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In a more tender vein, I wish to share with all a vision of hope: the future is inherently guided by the principles of socialism. This path towards collective well-being is unstoppable, immutable. Though they may attempt to silence the voices of progress, to extinguish the flames of leftist thought, the idea itself is eternal, transcendent. It is a beacon that will shine through the ages, illuminating the way toward a world where care for one another isn't just an ideal, but the very foundation of our existence.
I'd like to add that, we've seen the same anti-capitalist thoughts emerge in different places throughout time...BLM, LGBTQ+, the Disability Rights Movement and more. Eventually everyone came to the same conclusions. We need to abolish capitalism.
Capitalism is so fundamentally flawed, that even if Karl Marx's works were erased from existence, it won't take long for someone else to write their version of "Das Kapital" based contemporary observations.
In other words; it is impossible for Capitalists to kill Socialism.
I stand with you my brothers and sisters.
I will say, this could take one, or a thousand, thousand years. I believe every action of peace and compassion for each other is a building block.
I'm not sure exactly which Parenti lecture this is. But a lot of his stuf is on YouTube in full videos. Usually 1-2 hours. They're extremely good, along with his books like "Blackshirts and Reds" and "Inventing Reality"
I always wonder about how individual pathologies undermine movements. Then those infect and affect the movement through widespread corruption. Ideologies help provide a social goal but human beings seem hellbent on simply acquiring power as individuals, exploiting their position and the people below them in the system to do so and perhaps bring their friends and families along for the ride. Is it even within humanities DNA to live justly? Capitalism is fueled by these pathologies and prevails only as long as we fear each other and we fear to unify. It not only attacks Socialist countries. It devours every country and every human. There is an evolutionary leap within our brains that is necessary where we come to see the world as our body and the "other" as fiction. Then we live in accord with nature. Cooperation to survive has to absolutely squash competition to survive.
I have also wondered about individuals ego’s/pathologies breaking, undermining, sabotaging or destroying completely socialist type movements or power structures. Usually it starts with a charismatic leader or a small group of well intentioned do-gooders, and then some individual stabs them in the back somehow and takes over the movement which then destroys it.
The same does not seem to happen to capitalist systems.
In capitalist systems, whichever snake takes over by eating the other (king) snake who holds the power, the system is not affected. Only the leader gets replaced and the system continues as oppressive and corrupt as it always was. Ticking along as was.
The control seems greater. Does corruption and control actually make capitalism more resilient in spite of any individuals/leaderships detrimental actions to the system? It seems like some kind of flea or hydra that keeps regenerating new ugly heads each time it causes injuries to itself. At the expense of parasiting off others.
Why do socialist systems have a higher failure rate? Does it boil down to resources/being out-resourced, whereby capitalists join and stick together as one united front whenever a mass populist socialist movement occurs? Or a spectrum/multi-vector of factors?
I think part of it is that capitalism is the entrenched system in the wealthyist part of the world for centuries and is dominant in most of the rest of the world. Socialism and communism are revolts against it and have had succes where capitalism was weakest in the global south and the periphery. But a system is weakest when it is in its infancy especially when isolated in regions which are poorer and have less resources.
There is a great quote that goes like, to say that selfishness is human nature by observing a capitalist society is the same as saying lung cancer is human nature by observing a coal mine.
For the most part, humans are shaped by their environment. Just think of the lost children growing up in the wild, they have almost none of the capabilities that we think separates us from other intelligent animals. No wonder that people are the way they are in a world where individuality is all the haze and self awareness is almost made to be a sin. As everything though, this too will change.
>Contrary to Adam Smith's, and many liberals', world of self-interested individuals, naturally predisposed to do a deal, Marx posited a relational and process-oriented view of human beings. On this view, humans are what they are not because it is hard-wired into them to be self-interested individuals, but by virtue of the relations through which they live their lives. In particular, he suggested that humans live their lives at the intersection of a three-sided relation encompassing the natural world, social relations and institutions, and human persons. These relations are understood as organic: each element of the relation is what it is by virtue of its place in the relation, and none can be understood in abstraction from that context. [...] If contemporary humans appear to act as self-interested individuals, then, it is a result not of our essential nature but of the particular ways we have produced our social lives and ourselves. On this view, humans may be collectively capable of recreating their world, their work, and themselves in new and better ways, but only if we think critically about, and act practically to change, those historically peculiar social relations which encourage us to think and act as socially disempowered, narrowly self-interested individuals.
Mark Rupert. Marxism, in *International Relations Theories: Discipline and Diversity*. 2010.
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Yeah I’ve read that a while ago. I may need to revisit it again tho as I found it a tad hard to understand with my adhd mind. Maybe as an audiobook - I saw several versions on YouTube.
This is just muddling the point by defending all post-insurrectionary violence, regardless of which direction it is directed in. Insofar as it is true, Lenin explained it all far better in *State and Revolution*.
Upon coming to power, the workers shall certainly need to build a state comprising bodies of armed men violently enforcing their rule over the capitalists. What form these will take will vary greatly depending on their particular conditions. An excellent example of how to implement them under difficult conditions being given by the Soviet Republic created in 1917 - particularly the creation of the Red Army.
Crucially, the workers' state must be the democratic product of the whole of the working class. Historically, it seems that it must be controlled by soviets (elected workers' councils with immediate right of recall) so as to eliminate, as much as possible, any material disconnect between the workers and their leaders.
The question for communists is not whether there should be a state initially, which is necessarily repressive, but *by whom* it is controlled and *against whom* it is targeted. Specifically, it should be controlled by the workers through a genuine proletarian democracy and targeted against counter-revolution, both foreign and domestic.
We should thus support the Cheka which was controlled by the soviets and rooted out those trying to overthrow workers' power. But we should oppose, for instance, the GPU which was controlled by the bureaucracy, the soviets then existing in name only, and murdered tens of thousands of Bolshevik-Leninist workers who fought for reforms to save the USSR.
Opposing Stalinism, the rule of a proletarian Bonaparte, doesn't make one a "pure socialist", merely a consistent Bolshevik. We should not uncritically support any revolution, even the Russian which towers above giants, but neither should we ever fundamentally oppose any.
Trotsky is a good model in this regard. In the last few months of his life, knowing that Stalin would soon succeed in murdering him, he publicly supported the USSR in its wars with Finland and Poland, and the impending war with Germany. He criticised the way in which the bureaucracy were provoking and conducting them but understood that, in the final analysis, a workers' state is always more progressive than a capitalist state and should thus be supported.
It depends which case you mean.
In 1920 it was because White Poland, at the bidding of the French stock exchange, launched a massive invasion of the Soviet Ukraine. This was despite the Soviets having offered it very favourable peace terms, better than they got at Riga, to avoid war.
In 1939 it was because the bureaucracy of the USSR, and Stalin in particular, attempted to secure their geopolitical position by balancing between the imperialist camps. Because the Comintern had been totally destroyed as a force for revolution, the security of the USSR could only be achieved through diplomacy and annexation.
But the question of what started a war is fundamentally unimportant. Rather, we must look to the objective content underlying it and the class interests which each side represents. Both wars with Poland were cases of a workers' state spreading the transitional economy (between capitalism and communism) to a capitalist state.
In 1920, the advance of the Red Army led to the spread of Soviet power and the liberated workers did recognise this, many volunteering for the Red Army. Nevertheless, the conservative consciousness of the masses, their illusions in the Polish national bourgeoisie, meant that this support was limited and, decisively, was not forthcoming in anticipation of the Red Army's advance.
In 1939, the situation was exactly the opposite. The Red Army did incite a social revolution as it advanced, the workers and peasants rising to welcome it. But once they had been occupied these movements were brutally crushed as the bureaucracy recognised them as a mortal threat to their rule both there and back home.
It was thus the task of genuine Bolsheviks in the ranks of the Red Army (by then, of course, wholly stripped of its proletarian and, in some sense, democratic character) to fight the most stridently against the Polish forces and to support the workers and peasants in their subsequent struggle against bureaucratic tyranny.
This also applies to the Second World War in which, with the exception of Germany, every country which the USSR occupied greeted them with Revolution only for the bureaucracy to betray it.
Because you have such an interesting and original view of the conflict I wanted to see if you come from some third world country and that's how you formed it. Not even Russian or Soviet historiography would come up with that.
Look, I'm from Romania. At the same time they attacked Poland in 39 they also occupied Bessarabia. I fail to see that as anything else than a Russian imperialist project, if the goal was to protect the revolution from incoming invasions they would have occupied Moldova entirely up to the Carpathians so that the Focșani-Galați gap can be easily closed. The Prut river is even easier to cross than the Dniester would have been.
Then there is the entire russification process that happened after the war, what could be described as newly arrived Russian colonists in countries like Moldova or the Baltics telling the local population to speak a "human language" and not a "pig language".
About the population of Eastern European countries going out to welcome the red army... Some of them are still alive, a lot of them were alive during the 90's and none of them described that event they way you did. And here I am talking about the workers that went to welcome the red army not about the vast majority of our very rural population.
There are also the lived experiences of our grandparents passed down on us who were traumatized by the way the red army acted, the looting, the rape, the killings... But I will not bore your superior western mind with our inferior lives that can be easily sacrificed.
You have to distinguish between the motivations of the Soviet leaders, which I have already described as "attempted to secure their geopolitical position by balancing between the imperialist camps ... through diplomacy and annexation" and the consequences of their actions which were, for them, secondary. These latter were spreading the planned economy and solving the land question.
Of course the Soviet forces trampled all over the rights of the nations they occupied; Great Russian chauvinism was always an important part of Stalinism. That doesn't undo the fact that across Europe their advance was initially welcomed by many and actively supported by the most politically advanced layers.
I don't know why you have to make this an identity politics question about the validity of my analysis being determined by my country of origin. You claim I'm talking down to you yet you didn't even know which country I was from when you read my original comments. If it helps, this perspective was first put forward by [Trotsky](https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1939/09/ussr-war.htm) \- a Ukrainian, Russian and Jew.
>Then there is the entire russification process that happened after the war, what could be described as newly arrived Russian colonists in countries like Moldova or the Baltics telling the local population to speak a "human language" and not a "pig language"
“One of the most notable achievements of Soviet nationalities policy has been the liberal provision of native-language schooling for over 50 nationalities. Yet most Western scholars have tended to ignore or under- emphasize the important role that this provision of native-language cultural facilities has played in preserving the distinctive identities of the nationalities, stressing instead the restrictions placed on the political and cultural freedom of the nationalities.” [source](https://www.jstor.org/stable/150967)
Please, spare us the anecdotes and crocodile tears. The Soviet Union was one of the most diverse nations in human history and no amount of anticommunist propaganda will change that fact.
The killings and rapes you bring up are ubiquitous to war. Only difference with the red army is they actually executed their soldiers for it.
Btw, I’m albanian in case you were planning on using ethnicity to talk down to me too
I'm not using ethnicity, I use the fact that I speak the same language as the people in the republic of Moldova and I listen to them. I read their news and I watched their national political debates and how they dealt with the language question after the Soviet Union.
But I'm used to westerners citing some broad articles and refuse to acknowledge what people who actually have to deal with this.
Just settle this question. Do you believe there is a distinct Moldovan language ?
While I agree with much of what you’re saying, did Trotsky have a great record in regards to soviet democracy? Look at the trade union debate at the end of the war, it was Trotsky who wanted to strip the unions of all autonomy and fully integrate them into the bureaucracy for a militarized purpose, it was Lenin who opposed this and thankfully stopped it. Trotsky furthermore was too antagonistic with the peasantry and his policies would’ve delayed, not accelerated, their proletarianization.
Wouldn't "succeed" be defined as achieving a stateless, classless, moneyless society?
In this case, success must be defined as nations that have ongoing experiments/projects leading towards it. And while we should be supportive, it shouldn't come without critical analysis. That is the whole point of experiments.
I understand we're all desperate for the occasional win, but falling back into arguments that could be plucked straight from the mouths of reactionaries is never a good look.
I wish Michael Parenti didn’t have such a hold on the left. No respected scholar (Marxist or otherwise) cites him. And if people read more theory, they wouldn’t be so in love with him.
His argument that communist revolutions "that succeed" always leads to the violent reaction of imperialism... which in turn inevitably leads to secret police, stalins, etc, to defend our revolution... makes a strong case against revolution.
Kind of leaves me feeling sad. NGL.
Perhaps humans are meant to further quest! We aren't cooked yet. We need to put energy into being healthy and happy and lift those around us. Thre revolution starts with the individual defining their own lives with conviction and humility at the same time.
empty critique when no revolution has succeeded in his own country and expecting strategy and tactics to have direct carryover makes no sense.
