Political Memes

Zero chance Pig isn't banned from all of .ml

But he did write quite extensively on Lumpenproletariat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

100%

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

I don't think you need to provide sources or preemptively defend wikipedia.

In my experience the kind of communists who want to shoot all the anarchists have a detailed knowledge of the history of shooting anarchists and talk openly about the fact that they'll shoot all the anarchists.

Also anarchists tend to be pretty aware of what happens when you oppose state power.

🫡

It's just hopelessly modernist and fails in all the same ways every modernist philosophy of that era does. That's why it's annoying why MLs try to lecture you like they know political science - because they clearly have some pretty massive polisci 101 blind spots.

Marxism doesn't call on the state to do that. That's leninism. Marxism is highly unobjectionable. The problem is how we get there. Marx himself spoke of an evolution over a long period of time in Society to arrive there. However humans desire immediate gratification. And thus that was unsatisfactory for most people. Which is where Engles, Lenin and others enter the picture. Who thought they could jump start communism/marxism using the very thing that kept communism/Marxism from being possible. The state.

I'm generally sympathetic to Marxism in general, but that's not the main thrust of the meme so I'll just say "Marxists aren't inherently tankies" and leave it at that.

I suppose the question is how do you go from state to no state in one fell swoop?