barsoap

The most radical among the Anarchists are a sort of Vanguard. All a Vanguard is is a group of radicals that are helping organize the revolution, at the forefront.

Noone's organising the revolution. We're organising society such when the revolution happens it won't be hijacked by vanguard fucks attempting, yet again, to take power from the people. Also, in the mean time, chocolate pudding.

As for State Capitalism, Lenin

...conveniently forgot to mention that he was crushing worker's councils with that move. He was taking absolutely nothing from capitalists, he took it from the workers.

Please explain how there was competition, accumulation among bourgeois elements competing in markets, forcing prices lower and thus rates of profit, with private corporations.

The way in which influence and backrubs were traded mirrors capitalism, which shouldn't be too surprising because capitalism is essentially legalised corruption.

What would be a Marxist revolution in your eyes, if not a revolution against Imperialism by Marxists?

The usual way they happened were a) a vanguard capturing a spontaneous revolution, followed by brutal authoritarianism, or b) a coup of some sort by a vanguard, also with brutal authoritarianism.

Secondly, I truly don’t see what the purpose of advocating against change is for

Me neither. Why do you think I'm doing that? Have some Malatesta in the context of how anarchism is necessarily gradualist:

[W]e can’t make the revolution on our own; nor would it be desirable to do so. Unless the whole of the country is behind it, together with all the interests, both actual and latent, of the people, the revolution will fail. And in the far from probable case that we achieved victory on our own, we should find ourselves in an absurdly untenable position: either because, by the very fact of imposing our will, commanding and constraining, we would cease to be anarchists and destroy the revolution by our authoritarianism; or because, on the contrary, we would retreat from the field, leaving others, with aims opposed to our own, to profit from our effort.

I know, I know, it's hard to get rid of the spooks. But that's what materialism looks like.

A worker state where the workers collectively own production is what Marx advocated for.

...so Lenin lied when he spoke about the system being state captalist, not communist, and now somehow capitalism was "really existing socialism"? It's a bunch of rhetorical smoke grenades to obscure the fact that power moved from the nobility to the nomenklatura.

There was no competition, no M-C-M’ circuit resulting in accumulation among borgeois actors, no tendendcy for the rate of profit to fall.

No, there was the exact same thing just with corruption.

Taking Cuba as our example, Marxism guided the revolution, and it hasn’t seemed to fail yet

The Cuban revolution was not a Marxist one, it was a war of independence and once Batista was toppled and Castro got to make hour-long speeches at the UN, the USSR wasn't his first choice of ally, but the US. The revolutionaries were generally lefties, yes, but far from unified Stalin-admirers. They absolutely would've gone with a vaguely socdem "between New Deal and Europe" like thing with the US as an ally: Workers' rights, unions, yes expropriate the slavers but that doesn't mean we can't have capital in the country. The US wanted to have none of it, just having lost its colony, I mean think of the United Fruit and Bacardi campaign contributions.

As such, when Cuba adopted Marxism-Leninism as a prerequisite of being an USSR ally they adopted it with Cuban characteristics. On their own terms, generally from first principles, without a forge-welded vanguard at its core.

There's parallels of that in Vietnam, of course, also a war of independence.

Secondly, if Anarchism is an ever-evolving theory that hasn’t really seen any large-scale results, would it not make sense to concede that Anarchism can play a valuable role outside of Revolutionary change while Marxists actually change the whole of society?

No, it wouldn't. Because a priori there's no reason to believe that a proper revolution is materially possible when you insist on going for "large-scale results" (whatever that's supposed to mean), and a posteriori there's neither. See means/ends unity. Materialism doesn't care about your impatience. To quote Adorno: Actionism is the anti-intellectualism of the left.

And, no, MLM states didn't change the mode of production: State capitalism is still capitalism. Again, Yugoslavia would've been a better example. Sometimes I do wonder how the world would look like now had Stalin sent another assassin and then Tito his single one.

I think it’s a bit hypocritical to wash the words of revolutionaries you claimed were good Marxists.

I never said "Che was one of the good ones". I called Cuba promising (as in: On its way to proper democratic socialism) and I called Council Communist essentially Anarchists.

