On most instances, I would assume this to be sarcastic; on grad and hex I would assume it to be serious but on .ml I'm unsure
Tankies don’t usually believe that Stalin or Mao “did nothing wrong,” although many do use that phrase for effect (this is the internet, remember). We believe that Stalin and Mao were committed socialists who, despite their mistakes, did much more for humanity than most of the bourgeois politicians who are typically put forward as role models (Washington? Jefferson? JFK? Jimmy Carter?), and that they haven’t been judged according to the same standard as those bourgeois politicians. People call this “whataboutism,” but the claim “Stalin was a monster” is implicitly a comparative claim meaning “Stalin was qualitatively different from and worse than e.g. Churchill,” and I think the opposite is the case. If people are going to make veiled comparisons, us tankies have the right to answer with open ones.
-Nia Frome, "Tankies"
I recommend reading the whole article. I think the meme is actually pretty poor agitprop about Stalin. The idea that Stalin genuinely did nothing wrong at all isn't found on Hex, .ml, or Grad. The idea that Stalin did more good than bad is the prevailing opinion among Marxists, however.
Demystifying Stalin
I know that after my death a pile of rubbish will be heaped on my grave, but the wind of History will sooner or later sweep it away without mercy.
[8 min]
[6 min]
[30 min]
[16 min]
[42 min]
[38 min]
[9 min]
[5 hr 51 min]
[5 hr 25 min]
Stalin's Major Theoretical Contributions to Marxism
I have come to communism because of daddy Stalin and nobody must come and tell me that I mustn’t read Stalin. I read him when it was very bad to read him. That was another time. And because I’m not very bright, and a hard-headed person, I keep on reading him. Especially in this new period, now that it is worse to read him. Then, as well as now, I still find a Seri of things that are very good.
Thanks, I was more commenting on the difference between instances and painted a flattened picture of tankies. I'm aware that tankies are willing to criticize Stalin and shouldn't have made such a stupid joke.
That said, you might guess from my instance that I disagree with the notion your quoting. When tankies say how bourgeois states are bad I agree because states in general are bad to varying degrees and in different ways but all states are authoritarian. For me, socialist state is an oxymoron and neither Lenin nor Stalin substantially worked towards a free, stateless society. That's what Bakunin predicted in his exchange with Marx, Kropotkin warned Lenin about, Goldman criticized after Kronstadt, ...
Kropotkin started a school of thought that describes stateless, egalitarian societies. Recent authors like Graeber, Gelderloos and J. C. Scott follow this tradition. The reason that it is difficult to find recent examples is that both bourgeois and bolshevik states work together to smash anti-state movements like the Makhnovshchina or the anarchosyndicalists in Spain, or more recently Rojava and the Zapatistas.
You're assuming the Marxist theory of the state is the same as the anarchist, which is wrong. Marxists care more about class, anarchists care more about hierarchy. A stateless society for Marxists is a fully collectivized and planned, classless economy, while for anarchists it usually looks something more like full horizontalism and petite bourgeois cooperatives at scale. Bakunin was wrong, in the end.
Class is hierarchy...
Not exactly. A manager is not a distinct class from a worker, class is related to ownership of the means of production. Administration in communist society isn't a class distinct from the rest of the working class, but is merely a position within the broader production in society.
Over time, as technology advances and the division of labor fades, this will likely also become shared responsibility, but such a time would be late-stage communism.
So a CEO is working class because they get salary while a stakeholder who owns like a fraction of 1% and has nothing to say is a capitalist? The binary class system of Marx' time has nothing to do with modern times.
Also: I always hear Marxists refer to "socialist states" as if non of them ever reached statelessness. I wonder why.
Obviously a CEO's primary source of income is going to be investments, and not their labor. If there was theoretically a CEO with no investments that got paid a moderate working class wage, then they would be working class, yes, but in practice in capitalism CEOs are paid massive salaries and the bulk of their income is from investing said salaries, not to mention stock options.
A stakeholder that owns 1% of, say, Apple, and can live off of the dividends from that money is more capitalist than anything else. A worker that has a tiny portion of mcdonalds stock in their 401k, but must still sell their labor to survive, is working class.
Marxism does not have a "binary class system," and modern times are not distinct from Marx's time when it comes to class dynamics. Classes are not individuals, but social groups, outliers and edge cases of course exist but the characteristics of the social group as a whole, based on averages and medians, makes up the class. This rigid segmentation is alien to Marxism, which instead uses and relies on dialectical and historical materialism. Part of which is analyzing not just aliquot parts but their entire contexts and relations, including over time.
As for socialist states not withering away, why would they be able to without the eradication of class globally? As long as there are organized capitalists, there cannot be a true stateless society outside of tiny pockets of communalist tribes.
I think it would be very useful for you to read more Marxist theory, if not to agree with it, to better understand Marxists and debate them, cooperate with them on shared goals, etc. I recommend my intro ML reading list, of course, but you don't have to read far.
Marxism does not have a “binary class system,” and modern times are not distinct from Marx’s time when it comes to class dynamics.
