/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

>>2440292
>Marx’s body of work was fundamentally open-ended and “Marxism” is just a whole bunch of people treating the man’s work as a sacred text to to be interpreted rather than as a tool to be used and coming to all sorts of incompatible and esoteric conclusions, and then shooting each other over it
>>2440432
>The appeal of Marxism is that it gives you a theory of everything. Its like Aristotle. The philosophy is connected to theory of history which is connected to the economics and to praxis. Because its so tightly integrated its like a jenga tower … Because of the collapse of the USSR, Marxists have developed a siege mentality where all outsiders are bad unless proven otherwise.
Marx kind of has a dual character, because on the one hand he was more of a scientist than many of his later followers. Engels also clarified a few things. It is open-ended and not teleological. But he also had an intolerant side, and I think that side was stressed more when things got serious and when Marxism fell into the hands of revolutionary politicians. Marx could describe tendencies and contradictions, but he could also be rhetorical, and Marxists can treat what was rhetorical as scientific "truths." Marx was also not interested in certain things, but it's like those things became unimportant because he didn't find them interesting.

>>2440799
>When I read Orwell.
>>2440844
>It's a critique of capitalism, but it does work as a critique of vangardism too.
Check out Milovan Djilas' "The New Class." He wrote a critique of communism in the 1950s that hits very hard because he was a high-ranking communist politician and revolutionary. His basic argument is that the party bureaucracy formed a new class and they owned everything and had privileges and became increasingly vulgar and blatant about it. Orwell's instincts were more literary and emotional. I like Mao. I think a lot of communists stop short when it comes to turning their own method back around on themselves. That said, it might also be that this "new class" also really emerged out of the mode of production of large-scale industry anyways. The base produces the class, and once it exists, the class builds an ideology around it and the institutions (police, censorship) to justify and protect its position, which in this case was dogmatic Marxism-Leninism. They didn't like new ideas because they were a bunch of industrial managers for whom the system worked.

I joined the team that wins without trying.

>>2440292
>Marxists themselves are some of the most viscerally insufferable people … TL;DR Basically, you could say I’m an anarchist because, unlike Marxists, I actually take Marx and the best of his followers seriously and at their word
The anarchists I've come across have come in two types. Either they're much more relaxed and open-minded compared to the communists I've met, or they're total fucking wrecker maniacs who will do something really stupid (and futile) and I want nothing to do with that. I am more partial to the large-scale, society-wide politics that Marxists at least aspirationally aim at.

Funny thing is the "utopian socialists" actually went out and made experimental societies, unlike the "scientific socialists" who dreamed up castles in the sky about labor vouchers and cribbing maxims from the Bible.

>>2440980
well, they're never satisfied.
want to start your own commune? utopian.
want to vote for left-wing candidates? reformist.
want to be charitable? moralist.

its a prison of defeatism. thats why i also realised that its important to separate politics from the civil. marxists will often use politics as an excuse to be bad people, while mocking anyone who thinks being on the left means trying to actually making things better.

Anarchism is retarded

>>2440292
You are contradicting yourself, my guy.
>1. An alarming number of Marxists treat Marxist theory as a dogma rather than an actual theory capable of change, and sneer “revisionist!” at any Marxist intellectual doing interesting or innovative work in ways that are too heterodox for their liking.
>3. They’re not fucking Marxists. They’re Engels-ists getting it filtered from Lenin. Or they’re Luxemburgists. Or Bordigists. Or Frankfurt Guys. Or Althusserians.
Which one is it? Do Marxists develop theory further or are they dogmatists?

>Marx’s body of work was fundamentally open-ended and “Marxism” is just a whole bunch of people treating the man’s work as a sacred text to to be interpreted rather than as a tool to be used and coming to all sorts of incompatible and esoteric conclusions, and then shooting each other over it
People here screech endlessly about groups that actually use Marxism as a tool to uplift the people instead of treating it like a sacred book. Especially the largest one, CPC. They have no respect for the materialist criteria of truth, only their idea of what a socialist society should look like.

Either way, if your conclusion was to become an anarchist - a group that historically failed to bring about any change at all - then I don't know what to say. You are just not a materialist.

