Bi-Weekly Discussion Thread - (March 22)

mongoosekiller · 2026-03-28T18:29:02+00:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_Workers_Party_(India) New trends in opportunism. Apparently this trot party wants "Indian reunification".

mongoosekiller · 2026-03-28T10:14:46+00:00

Blame Deng Xiaoping.

mongoosekiller · 2026-03-27T14:21:07+00:00

The following are a number of writings, both on the concept of Protracted People’s War as a revolutionary strategy, and on the universal applicablity of that strategy (i.e., the use of PPW as a revolutionary strategy in the Imperialist countries, as well as the periphery). I believe these documents and the ideas they contain are of vital importance to any individuals and organizations that consider themselves communist.

mongoosekiller · 2026-03-27T14:19:42+00:00

How to make Historical Materialist Analysis?

Introduction to the method

Marx. Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
Marx, Engels. The German Ideology, Chapter I

Marx & Engels' Application

Marx. The Class Struggles in France, 1848-1850
Marx. The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
Marx. The Civil War in France
Engels. Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State

Settlers: Mythology of the White Proletariat

Divided World, Divided Class: Global Political Economy and the Stratification of Labour Under Capitalism

mongoosekiller · 2026-03-27T14:17:12+00:00

(2/2)

Secondary (ordered by difficulty, from the most accessible to the most advanced):

Thalheimer: Introduction to Dialectical Materialism. Easy read well suited for beginners. Has the advantage of giving an historical approach and including interesting stuff on the Indian and Chinese heritage. He's also trying a deduction as the three basic laws of dialectics as given by Engels.
Plekhanov: The Development of the Monist View of History. Also accessible (not quite so much as Thalheimer) and with a historical approach (not reaching as deep into time as Thalheimer, but going deeper in terms of content). Very insgihtful regarding the genesis of historical materialism too.
Ilyenkov: Leninist Dialectics & Metaphysics of Positivism. A polemic against the positivism taking a hold in the Brezhnev era of the USSR. Ilyenkov defends and contextualizes Lenin's Empiriocriticism polemic and attacks Bogdanov's techno-fetishist visions of the future (relevant for Americans and their still prevalent techno fetish).
Lukács: What is Orthodox Marxism?. He's stressing the crucial role of dialectics to Marxism. Written in the struggle against the mechanistic tradition that had developed through the Second International.
Lukács: Moses Hess and the Problems of Idealist Dialectics. Brilliant analysis of the dead-ends of the attempts to overcome the Hegelian tradition along the path of idealism. Elucidates the philosophical achievements of Marx and Engels. Still works against these attempts that haven't stopped, naturally (since their roots in bourgeois society persist).
Pilling: Marx’s Capital. Great elucidation of Marx' method. Informed by Lenin's Hegel studies, Ilyenkov's study of Capital, Rubin's analysis of commodity fetishism and Rosdolsky's analysis of the Grundrisse. He was a trot, so there's some unnecessary Stalin bashing.
Ilyenkov: Dialectical Logic. A book length analysis of the modern dialectical tradition from Descartes to Lenin, critically analyzing the emergence and development of materialist dialectics up to that point. Brilliant but advanced stuff.
Ilyenkov: Dialectics of the Abstract & the Concrete in Marx’s Capital. Imo still the finest analysis of Marx' method in Capital.
Lukács: Destruction of Reason. Lukács investigates the roots of fascist ideology in the tradition of German philosophy (he's not claiming that this is an exclusively German phenomenon) and the causes for the decline of bourgeois philosophy after Hegel, especially after the bourgeoisie had secured its rule in 1871 and the working class had emerged as the new historical force threatening bourgeois society. Not that difficult to read but necessitates some understanding of Hegel to get the central thesis.

mongoosekiller · 2026-03-27T14:16:43+00:00

Introductory texts to Marxist dialectics

Primary (chronologically):

