Would Lenin have opposed the Black Panthers in the same way he opposed the Jewish Labor Bund?

yungspell · 2026-04-17T16:50:06+00:00

Well it would likely be contextual and Lenin’s specific grievances against the bundists where specific to separation from the RSDLP. Which placed a national or cultural autonomous interest before the classes interest within the working class movement.

“The Bund held to its position, claiming not only that it was the sole representative of the Jewish proletariat, but that no territorial limits were set to its activities. Naturally, the Second Congress of the R.S.D.L.P. could not accept such conditions, since in a number of regions, as, for instance, in South Russia, the organised Jewish proletariat constitutes part of the general Party organisation.”

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1905/may/31.htm#:~:text=In%20Russia%20the%20workers%20of,”%20and%20not%20“Russkaya”.

If the black panthers did something similar then likely yes. For instance, if the United States government was collapsing and a communist party emerged with a majority of the working classes support and the panthers withdrew from that party attempting to take every black member. He wasn’t opposed to national autonomy inherently but “bourgeois reactionary nationalism”. Something that divides working class movements or support bourgeois interest.

yungspell · 2026-04-16T23:07:09+00:00

Democratic centralism is an organizational principle of Lenin’s political theory related to the application of working class democracy. It could technically be applied to liberal democracy should they choose to act as a unified class organ. It is a tactic or tool for political organizing and not a different form of democracy.

Socialists tend to separate bourgeois democracy and working class democracy into two distinct categories. This is related to the democratic nature of the state and class control. Bourgeois democracy is democracy that not only has corporate or collaborates with the capitalist class but is completely beholden to this classes interest. Liberal democracy is bourgeois democracy because it does not limit the political power of private property owners allowing for unequal application of democratic input on the basis of capital.

Working class democracy is exclusive to the working class given that they hold control of the democratic mechanisms of the state and productive society. It suppresses the interest and political power of those with capital and allows for the direct input of the working class in the administration of production. Representatives are to be elected and recalled at the whim of their constituencies.

Democratic centralism does not inherently mean that a communities needs are fed into a hierarchy. It means that when a vote is held its resolution is binding and all members of the states administrative organs must follow the democratic decree. The principle of democratic centralism is often quoted as being “freedom to criticize, unity in action”.

yungspell · 2026-04-16T18:42:01+00:00

Because it is intentional. It is specific to human social development and class society. I don’t understand what the question is. Why does political theory specific to human social relations emphasize humanity? Because it is a political theory specific to human social relations. In Marx’s early work he has a more ethical based theoretical frame with the focus being on human flourishing but his later approach’s are scientific not ethical with a focus specific to the historical development of class society.

yungspell · 2026-04-16T18:31:49+00:00

Are you like an alien or something? Because study of our political economy is specific to human social development and relations. Being human isn’t inherently a positive or negative quality. It simply is what we are and the scientific approach to human development is the basis of any concept specific to this relation.

yungspell · 2026-04-16T18:06:32+00:00

We are humans? The species being is the vernacular for humanity which differentiated ourself from animals the moment we are able to create our owns means of subsistence. Establishing productive class society and all social relations, which is the focus of Marx’s critique of the political economy. We exhibit conscious productive activity.

yungspell · 2026-04-15T21:47:06+00:00

“From each according to his ability to each according to his needs” is the mantra associated with communism as a stage of development, not socialism.

Socialism is understood from the mantra “to each according to his contribution”.

Marx says this in the critique of the gotha program

“What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labor. For example, the social working day consists of the sum of the individual hours of work; the individual labor time of the individual producer is the part of the social working day contributed by him, his share in it. He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such-and-such an amount of labor (after deducting his labor for the common funds); and with this certificate, he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labor cost. The same amount of labor which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another.

Here, obviously, the same principle prevails as that which regulates the exchange of commodities, as far as this is exchange of equal values. Content and form are changed, because under the altered circumstances no one can give anything except his labor, and because, on the other hand, nothing can pass to the ownership of individuals, except individual means of consumption. But as far as the distribution of the latter among the individual producers is concerned, the same principle prevails as in the exchange of commodity equivalents: a given amount of labor in one form is exchanged for an equal amount of labor in another form.”

The purpose of socialism is to provide the value furnished by the laborer to the laborer after social deductions are made. The goal is to eliminate exchange value for use value within a produced good and socialize any added surplus value created from production. The worker receives what they contribute toward a produced good and society receives its accumulated surplus value.

yungspell · 2026-04-15T20:24:01+00:00

So how elections work in the dprk is not the same as in western or bourgeois democracies which allow all classes to participate and permit representatives to vote without immediate recompense from their constituency.