>>2440996
I think the Chinese have a more open-ended and pragmatic view of it. The Soviet version as codified by Stalin had serious flaws. It had some features of socialism but was centered around military mobilization and a personality cult around Stalin which demanded strict obedience to a hierarchy. There was too much concentration of power and a special interest group formed out of that numbering between 500,000-700,000 people + their relatives who'd game the system. It was around 1.5% of the population.

Marxist apostates are just spineless opportunists. I'd say that they were hardly Marxist at all. They like the idea of social revolution but not so much to actually work towards a new social order. This isn't dengist apologia - you can go to the elementary level, even. They are too good for practical organizing. Oh boo hoo we live the times of darkest reaction, so what? We don't have to go blindly towards social revolution, because we already know what needs to be done. You just don't want to work for it.

I think it's time to move away from Marx. I don't mean abandon his work but why do we make him the center of everything? There's no Nietzscheism, no Foucaultism etc but we can still appreciate those guys. We need to stop making literally one guy the center of a cult. Forget Marx!

>>2440292
>2. Materialism (in Marx’s sense) is and always will be a more useful way of looking at the world than culturalism
Disagree. The irony is that Marxists themselves wind up being vulgar materialists. I'm not even sure if Marx was a philosophical materialist or if he was just following Victorian scientific conventions. If by 'materialism' you mean analysis of how a community makes a living within its environment, that idea has merit but serious limits. Its pretty obvious that material conditions do not determine society the way Marxists claim they do. Autistic fixation on material conditions leads to a dozen other factors being ignored. The materialism of Marxists often blinds them. They end up coming with unhinged explanations for things entirely through extrapolating from Marxist dictum rather than studying the question and anyone who disagrees with them is branded an anti-materialist.

>Marx’s body of work was fundamentally open-ended and “Marxism” is just a whole bunch of people treating the man’s work as a sacred text to to be interpreted rather than as a tool to be used and coming to all sorts of incompatible and esoteric conclusions, and then shooting each other over it
The reasons Marxists shoot each other over disagreements is because they believe Marxism is a science. In their modernist conception of science, there can't be two truths and a difference of opinion on a point would be tantamount to conceding Marxism isn't a science. So wherever they disagree, one side must be false and since Marxism is a political movement the people who are false always end up being turned into enemies who have to be purged. Liberals behave in more or less the same way, but liberalism is a looser tradition than Marxism meaning there's more room for internal disagreement. Marxists can never agree to disagree because their extreme materialist scientism precludes that.


>>2440976
Anarchists often have the same problems as Marxists. Like communists, they love their arcane Victorian theories, like to lecture to people, and think they know what's best for ordinary people without bothering to listen to them. They are also prone to cultist thinking and fads that expose them as moral hypocrites e.g. Rojava. The plus side is that anarchist theory seems less dogmatic but not by a huge margin.

>>2440996
>Which one is it? Do Marxists develop theory further or are they dogmatists?
Those things aren't contradictory. Marxism as we know it today was a post-Marx creation. A lot of the stuff Marxists take as bible came from Engels and Kautsky. A complete critical edition of Marx's entire work has never been published. Marxism ossified in the period between the 1880s-1920s and has remained more or less static ever since.

>>2438942
> if you are do not treat members of the upper classes
>>2438942
>if you are do not treat members of the lower classes
You could had a machine help you out with your granmar Mr. Techno-ESL. I puzzled at the first one, then decided it must be a typo, then you did it again.

>>2438942
When i got a taste of Dubai chocolate.

that's a stupid reason OP
I never fully stopped being influenced by Marxism, but now I view it more as a lense for analysis than a comprehensive worldview. Ironically it was reading Marx and Engels that drove me to get the necessary qualifications for university and quit my job to study history and anthropology. Through my studies I got disillusioned with a lot of Marxist claims about history. Also Lenins theory of imperialism is wrong and I can't take its modern advocates serious.

It's impossible to abandon "Darwinism" nowadays and likewise it should be nearly impossible to abandon "Marxism", the issue is that some """Marxists""" think they ONLY have to read Marx to understand anything. You have mfs thinking they can opine on chemistry or military strategy just because they read the first volume of Capital. It makes no sense and makes the entire ideology worse.