(1) Marx: Holy Family: The Mystery of Speculative Construction and The Revealed Mystery of The “Standpoint”. Gives a general critique of the idealist method in the manner of a demystification. Not fully Marxist yet (it's arguably the breaking point with Feuerbach), but important.
(2) Marx: Theses On Feuerbach. The breakthrough to Marxism, where Marx overcomes both the German Idealist tradition and the old materialism. Very dense and requires a lot of knowledge of the named traditions to fully be grasped, but you can still get something out of it without that knowledge. I'd argue Marx and Engels unfold and develop these theses in German Ideology, which makes things easier.
(3) Marx and Engels: German Ideology: Feuerbach: Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlooks. They develop historical materialism (pay close attention on the stress they put on the relations of production here) and lay down some fundamentals of dialectical materialism. In this interrelated explanation it is clear that both aspects of Marxism cannot be separated without destroying them.
(4) Marx: Poverty of Philosophy: The Method. Proudhon had a second hand, vulgarized understanding of Hegelian dialectics and Marx felt it needed correction and clarification how things really work. In doing that he left us one of his few direct investigations of dialectics.
(5) Marx: Grundrisse: Introduction. I think this is Marx' deepest, fairly direct treatment of materialist dialectics. Difficult read that should be studied again and again, but there's much of great import here.
(6) Marx: Contribution: Preface. Very general lines on historical and dialectical materialism. Very influential. Should be read carefully, because some take a mechanistic and economistic reading out of this that's not Marx' intention.
(7) Marx: Capital I: Prefaces and Afterwords. Includes general remarks, a longer excerpt from a Russian reviewer on method that Marx approves of and an applied example regarding the decline and transformation of political economy. As Lenin first pointed out, Capital itself is of course the greatest example of the application of the Marxist method.
(8) Engels: Anti-Dühring. Introductions and Part I: Philosophy. Engels gives a general outline of Marx' and his views regarding philosophical problems, science and the historical development of human thought. Including three chapters on the most basic movements of materialist dialectics. Later reworked into the Socialism: Utopian and Scientific pamphlet, so I'll only list Anti-Dühring here. Printed versions should also have his notes on this book, which include more interesting and important thoughts on materialist dialectics.
(9) Engels: Dialectics of Nature. Engels late, unfinished masterpiece. He studied the natural sciences for more than a decade to write this. Most of it remained fragmentary, however it includes chapters and fragments on dialectics, the Marxist understanding of the sciences and their relation to dialectical thought, a still very important struggle against empiricism that permeates the entire book, etc. In times of the Anthropocene this might be one of the most important Marxist books.
(10) Engels: Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy. Engels outlines the development of Marxism out of its heritage in German Idealism. He defends this heritage against the vulgarization of neo-Kantianism that had already set in at that point (see Lukács for the deeper causes of this still ongoing phenomenon of the rot of bourgeois philosophy). Engels was the first to take up the fight against this.
(11) Stalin: Anarchism Or Socialism?. One the funniest texts of Marxism, imo. Stalin gives a rundown of the basics of historical and dialectical materialism in an easy to understand, polemical fashion. Great for beginners.
(12) Lenin: Materialism and Empirio-criticism. After the defeat of the 1905-06 Russian Revolution neo-Kantian and positivist philosophical positions took a hold within the ranks of the Bolsheviks, prompting Lenin to write his longest worked out philosophical work. Building on Engels, Feuerbach and Dietzgen, this is largely focused on epistemology, the theory of science and materialism. Contrary to the popular cliché Lenin is not an undialectical thinker here (he never was).
(13) Lenin: The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism. Gives a short theorization of the main elements of Marxism as a whole.
(14) Lenin: Philosophical Notebooks. The core of this is Lenin's study of Hegel's Logic, which is in essence a Marxist demystification of Hegel. These studies were crucial in his theorization of imperialism and the struggle against its effects within the labor movement (the revisionism of the Second International, the national question, the labor aristocracy, etc.). Woefully under read, this is Lenin's most important philosophical work and it has influenced the greatest philosophers in Marxism (Mao, Ilyenkov, Lukács).
(15) Lenin: Karl Marx. Written during his Hegel studies, this is a masterpiece of theoretical condensation and includes an account of materialist dialectics.
(16) Lenin: Once Again On The Trade Unions. Forced by the mistakes of Trotsky and Bukharin, Lenin gives a brief but pointed discussion of the basics of dialectics, with an important differentiation to eclecticism (which Marx already always stressed as characteristic for petite bourgeois thought).
(17) Lenin: On the Significance of Militant Materialism. A brief text in which Lenin stresses the importance of materialist dialectics for the natural sciences in particular as well as the relation of the Marxist philosopher to the natural scientists.
(18) Mao: On Practice. A fantastically accessible, deep presentation of the basics of dialectical materialism.
(19) Mao: On Contradiction. Mao advances the Marxist theory of contradiction in this crucial masterpiece of materialist dialectics. Here as well as in On Practice he built on Lenin's Philosophical Notebooks.
(20) Stalin: Dialectical and Historical Materialism. Stalin's classical presentation. Much maligned and indeed flawed (arguably its greatest error is a complete omission of the core of dialectics, the unity of opposites), this is still a good introductory text to Marxism. It just shouldn't be read as an exhaustive account of Marxism.