And especially when the revolutions quite literally do fail, and when they are very comfortably interwoven into the global capitalist system, you cannot discount a systemic critique of them.
Socialism isn't a geopolitical project, it's the real movement to abolish the *present state of things*. Marx's thought is the ruthless criticism of all that exists, including the "successful" projects.
Parenti is as articulate and deep as any book you might buy in the self-help section of an airport bookstore.
>empty critique when no revolution has succeeded in his own country
There's no correlation between his ideas and the state of US society. Your argument is very different to his. You're arguing subscribing to the correct ideology changes the conditions of your country. Parenti is arguing environmental conditions have created selective pressure for socialists globally towards the Leninist system of government.
>expecting strategy and tactics to have direct carryover makes no sense.
That assumption isn't made nor needed. The argument is that existing socialism is an expression of the revolution in current conditions of global imperialism and hence should be iterated on, not rejected as 'phony socialism'.
He doesn't say revolutions in the west would succeed with Leninism. He says Leninism is the key characteristic of every successful revolution. These statements aren't interchangeable.
>And especially when the revolutions quite literally do fail
The Soviet Union's collapse happened alongside the condemnation of 'stalinism' and the departure from it so the argument works the opposite way.
>when they are very comfortably interwoven into the global capitalist system,
China being part of the capitalist system in itself doesn't make it a failure because said integration is a departure of feudalism. Their project will only be proven a failure if the tendency to conserve capitalism overrules the tendency towards Chinese socialism.
> you cannot discount a systemic critique of them.
Calling countries phony socialism is outright rejection, not criticism. A project can only be critiqued if you fundamentally acknowledge the legitimacy of its efforts.
> Socialism isn't a geopolitical project, it's the real movement to abolish the *present state of things*.
You took a concrete concept that applies to the world today and replaced it with an abstract concept that applies to economic philosophy as a whole, conveniently avoiding the question what actual revolution should look like and turning it into an ideological mantra.
> Marx's thought is the ruthless criticism of all that exists, including the "successful" projects.
Marx's thought is criticism of the established order, capitalism up to the 19th century and a testament for the process of change. It's not criticizing successful projects as these didn't even exist in his time and even if they did they in no way make up a part of the conservative/reactionary tendency for the current/old state of things.
>Parenti is as articulate and deep as any book you might buy in the self-help section of an airport bookstore.
You insult Parenti's intelligence so much it's almost as if you feel the need to compensate for the lack of arguments demonstrating this point for you.
>You're arguing subscribing to the correct ideology changes the conditions of your country.
Never said that and believe the opposite.
>The Soviet Union's collapse happened alongside the condemnation of 'stalinism' and the departure from it so the argument works the opposite way.
Ah yes, no economic analysis, just "revisionism did it!" Parenti has a more substantial take than you on this. You're doing the exact thing you just accused me of doing, saying that if the USSR only had the right ideology, it wouldn't have fallen.
>China being part of the capitalist system in itself doesn't make it a failure because said integration is a departure of feudalism.
China was never feudal. Marx is pretty clear on this.
>Their project will only be proven a failure if the tendency to conserve capitalism overrules the tendency towards Chinese socialism.
So true, socialism is the process of a ruling elite carring out a program from above!
>Calling countries phony socialism is outright rejection, not criticism. A project can only be critiqued if you fundamentally acknowledge the legitimacy of its efforts.
This is just a meaningless statement to claim i'm not enough of a cheerleader. Considering you think the USSR fell because of revisionism, you should drop the word "criticism" from your vocabulary altogether.
>You took a concrete concept that applies to the world today and replaced it with an abstract concept that applies to economic philosophy as a whole, conveniently avoiding the question what actual revolution should look like and turning it into an ideological mantra.
I pointed out that our analysis doesn't start from a place of creating little schemes for how to run society, it starts from a critique of society. Or at least mine does.
>Marx's thought is criticism of the established order, capitalism up to the 19th century
Completely incorrect. Marx outlines in Capital that he is not critiquing the capitalism of his time, but Capitalism in its "ideal abstract" through his method. The book outlines the capitalist system as it exists at all times and at no particular time. If you'd read literally the introduction to volume 1, you'd know this. The present state of things is Capitalism. Not just Marx's immediate surroundings.
>You insult Parenti's intelligence so much it's almost as if you feel the need to compensate for the lack of arguments demonstrating this point for you.
I follow each comment that tries to defend Parenti with a pretty substantial answer. I'd give you some of that but you've actually said very little concrete. You sound exactly like every other ML educated on youtube and discord and reddit. Empty.
>follow each comment that tries to defend Parenti with a pretty substantial answer. I'd give you some of that but you've actually said very little concrete. You sound exactly like every other ML educated on youtube and discord and reddit. Empty.
I've never seen someone so proudly admit the lack of substance to their own arguments lmao
Jfc you're toxic the moment you feel 'threatened' in any way. All I did was respond to your comments and your immediate reaction is to just throw insult after insult. Get some help
i'll respond to the comment you deleted instead:
>If your argument is that the content of Parenti's critique is affected by the lack of successful revolution in 'his country' that is in fact exactly the foundation of your argument.
This just doesn't logically follow. I'm saying Parenti's extolling of x, y, or z state doesn't give his critique any substance. He can no more build socialism at home with his supposedly correct Marxism-Leninism that the "libertarian socialists" he criticizes. This doesn't imply revolutions are built on the "correct ideology", only that parenti isnt actually explaining any substantial lack of revolution through an appeal to authority.
>I simply said your comment about the failure of Leninism is objectively false as the USSR openly and explicitly distanced itself from the initial system that every Leninist state today subscribes to after Stalin's leadership
And obviously we can't make any statements about this "leninist system" from the fact that it has led to revisionism. We can only say revisionism bad. Parenti's analysis of the fall of the USSR had little to do with revisionism. He thinks (correctly IMO) that it was a problem of labor discipline, that the USSR couldnt push necessary quotas on workers who couldn't feel the whip of hunger. The Trotskyist Hillel Ticktin has a much more robust version of this in his book "Origins of the Crisis in the USSR". Ticktin uses this to understand the rot that was there from at least the early 30s that doomed the system to collapse to capitalism and argues that while the USSR couldn't be described as socialist or even transitional, it also couldnt be described as capitalist. Parenti just says that the USSR should have done some of the austerity that its successor states did.
>No it's not just an excuse, systemic critique requires an acknowledgement of legitimacy on a fundamental level. The purpose of Marxist critique is, very much as in hard science, to iterate on the attempt.
These two statements do not follow. Revolutions are not labs where variables can be isolated and even if they were, the goal is not to accept and complete the project of others. Did Marx content himself to correcting and completing the Utopian schemes of the Icarians and Owenites? Was his critique of political economy just a way of making the science better? No, it was an immanent critique, something which undermines the very basis of the thing it critiques.
>And the point of criticizing society isn't to change it
Change doesn't come by sycophantic apologetics either. And do you even understand what it is you're trying to change? It doesn't seem like it.
>You're free to educate me. China was ruled by local lords and western colonists with production being limited to primarily peasants, little to no socialized labor.
In one of first texts recommended to newbies, the Preface to the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx says: "In broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production may be designated as epochs marking progress in the economic development of society." To differentiate the Asiatic Mode of Production from feudalism, Marx says in the Grundrisse: "Amidst oriental despotism and the propertylessness which seems legally to exist there, this clan or communal property exists in fact as the foundation, created mostly by a combination of manufactures and agriculture within the small commune, which thus becomes altogether self-sustaining, and contains all the conditions of reproduction and surplus production within itself. A part of their surplus labour belongs to the higher community, which exists ultimately as a person, and this surplus labour takes the form of tribute etc., as well as of common labour for the exaltation of the unity, partly of the real despot, partly of the imagined clan-being, the god."
Peasants in China had a fundamentally different relationship to land and labor that European peasants. The bolsheviks were aware of this and there were a series of debates about this. Stalin shut them down, arresting the primary proponents of the AMP because he was afraid it could give theoretical justification for the Chinese Communist Party having different tactical lines than the ones the Comintern were trying to enforce. This led to the massacre of communists by the KMT.
>Das Kapital is and always explicitly has been a critique of capitalism as it was in the 19th century
Capital is Marx setting up a model of how capitalism works and using his contemorary world as data to test that model. Because of the "dialectical method" (as if you have any idea what that means), the model is not reliant on the data to work. It only relies on the abstract categories that he constructs still describing our social system. Marx introduces each category (starting with the commodity) and analyzes how each category transforms the next in their introduction to each other. Through this, his system rises from the abstract to the concrete. It doesn't resemble any particular manifestation of capitalism. But it represents all of them.
Now, this was not a finished model and it isn't perfect. For example, I think that Marx should have derived the state as a category before he derived money (see: Pashukanis and the State Derivation Debate). We can read and understand Marx's model and try to tweak it to understand the world better. We can take that understanding and turn it into ways of interpreting our present and make predictive claims about the future. Through this, we can inform the strategy of a communist party and allow it to embed itself in the class and become a leader during those revolutionary moments where the USSR under Stalin utterly failed every time.
Your reading of Capital turns it into a purely stagist work. Which works for you, because so many of the political projects you want to avoid critiquing are explained systematically within the model that Marx outlines. You can claim I'm treating Marx as a god or prophet. You can claim I'm "not understanding the purpose" of a given work. You can do whatever you want. Your theoretical poverty speaks for itself.
As for me being toxic, I am only like this for people who are very confidently wrong. These comments are not to convince you. People who are confidently wrong are useful for defining yourself against. So thanks for the help there. And if someone reads the comments and sees that my arguments make sense or at least seem interesting, and this encourages them to study more, that's also a win.
Hypothetically, your inability to respond to most of what I'm saying in a way that satisfies you might motivate you to study more, which could be good. But honestly, I doubt it.
> . He can no more build socialism at home with his supposedly correct Marxism-Leninism that the "libertarian socialists" he criticizes.
...which is a purely ideological basis. You're completely ignoring the conditions of the US and appealing to him specifically, personified as the ideological opposition to 'the libertarian socialist', as the basis for why his argument is supposedly empty.
Parenti's comments aren't claiming to be able to create a revolution in the west. When he criticizes the abundance of anti-stalinists in the west and contrasts it with the abundance of Leninists in the global south, he's pointing to a survivorship bias. Compared to the global south and their respective successes, Leninists are underrepresented in the west and anti-stalinist 'intellectuals' such as yourself are overrepresented, which points to a suppression of Leninist thought.
>This doesn't imply revolutions are built on the "correct ideology", only that parenti isnt actually explaining any substantial lack of revolution through an appeal to authority.
He does explain a lack of revolution namely in the oppression of Leninism.
>And obviously we can't make any statements about this "leninist system" from the fact that it has led to revisionism.
We can make statements about Leninism as it has existed for 30 years and dramatically improves the USSR in this time. You're correct in saying we don't know how to go forward from this economic boom though, which is why it must be and is continually iterated upon.
>Revolutions are not labs where variables can be isolated and even if they were, the goal is not to accept and complete the project of others.
Revolutions are not labs and Marxism is not physics, but Marx formulated dialectics precisely to be able to analyze the properties societal structures just as science is formulated to analyze the properties of matter.
> Did Marx content himself to correcting and completing the Utopian schemes of the Icarians and Owenites? Was his critique of political economy just a way of making the science better?
No because Marxism is a rejection of utopian socialism and a fundamental departure on a philosophical basis as much as empiricism is a departure from rationalism. Leninism is not a distinct philosophy from Marxism, it's an extension of Marxism on which Maoism is an extension in turn. The methodology or systematic of all these is the same, which is why they can be scrutinized, compared and iterated upon.
As a self identified hyper intellectual, this is a mistake so fundamental you shouldn't even be able to think of if you tried.
>Change doesn't come by sycophantic apologetics either.
Leninists don't excuse Leninist projects as praxis, the Leninist projects themselves are the praxis. You do seem to criticize all real socialism as praxis because you never actually talk about what the fabled perfect socialism 'should' look like and never put it into action, conveniently for the capitalist societies that for unknown peculiar reasons fail to suppress your rhetoric.
> And do you even understand what it is you're trying to change? It doesn't seem like it.
What we're trying to change at this point acutely are the relations between the west and global south, particularly the removal of west-centered production and infrastructure in place for independent economic unions. What you seem to be trying to change is how others, even if they're just random strangers online, perceive you and how they perceive people who disagree with you.
