Comment by Vespair@lemm.ee on "We're anti-sectarian!"

This is kind of tangential, but I wish people would make distinction between Marxism and Leninism. Marx didn’t say shit about the vanguard party. Imo, we can reject Leninism without having to reject Marxism.

Also don’t waste your time arguing with me, because I am woefully uneducated and stupid, but I can only work with what I have, ya know?

You’re absolutely not wrong. MLs are a… stark departure from Marx.

TBF even Leninism is a stark departure from what MLs believe.

If you look at the original plans for the Soviet Union, Lenin was basically planning a Syndicalist Representative-Democracy. Problem was that Lenin got too bogged down in crushing any chance that said democracy would vote against itself, and then Stalin just decided to go full corporate town with it.

I don’t think many people on lemmy conflate marxism with leninism outside of .ml, and even there folks seems to see leninism as something on top of marxism and not inherently mixed.

And then we also have people who feel stalinist style “communo facism” would work well because everyone you like will be fed and everyone you don’t like will be dead. I don’t think anyone ever liked those people, including themselves.

It’s the mechanical gaps in Marxist philosophy which arguably led to Leninist revisionism in that first era.

The annoying part is that there is now like 100 year of post-Lenin philosophy which MLs love to ignore because the thing they actually care about is relitigating 100 year old geopolitics.

But he did write quite extensively on Lumpenproletariat.

vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged convicts, runaway galley slaves, swindlers, charlatans, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, procurers, brothel keepers, porters, intellectuals, organ grinders, rag-pickers, knife-grinders, tinkers, beggars; in short, the entirely undefined, disintegrating mass, thrown hither and yon, which the French call la bohème.

That is quite a few groups he considered subhuman, where half the ‘cleansing’ operations under communism have derived their theoretical excuses from.

The point of the Lumpenproletariat isn’t that they’re subhuman, it’s that they lack cohesiveness as a class or revolutionary potential.

Well - here’s the thing with “lacking revolutionary potential” and a dear-leader mindset… anyone dear leader deems lacking is labeled lumpen and thrown to the furthest gulag or has their rights removed and confined.

Eg in Stalinist Russia certain groups like the Roma, Crimean Tatars, Chechens, Koreans or homosexuals were labeled as such wholesale.

In modern times the Uighurs need reeducation etc.

Thing is, Marx didn’t have a Dear Leader mindset. Far from it. He is, in fact, focused on broad, sweeping, materialist strokes, something that has not survived quite as well as the more general ideas he advocated. When Marx talks about lacking revolutionary potential, he simply means that they aren’t going to be the instrumental class pushing the revolution forward. Peasants also lack revolutionary potential by Marx’s analysis, but few Marxists, if any, would advocate murdering them en masse.

By contrast, Marxism-Leninism thinks peasants DO have revolutionary potential, but tends to kill them en masse.

First I think what he wrote goes beyond them lacking the revolutionary potential and specifically being an active obstacle - I think the words were “significant counterrevolutionary force” and “more likely to sell out to reactionary intrigues”.

But either way, to be honest I don’t see a functional difference between Marx’s beliefs and every implementation of the communist manifesto known to date.

That is, it doesn’t matter what he wrote or believed in his heart of hearts if it can be interpreted in such broad strokes as to allow the implementation of the dear leader mindset with his writings as a touchstone without fail.

And it doesn’t matter what he thought should be done with the lumpen elements if he thought of them as less than, disgusting, parasitical, and even objecting to the cause, (his writings certainly show disgust in my opinion) - true believers to the cause will see them (as they have) as obstacles and will do whatever needs to be done to remove them - as they have.

First I think what he wrote goes beyond them lacking the revolutionary potential and specifically being an active obstacle - I think the words were “significant counterrevolutionary force” and “more likely to sell out to reactionary intrigues”.

And if I quote him saying the same things about the peasant class, will you concede the point or would I be wasting my time?

But either way, to be honest I don’t see a functional difference between Marx’s beliefs and every implementation of the communist manifesto known to date.

what

The difference between what he wrote and every communist regime that has existed, is the ones that existed all had Dear Leaders. He didn’t call for that. So they straight up failed at the jump.

They attempt to approach communism as a flash, a sudden struggle for control and then all will be well. There needs to be groundwork laid, there needs to be a community will to push things in that direction. You cannot arrive at a true communist state through violent revolution. It will inevitably devolve into an authoritarian dictatorship. I feel like you have to progress through some levels of democracy and socialism to arrive at such a goal, and it must be done with the consent and agreement of most people.

I’d argue none of those were people’s revolution, and in none of those cases did the people seize the means of production. All of those cases were vanguard parties claiming to act on behalf of the people, which I view as a wildly different thing than the people themselves.

I don’t see those as communist because they immediately reject the Marxist notions of rule of the people. Vanguard parties are inherently not of the people, as I see it.

And again, I am stupid and uneducated, so you’re probably gonna have to talk slow and avoid jargon for me to get it.

I mean while i agree with the premise of that argument this sounds a lot like ‘no true Scotsman’… which instances do you see as being in the true spirit then?

None? I dunno. Maybe it is a bit of the Scotsman fallacy or maybe I’m just too idealistic, but I don’t have an on-hand example of a true people’s revolution led only by the people yet. But I assume a lot of that is due to overwhelming power of capitalism and their incentive to immediately quell anything that resembles it, whether through violence, or compromise, or allures of wealth, more than the impractically of the thing happening.

I don’t have all the answers here, and I think it seems there needs to be some kind of catalyst to unify the working class in such a massive way, and while I’m uncertain what that catalyst is I don’t vibe with the “ends justify the means” approach of a vanguard that seems to me so antithetical to communal nature of my limited understanding of Marxism. I keep trying to understand it but it always comes back to me to a “they don’t know what’s best for them” mentality and then what’s the fucking point, we’re just trading one subjugator for another.

I’ll jump in. European Democracies that are taking care of their people are the furthest along.

Because that’s how you get to true communism.

The pitfalls on the path are the same that any democracy faces. Mostly authoritarians seizing power.

Vanguard parties are also a threat on the path to communism. Lenin participated in one election, and lost. So he seized power and created a new feudalist state, and then called it communism.

I accidentally wandered into a lemmy.ml bit recently and said ML can be rejected just on the basis of consistently devolving into cults. The reply came back of “why do you not like Marxism?” as of that’s what I said.

Oh, and they removed that comment and banned me, but that’s just as well.

we can reject Leninism without having to reject Marxism.

How about we reject the bad stuff, accept the good stuff, and stop idolizing/demonizing dead white dudes from hundreds of years ago?

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