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.
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.
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