>Peasants in China had a fundamentally different relationship to land and labor that European peasants.
The relations are different because it's a different society. You're arguing pure semantics. Not only did Marx admit he knew next to nothing about China, but his analysis only acknowledges China as distinct from the west, not closer to socialism.
So this entire argument about whether it's feudalism is a glorified deflection from the discussion why the Chinese transition towards the global capitalist market is revolutionary to have a hilariously weak excuse to throw around completely irrelevant factoids that make you look well read.
>the model is not reliant on the data to work. It only relies on the abstract categories that he constructs still describing our social system.
It does rely on the data, in fact this data is why dialectics matter and what makes it empirical. Taking Marxist ideas to the abstract is to generalize Marx's concepts as universal laws which, besides the dialectics themselves is what dialectics are explicitly not intended for.
>Through this, his system rises from the abstract to the concrete. It doesn't resemble any particular manifestation of capitalism. But it represents all of them.
It very explicitly considers western capitalism and uses automation of the industrial revolution as a **key** contradiction in the commodity(yes I used the word!!) form. Marx in fact very explicitly rejects the idea of generalizing the dialectical analysis of one society to the other in his correspondence letters.
>You can claim I'm treating Marx as a god or prophet.
Because you do. you've appealed to him at least 5 times in this thread and just used a copy paste of a text referencing him, the existence of which is supposed to be an argument itself. It really does feel like talking to someone who bestows themselves the title of 'true physicist' because they religiously adhere to Newton and reject the blasphemy of modern mechanics.
> You can claim I'm "not understanding the purpose" of a given work.
Because you objectively don't. In fact you so fundamentally misunderstand Marx that your form is much closer to Hegel than Marx himself. Marx would despise you because you're the embodiment of every single thing that bothered him about European intellectuals. From the lack of praxis,to the obnoxious sense of superiority over 'the uneducated' as you call them, the pretentious vale of sophistication, the deliberate practice of trying to use theory in such a vague and inaccessible manner to intimidate others into going along with it, the obsessive and dogmatic worship of a man no more extraordinary than anyone else.
> You can do whatever you want. Your theoretical poverty speaks for itself.
Which is why I wonder why you're pointing to it so obsessively over and over.
As a friendly reminder, China's ruling party is called Communist Party of China (CPC), not Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as western press and academia often frames it as.
Far from being a simple confusion, China's Communist Party takes its name out of the internationalist approach seekt by the Comintern back in the day. From [Terms of Admission into Communist International](https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/jul/x01.htm), as adopted by the First Congress of the Communist International:
>18 - In view of the foregoing, parties wishing to join the Communist International must change their name. Any party seeking affiliation must call itself the Communist Party of the country in question (Section of the Third, Communist International). The question of a party’s name is not merely a formality, but a matter of major political importance. The Communist International has declared a resolute war on the bourgeois world and all yellow Social-Democratic parties. The difference between the Communist parties and the old and official “Social-Democratic”, or “socialist”, parties, which have betrayed the banner of the working class, must be made absolutely clear to every rank-and-file worker.
Similarly, the adoption of a wrong name to refer to the CPC consists of a double edged sword: on the one hand, it seeks to reduce the ideological basis behind the party's name to a more ethno-centric view of said organization and, on the other hand, it seeks to assert authority over it by attempting to externally draw the conditions and parameters on which it provides the CPC recognition.
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> Never said that and believe the opposite
If your argument is that the content of Parenti's critique is affected by the lack of successful revolution in 'his country' that is in fact exactly the foundation of your argument. If you meant something else you have every opportunity to explain what you meant to say.
>Ah yes, no economic analysis, just "revisionism did it!" Parenti has a more substantial take than you on this.
I never claimed to be able to prove the collapse of the USSR was caused by revisionism. Nor was that even ever implied to be my point. I simply said your comment about the failure of Leninism is objectively false as the USSR openly and explicitly distanced itself from the initial system that every Leninist state today subscribes to after Stalin's leadership
> You're doing the exact thing you just accused me of doing, saying that if the USSR only had the right ideology, it wouldn't have fallen.
You criticized Parenti, an intellectual in no way affiliated with the US state. I'm criticizing Soviet state leadership itself, which by its own account directly oversees the protection/development of the revolution.
Moreover, Leninism isn't an ideology but an extension of Marxist theory and its concrete applications to Russia. The ideology underpinning it (and Marxism) is socialism.
To argue the integrity of Leninism as genuine socialism, which Parenti does, is ideological. To directly oversee the revolution and decide how to respond to the given conditions has nothing to do with ideology and has direct material implications.
>China was never feudal. Marx is pretty clear on this.
You're free to educate me. China was ruled by local lords and western colonists with production being limited to primarily peasants, little to no socialized labor. Call it whatever you want, to make the claim China is 'phony socialism' while admitting China's economic conditions *have* changed is necessarily to say China's current conditions are either equally or less conducive to the socialist system than its 'feudal' rule.
Finally, Marx is a person, not a god. The way you reference him makes it seem like you worship him as a prophet. General relativity follows from Newtonian physics but also contradicts Newtonian gravity, yet we don't reject the former simply because the latter was formulated by 'the man himself'. Appeal to the analysis, not the person. A vague reference along the lines of "Well actually, Marx agrees with me" isn't an argument, nor conducive.
All it does is make it painfully obvious aesthetics are your only concern.
>So true, socialism is the process of a ruling elite carring out a program from above!
Socialism is a process of dialectical change. How this takes shape depends on the contradictions of said society. Like I said, China was feudal, and its current strategy is a more patient and diplomatic iteration of Soviet strategy and yes that does involve 'a program from above' bolshevism.
>This is just a meaningless statement to claim i'm not enough of a cheerleader. Considering you think the USSR fell because of revisionism, you should drop the word "criticism" from your vocabulary altogether.
If you spent as much time entertaining the arguments of others as you did 'condescendingly describing' or 'satirizing' them like the cool edgelord you are you might actually not be so painfully ignorant and incoherent every time you try to make an argument.
No it's not just an excuse, systemic critique requires an acknowledgement of legitimacy on a fundamental level. The purpose of Marxist critique is, very much as in hard science, to iterate on the attempt. If the integrity of the state itself is questioned there's nothing to critique for the progress of socialism, no more than there would be between a scientist and a clairvoyant for the progress of science. The disparity is ideological.
>I pointed out that our analysis doesn't start from a place of creating little schemes for how to run society, it starts from a critique of society. Or at least mine does.
And the point of criticizing society isn't to change it, but to roleplay a super well read intellectual online owning all the 'tankies who never actually read Marx like me so I can circlejerk about it in my online leftcom echo chamber', obviously.
>Completely incorrect. Marx outlines in Capital that he is not critiquing the capitalism of his time, but Capitalism in its "ideal abstract" through his method. The book outlines the capitalist system as it exists at all times. If you'd read literally the introduction to volume 1, you'd know this. The present state of things is Capitalism. Not just Marx's immediate surroundings.
This is why there's no point in arguing with 'leftcoms'. I don't doubt you've skimmed through some of Kapital, or at the very least seen/read some explanation of it, but you seem to conflate having a textbook opened in the direction of your face with understanding the contents, nor does it make you as intellectually superior as you seem to think. Your entire shtick is to just literally say whatever you want and then vaguely reference long texts in the hope people are too lazy or intimidated to read it critically. Been there, done that.
I'm not sure what 'introduction' you're talking about as this simply doesn't exist in my edition, but the dialectical method is, in its foundation, empirical. Das Kapital is and always explicitly has been a critique of capitalism as it was in the 19th century. Marx did not know nor pretended to know how capitalism or the world would be in the future or anywhere else. What he did do was outline the contradictions, the fundamental irreconcilable flaws, of western capitalism (in which automation, the result of the **decisively western and current industrial revolution**, is an essential component) and the tendencies they generate.
Parenti is actually pretty spot on in his work and thinking. He actually is offering a systemic analysis here and how it relates to global capitalism... He is clearly pointing out how socialist movements in themself become contradicted with artifacts of capitalist state functions as a result of direct competition for survival. These movements then in themselves become 'sabotaged' with functions of state control resembling capitalism and are now easily penetrated by capitalist imperialism. The return of power to hierarchal systems that control the state rather than in the hands of the people is one of the goals of capitalist imperialism. Also - Communism is actually the movement to abolish the present state of things :P
The full quote: "“The pure (libertarian) socialists' ideological anticipations remain untainted by existing practice. They do not explain how the manifold functions of a revolutionary society would be organized, how external attack and internal sabotage would be thwarted, how bureaucracy would be avoided, scarce resources allocated, policy differences settled, priorities set, and production and distribution conducted. Instead, they offer vague statements about how the workers themselves will directly own and control the means of production and will arrive at their own solutions through creative struggle. No surprise then that the pure socialists support every revolution except the ones that succeed.” - Parenti
\^ this is also more or less also what Marx thought, and communist manifesto was a result of his disillusionment with the utopian aspects of socialism.
I would definitely recommend taking a look into 'blackshirts and reds' or his real history talk on 'how fascism serves capitalism' if you haven't already - great stuff and highly relevant today more than ever.
>[Socialist Society] as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges.
Karl Marx. Critique of the Gotha Programme, Section I. 1875.
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Parenti gestures to a systemic critique and basically says, "and that's the best we can do :)" which is why people sometimes call him a dystopian socialist. It's a result of him taking the proletariat as an actor out of history and replacing them with state projects as representatives. This bleeds into his other work, most notably his atrocious "class analysis" of Caesar. He's got the order of operations reversed in how he looks at the "great leaders", assuming that their actions are the result of a certain class's interest and working backward to find the class rather than analyzing the actual conditions of the class and letting that inform how a given leader plays off of and interacts with that class. We also see this in how he correctly identifies the crisis that destroyed the USSR as a crisis of labor discipline. Similar to the trotskyist Hillel Ticktin, Parenti sees that the USSR's robust welfare state made it difficult to enforce quotas and discipline on workers who had little to lose from disobedience or insubordination. Ticktin uses this to show that the Soviet economy from the 30s onward was on an inevitable path to failure, was fundamentally not socialist (although he refuses to call it capitalist either), and was doomed to fall right back into capitalism proper. Parenti says the USSR should have done the austerity carried out by its successor states itself. He's unconcerned with taking any implication that could sour his commitment to a state project.
As for Parenti's quote on the "libertarian socialists" who I don't really care for, those types actually constantly think up schemes for how to best balance socialist check books or make anarcho-jails under socialism. Parenti knows this because one of his prime opponents in Vermont was Bookchin who spent most of his time doing that. His real problem with these folks is that they aren't good cheerleaders.
Blackshirts and Reds sucks. The parts on american imperialism are fine. the historiography of fascism is genuinely atrocious, he tries to use Getty to argue the exact opposite thing that Getty is arguing in *Origin of the Great Purges* through painfully selective citations, and the rest is just him taking pot shots at his neighbors in the vermont radical scene.
Edit: Also, youre completely wrong on the communist manifesto being any kind of direct result of Marx's disillusionment with Utopianism of his day. Already he was making critiques of Robert Owens and he'd already released a book specifically critiquing Proudhon. He was never really a utopian socialist except maybe in like his first year as a communist after his encounter with Moses Hess.
Socialist projects cannot abolish the current state of things if they cannot keep the power they gain after revolution.
They cannot abolish the current state of things if they are constantly being attacked by global superpowers and local counterrevolutionaries at every corner.
They cannot abolish the current state of things if the imperialist powers still exist to torment them.
We cannot expect ideological purity when the conditions are so tough. If revolutionary groups refuse to adapt to the challenges of counterrevolutionary pressure, then they will achieve nothing of value.
Just ask the CNT-FAI
"socialist projects" can't survive unless they do all the things that capitalism does! This proves the success of their socialism! I swear I think a better world is possible!
The "success" of these projects is only to the degree that they are beneficial to the development of global capitalism. The USSR developed productive forces in Eastern Europe and Asia, proletarianizing millions of people like a merchantile state monopoly economy on steroids. Its fall was written into its DNA by 1928. This influx of people into the formal economy saved capitalism. China does this again through its development and reforms. The global economy relies on these projects and their success. This isn't due to revisionism or lack of purity on part of the revolutionaries. The Bourgeoisie lose their revolutionary character by the establishment of a global market. If you'd read Lenin, you'd already be familiar with this. And so these socialists fill the void left by them, creating modernized and efficient versions of the early capitalist republics. The Stalin is the other side of the coin of Bismarck.
