this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2025
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Stalinists, Maoists and Socialists (at least the reformist ones) are pro-capital, just under a different form. They love their commodity production and wage labor...
Marxism-Leninism (which I presume you mean by the term "Stalinist") is more classically Marxist than those who think they can abolish commodity production over night. I elaborate more on that in this comment.
While I do like your writing style and think you're quite talented at it, that's just a bunch of ML revisionism/State capitalist (Dengist) apologetics that misrepresents Marx.
Not gonna thoroughly debunk it cause it's a wall of text, but ownership =/= mode of production. Marx never said that public ownership alone makes something socialist, what matters is how things are produced: Is it for exchange or use? Is labor still waged? Does surplus value still exist and get extracted? If yes - that's still capitalism therefore not Marxist.
You also claim that "Marx didn't think you could abolish private property by making it illegal" which is true cause else it would be idealism, but then you use this to spin it into "that's why we need to let firms develop then make them public" while in reality what Marx meant is that we should abolish capital relations, not co-exist with capital and preserve businesses until they're "ready".
You're also trying to spin the "by degrees" quote from the manifesto to act as if Marx argued for gradual market-led process of evolution from Capitalism to Socialism (or in other words, keeping Capitalism and Markets for decades after the revolution) and not a revolutionary process of abolition of Capital entirely.
That isn't Marxism, but maybe I'm just too ideologically pure and idealistic. Still, I think being more honest that it's not actually "classical Marxism" wouldn't hurt.
I'm very interested in how you think we should abolish capital relations?
I don't have enough hubris to say that I have all the answers, especially when it comes to the way forward - this is something that's up to the revolutionary party collectively to decide, but I do disagree with the ML's theory and methodology, especially with "Socialism in one state" or the 'worship' of State Capitalism. However, if you had a gun to my head, I'd probably manage to squeak out something possibly infantile like this:
When it comes to proletarian revolutions that attempt to build socialism, internationalism is a necessity (both to allow international trade to help meet everyone's needs and weakening of the capitalist global order and reducing them as a threat) - once proletarian and an international party takes power, the focus should be in coordinating/exporting the revolution worldwide mostly via the support of proletarian movements, else it will get isolated, start playing for survival, have to adapt to capitalism and eventually collapse or degenerate as seen historically.
Also, instead of treating state capitalism and markets as a transitional phase that is constantly expanded/built upon, it should instead not be viewed as legitimate and rather something residual, to be replaced as soon as possible. In theory, this should allow for a certain amount of goods to be produced for use, and goods that are more scarce could be produced as commodities and rationed through money.
Once sufficient economic restructuring for transition towards socialist mode of production is done, that's when the transition towards non-accumulative labor vouchers can be done, which should eliminate the law of value and capital relations.