Like it or not the truly horrific legacy of Marxism as Bolshevik Stalinism wrecked the reputation of the left. This gruesome portrait of an empowered psychopath in the name of ‘communism’ is sobering…A complete break with the Marxist junk canon is essential… A real social vehicle as neo-communism can resolve the issues behind the incompetence generated by Marxism…
Category: Bolshevism
It’s Ok to not be a marxist? It is essential for socialism to start over, and be postmarxist….
This article has lead to a whole series of confused or irrelevant/beside the point posts at marxmail.
The issue is that marxism as a whole, despite many insights, is unlikely to lead to a viable path to postcapitalism.
There are many issues here but for starters consider the link today at Marxmail on the position of Chinese communists such as JI
on ‘democracy’. See the link below and my comments.
https://redfortyeight.com/2021/12/20/china-democratic-pure-garbage-china-and-the-other-socialist-countries-are-smashing-the-myth-of-socialism-as-undemocratic-friends-of-socialist-china/
The way JI coopts a classic leftist/marxist meme and turns it upside down is a warning that trying to use Marxism will generate cognitive dissonance in the Babel of tongues that makes up its historical legacy in Bolshevism and Chinese communism. The passage is pure doublethink in the Orwellian sense. How can you use the same language and not end up in a muddle, what to say of a massacre as the outstanding Stalinists move to liquidate any dissent, and no doubt the whole of Marxmail. These people are stalinist mass murderers and probably have agents already at Marxmail. And Ji’s confusion on democracy is amateurish and clumsy. Noone can think about anything.
More generally the legacy of Marx played its part for another generation, now long gone: Marx ruthlessly created a hard canon and eliminated everyone else. Look at this treatment of Weitling in the movie. The Stalinist element entered early in the way he simply eliminated a fellow socialist as even Engels winced, a devoted comarde destroyed as Marx mutters about the need for theory. Marx brought some coherence to a confused field of early socialists, but the result doesn’t look so good anymore. It has too many confusion points, such as the fallacious theory of history, the Hegelian dialectic turned materialist and other hogwash. Socialism doesn’t need historical materialism and dialectic. Who cares, these are archaic obsessions, and false credentials in a Marx cult.
The Marx canon is strange, looking back. It is too flawed to stand for the future. Best to make Marx/Engels historical reference points and start over with a new language and a simpler approach. Marx was a dominating and neurotic authoritarian who left behind a cult based on a cult of personality. Marxism as a term is an example: the term should be discarded and replaced with a neutral and generalized term.
Marx’s final product is puzzling. His stages of production theory is not scientific at all, and it makes the whole corpus a target for critics who can refute the whole subject very easily.
What is left after getting rid of the bad theory is still useful but it also needs to be recast.
I have suggested in my The Last Revolution the need to discard theories of history, stick with empirical histories, empirical studies of economics in history, and adopt a constructivist approach to socialist construction. Marx says communism will follow capitalism by a law of history. That’s nonsense and every critic of Marx is enabled with a
decisive path to rejection. The question of postcapitalism is gruesome: we need, not a theory, but a practical path in a crisis of monumental and that’s gotten harder and harder as the complexity of capitalism increases even as ecology degenerates. The idea that Marx has the solution to doing that is false, and even Marx warned that he couldn’t get specific.
I think that socialism needs a clear recipe approach that can resolve democracy but with a combined power to prevent capitalist pseudo-freedoms, resolve markets and planning in a system that is functional beyond the utterly brain dead stupidity of the Bolsheviks.
I have suggested dropping the term ‘marxism’ for good. So it is good to not be a marxist. From there you have to establish a system that is another horror like that of the era of Lenin.
Marxism and the waste of a golden opportunity…//The collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of Putin
Postcapitalist_ Futures_Last_Revolution_ver_fnal_1a_12_10_21
This month marks the 30th anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union. The most powerful deformed workers’ state was collapsing into chaos as supposed communists were looting the state and its assets, cheered on by the imperialists of the west.
Source: The collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of Putin
Although not the whole story it is significant as here and essential for the (Marxist) left to disown the whole Bolshevik fiasco. Continue reading “Marxism and the waste of a golden opportunity…//The collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of Putin”
Book launch of Vadim Rogovin’s Was There an Alternative?