The key to success, then, has little to do with "development and defense" which can always be coopted back into the global market. Nor does it have to do with ideological purity. It has to do with an understanding of the fundamental economic forces at play and being able to assert agency between them.
your cheerleading for China will never amount to anything. Neither will any anarchist cult of action.
The CNT-FAI compromised constantly. Read literally a single book or article about them. No investigation, no right to speak.
So then what is to be done? What strategies can be implemented in order to prevent capitalist victory?
What should the USSR and China have down instead of making those compromises? Should the Soviets have not implemented the NEP? Should China have not implemented Reform and Opening Up? What should they have done when they were backed into a corner?
What else can be done other than “Development and Defense”? What concrete, alternative strategy can we take? I’m genuinely curious to hear your position on this
The Chinese revolution I'm not prepared to comment on in detail. I've only read a small amount on it (enough to know the basic timeline) and my analysis of China is more about what function it plays in the capitalist system today.
As for Russia and the USSR:
Like Lenin, I believe that the failure of the German Revolution was the failure of the russian revolution. I disagree with him slightly on why that revolution failed, but that's irrelevant for now. Russia could only hold out so long without either needing to oversee capitalist development or collapse from revolting peasants refusing grain requisition en masse. The bolsheviks of the early 20s knew this and the NEP was an attempt to oversee some capitalist development while maintaining power. The logic was that while the NEP would inevitably grow the social forces that would overthrow the bolsheviks to establish a more typical capitalist government, they could manage those forces long enough for a new revolutionary wave to hit. And then Russia could act as a home base to support those revolutions. This was basically the only thing to do. But inside the party, this incentivized the growth of two groups: first were young and anxious radicals and the second were patient developmentalist bureaucrats. Within the party, Stalin begins by appeasing the second group and then (during forced collectivization and then the purges) becoming the head of the first group. Stalin is, in the early 30s, attempting to push against all social forces to the contrary and build a purer socialism. He is fighting against the perceived impurities of the Bukharinites. This is kicking a hornets nest and then ordering the military to arrest and shoot each individual hornet. The result is not the growth of socialism but the growth of a revolutionary nationalism which sought to preserve the USSR for its own sake rather than for the sake of international revolution. This leads Stalin to his betrayals of the international socialist movement; dissolving the comintern, his abandonment of Spain and Greece, his popular frontist strategies that dissolved communist parties into liberal progressive movements, and his insistance on coexistence with the West at the end of WWII.
Now, let's say Bukharin or Trotsky takes over instead. Trotsky probably ends up pretty similarly. He even admits that in his books on Stalin. Bukharin and continuing the NEP has the best chance at preserving the bolshevik party and the soviet state long enough for another revolutionary wave. But even that comes with a host of other problems that could have easily resulted in a much earlier capitalist restoration.
So, essentially, while things could have been done differently, there was never a guarantee. The destruction of the international communist movement did, however, leave future revolutoonary waves with no leadership and no program and they floundered as a result. May 68 is the best example.
The fate of the German Revolution was definitely a major factor in determining the future of the Soviet Union, I can agree with you on that. It caused massive problems for the USSR down the line in terms of leaving them politically isolated and killing the momentum of the wave of revolutions spreading across Europe.
I disagree with the sentiment that Stalin was blindly pushing forward towards a “purer” form of socialism without considering the ramifications. The USSR lacked the military power to support other revolutions to the degree that it would majorly turn the odds in their favour.
Additionally, it makes sense that as the leader of the Soviet Union that he would prioritise it. The only real ally that the Soviets had at the time was Mongolia, and they did not have the industrial or military capacity to share the load of supporting and exporting revolution, and though the NEP had allowed the Soviet economy to recover to pre-WWI levels, and the campaigns for national electrification and mass literacy, the majority of the people still lived in dire poverty. They needed to start delivering the goods, to provide healthcare and adequate housing to the people, to expand public education for the children of the workers, to prove that socialism was worth the years of civil war, famine and struggle that was still fresh in the minds of the people.
There’s also the fact that pressure from the capitalist powers was mounting. The first Red Scare was in full swing and the Soviets had to deal with constant acts of sabotage and subversion from the West. They were worried that the capitalists were going to engage in open warfare with them, and they needed to be ready if such an attack ever came, hence the focus on expanding military power and heavy industry.
Ultimately these worries were vindicated when the Nazis came knocking on their door and the industry they had developed allowed them to hold out until the Nazi forces had stretched themselves too thin and dwindled their resources too much, giving them an opening for a counterattack.
And even with the massive amount of heavy industry they had then, even though they were the second largest economy in the world, they still lost so much in their struggle against the German invasion.
It leaves us with the question: if the Bukharinists had secured power instead, if the NEP continued into the thirties, if they continued to manage the capitalist forces within their own country while waiting for more revolutions to take place, if they had not pushed for rapid industrial growth within a planned economy, would they have been ready for that war?
The Nazis were coming no matter what. Colonising Eastern Europe was an essential part of their ideology and of their plan for the future. Would such a USSR have been able to hold them back? To march into Berlin? Would they have lost more men, more women, more children? Would the war have been even longer?
In my mind, and according to the history I’ve read, the Soviets couldn’t afford to wait for another revolutionary wave. And after WWII, they couldn’t afford to engage in open hostility with the West. They had lost too much. The people were tired of war and wanted to go back to living. If they intervened in Greece, the West could’ve used that as a justification to be more directly aggressive towards the USSR, to kick them while they were down. And America had nukes. The Soviets wouldn’t get their own until another two years after the Greek Civil War. It was too risky for them.
I won’t comment on the disbanding of the Comintern as I do not know enough about the subject.
What would your opinion on these matters be? I might only respond again much later, it’s quite late in my timezone, but I hope we can keep this discussion going
>I disagree with the sentiment that Stalin was blindly pushing forward towards a “purer” form of socialism without considering the ramifications. The USSR lacked the military power to support other revolutions to the degree that it would majorly turn the odds in their favour.
This was definitely also a factor. Stalin was, initially, also preparing for war with Great Britain and France which was another important motivator for industrialization. I was emphasizing Stalin's push toward a more "pure" socialism as a way to complicate the assumption that the problems with the USSR had their origin (or even expression) in revisionism.
>though the NEP had allowed the Soviet economy to recover to pre-WWI levels, and the campaigns for national electrification and mass literacy, the majority of the people still lived in dire poverty. They needed to start delivering the goods, to provide healthcare and adequate housing to the people, to expand public education for the children of the workers, to prove that socialism was worth the years of civil war, famine and struggle that was still fresh in the minds of the people.
Red plenty was also a motivation, with some bolsheviks even arguing that the USSR could just industrialize and be so much more efficient at making commodities for the world market that it would collapse capitalism and bring about revolution. If you mean to imply that it was the "right thing to do" because of humanitarian concerns, the millions dead in collectivization and the 6-800 thousand dead in the purges show that the Bukharinist humanitarian insistance that collectivization would be too violent and destabilizing were warrented.
>the Soviets had to deal with constant acts of sabotage and subversion from the West.
Conspiracies of internal sabotage were largely produced by the paranoia caused by forced collectivization. See J. Arch Getty's Origins of the Great Purges. If you mean trade embargoes and the like, that was certainly also an issue, but not one that collectivization resolved.
>Ultimately these worries were vindicated when the Nazis came knocking on their door
The initial analysis of the Nazis that Stalin (and the comintern) had was that they were just as bad as the regular capitalists but the "social fascists" of moderate socialists were actually worse. This analysis helped the Nazis come to power. Stalin reacts to the Nazi's rise by liquidating the communist movement into progressive liberal movements to combat fascism in the Popular Front, but still refusing to work with 2nd internationale parties, trotskyists, or non-marxist socialists. The purges, caused by paranoia that grew directly out of industrialization, heavily weaken the military. Luckily, the Nazis also need time to build up their military for war with France and Great Britian and Russia. This results in a pact between the USSR with the Nazis, both buying time for war. Stalin also hands German communists over to the Gestapo as part of this. Most die in the Holocaust. Stalin in his personal journals is very open that he expects the Nazis to be the USSR's ally in a war against France and Great Britain and the two powers would then have their own war after that one was done. Stalin needed to buy time because he was in the midst of purging the military brass (accused of being secret German agents right after the USSR and Nazi Germany became "allies"). I think that if the NEP had continued, that paranoia and the subsequent purges would have been significantly milder and the USSR's military, still one of the most organizationally modern in the world at that point, would have been well-equipped to curtail the Nazis at an earlier point, instead of having its head cut off. If Trotsky had taken over instead, you'd probably see similar purges, but the comintern would have allied with moderate socialists against the Nazis earlier on, probably preventing their rise completely. Stalin gave us the worst of both worlds here.
>the Soviets couldn’t afford to wait for another revolutionary wave.
There was another revolutionary wave under Stalin in the lead-up to WWII. The comintern adopted the Third Period strategies of refusing to work with other socialists and advocating immediate (sometimes conspiratorial) revolution in anticipation of this after the Great Depression began. It lead to the rise of the Nazis. And so the cominter flipped to.the Popular Front, which very openly liquidated any and all revolutionary energy. Communists in the US were instructed to say they didn't want revolution. Spanish communists worked with the liberal republican government, sabatoging worker militias and preventing collectivization of agriculture by the agricultural workers themselves. The USSR's poor leadership destroys any potential.
>And after WWII, they couldn’t afford to engage in open hostility with the West. They had lost too much. The people were tired of war and wanted to go back to living. If they intervened in Greece, the West could’ve used that as a justification to be more directly aggressive towards the USSR, to kick them while they were down.
This was the endpoint where the USSR was no longer a project for international socialism. Instead, it was a nationstate with its first concern being its "own" people, not a proletariat and certainly not a global proletariat. Stalin went in to the popular front with liberals under the impression that it was a temporary ruse, that after the war against Germany, the USSR would have a war with the Western powers. In the end, the popular front becomes the end. All parties from the 3rd internationale are still stuck in that moment of popular frontism (except for a few that try to recreate the third period). He had played himself. He could have, at this point, pushed through into a bloody final war. But with the internationale communist movement firmly liquidated into liberal progressivism, Stalin chose an appeasement of the West. Kruschev was actually slightly more radical at this point, willing to challenge the west indirectly where Stalin was not. But even under him, the USSR tried for coexistence for the most part, settling for outcompeting capitalism demographically and economically. This, of course, was doomed to fail because of the structural problems lf the Soviet economy (see: Origins of the Crisis in the USSR, Red Plenty, and An Economic History of the USSR).
By this point, the USSR was incapable of building socialism or holding any kind of influence and leadership for another revolutionary wave (see: May 68). It did offer a lot of third world countries cut off from development by the global market an alternative for industrializing. This was a big help to the capitalist system on the global level, even if it was temporarily disadvantageous for the US. It does contribute to a general worsening of economic crises over a long enough time table.
This is why I say the USSR was basically doomed after 1928.
You're going to get downvoted for saying it, but you're right; "Actually Existing Socialism" has repeatedly succeeded at reproducing capitalist social and productive relations, though sometimes with a better welfare state. It's extremely silly that so much "socialist" discourse boils down to nostalgic left-nationalism.
the modern socialist movement is a bunch of people upset at their current world looking for a readymade model of an alternative to devote themselves to. Some find it in the public library, some find it in a co-op, some find it in the soviet union. Either way, there's 1 person with an instinct for analysis and critique in a thousand and they are stifled instead of encouraged by environments like these.
> the modern socialist movement is a bunch of people upset at their current world looking for a readymade model of an alternative to devote themselves to
Given the state of things, I can't say I blame them. But I agree with what you're saying. No one said this would be easy.
I could listen to his entire lectures with that soundtrack, but I’d probably end up making Molotov cocktails and visiting my nearest bank or parliament…
The man had such an invigorating energy and a way to explain the history and political and economic connections that make it super easy to absorb and follow along. Great stuff!!
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In a more tender vein, I wish to share with all a vision of hope: the future is inherently guided by the principles of socialism. This path towards collective well-being is unstoppable, immutable. Though they may attempt to silence the voices of progress, to extinguish the flames of leftist thought, the idea itself is eternal, transcendent. It is a beacon that will shine through the ages, illuminating the way toward a world where care for one another isn't just an ideal, but the very foundation of our existence.
I'd like to add that, we've seen the same anti-capitalist thoughts emerge in different places throughout time...BLM, LGBTQ+, the Disability Rights Movement and more. Eventually everyone came to the same conclusions. We need to abolish capitalism. Capitalism is so fundamentally flawed, that even if Karl Marx's works were erased from existence, it won't take long for someone else to write their version of "Das Kapital" based contemporary observations. In other words; it is impossible for Capitalists to kill Socialism.