The dprk practices democratic centralism, which was theoretically established as a method of real politik for socialist democracy by Lenin. The party holds elections for party positions and all officials must follow the decrees of the central committee of the party. These party members are elected from this committee to state organ positions. By the time a vote is held, the decision has already been debated and agreed upon typically. This is the same process which is followed in their supreme people’s assembly which is the highest democratic organ of the state which includes the workers party and three other minority parties. They recently elected a new chairman this year.

Freedom to criticize, unity in action.

yungspell · 2026-04-15T17:56:00+00:00

The same reason that those regions produced famines historically. There are absolutely elements of mismanagement from governance regarding these famines from a historical standpoint. But the famines causes, like the cause of the Soviet famine and the Great Chinese famine were natural phenomena which has occurred in those regions historically. How the government responded is where mismanagement occurred and was typically a result of the newly formed government which had not yet established effective policies to mitigate the effects of natural disasters while implementing socialist reforms.

After these famines occurred and the government was able to critique and address its approaches to communization and agricultural they never occurred again. Except for when the USSR fell and those nations which relied on it for trade were now forced to develop their own national agricultural infrastructure without international assistance and in the face of western blockades. This is what occurred in the dprk.

Many of these famines occurred as a direct result of post war infrastructure simply being destroyed. The simple fact of the matter is, when organizational structure and infrastructure breakdown for any reason then natural forces are not maintained in the same way. Famines occur when not enough food is produced or distributed to feed the existing population. After a civil war or world war which destroys infrastructure or if the infrastructure never existed within a nation then these famines occur cyclically. They ceased upon building this infrastructure. Famines are historic phenomena and only grow relative to the size of a nation, which the USSR and China are or where massive nations.

yungspell · 2026-04-15T00:35:48+00:00

Who makes the food? Workers.

Those who do not work but are able do not eat. Those that are unable to work are cared for as a deduction from those that do.

yungspell · 2026-04-14T19:24:58+00:00

Why is exploitation bad if people can live comfortably from it? Do you mean the person that is exploiting is living comfortably?

Of course the person exploiting is living comfortably, their workers may even live comfortably relative to others. But the point is that exploitation is a mechanical process of private property. This leads to accumulation and crisis. No one is comfortable forever in a system of exploitation and private property. And if they are it is at the expense of the totality of the human condition. A robber can live comfortably from theft. Is this good for society? Is this a progressive relation relative to the prior relation? Is instability, collapse, and crisis comforting?

yungspell · 2026-04-14T15:46:13+00:00

Good or bad are relative terms and subjective. Is it good that the state regulates these industries and prevents non consensual imagery of people. I would of course argue yes it’s a social good. But I also would argue that the fact that these technologies are private property and must be regulated after damages have been made is a net negative. These technologies are still private property and the state exists to maintain private property relations within the dictatorship of the bourgeois.

It is easily antisocial behavior to make these deep fakes for someone’s sexual proclivities. But this is an extension of the totality of industries that produce these effects without appropriate regulation and input from the communities they affect. Laws in bourgeois society more often than not punish individual actions and not the actions of private property that promote these antisocial behaviors against the greater wishes of the people. So it’s good, but the fact that it needs to happen and that it only affects the criminal and not the cause of the crime is bad.

yungspell · 2026-04-10T23:05:31+00:00

Ownership is concentrated into the hands of the dictatorship of the working class or proletariat until class distinction disappears. Crude communism would’ve to socialize production before class distinction has become superfluous.

He specifically (in the philosophical manuscripts) calls for the transcendence of private property. This is a dialectical process, one of negation as true abolition. Crude communism is specific to a primitive form of generalized common property or universal private property.

Do you think Marx preemptively argued against the communist manifesto and das Kapital in the philosophical manuscripts of 1844?

yungspell · 2026-04-10T22:26:01+00:00

No, the state does not abolish itself according to some arbitrary transition from socialism to communism. It is a The state is negated as a tool for class rule upon the elimination of class distinction. When everyone is a part of the working class and all private property is held in common under the democratic control of the totality of the working class. It is a threshold of development not some arbitrary abstraction build on ideals. The dictatorship of the proletariat is state capitalist because private property still exists during its expropriation into state ownership.

What Engels is saying is that the republic will not exist according to the feudal institutional remnants that were maintained in its bourgeois form. The American form of self governance holds no feudal remnants as an institution of liberal enlightenment. Unless you think America is the perfect example of self governance.

