#Marxist anon

[marxistswiftieism]

It is genuinely so fucking crazy how racist some of you are towards people in the dprk. You sit there and go “ah!!! poor little brainwashed stupid fools! they CLEARLY need me, a westerner, to come and fix their backwards savage authoritarian society! They don’t know how to govern themselves so of course I, as a believer in FrEeDoM™️™️™️™️ and DeMoCrAcY™️™️™️ 🗳️🦅🇺🇸🎆🏈, need to show them how life should be lived by sending thumb drives containing, inexplicably, episodes of american cartoons and late night talk shows across the border thus proving how vastly superior our glorious liberal democratic republic is to their dictatorial regime!” and then somehow after doing all of that you will open up a history textbook to read about manifest destiny and the white man’s burden and go “oh how awful! Good thing I, a noble and educated citizen of a beautiful liberal democracy, would NEVER do that!!”

[unhingedfemmecontent]

You really need to be raped until you realise the delusion you are in. Not by all men. Just 1 is enough. I don't believe women should be fucked by all men. Rather they should be by their own man. Yes continuous exposure to dick pounding inside your pussy, until you cum will help you break the delusion. Idiot.

no. i will never have sex with a man glad that bothers you so much though.

[rxvera]

IIIIIiiiiii didn't know you were a BEYOND loverrrrrr

why does that fit tho

I cannot believe you didn't clock that I would be obsessed with a man that's compensating for a raging inferiority complex and likes to kill people but especially himself

[hussyknee]

hi! I like your blog very much, but minor question here. Your dni says marxists, does that include general communists, socialists, etc or no?

Anyone who doesn't call me "comrade", dream of overthrowing the government with armed revolt, deny the genocides of communist governments, or try to tell people who actually lived under communism that it wasn't "real communism" is welcome to follow me. Or if you do believe those things, don't subject me to them.

[pancakehouse]

wait i have a reason for top sirius. he is an aristocrat and why should aristocrats just get to lie around and do nothing. Workers of the world unite.

you know what you’ve made a fantastic point here this is so true sirius tries to lie back in one of those lush dormitory beds he is sooo comfy he’s relaxed ready to have a good time there’s crimson scarlet bright red pillows and duvet sheets all around him there’s little gold detailing on everything and well the irony is certainly not lost on remus he whips out his battered annotated dog-eared copy of the communist manifesto and is like WELL listen up here black ….

[thevalicemultiverse]

"WILL PENSIONS CRISIS CAUSED BY GAY MARXIST MUSLIM ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS FROM THE ZIONIST-CONTROLLED EU CHEATING ON BENEFITS AND BISEXUAL BLACK TRANSGENDER PAEDOS TAKING OUR JOBS CAUSE HOUSE PRICE CRASH AND CANCER IN MARGINALIZED WHITE CHRISTIAN BLACKSHIRTS?!?"

"No, but it'll probably cause hearing loss thanks to assholes like you," Alice mutters, digging around in her ear.

[spaghettioverdose]

people are discovering I'm an evil tankie lmao

anyways the second one is particularly dumb. you speak of the concept of ml transfems like they're this wacky sort of weird rare position that no one really has. are you aware how many popular posters on this site are transfem MLs or transfem ML adjacent? moreover, based on what do you know that MLs are the most transphobic people on the left? like not talking about a subreddit or a discord server, or even CPGB. I'm talking about the movement as a whole. and if there is, a trend where marxism-leninism is especially transphobic (hint: there is not) is that due to the ideology itself being inherently transphobic or is it the people living in particular material conditions that lead to them holding out reactionary ideas?

I could bring up a million arguments to refute this like the incredibly progressive new family code in Cuba, or East Germany's progressive LGBT policies, or how people were already lamenting how many rights they were going to lose from the reunification, or the general trend of modern socialist states to make gains when it comes to LGBT rights and protections, but this has been brought up a million times and you are all still stupid.

Tell me anon, who am I, as a transfem, supposed to side with politically? Liberals who have all shown to be willing to throw us under the bus in record speeds if they believe it might get them three more votes? Anarchists who are utterly incapable of forming any kind of cohesive movement, incabable of holding powe for longer than 2 years, and incapable of organising the economy in any that helps anyone? Am I meant to become a trotskyite or a leftcom so I can whinge about stalinism all day and never do anything useful? What ideology should I fucking be anon? I've was a liberal and I was an anarchist and they both were shit. And believe it or not, anon, anarchists aren't as inherently good to transfems as you think either.

