Why is it so hard for Marxist-Leninists to admit that the bureaucracy of their regimes end up constituting a class with their own interests different from ordinary workers?
Wage labourers in a factory: :OOOOOO
Wage labourers in a government administration building: :/
Because we have a materialist understanding of class
>>2770986which one has more power
>>2770983Because they imagine themselves as the bureaucrats.
>>2770992The one that controls entire economy.
my biggest complain about MLs is not that they are tyranical or exploitative, it's that they do nothing and lost the cold war due to cowardice.
>>2770983>a class with their own interests different from ordinary workers?then why did the bureaucrats aspire to become another bourgeoise? to abolish themselves as a class to become another?
>>2770986What was the wage of workers in the factory compared to upper echelons of bureaucracy?
>>2770983shut it chud, socialism is when M-C-P-C'-M' with a red flag
>>2771035>>2770992Neither of those things are definitive of class. Trotsky had it right when he called them a "privileged stratum" which could develop into a new ruling class. However this didn't really happen until the Gorbachev years. Until then they were an elite stratum with a (mostly) non-antagonistic relationship with the rank and file workers, which is why the USSR was still able to do so much for workers and progressive forces both at home and internationally.
>>2771044The fact that they dissolved it weighs against them being considered a class prior to the very end. If they were a ruling class then this necessarily implies they presided over a mode of production and state apparatus that was designed around their interests, and served them above all others. However if this was the case, then why would they dissolve that mode of production and state apparatus? The truth is they were limited by it, not fully empowered.
>>2770983>what is productive vs. unproductive labour<chegg m8 margsistsread a book
Voroshilov is the only og. bolshevik in this picture
Bureaucracy isn't ideal but so far we haven't seen any concrete alternative to running a revolutionary state unfortunately.
Even revolutionary Catalonia was developing a crypto-bureaucracy.
The situation of most revolutionary states of being at war or economicly encircled also doesn't help by facilitating a tendency twords organization and centralization.
>>2771080Does Bulganin count as an "OG bolshevik" if he joined the party before the revolution?Also that picture is falsely attributed. It's the vote to elect Khruschev as premier in 1958, not to remove him in 1964. Neither Voroshilov nor Bulganin were part of the Central Committee in 1964
As Plato writes in the Republic, the guardian class cannot be permitted to have wealth, and must undertake a vow of poverty to not be corrupted by perverse incentives. I would further add that all politicians must pledge a promise to the public and if they fail, they must immediately be arrested. What Stalin at least got right is that purges of the political class are absolutely necessary.
>>2771021100% yes. After the creation of the Tsar Bomb the USSR should have immediately nuked London without warning.
>>2771102>What Stalin at least got right is that purges of the political class are absolutely necessary.The problem was that Stalin wasn't killing officials because they were corrupt. He was killing them because he was believing fake disinfo made by his enemies who wanted to trick him into thinking that loyalists were enemy agents. This happened multiple times and even past the post-WW2 era.
>>2771170yeah, he was 5'5'' with a mickey mouse voice. manlets should not be allowed to power
>>2771102>What Stalin at least got right is that purges of the political class are absolutely necessary.The purges failed though, and the mechanisms used to carry them out were then immediately deployed in service of the bureaucrats. If you think this is an isolated case then look at Albania, where 40 years of regular purges and a handpicked successor still resulted in their own version of Glasnost before Hoxha was cold in the ground. Only proletarian democracy can defeat and contain the bureaucracy.
>>2771173>this is what lanklets believe.lack of air has ruined your brain, comit bend down.
Or maybe you can accept that all politics are bullshit
>>2771186Fuck off Fed. Just because you work for pedos and war criminals doesn't mean that everyone else wants to be a slave.
>>2771185co2 falls to the ground first big guy
you have to build the world you want to see. revolution is a 2nd job that will probably get you killed. i would much rather be ruled over by a marxist-leninist bureaucracy of former working class revolutionaries than by a bunch of genocidal geriatric pedophile billionaires like i currently am. capiche?
