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indigi
Jul 20, 2004

how can we not talk about family
when family's all that we got?

dex_sda posted:

It's more like if you toed the line you had a pretty decent life. But, say, if you had substance abuse problems, got into the wrong team at work, stepped on a wrong person's toes or got caught doing some minor crime you were hosed.

In fairness to communism there was less inequality so that was an improvement. And there were outside influences and inside opportunists fighting it at every turn. But just be weary of whitewashing it all.

I wonder how much of the police/military brutality and hosed criminal justice system was due to the extremely volatile nature of the USSR's origin - esp wrt opportunists/capitalist influences. one of my main problems with communism is how a lot of people (MLs in particular, though god knows I love my comrades) will just handwave any discussion of brutal and repressive police in communist countries

I wish a guy like Parenti would write a history of the USSR. he seems pretty fair handed on the topic from what I've read of his

dex_sda posted:

EZLN stuff

what's their stance on anxiety/depression meds? like are benzos prohibited too?

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indigi
Jul 20, 2004

how can we not talk about family
when family's all that we got?

this is all interesting as hell. I wish I understood it better. I'd especially like to know how philosophical/theological lefties build on that stuff

dex_sda
Oct 11, 2012


indigi posted:

what's their stance on anxiety/depression meds? like are benzos prohibited too?

Good question that I don't know the answer to. They have better healthcare than rest of Mexico and are science based so you'd think they allow them, but I'd have to check for sure

Hellblazer187
Oct 12, 2003

OK. Phew. Made it through this thread. Should have been providing my employer surplus value instead, I suppose, but I read this instead.

I've seen mentioned a few times "capitalism speedrun." Is this just what it sounds like? It's obviously CSpam shitposting language but I think I intuitively understand the concept. IIRC you need capitalism for a little while to get a prosperous society. Socialism wouldn't work without the prosperity built up by capitalism. Do I have that right? So is the idea that China is basically trying to go from agrarian to modern global capitalist society as quickly as possible? If I'm correctly understanding the concept held by the term, I have follow up questions.

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


Hellblazer187 posted:

I've seen mentioned a few times "capitalism speedrun." Is this just what it sounds like? It's obviously CSpam shitposting language but I think I intuitively understand the concept

then the term did its job haha

You got the gist of it. After Mao croaked, his successors were the right-wing of Communist Party, most importantly of them being Deng Xiaoping.

I do not know much about how things went after Mao's death, but overall, Deng famously says "Mao got 70% right and 30% wrong" and they implement the strategy of "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics": we are going to build a state capitalist enterprise and prepare ourselves towards a capture of international markets in order to assert and ensure ourselves in difference to the USSR and against the West. Communist party theoreticians there believe the "capitalist catapult" has helped China get to a stage of economic development much faster to become safe and central in a global position, but inadvertently seems to have proven Mao's early concern right, about "harnessing capitalism" as dangerous and counterproductive.

(I do not recall where I have read this, but it seems that public discussion of Maoist topics has been put under censorship a while ago because of that)

animist
Aug 28, 2018

dead gay comedy forums posted:

Contradiction. IMHO, this is the biggest one, and is something that a lot of lefties dislike talking about in general because it raises all sorts of very uncomfortable ideas depending where you come from on this subject. In one of the greatest trolling acts of all time, Engels made Marx extremely mad when he addressed the problem that, well, contradictory poo poo exists and is compatible through historical materialism. There is paradox, contradiction and illogical fuckery in reality: as such, it must be a material property of the universe. The whole heavy truck impact of this took a very long while to happen, because for a lot of people, Engels was talking about what Marx meant by contradiction: stuff like class struggle and so on and so forth, but the text seems to suggest that he was in fact being metaphysical about it as well.

this is really interesting, i'd never heard about mao's reinterpretation of that before. gonna add "on contradiction" to my reading list.

animist has issued a correction as of 00:14 on Jun 24, 2020

Hellblazer187
Oct 12, 2003

dead gay comedy forums posted:

then the term did its job haha

You got the gist of it. After Mao croaked, his successors were the right-wing of Communist Party, most importantly of them being Deng Xiaoping.

