What's the difference between a Leninist, Troksyite, Stalinist, Marxist....etc...

I feel like I should know this, but looking up these terms is a bit confusing, and I get the sense that they are often used rather loosely. Also considered: Gramscian, Althusserian...any others?

sorry, also Maoist/Maoism

wikipedia

if you're a Stalinist, you're at best indifferent or at worst delighted with the wholesale slaughter of millions for simply opposing you.

some say that stalin was one of the most ardent stalinists

I always loved this photo and Robert Conquest's caption:

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/138/328574440_d06e3e5012_o.jpg

"The next day, Stalin had her father shot."

wikipedia, yes. but im also looking for the slightly vaguer meanings. i get the sense that a Trotskyite is often a term meaning a hopeful intellectual a bit divorced from reality, while a Leninist is a bit more cynical, but i started this thread because im not confident that i'm understanding them correctly.

or maybe people just use them and dont know what the fuck they're talking about.

I get the impression that many of these terms are vague and interchangeable. It's all made-up after all. I wouldn't worry about it too much, except I wouldn't go around accusing people of being Stalinists willy-nilly.

if you can fit "Althusserian" into less than 2000 words my hat's off to you

What we need is a wikipedia-esque page to sum up the wikipedia entries that are just too long

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Years%27_War

how the fuck am I supposed to read all of this

Althusserian in terms of politics or culture or both?

both with an extra helping of strangulation

It's all made-up after all

The Dallas surprise ending to 92 years of communist states...

For the most part, Althusser began from the Marxist critique of Capitalism, and focused on how that ideology works to keep people in line. One of his most noteworthy theories was that of "interpolation" - which basically means that an individual will perceive him/herself as subject to authority, that when the voice of authority says, "You must do this," that "you" refers to him/herself. Althusser is also known for believing that cultural products produced by Capitalist governments and corporations contribute to the powerlessness of the people, that they are an opiate of the masses.

also for extending that idea as far as the structure of language mais non? that's where I know him from, ye olde crit theory

ilx is not a workers' paradise

this dude was a treat
free market economics - the only game in town?

i always assume these are labels people give themselves or opponents, rather than really specific and clear programs of thought. at least that's how it seems to go with "marxists," maybe not so much with the others?

Re: free market thread, it's a sad ILX reality that the most entertaining (crazy) posters get chased away. that dude was hysterical

also for extending that idea as far as the structure of language mais non? that's where I know him from, ye olde crit theory

yes, but not to as great an extent as Derrida

sarahel i love u fyi

iirc--

marxism - i dunno
leninism - vanguard party
stalinism - no clue, based on my limited understanding of stalin i dont think this would mean anything at all as dude was not much of a "thinker"
maoism - rural/agrarian instead of urban/industrial? cultural revolution type shit? i think this is what u call ur self if ur hardcore since no one will call themselves stalinists
trotskyism - permanent revolution. my understanding is that this is what u call urself if u think of urself as a "true marxist"
gramscian - afaik this is not a "thing" only sociology majors read gramsci anyway
althusserian - permanent wife-choking

i'm trying to remember in what context i had to read gramsci - it might have been cultural theory or it could have been history of education, at any rate, not sociology; gramsci was the dude who wrote his manifestos on toilet paper while in prison, wasn't he?

how many trotskyites does it take to screw in a light bulb

How many?

oh, I dunno, I thought the only good thing these names were for was for lightbulb jokes

funny jokes says:

How many Trotskyites does it take to change a light bulb?
It's no use trying to CHANGE it brothers, it's got to be SMASHED.

oh, i thought the punchline would have to do with doctored photos, like:

At least one, but you can't see anyone in the pictures

"He's behind you!"

For the most part, Althusser began from the Marxist critique of Capitalism, and focused on how that ideology works to keep people in line. One of his most noteworthy theories was that of "interpolation" - which basically means that an individual will perceive him/herself as subject to authority, that when the voice of authority says, "You must do this," that "you" refers to him/herself. Althusser is also known for believing that cultural products produced by Capitalist governments and corporations contribute to the powerlessness of the people, that they are an opiate of the masses.

