For fellow Marxist apostates: what made you turn away from Marxism?
I had abandoned Marx and Lenin when I had realised their theory is based on a massive hypocricy: if you are do not treat members of the upper classes as human beings but as machines programmed to optimise their economic interests, you are a doing le based materialst analysis and are epically owning moralists and idealists, but if you are do not treat members of the lower classes as human beings but as machines programmed to optimise their economic interests, you are an evil fascist, eugenicist, and social darwinist (and sometimes racist). Realising that, I ditched ML and jumped on the technocratic communism team.
>>2438942>if you are do not treat members of the upper classes as human beings but as machines programmed to optimise their economic interests, you are a doing le based materialst analysis and are epically owning moralists and idealists, but if you are do not treat members of the lower classes as human beings but as machines programmed to optimise their economic interests, you are an evil fascist, eugenicist, and social darwinist (and sometimes racist).Correct. Now face the wall.
>technocratic communism team.Might as well just say you’re a technocrat, revisionist.
>>2438942I was a member in my countries socialist party for 2 years i also got around for meeting with the other big groups.
Its not marxism or the politics of these groups that i pushed me away,not even the strategy of what we did or anything like that its the peopel the human capital if you will the people associated with all of this just and pardon me but scum i must have meet irl atleast 200 socialists/trots/anarchists/socialdemocrats/activists/radicals and not a single one could i call a good person or even a decent person just scum,human trash.
Was a Marxist until recently, now I’m an anarchist.
First, I’ll say some good things about Marx:
1. His description and analysis of capitalism is correct
2. Materialism (in Marx’s sense) is and always will be a more useful way of looking at the world than culturalism
3. Bakunin was right that for all his personal flaws (and he had many), Marx was a man of analytical genius, and his work remains *the* cornerstone of anti-capitalist politics and theory for a good reason
Okay, that out of the way, I’d say about 60 to 70 percent of his followers are dipshits for the following brief reasons
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. Which flies in the fucking face of what Marx was doing. Marx was a fucking social scientist, not the founder of a religion
2. Marxists themselves are some of the most viscerally insufferable people in the anti-capitalist movement, every time these people show their true face under conditions of online anonymity they just act like edgy radlibs, sneering and moralizing over anything and everything, and then wonder why people would rather eat razors than joining PSL or whatever (anarchists can do this too, but they don’t go out of their way to dick wave in the way marxists do). Yeah maybe don’t make screaming “I WILL SKULLFUCK YOUR DAD FOR BEING TREATLER COCOMELON IS FASCIST AHAHAHAHA I CORNCOBBED YOU CORNCOB BIIIIIIINCH” on Twitter the public face of your ideology
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. 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
4. Marx’s entire project is a massive refutation of great man theory, but Marxists are some of the most hypocritically great man brained dipshits alive. Every breath they take is them glazing the dick of Great Men Who Understood Marx Bestest, whether it’s Stalin or Trotsky or Mao or blah blah blah
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
>>2438942Because not only Marxist was racist and homophobic I think is virtually impossible for communism to flourisy
The best we can hope for is social democracy
>>2440292>Marxist intellectual doing interesting or innovative workCan you point out any such work aside from twitter threats made by socdem literal whos? Marxism is a science and should be treated as such, therefore any revisionism in the strict sense should be a big deal and liberal revisionist rhetoric has shown itself as a very real threat again and again. A student of Marxism should be humble enough to assume past marxists to have reached a greater understanding of political economy than them until proven otherwise.
>Engels-istsNow this is a particularly bad case of revisionism pushed by Kautskyites, Humanists and similar ilk. There is no indication Marx disapproved of what Engels wrote within his lifetime. Any allegations of "Engelsian falsification" i have seen rely on very narrowly litigating the role of dialectics in Marx and speculating about what the unwritten volumes of capital would have looked like.
>Marxists themselves are some of the most viscerally insufferable peopleI blame the state of internet discourse in general. I've noticed plenty of people being vocally wrong or right about something, because conflict drives engagement.
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. Marxists are reluctant to change anything because it might cause the whole system to break so they change nothing. So you end up with a fossil that gets no updates. Because of the collapse of the USSR, Marxists have developed a siege mentality where all outsiders are bad unless proven otherwise. Every other idea or theory is either ignored or brushed off with dismissive hand waving. Even the least unhinged Marxists come off as arrogant and nutty.
Several Marxist theories are just plain wrong or seriously flawed. Marxism was more or less an attempt at reformulating liberalism. The two share the same destination but differ over how to get there. So Marxists suffered from a parasitic relationship with liberalism. Whereas bourgeois liberals created entirely new institutions like modern codified law, the modern state, standing national armies etc. Marxists simply tried to mod these. In any case, liberals can easily point out that their system is more stable in getting to the destination, which neuters the Marxist critique. "Sure, markets may be inefficient but they are better than command economies." So Marxist projects ultimately wind up leading to a restoration of liberalism or end up watered down like China.
Marxists accepted the foundations of Western politics, economics, and sociology. They never seriously challenged the logic and the assumptions behind those ideas. So Marxists were never able to produce a really serious critique of the system we all live under. Despite their contributions, their critique of the system wasn't very deep and nowadays is pretty hollow, one of the reason these guys are constantly attacking each other as CIA agents or bourgeois stooges is because deep down they know how empty it all is.
>>2438942So you traded critical analysis for “Le people are machines”.
I’d take a di.scord server of leftcoms who giggle over slurs and moralism over a bumbling wanna be dictator like you.
>>2438942When I read Orwell.
He hits the nail on the head. Animal Farm is every Marxist/ML state that ever existed.
It also really opened my eyes on how Marxist society and revolution is a utopian pipe dream. It's based on delusions, idealisms and conditions that cannot be reproduced in real conditions.
Circling back to ML implementation is where the proof is manifested. They always start with a revolution, then revisionism happens, classes return, revolutionaries get purged and bourgs take over, concessions are made and dogmas are dropped, people get fed up with all the oppression, hypocrisy and bad living, and before you know it pic related happens.
>>2440856>SO WHATThat's what your saying about superior not for profit healthcare education so on so forth?
OK, bye 👋
>>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.
>>2440980well, 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.
>>2440292You 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 itPeople 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.
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 culturalismDisagree. 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 itThe 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.
>>2440976Anarchists 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 as human beings but as machines programmed to optimise their economic interests<implying marxism is vulgar economismdidnt read marx award
>technocratic communismLMAO
>>2442040<"consciousness" in sociological terms<implying proletarians can even choose not to keep "producing value for rich people" (?)<some philosophical shit about being le individualfucking retard
>I didn’t know shit about Marxismyou clearly still dont
>>2447264marx 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 marketshe 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>>2449051>what is wrong about Lenin's theory of imperialismEven 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.htmOf 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.
>>2449052I 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".
>>2449213It'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.
>>2438942I 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").
>>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.
>>2452070I 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.
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