But besides even all this, you deeply misunderstand why I'm even an ML. I believe that marxism-leninism provides a scientific lens through which economy and politics can be analysed to produce analysis with actual predictive power. This is a quality that is very much absent from every non-marxist ideology. Every newer liberal economist that suddenly discovers a basic function of capitalist economy and who is then lauded as a genius, has been playing catch-up with Marx and they're still very far behind. Keynes discovered the concept of "in an economy that runs on commodities being bought, when no one has money to buy said commodities, the economy collapses" is something that scientific communists knew for since the later half of the 1800s. Marxism-leninism is the only form of leftwing ideology that has been effective. Marxism-leninism, when applied, has almost universally raised the standards of living, industrialisation, life expectancy and women's rights. I'm not an ML because I think of ideologies as sports teams, cliques, or fun little labels to add to myself.

[txttletale]

Sorry if this is awkward but cold you elaborate on what you mean by your "morally indistinguishably from a fascist" post?

sure. the police (especially in the USA, but this is true across the capitalist world) are white supremacist death squads with a long, long history of showing up and killing whoever they see when you call them, including but not limited to: innocent bystanders, people having mental health episodes they were called to 'check on', and the very people who call them. people have been killed over noise complaints.

if you call the police on someone, there is an extremely non-neglible chance that you are going to get that person killed. even if you don't, you could destroy their life by forcing them into the carceral system. i try not to deploy 'fascist' comparisons too much--i think the term's overuse dilutes it, and it's a particularly annoying habit of marxist-leninists as a whole that i prefer to avoid--but if you call the death squads to someone's door and you think 'well, they broke the law, anything that happens from now isn't my fault', you are indistinguishable from the law-abiding german citizens who informed for the gestapo.

oh and as for this anon: i would fucking deal with it you whiny piece of shit. i cannot imagine the level of banal moral rot it would take to call the fucking cops on someone for anything less than actively trying to kill you, and all this 'uhhhgh but what if you had no choice :(' stuff is genuinely wretched. i would Fucking Cope because i dont think that the penalty for annoying me should be death.

[apas-95]

Hey can you believe in genes while also being a Marxist-Leninist? I wouldn't want to believe in anything idealist. :X

even if you're on anon I still know it's you lysenko

[mesetacadre]

Half-doubting if this anon was even a good idea to begin with but, am I a bad communist for being actively hostile against any form of authoritarian concentration of power?

I just don't think any single person could embody the revolution much less serve it on a system built entirely on personalism where we worship the leader instead of the workers themselves. The only role individual people should have on communism is that of thinkers and philosophers, not of absolute rulers.

This may be drawn from a personal bias though, my country was destroyed by a dictatorship that would have gladly shot me and hid my body for being a lesbian and I have developed animosity towards authoritarians that is perhaps unhealthy.

Where do we draw the line to avoid becoming a red painted tyranny? Or am I just not a good communist for my intransigence?

Thank you for your time

I'll break this down into two parts, authority and idolatry

Authority is a value-neutral, metaphysical concept. It is the use of some kind of force to impose a will on others. If you consider yourself a communist, then how do you intend to overthrow capitalism without exerting authority? Engels said it best: «A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all». We must come to terms with this, as revolutionary marxists. If we refuse the concept of authority all-together, then all that can happen is that authority is applied against our entire class, for the rest of time. I also live in a first-world country that used to have a fascist dictatorship, and the ~150,000 thousand killed for political reasons, 30,000 disappeared, 500,000 interned in concentration camps, more than 100,000 summary trials, tens of thousands of slaves and the thousands tortured up to the very end can speak to its destructiveness. But it wasn't as simple as "they used authority, therefore all authority (abstractly) is bad". Franco's dictatorship responded to a series of needs that the Spanish and European bourgeoisie had, by the time of their sponsored coup d'etat in 1936, Spain was at the forefront of organization of the working class in Europe, the communist party had hundreds of thousand members if you include their youth wing, and the biggest unions reached the millions, in a country of just under 25 million. Italy, Germany, Austria and Portugal found themselves in a similar resurgence when their fascists took power, in every case financed by their biggest capitalists, national and foreign.

