Legit critiques of leftism Anonymous 17-06-24 23:52:56 No. 22312
So /edu/ this site is full of threads debunking standard chicken headed talking points but what are some legit criticisms of leftist thought? I found this book Black Marxism by Cedric Robinson and his thesis runs as following. Marxism and European socialism, instead of being an ideology of the proletariat, was a petty bourgeois ideology born out of a ressentiment for the bourgeoisie and the belief that the proletariat could be better managed. Leftists falsely understood capitalism as a rationalizing force which would create a homogenous proletariat, while in truth capitalism exacerbates racial differences to manage pops more efficiently. Leftists mistake nationalism and racism as essentially reactionary, while in truth it has always played a huge and sometimes preponderant part in history. Second Kolakowski's book Main Currents of Marxism makes two important claims. Terms like "materialism" and "dialectics" are not well defined leading to ambiguity and confusion. This is why Lenin and the Russian Marxists misinterpreted Marx's materialism as an ontology of matter. Second leftist materialism is determinstic and offers a telological history in which outcomes are predetermined. This undermines human creativity and autonomy and is why the Soviets and "actually existing socialism" became totalitarian in practice. The party led by masters of Marxist theory and technocrats can guide society through more and more bureaucratization cancelling out the need for democratic participation and subordinating individual agency to the needs of the bureaucracy itself. I believe the Maoists saw this and tried to break from it but China ended up producing the same results because even the red guards embraced the same interpretation of historical/dialectical materialism. I want bring out Carl Schmitt here for all the leftcoms and anarchists. If you have a radically open society you can easily get invaded by an influx of new people. /pol/ stormfaggot colonization of online spaces proves that anarchic environments are highly vulnerable to this type of invasion or the emergence of extremism within. Anarchist societies would not have the means to resist these invaders. Probably why the Zapatistas are scrapping their communal autonomy model because of cartels moving into Chiapas and causing trouble. The anarchist army could resist an external military force. Its been done before. But an anarchist society is prone to collapse and reversal through inability to resist demographic pressure. Lets say your anarchist liberated zone has a large population of MLs who decide to do the coup or just convert people to MLism and change the structure to a bunkerman dictatorship. You can't really stop them without effective policing instruments, surveillence, intelligence agencies but if you build those you end up recreating the state. pic unrelated
Anonymous 18-06-24 13:27:12 No. 22320
>>22317 MLs are determinists who believe they understand truth from an objective standpoint and have the right to lead and control others to implement this so called correct line. Anarchists aren't just another group of people who should be allowed to exist. They are heretics who stand in the way of full socialism and have to be defeated. MLs would invade an anarchist territory to "liberate" the proletariat from "infantile leftism" and impose their own worldview. They won't tolerate an anarchist territory because its existence as an alternative to state socialism undermines their ideological claims and their legitimacy to rule as a dictatorial vanguard.
>>22319 I will say 4chan was an anarchic or semi-communistic space ruled by a tyrannical mod team not a full fleged anarchism. Even if Moot was a dictator the tools available to control the site and the population are limited and with minimal rules it became an anarchic space that was highly irrational and had elements of gift exchange economies. 4chan is a site not a territory so it only serves as an ideal type. Schmitt's point is that by giving away so much freedom liberals and anarchists can't stop threats to the community like MLs or fascists from taking over. When you have a highly anarchic space its easier for bad actors to come in and wreck it which is what happened to 4chan. A small imageboard I used went private registration only after being hit up with CP spam and /pol/ invaders. Accounts and registration defeat the purpose of an imageboard. Similar to this, if anarchists want to stop bad actors from wrecking their territory they have to build structures to keep them out but these risk compromising anarchy itself.
Glownonymous 18-06-24 23:41:39 No. 22326
>>22312 >I found this book Black Marxism by Cedric Robinson and his thesis runs as following. Marxism and European socialism, instead of being an ideology of the proletariat, was a petty bourgeois ideology born out of a ressentiment for the bourgeoisie and the belief that the proletariat could be better managed. This has a kernel of truth (that popular theorists of socialism were not from poor backgrounds - though that really makes sense considering that's what you'd expect of a learned person at a time when universal literacy wasn't a thing) but it makes no sense on closer inspection. How does theorizing the democratic self-management of the proletariat help the petite-bourgeoisie manage the proletariat? How is a political position that openly advocates the expropriation of all productive property a position of the petite-bourgeoisie, and which was specifically against small ownership as the solution to the social questions of their times, an ideology representative of the interests of the petite-bourgeoisie? It's not.
