Like the title says, I'm new to Marxism and have only read a couple works relating to socialism. I don't think I know enough about Marxism to firmly define myself into any "type" (although council communism sounds pretty interesting.) Second Thought and Yugopnik are what got me into Marxism, but more recently I've been listening to Socialism For All's audiobooks and reaction videos while driving. In his reaction video to The Deprogram's China Episode, he makes some interesting points about how China could become "social imperialist" and succeed the US/NATO as the new imperialist global hegemon, among some other things. From an outsider's perspective, I don't consider the current China socialist because of the fact that private property and many other capitalist elements still exist within it, but I do appreciate how much it has been able to develop over the past few decades, like poverty reduction and massive infrastructure projects that wouldn't be possible with typical liberal democracies. People excuse the private property and "restricted" capitalism as necessary evils until China has the conditions to create socialism, but I have doubts about whether China's still even working towards socialism or whether the Chinese proletariat actually hold power over the bourgousie. China doesn't support communist movements internationally, and the liberalized economy has gone on far longer than the NEP in the soviet union despite both being created for the same reason, and I can't seem to find a good reason why it's lasted this long. (I also have concerns about privacy and the fact that access to the outside internet is restricted, although that's not really related to this topic.) I'd stumbled across this reddit thread a while ago, and while I know reddit isn't the best place for serious discussion, I think that the person in the video does make good points, as do the people in both the r/TankieTheDeprogram and r/ultraleft threads and I honestly don't know what to think or who to take seriously in that discussion. I would appreciate if anyone could give me a genuine response to these concerns, thanks.
Edit: Thank you all so much for the responses! I've learned quite a bit reading them, although I haven't had a chance to check out the links people have sent yet. I'll try to update this post with any new questions and respond to comments whenever I have time.
You are already off on the wrong foot. You take Marxism to be a moralist philosophy that states private property is morally wrong therefore should all be made illegal, and you find it problematic that China has not done that, and then see people explaining why as "excusing" it as a "necessary evil."
Marxism is not a moralist philosophy. The treatment of private property is not that it is morally repugnant. Marxism is a branch of scientific research that attempts to analyze the development of human societies objectively, using evidence and material analysis, to form models of it, as well as to use those models to predict how it will develop in the future.
The treatment of private property originates from Marx's analysis that the material basis of private property is in the decentralization of production, but that markets have a natural tendency to centralize production as the production process becomes more and more complicated. Marx referred to this centralization of production as "socialization."
Centralized production is a different foundation than decentralized production, and it is less socially stable when paired with private ownership, because you end up with an extraordinarily tiny number of people meticulously controlling everything in society.
Marx made a prediction, based on this analysis, that this social instability will grow and grow as enterprises grow larger in scale, and eventually will become so socially unstable that society will not be able to proceed any further unless the contradiction is resolved. Given that the socialization of production is a natural consequence of the immense scale of production due to its technological complexity, Marx did not believe you could always "bust up" large enterprises without destroying their technological foundations (at least the ones which became large through fair means of actually producing the best product). Thus, you instead have to change the ownership structure around it, i.e. to make it public and no longer private.
Why do I mention all of this?
Because the moralist analysis say: "private property is morally evil, therefore we should make it all illegal." This mentality leads people to think socialism is just about passing a law that says "all private property is now illegal, and any country which doesn't do this is evil betrayer of 'true' socialism."
But in Marx's analysis, there is no moral condemnation of private property, but instead the expropriation of industries exists for a very particular purpose, which is to resolve the contradiction between the socialization of production and the privatization of appropriation. There is thus a necessary condition that is a prerequisite to justify expropriating industries: that the industry is sufficiently socialized.
You see, if you nationalize a section of the economy which is dominated by small enterprise, where production is not socialized and it is not already operating on a national scale, then you are requiring the state to take over a section of the economy which the infrastructure and technology objectively, materially does not even exist yet to operate it at a national scale. You will introduce a contradiction between socialized appropriate and private production.
The moralist position ends up introducing policies which are antithetical to Marx's own analysis and would be predicted to fail. Indeed, Lenin in "A Tax in Kind" said that nationalizing the small producers would be "economic suicide" to the party that attempted it, and that in "Left-wing Communism: an Infantile Disorder" said that you just have to "learn to live alongside them" (the small producers). In the Manifesto Marx is clear that you cannot nationalize all the small producers instantly, but can only nationalize the largest enterprises, and then promote rapid economic development, because this will encourage the development of more national giants and allow you to extend expropriations very gradually over a long period of time.