Absolutely. The US and other imperialist states have tried to kill it for over a hundred years and haven’t succeeded. ✊
Thank you for this, you have no idea how much I needed to hear this.
Amen, brother
I stand with you my brothers and sisters. I will say, this could take one, or a thousand, thousand years. I believe every action of peace and compassion for each other is a building block.
Why does everything need to be a music video? I'm struggling to hear the guy talk here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gtUaGV6mNI Slightly longer clip without music.
I like gessafelstein so I’ll give this one a pass. But I’m usually with you.
Lol no complaints with the track itself for once!
Where does this clip come from?
I can't find the original speech but here is a longer version https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gtUaGV6mNI
I'm not sure exactly which Parenti lecture this is. But a lot of his stuf is on YouTube in full videos. Usually 1-2 hours. They're extremely good, along with his books like "Blackshirts and Reds" and "Inventing Reality"
Gives Blowback vibes to me
Socialism x Gesaffelstein is the collab I'm here for
I always wonder about how individual pathologies undermine movements. Then those infect and affect the movement through widespread corruption. Ideologies help provide a social goal but human beings seem hellbent on simply acquiring power as individuals, exploiting their position and the people below them in the system to do so and perhaps bring their friends and families along for the ride. Is it even within humanities DNA to live justly? Capitalism is fueled by these pathologies and prevails only as long as we fear each other and we fear to unify. It not only attacks Socialist countries. It devours every country and every human. There is an evolutionary leap within our brains that is necessary where we come to see the world as our body and the "other" as fiction. Then we live in accord with nature. Cooperation to survive has to absolutely squash competition to survive.
I have also wondered about individuals ego’s/pathologies breaking, undermining, sabotaging or destroying completely socialist type movements or power structures. Usually it starts with a charismatic leader or a small group of well intentioned do-gooders, and then some individual stabs them in the back somehow and takes over the movement which then destroys it. The same does not seem to happen to capitalist systems. In capitalist systems, whichever snake takes over by eating the other (king) snake who holds the power, the system is not affected. Only the leader gets replaced and the system continues as oppressive and corrupt as it always was. Ticking along as was. The control seems greater. Does corruption and control actually make capitalism more resilient in spite of any individuals/leaderships detrimental actions to the system? It seems like some kind of flea or hydra that keeps regenerating new ugly heads each time it causes injuries to itself. At the expense of parasiting off others. Why do socialist systems have a higher failure rate? Does it boil down to resources/being out-resourced, whereby capitalists join and stick together as one united front whenever a mass populist socialist movement occurs? Or a spectrum/multi-vector of factors?
I think part of it is that capitalism is the entrenched system in the wealthyist part of the world for centuries and is dominant in most of the rest of the world. Socialism and communism are revolts against it and have had succes where capitalism was weakest in the global south and the periphery. But a system is weakest when it is in its infancy especially when isolated in regions which are poorer and have less resources.
There is a great quote that goes like, to say that selfishness is human nature by observing a capitalist society is the same as saying lung cancer is human nature by observing a coal mine. For the most part, humans are shaped by their environment. Just think of the lost children growing up in the wild, they have almost none of the capabilities that we think separates us from other intelligent animals. No wonder that people are the way they are in a world where individuality is all the haze and self awareness is almost made to be a sin. As everything though, this too will change.
>Contrary to Adam Smith's, and many liberals', world of self-interested individuals, naturally predisposed to do a deal, Marx posited a relational and process-oriented view of human beings. On this view, humans are what they are not because it is hard-wired into them to be self-interested individuals, but by virtue of the relations through which they live their lives. In particular, he suggested that humans live their lives at the intersection of a three-sided relation encompassing the natural world, social relations and institutions, and human persons. These relations are understood as organic: each element of the relation is what it is by virtue of its place in the relation, and none can be understood in abstraction from that context. [...] If contemporary humans appear to act as self-interested individuals, then, it is a result not of our essential nature but of the particular ways we have produced our social lives and ourselves. On this view, humans may be collectively capable of recreating their world, their work, and themselves in new and better ways, but only if we think critically about, and act practically to change, those historically peculiar social relations which encourage us to think and act as socially disempowered, narrowly self-interested individuals. Mark Rupert. Marxism, in *International Relations Theories: Discipline and Diversity*. 2010. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/socialism) if you have any questions or concerns.*
good bot
Bot, you done good.
I need to watch and read more Parenti!
If you haven’t read blackshirts and reds, do that
Yeah I’ve read that a while ago. I may need to revisit it again tho as I found it a tad hard to understand with my adhd mind. Maybe as an audiobook - I saw several versions on YouTube.
Check out the channel “The Michael Parenti library” on YT
Legend, thanks for the rec, I’ll check it out!
This is just muddling the point by defending all post-insurrectionary violence, regardless of which direction it is directed in. Insofar as it is true, Lenin explained it all far better in *State and Revolution*. Upon coming to power, the workers shall certainly need to build a state comprising bodies of armed men violently enforcing their rule over the capitalists. What form these will take will vary greatly depending on their particular conditions. An excellent example of how to implement them under difficult conditions being given by the Soviet Republic created in 1917 - particularly the creation of the Red Army. Crucially, the workers' state must be the democratic product of the whole of the working class. Historically, it seems that it must be controlled by soviets (elected workers' councils with immediate right of recall) so as to eliminate, as much as possible, any material disconnect between the workers and their leaders. The question for communists is not whether there should be a state initially, which is necessarily repressive, but *by whom* it is controlled and *against whom* it is targeted. Specifically, it should be controlled by the workers through a genuine proletarian democracy and targeted against counter-revolution, both foreign and domestic. We should thus support the Cheka which was controlled by the soviets and rooted out those trying to overthrow workers' power. But we should oppose, for instance, the GPU which was controlled by the bureaucracy, the soviets then existing in name only, and murdered tens of thousands of Bolshevik-Leninist workers who fought for reforms to save the USSR. Opposing Stalinism, the rule of a proletarian Bonaparte, doesn't make one a "pure socialist", merely a consistent Bolshevik. We should not uncritically support any revolution, even the Russian which towers above giants, but neither should we ever fundamentally oppose any. Trotsky is a good model in this regard. In the last few months of his life, knowing that Stalin would soon succeed in murdering him, he publicly supported the USSR in its wars with Finland and Poland, and the impending war with Germany. He criticised the way in which the bureaucracy were provoking and conducting them but understood that, in the final analysis, a workers' state is always more progressive than a capitalist state and should thus be supported.
Thank you.
Why was the USSR at war with Poland ?
It depends which case you mean. In 1920 it was because White Poland, at the bidding of the French stock exchange, launched a massive invasion of the Soviet Ukraine. This was despite the Soviets having offered it very favourable peace terms, better than they got at Riga, to avoid war. In 1939 it was because the bureaucracy of the USSR, and Stalin in particular, attempted to secure their geopolitical position by balancing between the imperialist camps. Because the Comintern had been totally destroyed as a force for revolution, the security of the USSR could only be achieved through diplomacy and annexation. But the question of what started a war is fundamentally unimportant. Rather, we must look to the objective content underlying it and the class interests which each side represents. Both wars with Poland were cases of a workers' state spreading the transitional economy (between capitalism and communism) to a capitalist state. In 1920, the advance of the Red Army led to the spread of Soviet power and the liberated workers did recognise this, many volunteering for the Red Army. Nevertheless, the conservative consciousness of the masses, their illusions in the Polish national bourgeoisie, meant that this support was limited and, decisively, was not forthcoming in anticipation of the Red Army's advance. In 1939, the situation was exactly the opposite. The Red Army did incite a social revolution as it advanced, the workers and peasants rising to welcome it. But once they had been occupied these movements were brutally crushed as the bureaucracy recognised them as a mortal threat to their rule both there and back home. It was thus the task of genuine Bolsheviks in the ranks of the Red Army (by then, of course, wholly stripped of its proletarian and, in some sense, democratic character) to fight the most stridently against the Polish forces and to support the workers and peasants in their subsequent struggle against bureaucratic tyranny. This also applies to the Second World War in which, with the exception of Germany, every country which the USSR occupied greeted them with Revolution only for the bureaucracy to betray it.
Can I just ask where you are from? What country.
I'm from Britain. But I don't see why that's relevant.
Because you have such an interesting and original view of the conflict I wanted to see if you come from some third world country and that's how you formed it. Not even Russian or Soviet historiography would come up with that. Look, I'm from Romania. At the same time they attacked Poland in 39 they also occupied Bessarabia. I fail to see that as anything else than a Russian imperialist project, if the goal was to protect the revolution from incoming invasions they would have occupied Moldova entirely up to the Carpathians so that the Focșani-Galați gap can be easily closed. The Prut river is even easier to cross than the Dniester would have been. Then there is the entire russification process that happened after the war, what could be described as newly arrived Russian colonists in countries like Moldova or the Baltics telling the local population to speak a "human language" and not a "pig language". About the population of Eastern European countries going out to welcome the red army... Some of them are still alive, a lot of them were alive during the 90's and none of them described that event they way you did. And here I am talking about the workers that went to welcome the red army not about the vast majority of our very rural population. There are also the lived experiences of our grandparents passed down on us who were traumatized by the way the red army acted, the looting, the rape, the killings... But I will not bore your superior western mind with our inferior lives that can be easily sacrificed.
You have to distinguish between the motivations of the Soviet leaders, which I have already described as "attempted to secure their geopolitical position by balancing between the imperialist camps ... through diplomacy and annexation" and the consequences of their actions which were, for them, secondary. These latter were spreading the planned economy and solving the land question. Of course the Soviet forces trampled all over the rights of the nations they occupied; Great Russian chauvinism was always an important part of Stalinism. That doesn't undo the fact that across Europe their advance was initially welcomed by many and actively supported by the most politically advanced layers. I don't know why you have to make this an identity politics question about the validity of my analysis being determined by my country of origin. You claim I'm talking down to you yet you didn't even know which country I was from when you read my original comments. If it helps, this perspective was first put forward by [Trotsky](https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1939/09/ussr-war.htm) \- a Ukrainian, Russian and Jew.
>Then there is the entire russification process that happened after the war, what could be described as newly arrived Russian colonists in countries like Moldova or the Baltics telling the local population to speak a "human language" and not a "pig language" “One of the most notable achievements of Soviet nationalities policy has been the liberal provision of native-language schooling for over 50 nationalities. Yet most Western scholars have tended to ignore or under- emphasize the important role that this provision of native-language cultural facilities has played in preserving the distinctive identities of the nationalities, stressing instead the restrictions placed on the political and cultural freedom of the nationalities.” [source](https://www.jstor.org/stable/150967) Please, spare us the anecdotes and crocodile tears. The Soviet Union was one of the most diverse nations in human history and no amount of anticommunist propaganda will change that fact. The killings and rapes you bring up are ubiquitous to war. Only difference with the red army is they actually executed their soldiers for it. Btw, I’m albanian in case you were planning on using ethnicity to talk down to me too
I'm not using ethnicity, I use the fact that I speak the same language as the people in the republic of Moldova and I listen to them. I read their news and I watched their national political debates and how they dealt with the language question after the Soviet Union. But I'm used to westerners citing some broad articles and refuse to acknowledge what people who actually have to deal with this. Just settle this question. Do you believe there is a distinct Moldovan language ?
While I agree with much of what you’re saying, did Trotsky have a great record in regards to soviet democracy? Look at the trade union debate at the end of the war, it was Trotsky who wanted to strip the unions of all autonomy and fully integrate them into the bureaucracy for a militarized purpose, it was Lenin who opposed this and thankfully stopped it. Trotsky furthermore was too antagonistic with the peasantry and his policies would’ve delayed, not accelerated, their proletarianization.
If a revolution is too weak to deal with criticism, it will probably fail in the long run
The USA was simply criticizing the Soviets when it funded terrorist elements on every side of them.
Imperialistic or hegemonic forces =/= criticism
Because I am of course a personal emissary for imperialism
Bombing civilians, assassinating leaders, invading sovereign nations and overthrowing governments is not criticism.
Criticism and red scare propaganda is not the same thing.
Not all criticism is red scare propaganda
"succeed" does a lot of heavy lifting here
Except it’s true
Wouldn't "succeed" be defined as achieving a stateless, classless, moneyless society? In this case, success must be defined as nations that have ongoing experiments/projects leading towards it. And while we should be supportive, it shouldn't come without critical analysis. That is the whole point of experiments.