Well, in the Manifesto, he argues that the complex medieval system will collapse into a twofold system (hence binary) of haves and have-nots, those who own stuff and those who have nothing to sell but their labor. Arguably he adds the lumpenproletariat as a third class (in contrast to the "reserve army" of temporarily unemployed who still belong to the working class) but it's a small, marginalized group. He predicts that the middle class, while still prominent in his time, will disappear. Some modern Marxists will add other classes due to their relation to wage labor, like feminist Marxists who view unpaid care workers (like housewives) as a distinct class or anti-colonialists applying the class system to the relation of the global south and the global north. While I agree with both groups on many things, I wouldn't use the terminology of "class" in this context but that's just terminology. I wouldn't agree nor actively disagree on that if that makes sense.
Other Marxists will double down on the twofold distinction, insisting that it's only about either investing money or being paid; and therefore the national manager of a multi-national company has the same class interest as the factory workers, the middle management, the office workers who may or may not – to use Graeber's terminology – have a bullshit job. And that's a lens that's not really helpful. First, it does not agitate well to tell people their boss is basically on the same level because this doesn't feel right (and I would argue it isn't). If the power structure stays the same, what even changes? I looked it up and my CEO made €2.1 Mio last year. Reinvest or not, this is exorbitant more than I ever will. He isn't CEO anymore, his successor is a woman, another win for feminism (\s). the only stakeholder is the state and that's basically the way you want things to be, right?
What Marx had in mind was a factory worker and if he talks about higher workers, he's talking about foremen in direct contact with the manual worker, not a manager. I would argue that the stratification happened all over again. Modern work environment resembles feudalism much closer than Marx' idea of two classes (not necessarily in the inheritance aspect but in many others).
As for socialist states not withering away, why would they be able to without the eradication of class globally?
Sounds like an excuse without an expiry date. If an anarchist experiment is smashed by a Bolshevik state, it's because they never would suggest anyway. If said Bolshevik states doesn't bring us nearer to a stateless society, it's because of the other states.
Bakunin was wrong, in the end.
(This is from a previous comment I haven't responded to)
Just to make sure you know what I'm referring to when I say some of what he said aged well:
So the result is: guidance of the great majority of the people by a privileged minority. But this minority, say the Marxists, 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 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.
It reads as a comment after the fall of the Soviet Union but it's from the 1870s. I even like Marx' reaction. I wish more Marxists today would have kept to this side of Marx.
You're confusing Marx's simplification of class as a binary, all-exclusive system as shown in the manifesto with Marx's actual full theory, but class is bimodal, not binary. There were capitalists and wage laborers in feudalism, mercantilists, small manufacturing workers, etc, and even in capitalist-dominated economies there are the sole proprietors, petty bourgeois cooperatives, etc. Marx's point is that society is bimodal, and is dominated by one ruling class and their largest associated working class, be they lords and serfs, slavemasters and slaves, or capitalists and wage laborers.
Further, class itself is a social category, not an individual, and thus trying to analyze edge cases and outliers to disprove medians and averages is like the ones who think spending 15 hours of labor on a chair customarily produced in 5 will cost 15 hours of labor. Outliers exist in all categories, but what's important are the averages and medians, and their contexts and trajectories.
Next, you go on to equate CEOs with administrators in socialism as though they are perfect analogues. This isn't true, though. Capitalism is run on the basis of profit, not for fulfilling needs. There's absolutely no basis for an administrator in a late-stage socialist, early communist society (pre-abolition of money) to make that much money, or even to have the ability to invest that money in a market to earn off of speculation. It's a false-connection, and taking the Soviet Union as an example, the top of their society made around 10 times the bottom, while in capitalist and Tsarist Russia that numbers in the hundreds of thousands to billions.
Moving forward, no, modern times do not resemble feudalism more than capitalism. The sale of wage labor and the fact that we no longer focus on agrarian production producing rent for lords and nearly everything else for ourselves distances us from capitalism entirely. What we see today is capitalism's latest stage, imperialism, and how that pushes manufacturing onto the global south while the north plunders and profits. Marx's analysis is just as valid today, heightened by Marxists like Lenin.
As for the Bakunin quote, I was familiar with what you meant. Reality sides with Marx, though, the Soviet Union was more in line with Marx's depiction of socialist society than it was Bakunin's. The Soviet Union is caricatured by you, not accurately represented. I do agree that that's one of my favorite responses to Bakunin from Marx, though.
What we see today is capitalism’s latest stage, imperialism, and how that pushes manufacturing onto the global south while the north plunders and profits. Marx’s analysis is just as valid today, heightened by Marxists like Lenin.
I don't get this notion that Lenin was right about imperialism as the last stage of capitalism. He said that more than a century ago and we are still in this last stage.
The original title in Russian, Империализм, как высшая стадия капитализма, actually translates to "current highest" or "latest highest," not the last or final. Authors like Cheng Enfu have written works like Five Characteristics of Neoimperialism, analyzing the current characteristics of and contradictions in imperialism today. Moreover, Lenin has still been correct, the global south is rising against imperialism and the global north is declining. The US Empire has become the indusputed hegemon, and as it dies is taking the whole imperialist system propping it up down with it.
Also: I always hear Marxists refer to “socialist states” as if non of them ever reached statelessness. I wonder why.
It's good to be curious! Marxism posits that classlessness and (therefore) statlessness can only be reached once all is Socialist.
And trying to make a stateless country while half the world is capitalist and you are under constant threat of invasion and CIA sabotage, while the (former) capitalists are working to reintroduce capitalism, is at best foolish, and at worst sabotage, betrayal of the people.