I do not know much about how things went after Mao's death, but overall, Deng famously says "Mao got 70% right and 30% wrong" and they implement the strategy of "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics": we are going to build a state capitalist enterprise and prepare ourselves towards a capture of international markets in order to assert and ensure ourselves in difference to the USSR and against the West. Communist party theoreticians there believe the "capitalist catapult" has helped China get to a stage of economic development much faster to become safe and central in a global position, but inadvertently seems to have proven Mao's early concern right, about "harnessing capitalism" as dangerous and counterproductive.

(I do not recall where I have read this, but it seems that public discussion of Maoist topics has been put under censorship a while ago because of that)

Got it, thank you. The follow up is... how then do you transition to socialism? Like it feels like combining state and capital provides way too much power to topple. It would require trusting that the people in the party will just gladly give up the power they've built via state capitalism. Even if you somehow got a single party leader with that level of commitment to the project, there's a party apparatus behind him or her that could (and I'm thinking would) fight it.

I mean state and capital are pretty grossly intertwined in a western liberal democracy too, but there's at least sort of a potential pressure from the ballot box.

dex_sda
Oct 11, 2012


Hellblazer187 posted:

Got it, thank you. The follow up is... how then do you transition to socialism? Like it feels like combining state and capital provides way too much power to topple. It would require trusting that the people in the party will just gladly give up the power they've built via state capitalism. Even if you somehow got a single party leader with that level of commitment to the project, there's a party apparatus behind him or her that could (and I'm thinking would) fight it.

I mean state and capital are pretty grossly intertwined in a western liberal democracy too, but there's at least sort of a potential pressure from the ballot box.

This is basically the main socialist critique of China, that a party that does not implement socialism and that happily engages in capitalism is no marxist party at all, and definitely cannot be trusted to 'dig its own grave' so to speak.

cheetah7071
Oct 20, 2010

honk honk
College Slice
Even if they did transition to state socialism the officials in charge of distribution will inevitably have the opportunity to enrich themselves at the expense of the masses--that's just corruption and I'm not sure we've seen a state capable of truly stamping out corruption. That's still a class distinction between those who work and those who exploit, even if the class dynamic isn't the same as the capitalist one.

I don't think threading this needle is impossible but it would probably require back-to-back one-in-a-million leaders to successfully oversee the dismantling of that new class division without a second revolution

Hellblazer187
Oct 12, 2003

So I am going to read as much theory as I can stomach, but what if I can't bring myself to say I'm a communist or a Marxist or whatever. Is there a place I can go for theoretical underpinning for something like libertarian socialism? I kind of feel like an understanding of Marx is necessary no matter where I eventually end up on the left wing spectrum but I'm just sort of curious what other thought leaders besides Marx and Kropotkin I need to be familiar with. I know I'm not OK with the capitalist status quo, but I'm not yet committed to saying "yeah I'm a Mao guy" or whatever.

Lostconfused
Oct 1, 2008

Hellblazer187 posted:

Are there any recommended books about the history of the Soviet Union and/or modern China that are written by a Marxist or at least some other flavor of leftist? I'm working my way through studying Capital now. It's hard. I'm getting there. But like, OK, all of this sounds very right in theory. But the USSR committed atrocities and fell. Modern China sounds terrifying. So, I have a few thoughts on how to square these:

1) What I've learned through a western education and media bias about the USSR and about China are skewed.
2) Neither the USSR nor China have been able to run the socialist experiment "in peace" in that there has been outside interference from the capitalist powers
3) Leaders of the communist party deviated from whatever Marx prescribed (I'm not really there yet, I'm still struggling with commodities).
4) There are failures inherent in Marxist thought/philosophy.

I imagine that the soviet experience can be explained by some combination of these factors. So I'd like to study more, but I don't want to read some a book about the failings and crimes of the USSR as written by a neoliberal capitalist dork.