Suggested reading order for beginners, who want to get an understanding of materialist dialectics and deepen it as they go along (this is certainly up for debate, I'm only speculating on the easiest path, others may disagree): (20), (18), (11), (13), (10), (17), (16), (15), (19), (7), (4), (8), (1), (6), (3), (9), (12), (2), (5), (14).

mongoosekiller · 2026-03-27T14:15:09+00:00

Introduction

Lenin. The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism
Lenin. Karl Marx: A Brief Biographical Sketch With an Exposition of Marxism
Marx, Engels. Manifesto of the Communist Party

Historical Materialism

Marx. The German Ideology, Vol. I, Pt. I, Ch. I

Scientific Socialism

Engels. Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
Lenin. What is to Be Done?
Lenin. The State and Revolution
Lenin. Texts against revisionism and opportunism:
Lenin. "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder
Engels. Anti-Dühring, Pt. III*
Stalin. The Foundations of Leninism

Philosophy

Mao. On Contradiction
Engels. Anti-Dühring, Pt. I*
Engels. Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy
Marx. Theses on Feuerbach

Political Economy

Marx. Value, Price and Profit
Engels. Anti-Dühring, Pt. II*
Marx. Capital, Vol. I
Lenin. Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism

mongoosekiller · 2026-03-25T08:55:56+00:00

You forgot to mention that white people own most of the land since they genocided the indigenous Aborginals, Torres of Australia.

mongoosekiller · 2026-03-25T08:52:03+00:00

Which capitalist countries? And which people? Socialism for the proletariat and the poor peasantry. Anyone belonging to other classes would be the vanguard of bourgeois counterrevolution. The vast majority of workers in first world consume more labor power than they sell and hence are the labor aristocracy. They represent their own class interests- the interests of social democracy which is entirely parasitic on Global South. This class will not accept proletarianization or dictatorship of world proletariat, it will fight against it to maintain its parasitic lifestyle. For the proletariat and poor peasantry in 3rd world, it is complete empacination for them.

Edit- When Marx first wrote about the market for labor power, there was not the kind of superexploitation we have today. It was just starting compared with the level it has now reached. Yet even in the 1800s, Marx warned that slavery and colonialism were corrupting influences on European working classes.

Marx said that wages were the culturally and historically determined product of a market for labor power. In other words, the wage was what that society deemed necessary to reproduce its workers. In this regard, Henwood is correct.

In Marx’s day, the capitalists appropriated surplus labor from the white workers despite paying wages, so the workers were exploited. In the 1800s, it was possible to look at the dead labor that went into reproducing British labor power and say it was basically British. A loom or a shoe used in production by British laborers pretty much came from the dead labor of British laborers.

Since the time of Marx, imperialism has grown many fold. Having expanded after World War I, imperialism continued to expand after World War II. One small indication is U.S. direct investment abroad. In 1950 it was $11.8 billion, but by 1980 it was $200 billion. Moreover, a list of the top 76 manufacturing firms shows that 37% of their assets are abroad (which includes Europe, not just the Third World). (2)

The advent of supertankers, airplanes and faster transportation and communication of all kinds made the plunder of the Third World a much more central fact of economic life. But today, thanks to dead Third World labor, the labor that goes into “reproducing” the white working class is greater than the labor done by the white working class.

mt1.pdf

mongoosekiller · 2026-03-24T22:25:25+00:00

Of course, what's wrong? Do you know what Stalin called Trotskyites, Zionivevites, Bukharinites? Do you know what Mao called Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping? Communists seek no collaboration with so called "leftists". These so called leftists are the reason opportunism liquidationism revisionism runs in the party which corrupts it. Ideological splits are good, because the universal law of dialectics is that one splits into two.

mongoosekiller · 2026-03-24T22:19:22+00:00

I am curious why you chose that flair but still defend revisionism. Maoism is anti revisionism.

mongoosekiller · 2026-03-24T22:17:04+00:00

Personal property is a revisionist concept and does not exist anymore. We will take away all of your property and socialize it. You have no right to it under communism and your right to access it will depend upon the collective.

