Communism101

Hey folks, just posting to share that we're hosting a Beginner Bookclub over at the Decolonial Indigenous and Proletariat study group discord server!. It is made for beginners but anyone can join. All of us attending it are MLs, just like the server itself.

Our meetings take place on Saturdays at 4:30 PM EDT (UTC-4), and I'm the organizer. Additionally, we have Prolewiki members who attend, ready to answer questions and provide context during our reading sessions. Right now, we're digging into 'How Marxism Works' by Chris Harman, which is super beginner-friendly. We read during the sessions so no need to read before. You can pretty much jump in at any point and follow along just fine.

If we see more new faces joining us, we might even consider restarting the book!

If your new/ish to communism we would love to see you. Here’s your invitation to join the server.📚

https://discord.gg/Wj3HnJAQ

note: there are some questions to fill out to enter the server. Just fill them out the best you can and let them know your here for the bookclub

It's a Soros funded organization based out of NYC, run by hedge fund people, they certainly aren't pro communism or Marxism, but they have a lot of videos advocating for unusually things when compared to typical neocon and neolib economix thinkers and institutes in the west, in particular they have a pro-china tilt, I don't really know what to think about them and digging hasn't helped at all, anyone have any decent resources or videos about them? Or suggestions for where to look?

Is it contradictory to run an anti-capitalist business? Is it inevitable to fail under capitalism? And what would it look like under socialism?

I've never thought too much about identifying as one "branch" of Marxism, but now that I think about it I can't really come up with a simple explanation of the main divergences between different currents (ML vs MLM for instance). I suppose I agree more with Marxist-Leninist thought but besides some obvious ones like Trotskyists and patsocs I can only come up with extremely specific details of those divergences (mainly over critical support for AES).

And I definitely can't describe disagreements of less common discussions such as Xi Jinping thought and "Fidel Castro thought".

It doesn't help that a lot of the discussion centers around people like Wisconcom who aren't exactly the height of ideological consistency.

So can anybody help out?

In The State and Revolution, Lenin (and Engels, whom he is quoting) disagrees with communists using "People's State" or "Free People's State" as a programme goal.

If I understand correctly, this is because a) it creates a misunderstanding on the final phase of communism, which is stateless and b) it goes against the Marxist understanding of states as forces of oppression. On the other hand, it seems logical to me that a state following the dictatorship of the proletariat principle would call itself "People's", since the proletariat is the majority.

So, I've been wondering if the existing socialist states have an official line about this, or if there's a consensus amongst M-Ls.

I support the writer's guild strike because they are not part of the bourgeoisie. The same can't be said of a lot of these rich actors who own a ton of capital themselves. So on the one hand, it kind of seems like the bourgeoisie is fighting the bourgeoisie on this one. On the other hand, not every actor in the guild is as successful as Tom Cruise, so some of those striking actors are working class.

Someone curious asked:

Do you know of any resources where I can hear the options of average Soviet citizens during the time of the USSR?

I linked Dessaline's GitHub page: https://dessalines.github.io/essays/socialism_faq.html#did-the-citizens-of-the-soviet-union-dislike-their-government.

And I suggested Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds but I don't think it quite fits the description.

Can anyone think of other resources, maybe a peoples' history kind of thing?

Marcuse argued that the middle class was too obsessed with consumerism for them to fight capitalism. This leads to a weak unity among the working class. Instead, the marginalized, victims of fascism basically, should be united.

I read an article critical of him on the marxists website, and it was kinda dumb. At the start of the article the writer labeled him as “anti-working class”, he immediately accused him of being a CIA puppet as well. Then he said he was an anarchist lol. Afterwards, he claims that the working class is not pacified, citing they had " lack of trust" in government as evidence.

Finally, here is a gem of a statement emphasizing the author's idiocy.

“Marcuse was also often accused of being an advocate of the so-called “sexual revolution,” including the supposedly “liberating” effects of promiscuity, pornography and the sexual content of mass culture. Actually, he was strongly opposed to these trends; which he criticized with his theory of “repressive desublimation.” By turning people’s natural sexuality into a commodity, he argued, capitalism actually repressed their capacity for loving relationships and replaced it with perversions that became increasingly brutal. He associated this perversity with the rise of fascist trends and viewed its encouragement by the ruling class as a form of social control.”

It seems the writer thinks porn is liberating? It's what I got from this.

What do you guys think of Marcuse?