You can try Stephen Kotkin's Paradoxes of Power. He is a neolib, but his concern is with documenting Stalin's rise to power and leadership not a take down of socialism. His account seems a lot more fair than what you usually get in english. For example the classic about famine and starvation in Soviet Union is presented as a product of economic and government policies, and not some ideological failing inherent to communism.

dex_sda
Oct 11, 2012


Hellblazer187 posted:

So I am going to read as much theory as I can stomach, but what if I can't bring myself to say I'm a communist or a Marxist or whatever. Is there a place I can go for theoretical underpinning for something like libertarian socialism? I kind of feel like an understanding of Marx is necessary no matter where I eventually end up on the left wing spectrum but I'm just sort of curious what other thought leaders besides Marx and Kropotkin I need to be familiar with. I know I'm not OK with the capitalist status quo, but I'm not yet committed to saying "yeah I'm a Mao guy" or whatever.

Well, the foundational theory goes:
for every socialist: Marx and Engels. This is non-negotiable. Communist Manifesto + a Capital analysis is sufficient, but the more the merrier.
Then you have two main branches:
* Marxism-Leninism: read Lenin. What Is To Be Done is good if you only read one thing.
* Anarchism: Kropotkin really consolidated anarchist thought. Read The Conquest of Bread if you only read one thing.

After that, it really is what you find more persuasive. Modern anarchist texts are varied, I like neozapatismo stuff because it's things that are being put into practice and that's a boon in your theoretical stuff. But you gotta make the choice yourself. If you aren't okay with the capitalist status quo, know that you will find something in socialism because it's the answer to capitalism's problems.

e; on a personal note, conquest of bread loving owns so I recommend it, and along with Bakunin it's the underpinning of libertarian socialism (aka anarchism) but see both points of view imo

dex_sda has issued a correction as of 00:27 on Jun 24, 2020

Minera
Sep 26, 2007

All your friends and foes,
they thought they knew ya,
but look who's in your heart now.

mycomancy posted:

Imagine if Russia was already industrialized when they socialized!

My assumption is that Russia was able to socialize because they weren't industrialized yet. Like a lot of people looking at marx in the late 1800s in russia went "well how does this apply here, there's barely any workers for us to radicalize because everyone's a farmer" which is how things like WItBD got written. And I guess I need to read more Mao now, because I guess that was his conclusion too judging by the post made about it earlier.

Most of Europe swung towards socialism through democratic frameworks after WW2, but most of that was a consequence of everything being loving poo poo rear end busted after all of Europe got bombed and shot up. Nowadays it's all been or being dismantled by liberal austerity, like how the UK is attempting to defund the NHS. None of it managed to "stick" because capitalists can more easily put a thumb on the scale of democracy.

Beowulfs_Ghost
Nov 6, 2009

animist posted:


i think older movements for the betterment of the world have useful observations for us here. i've spent some time studying Zen Buddhist literature and practice; there's some stuff in there that i think can be useful in a materialist framework. (Western Zen is particularly amenable to this, since it's been scrubbed of a lot of its religious connotations, to make it more palatable to westerners.)

Zen deffinately has some distance from more "theistic" stands of Buddhism.

However, Zen's lineage includes Nagarjuna and Vasubandu, and they were not big proponents of materialism. Buddhism in general is not big on metaphysics because it considers it a distraction. Nagarjuna makes arguments pulling this sort of stuff apart as having no inherent self existence. Vasubandu takes that further and argues that all concepts are only in our head. Sort of like Kant's idea of how we can't know the thing-in-itself.

So the opinion on metaphysics as distraction ranges from, "reality is ineffable, so it is a waste of time to talk about it.", to, "you only experience reality in your mind, so it is a waste of time to look for it."


Buddhism does have an excellent toolset for questioning one's relationship to the material world. I would be hesitant to use it to try and build up a materialist framework.

ToxicAcne
May 25, 2014
Could one view the American Civil War as a sort of bourgeois revolution, where the last elements of the feudal class in America (the Southern Aristocracy) was removed?