I was a Marxist a long time ago . I left it when I saw that there was a flaw in the Soviet system that the environment did not change the consciousness of the Soviet people after decades of socialism in other words the Soviet people’s consciousness was still rather capitalist orientated after years of socialism the mind did not change due to the environment but was rather still empirical and deterministic .because I was reading these ex socialist physicists who were socialists in the 20s but by the 70s were full on hippie liberals.saying only neoliberalism can stop global warming and what a lie that was . So I came back to Marx and Reread almost his works and saw I didn’t know shit about Marxism and now I’m loving Marx

>>2442040
nukes spooked the CPSU leaders into liberalism. look at how gorbacuck dismantled the warsaw pact and the USSR and rolled out the red carpet for the bandit plunderers of the west in the hopes that they would… what? Not expand NATO?

>>2438942
>if you are do not treat members of the upper classes as human beings but as machines programmed to optimise their economic interests
<implying marxism is vulgar economism
didnt read marx award

>technocratic communism
LMAO

>>2442040
<"consciousness" in sociological terms
<implying proletarians can even choose not to keep "producing value for rich people" (?)
<some philosophical shit about being le individual
fucking retard

>I didn’t know shit about Marxism
you clearly still dont

>>2438942
I came to believe that orthodox marxism (NOT marxism-leninism) is barely different from anarchism so now I'm just a non-denominational libertarian leftist

>>2444809
>Marx’s analysis of capitalism is too mechanical. He neglected services in favor of commodities. Despite that, he failed to fully account for the cultural life of commodity consumption. He dangerously neglects rural economics which is one of the reasons Marxist regimes struggled with peasants. Marx doesn’t really challenge our ideas about exchange, what commodities are, how distribution works. Compare him to Mauss’ study of gift economies. There’s a whole logic of Western commodity production and exchange that Marx just takes as a matter of fact, but why did it take this particular form?

>Another problem is Marx understands the need to exploit labor. But he doesn’t analyze how labor is actually policed, controlled, and subjected to surveillance, the micro politics of factory life etc. that stuff is super important because these technologies of control become the focal points of class conflict.
most if not all of that can be done by expanding marxism rather than rejecting him

>>2447264
marx sees exchange as constitutive of the value relation (as per the value form) because it trades a use-value for an exchange-value. this differs from gift exchange since gifting is the circulation of reciprocal debts rather than the termination of value in consumption. of course, marx's shortcoming is his classical prejudice of exchange being a means to an end rather than an end in itself. we see in large scale industries the place of gambling too, where the point isnt to win, but to keep playing, like how it would be highly unethical to hold a surplus of birthday money rather than sharing wealth, even though its the rational thing to do. marx prefigures reason into the economy.
>he questioned markets
he praises market activity here:
>This sphere that we are deserting, within whose boundaries the sale and purchase of labour-power goes on, is in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of man. There alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham. Freedom, because both buyer and seller of a commodity, say of labour-power, are constrained only by their own free will. They contract as free agents, and the agreement they come to, is but the form in which they give legal expression to their common will. Equality, because each enters into relation with the other, as with a simple owner of commodities, and they exchange equivalent for equivalent. Property, because each disposes only of what is his own. And Bentham, because each looks only to himself. The only force that brings them together and puts them in relation with each other, is the selfishness, the gain and the private interests of each. 
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch06.htm

>>2441053
Please do elaborate what is wrong with Marxist claims about history and what is wrong about Lenin's theory of imperialism.

>>2449051
>what is wrong about Lenin's theory of imperialism
Even Lenin himself prefaced his literal pamphlet with telling you to read better writings on the matter.

Anyway, this article is pretty concise on everything wrong with it.
https://ruthlesscriticism.com/lenin.htm

Of all the daddy figures larpers love to ape Lenin was the only communist, sure, but they still make the mistake of applying everything he did in a time of literal war and revolution 1:1 to a century later.

>>2449052
How about you just explain it in your own words?

>>2449060
I've wasted enough time arguing with retards in this shithole, if you can't read some short article then that's entirely on you. Sorry I'm not unemployed.