>Leftists falsely understood capitalism as a rationalizing force which would create a homogenous proletariat, while in truth capitalism exacerbates racial differences to manage pops more efficiently. Leftists mistake nationalism and racism as essentially reactionary, while in truth it has always played a huge and sometimes preponderant part in history. Is the first claim even true? The way that racial antagonisms were stoked to undermine class unity has been acknowledged forever by socialists in the labor movement. The second claim is basically just the standard idpol claim, which has two sides: one, it's talking about "history" and not only the history of capitalist society, and so it's engaging in ahistorical analysis that doesn't address why national antagonisms existed in the past and compare that to why and how national antagonisms are reproduced in the present - they are very different. E.g. it's a huge difference to enslave an external population because a large part of production in your society depends on slave labor (which is high turnover and demands constant raids on external communities) and create national hostility and war this way, and the national antagonisms between colonizer and colonized nations in a global capitalist system which relies primarily on waged labor and secondarily on slave/coerced labor. But it also is mistaken if it thinks that identity struggles are able to hold their ground without challenging capitalist rule, since patriarchy, racism/nationalism, etc. are not just vestigial, irrational forms of oppression but actually complement capitalist production, reproduction, and social control, and so the active reproduction of these oppressions is sought by at least portions of the ruling class. Also the national movements within capitalism have won de jure in many cases but de facto oppression was never ended, and inequality, brutality, and poverty remain. National oppression is only relieved for the bourgeoisie.
>Second Kolakowski's book Main Currents of Marxism makes two important claims. Terms like "materialism" and "dialectics" are not well defined leading to ambiguity and confusion
Is this true at all? Materialism is pretty much just the view that the observable world precedes consciousness, and has objective reality outside of our subjective perception of it. Maybe this idea is so ubiquitous today that it just seems silly to incorporate it as the philosophical basis of political theory, and Kolakowski wants it to be more complicated than it is? For dialectics, yes there are many definitions available but for M&E they are coming from the hegelian tradition, so it's in the sense that Hegel uses it, and also Engels lays out the main 'laws' of dialectics in Anti-Duhring so there shouldn't be confusion there, even tho yes it's inherently confusing how an idealist theory is turned into a materialist one but the name is maintained.
>This is why Lenin and the Russian Marxists misinterpreted Marx's materialism as an ontology of matterThis makes no sense, because matter was just the current way physical science saw the world. Later on we got the "everything is energy". The fact that 100 years ago materialists were using the scientific language of their day doesn't equate to that language being the defining characteristic of the philosophy, which is a broader view about the independent objectivity of reality from human subjectivity.
>Second leftist materialism is determinstic and offers a telological history in which outcomes are predeterminedThis is kind of funny because determinism says "things happen based on their configuration, forces, movement, etc. and there is no room for randomness or miracles in this", which puts time going forward, whereas a telological view posits the ends as inevitable. These only line up when we look at the past, but looking at the future these are opposite stances. Also this argument is an argument against materialism as a whole, because it implicitly claims that we can't understand the world enough to make predictions of the future. Why can the world not be known through study? This line of thought is the domain of idealists and 'skeptics'. Making predictions about the future is not 'denying free will'. Men make their own history, but not as they please. We aren't imbued with divine agency that allows us to miraculously navigate outside the confines of causality, and in that sense we are pre-determined beings, but at the same time we act with a sense of agency except when specifically denied free initiative usually by other humans. What a trashy idealist 'argument' based on existential anxiety.
>I want bring out Carl Schmitt here for all the leftcoms and anarchists. If you have a radically open society you can easily get invaded by an influx of new people. /pol/ stormfaggot colonization of online spaces proves that anarchic environments are highly vulnerable to this type of invasion or the emergence of extremism within.