Sylink
Apr 17, 2004

dex_sda posted:

That's exactly it. You make decision making a federation of local governments to diffuse power. You prioritise consensus over 2/3 majority over simple majority. Justice is done by a jury of your peers, as in, literally everyone. Large penalties like exile would be decided by multiple communes.

I'll give you an example Sylink. In the Zapatista community, in 1996, the women (feminism is very represented there) came forward with an idea. The idea was that alcohol consumption was especially damaging to women - because when men consume alcohol, women get a disproportionate amount of domestic violence. Also, crime increases under the influence. Similarly, a lot of accidents and long-term diseases like cirrhosis happen because of it: in the jungle of Chiapas the men often cut themselves with machetes when under the influence. The law was debated, and voted on by the Zapatistas. It passed - alcohol and drugs have since been completely prohibited in Chiapas. What happens if you disobey? Well, penalties, instituted by the commune's autonomous police force consisting of members accepted by the assembly. Individual commune can institute punishments as desired, but generally, they constitute extra public work you have to do, or restitution if personal property gets taken or bodily harm happens. That's thanks to the socialist spirit ingrained in every participant of this democracy. They only reserve the toughest punishments for people egregiously against their law - this includes the prohibition. Allegedly, in 2013, in this area with at the time 400k inhabitants, only two men were in jail, for cultivating weed.

The 'statelessness' is not in the lack of structure. The statelessness is a lack of a hierarchy capable of oppression: you'll notice at every point in the process I described, things were voted on either directly by everyone or at least by a huge representation of the genpop. You'll also notice that this is properly exactly what Engels envisioned with his 'withering away of the state' that he advocated as the end-game of socialism: the disappearance of the unilateral coercive element.

Thanks for the replies on this from all.

I can see that works well for social interaction i.e. stopping violence against each other. How does that extend to regulatory bodies in a tech filled world?

For example, the FDA and other agencies are quite powerful and headed by only a few people. Likely a similar structure is still needed, because its not possible for all the masses to be well informed about specialized subjects (because technology is complicated and division of labor).

So is that just fine as long as the various cells of people consent to it? i.e. various groups willfully endow a smaller group with regulatory powers, and that group is smaller simply by virtue of the subject matter not having a tremendous amount of true expertise to spare?

I realize the FDA is more than few people, though still it is a hierarchical body. Or in that kind of case do you extend the non-heirarchy into the agencies, so they are just extensions of the existing social system but with a more focused purpose ?

shovelbum
Oct 21, 2010

Fun Shoe

ToxicAcne posted:

Could one view the American Civil War as a sort of bourgeois revolution, where the last elements of the feudal class in America (the Southern Aristocracy) was removed?

No because it was retained and reinforced, the exact nature of oppression was brought up to more profitable standards compatible with industrial agriculture and financial captalism

cheetah7071
Oct 20, 2010

honk honk
College Slice
For some percentage of it, the need for regulation would theoretically go down. How many people are going to knowingly peddle snake oil when there's no economic benefit to doing so? How many factories would resist taking steps that limit pollution when the cost of doing so is borne by the community rather than by the factory owner? A lot of the problems coercive regulation fixes come about because of the fact that getting rich and being a good person are at odds

This obviously doesn't answer all cases of industrial regulation--a drug could merely be undertested rather than known to be harmful, for example. Or people might take shortcuts out of laziness. I don't have an answer for what to do about the rest of the cases that don't boil down to economics, though maybe others do.

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


ToxicAcne posted:

Could one view the American Civil War as a sort of bourgeois revolution, where the last elements of the feudal class in America (the Southern Aristocracy) was removed?

shovelbum posted:

No because it was retained and reinforced, the exact nature of oppression was brought up to more profitable standards compatible with industrial agriculture and financial captalism

Those conclusions are the same, imo. The Civil War was definitely a liberal bourgeois victory as it furthered the possibilities of capitalist development in the USA. I mean, Marx himself said it, lol. What is far more interesting, however, is to consider this take: because of Lincoln's murder, there was a very successful reaction carried out by the remnants of the southern oligarchies that greatly slowed down or even halted the revolutionary process unleashed by the war

Greg Legg
Oct 6, 2004
I'd like some education about something since I am not well read about this stuff. What is a red brown alliance?

indigi
Jul 20, 2004

how can we not talk about family
when family's all that we got?

