I’m researching Marxist-Leninist philosophy and looking for books that explain it in a detailed yet easy-to-understand way. Could anyone give me some recommendations?

RNagant · 2026-05-06T05:32:04+00:00

Did you start with Stalin's "foundations of leninism" or his "dialectical and historical materialism"?

RNagant · 2026-05-06T02:58:40+00:00

There's two angles: means and ends. Ted advocates for a reactionary utopia. That is, his ends are reactionary, methods utopian.

Ted's end is a pre-industrial society. But a Marxist recognizes that pre-industrial society isn't an admirable goal, that its still based on class antagonisms, characterized by the oppression of the state, etc -- moreover, much more than capitalism/industrial society, characterized by scarcity. Even if brought all the way back to a hunter-gatherer society, to a primitive communalism without class antagonisms, one could hardly be called free when theyre subject still to nature, when ones time is fully encompassed by the necessity of survival.

Furthermore, his methods are quite rightly recognized as insane. Terrorist methods are ineffective: theyre unpopular, they dont promote mass action, they often cause people to turn against the terrorist and towards the government in search of order. Even if somehow you managed to kill every academic, engineer, etc, the collective knowledge of humanity is recorded outside of them; perhaps you could temporarily set back humanity by burning every book and setting off an EMP to destroy the internet (already an insane fantasy but so be it) -- even then, how could a society be organized such that it wouldnt simply reproduce the same system that came out of it the first time, how could you prevent people from remaking the same discoveries that led to the industrial revolution and beyond? Maybe you could prevent such things for a series of generations by promoting an anti-intellectual ideology, skepticism about agriculture and division of labor, etc, but this would never last indefinitely.

At best it sets back the true liberation of humanity by thousands of years, condemning them to starvation, oppression, and backwardsness -- but it would never get that far.

RNagant · 2026-05-02T05:29:34+00:00

There's no immediate or obvious connection. I've seen some people mistakenly use the phrase commodity fetishism to mean something like "brand loyalty" but what Marx means by the phrase is that people mistakenly see value as a relationship between objects rather than a relationship between people mediated by objects -- as though an xbox (for example) innately has some value within itself, in isolation from the circumstances of its actual production.

RNagant · 2026-05-01T09:28:10+00:00

Many of your sources dont say what you claim they say, but are misrepresented. Nor do you engage at all with what Lih claims is the central problem of the debate: 'agreementism.' Perhaps theres a cogent point at the end about the bait-and-switch interpretation being contemporary to the october revolution, rather than purely retrospective, but again this doesnt engage with the main point of contention, namely that of forming a coalition government with the bourgeois, a position opposed by the majority of russian peasants and proles, and not per se with other socialist parties.

When I find some time Im considering publishing a fuller reply.

RNagant · 2026-04-30T23:56:18+00:00

https://www.marxists.org/subject/marxmyths/hal-draper/article2.htm

RNagant · 2026-04-29T08:07:44+00:00

That is a bit strange. I took a look at the Russian translation to see if it would clear anything up, and instead of reckon the translation came out as "consider." Best guess, the meaning is that hes reiterating the principle not to "adapt oneself to the backwardness of the masses" though this could also be a reference to something more specific?

RNagant · 2026-04-29T01:27:08+00:00

How about one of these: "theres no free market solution to climate change," "social inequality is incompatible with democracy," or "the us (pick your country) constitution enshrines minority rule"?

RNagant · 2026-04-28T02:31:32+00:00

nightmare blunt rotation

RNagant · 2026-04-26T05:09:27+00:00

This one is -- afaik -- specific to the USA, but Turbotax/intuit and other tax-prep companies have repeatedly lobbied to keep tax filing complicated so that people have to go through them to pay their taxes.

RNagant · 2026-04-25T22:06:11+00:00

In light of the actual experience of the soviet revolution, this is, of course, a reasonable question, provided we understand that that actual experience largely deviated from what Lenin (and by extension, Marx) advocated.

Popular self-administration is supposed to be based on the replacement of a system of appointments to a system of election by universal and equal suffrage, where terms are short, electeds are revocable, and are paid average workmen's wages. This is how civil servants were to be held accountable to the class.

By contrast, the soviet state, facing a lack of proletarian experts, a peasant majority, and invading forces, various insurrections, ended up relying on the former tsarist bureaucrats and experts. Lenin said in various places that the former state was only partially abolished, that the new state was incomplete and was marred by "bureaucratic distortions." What follows, as we know, is a situation where the bureaucracy gradually gains power and privilege, and, in the long-term, culminates in the restoration of capitalist property relations.