― somewhere a poll is missing its wacky write-in vote (sarahel), Tuesday, October 6, 2009 2:56 AM (9 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this is like one althusser essay, isn't it, not his main shit, which was an attempt to purify the body of marx's work of any contact of what althusser thought of as empiricism, ie reality, because reality is only understandable via the tainted and complicit structures of language that uphold capitalism – or some such horseshit.

but in any case this business about 'ideological state apparatuses' that interpolate the unthinking proles is just a slightly more sophisticated version of vulgar base-and-superstructure marxism. but by gussying it up with then-fashionable ideas taken from the philosophy of science (ie the 'coupure') or structural linguistics he hoped to appear less of a stalinist.

thus you have the inscrutable idea of cultural 'determination in the last instance' by the economic 'base', instead of, er, some more straightforward and stalinist idea of determination in... the... first instance?

ya iirc althussers "main shit" is the epistemological split or shift or whatever, i.e. the idea that half of marx is regular old german philosophy and the other half is this radical almost mystical body of work that marx himself barely understood--founded in particular on a collapsing of the subject and object, or at least the idea that such a distinction is untenable

i've read a bunch of the prison notebooks, and liked them!, but i can't remember what made gramsci special as a thinker. capitalism doesn't always reproduce its authority by force, there are social institutions like the church and media that tell people how they ought to think about things, sort of like duh? it's interesting reading, esp. because he wrote a lot of it with a bunch of code words which then became a new set of marxist slang (?), like half the time "hegemony" just means "ideology" but that word would alert the fascist censors. but now we talk about hegemony. he had a hot wife too iirc.

sorry the gramsci thing was more just... i dont know of anyone who calls themselves a gramscist. or people who call themselves althusserists.

i think gramsci was novel in the 20s/30s for saying that communists ought to pay attention to stuff like media, advertising, etc (instead of just writing it off as superstructure)

lol was waiting for nrq to show up in this thread <3

i think gramsci was novel in the 20s/30s for saying that communists ought to pay attention to stuff like media, advertising, etc (instead of just writing it off as superstructure)

― goole, Tuesday, October 6, 2009 4:24 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

im sure if he was known at all back then. alla these dudes (also the frankfurt school) have only really got famous since the '60s iirc. and (like the frankies) in cultural studies/eng lit/film studs etc rather than in history or, closer to what marx was about, real political activity. (partly by redefining 'real political activity', i suppose, as gaining tenure, etc.)

i guess leninism, trostskyism, maoism are partly about yer actual revolutionary strategy, how to seize power, who should hold it, etc. outside of the study of the histories of russia, china, communism, etc., i don't know if reading these bloodthirsty chaps would yield much; whereas people seem to read the others for pleasure, as it were.

u know who'd i'd really like to read a good bio of is this cat

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deng_xiaoping

oh i've seen "gramscian" and "althusserian" tossed around, but only in academic circles. perhaps not as much anymore. "stalinist" wasn't entirely unheard of either.

though i guess you could roughly divide this group between the theorists and the politically/practically minded, with Lenin straddling over both.

yeah this is pretty much what i meant – though i don't think you get many maoists anywhere now.

the problem with being a –ist with this lot is that (duh) most political theory is motivated by what's expedient. "leninism" (which is the application of marxism to the pre-existing revolutionary tradition in russia) was what it was (ie completely ruthless) partly because of the very unfavourable conditions he faced – public debate was pretty tricky under the tsars, for example. iirc the maoist "cultural revolution", which empowered students to kill, rape, and torture the fuck out of the party apparatus, was closely related to a power struggle at the top of the party.

im mostly interested in french and british historians, and their debt to marx: few of them have concepts you can take from their books and apply willy-nilly to 'true blood' etc. so they are less well-known among liberal arts students. im gonna read braudel's 'mediterranean' this autumn, i hope.

though i don't think you get many maoists anywhere now

They're pretty hard to ignore in Nepal. Also find them in India:

http://monkeysmashesheaven.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/rsmtw.png?w=426&h=510

lol oh yeah.

guess i meant in "the west".