Greg Legg posted:

I'd like some education about something since I am not well read about this stuff. What is a red brown alliance?

something bad that sucks and is stupid, i.e. an alliance between communists and fascists. it's bad.

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


Greg Legg posted:

I'd like some education about something since I am not well read about this stuff. What is a red brown alliance?

Right place for that, welcome :)

Red-brown alliance refers to the respective colors of the nazi uniform and soviet russia. The idea comes from the limited collaboration between Hitler and Stalin preceding WW2, such as the partition of Poland and stuff like that. Some liberals were afraid that this could result in an eventual alliance between fascists and communists, which was an extremely lol-worthy notion but that some fash actually held up high hopes and expectations from.

The only guy in the red side who thought that it was possible to have a greater degree of cooperation was Stalin, because of his reasoning of "well the capitalists were far more annoying to me and have a much worse track record than the fascists", which others in his inner circle repeatedly told him "well Hitler literally said that a genocidal total war against the slavic race is necessary to ensure Germany's security and prosperity", something he thought often was a joke and just a political play of Hitler's part

As for its relevance for today, all serious leftists that I know of would rather be subject to a piss shower from Trump himself than to entertain that notion with any degree of credibility. There are some fash and fash-adjacent people who think that this is the way to go, so beware of any self-proclaimed leftist spousing collaborative points to fascism

Finicums Wake
Mar 13, 2017
Probation
Can't post for 8 years!

Hellblazer187 posted:

Are there any recommended books about the history of the Soviet Union and/or modern China that are written by a Marxist or at least some other flavor of leftist? I'm working my way through studying Capital now. It's hard. I'm getting there. But like, OK, all of this sounds very right in theory. But the USSR committed atrocities and fell. Modern China sounds terrifying. So, I have a few thoughts on how to square these:

1) What I've learned through a western education and media bias about the USSR and about China are skewed.
2) Neither the USSR nor China have been able to run the socialist experiment "in peace" in that there has been outside interference from the capitalist powers
3) Leaders of the communist party deviated from whatever Marx prescribed (I'm not really there yet, I'm still struggling with commodities).
4) There are failures inherent in Marxist thought/philosophy.

I imagine that the soviet experience can be explained by some combination of these factors. So I'd like to study more, but I don't want to read some a book about the failings and crimes of the USSR as written by a neoliberal capitalist dork.
for a sympathetic yet critical overview of how the economy of the USSR actually functioned, check out socialist planning by michael ellman

mycomancy
Oct 16, 2016

Greg Legg posted:

I'd like some education about something since I am not well read about this stuff. What is a red brown alliance?

A red-brown alliance is when you have bloody diarrhea.

Another more disgusting definition is when fascists and ""''''communists""'''' collaborate.

StashAugustine
Mar 24, 2013

Do not trust in hope- it will betray you! Only faith and hatred sustain.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbRFSgrrjSk

Lostconfused
Oct 1, 2008


So this was a precursor to Blair Mountain?

StashAugustine
Mar 24, 2013

Do not trust in hope- it will betray you! Only faith and hatred sustain.

Lostconfused posted:

So this was a precursor to Blair Mountain?

Yeah the movies a semi fictional account of the events leading up to the battle, ending at the shoot out that kicked the whole thing off. (Sid Hatfield, the only good cop, is played by David Strathairn, and he rules)

dex_sda
Oct 11, 2012


Sylink posted:

So is that just fine as long as the various cells of people consent to it? i.e. various groups willfully endow a smaller group with regulatory powers, and that group is smaller simply by virtue of the subject matter not having a tremendous amount of true expertise to spare?

I realize the FDA is more than few people, though still it is a hierarchical body. Or in that kind of case do you extend the non-heirarchy into the agencies, so they are just extensions of the existing social system but with a more focused purpose ?

