After seeing a megathread praising Mao Zedong, an actual mass killer, and a post about a guy saying “99% of westerners are 100000000000% sure they know what happened in ‘Tiny Man Square’ […] the reasons for this are complex and involve propaganda […],” I am genuinely curious what leads people to this belief system. Even if propaganda is involved when it comes to Tiananmen Square, it doesn’t change the atrocities that were/are committed everywhere else in China.
I am all for letting people believe what they want but I am lost on why one would deliberately praise any authoritarian system this hard.
Can someone please help me understand why this is such a large and prominent community? How have these ideals garnered such a following outside of China?
There is no one answer. Dr. Bob Altemeyer‘s book “The Authoritarians” sheds some light on the psychology.
Regardless of what you think about vanguardism as a means to leftist ends, they also seem to miss the logical point that vanguardism and the state are meant to wither away. It is a theoretical rightist means to a leftist ends, it is not itself leftist.
But again, if you read The Authoritarians you find that logic and reason do not matter to them. Trying to reason with an authoritarian is pointless.
Nobody misses that the state is meant to wither away, what happens is non-Marxists don’t read Marx, Engels, Lenin, etc. but assume the state withering means a rapid transition to full horizontalism, similar to anarchism but over the course of years or decades. That’s wrong, though. Anarchism is primarily about communalization of production and distribution, while Marxism is primarily about collectivization of production and distribution.
When I say “communalization,” I mean anarchists propose horizontalist, decentralized cells, similar to early humanity’s cooperative production but with more interconnection and modern tech. When I say collectivization, I mean the unification of all of humanity into one system, where production and distribution is planned collectively to satisfy the needs of everyone as best as possible.
For anarchists, collectivized society still seems to retain the state, as some anarchists conflate administration with the state as it represents a hierarchy. For Marxists, this focus on communalism creates inter-cell class distinctions, as each cell only truly owns their own means of production, giving rise to class distinctions and thus states in the future.
For Marxists, socialism must have a state, a state can only wither with respect to how far along it has come in collectivizing production and therefore eliminating class. All states are authoritarian, but we cannot get rid of the state without erasing the foundations of the state: class society, and to do so we must collectivize production and distribution globally. Socialist states, where the working class wields its authority against capitalists and fascists, are the means by which this collectivization can actually happen, and are fully in-line with Marx’s beliefs. Communism as a stateless, classless, moneyless society is only possible post-socialism.
Abolishing the state overnight would not create the kind of society Marxists advocate for advancing towards, and if anything, would result in the resumption of competition and the resurgance of capitalism if Marx and Engels predictions are correct.
None of this was specific to Marxism-Leninism, but Marxism in general.
I think your comparison is extremely valuable to read. I never had it written out in such a concise manner.
BUT
It is seemingly a marxists way of describing anarchism because the focus is very much on the sphere of production. Anarchism can and should be applied in so many more contexts. To say it with the words from Crimethinc, the goal of (many proponents of anarchism) is “To Change everything”.
There’s bias in my writing, sure. I’m not an impartial observer, but a Marxist-Leninist that came to Marxism after anarchism. In the context of the state, which we are necessarily limited to, I have to tackle the economic foundations, though both Marxism and anarchism are about much more. Dialectical materialism, for example, is applicable to all manner of analysis and change, not purely for political ends.