>>2771186>apolitical nihilismpassive acceptance of status quo
>>2770995This.
ML groups tend to attract people who believe they are special strategists who harbour revenge fantasies and feel they could do things better. They can't imagine for a second that they would be the ones working in a factory
>>2770983Because to admit that is to admit Marx's "adminstration of things" was BS and Marx is the least great defense of the industrial system.
>>2770995>>2771461wouldn't you much rather be ruled over by a marxist-leninist bureaucracy of former working class revolutionaries than by a bunch of genocidal geriatric pedophile billionaires like you currently are?
The solution is to make make everyone a bureaucrat
>>2771529yes and anyone who says otherwise is a cuckold
there are no other options it is literally establish a socialist dictatorship or get ruled by pedos and warmongers forever
ML's are also giant hypocrites they want a workers state yet they oppose democracy and want to make it so the working class has no say whatsoever in their country.
I think its just because they know that nobody likes them irl and they'd always lose.
>>2771461At least they can imagine still working post-revolution at all, anarkiddy.
>>2771563>ML's are also giant hypocrites they want a workers state yet they oppose democracyNonsense nobody ever said.
>But what about the POWER and PAY the Bureaucrats have!?
Interests are about end goals, not necessarily the means to those goals being equally distributed.
There's a lot of accusations ITT of MLs wanting to eliminate democracy via the mere existence of people with more power than others to make decisions, but in that there's the obvious suspicion that non-MLs are chronically overestimating how much the average worker wants to micromanage the society they exist in.
>>2770983A labor aristocracy one could say
>>2771703That would imply they produce value
>>2770995/thread
You never see any of these Internet MLs or Commies with pfps of Most Honorable Wrench-Turner in a factory or a humble tenement apartment. No no no, it's always the upscale neighborhoods of the administrative class and some highly-decorated general. Most of these people
>especially in the anglospherewould be rabid counter-revolutionaries if they found themselves in such a society as soon as the accountability and responsibility a truly collectivist state imposes on them.
These people think HOAs are worse than fascist dictatorships - oh, but they'd definitely thrive in the CCCP.
Lmao, pull the other one.
>>2771833Did you write this while on your way to snitch on an ML? lmao
>>2771890Notice how you didn't deny it.
>>2770983<Why is it so hard for human-biology reactionaries to admit that the brain neurons of their body-politic end up constituting a class with their own interests different from ordinary biological cells of muscle or connective tissue?the anarchist/ultraleftists's ideal society is to be like a flaccid jellyfish who cannot move beyond their proscribed progression of history given to them by ocean waves. Most animals are capable of conscious locomotion because of the subordination of mitochondria powerhouses of cells can be harnessed to move and adapt to changing material conditions
>>2771173> with a mickey mouse voicecommunism with Kingdom Hearts characteristics
>>2771833>These people think HOAs are worse than fascist dictatorships HOAs protect the suburban cops who are trained by Israel to do colonialist policing and slave catching in American zionist-nazi ghettos.
>oh, but they'd definitely thrive in the CCCPYou'd thrive in the Jeffrey Epstein class of Chinese dissident liberals
https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2026/02/04/leaked-documents-reveal-tangled-web-epstein-chinese-dissidents-and-the-shadowy-arms-trade/ >>2771592That's a strawman of non-MLs. Not all MLs want a party-state, but a lot of them are comfortable defending purges and seem to think that the kind of social democratic dictatorships that emerged out of revolution in agrarian nations like the USSR and China are a completely fine model of socialism because of imperialism and WW2 or something.
>>2772033You said that was a strawman of non-MLs, but rather than explaining why you just attacked MLs again.
>>2772033>Not all MLs want a party-stateYes they do, that’s what makes them ML, that’s the whole deal
>>2772071It's obviously a moot point because I can't think of a socialist tendency where the delegation of powers in dotp is not a thing. Seems more like an anarchist thing to me.
