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Authoritarian Leftism Only Achieves Capitalism (www.youtube.com)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/anarchism@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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[–] 2 points 3 months ago (3 children)

Are you a leftcom? I feel like that last paragraph is a common leftcom opinion, and I'm curious to hear why you think it's a falsification. I don't think MLs believe that socialism should remain in one state at all, just that it's a stepping stone to an international revolution.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    It's not exclusively leftcom opinion but just a take that anyone reading Marx would automatically come into, especially first 3 chapters of Capital and Critique of Gotha Programme (leftcoms are theorycels though so they do come to this conclusion). You can't have commodity production and somehow be socialist, despite Stalin's falsifications.

    It also goes against materialism into the realm of idealism, where a DOTP can look inwards and start pursuing its national interests to build itself up and compete within the capitalist world against other capitalist powers using capitalism and everything that it implies (like class relations), and somehow through magic still retain proletarian character despite it actively going against the interests it pursues and literally being the kind of society the proletariat as a class have the historic task of abolishing. This is nonsense, and that's why the primary objective of DOTP is internationalism and it's where it lives or dies, rather than indefinite national development as it's not a national project.

    I tried to keep this as short as possible since I could yap about this for super long so it's not all-encompassing, though I'd also recommend reading Engels Principles of Communism and Bordiga's Dialogue with Stalin, the latter text is especially related to this topic.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (1 child)

    I've read Principles of Communism already but I'm not sure how it connects to the topic of commodity production specifically, perhaps I need to give it a reread. I'll check out Dialogue with Stalin at some point, since my only knowledge of commodity production in Socialism comes from this short Hakim video. At around 8 minutes he starts talking about how the material conditions of past revolutions influenced their economic strategy and why they had to engage in commodity production as the most viable option, although he does dismiss international revolution as unrealistic without really going into why. Overall, I feel like the argument the video makes is cohesive though, so would you have any arguments against it?

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago

    Principles is more targeted towards the "in one country" bit especially the 19th point, how revolution and by extension socialism isn't merely a national project and how in this global system people are so interconnected that an existential crisis of capital hasn't (as seen in ~1920's) and can't be localized in one country alone. It does touch up a bit on the nature of commodities and their production plus crises that inevitably arise from those (such as overproduction) which 'AES' states aren't magically immune to.

    As for the video, even though I can't really watch it cus I'm at work, I can already guess the song and dance from your short description and from the fact that it's Hakim. It's true that historical conditions have changed, we live in a historically inopportune moment and proletariat have been largely pacified since 1920's, but in no way does this invalidate marxist materialist analysis which is what indirectly gets claimed by falsifiers. Commodities still have an inherently capitalist character, 'AES' countries using capitalism as its base to build up national wealth still remain capitalist and by extension still have capitalist material interests that cannot be shed by just having "people with right ideas in power", etc.

    What's also relevant when it comes to critiquing SIOC is how it came about historically - by the time it was officially adopted in USSR, the country was undeveloped, isolated due to proletarian revolutions worldwide getting crushed or pacified, it already had given many concessions such as NEP towards non proletariat to avoid complete collapse and while these concessions (SIOC included as it abandoned proletarian internationalism in favor of national interests) were necessary, they were desperate measures to try and ensure that the state lives on rather than steps towards socialism. In other words, survival tactics stemming from failure.

    Anyway, I would highly advise before anything else to read at least the first 3 chapters of Capital, it analyzes commodity and their nature fully and isn't too hard to grasp especially considering how concepts get repeated over and over again, it completely demolishes the idea that commodities can be socialist by just explaining what commodities are. There's also a video by RoseMedia about AES and why they're bound to fail in their goal which as with any youtube video (Youtube is not a replacement for theory) should be taken with a mountain of salt. There's also Revolution Summed Up, a text which talks about the history of USSR leading up to SIOC including wrong lessons that leftists took from it which is an interesting read also.

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