The Marxist vision of a classless society is not one where there is no private businesses because having a private business is illegal and you will be shot if you try to start one. No, it is a society where the publicly owned national enterprises are so technologically developed and efficient that if you tried to start a private business, you would have no chance of competing and would just go bankrupt. It would not be laws that prevent you from starting your own private business, but the material conditions in the real world.
People complain that "only" 40% of China's GDP output comes from the public sector, but they forget that 60% of China's GDP output is from small-to-medium sized enterprises. These kinds of things should not be nationalized to begin with. People often bring up the NEP but it's not relevant. It is just basic Marxian analysis 101 that it makes zero sense to nationalize producers which are not already operating at a national scale.
What the USSR implemented was ultimately a wartime economy for the purpose of preparing for war against Germany. It is not how Marxist generally understood how the development of socialism would proceed, and is largely an invention of Stalin, which is why it is referred to in Chinese literature as the "Stalin Model" (斯大林模式). It is ultimately a revision of classical Marxism that many people copied because for a short time it seemed to work, but that was only when the economy was focused primarily on heavy industry.
When it came time to shift into light industry, they ran into exactly the kind of contradiction that classical Marxism would predict, which is that the state simply lacked the material infrastructure to satisfy all the light industry demand on a national scale, and naturally you had black markets of small producers arise which tried to fill in the gap themselves, but due to Soviet law, they had to constantly crush the small producers that only spontaneously arose to fill the gaps in their own system. This was, again, something Lenin warned about, that you should not waste time trying to crush the small producers that only arise due to your own economic inefficiency.
This, however, contributed to enormous corruption, because, on a material level, their economy was simply not compatible with production on a national scale for all products, and so the small producers were unavoidable and would continually spontaneously return. Since they remained illegal, they became part of the black markets, an unregulated secondary economy which, already in violation of the law, would use their influence to try and bring down the Soviet government.
This is something the PCC in Cuba commented on when they reformed their law as well, that the small producers always existed and the change in law was merely recognizing their existence, and that the purpose of doing so is to allow for them to be properly regulated and controlled, which is more difficult when you just declare them illegal and pretend they don't exist. There was objectively, materially speaking, always private enterprise in the USSR, Cuba, and China, just written legislation that remained in denial of it.
The entire part of the stalin model and squashing of small producers in your comment is the first time i have understood that part of soviet history.
I legit learned today.
Very interesting comment, thank you! I guess there's still a lot I need to learn about Marx's predictions
Holy moly, this is a golden explanation. I'm saving this thread. Thanks so much, comrade.
I just wanted to say this is such a cogent and well-argued comment that i am really thankful to you it explains a lot of these concepts in a way i can understand and in a way i think i could even share with others in my life. thank you :)
Why is the NEP not relevant? Deng made it explicitly clear that Reform & Opening Up was inspired by the NEP, and was implemented for similar reasons. I agree that the basis of the NEP is in basic Marxian analysis of small producers vs. large producers, and therefore see the connection between the soviet NEP and Reform & Opening Up as being correct implementations of Marxian economics.
What do you mean by the NEP being irrelevant?
Whether or not the NEP occurred has no relevance to what I am talking about. What I am talking about was already the well-established dominant position among Marxists prior to the Stalin model. It was the position advocated by Marx, Engels, Lenin, etc, if you read Hilferding's "Finance Capital" he talks about how early stage socialism will look and basically describes modern China to a T.
Equating modern China to NEP is a bit misleading because it implies (1) the policy is a development by Lenin, which Lenin did add a lot to Marxism, but what I am talking about is just classical Marxism and would be true even if Lenin never exited and can be found throughout Marxist writings prior to Lenin, and (2) when Lenin implemented the NEP, at the time, the country was so obscenely underdeveloped that national enterprises were few and far between did not even have a dominant position in the economy, which is why Lenin described NEP Russia as "state capitalist" and not socialist. While the dictatorship of the proletariat nationalized the largest enterprises, the largest enterprises objectively were insufficient to actually control the economy. The economy was largely still autonomous, overwhelmingly ran by small private producers.
