For one big example, Look at all that had to happen for the Bolsheviks to succeeded
>WW1
>Nicholas making the decision to go to the front line to lead the troops
>The February Revolution
>Kerensky re-entering Russia into WW1
>Kerensky's government collapsing because he tried to orchestrate a coup on himself and then double crossed the Army by arming red militias in petrograd
>The liberals giving the Bolsheviks(among other parties) guns to help stop the Army from overthrowing the provisional government.
>The other socialist parties(which were more popular) believing Lenin would reinstall the constituent assembly
>When the SRs did rise up they refused to execute captured bolshevik officers or do much of anything.
>When the Petrograd sailors rebelled they sat on their island printing newspapers hoping that the people of Russia would realize Lenin was a big meaniehead and get rid of him.
Obviously the future is not a wide-open blank slate where anything can happen. Even massive upheavals like the First World War had observable conditions. But the way it unfolded(with Belgium being invaded and Britain, followed by America, entering the conflict) was due to random chances and the decisions of a handful of individuals.
>>2290636Lenin was a chancer in every sense of the word, a complete opportunist. He literally said that he wouldn't live to see the revolution weeks before it happened.
The Bolsheviks were brutal thugs and mass murderers and Lenin was making shit up as he was going along. The methods he took sowed the seeds for Stalin's brutal reign and the ultimate end of the USSR after years of bureaucratic ineptitude.
Lenin and the Bolsheviks are condemned by history, especially from 1992 onwards.
>>2290636you misunderstand 'marxist historiography' in that case.
These were not known pre-requisites for the success of the Bolsheviks.
The Bolsheviks tailored their actions, propaganda, and strategies in a way which exploit these happenings.
for example:
>The liberals giving the Bolsheviks(among other parties) guns to help stop the Army from overthrowing the provisional government.Well, the Bolsheviks were popular within the army. The soviets had workers and soldiers. If the army went ahead and overthrew the provisional government, the Bolsheviks would use their influence within the soviet of soldiers. The liberals chose to arm the Bolsheviks directly, even better.
>>2290703>pessimist >pragmaticchoose one
A Bolshevik cannot be pessimist
But a Bolshevik is the supreme pragmatist
>>2290660you are a moron
Lenin was a genius who could do real-time analysis and strategise accordingly.
You idealist morons have a fossilised 'analysis' which is nothing more than regurgitating big words which can only impress academics and nothing more.
>>2290636>random chances and the decisions of a handful of individualsall those were direct consequences of material reality and decisions made to respond to this reality that most people wouldve made. Bolcheviks were also very competent and dedicated and did all the right crucial choices. None of this was "random", some of it was unpredictable and yet they still reacted well and managed to seize complete victory from an incredible clusterfuck.
In fact, if you look at many communist victories, they often faced incredible odds and yet skill, dedication and the ability to act with pragmatism and focusing on material reality rather than on spooks gave them the win. The long march, the russian civil war, the cuban revolution, thats not simple luck, clawing out the win in those conditions demand above all dedicated and competent cadres.
>>2290660>He literally said that he wouldn't live to see the revolution weeks before it happened.Sauce? Not because I doubt it, but because that's hilarious and I want to have it up my sleeve.
Lenin was very clearly a pragmatist who seized opportunities they saw, and I don't see a problem with that.
>and Lenin was making shit up as he was going alongAh right, they should have been taking guidance from…………………….. uh…
>Lenin and the Bolsheviks are condemned by history,HAHAHAHA
>>2290636The details are how they are because of larger trends of history. These moments you list are not mere moments unmoored from history and causality. They are symptoms of greater trends. To some degree there are variations in how history might play out, but our struggle is on the timeline of centuries not election cycles.
>>2290660This is true and it's based.
You have to be an opportunist to follow the flow of history. Making it up as you go along is necessary because history doesn't follow a script. It's called scientific socialism for a reason. You have to figure it out in practice. This revelation is what made Marx into a materialist. Lenin had all sorts of high minded ideals but they were ill suited for the revolution he fought so he abandoned them, which was absolutely necessary.
The Bolshies had to be mass murdering thugs (a good thing when you have a mass of reactionaries or fascists opposing you) to secure their proto-socialist state (sorry Makhno you were right about the long arc of history but not this historical moment). The Russian empire wasn't in a condition suitable for socialism let alone anarchism and the revolution it got was the best it could get without international revolution happening elsewhere at the same time.
If Stalin had been softer, the Nazis would have won the eastern front. That's more a case of being right by accident than anything, but that still makes it the right answer. Would that the USSR made a pact with Satan and made themselves literal demons so they could have laid waste to the Nazis and other bourgeois forces of Europe and made the continent red. Stalin setting the stage for the USSR to decay is preferable to the Nazis winning.