Online "spaces" involve no actual space, so they can't be good allegories for physical space imo. In real societies, human people need to work, eat, and live. Where do they live? Who owns the land? What economy is there? A sudden influx of people means refugee camps with deep poverty, not simply a demographic shift in the given society. It creates a two-tiered society unless special efforts are made towards integration and rapid construction and expansion of the economy to fit these people and accommodate their needs. Also online "communities" are not real communities, they are sites of recreation and communication, but don't structure the daily lives or all round social existence of their participants. Real communities exert an influence back on their members via social meaning-making, so the inclusion of people with foreign beliefs would not necessarily simply change or corrupt the community. The community would also change them. This may result in a mixing, or in assimilation of the small amount of new members from outside, or of the minoritization of the previously predominant culture in the case of a large influx that outnumbers the old group and massively grows the society, but in that case we can see how minority cultures keep their ways alive and so again there's no reason to fear disintegration because of new people. The whole idea is based on fake "communities" that can't exert much influence on their members, in digital "spaces" that actually require no space, and to which economy is totally foreign.
Ironic posting 24-06-24 15:11:10 No. 22341
>>22340 >There aren’t enough resources on earth to sustain universal communism. Trillions of dollars are wasted every year on wasted food that no one consumed, while the millions die from hunger. Somehow people think communism is when you can get whatever you want, no matter how much, just by thinking hard enough. This has nothing to do with communism, or the communist manifesto, or any work of any real communist.
Communism is not your "think and it will exist ideology". That is the opposite of materialism
Ironic posting 24-06-24 15:22:43 No. 22342
80% of the Chinese population think their country is great and will become better in the future, while almost no one in america or europe think their countries are great, much less that it will get better anytime soon. Europe and US are just everything they can to embargo China now that it is producing the vast majority of green energy in the planet, while still investing billions in gas, oil and not renewable sources of energy. While your IMF is forcing poor countries into debt slavery and forcing then to give up all their mineral and natural resources, China can't stop pardoning loans with no interest rate, literally giving free money to Africa so it can industrialize in the first time in history. Socialism is not about "getting all the bitches you want", is a question of life or death. People already voted hitler for power, no one can unironically believe bourgeoisie democracy is real. No one is happy, this capitalism world is shit, you need to be blind not to see the decay of late stage capitalism.
Anonymous 13-07-24 17:43:49 No. 22469
>>22312 Stalin personally walked back the position on Jews he expressed in "Marxism and the National Qestion", resulting in the creation of one of the most reactionary states in existence and genocide. While this might be understandable from a personal perspective considering what just happened at that point, a communist has no right to act like that when so much is on the line.
The party in general degraded into liberalism very quickly, Khruschev was straight up a liberal, as evidenced by his secret speech. No materialist analysis of the situation is present at all, just "Stalin was rude" and bourgeois-tier nothings about how our party will get better. Even
bourgeois journalists sometimes get above this level. A thorough investigation of why exactly this happened is needed.
With that said, anarchists never managed to get past liberalism at all. For them, "freedom" is still freedom from the state, not from the forces shaping society. "Decentralization" is inherently positive for them in exactly the same way it is to liberals, and the idea of "asiatic despotism" is a massive presence in today's warmongering propaganda. People are dying because of it right now. Many "anarchists" and "libertarian leftists" have very comfortably made the migration from talking about decentralized and just society to demanding nuclear strikes on all who dare refuse American dictate. There is nothing "progressive" about anarchism, it points away from historical materialism and into idealism.
It makes perfect sense for us all to be struggling with liberalism because it is the all-consuming superstructure of capitalism. We have all internalized it very deeply, and this seems to be what Marx says with the analogy of us all being Jews wandering in the desert. We're all liberals: you, me, Marx, Stalin.
But especially the op because god damn, it would be hard to put more completely ignorant takes in one post.
Anonymous 13-03-25 03:30:12 No. 23907
>>23904 We didn't always have markets or stocks. They aren't primordial to the universe.
If you could request the goods you wanted in the first place and enjoy the security of knowing they will be there regardless of your circumstances, would you not prefer that? You would prefer it even more if this were cheaper and better in every way? That is the very simple goal. Someone could deal in the uncertain market, but you wouldn't have to and your future wouldn't be tied to a game that is rigged for the rich to get richer.
Anonymous 08-04-25 17:49:35 No. 24124
>>22317 Can't coexist. Well, the only example of something like this that I know of is
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_and_Labor_Commune and the soviet state eventually collectivized them.
Anonymous 09-04-25 05:22:21 No. 24130
>>22312 >Leftists mistake nationalism […] as essentially reactionary Marxists definitely don't so this doesn't really make sense.