Yeah you got it just right. You make bodies of experts that are trusted by the populace and that get their broad approval. They also exist in an informatory capacity: their views still need to be agreed upon by the populace. For instance this comes into play for economic planning, believe it or not: while most of the economic planning is just a cooperative economy where smaller cells simply say what they can produce and what it contributes to everything, and you can trust bread and basic provisions and necessities will be made in abundance because there is no incentive not to do it and distribute it correctly, there still is a need for 'eyes' that look at the total output and say how much time needs to be devoted to exports so you can buy things you can't produce; or how much time needs to be spent on improving overall infrastructure etc. So you'd have a group of experts for that talk.

You begin to see why education is so important and the main disadvantage of anarchism even I as a proponent must admit: the totality of the trust you put in people means you have to be sure they are science and socialism oriented individuals. It's not a thing you can bring in overnight the way Kropotkin says because when he was alive the world was not so technological.

dex_sda has issued a correction as of 07:07 on Jun 24, 2020

cheetah7071
Oct 20, 2010

honk honk
College Slice
I've formed a political book club with some of my friends, and after subjecting them to the stuff I agree with (breadbook) it seems fair to read next what they expect to agree with, which is socdem stuff. Is there any good, shortish overview of that? Obviously a bit outside of the topic of this thread, but hopefully only a bit.

Epic High Five
Jun 5, 2004



cheetah7071 posted:

I've formed a political book club with some of my friends, and after subjecting them to the stuff I agree with (breadbook) it seems fair to read next what they expect to agree with, which is socdem stuff. Is there any good, shortish overview of that? Obviously a bit outside of the topic of this thread, but hopefully only a bit.

I find the best thing to expose soc dems to is stuff designed to radicalize them, like The New Jim Crow or Listen, Liberal

being a social democrat is such a safe and obvious thing that I'm not aware of any books elaborating on it since it's basically defined as "just right of what the liberals consider too far left" and so varies from country to country. Best to launch some depth charges into the still and comfy waters of their present ideology

Stringent
Dec 22, 2004


image text goes here
Is Manufacturing Consent still the gold standard for books on American media bias/capture?

cheetah7071
Oct 20, 2010

honk honk
College Slice

Epic High Five posted:

I find the best thing to expose soc dems to is stuff designed to radicalize them, like The New Jim Crow or Listen, Liberal

being a social democrat is such a safe and obvious thing that I'm not aware of any books elaborating on it since it's basically defined as "just right of what the liberals consider too far left" and so varies from country to country. Best to launch some depth charges into the still and comfy waters of their present ideology

I'd feel bad recommending a book intentionally designed to push them left when the point is to pick something they'd probably agree with but I'll keep those books in mind

e: their degree of socdem is UBI fwiw. Dunno if that changes any answers.

cheetah7071 has issued a correction as of 07:06 on Jun 27, 2020

Epic High Five
Jun 5, 2004



cheetah7071 posted:

I'd feel bad recommending a book intentionally designed to push them left when the point is to pick something they'd probably agree with but I'll keep those books in mind

e: their degree of socdem is UBI fwiw. Dunno if that changes any answers.

Hmmm, Four Futures maybe? It has some interesting things to say about UBI and basically just lays stuff out for you to think about and discuss as opposed to propagandizing

A4R8
Feb 28, 2020

Hellblazer187 posted:

Thanks for the replies guys. I'm working my way through the thread and I'm seeing some of the issues I brought up have been addressed. It's a long thread and I generally prefer to educate myself with books rather than forum posts, but I'll get through the whole thing. And yeah, so far Capital (I'm reading the Ben Fine book because reading the ACTUAL book is a challenge I'm not yet ready for) seems more like "This is what capitalism is and why it's hosed up" and less like "Here is the specific way we could set up an entire nation state to be better." I'll check out the Engels book you mention when I'm finished.

Pick up Anti-Duhring by Engels as well; Lenin himself described it as essential reading for every class conscious worker. It’s only like 200 pages IIRC, too.

