>>1406992and
>>1406999the duality of man.
<this is literally some next level shit right here. here we have people implying PSL is not Marxist Leninist by way of disagreeing with it being called Marxist-Leninist because it is not "stalinist"* or "maoist"* and then someone else saying that marxist leninist because it is "stalinist".lmao
this is not unlike the time when someone wrote a screed on the itsgoingdown anarchist website where they called PSL 'Stalinist' and tried to argue that all of its activities in the struggle for abortion rights were actually invalid because
* terms like stalinist and maoist are anticommunist terms. there is no universal blueprint for building socialism. the idea that communists have to adhere to only the methods used by specific revolutionaries in one country, in one movement, or one individual revolutionary figure, like Lenin, or Mao, or Honecker, or Castro, or Sankara, or Il-Sung, is at best limiting. we should want to learn from all of them and to understand the experiences of those struggles, but the idea that we can replicate their successes by only mechanically practicing their same methods is a contradiction, and cannot be revolutionary. our approach has to also take into consideration the material history of our class, and of our people. we have to be acquainted we are informed by theory, of course, but also by practice. it is through practice, and a thorough examination of the material world that we can even hope to build socialism with our people. the idea that we could apply all the methods that worked specifically for Lenin and his fellow people, that they used to build socialism over in Russia, and take that and put that into our country, without any adjustments whatsoever, is both mechanical thinking, non-critical, and blunted. we cannot shove a square peg into a round hole. the experience of building socialism in vietnam, of course, is different from the experience of building it in cuba, or in the democratic people's republic of korea, or in china. Each of these revolutions involved trial and error, and each of these revolutions had specific obstacles. The same theory of development that explains the material circumstances of those countries, with a thorough review of the material history of those countries, is also the same theory that explains why Marx had once thought that revolution would first occur in the most developed countries in Western Europe, and why he ended up being wrong. He was writing with the best information he had available at the time, as we all are.
stalin was not perfect by any means, but, also, we recognize that communists, believe it or not, can also make mistakes, and that it is mostly experimentation through which that we learn what the theory of revolution actually is. stalin was a marxist-leninist. mao was a marxist-leninist. but their lack of "purity," the fact that they sometimes made mistakes (mao would admit to many mistakes), is not something we should look at exclusively. we should concern ourselves with real world outcomes, which is the object of policy and decision-making in most cases. China went from being a backward semi-feudal country, subject to imperialist invasion, to a superpower that is soon to break through the world unipolarity. Vietnam was also a backward, semi-feudal country, that was colonized by France and invaded by the Japanese. Vietnam has grown significantly because of socialism, and though it was besieged seemingly on all sides, it not only overcame odds but won its soverignty, and stopped pol pot, a CIA puppet.