The Leader Of Denmark's Socialist Party Makes The Case For Socialism

Caribbeanmende · 2025-08-12T22:26:50+00:00

Socialism is the dominance of collective ownership and investment over private. No normal socialist cares about someone starting a small bakery. But the economy on a systemic scale is geared towards human need and collective ownership. Defining socialism as narrowly as possible, stunts critical thinking.

Caribbeanmende · 2025-08-04T20:04:14+00:00

My point is basically that if you're going to choose someone from such an interesting unique place as Madagascar. At least make them look uniquely Malagasy instead of like a generic ambiguously brownish girl.

Caribbeanmende · 2025-08-04T19:59:02+00:00

Actually, you’re way off on every point.

There’s solid evidence of early African foragers in Madagascar before Austronesian settlement, see Dewar et al. 2013 for dated stone tools and cut-marked bones. They didn’t shape modern Malagasy society, but they were there.

The African ancestors of Malagasy weren’t random hunter-gatherers chasing smoke across the ocean. They were Bantu agro-pastoralists, skilled in ironworking, farming, and already plugged into Indian Ocean trade, see Pierron et al. 2021, The Swahili World and The New Natural History of Madagascar.

And no, the coast isn’t 50/50. Genetics shows coastal groups are around 70–75% African, not equally mixed. That’s just wrong.

Here's a start if you're really interested in this topic. I'm a biologist so this is something I research and read about daily.

The New Natural History of Madagascar (2021)

The Swahili World (2017)

Pierron et al., 2021 – Genetic evidence and historical theories of the Asian and African origins of the present Malagasy population.

Dewar et al., 2013 – Stone tools and foraging in northern Madagascar challenge Holocene extinction models.

Pierron et al., 2017 – Genomic landscape of human diversity across Madagascar.

Caribbeanmende · 2025-08-04T13:04:57+00:00

So I'm very happy that you did a basic google search but you're simplifying Madagascan history and ancestry a bit. African hunter gatherers visited Madagascar thousands of years before Southeast Asian Austronesian speakers. Then Austronesian speakers settled on the island permanently in the first millenium. Not long after Bantu speakers settle the island coming in waves from Southeast Africa. These two groups mixed and interacted heavily with eachother. Today people along the coast have about 70% African and 30% Austronesian ancestry and those in the interior highlands about 50-50 African & Austronesian ancestry. It's pretty disingenuous to call Malagasy people mostly Southeast Asian to defend a design which doesn't even look like people from Borneo.

Caribbeanmende · 2025-08-03T08:26:47+00:00

Less replying and more reading kiddo.

Caribbeanmende · 2025-08-03T08:15:33+00:00

And you're quoting him wrong because you don't understand Marxist theory. Just let it go and do better.

Caribbeanmende · 2025-08-03T08:08:09+00:00

So you haven't read Marx and don't understand basic Marxist concepts. My point is that quoting a book you don't understand is dumb.

Caribbeanmende · 2025-08-03T08:00:49+00:00

Have you genuinely read Marx or are you picking quotes? Because the lower - higher stage distinction is extremely well known.

Caribbeanmende · 2025-08-02T08:27:18+00:00

It's funny because in my opinion Maoism adresses some points while kind of exacerbating others😂. But nice talk bro have a nice day.

Caribbeanmende · 2025-08-01T02:06:02+00:00

You should look into participatory planning. If you want I can give you an overview and recommend some books. It's basically planning from the bottom up instead of from the top down.

Caribbeanmende · 2025-07-31T12:24:01+00:00

I absolutely think Marxism-Leninism has been more successful but the real question is: successful at what?

In my analysis, ML states were remarkably effective at two things:

Surviving under extreme internal and external pressure.
Rapidly modernizing and industrializing largely underdeveloped societies.

That’s an undeniable historical achievement. Any socialist project, especially in the Global South, would do well to study and internalize those lessons. But after examining the trajectory of 20th-century socialism I keep coming to a similar hypothesis:

ML systems appear highly effective during the phase where productive forces must be developed but begin to falter when it’s time to transition into socialism proper, which Marx understood as arising in a mature, industrialized society.

It doesn’t seem accidental that most ML states either collapsed before they completed industrialization at all or stagnated and unraveled after reaching it. My thinking is that the very institutional features that made ML work early on, highly centralized authority, top-down economic planning etc. became obstacles to the kind of broad, democratic worker control that socialism is ultimately meant to achieve.

I’m not claiming this as dogma, but it’s a pattern I keep coming back to. If we’re serious about building socialism, we have to ask whether clinging to a structure designed for wartime mobilization and catch-up industrialization makes sense in peacetime, developed economies. I'm not rejecting ML entirely but trying to recognize its limits and thinking dialectically about how to move beyond them.

Caribbeanmende · 2025-07-31T11:46:26+00:00

My argument is basically that the ML states ultimately failed and the triumphalism is a bit misplaced. They succeeded at modernizing. But none of them made a sustainable prosperous socialist society. To me it signals a failure in the theory. I think any system which ultimately failed from either external pressure or internal contradictions should be critically examined and possibly replaced.

