/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

>that is unexplained
Marx and engels took.substantial time to explain it

>>2885513
No they didn't

>>2885513
They didn’t
>>2885500
See
>>2885511

>>2885511
>>2885552
>ad hom
Grow up dorks

>>2885553
Pick an actually decent theorist next time and maybe people will give more of a shit.

>>2885556
>I'm exactly the type of power-hungry, intellectual coward that Chomsky described
Ok.

>>2885500
>Epsteinite anarkiddie

Low quality bait

The Party isn't some self-appointed club of enlightened intellectuals that "drives" society by miracle. The Party exists because the working class under capitalism is fragmented. Workers sell their labor individually, compete with one another, and are bombarded with bourgeois ideology every day. That doesn't make them stupid. It simply means that capitalism reproduces itself materially and ideologically. The vanguard is simply the organized, politically conscious section of the proletariat. Its job isn't to replace the class but to unify it around a program, defend the revolution, and prevent the old ruling class from taking power back.

I don't even know why I'm stating this when history already gives pretty obvious reasons why this matters. Every socialist revolution immediately faced civil war, sabotage, sanctions, invasion, or all four. Russia had fourteen foreign armies intervene. China fought warlords, then Japan, then the KMT. Cuba has lived under blockade for decades. In every case, dismantling centralized leadership would've meant getting crushed.

>le "freedom and justice"
Marxism doesn't treat those as abstract moral gifts handed down by a government. Freedom depends on material conditions. A starving peasant, an unemployed worker, or someone one missed paycheck away from homelessness isn't meaningfully free just because they vote every four years. Economic development isn't some weird side quest either. It's the precondition for abolishing class society. You can't distribute abundance you don't have. Lenin never argued the Party magically creates communism; he argued the proletariat has to seize power, suppress the bourgeoisie while it still exists as a class, industrialize, and build the conditions where classes themselves disappear.

The irony is that Chomsky accepts the need for organization EVERYWHERE EXCEPT revolution. Every successful ruling class has disciplined institutions (the bourgeoisie has the state, the military, the media, finance, corporations, etc.). But apparently the working class is supposed to defeat all that with loose federations and the power of love and friendship. Smh.

>>2885576
>words words words to hide the fact you have nothing to say rather than just admit Chomsky is right
There's a reason people hate you freaks even more than fascists

>>2885583
Thank you for participating, anon. Great insights indeed.

>>2885576
Insofar as economic development is essential, this is generally an argument against revolution, or for a revolution focused more on destroying social impediments to development than on implementing "AES"
(e.g. Deng was right, but Mao was also right. Contrast India's attempt at developmentalist socialist democracy, where the democracy vetoed breaking stupid old feudal norms and the socialist part turned into stagnation.)

But in the case of the Koreas, for example, the south clearly won. (And here we do not have to hand it to the Americans, Park Chung Hee's program was indigenous and the Americans were more than happy to leave Korea stagnant and corrupt as it was before him.)

Owned by Foucault out of all people award

The purpose of Leninism and the vanguard party is to advance capitalist social relations in societies which are too backwards to do it themselves. Czarist Russia, feudal China, etc. were too incompetent to reform themselves in line with western Europe, therefore a Leninist vanguard took power to develop a modern state, proletarianize the peasantry and universalize the wage relation, and generally prepare the people for privatization and entry onto the world market.

All this was called 'socialism' and justified through Marxist shibboleths to pacify the native working classes, and to trick generations of dumb westerners into defending their foreign policy choices in the name of 'anti-imperialist solidarity.'

>>2885553
>muh ad homo

its perfectly accurate to say the pedo zionist should be ignored, if someone covered in poo and shit tried to tell me the time id likely ignore them as well.

>>2885588
I'd respectfully push back on a couple of points.

>an argument against revolution
Revolution and development aren't opposites. In many countries, revolution is what makes development possible because it removes the class that's actively blocking it. Landlords don't voluntarily give up land. 'Comprador' bourgeoisies don't voluntarily industrialize if their profits come from exporting raw materials and importing finished goods. China is probably the clearest example. Mao carried out the social revolution that destroyed landlordism, unified the country, massively expanded literacy and healthcare, and built the industrial base. Deng then liberalized parts of the economy on top of those foundations. Those aren't two unrelated projects. If anything, they're different stages of the same one. Deng himself never argued capitalism should replace socialism. What he argued was that markets could be subordinated to socialist state power. India is almost the mirror image. The bourgeois-landlord bloc was never fundamentally broken. Land reform was partial, caste and landlord power remained entrenched across much of the countryside, and planning had to coexist with classes whose interests ran against development. That's not "socialism failed," because the revolution never happened in the first place.

>South Korea won
Depends on what you're measuring. If you mean GDP per capita, sure. But South Korea also received an extraordinary level of military, financial, and market support from the US bloc while integrating into the capitalist world economy. The DPRK spent decades under sanctions and near-total diplomatic isolation and prioritized military survival after the USSR collapsed. Those aren't remotely comparable starting conditions. That isn't to say the DPRK made no mistakes. I'm the first to admit it absolutely did. But reducing the divergence to "capitalism beat socialism" ignores the geopolitical context. If you're comparing systems, you can't pretend one developed under the security and investment umbrella of the world's dominant empire while the other was subjected to sustained economic warfare. That's not a controlled experiment, if I'm honest with you.