But, yeah, the Nepalese Maoists, I'm not exactly sure what makes them Maoists

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d8/5PadriComunisti.svg

oops, see if this works:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d8/5PadriComunisti.svg

Less and less facial hair seems part of the answer.

guess i meant in "the west".

when i was a child i used to roll with http://rwor.org/

hoostorical imperative

The conversation has moved far afield of this, but the OP was talking about they way these are commonly used as shorthand descriptors, right?

Marxist = In its most common usage, this seems to simply mean "communist" - any sort of communist, the actual philosophy doesn't really matter. Sometimes extended to anyone with even mild socialist inclinations. Pejorative distortions aside, it refers to an endorsement of revolutionary anticapitalism and a class-conscious view of history & society.

Stalinist = Dangerous communist who excuses tyranny and genocide. Essentially a way to call someone "the worst possible communist". Both of these terms are often used by anti-communists to negatively associate non-communists with communism.

Leninist = Communist idealist. Someone who attaches faith to the founding ideals of specifically Soviet communism, if not the actual practice. Can connote naivete or even fascist tendencies.

Trotskyite = Another, purer brand of communist idealist. Someone who believes that communism, social freedom and democracy are compatible. "Ha ha, u r untainted but doomed" connotations.

Yes that's exactly what I was thinking about. I remember, in particular, reading about the "icy Maoism" of a Godard film and wondering what that phrase was meant to connote, and why not just say "icy Marxism" (not sure what THAT would mean but nevermind)

it's been a while since i gave this malarkey any thought, but what i remember from college is:

Marxist = class struggle blah blah yackity schmackity, vague about the end result.

Stalinist = swell people.

Leninist = revolution, very literal interpretation of dictatorship of the proletariat.

Trotskyite = what's that in my ear?

Maoist = mommy i'm hungry.

maoist = high rhetoric to idealize brutal lockstep reality iirc

Yeah, calling someone a "Maoist" is usually just another (perhaps slightly milder?) way to call them a Stalinist. It tars the subject as a misguided apologist for horrendous evil, perhaps with a splash of yellow menace racism thrown in. "Icy Maoism" probably refers to a lack of concern for the human consequences of one's ideology. Or maybe sno-cones, I dunno.

In Godard's case, it might refer to a literal endorsement of Mao's policies. ???

there is probably something going on re: french maoists vs french (stalinist) communists vs french trotskyists etc in the 60s too -- what that has to do with one writer saying "icy maoism" and if godard really had that quality -- and what any of that shit had to do with mao, well, i dunno?

the other day i said something about how obama gives a great speech and my john birch society coworker responded "yeah, so did mao!!"

goole otm

maoists saw themselves as total opposite of stalinists: the latter called for total party discipline, mao was more about "decentralizing" power by giving weapons to excitable and murderous students. so in the french context the maoists godard got interested in were "to the left of" the official communist party.

hard to say how far godard literally endorsed mao. or indeed how far any french intellectual did. i guess we like to think they "didn't mean it really", and with godard it's easy to because he changed direction with such regularity.

i guess icy maoism means "is prepared to kill your family if it means bringing about the workers' paradise."

wouldn't the Maoism in Godard's case also refer to a distrust/rejection of high culture?

don't see why, but he never did that anyway did he? not in 'weekend', one of his more mao-y films anyway. iirc.

xp hoos - I used to work for birchers. It was fortunate that this was when GWB was in office, so we could all agree that giving money to the government was a bad thing.

he has a whole bit about how the harmonic intervals in the rolling stones are really bach's though... or something, i can't remember. i would never have thought of him as someone with a problem with high european western canon ish anyway. he had a much bigger problem with pop music, advertising, etc.

