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No true Scotsman, capitalist edition (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 month ago by to c/socialism@lemmy.ml
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[–] 1 point 1 month ago (1 child)

You're arguing against Marxism, though. Revising Marxism and then accusing others who hold a more classically Marxist understanding (in this case Marxist-Leninist) is still arguing against the classical bits of Marxism you've revised.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 child)

    I was heading to reply to your comment when I discovered my previous one has been deleted. Didn't seem worth continuing to debate the topic if mod tools would be used to excise the bits of my arguments that you didn't like.

    I certainly haven't revised Marxism any more than Lenin did by your own argument (since advancements are literally revisions anyways).

    "Political class" was me attempting to avoid getting into what I assumed would be an unproductive debate about how the politburo and other central committee members were clearly not of the working class based on their power and lifestyles; I was not asserting it as an actual part of Marxist class hierarchy.

    And using "we're collectivist not horizontalist" is a great euphemism for saying "we'll recreate the vertical structures of class stratification, but claim the collective Will as we do so".

    Look, I think you and I probably agree at the root about Communism vs Capitalism. I think where we diverge is that I don't think Marxism needs to be "advanced" to function within the confines of a State-dominated Capitalist world and operate as peer-states, which is what Lenin was trying to do.

    I think the beauty of Marxism (as well as many other forms of Socialism, including ones Marx considered Utopian) is partially that it rejects the instinct to play using the rules and language that Capitalists and Statists use to order the world (and the language absolutely controls the mental and therefore social models).

    If you start trying to alter it so that you can just have a peer-state operating under a Socialist model of labor organization, you're still going to fall prey to the inherent re-structuring that States as structures naturally undergo due to how inter-national power works.

    Why did the USSR collapse? I think you and I both agree it's not due to it failing on it's own, nor due to it being somehow destroyed by the US and their cronies (though they certainly did everything they could to harm it, they couldn't ever destroy it without military action, which is capitalism's go-to method of "competition"). In my view, it's because its Statist governing* model was intrinsically incompatible with its Socialist social and labor model in the long run.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago

    When Marxists say "revisionism," we do not simply mean "expansion" or "extension," but instead changing the pillars of Marxism. This isn't inherently wrong, Marx could be disproven and therefore revising his theories would be correct. However, what Lenin did was carry Marxism to the era of imperialism. He did not challenge or change the pillars of Marxism. By revising class into something that includes administrative differences, and isn't related to ownership of the means of production and distribution, you are attacking the foundations of Marxism itself.

    The Politburo and various administrative positions were in fact proletarian. They received wages for their work, and did not gain through ownership of capital. They occupied high positions in the state, but this is not a class. All of your criticism of Marx (and you say it's criticism of Lenin, but this was not something invented by him but instead by Marx) rides its way back here. When I assert that you change Marx into an anarchist, I mean you are replacing Marxist class theory with anarchist power theory. This does not actually follow from dialectical materialism or the materialist conception of history.

    The USSR's dissolution was complex. A number of factors contributed to it, but part of it was the Khrushchevite reforms that added competition within the state apparatus, Gorbachev's incompetent growth of problems laid under Khrushchev, and finally the Yeltsin coup. World War II killed the majority of competent, trained, dedicated communists, which hollowed out the party apparatus and left it vulnerable to careerist opportunists. The fact that it was a socialist state was of no consequence to socialist construction, it was in fact the weakening of the state that led to a counter-revolt.

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