Editing Ontology:Q49,93 (section)

== Usage notes ==

This is the claim that early Marxism, as laid out by Marx and Engels, still has some amount of accuracy or relevance to reality although {{em|Leninism}} as laid out by Lenin, Stalin, Hoxha, Mao, or Trotsky is claimed not to hold such accuracy or relevance. People may have varying reasons for claiming that Leninism has been rejected, and these would all be distinct propositions. This is simply the overall claim that some collection of central components of Leninism is not true.

One major category of philosophies which will claim this is simply plain old anticommunism. People will get scared by the concept of dividing a population in two or creating a workers' state, and try to insist that Marxism actually means something totally different from creating a Soviet Union. Whether this is true or false on a literal level is complicated. The past century has shown us that a proper use of historical materialism likely does not have just a single outcome, and appears to have many different outcomes correlated with the presence of different [[E:country characteristics|country characteristics]] and more specifically the class composition of a country. In this sense there would certainly appear to be multiple possible Marxisms, only one of them being the historical Soviet Union. With that said, the intention of invoking multiple Marxisms within ideologies such as Lacanianism and the "Fisherist" wing of Western Marxism is not usually to open up [[E:meta-Marxism|a boundless terrain of possibility]]; the purpose is usually just to crudely rule out Bolshevism for the sake of doing that. It must be repeated that this is a non-Marxist position. No matter what exact set of details Marxism is to contain, Marxism {{em|never}} means ruling out workers' states which are already viable and calling them [[E:|fake periods of history]]. The core objective of Marxism is for all the world's Marxisms [[E:Communist International|to coexist]]. Any Marxism which does not at least try to do this is a potential candidate for [[E:undialectical idealism, historical existentialism, & class non-analysis|a history-denying philosophy, or a non-Materialist philosophy]]. Unfortunately even a failed Marxism cannot simply be labeled "not a Marxism". A great number of theorists who [[E:Trotsky is your new hero|ally themselves with Marxism]] are likely to fail to do it correctly. Even Lenin made errors at first; if every bad Marxist was preemptively labeled not a Marxist, there wouldn't be any Marxists.

The other major case of a philosophy claiming Marxism-Leninism is over is Deng Xiaoping Thought. The way the claim manifests in this philosophy is very different from the way it manifests in philosophies like Lacanianism or center-Liberalism. Deng Xiaoping Thought does not present the Material system of Bolshevism as categorically bad, as much as an unfinished goal to aspire to. At the same time, it has casually put said goal aside for the practical purposes of defending the borders of China, Cuba, or Vietnam through [[E:Deng Xiaoping process|constructing a viable economy and building tight connections between all the people inside the country]].


[[Category:Anticommunist propositions ontology]]