Rogovin’s work brings to light the rich and complex history of the Marxist opposition to the usurpation of the Russian Revolution by the Stalinist bureaucracy. It unearths from beneath the lies, piled high by the Stalinists and post-Soviet academics for nearly a century, the fight of Leon Trotsky and the Left Opposition for an alternative, revolutionary course for the Soviet Union.
Source: Book launch of Vadim Rogovin’s Was There an Alternative?
RUSSIAN REVOLUTION AS NEVER SEEN BEFORE: the real story, told by an eyewitness – EXCLUSIVE
Despite our different perspective on Marxism, this article raises many questions very acutely and is a reminder of the place of counterrevolution in the outcome.
One hundred and four years ago, the Russian working class seized power. To celebrate the anniversary of these remarkable events, we are excited to make the following eye-witness account of revolutionary Russia in 1920 available to an online audience.
Source: RUSSIAN REVOLUTION AS NEVER SEEN BEFORE: the real story, told by an eyewitness – EXCLUSIVE
DMNC and the puzzle of the russian revolution
Although we have adopted a critique of Marxism, and stand wary at ‘theory’ the issues in the history of the left present a set of puzzles for our new perspective. We have spoken to both reformist and revolutionary viewpoints, but the reformist stance is misleading: we can stage a revolution via reformist stance, however unlikely, if ‘reform’ can move to change a constitution and/or expropriate capital. The latter seems implausible but nationalizations actually occurred in the English Labor era, etc…The revolutionary path is equally tricky and this article on the issue of revolution, and the case of Lenin present, and warn of the immensely tricky steps to any kind of socialist/communist, in our case the neo-communism of our DMNC. Despite these differences we can in many ways simply substitute our model into the deliberations of the Lenin era. It is rare that anyone left or right can navigate this history of the Russian Revolution. Our stance is that ‘if only’ the Bolsheviks/marxists had had a better vision of a socialist outcome on the grounds of democracy, markets, planning, state capitalism/a Commons, and the relationship of a revolutionary party to a democratic party. All that said this by the book article by marxists shows how we need to be wary of socialist realizations, in the context of revolution. Another issue is that of the concept of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat. Lenin correctly/incorrectly took this notion to heart and he must have thought there was no contradiction in his claim to take the stance he represented the working class. At the start the mysterious constellation of factors seems to justify that but the whole game ended in failure. The term should be retired. But as this article makes clear a truly tricky set of factors were at play and Lenin, often accused of a coup, in fact moved in the context of working class thematics and in terms of the actual orgs thus in the working class ‘soviets’ to seize the moment. In the end our DMNC version would confront this tricky navigation though a complex chess puzzle. It seems that Lenin was successful but then the limits of the Marxist model moved to derail the remarkable revolutionary fait-accompli. But the Marxist package was anemic and the result in the end was hardly a working class soon again the exploited victim in the victim in the coming of Stalin.The democratic failsafe wasn’t there.
We have and again yesterday confronted the worsening crisis and noted how the justification for revolution starts to creep back into the reformist complacency. Revolution is becoming a duty having just watched a fascist wannabee liquidate 600,000 citizens. But the elder situation is far different: Russia simply fell apart as the army nearly dissolved as soldiers threw down their rifles and trekked home, in the horror of World War I which was the real ‘revolution’ by accident. The American military will sooner move to fascism than radicalize and the issue of ecology in the era of global warming moves swiftly past Marxist cliches to demand a whole new rethinking. The future here could be a fascist military, liquidation of the left, and bunkers in Sweden for the capitalist remnant. Capitalist mass murder can now move from six hundred thousand to a hundred million.
Capitalism has ceased to take humanity forward. It should long ago have been overthrown by the working class.
Source: The class, the party and the leadership: How to organize revolution
From working class ideology to the perspective of the Universal Class.
Source: Were marx’s theories to blame?…//Why Did Socialism Fail? – 1848: The End(s) of History
We have commented already today on this essay but might continue with a discussion of the question of creating working class democracies and its failures.
Continue reading ” From working class ideology to the perspective of the Universal Class.”
1848+: The End(s) of History 