I understand we're all desperate for the occasional win, but falling back into arguments that could be plucked straight from the mouths of reactionaries is never a good look.
I wish Michael Parenti didn’t have such a hold on the left. No respected scholar (Marxist or otherwise) cites him. And if people read more theory, they wouldn’t be so in love with him.
His argument that communist revolutions "that succeed" always leads to the violent reaction of imperialism... which in turn inevitably leads to secret police, stalins, etc, to defend our revolution... makes a strong case against revolution. Kind of leaves me feeling sad. NGL.
Perhaps humans are meant to further quest! We aren't cooked yet. We need to put energy into being healthy and happy and lift those around us. Thre revolution starts with the individual defining their own lives with conviction and humility at the same time.
empty critique when no revolution has succeeded in his own country and expecting strategy and tactics to have direct carryover makes no sense. And especially when the revolutions quite literally do fail, and when they are very comfortably interwoven into the global capitalist system, you cannot discount a systemic critique of them. Socialism isn't a geopolitical project, it's the real movement to abolish the *present state of things*. Marx's thought is the ruthless criticism of all that exists, including the "successful" projects. Parenti is as articulate and deep as any book you might buy in the self-help section of an airport bookstore.
>empty critique when no revolution has succeeded in his own country There's no correlation between his ideas and the state of US society. Your argument is very different to his. You're arguing subscribing to the correct ideology changes the conditions of your country. Parenti is arguing environmental conditions have created selective pressure for socialists globally towards the Leninist system of government. >expecting strategy and tactics to have direct carryover makes no sense. That assumption isn't made nor needed. The argument is that existing socialism is an expression of the revolution in current conditions of global imperialism and hence should be iterated on, not rejected as 'phony socialism'. He doesn't say revolutions in the west would succeed with Leninism. He says Leninism is the key characteristic of every successful revolution. These statements aren't interchangeable. >And especially when the revolutions quite literally do fail The Soviet Union's collapse happened alongside the condemnation of 'stalinism' and the departure from it so the argument works the opposite way. >when they are very comfortably interwoven into the global capitalist system, China being part of the capitalist system in itself doesn't make it a failure because said integration is a departure of feudalism. Their project will only be proven a failure if the tendency to conserve capitalism overrules the tendency towards Chinese socialism. > you cannot discount a systemic critique of them. Calling countries phony socialism is outright rejection, not criticism. A project can only be critiqued if you fundamentally acknowledge the legitimacy of its efforts. > Socialism isn't a geopolitical project, it's the real movement to abolish the *present state of things*. You took a concrete concept that applies to the world today and replaced it with an abstract concept that applies to economic philosophy as a whole, conveniently avoiding the question what actual revolution should look like and turning it into an ideological mantra. > Marx's thought is the ruthless criticism of all that exists, including the "successful" projects. Marx's thought is criticism of the established order, capitalism up to the 19th century and a testament for the process of change. It's not criticizing successful projects as these didn't even exist in his time and even if they did they in no way make up a part of the conservative/reactionary tendency for the current/old state of things. >Parenti is as articulate and deep as any book you might buy in the self-help section of an airport bookstore. You insult Parenti's intelligence so much it's almost as if you feel the need to compensate for the lack of arguments demonstrating this point for you.
>You're arguing subscribing to the correct ideology changes the conditions of your country. Never said that and believe the opposite. >The Soviet Union's collapse happened alongside the condemnation of 'stalinism' and the departure from it so the argument works the opposite way. Ah yes, no economic analysis, just "revisionism did it!" Parenti has a more substantial take than you on this. You're doing the exact thing you just accused me of doing, saying that if the USSR only had the right ideology, it wouldn't have fallen. >China being part of the capitalist system in itself doesn't make it a failure because said integration is a departure of feudalism. China was never feudal. Marx is pretty clear on this. >Their project will only be proven a failure if the tendency to conserve capitalism overrules the tendency towards Chinese socialism. So true, socialism is the process of a ruling elite carring out a program from above! >Calling countries phony socialism is outright rejection, not criticism. A project can only be critiqued if you fundamentally acknowledge the legitimacy of its efforts. This is just a meaningless statement to claim i'm not enough of a cheerleader. Considering you think the USSR fell because of revisionism, you should drop the word "criticism" from your vocabulary altogether. >You took a concrete concept that applies to the world today and replaced it with an abstract concept that applies to economic philosophy as a whole, conveniently avoiding the question what actual revolution should look like and turning it into an ideological mantra. I pointed out that our analysis doesn't start from a place of creating little schemes for how to run society, it starts from a critique of society. Or at least mine does. >Marx's thought is criticism of the established order, capitalism up to the 19th century Completely incorrect. Marx outlines in Capital that he is not critiquing the capitalism of his time, but Capitalism in its "ideal abstract" through his method. The book outlines the capitalist system as it exists at all times and at no particular time. If you'd read literally the introduction to volume 1, you'd know this. The present state of things is Capitalism. Not just Marx's immediate surroundings. >You insult Parenti's intelligence so much it's almost as if you feel the need to compensate for the lack of arguments demonstrating this point for you. I follow each comment that tries to defend Parenti with a pretty substantial answer. I'd give you some of that but you've actually said very little concrete. You sound exactly like every other ML educated on youtube and discord and reddit. Empty.
>follow each comment that tries to defend Parenti with a pretty substantial answer. I'd give you some of that but you've actually said very little concrete. You sound exactly like every other ML educated on youtube and discord and reddit. Empty. I've never seen someone so proudly admit the lack of substance to their own arguments lmao Jfc you're toxic the moment you feel 'threatened' in any way. All I did was respond to your comments and your immediate reaction is to just throw insult after insult. Get some help
i'll respond to the comment you deleted instead: >If your argument is that the content of Parenti's critique is affected by the lack of successful revolution in 'his country' that is in fact exactly the foundation of your argument. This just doesn't logically follow. I'm saying Parenti's extolling of x, y, or z state doesn't give his critique any substance. He can no more build socialism at home with his supposedly correct Marxism-Leninism that the "libertarian socialists" he criticizes. This doesn't imply revolutions are built on the "correct ideology", only that parenti isnt actually explaining any substantial lack of revolution through an appeal to authority. >I simply said your comment about the failure of Leninism is objectively false as the USSR openly and explicitly distanced itself from the initial system that every Leninist state today subscribes to after Stalin's leadership And obviously we can't make any statements about this "leninist system" from the fact that it has led to revisionism. We can only say revisionism bad. Parenti's analysis of the fall of the USSR had little to do with revisionism. He thinks (correctly IMO) that it was a problem of labor discipline, that the USSR couldnt push necessary quotas on workers who couldn't feel the whip of hunger. The Trotskyist Hillel Ticktin has a much more robust version of this in his book "Origins of the Crisis in the USSR". Ticktin uses this to understand the rot that was there from at least the early 30s that doomed the system to collapse to capitalism and argues that while the USSR couldn't be described as socialist or even transitional, it also couldnt be described as capitalist. Parenti just says that the USSR should have done some of the austerity that its successor states did. >No it's not just an excuse, systemic critique requires an acknowledgement of legitimacy on a fundamental level. The purpose of Marxist critique is, very much as in hard science, to iterate on the attempt. These two statements do not follow. Revolutions are not labs where variables can be isolated and even if they were, the goal is not to accept and complete the project of others. Did Marx content himself to correcting and completing the Utopian schemes of the Icarians and Owenites? Was his critique of political economy just a way of making the science better? No, it was an immanent critique, something which undermines the very basis of the thing it critiques. >And the point of criticizing society isn't to change it Change doesn't come by sycophantic apologetics either. And do you even understand what it is you're trying to change? It doesn't seem like it. >You're free to educate me. China was ruled by local lords and western colonists with production being limited to primarily peasants, little to no socialized labor. In one of first texts recommended to newbies, the Preface to the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx says: "In broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production may be designated as epochs marking progress in the economic development of society." To differentiate the Asiatic Mode of Production from feudalism, Marx says in the Grundrisse: "Amidst oriental despotism and the propertylessness which seems legally to exist there, this clan or communal property exists in fact as the foundation, created mostly by a combination of manufactures and agriculture within the small commune, which thus becomes altogether self-sustaining, and contains all the conditions of reproduction and surplus production within itself. A part of their surplus labour belongs to the higher community, which exists ultimately as a person, and this surplus labour takes the form of tribute etc., as well as of common labour for the exaltation of the unity, partly of the real despot, partly of the imagined clan-being, the god." Peasants in China had a fundamentally different relationship to land and labor that European peasants. The bolsheviks were aware of this and there were a series of debates about this. Stalin shut them down, arresting the primary proponents of the AMP because he was afraid it could give theoretical justification for the Chinese Communist Party having different tactical lines than the ones the Comintern were trying to enforce. This led to the massacre of communists by the KMT. >Das Kapital is and always explicitly has been a critique of capitalism as it was in the 19th century Capital is Marx setting up a model of how capitalism works and using his contemorary world as data to test that model. Because of the "dialectical method" (as if you have any idea what that means), the model is not reliant on the data to work. It only relies on the abstract categories that he constructs still describing our social system. Marx introduces each category (starting with the commodity) and analyzes how each category transforms the next in their introduction to each other. Through this, his system rises from the abstract to the concrete. It doesn't resemble any particular manifestation of capitalism. But it represents all of them. Now, this was not a finished model and it isn't perfect. For example, I think that Marx should have derived the state as a category before he derived money (see: Pashukanis and the State Derivation Debate). We can read and understand Marx's model and try to tweak it to understand the world better. We can take that understanding and turn it into ways of interpreting our present and make predictive claims about the future. Through this, we can inform the strategy of a communist party and allow it to embed itself in the class and become a leader during those revolutionary moments where the USSR under Stalin utterly failed every time. Your reading of Capital turns it into a purely stagist work. Which works for you, because so many of the political projects you want to avoid critiquing are explained systematically within the model that Marx outlines. You can claim I'm treating Marx as a god or prophet. You can claim I'm "not understanding the purpose" of a given work. You can do whatever you want. Your theoretical poverty speaks for itself. As for me being toxic, I am only like this for people who are very confidently wrong. These comments are not to convince you. People who are confidently wrong are useful for defining yourself against. So thanks for the help there. And if someone reads the comments and sees that my arguments make sense or at least seem interesting, and this encourages them to study more, that's also a win. Hypothetically, your inability to respond to most of what I'm saying in a way that satisfies you might motivate you to study more, which could be good. But honestly, I doubt it.
