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this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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I think anyone who supports Stalin and Stalinism is an idiot at best. If you don't agree with me I really don't know what to tell you. I can understand Jeremy Corbin saying that comparing him to hitler is unnecessary as they aren't on the same level. Saying someone isn't as bad as Hitler isn't the same as saying you support them.
Okay what do you think socialism is?
As far as I am concerned it's where the workers control the means of production. If the government controls the means of production that government needs to be controlled by the people or else it isn't socialism!
That's why the USSR under Stalin can barley be called socialist, because Stalin had an outsized influence on the government. He could get you killed for disagreement with him.
You're really gonna argue physics with me?
Newton had great ideas, just like Marx had great ideas. Newton's equations though have largely been replaced by Einstein and his theory of relativity. It gives more precise understanding of the way forces and gravity work than Newton could dream of. Likewise Einstein was wrong about quantum physics and things like the behavior of light.
In a science we don't just sit on our laurels and blindly repeat past scientists. We constantly test, refine, improve, or reject old ideas.
We should be treating Marx like we treat Newton or Einstein. Had some great ideas, some are still true, some are close but need further refinement, some are just straight up wrong. That's the difference between an academic and a religious person.
Which of his books have you read? I suspect none. Why exactly do you feel authoritative on the subject without any actual knowledge?
Ok, but you called SWCC borderline fascism while stating you like titoism, despite both having more or less identical political and economic structures. The main difference being inclusion of MZT in the Chinese strain while that isn't present in Tito's strain. You kinda just sidestepped this when I brought it up and have avoided it ever since. What do you actually know about the fundamental structure of their electoral system? Why do you call it borderline fascism?
Yes and that's what marxism also does, which is why marxist-leninist theory today is not the same as it was when marx wrote his ideas, or when lenin contributed, or stalin, or mao, or tito, etc etc. You are once again demonstrating an extremely poor knowledge of the subject matter, marxism is a science, and marxist-leninists are not dogmatic.
You are literally describing the marxist-leninist approach. If what you said about being a member of Socialist Appeal is true then I suspect your experience was cult-like and dogmatic, and this probably coloured all of your views. It probably also doesn't help that they don't actually do anything of value except grift off of everyone else's work. (not true of some of the other international branches of socialist appeal, but certainly true of the UK one).
I wish you were a little more honest about what you do and don't know, and less of your responses felt like winging it on certain topics while hoping someone who has actually read the material won't notice. It would make it much easier to root out what the problem here is, and why you seem to hate literally every socialist that exists except the liberals that wear the aesthetics while spending all of their time engaged in nothing but anti-socialism.
I have never heard if Tito or Tionism. How could I have argued about someone I have never heard of. Maybe I described his ideas without calling him by name?
What SWCC? Any searches I ran came up with organisations not related to socialist politics.
I think you might be right about socialist appeal. People have actually called them a cult before. It wouldn't surprise me if they have turned people off marxism before. The issue is they are probably the best at recruiting young people, they were the only polticial organization to show up at my university for instance. They also have posters everywhere.
Liberals? What do you mean by liberals? If you mean the American party then I don't like them either, though they do beat the republicans. If you mean libertarian then all anarchists and even some marxists are libertarian. So are right wing capitalists and some people in between. It's a very broad term that basically equates to freedom of speech and some other freedoms.
I hope you don't actually support Stalin though. From what I have been told what he wrote in his theory is somewhat reasonable, but dosen't at all match what he actually did. The writing was mere propaganda. I have also spoken to people from ex-soviet countries, they basically all hate the USSR. It's what caused a friend if mine to stop being a Marixst-Leninist.
You are right that I haven't read much theory. Theory is incredibly boring especially given it's mostly in older English and hard to understand. Poltitics isn't something I plan to do for a living - at least not any time soon.
I have yet to see any evidence that marxism is a science. I also don't believe modern capitalist economics is a science either. I have a very high bar for these things. When has marxism done controlled studies of different economic or polticial systems? If you have never done a controlled study then your not a science. Maybe there are some studies on this that I don't know about. I would love if you could show me some.
Turns out I have you mixed up with someone else. Sorry.
This actually makes a complete mess of the conversation for me because I'm not sure entirely what I said that was responding to you correctly and what I mixed up with the user who brought up liking Tito.
Let's throw away the part where I called you a liberal, and some of the other accusations of not knowing what you're talking about. This was mostly caused by the other conversation I was having.
Hmm 70% good, 30% bad. There's a lot of historical context that needs to be considered, 2 world wars, 2 revolutions and a civil war supported by all the capitalist powers of the world. Also the fact that they were doing something nobody had ever done before, with no idea of the "what not to do" things. Mistakes were absolutely made. But at the same time you have to discard the rampant propaganda that portrays this man as a cartoon villain, the trots are absurd for this and the capitalists are obviously unreliable because they want him to be a villain for the fact it also makes socialism a villain. The reality is much more balanced. Winston Churchill is a bigger monster than he ever was and I don't think you view him through the weird "evil monster" lens created by the narrative and environment we have surrounding this man.
The ones that were under 10 at the end of the USSR should be discarded as irrelevant. They claim to have lived it but were too young to remember and grew up during a capitalist storm of anti-socialism. The capitalists who were disempowered (and their descendants) should also be carefully disregarded, such as the Cuban gusanos of Florida who are all basically descendants of the bourgeoisie who lost their businesses and land when the communists took power. Those that should be listened to? Anyone that was 20+ at the time the USSR disbanded, and the genuine working class rather than migrant bourgeoise elements
I strongly recommend interview videos like these ones, which include the bad and the good, to see and build an idea from the people who actually lived it. https://youtu.be/ui11x8vLQFI https://youtu.be/mGUAIwlVR9A https://youtu.be/rfrtr9hAFYs
You've not read Engels then? Socialism: Utopian and Scientific forms the basis of explaining this, and compares it to utopian socialism which is not at all scientific, mainly idealism.
A science is just a body of theories grounded in a materialist analysis that produces predictable and reproducible results. When it is not predictable or reproducible other theories are then evaluated, and so on and so forth.
There are three main parts to Marxian methodology which are interdependent on each other. These are the Labour Theory of Value, Materialist Conception of History and the theory of class struggle. The Labour Theory of value sets out the economic laws which regulate commodity production under capitalism. The Materialist Conception of History places the productive relationships of commodity production, wage labour and capital in the setting of history. And class struggle provides the setting for explaining social evolution in terms of a revolutionary process. All of this are analysed in a materialist rather than idealist way, and if/when results are not predictable we either evaluate whether the material conditions have been incorrectly analysed or whether the theory itself needs adjusting. We reject dogmatism and constantly reassess and adjust as things have changed historically, Marx existed pre-industrial revolution afterall.
Your experience with Socialist Appeal and the manner in which they treat Trotsky as a god and Stalin as a demon is itself incredibly dogmatic bordering on cultlike religious attitudes. We don't. We take the bad, we take the good, and we aim to analyse things clinically without moralising.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/ui11x8vLQFI
https://piped.video/mGUAIwlVR9A
https://piped.video/rfrtr9hAFYs
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Huh this is neat. Nitter for youtube? I can see good reason for this with them banning people who use adblockers (although I added a script that gets around it on like day 1 lol).