For anyone that hasn’t engaged with communist theory before but wants a place to start, I made a basic Marxist-Leninist study guide meant to be easily read or listened to on breaks at work. Feel free to check it out! The first section only takes a short afternoon to work through and can answer many questions you may have, the rest of the guide is meant for those who really want to get a thorough understanding of the fundamentals.
Ive updated the sidebar to include the basic course, Thank you!!
No problem! The older “advanced” course is supposed to get a rework and come after the basic course, but I have a lot of self-study I want to do first.
It’s a path forward. I’d personally rather not be bound by the rules of a state that doesn’t want me to exist.
It sounds like you have an opinion thats been formed based on imperialist propaganda.
I’m open to that possibility. Which governments haven’t ever been responsible for human rights abuses that I should be aware of?
Apparently none, got it. That’s about what I figured.
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Marxiam-leninism is neither communism, nor marxism!
Can you elaborate? Marxism-Leninism is the world’s largest and most significant Marxist and communist ideology, and the only Marxist ideology that has implemented socialism in the real world. How does it depart from Marx and communism to the point of not being able to be considered as such?
communism is a stateless, classless society based on the self-organization of workers and communities. The state is not the vehicle for achieving that society. It is one of the institutions that reproduces hierarchy and domination.
Marx certainly argued that the working class must overthrow capitalism and that there would be a transitional period after the revolution. But he also praised examples like the Paris Commune precisely because they dismantled the centralized state rather than strengthening it. His critique of alienation and exploitation was ultimately aimed at human emancipation, not at creating a new bureaucratic ruling class.
Marxism-Leninism departs from this in several fundamental ways. It replaces the self-emancipation of the working class with the rule of a centralized party claiming to act on its behalf. It builds an increasingly powerful state instead of dismantling state power. It substitutes workplace and community self-management with centralized planning directed from above. In practice, workers remained wage laborers under managers appointed by the state rather than collectively controlling production themselves.
Calling those societies “socialist” depends entirely on defining state ownership as socialism. A definition that is rejected by communism concepts. If workers do not directly control production and political power remains concentrated in a party-state, then capitalism has not been abolished in any meaningful sense. The employer has simply become the state.
As for being “the world’s largest Marxist ideology,” popularity does not settle theoretical questions. Christianity is the world’s largest religion, but that does not resolve debates about theology. Likewise, the historical success of Marxism-Leninism in building states does not prove that it fulfilled Marx’s emancipatory project or achieved communism.
So Marxism-Leninism’s model of socialism is fundamentally different from the Marx’s critique points toward: the direct self-emancipation of workers without a ruling party or a permanent state.
Okay, thank you for sharing your views. I think I see where you are getting confused in your understanding of Marx, and why you see Marxism-Leninism as a departure despite it being a continuation of Marxism to the era of imperialism. The core problems I see are as follows:
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Marx did not argue against administration, nor against vanguards, nor against the state. Communism is not flat and horizontal, it’s a fully collectivized system of production and distribution, which Marx saw as necessarily requiring administrative labor. Engels referred to the stateless government as the “administration of things.” Class is abolished when production and distribution is fully collectivized, and when class is abolished so too is the basis for the state. What remains is administration necessary for running society at scale.
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The vanguard is not a “bureaucratic class,” it is an organized subsection of the most politically advanced of the proletariat. Classes are not hierarchies, but relations to production and distribution. Just as teachers and principals are both proletarian, so are government workers.
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Marx criticized the Paris Commune harshly for not establishing state power, and refusing to march on the banks. The Paris Commune did not go far enough. While it was admirable as one of the first real proletarian revolutions, it was a failure for not smashing the former state power and replacing it with a worker state.
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The treatment of publicly owned and run industry as essentially the same as private is absolutely anti-Marxist. Private industry is run for accumulation and profit, and operates in commodity and capital valorization circuits. Public industry is not beholden to the profit motive, and government officials were not paid in profits, but wages. This is why socialist administrators do not see the same ballooning wealth as capitalists.