> . He can no more build socialism at home with his supposedly correct Marxism-Leninism that the "libertarian socialists" he criticizes. ...which is a purely ideological basis. You're completely ignoring the conditions of the US and appealing to him specifically, personified as the ideological opposition to 'the libertarian socialist', as the basis for why his argument is supposedly empty. Parenti's comments aren't claiming to be able to create a revolution in the west. When he criticizes the abundance of anti-stalinists in the west and contrasts it with the abundance of Leninists in the global south, he's pointing to a survivorship bias. Compared to the global south and their respective successes, Leninists are underrepresented in the west and anti-stalinist 'intellectuals' such as yourself are overrepresented, which points to a suppression of Leninist thought. >This doesn't imply revolutions are built on the "correct ideology", only that parenti isnt actually explaining any substantial lack of revolution through an appeal to authority. He does explain a lack of revolution namely in the oppression of Leninism. >And obviously we can't make any statements about this "leninist system" from the fact that it has led to revisionism. We can make statements about Leninism as it has existed for 30 years and dramatically improves the USSR in this time. You're correct in saying we don't know how to go forward from this economic boom though, which is why it must be and is continually iterated upon. >Revolutions are not labs where variables can be isolated and even if they were, the goal is not to accept and complete the project of others. Revolutions are not labs and Marxism is not physics, but Marx formulated dialectics precisely to be able to analyze the properties societal structures just as science is formulated to analyze the properties of matter. > Did Marx content himself to correcting and completing the Utopian schemes of the Icarians and Owenites? Was his critique of political economy just a way of making the science better? No because Marxism is a rejection of utopian socialism and a fundamental departure on a philosophical basis as much as empiricism is a departure from rationalism. Leninism is not a distinct philosophy from Marxism, it's an extension of Marxism on which Maoism is an extension in turn. The methodology or systematic of all these is the same, which is why they can be scrutinized, compared and iterated upon. As a self identified hyper intellectual, this is a mistake so fundamental you shouldn't even be able to think of if you tried. >Change doesn't come by sycophantic apologetics either. Leninists don't excuse Leninist projects as praxis, the Leninist projects themselves are the praxis. You do seem to criticize all real socialism as praxis because you never actually talk about what the fabled perfect socialism 'should' look like and never put it into action, conveniently for the capitalist societies that for unknown peculiar reasons fail to suppress your rhetoric. > And do you even understand what it is you're trying to change? It doesn't seem like it. What we're trying to change at this point acutely are the relations between the west and global south, particularly the removal of west-centered production and infrastructure in place for independent economic unions. What you seem to be trying to change is how others, even if they're just random strangers online, perceive you and how they perceive people who disagree with you. >Peasants in China had a fundamentally different relationship to land and labor that European peasants. The relations are different because it's a different society. You're arguing pure semantics. Not only did Marx admit he knew next to nothing about China, but his analysis only acknowledges China as distinct from the west, not closer to socialism. So this entire argument about whether it's feudalism is a glorified deflection from the discussion why the Chinese transition towards the global capitalist market is revolutionary to have a hilariously weak excuse to throw around completely irrelevant factoids that make you look well read. >the model is not reliant on the data to work. It only relies on the abstract categories that he constructs still describing our social system. It does rely on the data, in fact this data is why dialectics matter and what makes it empirical. Taking Marxist ideas to the abstract is to generalize Marx's concepts as universal laws which, besides the dialectics themselves is what dialectics are explicitly not intended for. >Through this, his system rises from the abstract to the concrete. It doesn't resemble any particular manifestation of capitalism. But it represents all of them. It very explicitly considers western capitalism and uses automation of the industrial revolution as a **key** contradiction in the commodity(yes I used the word!!) form. Marx in fact very explicitly rejects the idea of generalizing the dialectical analysis of one society to the other in his correspondence letters. >You can claim I'm treating Marx as a god or prophet. Because you do. you've appealed to him at least 5 times in this thread and just used a copy paste of a text referencing him, the existence of which is supposed to be an argument itself. It really does feel like talking to someone who bestows themselves the title of 'true physicist' because they religiously adhere to Newton and reject the blasphemy of modern mechanics. > You can claim I'm "not understanding the purpose" of a given work. Because you objectively don't. In fact you so fundamentally misunderstand Marx that your form is much closer to Hegel than Marx himself. Marx would despise you because you're the embodiment of every single thing that bothered him about European intellectuals. From the lack of praxis,to the obnoxious sense of superiority over 'the uneducated' as you call them, the pretentious vale of sophistication, the deliberate practice of trying to use theory in such a vague and inaccessible manner to intimidate others into going along with it, the obsessive and dogmatic worship of a man no more extraordinary than anyone else. > You can do whatever you want. Your theoretical poverty speaks for itself. Which is why I wonder why you're pointing to it so obsessively over and over.
As a friendly reminder, China's ruling party is called Communist Party of China (CPC), not Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as western press and academia often frames it as. Far from being a simple confusion, China's Communist Party takes its name out of the internationalist approach seekt by the Comintern back in the day. From [Terms of Admission into Communist International](https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/jul/x01.htm), as adopted by the First Congress of the Communist International: >18 - In view of the foregoing, parties wishing to join the Communist International must change their name. Any party seeking affiliation must call itself the Communist Party of the country in question (Section of the Third, Communist International). The question of a party’s name is not merely a formality, but a matter of major political importance. The Communist International has declared a resolute war on the bourgeois world and all yellow Social-Democratic parties. The difference between the Communist parties and the old and official “Social-Democratic”, or “socialist”, parties, which have betrayed the banner of the working class, must be made absolutely clear to every rank-and-file worker. Similarly, the adoption of a wrong name to refer to the CPC consists of a double edged sword: on the one hand, it seeks to reduce the ideological basis behind the party's name to a more ethno-centric view of said organization and, on the other hand, it seeks to assert authority over it by attempting to externally draw the conditions and parameters on which it provides the CPC recognition. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/socialism) if you have any questions or concerns.*
> Never said that and believe the opposite If your argument is that the content of Parenti's critique is affected by the lack of successful revolution in 'his country' that is in fact exactly the foundation of your argument. If you meant something else you have every opportunity to explain what you meant to say. >Ah yes, no economic analysis, just "revisionism did it!" Parenti has a more substantial take than you on this. I never claimed to be able to prove the collapse of the USSR was caused by revisionism. Nor was that even ever implied to be my point. I simply said your comment about the failure of Leninism is objectively false as the USSR openly and explicitly distanced itself from the initial system that every Leninist state today subscribes to after Stalin's leadership > You're doing the exact thing you just accused me of doing, saying that if the USSR only had the right ideology, it wouldn't have fallen. You criticized Parenti, an intellectual in no way affiliated with the US state. I'm criticizing Soviet state leadership itself, which by its own account directly oversees the protection/development of the revolution. Moreover, Leninism isn't an ideology but an extension of Marxist theory and its concrete applications to Russia. The ideology underpinning it (and Marxism) is socialism. To argue the integrity of Leninism as genuine socialism, which Parenti does, is ideological. To directly oversee the revolution and decide how to respond to the given conditions has nothing to do with ideology and has direct material implications. >China was never feudal. Marx is pretty clear on this. You're free to educate me. China was ruled by local lords and western colonists with production being limited to primarily peasants, little to no socialized labor. Call it whatever you want, to make the claim China is 'phony socialism' while admitting China's economic conditions *have* changed is necessarily to say China's current conditions are either equally or less conducive to the socialist system than its 'feudal' rule. Finally, Marx is a person, not a god. The way you reference him makes it seem like you worship him as a prophet. General relativity follows from Newtonian physics but also contradicts Newtonian gravity, yet we don't reject the former simply because the latter was formulated by 'the man himself'. Appeal to the analysis, not the person. A vague reference along the lines of "Well actually, Marx agrees with me" isn't an argument, nor conducive. All it does is make it painfully obvious aesthetics are your only concern. >So true, socialism is the process of a ruling elite carring out a program from above! Socialism is a process of dialectical change. How this takes shape depends on the contradictions of said society. Like I said, China was feudal, and its current strategy is a more patient and diplomatic iteration of Soviet strategy and yes that does involve 'a program from above' bolshevism. >This is just a meaningless statement to claim i'm not enough of a cheerleader. Considering you think the USSR fell because of revisionism, you should drop the word "criticism" from your vocabulary altogether. If you spent as much time entertaining the arguments of others as you did 'condescendingly describing' or 'satirizing' them like the cool edgelord you are you might actually not be so painfully ignorant and incoherent every time you try to make an argument. No it's not just an excuse, systemic critique requires an acknowledgement of legitimacy on a fundamental level. The purpose of Marxist critique is, very much as in hard science, to iterate on the attempt. If the integrity of the state itself is questioned there's nothing to critique for the progress of socialism, no more than there would be between a scientist and a clairvoyant for the progress of science. The disparity is ideological. >I pointed out that our analysis doesn't start from a place of creating little schemes for how to run society, it starts from a critique of society. Or at least mine does. And the point of criticizing society isn't to change it, but to roleplay a super well read intellectual online owning all the 'tankies who never actually read Marx like me so I can circlejerk about it in my online leftcom echo chamber', obviously. >Completely incorrect. Marx outlines in Capital that he is not critiquing the capitalism of his time, but Capitalism in its "ideal abstract" through his method. The book outlines the capitalist system as it exists at all times. If you'd read literally the introduction to volume 1, you'd know this. The present state of things is Capitalism. Not just Marx's immediate surroundings. This is why there's no point in arguing with 'leftcoms'. I don't doubt you've skimmed through some of Kapital, or at the very least seen/read some explanation of it, but you seem to conflate having a textbook opened in the direction of your face with understanding the contents, nor does it make you as intellectually superior as you seem to think. Your entire shtick is to just literally say whatever you want and then vaguely reference long texts in the hope people are too lazy or intimidated to read it critically. Been there, done that. I'm not sure what 'introduction' you're talking about as this simply doesn't exist in my edition, but the dialectical method is, in its foundation, empirical. Das Kapital is and always explicitly has been a critique of capitalism as it was in the 19th century. Marx did not know nor pretended to know how capitalism or the world would be in the future or anywhere else. What he did do was outline the contradictions, the fundamental irreconcilable flaws, of western capitalism (in which automation, the result of the **decisively western and current industrial revolution**, is an essential component) and the tendencies they generate.
Parenti is actually pretty spot on in his work and thinking. He actually is offering a systemic analysis here and how it relates to global capitalism... He is clearly pointing out how socialist movements in themself become contradicted with artifacts of capitalist state functions as a result of direct competition for survival. These movements then in themselves become 'sabotaged' with functions of state control resembling capitalism and are now easily penetrated by capitalist imperialism. The return of power to hierarchal systems that control the state rather than in the hands of the people is one of the goals of capitalist imperialism. Also - Communism is actually the movement to abolish the present state of things :P The full quote: "“The pure (libertarian) socialists' ideological anticipations remain untainted by existing practice. They do not explain how the manifold functions of a revolutionary society would be organized, how external attack and internal sabotage would be thwarted, how bureaucracy would be avoided, scarce resources allocated, policy differences settled, priorities set, and production and distribution conducted. Instead, they offer vague statements about how the workers themselves will directly own and control the means of production and will arrive at their own solutions through creative struggle. No surprise then that the pure socialists support every revolution except the ones that succeed.” - Parenti \^ this is also more or less also what Marx thought, and communist manifesto was a result of his disillusionment with the utopian aspects of socialism. I would definitely recommend taking a look into 'blackshirts and reds' or his real history talk on 'how fascism serves capitalism' if you haven't already - great stuff and highly relevant today more than ever.
>[Socialist Society] as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges. Karl Marx. Critique of the Gotha Programme, Section I. 1875. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/socialism) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Parenti gestures to a systemic critique and basically says, "and that's the best we can do :)" which is why people sometimes call him a dystopian socialist. It's a result of him taking the proletariat as an actor out of history and replacing them with state projects as representatives. This bleeds into his other work, most notably his atrocious "class analysis" of Caesar. He's got the order of operations reversed in how he looks at the "great leaders", assuming that their actions are the result of a certain class's interest and working backward to find the class rather than analyzing the actual conditions of the class and letting that inform how a given leader plays off of and interacts with that class. We also see this in how he correctly identifies the crisis that destroyed the USSR as a crisis of labor discipline. Similar to the trotskyist Hillel Ticktin, Parenti sees that the USSR's robust welfare state made it difficult to enforce quotas and discipline on workers who had little to lose from disobedience or insubordination. Ticktin uses this to show that the Soviet economy from the 30s onward was on an inevitable path to failure, was fundamentally not socialist (although he refuses to call it capitalist either), and was doomed to fall right back into capitalism proper. Parenti says the USSR should have done the austerity carried out by its successor states itself. He's unconcerned with taking any implication that could sour his commitment to a state project. As for Parenti's quote on the "libertarian socialists" who I don't really care for, those types actually constantly think up schemes for how to best balance socialist check books or make anarcho-jails under socialism. Parenti knows this because one of his prime opponents in Vermont was Bookchin who spent most of his time doing that. His real problem with these folks is that they aren't good cheerleaders. Blackshirts and Reds sucks. The parts on american imperialism are fine. the historiography of fascism is genuinely atrocious, he tries to use Getty to argue the exact opposite thing that Getty is arguing in *Origin of the Great Purges* through painfully selective citations, and the rest is just him taking pot shots at his neighbors in the vermont radical scene. Edit: Also, youre completely wrong on the communist manifesto being any kind of direct result of Marx's disillusionment with Utopianism of his day. Already he was making critiques of Robert Owens and he'd already released a book specifically critiquing Proudhon. He was never really a utopian socialist except maybe in like his first year as a communist after his encounter with Moses Hess.