If you want me to say something positive about Marx we'd have to talk labour theory of value or such.

It loses its revolutionary potential and becomes Idealism.

See from the anarchist POV most Marxist-type socialisms are idealism, down to mostly two factors: a) no means/ends unity, making failure inevitable, and b) trying to foresee the future. We, at our current level of understanding of human nature and society, influenced by various material factors holding us back in terms of even imagination, cannot possibly craft plans that would be appropriate for our grandchildren: The revolution must necessarily be gradual because that's the only way that our descendants get to put us up against the wall for being counter-revolutionary. Without those things there cannot be theory of revolution that's actually material.

With that out of the way, most of your suggestions boil down to “use lemmy.world instead”.

It's where big replacement communities happen to be, that's all there is to it. Avoiding centralisation is a good thing in general but "tired of .ml mods? Here's alternatives" isn't the right time to go for it I think. Maybe the admins can come up with a scheme to round-robin disable community creation or something, to spread things out. Also, community migration is in the pipeline software-wise that would help a lot.

Che was highly critical of Stalin's authoritarianism and cult of personality. The, you know, defining factors of Stalinism in modern parlance.

And I have no idea why you're bringing up the US or how it's relevant to anything, are you American or something they love to do that, all self-important.

With regards to imperialism: Do you know how I earned my permaban from lemmygrad? As a, quote, "NATO propagandist"? By telling them that Russian imperialism evil. I don't even like NATO, short of it being a vehicle to keep the US somewhat on a leash. The month ban from !worldnews@lemmy.ml was for pointing out that Ukraine does not in fact lay claims to Russian territory Ukraine describes as "Historically Ukrainian-speaking". Because they don't. As the article that OP there linked said itself.

This is about Chinese billionaires. No foreign stock-traded company would ever care that Chinese can't inherit fortunes.

What’s the cutoff point for how much a Capitalist should own?

Once it has systemic impact. Turn their company into a foundation, put them on the board, rest of the seats go to workers and something like the local university, allow that their kids two generations down the line are rich enough to never have to work a second in their life (if they manage to not squander), but definitely don't allow inheritance of that kind of capital which is what China does. Interesting paper especially about the inheritance thing, ultimately that alone is sufficient to curb concentration of wealth:

We demonstrate that chance alone, combined with the deterministic effects of compounding returns, can lead to unlimited concentration of wealth, such that the percentage of all wealth owned by a few entrepreneurs eventually approaches 100%.

We show that a tax on large inherited fortunes, applied to a small portion of the most fortunate in the population, can efficiently arrest the concentration of wealth at intermediate levels.

I'm actually quite positive when it comes to Cuba, and Vietnam might follow suit. The rest range from falling to capitalism to falling to fascism.

Anyhow this wasn't about the success or failure of "AES" countries but making clear that not all Marxists are tankies.

staying intrgrated with global Capitalism while trying to subvert Lenin’s idea of Imperialism

...and you have to have billionaires for that? Also, heck, the GDR was integrated into capitalism and they had a mostly (asides from the trades) planned economy. They built industrial robots which then churned out cars in Wolfsburg, and stomped a silicon industry out of the ground to keep competitive in that area. Western mail-order catalogues were full of GDR washing machines, fridges, etc.

Council communists, definitely, functionally that's the same as Syndicalism. Some Trotski and Tito fans. A lot of Cubans, over there authoritarianism seems to be more and more a habit than principle.

If by "successful" you mean "took over a whole state, sustainably" then there's zero (both Rojava and Chiapas are mere territories), but then the only ML states left are basically Cuba and Vietnam, the USSR collapsed, China has richer billionaires than plenty of liberal democracies, etc.

If with "successful" we also mean "feed the poor, organise the disenfranchised, and punch Nazis" then there's uncountably many. It's all predominantly prefiguration and avoiding liberal democracies to regress, in line with more recent theory.

revisionist

See I'm an anarchist, revisionist is not actually an insult to me. But it surely does rile up MLs if you point out that they're ever so slightly disagreeing with previous canon so I might be using it more liberally than them :)