The point I'm getting at is that, if you want to understand class society, you have to go beyond the black-and-white, metaphysical liberal philosophy. Violence can be exerted by multiple classes through their own class organizations, and the character, context and sense of that violence changes accordingly. I'm not saying that all violence committed by workers without exception is wholly good. I'm saying that the relationship each class has with class society modifies the very reasoning and effect of that violence. And no example of violence in history can be really described as senseless. My country's dictatorship did not kill, torture and repress that many people for no reason, the holocaust did not happen because Hitler was an evil entity, and the various proletarian states, past and present, have not exerted their authority senselessly.

In marxist theory there are two very important concepts: the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie (DotB), and the dictatorship of the proletariat (DotP). The DotB is a catch-all term for any state of any form that serves capitalist interests. This is useful because, whether it's a liberal democracy with a strong welfare system, or Pinochet's Chile, they both ultimately serve to protect and expand the interest of the capitalist class. Put another way, the capitalist economy sustains the state and other entities like the media, the military, the government (what we call the suprastructure), while the capitalist economy underneath it all (what we call the infrastructure) maintains its existence. It is a dictatorship because it is one class enacting their own will in their own interests. The DotP is the same concept, but turned on its head. After our class has taken power and has began to build socialism-communism, it is actively enacting their sole will in their own interests. Why would the formerly exploited listen to what their former exploiters want? The proletariat must be able to repress the extant capitalist elements within and the permanently hostile capitalist class without. Dwell on this for a moment. While a DotP fosters democratic mechanisms for its class, the social majority (as all DotP in history have done), it simultaneously exerts its authority on those extraneous to the working class. If you live in a capitalist state, the very same thing is happening, just reversed. The managers of capitalism, i.e. the representatives in liberal democracy, govern for the capitalist class, even representing various sections of that class, while simultaneously repressing or preventing any organization of the working class.

I did not mention Chile as an example for no reason beforehand. When the working class of Chile attempted to build socialism through non-violent means, after the election of Allende (there were many tendencies within Allende's party and among his entire support base but that's beyond this post), they were met with an intervention that did not have any qualms about using violence, kickstarting Pinochet's 17 year long dictatorship, backed by Chilean and USAmerican capitalists, atop the corpses of at least 40,000 executed and/or tortured. Look up the massacre of Estadio Nacional if you're interested, it's where Victor Jara was murdered.

"Authority" in DotP is never as widespread nor as violent, firstly because it doesn't aim to repress the social majority, but rather the small but resourceful capitalist class, and secondly because its "repression" more often than not manifests in our actual goals, which is to build a socialist economy, which would necessarily eliminate the social basis for a capitalist class to exist in the first place. In the USSR, for example, the rich landowner peasants disappeared first an foremost because the structure of land ownership was completely changed, eliminating the source of their power. Any instances of actual violence were mostly against saboteurs during collectivization or during the grain seizures to curb the mass starvation that happened in the cities during the civil war, since no grain made it there. Capitalist authority is meant to keep the mass of working people subservient and exploited, proletarian authority is meant to protect the project of socialism-communism against attacks. It has never been about killing all the rich people, it has been about abolishing the capitalist mode of production and building a new one, one which does not need the oppression of any kind of people to keep functioning.

I recommend the following books if you're interested in sources about "authority" and democracy in DotPs:

The Soviets Expected It, Anna Louise Strong (1941). It is focused on the USSR's lead-up to the fascist invasion, but it contains a few examples from ALS' own, unsupervised, experience with soviet democracy and the general attitude of working people

In North Korea: First Eyewitness Reports, Anna Louise Strong (1949). Same as the previous one, it has a few examples of ALS' unsupervised travels through North Korea before the Korean War that talk about how democracy was set up.

