, by considering the problem of revolutionary organization abstractly (what is often called "vanguardism") devoid of the concrete historical conditions you're engaging in impotent abstractions.
You return again with the example of Thermidor, every revolution experiences it's ebbs and flows of revolution/counter-revolution, but without an organization capable of drawing lessons in real time and actively intervening in political process the only thing that's inevitable is the reactionary forces winning out over the less organized revolutionary forces.
"Electoralism" isn't an answer either, because it fails to prepare working people for the difficult task of breaking with the bourgeois state, in fact it makes it harder because the organized elements of the workers movement then become dependent on their offices and relation to the state in order to continue their work. The historical experience of the SPD is the example to look at here. The other example of the so-called electoral road to socialism is Chile/Allende which shows us the deadly consequences of sowing illusions in the "democratic legitimacy" of the bourgeois state, at a crucial junction of the radicalization process Unidad Popular and their working class base was completely hogtied and left unprepared to defend themselves in the face of reaction. They were crushed and we know very well what the result was.
The historical record isn't good for those who argue for some vague form of spontaneous revolutionary process or electoral road to socialism. One could argue the same for those who advocate for revolutionary organization but the difference here is that we have positive historical examples of the latter for at least the first 5 years of its life.
My driving point here is to resist schematic thinking, the formulation of Leninism to Stalinism or revolutionary organization tout court to bureaucratism is not some universal truth. I reject that facile thinking because the stakes are too high, the onus is on those making the argument as to why the forms of struggle that haven't worked before suddenly will in a way that will tackle the enormity of the tasks working people face.
I'll end with a plea to consider Victor Serge's words:
Victor Serge started out as an individualist anarchist, he really came a long way!
Last edited by a moderator:
Ive been thinking a lot about why conservatism in the US (and the world really) lends itself to social organization that progressivism seems to lack in comparison. The long-term maneuvering by political entities like The Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society and further still into social movements like the IDW (blegh I even hate to give legitimacy to it by mentioning it) or Gamergate are decades in the making and we havent even started. Where is this similar movement by progressive ideology? I think the quick answer is obviously "well, the predatory nature of neoliberal capitalism goes hand in hand with reactionary ideologies like conservatism which uphold a status quo of systemic exploitation" and how institutions and social apperatuses will manipulate and reincorporate divergent social presences in order to maintain themselves.
I dont know, I guess Im just feeling particularly dejected today. The fact of the matter is that this thinking is NOT the majority, and that's my one solace in all of this.
I dont know, I guess Im just feeling particularly dejected today. The fact of the matter is that this thinking is NOT the majority, and that's my one solace in all of this.
Conservative capital pours money into domestic propaganda. Liberal capital pours money into means-tested micro-loan creditors in India.
Also they try to solve problems with disruptive apps instead of, you know, directly.
Direct solution to housing crisis: Seize empty homes, build more housing
(Neo)Liberal solution to housing crisis: Tax credits, mixed-income developments, public-private partnerships where private entities take a piece of that delicious public subsidy
Last edited:
Liberal capital is only interested in making capitalism work better, thereby evangelizing it.
The only credit I give to liberal capital is the efforts against climate change. As long as something, anything, gets us over that hump...