Hello everyone. I am looking for any resources (videos, books, ect) that explain what a vangard partie must do to prepare for revolution and how parties that have led successfull revolutions did it. Things like: how to build a dual power stucture able to compete against the bourgeois state, how to deal with reactionnary infiltration of the partie, how to build popular support, how to get ressources, weapons and money, ect.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/853128

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I was listening to an ep of the Deprogram where they talk about how in China, many people have translated Hakim and Yugopnik’s videos into Chinese to understand Marxist discourse from around the world. I’m a lil jealous because they said it doesn’t happen much the other way around, most Chinese resources are not translated into English. I would like to learn more about Chinese resources on Marxism and modern Chinese takes on anti-Imperialism, I tried looking up Chinese sources and surprise surprise, it’s in Chinese and is not really translated well, barely intelligible in the translation I found. I’ll find the link if I still can. TL;DR Where to find good translations of Chinese resources on Marxism?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/638597

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Comrades, today I had the pleasure of participating in our city's First of May demonstration, and to purchase two books from the local chapter of the MLPD (Marxist-Leninist Party of Germany). One of them is pretty well-known, it is the Dialectics of Nature by Friedrich Engels; the other was an obscure philosophy tract written by one Mr Oscar Creydt where he attempts to reframe the entire history of the universe from a ML point of view, which is why I went in there with high expectations, namely that it would use recent discoveries from natural science to develop new ML philosophy.

Unfortunately for me however, whilst the book started promising and ambitious and it does demonstrate a good grasp of the historical developments of quantum mechanics, by page 60 of 220 it occurs to the author that he wants to deny Einstein's theory of general relativity, arguably the most well-tested and internally consistent theory in all of physics. But this was only the hors-d'oeuvre of the work, he goes on to try and reduce every single phenomenon in the universe to the vibration inherent to photons (which he calls "radions"), he spouts metaphysical nonsense about why the speed of light is constant, he declares the cosmic microwave background radiation to be the "primitive stage" of this vibration because Big Bang cosmology isn't real either, and he makes no attempt to explain cosmological redshift, gravitational lensing, or the perihelion precession of Mercury with his mental construction.

Now bear in mind that I don't necessarily want to accuse the author of being bad at science. The foreword of the book explicitly remarks that due to the anticommunist Stroessner regime in Paraguay, he couldn't rely on qualified people to empirically test or mathematically proofread his work, it is possible that the libraries he frequented just didn't have reliable books on the topics, and even the best scientists might publish utter drivel after having to work in isolation for decades. However, it is obvious that the mistake with this approach is that you cannot start with your own interpretation of dialectical materialism, and then change science to fit into it. This is a misconception of ML philosophy which many theoretically-minded comrades have already exposed, including on this very website. The refutation to it is that rather than relying on some rigid dogma formulated by humans, nature begets the shape of her own dialectics via her own interactions with herself; which is why we must study nature to arrive at natural philosophy and not vice versa.

The last thing I want to remark is that, if instead it had been let's say a Christian fanfic of science, one would immediately have noticed from the lack of footnotes and historical background knowledge, the presence of biblical and other nonscientific references, the use of odd figures and diagrams derived from gnosticism, or the extensive use of all-capital letter words. Here, there were no such signs. Marxist-Leninist scientific malpractice is especially worrisome because you might not even notice it until several pages into the book and even then the errors are of a much more subtle nature and require background knowledge.

My region is home to the world's largest worker cooperative, Mondragon Corporation. Do you think worker cooperatives are useful to us? Why aren't they more widespread? Could their growth be facilitated by new technologies like the Internet or Blockchain?

I heard Maoism is popular in India. Why? What is so appealing about committing terrorism in the name of left-deviationism?

Something that isn't anti-deng but honest criticisms

Thanks

Who you agree with more? Kollontai's Glass of Water theory or Zalkind's Twelve Sexual Commandments of the Revolutionary Proletariat? Were they good for 1920s-1930s Soviet Union? What about current implementations, which one would you lean closer to and why?

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/556716

If I am to believe my school textbooks (which are not to be trusted more than half the time on recent history), Yugoslavia made use of the Marshall Plan, and if I'm to trust another book, related to that history period, but released when we still had socialism in Poland, the Marshall Plan was used by the USA to manipulate politics of the plan's beneficinaries to their likes.

How did this affect the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, if at all?

I've heard conflicting things about their political orientation.

I was gonna ask "Are Mestizos settlers?" but I quickly realized that the answer to this question probably isn't black and white. If the answer to this isn't just "Yes" or "No" then what determines whether or not a Mestizo person is a settler?

Do you guy have any good materials about Estonia after the fall os the USSR?

How is their economy doing, how is the wealth distribution, the populations access to basic needs etc

this kind of i formation