A trend that will only continue to grow.

Marxism-Leninism is an ideological framework. Essentially, it fronts dialectical materialism, the materialist conception of history, and Marxist political economy as correct. There is no one “Marxist-Leninist form of governance,” just as in real life there is no one universally correct form of governance. However, all of the component parts of Marxism-Leninism are correct, including dialectical materialism, which is the basis of correct scientific analysis and interpretation. It is not a replacement for the scientific method, but a way we understand the world.

What you describe is broadly empiricism. The limits of pure empiricism are that, if we are being truly pure, we do not draw connections between linked phenomena. In other words, we do not assume gravity will be the same tomorrow as it is today, because we have not yet tested it. As the world is constantly changing on both a micro and macro scale, this means each test is in fact fresh, with fresh conditions. Empiricism, taken to the extreme, denies this understanding.

Dialectical materialism expands upon empiricism by recognizing the interconnection of everything, and that knowledge is something continuous. As we test the world, we gain a better understanding of it, and therefore the world is always changing so our knowledge is always becoming outdated as long as we are not continuously testing and practicing. Through practice, we gain better knowledge, with which we can better predict what will happen.

There’s nothing spiritual about Marxism-Leninism. Knowledge comes from practice, of course it does. However, without acknowledging that we all have a world outlook, this solidifies what might be incorrect, such as idealism or metaphysics, as has often happened in the field of science.

I already said Marxism-Leninism is not a “form of governance.” The fact that you repeat this claim leads me to believe that you aren’t actually reading what I’m writing.

Phikosophy, our world outlook, is already before science. The way we see the world and understand it determines how we view science and perform it. This is why vulgar materialists, as opposed to dialectical materialists, tried to prove race theory correct and thus advocate for eugenics. Science is not neutral. The world around us, the material world, does not care how we interpret it beyond how we change it. However, there is no such thing as a perfectly neutral observer, we all have preconceived biases.

Marxism-Leninism is already scientific, the scientific method is a tool employed by it already. You’re trying to remove science from the context it exists in.

You’re still treating science like it’s not a process gone through by humans. Science once posited that race science was correct in order to justify eugenics. We need to be aware of our world outlook and correct it before we begin to use science, otherwise we come to incorrect conclusions and incorrect propositions. That’s my point.

Marxism-Leninism is correct not because it is a “form of governance” (it isn’t) but because it’s a living social science grounded in scientific understanding of the world.

Science is not independent of philosophy. There’s idealist science, metaphysical science, etc, all of which are wrong. There is no such thing as science without philosophy, because science is an attempt by humans to understand the world. Humans are all philosophers, as we all have a world outlook. By rejecting study of philosophy as it relates to science, you are ignoring preconcieved biases, rather than acknowledging them and correcting the misconceptions.

This is why Marxism-Leninism is correct, and why all science must be done from a dialectical materialist standpoint.

Marxism-Leninism is already heavily based on science, and takes the stance of dialectical materialism as the basis for science and analysis. What’s wrong with scientific socialism as it already exists, in your eyes?

It’s actually pretty accurate, lmao. The meme is saying dark green is the best, not light green, though RSF treats light green as the best. That’s the source of the misalignment.

Sure, it happens to corroborate what we know about the state of conscription in Ukraine.

All clocks are “broken,” then. They all serve their own interests, that means we have to identify what they are to figure out how to read them. The fact that Ukrainians are struggling, many are fighting back against conscription vans, etc. is both convenient to Russia and actually true. That doesn’t mean everything RT says is correct 100%, but it does mean that not everything pro-Russia or anti-Ukraine from Russian media is wrong.

For example, I know BBC frequently outright lies and fabricates information about China. This is well-documented, they even add gray or yellow filters to video to make it seem scarier. That doesn’t mean they are never correct.

As much as BBC is pure British propaganda, sure. “Press freedom indexes” generally measure how privatized the press is, it doesn’t actually measure how truthful the press is. Russian press is fully capable of presenting true accounts.

I don’t really think it’s a secret that this is a Russian POV, that doesn’t mean it’s worthless.

Do you think that a Ukrainian drone causing a Russian passenger bus to catch fire, as the headline at least asserts, did not actually happen? Why not?

No, lol. The US is on the backfoot and is desperate, they cannot actually stop the IRGC just by killing as many civilians as possible.

Might as well be, NATO’s earned it.

Agreed! It’s very fun!

Right now I’m reading Neocolonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism by Kwame Nkrumah. It’s a really good expansion of Lenin’s work on Imperialism as a stage in capitalism. Nkrumah was coup’d one year after its publishing with support from the US.

As for favorites, I really love both Piranesi and Roadside Picnic! The former is just a really fun mystery with a good deal of whimsy, the latter is excellent sci-fi.

I am a Marxist-Leninist, and my analysis of the soviet union and imperialism in general is aligned with the overwhelming majority of Marxists. Whether or not you want to call me a “tankie” is irrelevant to the conversation, there is no cognitive dissonance on my part. The Soviet economic model worked tremendously well, as I already proved earlier, and as I also proved earlier the majority of those who lived in former Soviet socialism regret the fall of the USSR. The Soviets did not imperialize anyone.

As for socialism being the cause of soviet disollution, no, this is incorrect. The Soviet economy had slowed down a bit towards the end, but it was never in danger of collapsing. This is backed up by data I already linked and you promptly ignored. The largest reasons for Soviet disollution were the coup by Yeltsin, and the policies from people like Gorbachev that weakened internationalist unity within the Soviet Union, leading to a rise in nationalist movements. After the disollition, the west took advantage of the shock doctrine, buying up tremendous parts of the former Soviet economy, and then in Russia a nationalist movement took place, leading to the west getting kicked out and the modern Russian nationalist bourgeoisie taking power.