>>2772073I'm using ML mostly as a stand-in for someone who thinks China and the USSR are legitimate AES and such, the ones less ideologically committed to "anti-revisionism"
How are you gonna have a dictatorship of a class that theoretically is supposed to abolish itself? You have schizophrenia
>>2770983same reason it's hard for people who say this to explain how it constitutes "a new class" without abandoning marxism. Djilas who popularized this view completely dropped communism btw. arguing that having a higher income and some material benefits like dachas for vacationing is a class is the kind of thing Trotsky criticized, but it keeps happening
From Isaac Deutscher the biggest trot historian
>What this so-called new class lacks is property. They own neither means of production nor land. Their material privileges are confined to the sphere of consumption. Unlike the managerial elements in our society, they are not able to turn any part of their income into capital: they cannot save, invest, and accumulate wealth in the durable and expansive form of industrial stock or of large financial assets. They cannot bequeath wealth to their descendants; they cannot, that is, perpetuate themselves as a classthis is why I could never take the 'new class' and the maoist/hoxhaist debate about capitalist restoration in the USSR seriously. the only clear restoration happens after perestroika and even then only by 1990 with Gorbachev's 500 days program do they seriously start debating the transition to a market economy and mass privatization. by 1991 gosplan was abolished but only few privatizations happened before 1992. so in short, they were never a new class in the soviet union and only after it was abolished some of the party higher ups and pro-capitalist camp used their advantage to secure wealth and positions in the new capitalist russia. and only some, it's a myth that they all became capitalists. studies show that most of these came from managerial posts in industry and banking or had backgrounds in science and engineering. not to mention the huge role organized crime played.
and trotsky defined the problem as a workers state hindered by a layer of bureaucracy that had necessary roles like sustaining a planned economy but also dangerous, oppressive political power. yet he also explained that the rise of this bureaucracy was unavoidable due to the Russian civil war, the failure of other revolutions, the shitty conditions of Russia and so on.
>Trotsky once predicted that the Soviet bureaucracy would fight for the right to bequeath their possessions to their children and that they might seek to expropriate the State and become the shareholding owners of trusts and concerns. This prediction, made over thirty years ago, has not come true so far.it seems to me that in the end each communist strain has come to largely similar views on this problem and more or less similar solutions (cultural revolution, purging careerists, more political participation, multiparty elections, direct democracy, etc) so part of this historical debate has been rendered meaningless by now
some of it is just cope, some of it is the prudent instinct that just denouncing the problem as ossified bureaucracy leads to saying "well next time we simply wont do that :)" and then failing to learn from successes and failures
that said they were not really a distinct class in the sense of materialism. they worked for the state like anyone else and whatever privileges and allowances they accrued were only really different in scale not in kind. they were essentially a caste of factory managers on the scale of an enormous society. whatever is unequal and resented about the managers cushy office and distance from the actual labor he disciplines others to perform, he doesnt own the factory.
>>2772109The problem is that this thread and yourself frame bureaucracy simply through the lens of “power”, making the point that there shouldn’t be employed individuals with such authority in decision making as that represents, apparently, a different class.
But absent from this criticism, is the recognition that it’s not just “power” and “pay” that defines the bureaucrat, but also responsibility.
You can want to rid your society of people with suits and have only workers in factories exclusively, but that won’t rid the necessity of decision making responsibility in society.
I’m afraid saying “dotp” doesn’t cut it as an explanation for how you’d practically distribute responsibility for every decision that needs to be made equally amongst people who are working full time already and likely don’t have an opinion on decisions that aren’t related to their particular industry.
Unless of course, the point is you DO want people for whom responsibility is delegated and their jobs ultimately are decision making, but you just want them to wear boiler suits as well.
>>2771173there are recordings of stalin. he had a normal guy voice.