Managers are objectively not an elevated class, assuming they have the same relations to ownership of the means of production, in Marxist analysis. You don’t need to read Capital for this, Marx’s Conspectus of Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy makes Marx’s position explicit:
Marx responding to Bakunin
Will the entire proletariat perhaps stand at the head of the government?
In a trade union, for example, does the whole union form its executive committee? Will all division of labour in the factory, and the various functions that correspond to this, cease? And in Bakunin’s constitution, will all ‘from bottom to top’ be ‘at the top’? Then there will certainly be no one ‘at the bottom.’ Will all members of the commune simultaneously manage the interests of its territory? Then there will be no distinction between commune and territory.
The Germans number around forty million. Will for example all forty million be member of the government?
Certainly! Since the whole thing begins with the self-government of the commune.
The whole people will govern, and there will be no governed.
If a man rules himself, he does not do so on this principle, for he is after all himself and no other.
Then there will be no government and no state, but if there is a state, there will be both governors and slaves.
i.e. only if class rule has disappeared, and there is no state in the present political sense.
This dilemma is simply solved in the Marxists’ theory. By people’s government they understand (i.e. Bakunin) the government of the people by means of a small number of leaders, chosen (elected) by the people.
Asine! This is democratic twaddle, political drivel. Election is a political form present in the smallest Russian commune and artel. The character of the election does not depend on this name, but on the economic foundation, the economic situation of the voters, and as soon as the functions have ceased to be political ones, there exists 1) no government function, 2) the distribution of the general functions has become a business matter, that gives no one domination, 3) election has nothing of its present political character.
The universal suffrage of the whole people…
Such a thing as the whole people in today’s sense is a chimera…
…in the election of people’s representatives and rulers of the state — that is the last word of the Marxists, as also of the democratic school — [is] a lie, behind which is concealed the despotism of the governing minority, and only the more dangerously in so far as it appears as expression of the so-called people’s will.
With collective ownership the so-called people’s will vanishes, to make way for the real will of the cooperative.
So the result is: guidance of the great majority of the people by a privileged minority. But this minority, say the Marxists…
Where?
…will consist of workers. Certainly, with your permission, of former workers, who however, as soon as they have become representatives or governors of the people, cease to be workers…
As little as a factory owner today ceases to be a capitalist if he becomes a municipal councillor…
…and look down on the whole common workers’ world from the height of the state. They will no longer represent the people, but themselves and their pretensions to people’s government. Anyone who can doubt this knows nothing of the nature of men.
If Mr. Bakunin only knew something about the position of a manager in a workers’ cooperative factory, all his dreams of domination would go to the devil. He should have asked himself what form the administrative function can take on the basis of this workers’ state, if he wants to call it that.
These confusions on your part are why you see socialist production organized by the working classes collectively as in contradiction with itself. Management and administration are socially necessary, and were always understood to be a part of communism. The anarchists disagreed with Marx and Engels, and so were kicked out of the first international (itself a proto-vanguard) along with Bakunin. You may disagree with Marx and Engels, but this does not make Lenin’s continuation of Marxism a betrayal of it.
I believe that those are really the key problems here. You are reading Marx to have been an anarchist, and are therefore seeing applied Marxism as a betrayal of “Marx the anarchist,” the version of Marx you believe to be authentic but which does not exist.
I think you’re responding to an argument I didn’t actually make.
I never claimed that administration, coordination, or delegation are incompatible with communism. Every complex society requires administration. The question is how administrative power is organized, who exercises it, and how accountable it is. There is a fundamental difference between delegates who are directly accountable, recallable, and subordinate to workers’ assemblies, and a centralized party-state whose decisions flow downward.
