/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

There is an enormous issue with dogmatism and a lack of properly understanding theory. People treat it like the bible, and will throw up quotes to debunk people who disagree with them without giving why the writer thought that way (I know because I have done the same). Lenin said a lot of things in his life. You can cherrypick individual quotes from obscure pamphlets to align Lenin with basically anything. I have done this before, quoting Stalin on imperialism without adding the text that explains his point. This is just dogmatism, with many posts basically being stereotyped party writing. This gets especially egregious with the letters of Marx and Engels. I honestly don't think these should be taken as theory at all. It literally does not matter what either one of them thought about africans or women. Their individual words were often wrong, it is their actual work that is important.

You don't have to agree with everything Marx or Lenin or Stalin or Mao said to be a good communist. In fact you should be disagreeing with some parts, you should be criticising them from a productive stance (this is what Mao did with Stalin). You need to understand the context behind each text. Full length books are probably completely what the person believed, but you don't need to necessarily listen to everything in a one page statement. Shorter pamphlets might not explain everything completely but they are often among the most useful pieces of theory. You have to read these critically and put in your own brain power to fill in the gaps. This is the way to be a scientific socialist.

Generally the worst examples of this are people who overanalyze every single word Marx wrote like the sublation debate or whatever. This is pure bourgeois intellectualism. It doesn't matter what he wrote, it matters what you take away from his work as a whole and end up believing. In general 'Marxology' is completely against the science of Marxism. If you only read Marx you are not a Marxist, you are a historian at best. Like how can you be a physicist if you only read Isaac Newton?

There is just ridiculous dogmatism, an unending and unchanging devotion to 19th and 20th century political figures without updating it at all to the modern time. Obviously anyone can think of examples of this, like the 'Orthodox Marxists' or the fringe ultra-left strain of Maoism which adopted the MLMpM designation (even if that is probably still a useful term, its just been kind of co-opted by these groups). But this ends up becoming ecclecicism because it has stopped being a science, it has become a myth. That is the path Trotskyism went down, as well as most of the revisionist parties. They ended up fully with ridiculous, vapid and completely un-Marxist positions. There was a material reason for this, it's not like they just became revisionists because whatever.

Then there is 'dogmato-ecclecticism', which many MLs suffer from. It's a kind of pick and choose mentality to history and theory. The ACP is an example of this, they dogmatically follow the revisionist strain until they end up in a completely ridiculous position (this is the case because of the bourgeois class character of the party). This is also the path most 'anti-revisionists' will inevitably go down because they are limited by their lack of adopting Maoism (for example the CPBG-ML which hates Kruschev but loves Deng). Bob Avakian is another example of dogmato-ecclecticism. Anyway I don't want to make this post too much about that, and instead just a general point about being scientific when reading theory.