/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

>Marxist literature
>Marxist states
<communism as ideology
i dont think the problem is the word, youre just retarded

>>2451440
Okay wise guy, why am I "retarded"? If you can spare the time for a verbal downvote, you can spare the time to explain that downvote.
>Marxist literature
Manifesto, What is to Be Done, Little Red Book…
>Marxist states
China, East Germany, Cuba, Vietnam, North Korea, the Soviet Union…
>communism as ideology
I didn't say it was an ideology, I said it was an all-encompassing geneology, which is to say, something that constitutes multiple ideologies, as well as governments, economic systems, social movements, etc, with the common thread being their relationship to Marx and his intellectual heirs. Am I wrong? And, again, if so, why?

>>2451584
the second dumbest thing you can do on here is make an effortpost because people will just call you retarded without elaborating.

the third dumbest thing you can do on here is pick apart a rude reply and clarify what you mean because they'll just ignore you or call you retarded again.

but really the dumbest thing you can do is type leftypol dot org into your address bar and expect anything good to come of it

>>2451591
Are there places to discuss Marxism that aren't braindead? This is an honest question.

>>2451618
Chinese, Russian, German, and Spanish speakers probably have more communists per capita than speakers of other languages just because of their historical connection to the real movement so go to Marxist websites online that speak those languages and you might have better luck, even if you're stuck using translate tools.

>>2451683
Thanks for the suggestion. I need to learn more languages anyway.

Yeah, it's not a very useful term by itself. It's just a vague framework.

>>2451618
to be honest the time for discussing is long past.

>>2451591
Thermonuclear H-bomb level based take

I agree. Reading Mao I don't think his theory is in line with Marx's reasoning and way of conceiving of things. I have the impression Mao merely used various terms by Marx and Engels as buzzwords.

I find it preferable to make out what "Marxism" is from a epistemological standpoint and decide based on that what counts as "Marxist" instead of adding any Marx inspired political figure and their thoughts to Marxism.

>>2452058
Like?

>>2451433
You have to understand that there are a large number of opportunists in the imperialist core who are co-opted by the bourgeoisie instead of organizing the proletarian class into a party independent of the bourgeoisie to spread revolutionary propaganda, there is an obsession with abstentionism instead of voting for a communist party even though there is no chance of winning, an inability to separate the dictatorship of the proletariat from communism in its low stage, not knowing how to separate the term state capitalism spoken of by Lenin as something specific in the NEP and that it is superior to private capitalism and that it was much more common before the Washington Consensus made this a taboo trying to normalize neoliberalism as "common sense" in today's bourgeois democracies. Another opportunistic error is the inability to separate a socialist economy from anti-imperialism and multipolarism. Some of these opportunists take advantage of this to attack past socialist experiences by accusing them of "state capitalism." Other opportunists use arguments about the liberalization of modern China, which uses state capitalism as an economic tool. These other opportunists create complacency by equating modern China with socialism in the Soviet Union and Maoist China. It's important to remember that anti-imperialism, national liberation struggles, multipolarism, economic sovereignty, international socialist solidarity, and anti-jingoism can be defended without these opportunistic distortions and without equating everything as if it were "inter-imperialist," always prioritizing cutting off financing from financial capital abroad if you are in the imperialist core.

There are opportunists who do not know how to defend anything without regressing to moralism and the Sakaist or "Maoist" opportunists who distort the concept of labor aristocracy spoken of by Lenin out of resentment against the workers of their country to justify their incompetence with the invention that the labor aristocracy does not share interests with other workers and that they would be the majority, when in truth the labor aristocracy is a minority of class traitors who sabotage and deceive other workers of their collective interests, weakening the movement as a whole.

To say you're a Marxist, and I assume you are for overthrowing the bourgeois state and establishing a dotp. Everything else is pointlesss.

>>2452427
right on the money ngl

>>2452451
This is just academic nonsense that looks like a level-headed critique. What Marx brings to the table is the idea of proletarian dictatorship. The laws of capitalist motion could've been discovered by anyone, because they are objective laws of capitalism, but the idea of the proletarian dictatorship - that's what Marx is about.

>>2451618
420Chan when it comes back, /r/Ultraleft for now.

>>2451584
>Little Red Book…
I thought you meant Marxist in the sense of studying Marx, not the "If anything is certain, it is that I am not a Marxist".

because marxism is not an ideology or a "form of government", it's a methodology, dumbass

>>2452451
>Marxists are generally brain dead so no
Even so, a framework based on Marx's writings is useful, at least for showing workers that they are exploited for surplus, if nothing else. If workers are stuck believing their CEO and board of directors "deserves" the profit because they "worked hard" or "created jobs" or "took on risk" you can't even establish a trade union level of consciousness, let alone a more revolutionary class consciousness.

>>2452486

>If workers are stuck believing their CEO and board of directors "deserves" the profit because they "worked hard" or "created jobs" or "took on risk" you can't even establish a trade union level of consciousness, let alone a more revolutionary class consciousness.
https://pplswar.wordpress.com/2020/12/08/on-agitation-ob-agitatsii-arkadi-kremer-julius-martov/
I think you'd like this.

>>2452485
I didn't say it was. I called it a genealogy; an intellectual heritage that is defined by its origins in Karl Marx's thought and its opposition to the current state of things. And I still stand by that assessment.

>>2451584
Marxists believe that 'ideology' is fake crap you believe that maintains the current order. But it's actually a useful older word that means system of belief which is how 99% of people use it so in this instance they're just acting like the smug leftoid academic everyone hates.