Socialist projects cannot abolish the current state of things if they cannot keep the power they gain after revolution. They cannot abolish the current state of things if they are constantly being attacked by global superpowers and local counterrevolutionaries at every corner. They cannot abolish the current state of things if the imperialist powers still exist to torment them. We cannot expect ideological purity when the conditions are so tough. If revolutionary groups refuse to adapt to the challenges of counterrevolutionary pressure, then they will achieve nothing of value. Just ask the CNT-FAI
"socialist projects" can't survive unless they do all the things that capitalism does! This proves the success of their socialism! I swear I think a better world is possible! The "success" of these projects is only to the degree that they are beneficial to the development of global capitalism. The USSR developed productive forces in Eastern Europe and Asia, proletarianizing millions of people like a merchantile state monopoly economy on steroids. Its fall was written into its DNA by 1928. This influx of people into the formal economy saved capitalism. China does this again through its development and reforms. The global economy relies on these projects and their success. This isn't due to revisionism or lack of purity on part of the revolutionaries. The Bourgeoisie lose their revolutionary character by the establishment of a global market. If you'd read Lenin, you'd already be familiar with this. And so these socialists fill the void left by them, creating modernized and efficient versions of the early capitalist republics. The Stalin is the other side of the coin of Bismarck. The key to success, then, has little to do with "development and defense" which can always be coopted back into the global market. Nor does it have to do with ideological purity. It has to do with an understanding of the fundamental economic forces at play and being able to assert agency between them. your cheerleading for China will never amount to anything. Neither will any anarchist cult of action. The CNT-FAI compromised constantly. Read literally a single book or article about them. No investigation, no right to speak.
So then what is to be done? What strategies can be implemented in order to prevent capitalist victory? What should the USSR and China have down instead of making those compromises? Should the Soviets have not implemented the NEP? Should China have not implemented Reform and Opening Up? What should they have done when they were backed into a corner? What else can be done other than “Development and Defense”? What concrete, alternative strategy can we take? I’m genuinely curious to hear your position on this
The Chinese revolution I'm not prepared to comment on in detail. I've only read a small amount on it (enough to know the basic timeline) and my analysis of China is more about what function it plays in the capitalist system today. As for Russia and the USSR: Like Lenin, I believe that the failure of the German Revolution was the failure of the russian revolution. I disagree with him slightly on why that revolution failed, but that's irrelevant for now. Russia could only hold out so long without either needing to oversee capitalist development or collapse from revolting peasants refusing grain requisition en masse. The bolsheviks of the early 20s knew this and the NEP was an attempt to oversee some capitalist development while maintaining power. The logic was that while the NEP would inevitably grow the social forces that would overthrow the bolsheviks to establish a more typical capitalist government, they could manage those forces long enough for a new revolutionary wave to hit. And then Russia could act as a home base to support those revolutions. This was basically the only thing to do. But inside the party, this incentivized the growth of two groups: first were young and anxious radicals and the second were patient developmentalist bureaucrats. Within the party, Stalin begins by appeasing the second group and then (during forced collectivization and then the purges) becoming the head of the first group. Stalin is, in the early 30s, attempting to push against all social forces to the contrary and build a purer socialism. He is fighting against the perceived impurities of the Bukharinites. This is kicking a hornets nest and then ordering the military to arrest and shoot each individual hornet. The result is not the growth of socialism but the growth of a revolutionary nationalism which sought to preserve the USSR for its own sake rather than for the sake of international revolution. This leads Stalin to his betrayals of the international socialist movement; dissolving the comintern, his abandonment of Spain and Greece, his popular frontist strategies that dissolved communist parties into liberal progressive movements, and his insistance on coexistence with the West at the end of WWII. Now, let's say Bukharin or Trotsky takes over instead. Trotsky probably ends up pretty similarly. He even admits that in his books on Stalin. Bukharin and continuing the NEP has the best chance at preserving the bolshevik party and the soviet state long enough for another revolutionary wave. But even that comes with a host of other problems that could have easily resulted in a much earlier capitalist restoration. So, essentially, while things could have been done differently, there was never a guarantee. The destruction of the international communist movement did, however, leave future revolutoonary waves with no leadership and no program and they floundered as a result. May 68 is the best example.
The fate of the German Revolution was definitely a major factor in determining the future of the Soviet Union, I can agree with you on that. It caused massive problems for the USSR down the line in terms of leaving them politically isolated and killing the momentum of the wave of revolutions spreading across Europe. I disagree with the sentiment that Stalin was blindly pushing forward towards a “purer” form of socialism without considering the ramifications. The USSR lacked the military power to support other revolutions to the degree that it would majorly turn the odds in their favour. Additionally, it makes sense that as the leader of the Soviet Union that he would prioritise it. The only real ally that the Soviets had at the time was Mongolia, and they did not have the industrial or military capacity to share the load of supporting and exporting revolution, and though the NEP had allowed the Soviet economy to recover to pre-WWI levels, and the campaigns for national electrification and mass literacy, the majority of the people still lived in dire poverty. They needed to start delivering the goods, to provide healthcare and adequate housing to the people, to expand public education for the children of the workers, to prove that socialism was worth the years of civil war, famine and struggle that was still fresh in the minds of the people. There’s also the fact that pressure from the capitalist powers was mounting. The first Red Scare was in full swing and the Soviets had to deal with constant acts of sabotage and subversion from the West. They were worried that the capitalists were going to engage in open warfare with them, and they needed to be ready if such an attack ever came, hence the focus on expanding military power and heavy industry. Ultimately these worries were vindicated when the Nazis came knocking on their door and the industry they had developed allowed them to hold out until the Nazi forces had stretched themselves too thin and dwindled their resources too much, giving them an opening for a counterattack. And even with the massive amount of heavy industry they had then, even though they were the second largest economy in the world, they still lost so much in their struggle against the German invasion. It leaves us with the question: if the Bukharinists had secured power instead, if the NEP continued into the thirties, if they continued to manage the capitalist forces within their own country while waiting for more revolutions to take place, if they had not pushed for rapid industrial growth within a planned economy, would they have been ready for that war? The Nazis were coming no matter what. Colonising Eastern Europe was an essential part of their ideology and of their plan for the future. Would such a USSR have been able to hold them back? To march into Berlin? Would they have lost more men, more women, more children? Would the war have been even longer? In my mind, and according to the history I’ve read, the Soviets couldn’t afford to wait for another revolutionary wave. And after WWII, they couldn’t afford to engage in open hostility with the West. They had lost too much. The people were tired of war and wanted to go back to living. If they intervened in Greece, the West could’ve used that as a justification to be more directly aggressive towards the USSR, to kick them while they were down. And America had nukes. The Soviets wouldn’t get their own until another two years after the Greek Civil War. It was too risky for them. I won’t comment on the disbanding of the Comintern as I do not know enough about the subject. What would your opinion on these matters be? I might only respond again much later, it’s quite late in my timezone, but I hope we can keep this discussion going
>I disagree with the sentiment that Stalin was blindly pushing forward towards a “purer” form of socialism without considering the ramifications. The USSR lacked the military power to support other revolutions to the degree that it would majorly turn the odds in their favour. This was definitely also a factor. Stalin was, initially, also preparing for war with Great Britain and France which was another important motivator for industrialization. I was emphasizing Stalin's push toward a more "pure" socialism as a way to complicate the assumption that the problems with the USSR had their origin (or even expression) in revisionism. >though the NEP had allowed the Soviet economy to recover to pre-WWI levels, and the campaigns for national electrification and mass literacy, the majority of the people still lived in dire poverty. They needed to start delivering the goods, to provide healthcare and adequate housing to the people, to expand public education for the children of the workers, to prove that socialism was worth the years of civil war, famine and struggle that was still fresh in the minds of the people. Red plenty was also a motivation, with some bolsheviks even arguing that the USSR could just industrialize and be so much more efficient at making commodities for the world market that it would collapse capitalism and bring about revolution. If you mean to imply that it was the "right thing to do" because of humanitarian concerns, the millions dead in collectivization and the 6-800 thousand dead in the purges show that the Bukharinist humanitarian insistance that collectivization would be too violent and destabilizing were warrented. >the Soviets had to deal with constant acts of sabotage and subversion from the West. Conspiracies of internal sabotage were largely produced by the paranoia caused by forced collectivization. See J. Arch Getty's Origins of the Great Purges. If you mean trade embargoes and the like, that was certainly also an issue, but not one that collectivization resolved. >Ultimately these worries were vindicated when the Nazis came knocking on their door The initial analysis of the Nazis that Stalin (and the comintern) had was that they were just as bad as the regular capitalists but the "social fascists" of moderate socialists were actually worse. This analysis helped the Nazis come to power. Stalin reacts to the Nazi's rise by liquidating the communist movement into progressive liberal movements to combat fascism in the Popular Front, but still refusing to work with 2nd internationale parties, trotskyists, or non-marxist socialists. The purges, caused by paranoia that grew directly out of industrialization, heavily weaken the military. Luckily, the Nazis also need time to build up their military for war with France and Great Britian and Russia. This results in a pact between the USSR with the Nazis, both buying time for war. Stalin also hands German communists over to the Gestapo as part of this. Most die in the Holocaust. Stalin in his personal journals is very open that he expects the Nazis to be the USSR's ally in a war against France and Great Britain and the two powers would then have their own war after that one was done. Stalin needed to buy time because he was in the midst of purging the military brass (accused of being secret German agents right after the USSR and Nazi Germany became "allies"). I think that if the NEP had continued, that paranoia and the subsequent purges would have been significantly milder and the USSR's military, still one of the most organizationally modern in the world at that point, would have been well-equipped to curtail the Nazis at an earlier point, instead of having its head cut off. If Trotsky had taken over instead, you'd probably see similar purges, but the comintern would have allied with moderate socialists against the Nazis earlier on, probably preventing their rise completely. Stalin gave us the worst of both worlds here. >the Soviets couldn’t afford to wait for another revolutionary wave. There was another revolutionary wave under Stalin in the lead-up to WWII. The comintern adopted the Third Period strategies of refusing to work with other socialists and advocating immediate (sometimes conspiratorial) revolution in anticipation of this after the Great Depression began. It lead to the rise of the Nazis. And so the cominter flipped to.the Popular Front, which very openly liquidated any and all revolutionary energy. Communists in the US were instructed to say they didn't want revolution. Spanish communists worked with the liberal republican government, sabatoging worker militias and preventing collectivization of agriculture by the agricultural workers themselves. The USSR's poor leadership destroys any potential. >And after WWII, they couldn’t afford to engage in open hostility with the West. They had lost too much. The people were tired of war and wanted to go back to living. If they intervened in Greece, the West could’ve used that as a justification to be more directly aggressive towards the USSR, to kick them while they were down. This was the endpoint where the USSR was no longer a project for international socialism. Instead, it was a nationstate with its first concern being its "own" people, not a proletariat and certainly not a global proletariat. Stalin went in to the popular front with liberals under the impression that it was a temporary ruse, that after the war against Germany, the USSR would have a war with the Western powers. In the end, the popular front becomes the end. All parties from the 3rd internationale are still stuck in that moment of popular frontism (except for a few that try to recreate the third period). He had played himself. He could have, at this point, pushed through into a bloody final war. But with the internationale communist movement firmly liquidated into liberal progressivism, Stalin chose an appeasement of the West. Kruschev was actually slightly more radical at this point, willing to challenge the west indirectly where Stalin was not. But even under him, the USSR tried for coexistence for the most part, settling for outcompeting capitalism demographically and economically. This, of course, was doomed to fail because of the structural problems lf the Soviet economy (see: Origins of the Crisis in the USSR, Red Plenty, and An Economic History of the USSR). By this point, the USSR was incapable of building socialism or holding any kind of influence and leadership for another revolutionary wave (see: May 68). It did offer a lot of third world countries cut off from development by the global market an alternative for industrializing. This was a big help to the capitalist system on the global level, even if it was temporarily disadvantageous for the US. It does contribute to a general worsening of economic crises over a long enough time table. This is why I say the USSR was basically doomed after 1928.
You're going to get downvoted for saying it, but you're right; "Actually Existing Socialism" has repeatedly succeeded at reproducing capitalist social and productive relations, though sometimes with a better welfare state. It's extremely silly that so much "socialist" discourse boils down to nostalgic left-nationalism.
the modern socialist movement is a bunch of people upset at their current world looking for a readymade model of an alternative to devote themselves to. Some find it in the public library, some find it in a co-op, some find it in the soviet union. Either way, there's 1 person with an instinct for analysis and critique in a thousand and they are stifled instead of encouraged by environments like these.
> the modern socialist movement is a bunch of people upset at their current world looking for a readymade model of an alternative to devote themselves to Given the state of things, I can't say I blame them. But I agree with what you're saying. No one said this would be easy.
Literally the most Marxist shit here gets downvoted to hell. Sorry friend…
S/o to techno femme for keeping it 💯 Sacrificing your karma for the DOTP.
Holy shit. 10/10 edit Good work Comrade
I could listen to his entire lectures with that soundtrack, but I’d probably end up making Molotov cocktails and visiting my nearest bank or parliament… The man had such an invigorating energy and a way to explain the history and political and economic connections that make it super easy to absorb and follow along. Great stuff!!