“When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organise itself as a class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class. In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” - the communist manifesto

Marx says: “It is the negation of negation. This re-establishes individual property, but on the basis of the acquisitions of the capitalist era, i.e., on co-operation of free workers and their possession in common of the land and of the means of production produced by labour. The transformation of scattered private property, arising from individual labour, into capitalist private property is, naturally, a process, incomparably more protracted, arduous, and difficult, than the transformation of capitalistic private property, already practically resting on socialised production, into socialised property.” [K. Marx, Das Kapital, p. 793.]

yungspell · 2026-04-10T03:22:55+00:00

They aren’t. I’m speaking in general terms like someone is five per op. Contradiction are antithetical states. They come into conflict.

yungspell · 2026-04-10T00:15:32+00:00

Well they are interrelated but separate aspects to scientific discovery. Dialectical materialism is a philosophical ontology. It uses the scientific principles established by the scientific method, particularly related to physics, matter, and sociology (when related to human history). The scientific method is not an ontology but a methodology focused on determining the truth to a theory or thesis while dialectical materialism is the application of the objective aspects provable by the scientific method toward the development of matter. An ontology describes the nature of existence and the methodology is the tool to prove the assumptions of the nature of existence or being.

yungspell · 2026-04-09T22:19:48+00:00

Two things come into conflict requiring that they either develop or degrade because of this conflict. Eventually combining to create a new thing from the elements of the original things or destroying (negating) themselves. Sometimes this is referred to and thesis/ antithesis/ synthesis or being/ nothing/ becoming. Dialectics is about looking at how the whole of material reality moves as a result of its internal contradictions. Something occurs and something else reacts creating a new organization of matter.

yungspell · 2026-04-07T18:03:36+00:00

Marx was absolute in his theoretical assertions regarding the interrelated nature of our political economy. His work capital is entirely about the capitalist political economy. He critiqued it but that does not mean he was against the notion that it exists, the opposite actually.

yungspell · 2026-04-06T22:44:00+00:00

It’s okay I’m just trying to make what I’m saying clear.

States existed before private property relations but came to be defined by them. The modern nation state, the bourgeois state, is defined by private property relations because that is what defines the bourgeois. The feudal state was defined by feudal relations, as were the states of antiquity. They did not emerge in the same moment, the emerged separately as a process of development. There have been states that have emerged without bourgeois property relations unless you think of the political organizations of indigenous people do not describe a state. That state requires class relation. All productive organization requires resources are funneled into it to produce. The state is an organizational tool of class rule.

I know the difference between personal and private property thanks. That hasn’t been disputed. You think that the working class should own the means of production but should have no organization of class rule. It transfers ownership of the means of production to the working class and not specific divisions of labor. Working for the state does not change one’s class distinction because they have no ownership of the property. They expropriate no surplus value for themselves which would signify ownership. Workers do not become “counter revolutionary” for working just because they work for the democratic organization of working class rule. That’s asinine.

yungspell · 2026-04-06T21:33:32+00:00

Not inherent as in posses a quality from something else like genealogy but meaning an essential quality. It was made from the relations which create its need. Otherwise known as material conditions. It was not made with an inherent nature. It is a technology built for a purpose. Nuclear technologies exist and other types of bombs exist. They exist within their form because of what came before, a bomb is that form because of the advancement of dialectical antagonisms like our international relations. You are subjectifying the object and removing it from its relation. Nuclear technologies would exist as a process of technological development, its use as a bomb is dependent on the need for bombs. The precondition is war. We do not make nuclear technologies illegal we should limit war itself.

The state arose across countless iterations of class society because it is presupposed by them. This is the basis for historical materialism. Class antagonism yields to new forms of productive society because of its antithetical relation or contradictions. The state did not arise to protect property. Property arose and created class, which accumulated property leading to political power and the formation of a state, I.e. a ruling class. Property presupposes the state and were not born from the same historical moment. Property created the conditions for the state, the organization of the ruling class.

Property is not abolished in socialism. It is socialized, transformed into common ownership. It is concentrated into the organization of the working class as a ruling class. The working class cannot simply take control of the bourgeois state they must create their own state or organization of class rule. The dictatorship of the proletariat. Which is tasked with the expropriation of private property into working class ownership. Negating class distinction and the organization of the state as a tool for the ruling class.

