Marxism-Leninism is dangerous to the ruling class because it’s true, understands the world in an actionable way, and stands to end all of class society.
the extent to which the ruling class has convinced us that it’s dangerous is surprising sometimes.
i learned about marx because my teacher & my father reacted VERY strongly when i asked my teacher who marx was and she called my dad to “warn” him.
if they had neutral (or maybe even positive) reactions, i probably wouldn’t have bothered to search for him online at the school library.
Yep! Often times reaction backfires.
Mahmood Mamdani, father of the newly elected mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, shared how he was introduced to Marx:
I was in my room. There was a knock at the door. Two gentlemen in trench coats and hats said, “FBI.” I thought, “Wow, just like on television.” They sat down. They were there to find out why I had gone – because this turned out to be big – it is after Montgomery that King organized his march on Selma. They wanted to know who had influenced me. After one hour of probing, the guy said, “Do you like Marx?”
I said, “I haven’t met him.”
Guy said, “No, no, he’s dead.”
“Wow, what happened?”
“No, no, he died long ago.”
I thought the guy Marx had just died. So then, “Why are you asking me if he died long ago?”
“No, he wrote a lot. He wrote that poor people should not be poor.”
I said, “Sounds amazing.”
I’m giving you a sense of how naïve I was. After they left, I went to the library to look for Marx. So that was my introduction to Karl Marx.
https://www.warscapes.com/conversations/conversation-mahmood-mamdani
so you’re saying that it would be praxis if i had a child so that they can get elected and spread socialism throughout the country; thank you for the idea comrade. lol
I mean, Kamala Harris’ parents were Marxists too… The coconut can roll pretty far from the tree apparently
Can you tell me shortly how a marxist-leninist society would look like? I guess not like the Sovjet Union?
The Soviet Union, Cuba, DPRK, Laos, PRC, Vietnam, and former non-USSR socialist states in Europe such as the GDR were and are all examples of Marxism-Leninism being applied to establish socialist society. What makes you think the Soviet Union isn’t an example? At a fundamental level, Marxist-Leninists seek to establish an economy where public ownership is the principle aspect, and the working classes are in control of the state. At a more detailed level, however, this can look very different depending on local levels of development, history, and unique material conditions.
Because the Soviet Union was an autocratic surveillance state wasn’t it? At least that’s what I learned about GDR and projected it to other communist states.
The Soviet Union was a democratically run socialist economy, as was the GDR. First-hand accounts from Statesian journalist Anna Louise Strong in her book This Soviet World describe soviet elections and factory councils in action. Statesian Pat Sloan even wrote Soviet Democracy to describe in detail the system the soviets had built for curious Statesians to read about, and today we have Professor Roland Boer’s Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance to reference. Further, surveillance in socialist countries pales in comparison to modern capitalist surveillance and data harvesting.
Hell, salaried workers are exploited.
Salaries are essentially abstracted wages, same with piece-rates. Marx goes over the different ways labor is paid in Capital.
Some certainly are. But my salaried coworkers come in later then me, take a lunch twice as long as me and then leave before me. All while being paid 4x what I make.
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The reason the red scare existed was because the western capitalists were terrified of the revolution spreading to western Europe and the United States, which was extremely likely in the early 20th century. As such, all manner of censorship of Russian-language news, theoretical texts, reporting, etc. became the norm, and what was deemed acceptable to the capitalists was extremely filtered media, either from opposition in the USSR itself, or from western reporting, complete with what we now recognize as propaganda.
The truth is that the USSR was extremely functional. It delivered consistent results for the working classes, and in so doing doubled life expectancies, brought mass literacy and industrialization, dignified the soviet people, and much more. The west had to rely on a combination of fabrication, exaggeration of real issues, minimization of real successes, and other tried and true methods to invent an alternate reality version of the soviet union. Journalists like Anna Louise Strong, that supported socialism and reported on it honestly, were censored.
The red scare existed because porkie was terrified of a system that stood to steal from under their feet the very foundation they set up for their total reign.
USSR had a lot of issues, but was a lot better (for the working class) than what was before and what came after. The reason for red scare was to prevent the western working class from overthrowing the oligarchy.
Right now, China is surpassing western neoliberal nations by carefully mixing socialist and capitalist modes of production, guided by Marxism-Leninism with further theoretical developments.
You gotta go out and read some books dude.
The reason why the red scare existed was because the capitalists were scared of the workers and still are, the soviets had no equivalent and didn’t need to.
the soviets had no equivalent
Soviet reeducation camps and the million plus people that died in them disagree.
I think both capitalist and communist propaganda is full of shit, but damn.
Are you referring to the soviet prisons in general as “re-education camps?” An enormous number of prison deaths occured during World War II, when famine was widespread due to the Nazis storming Ukraine, the USSR’s breadbasket. On the whole, soviet prisons and the justice system itself were more progressive than their peers, Mary Stevenson Callcott documented it quite well in Russian Justice.
The soviet union, despite having a progressive legal system, was in a state of constant turmoil caused by pressures both external and internal. They couldn’t simply delete all previously existing ruling-class people and ideology, class struggle continues under socialism. Further, pressure from the imperialist west, invasion both in threat and in action, and intentional sabateurs meant that the prisons certainly weren’t empty. The soviet union never had a single year of normal, stable growth, free from intense opposition on the outside and counter-revolutionary forces on the inside.
I’ll state it again, as I said in my other comment: the red scare existed because porkie was terrified of a system that stood to steal from under their feet the very foundation they set up for their total reign.
I encourage you to learn more about the topic, we’re all taught to hate communism and be doomers, by our families, schools, media and so on, but when you look at the facts communism is better for the vast majority of people, those who do all the work but receive less compensation for it. The surplus of our work is stolen by those who own stuff.
You presume too much about my background. You are also missing the fact that every attempt at communism has somehow also resulted in a small group of elites stealing the surplus labor.
No judgement intended, but you’re literally echoing anticommunist propaganda, I encourage you to keep learning.
Propaganda is not necessarily false. All you are saying is that I’m not aligned with your political project. You are correct.
While you’re correct in that propaganda isn’t necessarily false, I said you’re repeating anticommunist propaganda, which is notorious for being a mix of exaggeration, bad faith interpretation and outright fabrication. We all learn that bs, unfortunately not all of us do the work to go over the claims and realize just how much it all rests on misrepresenting and misunderstanding history.
No? Socialism and capitalism have delivered demonstrably different results precisely because the social surplus within socialism was and is directed towards fulfilling the needs of the people, via large projects and social programs, which under capitalism are limited due to the capitalist class entitling itself to the vast majority of the surplus.