I also agree that Marx was not an anarchist. My argument isn’t that Marx secretly agreed with Bakunin. It’s that Marx’s project centered on the self-emancipation of the working class, and there are multiple traditions that claim to continue that project. Marxism-Leninism is one of them, but it is not the only one.
Where we fundamentally disagree is over the meaning of social ownership. You treat state ownership under a party-state as equivalent to collective ownership. I don’t. Nor do many other Marxists, including council communists, left communists, and libertarian Marxists. This is a long-standing debate within the socialist movement, not simply a misunderstanding of Marx.
Regarding the Paris Commune, Marx certainly criticized specific strategic mistakes, such as failing to act decisively against Versailles. But he also celebrated the Commune because it broke the existing bureaucratic-military state rather than simply taking it over. That is precisely why he described it as “the political form at last discovered” for working-class emancipation. The lesson isn’t simply “build a stronger state”; it’s that the old state apparatus cannot be used as an instrument of emancipation.
Finally, theory cannot be separated from historical practice. If the vanguard is merely an organized section of the working class, then why did Marxist-Leninist states consistently suppress independent workers’ councils, autonomous unions, opposition socialist parties, and grassroots initiatives whenever they conflicted with the party? That historical pattern deserves explanation. It cannot simply be dismissed by saying that administrators are still proletarians in an abstract sense.
So my disagreement isn’t based on reading Marx as an anarchist. It’s based on the belief that the self-emancipation of the working class requires institutions in which workers exercise power directly, rather than through a party that claims to permanently embody their interests. That’s a debate within the socialist tradition itself, not a rejection of Marx.
I don’t believe I misread you, I think you’re entirely mistaken about Marxism, Marxism-Leninism, and how socialist states actually function. For example, this comment here:
There is a fundamental difference between delegates who are directly accountable, recallable, and subordinate to workers’ assemblies, and a centralized party-state whose decisions flow downward.
These are not incompatible, and in fact, all of this existed simultaneously in the USSR. The USSR brought dramatic democratization to society. 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. Recall elections, workers assemblies, and bottom-up accountability all are tools used to keep the central government accountable.
The political party is merely the formalized and organized subsection of the working class that is politically advanced. Their role is to bring up the working classes to their level. This is employed by Marx, and is also employed by every communist party. To reject itself as a potential vanguard is to limit action to a glorified book club.
As for the lessons of the Paris Commune, indeed, the old state apparatus is not sufficient. Instead, it must be smashed and replaced. After all, Engels said we ought to blame them for not exerting their power even more than they did, and failing to codify a worker-state. The Paris Commune was incredibly progressive, but it ultimately failed for very good reasons, reasons which Marx used to advance his theory of the state further.
As for why socialist states ban opposition, this speaks for itself. Historical practice shows that opposition parties are the main mechanisms by which counterrevolution can occur, and we have many lessons from the 20th century showing how allowing factionalism and organized opposition can be leveraged by imperialist powers into color revolt. The quest for communism is one that breaks down liberal ideas that endless infighting is a sign of political strength, and instead pushes for unity. Disunity is leveraged against the rest, putting proletariat against proletariat.
In conclusion, your argument against political parties bows to sponteneity, in the quest for a “pure” revolution that will not and cannot manifest. Without organizing, and making use of all your best tools available, without creating a disciplined, educated, and dedicated force for revolution, you are merely stacking the odds in the favor of the capitalists and disarming yourself. It’s no coincidence that left-communists, council communists, and the like have never seen popularity outside of the west, and have never actually taken power anywhere. They are consistently on the backfoot due to relying on sloganeering in place of sound dialectical materialist analysis.
And even then, the majority of left-communists and so forth still acknowledge Lenin, to the point that Bordiga claimed to be “more Leninist than Lenin.”
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but cheeze is candy
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I did not get you banned from Lemmy.ml (nor were you “shadow-banned,” you were just community banned for 1 week), nor am I following you. You can check my comment history, I have a lot of comments in this community. I browse by subscribed, scaled sort, so I see posts from this community. You never explained what I said is “misguided drivel painted as facts,” and when pressed you just said I wouldn’t accept it anyways, so you didn’t even bother replying.