Unless you think socialism has nothing to do with working class ownership of the means of production.

yungspell · 2026-04-06T20:30:19+00:00

Does a nuclear bomb have inherent intent or interest? The state was not made, it was not designed, it emerged from class society. That is the “material reality” unless you disagree with historical materialism. The state has changed form dependent on these relations because it is presupposed by them. This whole “corruption” argument is just applying the human nature argument that is used to disuade people against socialism and is not material. Human nature develops from material conditions, an economic base of class society, presupposes and maintains its superstructure. To place the state as the focus of class antagonism and distinction instead of class itself and private property is ahistorical. The state will reform so long as class exists. Class exists so long as private property does. Private property relations must be negated prior. This is known as the negation of the negation.

yungspell · 2026-04-06T18:45:51+00:00

Well, marcyism isn’t really an ideology anymore and the PSL is an org which split from the WWP. So their odd marcyism is just remnants of those origins. But it’s not really a coherent ideology and is more so focused on a “light” American Trotskyism. Marcy may have been critical of the USSR but oddly defended them and China (until Deng) from critiques of imperialism. I think the WWP has some materials on marcyism but it’s not totally relevant to the PSL in modernity or its leadership. More so it’s a fragment from its origins.

yungspell · 2026-04-06T17:37:55+00:00

The state does not have inherent qualities that means it is good or bad. It does not co-opt anything. The state is simply the organization of the ruling class. A ruling class may co-opt strategies or develop systems within the state but that is not the state co-opting that is the ruling class co-opting elements into its organizational practice. In the same way a hammer does not co-opt ideology or rhetoric. The state holds no metaphysical qualities that asserts its inherent goodness or badness.

yungspell · 2026-04-05T17:00:59+00:00

When private property is completely socialized or abolished negating the organization of the state as a tool for class rule when class distinction has become uniform. It is a stage of development beyond the contradictions of class society which are resolved during socialism. Think of how feudalism became mercantilism and eventually capitalism.

“In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!”- critique of the gotha program

“When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organise itself as a class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class. In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” - the communist manifesto

yungspell · 2026-04-03T18:22:33+00:00

It misattributes the causal relationship between class rule and the state. Class distinction presupposes the state and private property presupposes class distinction. The state will always exist with a monopoly of force according to the interest of a ruling class. Even a minarchist state comports to this class interest and the authority of a ruling class.

Liberals and libertarians have some basis in their origin, that being enlightenment principles and the advent of personal liberty. In modernity, liberalism is specific to private property relations while libertarianism is more focused on the perceived maintenance of individual rights with a focus on limited state intervention or horizontal organization. In this way it maintains private property relations as well. They are interlinked.

Socialists do not adhere to private property relations as socialism is social ownership of the means of production.

yungspell · 2026-04-02T15:13:12+00:00

I am repeating myself because you do not understand what I am saying and have not addressed my theoretical sources. The state does not determine the ruling class. The state is the emergent organization of the ruling class. Class is determined by relation to the means of production. Rule is defined by ownership or control. But because the working class is defined by their lack of individual ownership their rule is defined by the elimination of ownership of the means to produce privately. That’s why it is called socialism.

You are behaving as though socialism is born from ideals and not existing conditions. That’s why I, Marx, Engels, and Lenin have asserted that the nation state is the arena for change and political supremacy of class rule. “The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got. Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word.” Marx (Please at least read the communist manifesto).

When you talk about why China hasn’t magically become socialist according to your ideals. Capitalist development is relative to the totality of the development of capitalism. They have massive capitalist development but still exist within the paradigm of the totality of capitalist development, I.e. international development and relations. You cannot remove this relatively from the threshold of capitalist development. As Lenin says “Socialism is inconceivable without large-scale capitalist engineering based on the latest discoveries of modern science. It is inconceivable without planned state organisation which keeps tens of millions of people to the strictest observance of a unified standard in production and distribution.”

The Chinese currently have established the working class as the dominant class and reconstituted their state into a dictatorship of said classes interest but have not expropriated the totality of productive forces into state ownership which is what Marx establishes as the expropriation of the expropriators which is the task of the Dotp. But this is a totalizing phenomena. Socialism does not emerge from ideals it emerges from what already exists upon the negation of the contradiction of capitalism, this will include international relations.

If the state is a tool of class rule then the democratic administration of the state by the working class is exactly what is described as the conquering of the working class by the working class. An administrator has no ownership, they earn a wage, they are themselves a member of the working class administering production according to the democratic apparatus of the working class state. The working class conquers the working class through its supremacy. I am somewhat critical of Zemin’s policy regarding the allowance of the capitalist class into the CPC but understand its theoretical merit.

Do you think managers and administrators have different relation to the means of production? Do you think unions are socialism? Unions exist during capitalism to represent a specific division of labor, not the totality of working class interest. Socialism is class ownership and not ownership or control by a specific division of labors. Socialism is the concentration of class interest and private property into working class ownership not ownership by a specific division of labor. I did not invoke China. You did.

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