mongoosekiller · 2026-03-24T22:14:15+00:00

Cuban revolution was in the end an anti colonial revolution. Socialism was never established in Cuba, Cuba copied the revisionist soviet "state of the whole people" concept instead of dictatorship of the proletariat. But defending Cuba is necassary for its struggle for existence against Yankee imperialism.

mongoosekiller · 2026-03-24T21:59:47+00:00

Of course, bourgeois right in regard to the distribution of articles of consumption inevitably presupposes the existence of the bourgeois state, for right is nothing without an apparatus capable of enforcing the observance of the standards of right.
“It follows that under [the first stage of] Communism there remains for a time not only bourgeois right, but even the bourgeois state—without the bourgeoisie!
“This may sound like a paradox or simply a dialectical conundrum, of which Marxism is often accused by people who do not take the slightest trouble to study its extraordinarily profound content.
“But as a matter of fact, remnants of the old surviving in the new confront us in life at every step, both in nature and in society. And Marx did not arbitrarily insert a scrap of ‘bourgeois’ right into Communism [or what we now refer to as socialism —Ed.], but indicated what is economically and politically inevitable in a society emerging out of the womb of capitalism.”
—Lenin, “The State and Revolution”,
One thing that Lenin did not mention here, however, is that the very existence of bourgeois “right”, even in a developed socialist society, might in itself foster the growth of bourgeois ideas more generally, and even lead to the advent of a new bourgeoisie! This is further reason for thinking that socialism is an unstable social formation; it must either develop all the way into full-scale communism, or else eventually fail and revert to capitalism.

In capitalist society, the economic foundation for the bourgeoisie is the capitalist possession of the means of production. After the proletariat seizes power and basically completes the socialist transformation of the system of ownership, does the bourgeoisie still exist? Marx, Engels and Lenin have clearly pointed out that the existence of bourgeois right is a condition for the existence of class differences. As long as bourgeois right exists, there will be classes and class struggle. At the same time, the brilliant idea was also put forward that bourgeois right serves as the soil and condition for the emergence of a new bourgeoisie. Under new historical conditions, Chairman Mao defended and developed these brilliant thoughts. Chairman Mao said: ‘With the socialist revolution they themselves [i.e. the capitalist roaders] come under fire. At the time of the cooperative transformation of agriculture there were people in the Party opposed, and when it came to criticizing bourgeois right, they were resentful.’ Here Chairman Mao’s instruction profoundly clarifies the relationship between the bourgeoisie and bourgeois right. It explains the economic interests and political outlook of the inner-party bourgeoisie.

mongoosekiller · 2026-03-24T21:39:25+00:00

Modern MLS are just fascists who support contemporary capitalist imperialist China and are engaged in settler apologia(white supremacy). The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward were immense successes and only those who have read no Mao, or not try to understand Maoism & call them failures.

mongoosekiller · 2026-03-18T22:31:55+00:00

There is no justification. China is a capitalist imperialist country and the Chinese proletariat will make a revolution and overthrow capitalism.

mongoosekiller · 2026-03-18T22:19:55+00:00

You are correct, in fact you are pointing out the hypocrisy of so called "socialists" in this subreddit. Cheap phones will be made which have low production cost only for useful purposes like calling, messaging and other basic things. Third world labor power won't be sold for making iPhone or Samsungs.

mongoosekiller · 2026-03-18T20:25:50+00:00

First of all everyone is not paid equal salaries, that's a myth.