Either way, the Marxist-Leninist study guide I made is linked in the sidebar of this community. I assume my contributions are, if not welcomed, at least tolerated enough to link my posts from other communities. This space is accepting of me and my views as a communist.
This person, who followed you here from !europe@lemmy.ml, is accusing you of following him. Deeply unserious.
And now they think they’re going to harass me via DM for banning them
Very much so.
Omgawd so ziocoded
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Your modlog is public. You have been temporarily community banned from c/Europe on Lemmy.ml for one week, and were previously permabanned from a “Linuxsucks” community. Either way, you still haven’t explained a single “alternative fact,” and now are relying on ableism to make a point.
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Here’s your second permaban
I use Linux, so not sure why I would join a “Linux sucks” community, and I don’t subscribe to “alternative facts” despite your repeated insistence that I do (which you still have not explained nor provided evidence for).
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Human greed prevents it from ever being allowed.
Prove it. Or are you just sprouting off thought terminating cliches?
Material conditions determine human nature.
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So you don’t understand material conditions either?
There are several socialist countries run by Marxist-Leninist parties, that won power through popularly supported revolution. China is one such country.
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You know the modlog is public information. Anyone can retrieve it can see that that was not your original comment. All you did was spew US imperialistic propaganda against a socialist country. You know nothing about socialism, communism or any other isms, and that’s pretty clear.
controlled by the Chinese
TiL that this white boy sitting in Texas is Chinese.
all I did was mention that millions of their own citizens starved to death
That’s not why, and that isn’t really what you said. The modlog is public.
“Anyone who disagrees with me is an evil foreigner!”
That’s what liberals taught them, never self reflect, always blame someone else.
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I’m sorry, but this just reveals that we aren’t on the same page when it comes to Marxism. Your primary error is with erasing all of the advances of historical materialism and scientific socialism from Marx, and returning it to the utopianism of pre-Marx socialists such as Robert Owen. Essentially, you are treating capitalism as “private property,” socialism as “public property,” and communism as “big socialism.” This is dogmatic, and erases that modes of production are NOT their finite parts, but instead are determined by which aspect of the economy is principal, ie dominant and rising, and which class controls the state.
When you say China is a “mix of capitalism and socialism,” this horrendously misrepresents what a mode of production actually is. In China, public ownership is the principal aspect of the economy. Huge state industry forms the backbone of the economy, and governs the large firms and key industries. This is because public ownership and planning is more effective at higher levels of development.
The private property that exists in China is relegated to small and medium industries, and highly competitive ones. This is because of the key development in Marxism advancing it beyond utopianism: the form of production suits the level of development of the productive forces. Rather than taking the Utopian path, which was to “model build” and create a system outright, Marx observed that capitalism came from feudalism with the rise in industrialization, and that markets themselves were centralizing, in other words socializing production while keeping profits private!
To return, your position that “the more communist you are, the more you dogmatically collectivize, regardless of level of development” is distinctly anti-Marxist, and moreover was already tried by China! Under the Gang of Four, there became a fetishization of equality in poverty. They were dogmatic in trying to collectivize as much as possible, with little regard for the level of development. Reform & Opening Up was a return to more classical interpretations of Marx, and thus saw a stablization and slight acceleration in development. This strategy and understanding is reflected in Cheng Enfu’s diagram, here:
When Marx and Engels wrote the Manifesto of the Communist Party, their basic advice to any successful revolution is to nationalize the large firms and key industries, develop the productive forces as rapidly as possible, and gradually nationalize the rest of the economy as it develops. This reflects the exact path the PRC is charting, right now. This is why it’s important to read and understand theory, as if you became a leader of a new socialist country with your current understanding, you’d likely commit the same mistakes as the Gang of Four.