xpost

xp: Weekend had a lot of rejection and distrust of high culture in it - the killing of poets, the classical piano player, to name two. His work from that period was generally drawing from/building on genres and styles that were mass culture or pop culture - like the film noir/detective stuff and rock music (e.g. the cannibal scene in Weekend and Sympathy for the Devil)

Nothing. They are all Marxist Socialist Nazi Fascists who hate freedom and white culture.

xp: Weekend had a lot of rejection and distrust of high culture in it - the killing of poets, the classical piano player, to name two. His work from that period was generally drawing from/building on genres and styles that were mass culture or pop culture - like the film noir/detective stuff and rock music (e.g. the cannibal scene in Weekend and Sympathy for the Devil)

― somewhere a poll is missing its wacky write-in vote (sarahel), Tuesday, October 6, 2009 8:26 PM (17 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i haven't seen weekend in a long time (because it's hateful), but as i say, i think he had bigger problems with "mass culture" – or rather he thought in those terms – than "high culture". plenty of highbrows of earlier epochs were comfortable with the detective thriller, for example, and would not have called it "mass" or even "pop" culture. "masculin-feminin" is probably the clearest statement of godard's on pop music etc.

i'm not saying he didn't find "mass culture" (in the Althusserian sense) problematic. Sympathy for the Devil was pretty much a deconstruction of it. it seemed to me that he was trying to concoct his maoist critique through mass cultural tropes, and his films seemed to argue that "high culture" was irrelevant and impotent.

always thought it was laughable that people tried to ascribe concrete, coherent philosophies to Mao and Stalin. They were psychopathic, egomaniacal gangsters, pure and simple - the center of their respective cults of personality.

that being said, contenderizer's breakdown of what the terms represent in common usage seems the most OTM

idk... im not really up to this at the moment, but i think you're reading too much coherence/intelligence into 'sympathy for the devil' and late 1960s godard in general. i used to know something of the relationship between maoism and althusser but have forgotten and kind of feel "both incredibly awful" now. the notion of a "maoist critique", made during the cultural revolution, is a bit of a turn off tbh! can't think why: probably something to do with all the people who got massacred.

is high culture *meant* to be potent (in the sense i think you're giving it) and "relevent"?

xposts to sarahel

ok so what's an etc

this is like one althusser essay, isn't it, not his main shit, which was an attempt to purify the body of marx's work of any contact of what althusser thought of as empiricism, ie reality, because reality is only understandable via the tainted and complicit structures of language that uphold capitalism – or some such horseshit.

That ideology and ideological state apparatuses essay was assigned in at least three of my undergraduate classes - cultural studies/media crit. I read some of his stuff on language in a semiotics class that i did only enough work to pass - which with Ivy League grade inflation was very little. I read several of his essays about popular culture and popular music in an ethnomusicology course on popular music criticism. So those are the things I associate with him, which at this point, seem more often to be assigned and read in order to provide a framework for being critiqued and refuted by later theorists and writers.

but in any case this business about 'ideological state apparatuses' that interpolate the unthinking proles is just a slightly more sophisticated version of vulgar base-and-superstructure marxism.

pretty much, but he also seems to be trying to contend with the question, "Why don't the people want a revolution?"

i think you're reading too much coherence/intelligence into 'sympathy for the devil' and late 1960s godard in general.

You've already said you think Weekend is awful. I disagree. I also think that 'sympathy for the devil' is really sharp in terms of unpacking the Rolling Stones "myth" in relation to that song, the rock music industry at the time, etc.

The Godard of Breathless & Bande a Part is comparable to Tarantino in his affection for what highbrow critics would then have considered cheap trash -- animated by a nerdy fan's aggressive celebration of what others discount. The art-critical apparatus the CdC guys created existed in opposition to the stuffiness of then-dominant modes of academic criticism. It was the criticism of youthful, obsessive fans, not of an established orthodoxy.