Moreover, the USSR was bound to fail from its very inception because it was built on shaky foundations. A True (Soviet) Socialism could not have won the Russian civil war which makes its superiority a moot point. Thereafter, the USSR remained under siege for its whole existence. Even its ashes remain besieged. It was a lost cause from the start, but even as a dying star they managed to accomplish plenty for the workers of the world and they deserve their place in history as one of the righteous first steps of toward communism.
The mistake is to treat them as a template rather than an early fluke where some element of communism won out for a while. This goes for all actually existing socialism, of all stripes.
>>2291282>OPPORTUNISM [Marxist-Leninist senses]>1. The political line and activity of an individual, group of people, or a political party who, though claiming that they are revolutionaries working to overthrow capitalism, in reality only work for some of the short-term interests of the proletariat in achieving reforms. In other words, in its most common usage, opportunism pretty much means the same thing as reformism.>2. A type of revisionism within MLM parties, whose essence is well summed up by Lenin in the following quotations:
>“The idea of class collaboration is opportunism’s main feature….>“Opportunism means sacrificing the fundamental interests of the masses to the temporary interests of an insignificant minority of the workers or, in other words, an alliance between a section of the workers and the bourgeoisie, directed against the mass of the proletariat.” —V. I. Lenin, “The Collapse of the Second International”, section VII, (May-June 1915), LCW 15.
>“The opportunist does not betray his party, he does not act as a traitor, he does not desert it. He continues to serve it sincerely and zealously. But his typical and characteristic trait is that he yields to the mood of the moment, he is unable to resist what is fashionable, he is politically short-sighted and spineless. Opportunism means sacrificing the permanent and essential interests of the party to the momentary, transient and minor interests.” —V. I. Lenin, “The Russian Radical is Wise After the Event” (Oct. 18, 1906), LCW 11:239.
>“Once again [Alexander] Parvus’ apt observation that it is difficult to catch an opportunist with a formula [or mutually agreed-upon political statement] has been proved correct. An opportunist will readily put his name to any formula and as readily abandon it, because opportunism means precisely a lack of definite and firm principles.” —V. I. Lenin, What Is To Be Done? (Feb. 1902), Appendix, LCW 5:525.
>“Opportunism does not extend recognition of the class struggle to the cardinal point, to the period of transition from capitalism to communism, of the overthrow and the complete abolition of the bourgeoisie.” —V. I. Lenin, “The State and Revolution” (Aug.-Sept. 1917), chapter II, section 3; LCW 25:412.
>“Opportunism is our principal enemy. Opportunism in the upper ranks of the working-class movement is not proletarian socialism, but bourgeois socialism. Practice has shown that persons active in the working-class movement who adhere to the opportunist trend are better defenders of the bourgeoisie than the bourgeois themselves.” —V. I. Lenin, “Report on the International Situation and the Fundamental Tasks of the Communist International”, delivered at the Second Congress of the Communist International, July 19, 1920.https://www.massline.org/Dictionary/O.htm#opportunismSee also: LENIN—On Opportunism and its Roots in the Labor Movement
https://www.massline.org/Dictionary/LE.htm#Lenin_on_opportunismalso also "No Compromises?" from lwc:aid
>Many sophists (being unusually or excessively “experienced” politicians) reason exactly in the same way as the British leaders of opportunism mentioned by Comrade Lansbury: “If the Bolsheviks are permitted a certain compromise, why should we not be permitted any kind of compromise?" […]Naïve and quite inexperienced people imagine that the permissibility of compromise in general is sufficient to obliterate any distinction between opportunism, against which we are waging, and must wage, an unremitting struggle, and revolutionary Marxism, or communism. But if such people do not yet know that in nature and in society all distinctions are fluid and up to a certain point conventional, nothing can help them but lengthy training, education, enlightenment, and political and everyday experience. In the practical questions that arise in the politics of any particular or specific historical moment, it is important to single out those which display the principal type of intolerable and treacherous compromises, such as embody an opportunism that is fatal to the revolutionary class[…]defence of direct or indirect alliances with the bourgeoisie of one’s own country against the revolutionary proletariat and the “Soviet” movement, and defence of bourgeois democracy and bourgeois parliamentarianism against “Soviet power” became the principal manifestations of those intolerable and treacherous compromises, whose sum total constituted an opportunism fatal to the revolutionary proletariat and its cause.etc
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/ch08.htmPragmatism is also a philosophy but I think here its less specific and refers more to recognizing that the specific conditions of a given situation may require different strategies and tactics, and not a dogmatic adherence to some kind of static list. Pragmatism, practical, practice, what actions you take to achieve the goals. Revolutionary tactical flexibility, temporary strategic comprimises. Reformists and tailists are two types of opportunism, like people who make their whole platform raising wages, especially for labor aristocrats under imperialism, without emphasizing class or making it clear it is just a first step, advocating for more of a share instead of abolishing exploitation, or supporting racist unions just because it appeals to the masses, while also undermining class solidarity and revolution. Basically jumping onto whatever the hot new topic is just because the workers like it. Today this might be something like endorsing "anti-woke" without explaining to the masses that low risk slop that appeals to the lowest common denominator is inherent to monopoly production and that getting rid of the "bad capitalists" means you just reset the cycle and end up in the same place.
