dashthered.medium.com/yo-dawg-the-maoists-have-a-point-9024983ee56a

I don't agree with everything in here, but I thought it was a good write up in general.

Curious what MLs on here think of it?

idk tbh,, I saw randomly in the wild and someone said it was a recent policy in the comments section. I can’t verify it though.

For a job it's not bad. Some places have uniforms.

Gave me some optimism ngl

The joke wasn’t almost the dress code it was about western liberals

A lot of silly points.

He calls "revisionism" the biggest problem Marxism has right now. Is this really a useful take? Is the biggest problem with socialism that "group X does not hold the right ideas"? Would the world change if all current socialists were now MLMs? I doubt it. The idea that changing our ideas alone will do much is, as the name implies, already idealist.

He says all "meaningful interactions of the past fourty years have been Maoist actions". The peak of the Naxalites is long past. The peak of the NPP was decades ago. The Shining Path doesn't even exist outside Western twitter accounts. What did Maoists really do? They lost in Afghanistan in the 80s after literally allying with Mujahedeen and getting ran out by them, they didn't win in southeast Asia. The only success would be Nepal, but there you have Maoists declaring PPW on other Maoists. Maybe Myanmar which started now can be successful, maybe not. Maybe the tide can change in India or the Philippines (Peru is already a lost cause for decades). But to say the only meaningful interactions of the left (according to whom?) are from Maoists - come on now.

He says: "And the new ‘Marxist-Leninist’ position, which can be summed up in that all we can do at the moment is watch the leftover ‘socialist’ states do capitalism, and hope somehow socialism comes from that eventually is basically a reduction of Marxism-Leninism to just being Kautskyite ‘ultra-imperialism,’ with extra steps."

This guy seriously thinks Marxism-Leninism is just Western internet Dengism, lmao

He says: "Lenin was also considered a fringe ‘ultra-leftist’ and ‘dogmatist’ in his own time by the Kautskyites."

Doesn't he realize that Lenin wrote two works against the ultra-left and one work against adventurers, to which a large part of the MLM would no doubt belong?

He says: "One of the main theses of Lenin is that the proletariat cannot make use of the bourgeois state or bourgeois state instruments for building socialism; the bourgeois state structure is to be smashed and a proletarian state is to be made and used in its place. This, too, is against the thesis that ‘doing some capitalism will help to advance socialism"’

He completely strawmans Lenin and Marxism-Leninism here. Yes, capitalism cannot be replaced by mere reforms within the bourgeois system. However, this doesn't mean reforms are all bad, or that anything less than revolution is unworthy. Since this guy loves to talk about revisionism to the point he almost regards these people as prophets, he should know what Marx said about reforms when writing the French Worker's Party program, and he should also know how much Lenin actually followed Kautsky (which is the reason he broke with him on WW1 so publicly to begin with). There is one obvious way in which socialists make use of the bourgeois state to build socialism, and that is in running in bourgeois elections, which is something Lenin explitcly supported, while warning of pure electoralism of course.

In the next part, he calls out Khruschev because of the Sino-Soviet split and says Mao was 100% right and only the USSR was to blame. Seriously? The same Mao that allied with Nixon later on? It seems this guy suffers of the Gonzaloist syndrome of worshipping these people and always using appeal-to-authority arguments instead of actually arguing in substance. Mao is cool = Sino-soviet split was justified.

The text goes on quite a bit and I'm not gonna bother reading more. He is essentially opposing Dengists as far as I can tell, who for all intents and purposes have little to do with Marxism-Leninism.

"The growing Rank and Flie Committee movement, despite increasingly desperate denial from the pseudo-left Pabloite revisionist renegades, is striking fear into the hearts of the global imperialist monopoly bourgeoisie. Global capitalism, now more than 80 years into its terminal death agony, can only be transcended through the fulfillment of the objective historical revolutionary role of the proletariat. The emancipation of the proletariat must be the act of the proletariat itself - under the leadership, of course, of the one true world party of socialist revolution, the International Committee of the Fourth International. In their steadfast struggle against all forms of pseudo-left vulgarizations of revolutionary Marxism, David North and the SEP have won the Rank and File proletariat to a genuine Marxist program. The contradictions of global imperialism threaten a Third World War fought with nuclear weapons, and therefore the fate of not just the working class, but the human species itself, depends on resolutely exposing the Pabloites, Grantites, Cliffites, Healyites, Hansenites, Wohlforthites, Mandelites, Steinerites, and all other forms of counter-revolutionary opportunism blocking the path to left unity and planetary proletarian revolution. We urge all workers, youth, and intellectuals stirred by this call to action to unite in Rank and File Committees and to contact the International Committee today."

i gotta say 3 sentences in the author is already pissing me off

"This is the meta-argument, here. Why are you upholding Marxism-Leninism instead of Maoism? I’m not asking you to answer me, I’m asking you to ask this question, deeply and sincerely to yourself. Do you actually think that ‘sit back and let China do capitalism more’ is the path forward to revolution; or is this the most convenient and safe path for yourself? Do you mock anarchists for ‘not really wanting a revolution,’ but you yourself have found one last tiny little ledge that you are clinging to in order to avoid the deep dive required?"

this is the s***tiest strawmanning of marxism-leninism ive ever heard. its literally like liberal anarchist level of misunderstanding what MLism is and then attacking ur own misunderstanding of it pretending you're making any sense.

it's pretty obvious projection that that was the author's own previous position, but there is no self-serious rational marxist-leninist communist that remotely thinks "‘sit back and let China do capitalism more’ is the path forward to revolution".

have u read zizek's essay on mao? lacan.com/zizmaozedong.htm

i think this essay is interesting in relation to this author in two ways: the emphasis on negation of negation and that they are technically right that the cultural revolution did not go far enough.

the author's own insistence on negating their previous dengist positions prevents their points from sublimating to what their actual point should be which is that the internal failures of the cultural revolution and therefore the FAILURE of the cultural revolution created the dengist line and approach that has revised china for what 50 years now almost.

i think this is a larger point that people who don't rigorously study dialectics tend to misinterpret. The existence of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is not a struggle that can be overcome by one's glorious and total victory over the other. The contradiction is resolved by the dissolution of this struggle in an economic system we have not fully realized yet.

proletarian and bourgeois are not immutable characteristics: one person can be both back and forth in one life time. the revolution built on the principles of the revolution we know is when we can truly begin to achieve a "classless" society in our current understanding of class

based as f***

What I don't understand is how Maoists align in their head that Deng appeared right after Mao. It seems obvious Mao's ~25 years of policies allowed the climate for Deng to pop up right after him in the first place

At least with Lenin you had 6, 7 decades after him before things went to s***

I commend Subway Guy for this

Also for IRON RICE BOWL that cool too

King

the drip lord

The Eternal Silicon Valley Guy

new right wing a***ysis of left wing politics just dropped

cnbc.com/2022/04/01/amazon-workers-in-staten-island-vote-to-unionize.html

SUFFER

fanon moment