Dunno about their problem with the word literature. Maybe only novels can be literature idk.

Mao didn't read Capital. But that's okay who does right.

I don't understand this view that Marxism doesn't really mean anything and Marx I guess just wrote hundreds of thousands of words waffling and not coming to any firm conclusions so socialism is just like vibes man. Wrong. He and Engels had specific views about what socialism meant (hence the whole project of analyzing the traits of capitalism so everyone knew what had to be overcome) and castigated their peers in extremely pedantic ways if they failed to grasp that.

Of course there's that Marx quote where he denies creating a system but that's because he's such a little smart alec. Like when they say they don't have any socialist ideals even though they obviously do by common parlance, i.e. a goal or aspiration, e.g. abolish the distinction between town and country. But they justify it by saying they discovered it scientifically by analyzing capitalism and history instead of having it in their brain ahead of time like the utopians. Because no scientist ever had the correct idea ahead of time right. God I hate philosophy (Marxists will also claim they're not philosophers lol).

If people want to say Marx's ideas weren't detailed enough, aren't workable, don't apply to the modern world, or just plain wrong e.g. transformation problem, and that new ideas are needed, okay, that's a different issue.

>>2452760
>Communism is a belief system, a utopian end goal.

“Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.”
― Karl Marx, German Ideology

And you're the one defending pedophilia in meta, no surprise there.

>>2452761
Yeah that's the type of philosophical bullshit I mentioned. Of course communism is a state of affairs to be established, an ideal of which reality will have to adjust itself:

End commodity production (end bourgeois property, end wage labor, production for exchange, etc.)

End classes.

End the bourgeois family.

End the distinction between town and country.

End religion.

End the state and replace it with an "administration of things"

Lower stage socialism with labor vouchers used to take from the common stock the equivalent of what you put in.

Marx is a thinker like anything else, the human mind thinks in abstracts which is both a blessing and a curse regardless of how educated the person is.
Which is a problem.
There are no terms used to describe how devotional to Marx many "Marxists" are.
Fucking Hitler read Marx you know that right? Two distinct sources state he did, and obviously he did, it was the 1900s, if he wanted to get political he would have to do so eventually, and he almost always went into a autistic rage at "Bolshevism" more than he name dropped Marx, as well as appropriated his terminology but most people would never say he was a Marxist.
Marx himself was most critical of all other socialists. to the point where I don't think he would have ever stopped finding anything wrong with the current state of affairs.
In this however, almost 80% of what modern socialists espouse is actually something he'd call them fucking retards for. There was a book posted here, the title was so abstract I can't even recall it, but I read it, it had citations down to the letters he shared when I read it, and he shit talked every single concept trying to make socialism feasible in his time. You can argue he was trying to tweak it but chances are he was against a lot of those things and more in line with doing away with it for a more decentralized, cashless communism. It's a whole thing.
Third and in relation to the above, there is a giant trove of shit Engels and Marx both said that just would not fly today, it's either going to be seen as insane, reactionary even, or just outdated in relation to places that no longer exist, knowledge that was just wrong, and the more we figure out to be fact with new scientific measurements the more it all comes into question. How come even the most hardcore orthodox Marxists kneel and say "Yeah Marx was wrong and a fucking retard actually."
So what makes a Marxist?
The answer is nothing, we have a tendency to group people together, and before you know it people think they're part of the gang, and that all it takes is agreeing with dialectics or class struggle to be Marxian, or believe in a DOTP.
If Marx came back today he would shit himself and throw a tantrum going "No! I'm the only Marxist! You fucking uyghurs have besmirched my name! Me I am the only one! How dare you turn my works into this!"
He would then be lynched by a angry mob and decapitated in public, his head now used as a football by them would be smiling as death would be preferable to being alive in such a world.
>>2451440
The problem is humans as a species are retarded and have a information glitch programmed in the brain directly.

> "I'm a Marxist" isn't a phrase that tells anyone much of anything
<"The modern synthesis was the early 20th-century synthesis of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and Gregor Mendel's ideas on heredity into a joint mathematical framework. Julian Huxley coined the term in his 1942 book, Evolution: The Modern Synthesis. The synthesis combined the ideas of natural selection, Mendelian genetics, and population genetics. It also related the broad-scale macroevolution seen by palaeontologists to the small-scale microevolution of local populations." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_synthesis_(20th_century)
Neo-Marxism would presumably also be a synthesis of some kind that collects a bunch of diverse fields into one…but the thing is, its all still Darwinian natural selection. Marxism is all still a historical materialist critique of liberal political economy that obscures class war as the root of historical development

>>2452754
>actually a useful older word that means system of belief
<Red Scare podcast neoliberals: "I'm not like those other girls, I'm non-ideological"
the liberal idealist conception of "Ideology" (VS the Marxian Althussy view of the 'ideological state apparatus' as you mentioned) is only a useful word for shit eating radlibs to pretend like they are just rational and objective scientists who magically know the truth

>>2452058
That just means you dont understand Marx's reasoning and way of conceiving of things

>>2451433
>In common usage, it describes a number of largely distinct ideologies and forms of political and economic organization that are connected by genealogy and geopolitics.
sorta yeah sorta not really. ML is just marxism applied to soviet conditions. MZT is applied to chinese conditions. HCMT to vietnam, juche to korean, foco to cuba. that last one even makes an example of itself by not working applied to different conditions. thats why marx oriented ancoms and demsuccs still get critical support when they arent atagonizing communists. its possible they know their conditions and they might apply. the proof is in practice not in theory, and thats marxism.