That is not the state of modern day China, nor what earlier Marxists like Marx and Engels themselves, or other early Marxists like Hilferding were advocating. Lenin saw the NEP as a temporary transition period to lay the foundations for the large-scale enterprises which would then serve as the basis of socialism, but, at least according to Lenin's own analysis, at the time, those did not sufficiently exist, and so it was explicitly not a form of socialism at all, not even an early stage of socialism, but of capitalism, due to the extraordinary levels of underdevelopment, even control of the largest enterprises did not translate itself to a dominant position of the "heights" of the economy.
Lenin also described the NEP as a "temporary retreat" precisely because it was state capitalist and not socialist.
When people equate modern day countries like Vietnam, China, Cuba, etc, to just doing the NEP in the modern era, it is very misleading. It implies these countries are not socialist but state capitalist, that they are not following the by-the-books development model suggested by Marxian political economy but are in a "temporary retreat" implementing a form of capitalism for the meantime. It also implies that this is an explicitly Leninist position, when it is not.
China already had a state capitalist phase and that had ended. The mistake was not that the state capitalist phase needed to be extended forever to all eternity in an endless NEP. The mistake was that the NEP should have gradually transitioned into a lower stage of socialism, which would then proceed to gradually transition into the higher stage of socialism, but the Stalin Model tried to jump directly from the NEP to the higher stage in one stroke. It was correct to move beyond state capitalism, just not in that way.
Ah, understood. We are on the same page, then, I misunderstood the wording. I can see the confusion that can arise by placing it on Lenin, rather than Marx, by referring to it as similar to the NEP. The Marxist basis of the NEP and China's socialist market economy is both in Marx, not Lenin, agreed.
I enjoy your to-the-point style. You could write essays on substack or whatever for money, I think.
Funniest thing is Deprogram/Second Thought/etc is considered to be more on the radical side of breadtube
Deprogram and Second Thought support China, it's Socialism 4 All that doesn't.
In the way the CPUSA "supports China" sure
I don't follow, the anti-China arguments mentioned by OP came exclusively from Socialism 4 All, not The Deprogram or Second Thought. I don't pay much attention to Breadtube, but I've always seen pro-China content from the latter 2 while only anti-China content from S4A.
They said Second Thought and Yugopnik got them into Marxism and this is the general tract I hear out of Luna Oi/Deprogram fans.
Hasan Piker is "pro China" and he thinks the US can just copy their policies via progressive campaigns.
Whatever I'll write up my last few years of being irritated with leftoids off Discord and shit when I completely stop valuing my time again (happens every few months). It seems like there is a new crop of these people. My natural inclination is to just vaguepost about it to find more people who can clue me in though
I don't know how people are still falling for "they had Rockhill on" etc when the ACP and ChemicalMind or like ~~Robinson Erdhardt~~ (this is a really bizarre slip I meant to write Acid Horizon, the other pod is where Wolff and Hudson meet up to express bewilderment) have done so
OP deliberately stated that S4A responded to The Deprogram talking about China and saying it was good. I don't care much for influencers, but the problem here is S4A, not The Deprogram.
#demonspotted #fuckoff
missed a bit of the first half because ADHD + cleaning shit but WOW https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5oT3c8nBQ8 go to about 13:30 they have a Very Special Announcement to reassure their liberal audience that they "don't endorse Iranian or Russian regional dominance"
So they're still trotting out this bullshit KKE interpetation (https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/KKE_Model) of imperialism. What on earth is their "support" of China based on then? Do they just support what they see as the lesser ebil imperialist? Absolute garbage, none of this would hold up to scrutiny from their opponents. I hate vibes!! I hate vibes!!! 😵💫
I feel like I'm gradually shifting toward a point of view that goes something like: Streamer/podcaster/youtuber (or I guess we could summarize it as "content creator") marxists should be de facto assumed to be untrustworthy.
I've written at least partial defense of one or more of them in the past, I think, but frankly the fact alone that the majority of them are not mouthpieces of a revolutionary movement, but are instead completely divorced from one and are simply doing an attempt at marxist theory takes, that already means they've got nothing to ground themselves on, no matter how good their intentions are.
At least when that's an aspect of somewhere like here, we're checking each other at the door regularly and none of us are being elevated as "the takes giver". But these people are both elevated as thought leaders by fandom level audiences and can very easily have no connection to praxis at all, which makes no goddamn sense for being a thought leader.