For Lenin, I would get What is to be Done?, State and Revolution, and Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. Again, each are fairly short.

For Stalin, do The Foundations of Leninism, then Dialectical and Historical Materialism.

All of these are for free on marxists.org too!

uncop
Oct 23, 2010

dead gay comedy forums posted:

MAOISM

Maoism, or "Mao Zedong Thought", is a communist school of thought formulated and developed primarily by its namesake articulator and founder of the People's Republic of China. Of the Great Posting Tendencies in the great CSPAM arena that is communist thinking, maoism is the one that we are closer to in both time and effect, as the current Chinese Communist Party still acknowledges maoism as its foundational doctrine, regardless of the alterations and transformations that the Chinese state has done in the past few decades in terms of market economy which were and are in effect a repudiation of what Mao Zedong himself aimed at following the Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War.

...

This post isn't about 'Maoism, or "Mao Zedong Thought"', it's about 'Mao Zedong Thought, or 'maoism'". There are four separate historically commonly evoked 'maoisms'.

1) Like with "leninism", the pejorative meaning came first: a crypto-anarchist peasant-bandit tendency of socialism, a.k.a. "cave marxism". Unlike the leninism pejorative, this one took on a long life in ML circles because of eurocentrism where the original bolsheviks were already looking down on the Chinese and the Sino-Soviet split produced a sharp international polemic against maoism. A bunch of anarchists and leftcoms were even inspired by the pejorative takes and went basically, "this, except actually it owns".

2) Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought: Marxism-Leninism as applied to the conditions of China. The peasantry as the main force of the revolution with the proletariat as the leading force, organized into a party, an army and a united front of revolutionaries engaged in People's War etc. like described in the post. It's a tendency internal to China that foreign movements inherently can't follow, only be inspired by in their own tendencies. Calling oneself ML-MZT has always been about declaring support for the CCP: first in support of the Cultural Revolution and against the CPSU, nowadays in support of ”Socialism with Chinese characteristics” against its opponents.

3) Maoism-Third Worldism: One popular attempt to universalize aspects of MZT onto the globe, largely developed by Black people in the USA in cultural entanglement with the Black nationalist movement, hence the "amerikkka" style rhetoric etc. They coined a broadened meaning for "labor aristocracy" that encompasses all the comfortable non-colonised workers of the world, and theorized a sort of world people's war where the global metropoles are encircled from the global countryside, colonized peoples. The "read Settlers" memers are a caricature of this tendency, but as it lost its vitality, the clowns became the main representatives, a lot like with posadism.

4) Marxism-Leninism-Maoism: the attempt to universalize aspects of maoism that became hegemonic, with almost every revolutionary MZT-inspired party eventually declaring themselves as MLM. It theorizes People's War as a universal strategy of revolution and the army and united front as universal instruments that the proletariat can't win without any more than without a party. Another major distinguishing factor from previous universalizations (other than MTW if we count it) is that it considers imperialism the primary contradiction of capitalism, above the struggle of labor against capital. That means they generally expect revolutions to begin through class alliances' resistance against imperialist exploitation, and that the proletariat can maneuver itself into political power without alienating the national bourgeoisie. MLM applied to first world conditions where the primary contradiction and alliances necessarily have to be different is sort of undertheorized because no one has managed to show a way forward in practice yet.

Basically, the differences have to be explained because it's really confusing how the same word is used for a lot of different things embodying different ideas. It's horrible when people basically hear different things from different sources and try to put everything together and end up believing in a Frankenstein's monster sewn together from mutually contradictory theoretical points that's a caricature of any of the real things. It's bad enough when people attack any of the real things using a Frankenstein assemblage of maoisms, but even worse then they try to defend something using one.

uncop has issued a correction as of 14:38 on Jun 27, 2020

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


uncop posted:

This post isn't about 'Maoism, or "Mao Zedong Thought"', it's about 'Mao Zedong Thought, or 'maoism'". There are four separate historically commonly evoked 'maoisms'.