Which is to say that the nouvelle vague was predicated on a celebration of pop in opposition to highbrow/academic art appreciation. Not that it was simplistic, or that Godard never moved past that...

contenderizer otm

Marxist = In its most common usage, this seems to simply mean "communist"

Wait: I don't know if we're just talking about defined political stances here, but "Marxism" can just be a lens, really -- just a "dialectical materialist" viewpoint. (Like in the sense that you can, e.g., write Marxist criticism, looking at the materialist/class aspects of a text.) I think in plenty of cases where people use the word, they're using it pointedly to refer to that lens or manner of analysis, more so than any more political agenda like socialism, communism, etc. You know, Marxism as an intellectual foundation.

As I understand it, Marx describes capitalism in detail but does not prescribe solutions in detail, certainly not in the terms enacted by the other gentlemen mentioned above.

wow, good reading here.

when I lived in an anarchist house around 20 years ago one of our roommates was an older commie guy, really great dude. He was able to parse all of these microcosms of the left and explain their history and significance in a way I haven't encountered since. once some friends of his who were Spartacists (aka Trotskyites) stayed with us and left us some red pepper Stoli as a thank you (red, har har).

I remember in college there would occasionally be flyers for meetings of the Spartacist League, which someone told me was associated with the fine upstanding institution, the Shining Path

Which is to say that the nouvelle vague was predicated on a celebration of pop in opposition to highbrow/academic art appreciation.

no it wasn't!

I'd say that it was, at least in part. Didn't mean to suggest that was the main or most important element. Another way to look at it is to say that it elevated certain pop/lowbrow products to the status of fine art by applying the mechanisms of academic criticism to them. Not that "pop" and "lowbrow" were the terms involved.

"...to suggest that this was the main or most important element."

"It" in that first post being the Cahiers du Cinema crew's reevaluation of genre crime, suspense and western films.

there wasn't any academic film criticism in the 1950s. if you read CdC you'll see it was really right-wing. or yeah, as you say, trying to say x-western is "like george eliot" in order to make it respectable. their *sensibility* was so far from pop or rock'n'roll or whatever. my current question for people extolling its virtues is: how do you think normal film magazines treated hollywood films in the 1950s?

the cahiers lot were not the first to "take hollywood genres seriously" – so far from the truth it's insane.

I am enjoying this thread immensely, even if it's only as an onlooker. (sarahel, I heart you also.)

do you mean the normal film magazines that were basically about movie stars in the Entertainment Weekly style?

the fine upstanding institution, the Shining Path

who I have always understood to be Maoists, by the way. along with the RCYB in the US. and I always understood the main thrust of such groups was rejecting all of the trapping of life beyond farming, except for those all important state run factories. in the Peru war the peasants who had stores/farms or any wealth were treated as ruling class by the Senderistas, while on the other end the government assumed that any poor campesino was a Senderista or sympathizer. there are apocryphal stories from the Cultural Revolution of people with glasses being treated as the enemy, but that might just be anarchist paranoia.

sorry, not meaning to divert from Godard/film, xpost

But I'm not saying that, HM. I'm saying that the CdC crew were among the first to develop a formal/philosophical approach to film criticism, to treat popular film as an art comparable to the "fine art" that academic criticism concerned itself with. Prior to that, film tended to be lauded to the extent that it was serious, grand, seemingly aware of its own importance, or even just entertaining -- but not accorded the importance of fine art. The idea that popular genre film might be as artistically important as classical music or painting was largely invented by those folks. This, at least, is what I've been taught...

speaking of the Shining Path and film - I've wanted to see State of Siege for quite a while, but it's apparently nowhere to be found on video in the US

the cahiers lot were not the first to "take hollywood genres seriously" – so far from the truth it's insane.

― history mayne, Tuesday, October 6, 2009 3:18 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark

OTM!

take them seriously from what perspective and in what context?

If there's a large body of formal/deep/"serious" criticism dedicated to Hollywood genre flix prior to what Bazin & co. wrote in the early 50s, I'm not aware of it.