>>2449063
Just admit you can't concisely explain it then lol. If you're oh so busy to give just a basic overview of your position on the matter, then what are you even doing here? Just shut the fuck up, close your tab and never come back if your time is so precious

>>2449052
I do not understand the point of this word salad. >Lenin is moralizing!
No more than Marx, using loaded language for effect is not moralizing. And it's funny to chastise Lenin's "humanism" when this "humanism", again, is no different from Marx's. In all likelihood, it's exactly Marx that Lenin would have inherited this "eccentric" feature from in his writings.
>Lenin is doing a fascism!
No more than Marx when Marx writes about the "progressive" parts of capitalism. And if such "polemic" is useless, as the author implies, then so is much of Marx's "polemic".
>Lenin was wrong about monopolies and bribery!
Besides not actually citing anything concrete to "debunk" Lenin, the author seems confused. Even IF some part of Lenin's formulation is false, let us say hypothetically, that does NOT translate to the ENTIRE text being false.

To quote Lenin, from the very preface you are referencing:
>This pamphlet was written with an eye to the tsarist censorship. Hence, I was not only forced to confine myself strictly to an exclusively theoretical, specifically economic analysis of facts, but to formulate the few necessary observations on politics with extreme caution, by hints, in an allegorical language—in that accursed Aesopian language—to which tsarism compelled all revolutionaries to have recourse whenever they took up the pen to write a “legal” work.
I guess we can forgive Lenin for being "wrong" about politics, when the man self-censored himself exactly on politics.

Furthermore, the claim by the author that WW1 was not a "land grab", ergo this disproves Lenin, is funny to me. Firstly, because in the other preface, the German and French one, Lenin says the war "of 1914-1918" vindicated his pamphlet (I'm presuming this edition was published after the war). Secondly, I am no historian, but I was literally taught in history class that one of the primary causes of WW1 was the struggle for colonies; indeed, Lenin affirms this again, in the same paragraph I referenced just now.

You don't seem like much of a historian or anthropologist when you post trash a layman like me can dismantle, a layman who isn't even actively involved in any communist groups, who casually reads Marx and Lenin, yet somehow knows Marx and Lenin better than the person running a website called "ruthless criticism".

>>2449129
It's crazy how much of a waste of time it is to read anything written by ultras. I somehow always get fooled into thinking that maybe this time it will be something of value, but it pretty much never is

>>2449213
It's interesting. My readings of Marx, Engels and Lenin indicate to me that it IS possible to guess what they "meant". This is in contrast to the views of the critical theory "death of the author" types and the (in effect) practice of the sectarian types. I guess there's several factors that lead me to that conclusion:
1. There is an unprecedented availability of information concerning these (and other) figures that might not have been available in the past (where the critical theory and sectarian views/practice crystallized, the article I was responding to for example was written in 1981 if the label is to be believed).
2. Following from the above, the abundance of writings left by or referencing Marx, Engels, Lenin, etc., not just the theoretical works, but the letters, the memoirs, combined with numerous biographies about their lives, their written memory in other words, almost figuratively allow us to "pick at their brains".
3. For example, a common in the past, and still levied at today, criticism of Marx was that he was "eurocentric". This misconception is literally cleared up instantaneously by reading the letter correspondence with the Russian narodnik socialists. Want to guess at what was going on in Lenin's head in relation to anarchists? There are at least two very vivid memoirs I know of featuring Lenin's meetings with anarchist figures. These trails available to us are, as far as I can tell, not actually being used much at all, which is a terrible shame, as they are a historical rarity: Marx, Engels, Lenin, etc. might literally be the most documented figures from first-hand accounts in the entirety of history, this is the closest humanity has accidentally ever gotten to being able to "reconstruct" a dead person's mind. If society wasn't so rabidly anti-communist, we could be interacting with faithful AI versions of them in the future, unironically.

The Marxists themselves. I just found Marxists very limited in their analyses and closed minded to anything outside of the explanatory power of Marxism. It seemed like a fast track to becoming retarded.

>>2440292
>but Marxists are some of the most hypocritically great man brained dipshits alive

You are fighting against the correct theory by screaming about how the correct theory is "great man influence". You are the hypocrite

>>2440861
Source for the image?