It's not, really. They just love insulting the intelligence of everyone they selected to die. That's the rule of every Marxist party. The philosophy breeds a love of low cunning and the superficial. The whole point of the Marxist method is to co-opt that new class (which was forming out of necessity for reasons no one could control), tell them to march in lockstep and never stop until they've killed everyone who doesn't think the way they do. They're not the only people doing this but they had a unique take on how and why to do it and what can be done with it. Its main function was to neutralize anyone from the lower orders that did think about it actually being different. The workers and lower orders hated this new class more than they hated anyone else and they had very good reasons for seeing correctly who their true enemies were. The rich capitalist gave the poor a job. The institutions gave the poor torture, death, humiliation, and mockery. You couldn't write a scenario more conducive to ensure nothing like socialism or communism actually happened, without transmuting it into the same sort of managerial tyranny capitalism already was.
The idea that mere bureaucratic power makes a separate class is so unmarxist that trots had to borrow terminology from spcial darwinist social degeneration theory because there was no economic explanation.
Here's a funny question: what does a "non degenerate" workers state look like? What does its bureaucracy look like?
I assume trotskyist theory is not so "degenerated" that they stoop down to the level of anarchists and suggest there'd be none.
I humbly suggest that a "non degenerate" workers state would look exactly like the ussr but with trotsky in charge
>>2773562this is dumbest liberal bullshit i have ever read, no wonder leftypol is going down the shitter
>>2773576Trotsky never considered the bureaucrats a class though.
>>2773586Lenin was a liberal
>>2770983This is one of the reasons why I feel out with Marxist-Leninists, I’m not a Maoist but I think his idea of the Mass Line was great and correct, I know Ho Chi Minh and Che Guevara also adapted the Mass Line thing but the bureaucracy is not the only reason why I now refuse to identify as any Surnameist other than Marxist
>>2773589Who cares what trotsky himself said, trotskyists dont read trotsky just like maoists don't read mao
they're just various kinds of CIA-backed ultroid left-anticommunism.
This is what happens when communist leaderss make mistakes, westoid leftists appropriate their MISTAKES and LOWEST POINTS right up and start calling anyone who didn't go along with trotsky's BPD moment or Mao's dementia an opportunist roader or something.
(notice how there is no strain of western anticommuism called "stalinism")
Because MLs want to BE the new ruling class and aclnowledging that would undermine their entire argument they use to Trojan Horse their way to that goal. Granted, the whole "you shouldnt be allowed to vote us out" thing is a dead giveaway regardless.
>>2770983What you are saying is false. Bureaucrats gained nothing from the restoration of capitalism and the end of the Soviet Union. Those individuals who benefited from joining the bourgeoisie had connections with the private sector during perestroika and with foreign financial capital, following the interests of private capital along with the bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie co-opted by the bourgeoisie. Many bureaucrats continued with their lives in a more precarious way, were fired, or remained complacent and quiet without gaining anything.
This is a problem of listening to the ignorant petty-bourgeoisie or copying the West because of the degradation of the dictatorship of the proletariat, so as not to be able to carry out revolutionary terror to punish the puppets of capitalist imperialism, because revisionism has eroded the ability to see the need to maintain the supremacy of the proletariat and never tolerate discourses of "freedom" of bourgeois individualism financed by capitalist imperialism.
For all these reasons, I do not tolerate demonstrations of weakness with speeches of peaceful coexistence or dictatorship of the whole people, forgetting the dictatorship of the proletariat that must exist until the global victory of socialism, while the dictatorship of the proletariat must not be afraid to suppress workers who deny the supremacy of the dictatorship of the proletariat hiding behind any discourse.
Marxism-Leninism is correct, the difference is that there is a need for the party of the supremacy of the proletarian class to be independent of the bourgeoisie, which teaches the need for class struggle and that class war must always be vigilant until the global victory of socialism. Also, the principles of scientific socialism must be defended no matter how much you are hated and demonized. There should be no fear of having the power to use violence and revolutionary terror to maintain the supremacy of the dictatorship of the proletariat, no matter how many will have to be sacrificed or will have to suffer. This means not clinging to sentimentality.
>>2773596surnameist shit will always devolve into anti-materialist cargo cults and great man theory regardless of stated ideology. I mean ffs none of the people calling themselves leninist, Mahknovist, Maoist were even remotely involved in the russian and chinese revolutions and the people who came up with all those -isms sure weren't either.
