Juice

Take this for what you will, but my dear friend, who is an award winning film maker, whose work is part of the criterion collection, low key loves the Sonic movies

It sounds like you are saying something like “Marx wouldn’t have condoned the USSR/China”. I don’t see any possible way of litigating this, as it is so abstract and moralistic that it can’t really be handled by Marx’s methods. As for my taking an “academic” view, everything I said is directly supported by the works of Marx, I can pull quotes if you like, but pulling my Marxism card is a pretty lame maneuver. I’m not an academic. I learned Marxism through study of Marx and secondary sources, and real application of his ideas. You will have to work very hard to prove that I am misunderstanding Marx. On these topics we are discussing: I do not misunderstand, I have receipts, and I don’t appreciate the implication.

If you want to criticize the USSR and China feel free to do so. Marx wrote extensively on the Obschina and the possibility of peasant communes to develop into socialism without going through a Capitalist phase. The revolutions in Russia and China were just, theoretically sound, and inevitable. The necessity of a proletarian and/or peasant revolution in both countries is underscored by how utterly bourgeois revolutions failed in their own time to actually overthrow their kings and emperors. All of them degenerated back into imperial relations.

Did the USSR and China also degenerate into top-down bourgeois relations? Absolutely, you’ll get no argument from me. But Marx’s theories were successful when they allowed revolutionaries to understand and act upon real conditions in order to overthrow the old order. I am familiar with the histories and criticisms, and are able to discuss them beyond just abstractly waving toward some (one might call) authoritarian “regime.” Stalinist rejection of Trotsky’s theory of “permanent revolution”, or the idea that if you start a revolution, you fucking finish it, bore out in predictable ways.

But if Trotsky had seized power instead of Stalin I doubt things would have changed much. These revolutions were thrust upon the revolutionaries, if you had asked Lenin in 1916 when a revolution would occur in Russia, he might have said “not for 50 years” and then advocated for a bourgeois revolution. The Bolsheviks had deep roots among the proletariat and peasants, but the proletariat was critically underdeveloped, the revolution as a “truly Marxist” one never stood a chance. That has nothing to do with Marx or the way his theories were applied or misapplied. It has to do with the exact conditions of those countries during their revolutions, and the difficult decades that followed. In order to understand those conditions, a thorough understanding of Marx is extremely helpful. but even then, there is still immense ground for disagreement. So much so that it hardly seems practical to litigate.

I’m happy to provide direct Marx quotes to support everything I said in my first comment, I have them saved on my phone and reference them frequently. I would be more than happy to share them. The works I would cite would be the Manifesto, Critique of the Gotha Program, the 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, and my personal favorite, The German ideology. Incidentally, TGI has a great quote that I believe defends your position:

The transformation, through the division of labour, of personal powers (relationships) into material powers, cannot be dispelled by dismissing the general idea of it from one’s mind, but can only be abolished by the individuals again subjecting these material powers to themselves and abolishing the division of labour. This is not possible without the community. Only in community [with others has each] individual the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions; only in the community, therefore, is personal freedom possible. In the previous substitutes for the community, in the State, etc. personal freedom has existed only for the individuals who developed within the relationships of the ruling class, and only insofar as they were individuals of this class. The illusory community, in which individuals have up till now combined, always took on an independent existence in relation to them, and was at the same time, since it was the combination of one class over against another, not only a completely illusory community, but a new fetter as well. In a real community the individuals obtain their freedom in and through their association

I don’t really disagree with you on some level, but it feels like you’re trying to discredit me in order to make a point that you aren’t making an explicit case for, so excuse me if I’m grasping a bit. I would appreciate specifics in order to continue, so we aren’t just “talking past” one another.

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when people try real communism

human nature it misunderstands

“Real” communism understands “human nature” in that human nature is not essential but historically and socially contingent. When communism is thought of and implemented abstractly, which you are doing but also in cases where social movements have “tried” it, then it fails to understand that society is made of people and their activity, and can not be thought of abstractly in separating people from the society we create.

Unfortunately, usually when people talk about “human nature” they are also being too abstract and can’t define exactly what they mean, because in order for something to be essential to humanity it has to be found in virtually every culture in every time. Human nature is always cultural, and culture is shaped by who rules over society.

I mean…what? Marx didn’t mention state control? Marx analysed state control in several contexts. He said that communist society was “stateless” so yes he did mention state control under communism in the manifesto. He analysed the “bourgeois” state, and hownit compared with

The Marxist formulation of the state is that it is a historical/social mechanism to manage class antagonisms. The state in a capitalist country is a capitalist state, which functions to keep the capitalists in power and divide/repress the workers, so the workers can be exploited by the capitalists. So, according to Marx, the state does in fact have to be seized by a mass worker party, smashed, and then replaced with a worker’s state.

This would be a transitional stage before communism. Some people call it “socialism.” This definitely had been tried, with different kinds of successes and failures in different places at different times.

This is all extremely abstract, and dependent on the time and place where it is “tried”. If you “tried communism,” as in creating a stateless, classless, moneyless society, according to Marx, it would definitely fail. That is not how theory of change works under Marxism, kind of how you describe “evolve naturally with neighbour working with neighbour and community working with community.” Except according to Marx, this change doesn’t come about by people working together, although that will undoubtably be a huge part of it, and such an important part of it I can’t fault you for it.

But what will bring about socialism, the transitional phase where the workers have control of a “state,” and use it to suppress the capitalists ability to exploit workers for their own profits, will be working together to smash capitalism, liberate as many people as possible – more people every day from oppressive conditions, institute new forms of real democracy and cinsent, and defend this revolution from anyone who tries to take power from the masses for themselves. That practical activity is communism. So communism can he tried in our society, in that Marxism isn’t just a theory but a theory in practice.

But trying to force a capitalist society into a fully communist society will always fail. And any attempts to do so, even in the name of Marxism, are not Marxist. Marxism rejects prefigurative politics. In fact I don’t really think of Marxism as a way of predicting the future, but rather, as a way of seeing what is actually happening in our society so we can take action to change it.

I just watched Pluto in the last few months, one of the best Anime I’ve ever seen.