Ontology:Q49,93
- pronounced (West) (S2): Leninism is over but "Marxism" is not 1-1-1
Core characteristics[edit]
- item type
- S2 (pronounced Category) 1-1-1
- pronounced P: label [string] (L)
- pronounced (West) (S2): Leninism is over but "Marxism" is not 1-1-1
- (DX swatch) Bolshevism is over but Marxism is not
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- pronounced 617. (Z) pronounced (West) (Z):Western Marxism 1-1-1
- Deng Xiaoping Thought 1-1-1
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- Party-nations are not actually Marxist
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Wavebuilder combinations[edit]
- pronounced P: pronounced Wave-builder: forms result [Item]
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Characterizations[edit]
- pronounced Wave-builder: route [Item]
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Prototype notes[edit]
- Leninism is over but "Marxism" is not -> I'm half convinced that every time somebody implies this (and isn't from China, Cuba, or Vietnam) that it's literally just a way to sneak in Existentialism and deceive people into believing all the things smaller than Liberalism and capitalism that ultimately reconstruct capitalism. half the time I laugh at this one and half the time I get angry, because it tends to trap people in this loop of insisting that if you don't believe Marxism can be used to purge people of all incorrect beliefs and create a perfect society full of nice people before getting rid of capitalism you're racist, while due to the actual material definition of capitalism, if they believe it it makes them absolutely, absolutely incapable of stopping people from becoming racist, digging them deeper and deeper into this hole they can never get out of.
- Marxism is over but party-nations are not ... -> the claim that central party-nations are not over but the attempt to regulate the stochastic sorting of people into corporate countable Cultures basically is. somewhat credible when there are about three countries that can vouch for it. many people like to think you can immediately springboard off this to justifying Existentialism but you actually can't. it almost implies the opposite: that primitive Existentialism is most stable when it's regulated from above and not allowed to become a government in and of itself.
Usage notes[edit]
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 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 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 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 never means ruling out workers' states which are already viable and calling them fake periods of history. The core objective of Marxism is for all the world's Marxisms to coexist. Any Marxism which does not at least try to do this is a potential candidate for 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 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 left.
Besides anticommunist philosophies, 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 center-Liberalism or "Fisherism". 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 constructing a viable economy and building tight connections between all the people inside the country. Across mainstream Marxism-Leninism, people have a range of varying opinions about this. Some people will uphold that having a party-nation at all is better than nothing, and only under a narrow range of conditions a party-nation can progress back to Bolshevism. Other people will treat Deng Xiaoping states as anomalous and incapable of engineering Bolshevism. The material facts on this are currently unclear, as so far there has never been a case of a Deng Xiaoping state productively reverting to Bolshevism. It may be worth investigating all the conceivable transition processes from Deng Xiaoping Thought to see whether people have thought too narrowly, such as the concept of several Deng Xiaoping states linking up to produce poly-Maoism and then rebuilding or reimagining Bolshevism.
There may also be an argument to be made that Trotskyists believe this proposition. If we analyze Trotskyism through its actions rather than its words, it could be argued that because Trotskyists have attacked every real-world instance of Leninism they do not believe in Leninism and instead believe in a Marxism which is not actually Leninist. Perhaps Trotskyists have not realized that they do not actually like Leninist parties, and instead define Marxism by a particular internal content to be achieved by a country rather than on physical substrates such as a party-nation. Perhaps Trotskyists actually do believe in Leninism but there have been and always will be multiple distinct countable Leninisms. The only thing that is clear is when mainstream Marxism-Leninism creates Leninism Trotskyism does not tolerate it.