>>2290660what a bunch of absolute chads honestly
one of the most important qualities of a revolutionary is ruthlesness otherwise you end up being dropped from helicopters
>>2291517Again we don't have time for delusions and irrelevant writings that only cater to intellectuals, we have to deal with the reality of our country and the world
>>2291520Good think I'm not a Marxist, I'm a Socialist
>>2290636None of the individual decisions matter in the face of class composition. It's so insignificant whether or not Germany attacks through Belgium or Switzerland when German working class is striking (or not) and destroying Germany's ability to wage offensive war
Specific justification under which Germany, Britain, France have occupied Soviet cities - Odessa, Vladivostok, Baltic states - don't matter, there's always a one excuse or another, what matters is if proletariat of those countries was sabotaging war effort or not.
>>2291532>they literally do nothing to advance communism neither in china ???
>totally not a capitalist strategy to slow down the tendency of the rate of profit to fall?????
but that speeds it up.
>>2290636Hey, this is a solid breakdown of how many contingent events and individual decisions shaped the Bolshevik victory. You’re right to emphasize that history isn’t just a blank slate and that random factors and key moments made a big difference.
That said, if you want to dig deeper into why those conditions even came about, why the system was ripe for such upheaval in the first place, I’d recommend checking out Louis Althusser’s Marxist structuralism. Unlike views that focus heavily on individual decisions or surface events, Althusser helps us see how deep structural contradictions within capitalism and the state create the conditions that make certain outcomes possible or even likely.
For example, WWI and the collapse of the Tsarist regime weren’t just random happenstances or decisions by a few leaders, they were the result of long-term systemic pressures like imperialist rivalries, class antagonisms, and ideological state apparatuses shaping how people think and act. Althusser’s framework helps explain how what might look like “random chances” are actually shaped and limited by these underlying social structures.
So, while the specific decisions by Nicholas II or Kerensky mattered, they took place within a system whose contradictions were pushing toward crisis and revolution. Using Althusser’s approach might help you combine your clear sense of contingency with a deeper understanding of the structural forces behind it all.
>>2291587Rather than extending capitalism it actually sharpens the contradictions of class conflict. Industrialized nations were able to break the rise in wages away from the corresponding rise in productivity by outsourcing jobs. They could have just lowered wages on their own but they wouldn't risk it because of union organizing, which has correspondingly gone down as a result, and it was easier to just find someone willing to work for less. Moving overseas was a double, killing unions and getting cheaper labor. But if every country is developed it is no longer profitable to outsource jobs, those people wont work for less anymore, those jobs will get unionized and their will be an increase in labor struggles, and maybe some of those jobs will even move back, and then those people will demand unions and higher pay too. And that higher pay will cut into the already low profits even more.
So you've actually just given a good example of how China advances communism abroad. Great work comrade!
>>2291596>>2291598>>2291598The Chinese Communist Party has already provided US$40 million to build the Mwalimu Julius Nyerere Leadership School in Kibaha, named after Tanzania’s revered founding father, which opened in 2022. Beijing also supported the refurbishment of the Herbert Chitepo School of Ideology in Zimbabwe – the political training school of the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front – that was completed last year.
In a report published by the Africa Centre for Strategic Studies on July 29, Nantulya said China seemed to be following the model it used in Ghana, where it has provided successive ruling parties with political leadership training since 2018.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has escalated its training of African party and government officials as part of CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping’s “new model of party-to-party relations,” particularly in the Global South. An indication of this renewed emphasis is the Mwalimu Julius Nyerere Leadership School. Launched in 2022, the Nyerere School trains ruling party members from the Former Liberation Movements of Southern Africa (FLMSA) coalition—Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe.