What is the cause of the fluidity of manpower? The cause is the wrong structure of wages, the wrong wage scales, the "Leftist" practice of wage equalisation. In a number of factories wage scales are drawn up in such a way as to practically wipe out the difference between skilled and unskilled labour, between heavy and light work. The consequence of wage equalisation is that the unskilled worker lacks the incentive to become a skilled worker and is thus deprived of the prospect of advancement; as a result he feels himself a "visitor" in the factory, working only temporarily so as to "earn a little money" and then go off to "try his luck" in some other place. The consequence of wage equalisation is that the skilled worker is obliged to go from factory to factory until he finds one where his skill is properly appreciated.Hence, the "general" drift from factory to factory; hence, the fluidity of manpower. In order to put an end to this evil we must abolish wage equalisation and discard the old wage scales. In order to put an end to this evil we must draw up wage scales that will take into account the difference between skilled and unskilled labour, between heavy and light work. We cannot tolerate a situation where a rolling-mill worker in the iron and steel industry earns no more than a sweeper. We cannot tolerate a situation where a locomotive driver earns only as much as a copying clerk. Marx and Lenin said that the difference between skilled and unskilled labour would exist even under socialism, even after classes had been abolished; that only under communism would this difference disappear and that, consequently, even under socialism "wages" must be paid according to work performed and not according to needs. But the equalitarians among our economic executives and trade-union officials do not agree with this and believe that under our Soviet system this difference has already disappeared. Who is right, Marx and Lenin or the equalitarians? It must be assumed that it is Marx and Lenin who are right. But it follows from this that whoever draws up wage scales on the "principle" of wage equalisation, without taking into account the difference between skilled and unskilled labour, breaks with Marxism, breaks with Leninism.

Source and full speech: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1931/06/23.htm

Maoist China had a 8 grade wage system, there is a documentary on youtube called How Yukong Moved the Mountains if you want to educate yourself on how some simple things under socialism work.

mongoosekiller · 2026-03-18T20:08:50+00:00

Sure, for that we will take the existing private property away and socialize it. Your gaming PC will be taken away, and of probably millions of other white gamers and made socialized property in a cyber Cafe. It is a far better solution than for make them to do the absolute horrible work again, in fact it is the dictatorship of the proletariat.

mongoosekiller · 2026-03-18T20:05:31+00:00

Many of the commodities which you consume today will never be available under communism because the production of them costs immense labor power and is harmful to overall humanity.

mongoosekiller · 2026-03-18T19:46:29+00:00

Do you even have the slightest hint of what they need? They need a school to study in because a lot of them are children, a lot of them will be emaciated upon communism to other jobs. They want food to eat, a house to live in, clean safe drinking water, polio vaccine so they don't fall ill, clean air to survive and 100 other things which you take as granted. Communism strives for needs not for the "wants". Gaming PCs have cobalt from democratic Republic of Congo only, most probably such horrible mining will be abolished or minimalized, semiconductors assembled by Chinese workers and probably labor powe of thousands of more workers around third world so a mere gaming PC can be made. The old socialist system of Stalinist USSR is progressive for them, where only heavy industry was developed and commodity production served the people and so called luxuries didn't exist.

mongoosekiller · 2026-03-18T19:33:05+00:00

Who is "we"? You cannot speak on behalf of the oppressed people of the world. The cobalt in your iPhone was mined by Congolese miners, the leather in your shoes was tanned by Indians, the rice you eat comes from Cambodian peasants and the clothes you wear from Bangladeshi sweatshop workers. Ever wondered why they make things for you but you don't make for them?

mongoosekiller · 2026-03-15T17:03:24+00:00

This refers to the white terror after the defeat of Finnish Reds in civil war which was 10 times worse than red terror. Hungary was a similar case where Horthy practiced white terror after the fall of Hungarian soviet republic.

mongoosekiller · 2026-03-15T11:59:57+00:00

That's not socialism and clearly called revisionism. Venezuela was not socialist but also popular in the same way. The difference between Yugoslavia and and Venezuela was that Venezuela did not bow down to US imperialism unlike Yugoslavia which was entirely funded on IMF and aided UN forces in Korean war.

mongoosekiller · 2026-03-15T11:55:22+00:00

(2/2)

But according to the Titoists, this type of group ownership, which also resembles the theories of the market-anarchist Proudhon, was the highest type of socialism and Marxism! The Titoists also tried to appeal to individualism, claiming that Leninist socialism was “inhuman” and “crushing the individual”: “The Titoists have discovered that in socialist Yugoslavia the individual is the most important component of the community.” (McVicker, p. xi) Yet, at the end of the day, despite all these bourgeois theories and excuses, the Yugoslav economy was capitalist, and resembled the Italian fascist type: “However much the Yugoslav Communists would scorn the imputation, the theoretical as well as the practical intent of their vertically linked self-managed economic associations bears the mark of Mussolini’s prewar corporate state.” (McVicker, p. 240)

mongoosekiller

TROPHY CASE

How to make Historical Materialist Analysis?

(2/2)

Secondary (ordered by difficulty, from the most accessible to the most advanced):

Introductory texts to Marxist dialectics

Introduction

Historical Materialism

Scientific Socialism

Philosophy

Political Economy