>>2885609
on the korea point: the north plays on hard mode because it has a socialist government/ was soviet aligned. The point to illustrate is that this choice was clearly bad for development.
On china: I share this analysis basically entirely but the average /leftypol/ user would certainly prefer that Dengism never happened and views its adaptation of an economic growth maximising approach as a betrayal, believing that one can simply build socialism at a lower level of development.

to clarify my view: it is not that socialism is bad or impossible, but that one cannot skip stages of economic development. the practical task of most socialist governments is to develop their capitalist economy to its maximum potential while retaining party rule, so that they will one day be ready for when underlying conditions can support socialism sustainably. In the case of most first world countries this could theoretically be achieved under bourgeois rule, although a general collapse in elite competence and state capacity bodes ill in practice.

the point of "the party" is that not everyone is allowed in, and thus it becomes capable of making a dictatorship. you couldn't just join the CPSU, you had to apply for membership and get approved.

>>2885598
Attacking the person instead of refuting their message is a logical fallacy and you should be embarrassed by being so loudly and proudly stupid.

If that person covered in shit is telling you that they found the remains of workers in the septic system then you're just a retard for ignoring them.

>>2885583
>There's a reason people hate you freaks even more than fascists
what people? reddit? r/tankiejerk?

>>2885588
>Insofar as economic development is essential, this is generally an argument against revolution, or for a revolution focused more on destroying social impediments to development than on implementing "AES"
(e.g. Deng was right, but Mao was also right. Contrast India's attempt at developmentalist socialist democracy, where the democracy vetoed breaking stupid old feudal norms and the socialist part turned into stagnation.)
But in the case of the Koreas, for example, the south clearly won. (And here we do not have to hand it to the Americans, Park Chung Hee's program was indigenous and the Americans were more than happy to leave Korea stagnant and corrupt as it was before him.)
>economic development
commodity production is not economic development and the south is a shithole

>>2885656
>what people?
The entirety of humanity other than neo-bolsheviks

>>2885658
The south won what, higher suicide rates?

>the north plays on hard mode because it has a socialist government/ was soviet aligned. The point to illustrate is that this choice was clearly bad for development.
north is doing actually good, your view on it is outdated by decades anon, and no, it was not bad for development, cuba went le market reform route since the 90s and it fucked them in the ass in the long run. with limited resources planning is always superior to free markets. btw north korea tried legalizing markets and had them for a while but it only led to smuggling, people scamming eachother and whatnot, and no production. during that period the economy was essentially stagnant, zero growth but then imagine what happened when my boi kim cracked down on those. buildings got build again, roads get paved again etc… you know i recently read an article lamenting the fact that the rising living standard is "le actually bad because, because… it just is ok??!" you know who else figured that out that planning is a superior distribution mechanism than markets when you have limited resources? literally all the countries during ww2

>>2885661
>neo-bolsheviks
I swear its the same lib that shits up every thread

only in america can chomsky be considered a person of interest, let alone a """"leftist"""" of interest

>>2885671
The problem is this assumption of limited resources: resources are only limited (instead of functionally limitless via trade) because these countries pissed off the US. If economic development maximisation is the goal, setting yourself up to be exploited by the US is a faster way of achieving this.

Cuba is in a pretty tragic position because there is no compromise Cuban communists could make to placate the US. They are loathed to a truly irrational degree. North Korea is more mixed, a long shot but could be normalised. Vietnam and China on the other hand show it's certainly possible.

I do not deny that the US is an outright malicious actor in this light, but it's like a tiger. It does no good complaining that a tiger acts like a tiger. If - and this is the important premise, because we're going back to the justification of a vanguard developing productive forces - the fastest route to development is placating the tiger, tautologically… the fastest route is by placating the tiger, not by half measures that piss him off.

>>2885661
>neo-bolsheviks
where are these guys?

>>2885638
I agree with the first half and disagree with the conclusion. The DPRK didn't "play on hard mode" because it chose socialism. It played on hard mode because it chose to oppose the US-led bloc. Those aren't identical. Had the North abandoned socialism, aligned with Washington, opened itself to US capital, and accepted the geopolitical terms that South Korea did, then yes, it almost certainly would've developed faster. But that's also saying that integration into the dominant imperial system tends to produce better growth outcomes than resisting it. That's not really an argument against socialism as such. On China, I actually think a lot of /leftypol/ users have a very idealist reading of socialism. They often treat socialism as a distribution problem rather than a production problem, and it's funny because Marx never argued that you could abolish scarcity simply "by decree." If productive forces are underdeveloped, someone still has to decide who gets what. Equal poverty is still poverty.

The whole point of "socialism cannot be built on the basis of poverty" isn't revisionism; it's plain historical materialism. Productive forces constrain relations of production. You can't simply will away those constraints because your intentions are revolutionary. Where I'd differ from your formulation is here:
>the practical task of most socialist governments is to develop their capitalist economy
I'd instead say their task is to develop the productive forces under the political dictatorship of the proletariat. Whether that involves extensive market mechanisms is a tactical question, not a question of class power. It's basically Lenin's argument during the NEP. Commodity production, markets, and even private capital can exist under proletarian state power without the bourgeoisie being the ruling class. The decisive question is: who commands whom? Does capital command the state, or does the socialist state command capital? That's also why Deng's famous line about not caring whether the cat is black or white isn't an abandonment of Marxism in itself. If markets are a tool subordinated to socialist political power and used to develop the productive forces, that's still operating within a Marxist framework. If the Party loses control and capital becomes the ruling class, then you've crossed the line into capitalist restoration.

So I think the real disagreement isn't over "stages." I mean, Marxists have always recognized stages. The issue is about what class should hold state power during those stages. Chomsky's answer is effectively "don't build a centralized workers' state." Marxism-Leninism answers: if the bourgeoisie still exists, someone is exercising dictatorship. The only question is whether it's theirs or the proletariat's.

>by some miracle that is unexplained
this Epsteinite might want to read up on the democratic part of democratic centralism. like no shit it's difficult