Not saying there isn't, mind, cuz I'm no expert. But I don't think I'm diverging too much from the CW.

it's been over 10 years since i was immersed in this stuff, but that is the conventional wisdom i remember, as well.

do you mean the normal film magazines that were basically about movie stars in the Entertainment Weekly style?

― somewhere a poll is missing its wacky write-in vote (sarahel), Tuesday, October 6, 2009 11:21 PM (20 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

oh were they now!? yes, i mean normal film magazines, newspapers and so on.

in what way did cahiers improve on these?

as it goes, i don't think hollywood genre films should be treated as fine art, exactly.* but honestly, the cahiers thing is a massive myth. i'm writing a long thing about it and can't get into it here. but there are plenty of examples of writing from the 1920s onwards that obviously anticipate cahiers.

i'm sort of interested in what people who bring cahiers up would recommend from it. i've read most of what's available in english and am at a bit of a loss. bazin is an appealing and suggestive writer, that said.

*nor should fine art.

xpost

it is indeed the conventional wisdom.

The reasonable suggestion that Cahiers-style highbrow genre film crit was anticipated by others, that they didn't invent it out of whole cloth, doesn't diminish the significance of what Bazin & co. did, though. Certainly not in terms of lasting influence. And I don't think it's at all hard to find challenging, novel, philosophically complex and most of all influential writing in the early CdC. Bazin and Astruc on creative responsibility, Renoir on technology, Godard on auteur theory, etc. I don't have time to dig around for stuff, and you don't have to agree that their writing is at all interesting, but I think it's "insane" to argue that its influence wasn't profound, and/or that it wasn't at least seen as novel by a hell of a lot of people at the time. No offense...

I said Renoir. I meant Rivette. Duh...

Given that you've involved yourself in dethroning the CW on this subject (on which I am, again, no expert), I totally see where yr coming from and am gonna respectfully bow out. You probably know the material a hell of a lot better than I do. Be curious to read whatever you eventually come up with...

yeah i'm curious to read it too.

Plus, we've drifted kinda far afield of my original point, which is that early Godard was fondly pop-referential. Which I think he was.

I agree.

I think it's "insane" to argue that its influence wasn't profound, and/or that it wasn't at least seen as novel by a hell of a lot of people at the time. No offense...

― That's not just me saying that, that's the Pentagon. (contenderizer), Wednesday, October 7, 2009 12:12 AM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

oh that's definitely true. it's influence was massive – that's why it's conventional wisdom! but i would dispute "hell of a lot of people". it seems to have been read by about 15,000 people. but via sarris and bogdanovich, and the institutional power of moma, and (obviously) the success of the critics as directors, the story of cahiers became a myth. in general film criticism is unmapped territory. even quite "famous" highbrow mags like positif (the left-wing alternative to cahiers) are relatively unknown in the anglosphere.

im reviewing a history of the magazine. hopefully it'll get through the hoops.

xpost

i don't think godard "got" pop music. but yea this is getting OT.

Mao would have you all shot for this thread derail btw

icepicks to the skull for the lot of you

wish there had been more threads like this in college, instead of getting trapped in the cafeteria with annoying pointyheaded blowhards.

awesome thread.

Wait: I don't know if we're just talking about defined political stances here, but "Marxism" can just be a lens, really -- just a "dialectical materialist" viewpoint. (Like in the sense that you can, e.g., write Marxist criticism, looking at the materialist/class aspects of a text.) I think in plenty of cases where people use the word, they're using it pointedly to refer to that lens or manner of analysis, more so than any more political agenda like socialism, communism, etc. You know, Marxism as an intellectual foundation.

― oɔsıqɐu (nabisco), Tuesday, October 6, 2009 10:51 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this is otm, i think.

Marx had really bad hemhorroids.

I misused "apocryphal" there, should have said "unverified".