The Triumph of Evil, Austin Murphy (2002). I've said a lot how this author is very annoying about keeping to this useless good vs evil dichotomy when talking about socialism and capitalism, but apart from those sporadic remarks, it's incredibly well researched. It focuses on economic aspects, but chapters 1, 2, especially 3, and 7 all contain analyses on the actual mechanisms of authority that DotP use, taking East Germany as an example. Again though, the author is very annoying as soon as he begins to give his personal opinions on morality.

Stasi State or Socialist Paradise? The German Democratic Republic and What Became of It, Bruni de la Motte and John Green (2015). Pretty self explanatory title, this one goes into more detail about the security apparatus of East Germany. I haven't read this one in full, but it has a dedicated chapter on democracy and the state security service.

Onto idolatry. I promise this part will be shorter.

I've written more in detail about this, but while personality worship is a problem, I don't agree that it leads to the problems you outline. It's undeniable that there have been elements of individual idolatry, but that's neither a reflection of actual power concentration or ever a substitution for the elevation of workers. Leadership in any communist party is always collective, and if it follows Leninist principles of organization even partially, then internal democracy is always guaranteed save for the most extreme of situations. Stalin might have been a popular figure, but the Central Committee he was a part of was not below him, and the periodical Congresses had more authority than the CC or any individual person. ALS mentions how, for example, the 1936 constitution was made. It was a wholly democratic process, more than a hundred thousand suggestions were all recieved and considered by the organs in charge. It was the most progressive constitution in its time, it guaranteed rights many of us still do not have. And that process supposedly happened while the "worship" of Stalin was in full force. Every position in DotPs has some mechanism of recall and accountability, everything is elected and ratified. Can you start a process of recall for any specific member of the state administration in your DotB? In one instance, as ALS says, in the region of Crimea up to half of the elected officials were all recalled in one year.

I keep using the USSR as an example because it's the system I'm most familiar with, but any other DotP you can think of has similar mechanisms and limitations to power. Once again, was there a certain amount of idolatry towards a few individuals? Yes. Was this a harmful vice which created unchecked concentration of power and undue oppression? Most certainly not. Besides this, we're materialists, and we understand that human psychology is largely molded by the underlying material conditions. Focusing on individuals when it comes to these sorts of things is almost inevitable for large groups of people because of how the exploitative economic conditions modify psychological tendencies. It is a remain of liberal ideology for the most part, and it should be fought against. But you can't expect millions of people to change how they view certain processes, changes like those take a lot of time, generations, and education.

I've spent essentially all of my political life within a party structure not very dissimilar from that of Cuba's, the USSR's, China's, the DPRK's, etc, and I can say with full confidence that it is the most democratic and simultaneously productive set of principles you can have in political activity. Compared to liberal democracy, and compared to horizontalist/non-centralized structures, even those employed by anarchists, which I have also experienced, it is still far more democratic and effective at taking into account all input without devolving into a glorified debate club.

I don't think you're a bad communist, having these doubts and talking to other people about it is a very good habit to have. If you still have doubts or want to keep talking about this, feel free to shoot me another ask or a private message :)

[edwad]

me: "i am not a marxist"

my anons:

[crippled-peeper]

If the edgy fuck harrasing you is who I believe it is.. did you know this psychotic bitch and her equally dumb vile gf support the venezuelan dictatorship just because maduro *claims* to be socialist despite him being the most blatant example of a guy getting rich at the cost of an entire country?

https://www.tumblr.com/tgirl-jdpon/757538801519411200/venezuelans-deserve-to-be-oppressed-for-wanting

Bitches want to LARP as the mythical marxist revolutionary poc in the global south so baddd

OH MY GOD FUCK

ANON ITS EXACTLY THEM

IM SCREAMING HOW DID YOU KNOW

DO THEY DO THIS SHIT OFTEN???? OMG

that fact doesn’t surprise me either. they’re also self proclaimed “maoists”. like hardly a standard deviation from being complete trolls

I can’t imagine being so fucking insufferable

[woman-respecter]

idk if this is an unpopular opinion but I no longer gaf about leftist people who voted 3rd party or didn’t vote to “protest vote” the democrats (especially not gonna give a pass to muslims like that anon earlier mentioned lol, they can enjoy getting deported.)

plenty of dumbass leftists/socdems/marxists/tankies + enlightened centrists who are marginalized on one or more axis didn’t vote for kamala out of moral purity, and I’m gonna feel bad for them when conservative policy fucks them over. they brought this on themselves by discouraging others to vote blue and by not doing the bare fucking minimum to get our rights intact.