China has built or supported African party schools going back to the 1960s. However, the Nyerere School is the first to be modeled after the CCP Central Party School, which trains China’s top cadres and leaders. It is also the first of its kind to cater to multiple African political parties. This school parallels the China-Africa Institute, a continental CCP initiative to train African party and government leaders. The Institute, which started in 2019, is based within the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing and the African Union (AU) in Addis Ababa.
CCP-supported governance and party training also occurs at the national level as illustrated by the refurbishment of the Herbert Chitepo School of Ideology, the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) party school, completed in 2023.
On February 22, 2022, the inaugural class of the Mwalimu Julius Nyerere Leadership School in Kibaha, Tanzania, listened intently to a message from Chinese President Xi Jinping. The Chinese leader spoke of “Great Changes Unseen in a Century” (bainian weiyou de da bianju; 百年未有 的大变局) and the “urgent need for China and African countries to strengthen solidarity, common development, and exchange of Chinese experience and mutual understanding in governance.”
Named after Tanzania’s revered founding father, this School is a joint project of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and six Southern African ruling liberation movements: the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO), the South West African People’s Organization (SWAPO) of Namibia, Tanzania’s Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM, or Revolutionary Party), South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC), and the Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF).
These parties are part of the Former Liberation Movements of Southern Africa (FLMSA) coalition, which analyzes geostrategic trends, domestic and global challenges to their rule, and plans to provide one another support. FLMSA is an incarnation of the Frontline States (FLS) alliance—a grouping of Southern African countries that gave sanctuary to guerillas fighting colonialism and apartheid. The FLMSA, in turn, is the nucleus of the 16-member Southern African Development Community (SADC).
The School underscores China’s approach to playing the long game to building influence.
China has been an ideological and military supporter of the six liberation movements and is now the sole external partner of FLMSA. China also provides more professional military education (PME) opportunities to SADC than other African regions. The Nyerere Leadership School reinforces this strategic partnership. It enables the six FLMSA parties to lay plans more systematically using training, educational, residential, and sporting facilities gifted to them by the CCP’s Central Party School in Beijing
very bad not good not communist no pls stop
>>2292284>both of these claims are correct one at the beginning and eventually the other oneI dont think that is correct. More goods does not increase rate of profit, but it can increase market share for an individual. But individual share of absolute profit does not change or reverse the tendency of the rate of profit to fall in total and does nothing to delay the contradictions capitalism. Again it actually increases them.
The share of total appropriation of surplus value towards a communist state further puts strain on non-communists, as private individuals they are reliant on profit, while a state is not.
>>2302656Didn’t Stalin date and fuck a 13 year old?
Or was a young adolescent an adult in the early 20th Century?
>>2290636OP, I wouldn't see that as a refutation of Marxist historiography, at least not the kind I subscribe to. What looks like a random chain of decisions, mistakes, and accidents (the Tsar going to the front, Kerensky's bungled self-coup, the arming of the Red Guards, the SRs' inaction) actually makes more sense when viewed through the lens of overdetermination i.e. how historical outcomes emerge from the interaction of many contradictions at once: economic, political, ideological, institutional. None of these events happened in a vacuum. WWI, for instance, wasn't just a diplomatic fluke, it was rooted in the structural tensions between imperialist powers under capitalism. Kerensky didn't act in pure ignorance or stupidity. He was constrained by the ideological and political structures of a collapsing liberal state. The choices made weren't just free-floating errors, they were shaped by a specific historical conjuncture.
One can reject both rigid economic determinism and the romantic idea that history is made by great individuals. People act, certainly, but they do so within structures they don't control (and often without realizing how deeply ideology has shaped their options, assumptions, and language). Ideology is material. It's not just what we think, it's what we do, how we live, what institutions we inhabit, the rituals and habits that form our reality. So when the Petrograd sailors sat on their island printing newspapers, or when the SRs hesitated to shoot, I don't just see that as incompetence or idealism. I see it as ideology acting through them. They were interpellated into roles and beliefs by systems that go far deeper than conscious intention.
There's no built-in path to socialism, no historical logic unfolding behind events. The Bolsheviks could've failed. Revolutions do fail. But the point is that even failure happens within structure. So when someone tells me the Russian Revolution was just a series of improbable events, I don't necessarily disagree. But I'd ask what made those improbabilities possible in the first place. What contradictions had to be in place for things to fall apart in that particular way? I don't think that makes history any less contingent, but it does make it legible. Not as a story of accidents, but as the messy, fractured outcome of deep structural forces working through real people, with no guarantee of success. That's why history is a process without a subject.
>>2291520A pipe-smoking, vodka-drinking Georgian decided the fate of billions of people, including you and me, along with his Anglo allies and future enemies
Laws, borders, and even the placement of millions of people were determined by a handful of men. We can only dream of wielding such immense power.
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