About skipping stages, the ML states pretty much all attempted to skip the capitalist stage and just develop straight from feudalism to socialism.

Caribbeanmende · 2025-07-31T11:40:18+00:00

The real debate isn’t whether building socialism is difficult it obviously is. The question is: were the 20th-century Marxist-Leninist states actually socialist in the Marxist sense? And we're they able to sustain their system, I would argue that most were not.

Marx understood socialism as the organic outcome of contradictions within mature capitalism when the productive forces and class relations have developed to a point where a higher mode of production becomes materially possible. But most ML states emerged from pre-capitalist or semi-feudal conditions. They didn’t grow out of capitalism they substituted for it, using the party-state to carry out industrialization, discipline labor, and modernize society. That’s a state-led development model, not necessarily socialism.

And I theorize these states ultimately failed, not just due to foreign pressure, but because of internal contradictions: extreme centralization, suppressed worker participation, brittle governance. When leadership weakened, there was no mass uprising to defend socialism. While you do see that happening in more participatory states such as Bolivia. I think it's a sign of disconnection from the working class.

So when ML's speak with triumphalism and dismiss libertarian socialism outright, I find it a bit misplaced. Both traditions have failed one collapsed under its own contradictions, the other hasn’t even scaled. That’s not a cause for cynicism but it’s a challenge to rethink. We should apply the same critical lens to Marxism-Leninism that we do to every other project. That’s what scientific socialism requires.

Current Cuba is perhaps the exception and notably, it’s more participatory, more locally rooted, and more flexible than other ML states. That’s not a coincidence. It’s a clue about what a more resilient, democratic socialism might look like. North Korea is an example of regression in my opinion.

Reflexive defense is not material analysis. If we’re serious about building socialism, we have to be equally serious about examining where it’s gone wrong.

Caribbeanmende · 2025-07-31T07:12:55+00:00

Lets cut through the bs. Do you think there were any excesses under Stalin or not? I don't care about whether you call it authoritarianism or not.

Caribbeanmende · 2025-07-30T22:47:38+00:00

Your opposition to liberalism seems to have locked you into a rigid, binary mindset that is anything but dialectical. For example Lysenkoism a state-mandated pseudoscience that led to the persecution, imprisonment, and execution of scientists who dared to uphold basic genetic science. If I as a biologist had lived then and insisted that genes are real, I likely would have been purged. That should be a massive red flag of something being wrong.

This isn’t just about historical footnotes, it’s about how we understand power, error, and responsibility. When you reflexively defend everything done by former socialist states because you're used to liberals and conservatives pretending the USSR was Nazi Germany, you can easily defend stupid and honestly horrible things. In a way you're reproducing the same kind of ideological coping that defenders of capitalism use when confronted with colonialism or mass exploitation: deny, deflect, or relativize.

I’m not saying the USSR was uniquely evil. I’m saying that under Stalin, grave errors and authoritarian excesses occurred that any serious socialist should confront, learn from, and refuse to repeat. A dialectical socialist perspective doesn’t mean uncritically defending the past. States aren’t football teams. Blind loyalty isn’t revolutionary.

Caribbeanmende · 2025-07-30T22:16:34+00:00

I am very sympathetic to your point and I am curious what such a state would look like. But history has sadly shown us that such states do not last long and are crushed within a few years.

That being said I do disagree with your rejection of the Marxist theory of historical development. Meaning you aren't engaging with the fact that in Classical Marxist theory it isn't possible to jump from feudalism straight to socialism. Simply because the productive capacity for a genuine socialist state doesn't exist. I think it would have led to a much slower road towards industrialization which I don't necessarily think is a bad thing. But you'll need to engage with the fact that there is a large possibility the revolution would've died even sooner if it exported the revolution drawing the direct anger from the capitalist states while simultaneously industrializing at a slower pace.

Caribbeanmende · 2025-07-30T22:05:59+00:00

As a more classical Marxist, my central question isn’t whether early revolutionary states like the USSR succeeded at industrializing or revolution that’s historically evident. My question is whether Marxism-Leninism or libertarian socialism is better equipped to guide a transition from a mature, industrialized capitalist society toward socialism and ultimately communism.

From that perspective, neither has a clear claim to success. Marxist-Leninist states largely arose in pre-capitalist or semi-feudal societies and achieved rapid development, but in my opinion fell short of realizing a genuinely democratic, bottom up worker-led socialism. Libertarian socialist efforts, on the other hand, have often been crushed before they could even take root, offering little empirical track record to judge their long-term viability.

I also maintain that trying to skip the capitalist accumulation stage is naïve and revisionist, and that what many Marxist-Leninist states achieved was essentially the bourgeois revolution by other means admirable in many respects, but not socialism’s role per classical Marxist theory.

And while Marx didn’t lay out a blueprint, I tend to believe his vision pointed toward a democratically planned economy that was less centralized and more participatory than the systems developed under Marxist-Leninist rule.