I do however feel bad for their loved ones and for the rest of us who have to suffer the consequences.

yeah i’m not gonna feel bad for them, in fact it will be hard not to revel at least a little bit in their suffering

[hussyknee]

Tumblr is not letting me edit this, so just to tack on that I know it doesn't answer your question entirely but I have a bad headache so I'm talking only about why Marxists, liberals and tankies are damaging and oppressive to the decolonial project. If your ideology is forcing the world top-down into a preconceived universal blueprint that's somehow supposed to maximise human happiness and freedom, then you're just peddling fascist, colonial bs. Anarchism and decolonization to me is collaborative, grassroots effort to center and empower voices from groups impacted by inequality and colonization. First interrogate the power dynamics, and then invert them one by one, then see how the narrative changes, then take your cues for action from that.

Hello I came from your recent post in the Palestine tag where in the replies you mentioned a few people whom you thought people should avoid. And then I went through your blog. If it is possible and I am asking this sincerely, can you tell me the difference between social anarchist and those who write anarchist/ communist etc etc. I have never been able to understand what the world order should be. Capitalism is bad but when I ask my professors what went wrong with communist nations, one told me that it wasn't real communism. And the other told me, it was always bound to fail but never could answer what should be the world order instead ( he is also rich as fuck and really discussing economy with him when he has the ability to spend endlessly and my family just...well :) let's say it feels patronizing).

I don't have the spoons to get into this, but "what the world order should be" is a fascist framing of social justice.

There is no "world order", only people and their right to the land they live off of, and their right to go somewhere else that has space for them and make a home for themselves there. The "world order" is a penitentiary system where each prison block is allowed to choose between one of two wardens and call it "democratic freedom". "Order" is what imperialists and colonial powere dress up as "peace" to legitimize their monopoly of coercive capital. "Order" is a means of achieving an artificial stability through subjugation and appeasement, making humanity into a equation of "expendable" Vs "non-expendable" and governance into a trolley problem. "Order" is the goal of liberals and marxists— the two ends of the fascist horseshoe. And they do that by insisting that the opposite of "order" is "chaos" and that chaos is the meaning of "anarchy".

People whose approach to issues of inequality or justice is "then what is the alternative system you propose?" are saying their priority is not actually working with the impacted community to find a way to alleviate either, but to find order and stability for themselves. The world is a Gordion knot of injustices and oppressions that need to be unravelled and wounds that need healing one by one, by as many hands as possible. None of that is going to come about by picking another pet imperialist genocider and hegemonic power and calling it "anti-colonial" as long as it's not the US, the way the Tankies do.

[read-marx-and-lenin]

hi give me the densest books on marxist and anti-imperialist theory you know of please

If you want a dense Marxist book, Capital is right there.

And I know I sound like a broken record, but txttletale's reading rec list is very good and I think everyone who wants more to read should check it out.

As always, if anyone else wants to leave their recommendations in the notes, feel free.

[specialagentartemis]

Hi there, I'm coming from that post you made on historical revisions; how come you include praise for the USSR? Marxist-Leninist states saw that after the USSR's collapse, there was a marked decrease in quality of life and an increase in human suffering. The people that were affected negatively were the upper-middle to upper-class and the rich, which is why business owners and the like fled Cuba and other countries. This isn't a debate, historians and academics largely agree that the USSR overall was a good thing, and that the US was the problem. I'd link references but Tumblr doesn't let you do that anymore, but you can look it up anywhere and it will largely corroborate their claims.

"you can look it up anywhere and it will largely corroborate their claims." Okay, anon! I'll take you up on that!