>>2438942
I realized it's all for nothing. Either China takes care of everything, in which case it's irrelevant to me, or western communists have to organize and do something useful, in which case we're doomed, or Marx is wrong, in which case it's irrelevant to me. Beyond that, what, it's a moderately interesting framework for looking at the news and going "ah yeah, class interests innit"

I've developed a lot of respect for basically every institution simply by comparing it with western marxist orgs. A failing local bakery is usually more institutionally functional and more socially worthwhile.
It's oddly started to push me in a more pro-market direction because one of the reasons pretty much any business is more successful than any western marxist org is because the market gets rid of the businesses that aren't. It's an elegant countervailing force to idiot failure. You don't have to remind me of all the edge-cases, failures, monopolies, etc, I've not suddenly become a libertarian - but it's a failure of equal magnitude to ignore all of the successes. Walmart engaging in massive central planning because it works for walmart is as much an argument for market forces as it is for central planning.
And, in any case, this is all very abstract because the people who're supposedly going to bring us central planning are useless shitposters like me. But not me, because frankly I'd rather make a webcomic than waste my life pretending to herd cats ("organizing").

idk I think we should change society insteas of just being correcr in our assessment of it

>>2438942
>human beings but as machines
True!

>>2450394
>A failing local bakery is usually more institutionally functional and more socially worthwhile.
The whole premise of communism, that is the critique of capitalism, is that having failing bakeries is wholly unnecessary. For example, if the bakery is short-staffed, due to wage pressure on the owner, everyone is worse off, even the owner. Communists ask: for what purpose? When we have all the prerequisite elements in play to not have this happen, what is the obstacle? Capital, its stranglehold over society. Abolish capital! This critique's truthfulness does not go away, regardless of how we choose to feel about it. If you've ever worked at a short-staffed workplace yourself, you knew YOURSELF even without reading any communists that it's a waste and shouldn't rationally happen, yet it does.

>>2438942
I abandoned marxism after learning that china indeed is ruled by a true communist party.

>>2452070
I have no real objection to that critique, where it collapses is
>Abolish capital!
because communists nominally organizing to do this run their organizations even more poorly than the imaginary bakery.

>>2440962
>>2440799
Bait should be treated with a bullet to the head

>>2440962
What "new" class? This "class" had essentially nothing compared to even a millionaire in the US or other capitalist states. Their influence was fucking tiny, they had no private property, essentially no rights and no command over labour. It's like saying the pmc have replaced the bourgeoisie as a class even though these are literal just managers, and even those managers in a capitalist system have more rights and are more akin to a class than some fucking party bureaucrats.

>>2452335
Wat if bait is correct invariant marxist line?

>>2452360
Oh no, it's retarded.

>>2452333
"Communists", you mean politicians and activists? The criticism you have isn't specific to ideology. I'm all-too-well familiar with the poor organization of political parties and NGOs, and I don't even live in a country with "communists".

>abandon
>not fusing two things that seemingly dont belong together, Marxist-Stirnerism, and pissing everyone off in the process
Get on my level

Marxism is a window into a different intellectual age when materialism could still be held by serious commentators as unifying paradigm for the social and political sciences. No doubt there are still materialists floating around, eagerly jotting down their thoughts for submission to the New Left Review, but as time and events go onward its explanatory power becomes less and less. Marxism's chief problem is also its virtue. Its globe scope, its lack of intellectual parochialism, its ambition and its attempt to explain the long sweep of history in a genuinely systematic way. Marxists simply reduce global cultural relations and processes into "modes of production" rather than melding cultural aspects more effectively with political economy. I do not find this economic determinism persuasive: ideology and culture cannot simply be reduced to veneers covering particular modes of production. That being said, nearly all modern social theory can be thought of as a conversation with Marx.

So what am I now? Marxian? Anarchist? Do these labels even matter?

>what made you turn away from Marxism?
Meth.

>>2453691
Mistakes into miracles.

>>2438942
>For fellow Marxist apostates: what made you turn away from Marxism?
What is certain is that I myself am not a Marxist.

Marx lacks path depedency