>>2773562this is on the level of didactic fairytale meant for the 1st graders or that one right wing student in Oklahoma do better. Even the cargo cultist MLs will still provide some sort of source,example or anecdote lol this is just pure idealism
>>2773611>they're just various kinds of CIA-backed ultroid left-anticommunismMarcyite Trotskyists supported the USSR though.
>>2774287>the cargo cultist MLswhat do you mean by this
>>2774441in online political discussion there a tendency that is hardly restricted to MLs for cargo-cultism. worshiping a series of great men, famous events, cultural signifiers, empty aesthetics and posting inflammatory sectarian shit like it actually provides material support to anything or anyone like how an actual cargo cult just sits around singing the same songs about the same shit to the same fetishes hoping for some random bullshit to just drop out of the sky. Marxist-Leninists and Anarchists easily have the biggest issue with this on the left but its even more extreme in segments of burger right where even the president just wishcasts and pretends thats whats actually happening or lolberts who basically think the constitution is a magical holy document that makes them exempt from the law.
>>2774464What they like to do now is adopt a text as a holy book but also excise the points in the book that aren't politically feasible and enact pseudo policy while still venerating the simple thoughts that came from those books. Couching Marxism-Lenism in only a particularity to advancing labor rights is so on the face disingenuous, that i'm certain that those same evangelists of that doctrine are even unsure of their real aims and far detached from them even, to the extent that there is no real reason to mention the texts at all. Like you said they are enuring an ill-begotten ideology through historical party-ism and they don't even need that text to do it, but still attach themselves to it for the benefit of historical authority (failed) and authenticity.
>>2774473>>2773562well marxism-leninism was defeated in the 80's, the alternative to it is the world you are living now, make sure to enjoy it
>>2774506Dear Papa Stalin,
Forgive us for not automating potato picking in time to save the Soviet Union and delaying the arrival of Full Communism by a century or so
Sincerely,
Humanity
>>2770983Because the bureaucracy chose to destroy the system they're supposedly the ruling class of? That idea doesn't make any sense.
>>2774546if they can benefit more from the next system then yes.
A lot of the porkies that dominated the next system came from the soviet bueacracy
>>2774506not even Kadar, Tito and Deng won
>>2774514
>fake capitalism
are you some sort of lolbertarian? this is real capitalism
>>2774440Just like how liberal zionists "support" palestine but not le evil tyrannical hamas
>>2774625Trve. If you check the wikipedia list of russian billionaires a majority of them were engineers turned managers at the end of the USSR. (And a surprising amount have the israeli nationality)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Russian_billionaires 所以需要不断的进行自我革命直到完全消除旧思想的残余，即毛泽东尝试的文革
>>2774732I wish you and the Chinese masses the best of luck comrade!
Long live Marx, Lenin and Mao! The people of the world will be victorious!
I will make you aware that there are many revisionist americans on this page, some even enforce regressive ideology as moderators of the website.
But anti-revisionist and Maoist users also contribute with posts and threads as well.
>muh bureaucracy
Reminder that the RF has more government workers and politicians than the Soviet Union did
>>2774769Missing the point really hard are we
>>2774771No? Are you? Im just saying the whole bureaucrats debate is overblown
"Democracy" as it actually exists IRL as well as what most people desire it to be, will be abolished after the communist revolution.
>>2775679Which is precisely why MLs can't be trusted
This was more of a problem in the past but in terms of the actual planning of the economy we can simply use verifiable mathematical models and trustless data collection mechanisms. This is the natural evolution of the means of communication. Cybernetic communism solves a huge portion of the bureaucratic problems faced in past regimes.
>>2771833I unironically want to be a line cook after the revolution
I want to serve people food
>>2770983They did nothing wrong, it was idiots like Gierek who bankrupted countries that had 0 national debt prior to their loan maxxing that brought on the troublesome 80s
Unique IPs: 64