Capturing the spirit of a thing in language is more important for me here than the excessively strict category work, which in my view and personal experience, ends up muddying far more than helping along with general purposes. The Peruvian socialist militant that comes from a mountain farm in the Andes might not know in detail about what makes their movement specifically Maoist in definition but also in contrast to the Chinese, which makes no difference to their ability in action.

As regards to your confusion and how it is horrible to deal with that, well, is the problem here perhaps an expectation of an universal context of understanding? I mean, if intuitive grasp of those ideas feels so awkward and awful, isn't that ultimately a matter of dogmatism?

uncop
Oct 23, 2010

dead gay comedy forums posted:

Capturing the spirit of a thing in language is more important for me here than the excessively strict category work, which in my view and personal experience, ends up muddying far more than helping along with general purposes. The Peruvian socialist militant that comes from a mountain farm in the Andes might not know in detail about what makes their movement specifically Maoist in definition but also in contrast to the Chinese, which makes no difference to their ability in action.

As regards to your confusion and how it is horrible to deal with that, well, is the problem here perhaps an expectation of an universal context of understanding? I mean, if intuitive grasp of those ideas feels so awkward and awful, isn't that ultimately a matter of dogmatism?

My bad if I came across as trying to start a beef or something, I wouldn't do that in a thread like this. The idea was to contribute some context for readers to be better equipped to relate all the other stuff they may have heard about maoism previously with your exposition.

Ideally, the correct answers should be intuitive and the wrong answers should not, but when people have been using the same word to refer to different things that the listener is unaware of, the intuitive thing is to assume that the things they've said are supposed to somehow be true at the same time. The most persistent wrong conceptions are persistent because they're very intuitive. It's not dogmatism to help people avoid misunderstandings; if someone's being creative, they're *helped* if they have a better idea about who contributed what and when they're doing something original.

Also, learning to equate 'maoism' with MZT would build an intuition that if there are people who call themselves maoists that disagree with and oppose MZT, their 'maoism' is somehow fake or misguided. That, if anything, would be an instance of unconstructive dogmatism.

uncop has issued a correction as of 20:26 on Jun 27, 2020

runaway pancake
Dec 13, 2008

by Fluffdaddy
Gravy Boat 2k

dead gay comedy forums posted:

Capturing the spirit of a thing in language is more important for me here than the excessively strict category work, which in my view and personal experience, ends up muddying far more than helping along with general purposes. The Peruvian socialist militant that comes from a mountain farm in the Andes might not know in detail about what makes their movement specifically Maoist in definition but also in contrast to the Chinese, which makes no difference to their ability in action.

As regards to your confusion and how it is horrible to deal with that, well, is the problem here perhaps an expectation of an universal context of understanding? I mean, if intuitive grasp of those ideas feels so awkward and awful, isn't that ultimately a matter of dogmatism?

It may not be important for the proletariat to understand these technical differences, but it is important for the leaders of the vanguard to understand them. The vanguard must not only educate the proletariat, but be able to defend the vanguard's position and ideology to potential comrades or those who would fight against it. It's difficult to build and organize a cohesive vanguard if you can't defend it theoretically. A complex understanding of history is required to learn from the mistakes of the past, to recognize when/if revolution can even occur in your country, and how to organize to achieve that.

The categorizations can be bad if it leads to fracturing, but the main way to prevent this fracturing is by understanding them, the differences, and learning how to prevent these differences from fracturing the left.

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


uncop posted:

My bad if I came across as trying to start a beef or something, I wouldn't do that in a thread like this. The idea was to contribute some context for readers to be better equipped to relate all the other stuff they may have heard about maoism previously with your exposition.

Ah, thanks for the clarification, I misunderstood your point and apologies if I sounded combative as well. I completely agree with giving more nuance and elaboration for the sake of at least having a better historical account, which can serve to inform us all better, of course.

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Sarrisan
Oct 9, 2012
Does anyone have a good source on learning about Peronism, both the ideology and history of the movement?

yes this question comes from me liking trashy musicals

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