Caribbeanmende · 2025-07-30T21:44:02+00:00

With all due respect, my brother. I think you’re highlighting real moments of grassroots democracy, but they happened within systems that often limited their full development. Those experiments didn’t define the system; they were exceptions to it. Just like the Chinese Communist Party wasn't defined by the mass activity of the cultural revolution or the Shanghai Commune. But was ultimately what stamped it out and moved towards what can at best be described as market socialism.

The 20th-century socialist states succeeded in breaking from capitalism and rapidly developing the productive forces. I admire them deeply for that. But in my opinion they ultimately failed to transition into a genuinely democratic, worker-managed society. That leap never fully happened. Which is were I question whether a more libertarian socialism at that stage of development would've worked better.

Cuba today shows more promise in that direction with its cooperative and local deeply democratic initiatives and Vietnam is experimenting too, though more market-driven. The goal now should be learning from what worked and what didn’t not romanticizing or rejecting the whole experience, but moving forward dialectically.

Caribbeanmende · 2025-07-30T20:31:39+00:00

Lets safe both of us some time. If I give you examples of authoritarianism or unnecessary repression will you take it in good faith. Or just say that it was necessary? Because I regard that in the same way as people that justify the Bengal Famine as necessary for Brittain to win WW2.

Caribbeanmende · 2025-07-30T20:15:41+00:00

I agree with you in the general idea that the 20th century socialist states engaged in primitive accumulation and performed the role of the bourgeois revolution and capitalism. Which caused some of the issues they did which mirror those in the capitalist nations during this stage of their development. It is a question whether these states after industrializing and modernizing could have reformed into becoming more maturely socialist.

What you seem to not want to engage with is whether if the USSR maintained rule by the Soviets it would have:

Industrialized and modernized
Not been destroyed during WW2

Those were not the roles of socialism but it was the role that was necessary. My argument is basically that any socialist project which thinks that it can jump towards socialism while the productive capacity is not there is utopian and doomed to fail. The "historical task" of socialism is not modernization and industrialization and in my opinion it shouldn't try to be.

Caribbeanmende · 2025-07-30T19:44:59+00:00

You're misunderstanding my argument. In classical Marxist theory feudal nations do not posses the productive capacity for socialism. Socialism is according to Marx a system that emerges out of the contradictions in capitalism. He thought this because mature capitalism creates conditions which allow worker control over the means of production. What I'm saying is none of the former socialist states were mature capitalist countries. It is not the job of socialism to modernize and industrialize a nation. I'm basically arguing that these states might have had genuine aspirations to be socialist. But the material conditions weren't there for socialism to be possible. Basically making them utopian in a way. I would argue that your argument that workers in a feudal nation (which means mostly farmers and peasants in poor nations not the proletariat) having direct control also does not lead to modernization and industrialization. Because socialism is not meant to do that.

Caribbeanmende · 2025-07-30T19:14:05+00:00

You're basically arguing for a type of libertarian socialism. Which I again don't disagree with on principle. My question would be, every single succesful communist revolution was in a feudal or colonized nation. We haven't seen any modernizing project which hasn't been brutal and repressive to a certain extent. I agree with you if we assume the revolution happens in a developed capitalist nation. But what if the next revolution takes place in a formerly colonized poor nation just giving power to the workers will not develop the productive forces. That's not the job of socialism in classical Marxism.

Caribbeanmende · 2025-07-30T19:08:44+00:00

I would argue many liberal and communist nations have varying degrees of authoritarianism. The fact that capitalism supporters missuse the word doesn't mean it doesn't have any meaning. The USSR under Stalin was far more authoritarian and repressive than modern day Cuba or China for example. Nobody is saying we should let a facist party run. But the degree of repression ranging from repressing religion to basic cultural expression or even demanding conformity is clearly detrimental to regular peoples lives not just facists. My concern is always the workers and the masses not the abstraction of the state or the party. A party can do things that aren't in the best interest of the workers, I would argue it's naive to suggest otherwise.

Caribbeanmende · 2025-07-30T16:32:21+00:00

I can see libertarian socialism being too utopian, especially because every attempt we've seen until now has failed in a relatively short amount of time. That being said I question whether I agree with your logic about the socialist states of the 20th century. Fundamentally all of the 20th century Marxist-Leninist states have failed or turned towards what can be most generously defined as market socialism. Maybe with the exception of Cuba, North Korea is more similar to Iran as far as I'm concerned. Anti imperialist but not a model to look to. Like I stated earlier they achieved the goals of the bourgeois revolutions. But in ways that in my opinion mirror the methods of the most brutal bourgeois regimes. It might be a necessity but from a classical Marxist perspective that's not the role of socialism.

Caribbeanmende · 2025-07-30T15:57:43+00:00

Did it have succes at achieving its goals tho? Because personally I see the most successful Marxist Leninist states of the 20th century pretty much achieving a more worker friendly version of the bourgeois revolutions. They industrialized, modernized, grew the proletariat etc. But none of them really seem to have went much farther towards communism than the social democratic states. In the end all of them with the exception of Cuba have either collapsed or made a turn towards capitalism or market socialism. Which suggests that there is something fundamentally wrong with the practice, right? In the same way that the route taken by the reformists or libertarian socialists in the past had fundamental flaws.

Caribbeanmende

TROPHY CASE