So I would say, the basic litmus test should be something like: Are they part of a revolutionary movement and are speaking directly from experience gained from that organizing about things that pertain to that experience? If not, they can still make valid points, but the authority of their position should be treated the same way you would some random person you chat up on the street.
Most of us would probably gain far more from translating and reading Xi Jinping speeches than listening to podcasters bullshit about theory for an hour.
10/10 take.
https://lemmygrad.ml/post/11896481
You can always go for the podcasts that are simply professors talking on zoom for multiple hours. Only thing that doesn"t make me like, angry
Eww, gross, thanks for showing this.
No, no, thanks for not settling for #vagueposting I really need to make this stuff more accessible for people. It kind of makes me apprehensive because of how cranky people have gotten with me over criticizing entertainers. So it's gotta be extensive no random potshots that only make sense to people with 1000 hours of communism and oil trade social media
Yea no worries, I know a decent bit about communism but very little about streamers.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
This might be a good point to ask, why are ultras (and trotskyists, etc.) so universally disliked? I'm still learning the history and differences between all the groups of marxists, but surely having discussions and debates with people more skeptical of AES will allow those projects to find/fix their contradictions and improve themselves? Are there any other channels I should listen to over S4A?
Critique is good, it's how a movement progresses. If a movement (org, party, etc) did the same thing over and over again regardless of outcome, they would eventually run in circles and into their own exhaustion.
The problem is that no advancements have ever been made by a westerner saying for the nth time that china is not socialist because Y reason. To make any material change, they would have to be Chinese, they would have to be in the CPC, and they would have to bring it up there. Saying it to an English-speaking audience on Youtube, no matter how big, is just not going to change China's mind. It is however going to change a lot of new leftists' minds.
There is the same contradiction when I yell that the US is starting yet another war on false premises, making people believe that their war is just when they have fabricated all of the justifications. But -- the difference is that I yell this to people to whom it will matter. I can plant the seeds of anti-imperialism theory in people's minds, even if they are not receptive at first.
I'm not saying either are very effective in the grand scheme of things, rather I'm saying that despite similarities in tactics, both exist for different reasons.
So what is their goal then? We come to the conclusion that they want to promote the idea that there is no socialism, and might never have been (some ultras believe there has never been socialism, some believe only the USSR until Stalin's death was ever an example of socialism). I find that conclusion not only very bleak but also very dangerous. Why do people want me to believe socialism has never succeeded, and that the only attempts at socialism that have been realized in the world were bound to fail, and not actual examples of socialism?
Isn't that very defeatist? Like, what is the material reason there hasn't been a Bordigist revolution that even grasped state power for a moment? Why is it only "fake" socialism that seems to succeed, according to ultras, and then turns into state capitalism? They are basically saying that capitalism is inescapable and there will never be anything else, but in other words from liberals.
I really don't see how you can make a career out of saying "there has never actually been socialism" and then can claim you are anything but an anti-communist mouthpiece.
As for Trotskyists they are "communists who are afraid to call themselves communists". I don't really mean it as a compliment... I found that trots can rarely explain how their theory actually differs from what the USSR under Stalin did. They like to imagine alternative history where Trotsky "won" the "power struggle" (as if Lenin decided his successor and not the central committee of the CPSU) and how different it would have been from Stalin, when, if you read both, you realize Trotsky would probably have passed the same policies as Stalin but been even harsher than Stalin was. They think the purges are bad because anything that paints Stalin in a bad light is good to Trotskyists, but Trotsky was fond of collective punishments and particularly execution. Nobody could stand him. Frankly it's a good thing he never ruled anything after the red army.
They can't even define permanent revolution, just that it's "different" from socialism in one country so it's automatically better. They can't define socialism in one country either. In reality permanent revolution would have destroyed the fledgling USSR. They are a group that has not read anything beyong Marx, Lenin and Trotsky (presumably because anyone after Trotsky was not Trotskyist enough) and it shows.
Truth is Trotsky was hated by everyone in the CPSU by the time he was first exiled to the Kazakh SSR, as he wanted to split the party and was impossible to work with. Then he tried to organize a coup. There was a reason he wasn't elected to be general secretary.
To piggyback off gramsci. They offer nothing but sterile vacous negative "criticism" without providing anything constructive and while achieving nothing.
