• Move to lemm.ee
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    11 year ago

    Turns out I have you mixed up with someone else. Sorry.

    This actually makes a complete mess of the conversation for me because I’m not sure entirely what I said that was responding to you correctly and what I mixed up with the user who brought up liking Tito.

    Let’s throw away the part where I called you a liberal, and some of the other accusations of not knowing what you’re talking about. This was mostly caused by the other conversation I was having.

    I hope you don’t actually support Stalin though. From what I have been told what he wrote in his theory is somewhat reasonable, but dosen’t at all match what he actually did. The writing was mere propaganda. I have also spoken to people from ex-soviet countries, they basically all hate the USSR. It’s what caused a friend if mine to stop being a Marixst-Leninist.

    Hmm 70% good, 30% bad. There’s a lot of historical context that needs to be considered, 2 world wars, 2 revolutions and a civil war supported by all the capitalist powers of the world. Also the fact that they were doing something nobody had ever done before, with no idea of the “what not to do” things. Mistakes were absolutely made. But at the same time you have to discard the rampant propaganda that portrays this man as a cartoon villain, the trots are absurd for this and the capitalists are obviously unreliable because they want him to be a villain for the fact it also makes socialism a villain. The reality is much more balanced. Winston Churchill is a bigger monster than he ever was and I don’t think you view him through the weird “evil monster” lens created by the narrative and environment we have surrounding this man.

    I have also spoken to people from ex-soviet countries, they basically all hate the USSR.

    The ones that were under 10 at the end of the USSR should be discarded as irrelevant. They claim to have lived it but were too young to remember and grew up during a capitalist storm of anti-socialism. The capitalists who were disempowered (and their descendants) should also be carefully disregarded, such as the Cuban gusanos of Florida who are all basically descendants of the bourgeoisie who lost their businesses and land when the communists took power. Those that should be listened to? Anyone that was 20+ at the time the USSR disbanded, and the genuine working class rather than migrant bourgeoise elements

    I strongly recommend interview videos like these ones, which include the bad and the good, to see and build an idea from the people who actually lived it. https://youtu.be/ui11x8vLQFI https://youtu.be/mGUAIwlVR9A https://youtu.be/rfrtr9hAFYs

    I have yet to see any evidence that marxism is a science.

    You’ve not read Engels then? Socialism: Utopian and Scientific forms the basis of explaining this, and compares it to utopian socialism which is not at all scientific, mainly idealism.

    A science is just a body of theories grounded in a materialist analysis that produces predictable and reproducible results. When it is not predictable or reproducible other theories are then evaluated, and so on and so forth.

    There are three main parts to Marxian methodology which are interdependent on each other. These are the Labour Theory of Value, Materialist Conception of History and the theory of class struggle. The Labour Theory of value sets out the economic laws which regulate commodity production under capitalism. The Materialist Conception of History places the productive relationships of commodity production, wage labour and capital in the setting of history. And class struggle provides the setting for explaining social evolution in terms of a revolutionary process. All of this are analysed in a materialist rather than idealist way, and if/when results are not predictable we either evaluate whether the material conditions have been incorrectly analysed or whether the theory itself needs adjusting. We reject dogmatism and constantly reassess and adjust as things have changed historically, Marx existed pre-industrial revolution afterall.

    Your experience with Socialist Appeal and the manner in which they treat Trotsky as a god and Stalin as a demon is itself incredibly dogmatic bordering on cultlike religious attitudes. We don’t. We take the bad, we take the good, and we aim to analyse things clinically without moralising.