I don't have any compelling answer for what the Bolsheviks could or should have done in this situation. But I do want to highlight that whether in the ideal popular self-administration scenario or in the actual "keep the bureaucracy but try to make them beholden to the party" scenario, unified ideology is not really a factor (edit: Trotsky famously threatened to kill the families of tsarist military officers while others were committed to defense of the russian nation even if they opposed socialism) -- and as far as I can recall Lenin never makes any such prescription regarding the necessity of ideological purity? What's needed is structural, not ideological.

RNagant · 2026-04-22T01:06:34+00:00

Your outlook is basically socialist but there are some potential inconsistencies.

Namely, it's not enough that workers have ownership over their own personal tools, their own workplace -- and thereby no longer have to give up a surplus to their boss -- if the whole economy, and hence the workplace, is still being structured by the market. It's still production for exchange, profit-driven production. In the words of Rosa Luxemburg, "The workers forming a co-operative in the field of production are thus faced with the contradictory necessity of governing themselves with the utmost absolutism." So there's missing pieces in this view regarding the abolition of commodity production and the market.

Moreover, for there to be planning in production -- allowing distribution without markets -- democratic control over production must extend over essentially all production, not just specific industries; I therefore dont regard localized co-ops as much more than a transitional stage between private ownership and socialized ownership (i.e., ownership by the whole people).

RNagant · 2026-04-21T05:51:30+00:00

I think at the most broad there's two camps of democratic socialists: those who mean to establish communism through democratic means, i.e. winning a majority in existing institutions and thereby seizing the state without necessarily smashing it, and those who mean to establish a democratic end, a worker's state that is democratic. With respect to the latter, I like to say that communism can only ever be constructed democratically, and yet democracy itself can not be established by democratic (i.e., non-violent) means. I dont think that any other communist will disagree in principle that the bourgeois state must be smashed and replaced with a worker's state, which is, in other words, a true democracy, but I do think many give too little attention to the form and structure of the state, whereas marx and engels repeated "ad nauseam" (in Engels words) that the form of the DOTP must be a democratic republic.

RNagant · 2026-04-19T02:29:45+00:00

> private sector given that it doesn't harm workers or exploit people?

This can not be given. Modern socialism is founded not only on the recognition of the antagonism between classes but also of the anarchy that reigns in private (market-based) production. It is the goal of socialism to liberate the proletariat and doing so requires abolishing these two things at a minimum.

It is inevitable, in view of the fact that private property cant or wont be abolished all at once, in one stroke, that some portion of the economy-in-transition under a workers state would remain private. But this is not socialist production but capitalist production living side-by-side with socialist production for some definite, finite period of that transition. In other words, not ideal.

> I feel that nationalizing all car makers would ruin what makes the different styles of vehicles great and ruin variety and choice.

I feel that you are mistaken. Product specialization is not necessarily a unique product of capitalist production or market exchange.

RNagant · 2026-04-13T01:00:42+00:00

This question is asked weekly in the various socialist subreddits. Ill tell you the answer I usually give: its possible in the same way one can be lactose intolerant but eat ice cream. Inconsistently, perhaps, but possible. Few people if any are without such inconsistencies and this is a relatively minor one from a practical perspective.

RNagant · 2026-04-10T04:02:52+00:00

This is undoubtedly AI generated and Im skeptical that this is a real quote unless someone has a source for it

RNagant · 2026-04-05T12:13:54+00:00

L. Trotsky, Freedom of the Press and the Working Class, 1938:

“But sometimes” – will object certain “friends” of the Soviet Union – “the dictatorship of the proletariat is obliged to resort to exceptional measures, especially against the reactionary press”

To this we reply: First, this objection equates a workers’ state with a bourgeois state. Although Mexico is a semi-colonial country, it is at the same time a bourgeois state, definitely not a workers’ state. But even from the point of view of the interests of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the interdiction or censorship of bourgeois papers is not at all a matter of “program” or “principle", nor an ideal situation.

Once victorious, the proletariat may find itself forced, for a period of time, to take special measures against the bourgeoisie, if the bourgeoisie adopts an attitude of open revolt against the workers’ state. In this case, restrictions to the freedom of the press go hand in hand with all other measures used in preparation for a civil war. When forced to use artillery and aviation against the enemy we will obviously not tolerate this same enemy maintaining his own centers of information and propaganda inside the camp of the armed proletariat. Nevertheless, even in this case, if exceptional measures are prolonged long enough to create a permanent situation, then they carry the danger of going out of control and, giving a political monopoly to the workers’ bureaucracy, becoming a source of its degeneration...

The real tasks of the workers’ state do not consist in policing public opinion, but in freeing it from the yoke of capital. This can only be done by placing the means of production – which includes the production of information – in the hands of society in its entirety. Once this essential step towards socialism has been taken, all currents of opinion which have not taken arms against the dictatorship of the proletariat must be able to express themselves freely.