Comrade Bordiga limits himself to upholding a cautious position on all the questions raised by the Left. He doesn’t say: the International poses and resolves such and such a question in this way, but the Left will instead pose and resolve it this other way. He instead says: the way the International poses and resolves problems doesn’t convince me; I fear they might slip into opportunism; there are insufficient guarantees against this; etc. His position, then, is one of permanent suspicion and doubt. In this way the position of the “Left” is purely negative: they express reservations without specifying them in a concrete form, and above all without indicating in concrete form their own point of view and their solutions. They end up spreading doubt and distrust without offering anything constructive.
That's incisive. Really important to differentiate between the possibility of a threat (abstract) and the realities of a threat (specific). I would venture to say making things specific through investigation is a significant part of the practicing communist's work. When the specifics are better understood, an appropriate solution can be worked out. When they aren't understood, naive or foolish one-size-fits-all attempts get made that may waste time and lose ground. Of course, in practice, we don't have time to address every little thing in the most precise way, but... to put it one way, if we have the time to cogitate and discuss over concepts of universality for hours, we have the time to ask a person some questions about themself and their life; about what they believe and why; about what their major concerns are and how they see the world.
because
It's a good clarification to make since I didn't really explain what I meant, the adversaries of people like S4A making completely boneheaded cases is the entire problem with this whole scene. Since they've gone through such an extensive process of elimination
Here is The Deprogram hosting a completely insane Russian leftcom (anticommunist) to talk about how the Ukraine war is heckin imperialist Russian fascism. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J65So9Ub-w0
When I get done watching this stupid Chapoid Deprogram video about China in the middle of the night I will explain why it sucks as well
I'm just tired of none of these people even listening closely to their own shows. I find the same shit every time. You guys actually have reactionary programs being posted on this side of the fediverse constantly & I'm too tired to explain since people just make Zizek glazer-esque "they radicalized me" excuses. No they didn't
That episode is where they lost me. Up until then I really thought they were a solid podcast, despite their flaws. But to me it is inexcusable to choose to platform a representative of a tiny minority of contrarian ultra-leftists over any one of tens of thousands of actual Russian communists, the overwhelming majority of who support the SMO and supported it before it even started. It is indicative of deeply entrenched western leftism on the Deprogram that they never thought of asking a communist from the Donbass who actually lived through the eight years of being constantly shelled and attacked by fascists to come on their program and explain the pro-SMO viewpoint, or give some insight into how the people of the Donbass view the Kiev regime. That is the very least you should do if you want to do the liberal "both sides" thing. You owe it to your audience to at least hear the side out that most Russian communists support, but they didn't even do that.
I still listen to a lot of people I have profound disagreements with if they have highly developed their field of study (not just to keep tabs on them and get mad ╭( ๐_๐)╮ ive been in recovery from that for years, thanks to D&HM). My issue with most of these Chapoids is they're simply regurgitating the same-old-same-old mainstream & popular alternative media stuff, and doing a teensy bit of media criticism to put their own spin on it. They don't move away from the premises that the US uses to enforce "realism" and hide its objectives (even from Iran and Russia partly) + true nature of its political control over "allies". So, they're not actually bringing underlooked global events, new angles, or sharp theoretical analysis to the table. They focus on making their audience feel like they have friends, which is really grating in the same way an AI trying to be nice to me is (like seriously stop it)
Guerrilla History or maybe Revleft (isnt it the same guy lol also he was in that fake psyop Misha girl's server along with FalconryFinance #hornyoldmen #IYKYK) did something similar where they platformed the one singular group of Ukrainian communists who hadn't been tortured to death, who explicitly say on their website they don't GAF about Donbas & Luhansk.
The underlying issue here is none of these people understand dependency theory! They're still working with economistic metrics dressed up as unequal exchange when the good part of that field has been using a much finer comb for years
Do you have some reading for dependency theory? I keep encountering it in contexts that assume the reader is already familiar.
What is D&HM?
Dialectical & Historical Materialism (I assume).
Ah, gotcha. That makes more sense.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
what did Luna Oi do tho
I don't watch "breadtube" so I wouldn't know.
I do not either my specialty is knowing search terms that magically bring up their worst video ever e.g. the Channel 5 Ukraine documentary is one of the only breadtube productions I have ever seen
Some people think this is being unfair but you should always use your high Insight stat to bypass "entertainers" completely