Hmm looking up. "Stalinism thus became an outright symbol of Stalin's ruthless authoritarian rule over the U.S.S.R. and the multinational forces misrepresented as the international Communist movement during the dictator's lifetime." nope. how about: "... This was particularly the case during the purge era in the second half of the decade when diplomats were faced with the difficulties of representing a regime which had unleashed terror on its people, as well as having to deal with the fear that they too might perish in the purges." hmm nope. "Numerous scholars and survivors of the USSR's "Great Terror," a common designation for the years 1935-1939, have described the period as one of sweeping or even total fear among the Soviet population.'" uh oh. Well maybe the perspective has changed since the 80s--"From mid-1937 to nearly the end of 1938, the Soviet secret police carried out a mass terror against ordinary citizens. This "kulak operation," as it was called, accounted for about half of all executions during the "Great Purges" of 1937-38. By the time it ended in November 1938, 767,397 persons had been sentenced by summary troikas; 386,798 of them to death and the remainder to terms in GULAG camps." well surely not everyone believes this, you SAID I could look it up anywhere--"Political terror was part and parcel of Soviet politics. Within the context of world history, Soviet terror is not necessarily unique; mass terror is characteristic of many forms of politics (such as Hitler's Germany, Mao's China, and Pol Pot's Cambodia). Within the context of Soviet history, however, the Great Terror of 1937-1938 is unique in that it was a policy of extraordinarily intense, concentrated, and purposeful killing of, at least, hundreds of thousands of people." but--"The ‘mass operations’ were large-scale campaigns of state repression, spanning from summer 1937 to autumn 1938, and marked the high point of the Great Terror. The first operation was launched on 30 July 1937 against former kulaks and other ‘anti-Soviet elements’; thereafter, similar operations targeted a range of different population groups, including national minorities such as Poles, Germans and Koreans." what about "Two decades have passed since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, but if you so much as scratch the surface of most family histories, you are likely to discover first-hand experiences of Gulags and deportations, dekulakisation and State terror. Yet there have been no legal processes put into place by which the atrocities of Stalinism would be officially recognised and condemned as crimes against humanity." noooo you said that historians were generally in agreement that the USSR was good! Maybe you meant, better in terms of personal freedoms than the US was at the time--oh. "Stalin's Soviet Union (U.S.S.R.) treated homosexuality as suspicious activity linked to sabotage, espionage, and a lack of political reliability. The U.S.S.R.'s most celebrated playwright Maxim Gorky was unequivocal in 1934 in seeing homosexuality as antithetical to the tenets of communism: "exterminate homosexuals and fascism (itself) will disappear." Homophobia ran rampant across the political spectrum." Uhhh here's a less harsh description of gulags? "Conditions were brutal and mortality rates were frighteningly high, with total deaths in the Gulag reaching well into the millions. Yet millions also survived and were released. No fewer than twenty percent of the Gulag population was released every year. At no point did the Gulag evolve into a system of industrialized death camps. Most Gulag prisoners stood at a crossroads. From the inhuman conditions in detention camps, prisoners would either reach redemption (and return to the social body) or final excision from society (through death)." damning with faint praise. Even this fairly neutral description of Stalin's rise from a source very sympathetic to the early revolutionaries describes the arrest, torture, imprisonment, and execution of Stalin's political enemies.

Maybe you simply mean economically. Here's an article that has lukewarm-at-best praise for the Soviet economy in the 60s-80s. Not horrible, certainly acknowledging the standard of living brought about by industrialization, but not glowing either. The freedom of women in the Soviet Union also wasn't bad. I can be fair.

But genuinely, Anon, historians don't even agree on whether relationships between the USSR and Poland were one of imperial control and denial of self-governance or undeniably imperial but more ambivalent relationship between the USSR and Poland in the post-WWII divvying up of influence in Europe between Churchill and Stalin, or whether Poles were actively persecuted and systematically murdered and if it should be counted as a genocide. Historians don't agree whether the USSR was a relatively safe place for Jews and pogroms were rare until WWII and only saw violent and repressive antisemitic policy become entrenched later under Khruschev, or if Stalin oversaw state-sanctioned anti-Jewish purges in the 1930s. Historians don't even agree on how many people died in the Holodomor. (This paper and this paper argue that Ukrainian archives and data were destroyed to intentionally obscure how many people died.)

The collapse of the Soviet Union saw a lot of conflict and difficulty in the post-Cold War world, as any really dramatic and sudden political transition will; some countries had positive outcomes, other countries had negative ones. Organized crime ramped up to fill political voids. Doesn't mean that the USSR "overall was a good thing" and certainly doesn't mean there's academic consensus about it.