LENINIST = BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA
TROTSKYITE = BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA
STALINIST =BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA
MARXIST = BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA

yeah nabisco's take on Marxism is how I was taught Marxism in my lit crit classes

I also kinda agree with Shakey's point upthread. not to poopoo all the great exegeses in this thread but to some observers these were just dudes trying to stay in power! lol @ praxis.

was "praxis" one of gramsci's topics, or was it someone else?

wish there had been more threads like this in college, instead of getting trapped in the cafeteria with annoying pointyheaded blowhards.

http://open.salon.com/files/sd_coneheads_01_large1235439314.jpeg

No DeLeonist, no credibility

Ha, given the derail (which I enjoyed reading) I'm afraid to mention that the other example that made me start this thread was Paul Wolfowitz being described as "trotskyite" during the lead up to the second Iraq war.

Godard really has a great ear for music, pop or otherwise -- possibly the only he still had from the films of his I've seen post-'68.

Also he was great at doing at doing the 'hook' bit in a film -- which is v pop

On the Wolfowitz thing, would it be the internationalist-vanguardist element in Trotskyism? ie revolutionary groups (often led or informed by intellectuals) in all countries working in concert to ensure the triumph of an international revolutionary socialism. I think that's the element that's seen as the ideological link to neocons - enlightened few bringing freedom to the masses of the world.

Plus some of the Neocons were semi-Trots at some point right? C. Hitchens is big on this (who I guess is an example: self-described as Trotskyite for long time, supporter of the second Iraq war.)

On the broader question, I think it was possible to be an ideological Stalinist at one point, even a self-describing one: shorthand for the belief that the USSR was a successful worker's state (reports of millions dead = propaganda), that your local Communist Party should answer to Moscow and that Trotskyite factions were ineffectual bourgeoisie?

That's a British perspective, but sadly do know enough about the factions of the British left to know if my vague ideas are right (despite once receiving a hour-long lecture from an electrician on the difference between Militant - now The Socialist Party - and the SWP. I should have got him started on the RCP/Living Marxism, but I did want the light switch fixed).

a lot of left-wingers of my parent's generation seem to use trotskyist/trotskyite/trot as shorthand for 'humourless sectarian'.

i think hitchens might be the ONLY real trotskyist who became a neo-sorta-con. pretty sure irving kristol, and later, wolfowitz, were just midcentury new dealer liberals before "switching". it's not like mid-century new dealer liberals had a problem with constant war anyway...

On the broader question, I think it was possible to be an ideological Stalinist at one point, even a self-describing one: shorthand for the belief that the USSR was a successful worker's state (reports of millions dead = propaganda), that your local Communist Party should answer to Moscow and that Trotskyite factions were ineffectual bourgeoisie?

see this is true, but oddly it applies primarily to people OUTSIDE of the Soviet Union, who had at best a wildly incomplete picture of Stalin's policies and the way they were actually implemented in the Soviet Union. In the USSR, to be a "Stalinist" simply meant to be loyal to Stalin. That's basically the long and short of it. Stalin himself was not an ideologue (he never even READ Marx!), he had no coherent political philosophy beyond fomenting his cult of personality and using the existing apparatuses of power to stay in power. Insofar as that meant paying lip service to Marxist tenets, developing propaganda, etc., he was all to happy to oblige. But read any bio of the guy - he was essentially an anti-intellectual bully. Mao is similar, although he differs from Stalin in that Mao was actually fairly well read...

yeah the excellent documentary Seeing Red addresses the Stalin issue within the US Communist Party, seems like it was really not OK to accept critiques of Russia or Stalin back then if you were a card carrying member.

^^^this kind of thing is a horrible historical tragedy, really. The Russian Revolution depresses me so much. There was this spark of potential that was almost immediately betrayed, and the end-result is that Marxism - which in its essence is a very concise and effective critique of capitalism, even with its glaring flaws - has been ultimately discredited. You can't even discuss it now without addressing its associations with murderous, totalitarian regimes. Its kinda analogous to the betrayal of Christianity that occurred with the Nicene Creed. A bunch of great ideas co-opted by people interested purely in consolidating power.

