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queermunism
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this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2026
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Memes of Production
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You do realize that ML is far from the only 'communist' currents, right? There's many other currents such as aforementioned Leftcoms (especially Italian leftcom current, growing in size mainly due to ex-ML's who decided to read Marx) who are highly critical of stalinism and it's derivatives, and their blatant falsification of Marx, Engels and Lenin?
This includes the rejection of AES as a concept, given how the overthrow of a global mode of production has to be realized globally and not just within one nation, which results in keeping commodity production going for international trade and reproduce the behaviors and interests of capitalist bourgeois states (in other words, historical materialism again which is talked about extensively in Marx's The German Ideology).
There's a good video that talks precisely about this if you don't care for reading theory, AES:Bound to Fail?.
So... then what is the historical materialist path to a global revolution? Each country, each province and city has some different mix of local conditions and ideological outlook. How are we to time things so it all happens at once? Say a place has the class consciousness, has the discontent with the status quo and the historical conditions that make revolution possible, are they just supposed to simmer on it until their neighbors catch up?
Proletarian revolutions aren't going to happen simultaneously, and they won't always be successful. International revolution is most likely to start within one state, or a cluster of states, after which their main goal must be to expand the revolution, lead by example and provide guidance or military aid for states that are also undergoing revolutions. This isn't guaranteed to succeed though, as seen in USSR where most revolutions abroad got extinguished by their national bourgeois, it having to take survival measures to preserve itself and alleviate poverty due to its isolation, then eventually succumbing to counter-revolution and subsequent stalinist nonsense.
Revolutions cannot be delayed or for them to be "left to simmer" until perfect conditions arise, since no such thing can exist given uneven developments, different levels of influence national bourgeois have on proletariat and just different historical conditions in general. Proletarian revolutionary crises themselves are largely spontaneous, they happen with or without bodies of power (like councils, parties, etc) organizing them, and all these bodies can really do is choose whether to act upon the revolutionary crisis or not, as in whether to agitate and shape the existing class consciousness to be a fully communist one and/or taking leadership of the movement entirely and ensuring revolutionary success, etc. In other words, they can merely react, not will the revolution into existence.
so, AES?
No, think USSR immediately after October revolution and Lenin actively making contact with communists abroad and having back and forths of tactics and advice, and preparing the red army in case a proletarian revolution abroad needed assistance.
AES on the other hand does the opposite, staying state capitalist or even introducing free markets by choice, with the primary goal being commodity/wealth accumulation to compete/work with capitalist states better, and internationalism being left secondary if being considered at all outside national interests. In other words, it's just capitalist development wearing red most often for geopolitical reasons (like aligning with USSR and being able to nationalize western buildings for instance), not spreading revolution.
I guess, but in present conditions, could Cuba or China or Vietnam or whomever really do that without the United States decrying it as imperialism and using it to justify military escalation?
Would a fundamentally capitalist nation that couldn't exist without and thus heavily depends on commodity production, capitalist trade, wage labor, one that actively advances the interests of capital and expands it, and one that never had proletarian character to begin with (vast majority of AES countries were a result of peasant or class collaborationist anti-colonial revolutions) that wear red while constantly contradicting Marxism with its actions and rhetoric really decide one day to do a completely 180 on it's inherent interests and go all in on proletarian world revolution which seeks to abolish everything it relies so heavily on? If magic was real then maybe.
Besides, if the goal is world revolution, then who gives a shit about what bourgeois governments say when you're essentially declaring a global class war? The mere existence of Soviet Russia had triggered a red scare due to a fear of revolution spreading at home, it's unavoidable if all one needs to do is exist to be decried.
For better or worse most places, ML have spent generations wearing an empty husk of communism. Puppeteering it, slaughtering actual communist to the point it is wrongly identified with them.
If you see people talking about communism generally, assume they mean ML. Because that's generally what they're talking about. Outside of close friends or those I'm well familiar with I wouldn't discuss libertarianism or communism using those terms. But rather their underlying ideals and praxis. The terms largely are so poisoned outside academic discussion to be counter productive.
An-coms are fine as well as other non Leninist/Stalinist/Maoist/Dengist Marxist. If you value consent, and don't seek to crush dissent under vanguard oppression. Its all good. But it's going to take lifetimes of education action to remove the stains from those terms. But in the end, it's the ideals that matter, not what they're called.