>This is why Lenin and the Russian Marxists misinterpreted Marx's materialism as an ontology of matter. Second leftist materialism is determinstic and offers a telological history in which outcomes are predetermined.also fundamentally mistaken, first in thinking that its a misinterpretation, and second that its deterministic and teleological
Anonymous 09-04-25 06:34:55 No. 24131
>>22343 >Zoomers just want free birches and free shit. That’s what socialism is about to them. Free stuff. genpol.
millennials were accused of the same thing
Anonymous 18-04-25 01:24:27 No. 24156
The modern era is predicated upon the conquest of the natural world and the development of technology towards the "progressive" advancement of man's liberation from the tyranny of nature. This is the taproot of all environmental terrorism and climate change, and is something that revolutionary leftists seems oblivious to or unwilling to acknowledge. The advancing march of technological socio-economic development entails ecological devastation and domination for the foreseeable future. Totalitarianism, as per Arendt, was but the ideological manifestation through unlimited state terrorism of this conquest of nature turning inwards against human nature, which is but a product of the natural world itself, to dominate and recreate man's spirit and condition for the establishment of the next stage of evolutionary or ideological world history. Modernity is entirely built upon man's emancipation from the natural world, even when this pursuit of emancipation entails the complete domination and rewriting of the human condition and the evolutionary residuals of the natural world that shapes and defines it. Either we totally deindustrialize and depopulate, or the world will witness a level of complete ecological catastrophe seen only a handful of times in its history, and in the off-chance humanity doesn't go extinct with this inevitability, it will undergo technological enslavement and reconstitution of the human condition towards a trans if not post-human course of history. The only path forward and away from either collapse or enslavement that I remotely envision is the grasping and full fulfillment of man's true nature and soul, and from that it's connection and symbiotic relationship to the divine and subsequent animal kingdom. What Hubble demonstrated of the Heavens; we must do to the depths of man's psyche towards the obtainment of a new Ultra-humanism as the final bulwark against ecological annihilation and/or nihilistic post-human world domination.
Anonymous 18-04-25 07:20:56 No. 24159
Robinson is very good. Although he's mainly known for his Racial Capitalism thesis, which often gets simplified as "capitalism hurts black people more", when in fact it situates 'racialisation' and 'classification' as two prongs of the same hydra, his stuff on meta-marxism is very good. An Anthropology of Marxism is sublime in this respect: “Finally, this litany of the historical achievements of preeminent individuals and classes tended towards the evisceration of social, political, and intellectual achievements stemming from the less conspicuous or unremarked-¬upon masses. In much of the Marxian imagery, slaves contributed nothing to revolutionary thought or organization; neither did serfs, peasants, or women from any class or strata. As Kautsky had presumed, the history of socialism could be traced and reconstructed through the genealogy of radical elites situated at critical junctures of economic formation and disturbance” (p.15) The critique of elitist Marxism also puts me in mind of Ranajit Guha's work on peasant rebellions. A lot of Marxists and even Gramsci to an extent often classify peasant or subaltern riots as spontaneous uprisings (which of course need an education leadership in the form of the leftists!). For Guha, it is logical that any peasant uprising must have occurred either through rational planning (as no peasant would risk their entire livelihood unless they had weighed up the cost/benefit of rioting and/or a last 'desperate, way out of an intolerable condition of existence’ . In terms of lessons on praxis, I think it calls for the end of the armchair or newspaper seller Marxist, who waits for the revolution to happen and then assumes they will be able to lead it as such.
Anonymous 03-05-25 19:14:15 No. 24232
>>22320 > MLs are determinists Historical Materialism isn’t determinist.
Likelihood =/= predetermined
Anonymous 05-05-25 21:15:02 No. 24250
>>24233 What has he said that was wrong?
If he sounds immature for saying this then I hate to know what your preference of what's correct is.
Anonymous 05-05-25 21:17:53 No. 24251
>>22324 Thats why some anons say they're communists, not leftists.
Leftism is just a farce, just no different from right is so far
Anonymous 09-05-25 04:35:21 No. 24324
>>24322 Ah. I thought you meant his critique of anarchy relying on "muh goodness of human nature".
But for real though, most psuedo intellectualism is often from those older than you think.
I like how people always assume online that anything that sounds wrong is written by a child.
I find far more farcical opinions on boomer chat spaces
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