Well, Marxism only works as a concise, effective critique of capitalism: a useful prism. I find most of it rather abhorrent.

seems like it was really not OK to accept critiques of Russia or Stalin back then if you were a card carrying member.

this is what leninism means, iirc, having a hell of strong leadership and rigorous line, total discipline. again, you can see why it might be useful in particularly circumstances, perhaps, but not in others. creates a lot of problems in any situation.

Well, Marxism only works as a concise, effective critique of capitalism: a useful prism. I find most of it rather abhorrent.

I agree - Marx isn't good about prescriptions (or about predicting the future). There's stuff I find abhorrent (lolz the Jewish Problem), but not sure what yr specifically thinking of.

I find class distinctions -- and class envy -- useful and salutary!

I think Marx's whole view of "the laborer", "the individual" and society profoundly dehumanizing, abhorrent. Not so much in that he prizes function and class over individual identity, but in that he seems to see himself as fit to determine the condition, needs and best interests of a class in which he does not even pretend to include himself. He might as well be talking about the condition of cows, or boulders. I say that not to discount his specific ideas, which are often interesting, but rather to critique the basic assumptions that his whole philosophy rests upon.

"think" up there should = "find". I find Marx's whole view...

e seems to see himself as fit to determine the condition, needs and best interests of a class in which he does not even pretend to include himself

this is pretty much every philosopher/political theorist ever though, no?

I mean you could certainly say the same of Plato

Here's two smart Carey articles.

which one is she then?

LOL

a mentalist.

Shakey: yes and no. Marx is kinda unique in that his philosophy is largely organized around the supposed condition and needs of a distinct class of people.

And if people were currently (or even had been recently) attempting to violently reorganize the world in an attempt to install appropriate philosopher kings as heads of state, I'm sure that Plato would seem equally abhorrent.

He'd actually be one of the better ones!

I dunno to me blaming Marx for the Shining Path (or Stalin or whoever) is like blaming Jesus for the Inquisition. It isn't really accurate or helpful.

Not saying much, but still...

I mean clearly the underlying pattern is that humans are horrible murderous cretins and they'll take advantage of whatever philosophical or political context they happen to find themselves in to exercise their horrible murderous cretinous ways.

i think Marxism, or "dialectical materialism" as said upthread, should be contextualized in the 19th century german metaphysics from which it came....not to say that it doesn't provide interesting insights, or produce worthwhile observations...one must simply ask what the "conditions of possibility" are for such a perspective.

above post OTM.

that being said, blaming the particular philosophy/politics in question seems misguided. Particularly when the actions in question are so thoroughly divorced from the actual content and intent of the philosophy/political theory as originally expounded (pretty sure Jesus wasn't down with capital punishment/torture, etc.)

Believe me, I don't give a fuck about Jesus either.

lolz

To ans the thread in qn, maybe you need to join Marxmail and let sparks fly for a while (if the intro is anything to go by)

let = watch

I don't care if you're a Leninist, Troksyite, Stalinist, Marxist....etc...

I don't think that you can so smoothly divorce Marx's thinking from others' application of his expressed ideas. He presents his philosophy as a call to violent revolution. Therefore, he bears a great deal of responsibility for the consequences.

pretty sure Marx wouldn't have approved of, for example, the mass enforced starvation of the Ukraine. Or Mao's similar wholesale starvation of the peasantry.

Nah, but arguing that the working class needs to rise up and violently overthrow the state does mean you bear some responsibility for the consequences. Even if the people who listen to you wind up "doing it wrong".

if you write about decentralized agrarian reform, fuck you

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51DhvS9abyI

Just watching this doc on Gramsci - interviews with people he was jailed with.

LOL old school Channel 4.

Also old school John "UKIP" Sessions.

hope u don't live in Barnsley, xyzzzz

https://twitter.com/MichaelDugher/status/771751652273582080

Trotskyite just means like "cool" Marxist, right?

with the best will in the world, none of the trotskyites I've ever met could really be described as "cool"

I always thought Sessions was an unfunny oxygen thief, but I didn't realise he was a UKIP voter as well.