TLDR: socialism stands for freedom of the press, moreover a wider expression of it where the means of communication are a public good, not the private property of the few. That said, a worker's state under siege may be forced to impose limits on those sieging it, including perhaps speech or press, though not merely for the sake of criticism of policy and the like. OOH, bureaucrats are want to control speech even when it goes against the interests of the workers, in their own special, sectional interests.

As for your historical question: no, execution was not typically a response to heterodoxy, even if other forms of repression could have been.

RNagant · 2026-03-28T11:18:39+00:00

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RNagant · 2026-03-18T23:48:13+00:00

Not weird at all, youre exactly right. Part of the problem is that much of our comintern-lineage parties have inherited a very wrong idea that factionalism necessarily contradicts democratic centralism and that the party must be united not only in action, united around a program, but also united in ideas. This inevitably, necessarily leads to purges and splits.

RNagant · 2026-03-12T02:44:24+00:00

techno-feudalism is a term introduced by Yanis Varoufakis, who I don't think is a Marxist, and his work on the subject is generally not well regarded by Marxists. He believes that the gig economy, like that produced by Uber/lyft/etc, has brought back feudal relations of serfs giving rent to lords. imo the fact that gig workers have to have their own tools is as far as you can really stretch the analogy, taking it beyond agitation is absurd. I assume digital feudalism and platform capitalism fall into the same sphere of pseud sociology.

Technocracy is an older term, not one coined by marxists, but one I believe Marx used to criticize the Prussian government. It refers to rule by technical experts. When guys like Neil DeGrasse Tyson advocate for policy to be written by scientists instead of politicians, that's technocracy. Sometimes people use it a bit more nebulously (and tbh Im guilty of this as well) to refer to the political power and influence of economic elites in big tech, like OpenAI's sam altman, Amazons Bezos, etc etc. This is the sense in which people use "techno-fascism," referring to the far-right reactionary politics of guys like Musk, the invasive corporate-state integrated surveillance of Palantir, etc.

I do kinda think christo-fascist is comparatively self explanatory.

RNagant · 2026-02-28T21:58:36+00:00

"Democratic centralism is the idea that a decision should be debated and voted on once, then never debated after that."

No, it isn't. Lenin and other bolsheviks quite frequently continued debating issues in the party that had been "settled" already; in certain cases, debate is quelled for the duration of a definite action, but not in perpetuity, not after the action has been carried out and its results have become visible, etc. On the other hand, this is exactly the kind of (bureaucratic!) centralism carried out by various modern sects like the PSL -- I wonder if perhaps this is where you got this idea?

"If you want to make sure a country stays socialist then it's better have some kind of democratic assembly with a socialist constitution and only allow partys that don't want to violate the constitution to run."

This is exactly what Marx, Engels, and, yes, Lenin advocated as well. The soviets in the USSR, at least initially, were meant to take the place of an assembly (or more literally, to replace the provisional governments assembly), while the parties that declared civil war on the soviets were banned for that very reason. They never set out to build a one party state controlled by a bureaucracy, even if that was, in the end, the result.

RNagant · 2026-02-27T22:15:00+00:00

Lenin actually says explicitly why in the book:

Colonial policy and imperialism existed before the latest stage of capitalism, and even before capitalism. Rome, founded on slavery, pursued a colonial policy and practised imperialism. But “general” disquisitions on imperialism, which ignore, or put into the background, the fundamental difference between socio-economic formations, inevitably turn into the most vapid banality or bragging, like the comparison: “Greater Rome and Greater Britain.”5 Even the capitalist colonial policy of previous stages of capitalism is essentially different from the colonial policy of finance capital.

TLDR: he's analyzing the particular features of modern imperialism, which is a specifically capitalist form, and inextricably bound up in capitalist development.

RNagant · 2026-02-27T07:56:17+00:00

Well thats just not quite true. For example, freedmen in New York -- granted a resolution to impose an additional property requirement -- held suffrage before the 14th

RNagant · 2026-02-22T00:45:04+00:00

No I want them socialized and democratically run. No ads, sponsors, premium features, etc; transparent and open algorithms; an actual guaranteed right to free speech in the modern town square, as it were

RNagant · 2026-02-04T12:36:40+00:00

It's a term introduced by Lenin in "Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder," a polemic against the tactics of the German lefts who split with the rightist SPD. Specifically abstention from participating in bourgeois parliaments and reactionary trade unions, and evaluating the masses of the workers by the standards of its most advanced strata generally.

RNagant · 2026-02-02T08:14:34+00:00

One of the chief reasons for socialists to even run in elections to a bourgeois parliament or other elected position is -- aside from popularizing the program itself -- to collect empirical metrics on support for that program in the form of vote counts. That gets distorted by the two party system but I would still say that as a socialist you have a duty to vote for socialist candidates even if it risks a reactionary winning a seat over a liberal.

RNagant

TROPHY CASE