As for China, the backbone of the economy is in the public sector, in huge State Owned Enterprises. The large firms and key industries in China are overwhelmingly publicly owned, while private ownership is relegated to small industry and highly competitive industries. As for working hours, the average is between 40 and 48 hours, usually hovering around 44-46. 996 is illegal, was largely in big tech firms, and is overall rare.

The PRC is a socialist state, not a state capitalist state like the Republic of Korea, US Empire, or Singapore. China being socialist has nothing to do with the name of the party in control, and everything to do with the mode of production and distribution in China. Rather than a neoliberal paradise, it’s closer to a nightmare for neoliberals. This editorial from The Guardian explains it quite well, actually:

But Xi’s support for mixing private and public ownership structures was purely pragmatic. It had value, he said in another forum, because it would “improve the socialist market economic structure.” Xi’s assessment is echoed by Michael Collins, one of the CIA’s most senior officials for Asia. “The fundamental end of the Communist party of China under Xi Jinping is all the more to control that society politically and economically,” Collins argued earlier this year. “The economy is being viewed, affected and controlled to achieve a political end.”

…

The party’s overarching aim, though, has remained consistent: to ensure that the private sector, and individual entrepreneurs, do not become rival players in the political system. The party wants economic growth, but not at the expense of tolerating any organised alternative centres of power.

…

“[Capitalists] act as if they are being chased by a bear,” wrote Zhang Lin, a Beijing political commentator, in response to these comments. “They are powerless to control the bear, so they are competing to outrun each other to escape the animal.”

How then, does China’s economy work? Public ownership is the principal aspect of China’s economy. This means that public ownership governs the large firms and key industries, and is what is rising in China, as private ownership is kept to small and medium non-essential industries. No system is static, meaning identifying the nature of a system depends on identifying what is rising and what is dying away. Cpitalists are held on a tight leash, and are prevented from gaining political power as a class. The reason private ownership is allowed at all is because China has very uneven development due to their rapid industrialization, and private ownership does help with filling in gaps left by the primary aspects of the economy like SOEs.

The form of democracy and the mode of production in China ensures that there is a connection between the people and the state. Policies like the mass line are in place to ensure this direct connection remains. This is why over 90% of the Chinese population supports the government, and why they have such strong perceptions around democracy:

The Chinese political system is based on whole-process people’s democracy, a form of consultative democracy. The local government is directly elected, and then these governments elect people to higher rungs, meaning any candidate at the top level must have worked their way up from the bottom and directly proved themselves. Combining this consultative, ground-up democracy with top-down economic planning is the key to China’s success.

I highly recommend Roland Boer’s Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance. Socialist democracy has been imperfect, but has gone through a number of changes and adaptations over the years as we’ve learned more from testing theory to practice. Boer goes over the history behind socialist democracy in this textbook.

China does have billionaires, as you might then protest. China is in the developing stages of socialism. Between capitalism, which is characterized by private ownership being the principal aspect of the economy and the capitalists in control of the state, and communism, characterized by full collectivization of production and distribution devoid of classes and the state, run along the lines of a common plan, is socialism, where public ownership is principle and the working classes in control. China in particular is working its way out of the initial stages of socialism:

The reason China has billionaires is because China has private property, and the reason it has private property is because of 2 major factors: the world economy is still dominated by the US empire, and because you cannot simply abolish private property at the stroke of a pen. China tried that already. The Gang of Four tried to dogmatically force a publicly owned and planned economy when the infrastructure best suited to that hadn’t been laid out by markets, and as a consequence growth was positive but highly unstable.

Why does it matter that the US Empire controls the world economy? Because as capitalism monopolizes, it is compelled to expand outward in order to fight falling rates of profit by raising absolute profits. The merging of bank and industrial capital into finance capital leads to export of capital, ie outsourcing. This process allows super-exploitation for super-profits, and is known as imperialism.

In the People’s Republic of China, under Mao and later the Gang of Four, growth was overall positive but was unstable. The centrally planned economy had brought great benefits in many areas, but because the productive forces themselves were underdeveloped, economic growth wasn’t steady. There began to be discussion and division in the party, until Deng Xiapoing’s faction pushing for Reform and Opening Up won out, and growth was stabilized.

Deng’s plan was to introduce market reforms, localized around Special Economic Zones, while maintaining full control over the principle aspects of the economy. Limited private capital would be introduced, especially by luring in foreign investors, such as the US, pivoting from more isolationist positions into one fully immersed in the global marketplace. As the small and medium firms grow into large firms, the state exerts more control and subsumes them more into the public sector. This was a gamble, but unlike what happened to the USSR, this was done in a controlled manner that ended up not undermining the socialist system overall.

To dogmatically collectivize the entire economy would actually be a move undesirable by Marxist standards. Certain economies like the DPRK and USSR have had to do so in order to develop military deterrence, China managed to negotiate itself into the global economy and take advantage of the utility of markets in socializing the small industries, making them ripe for central planning. Your understanding of Marxism is painfully shallow. You erase historical materialism from Marxism, reverting it from scientific socialism back to the very utopianism Marx and Engels criticized of their predecessors!

I don’t know why you think the revolution has been “disappointing,” Marxists understand that the progress to socialism and communism is long and protracted, winding and uneven, with temporary setbacks and strategic retreats. The fact that Marxists correctly predicted this is the opposite of Marx being wrong!

As for social democracies “redistributing wealth,” this is purely from the global south to the global north. Framing imperialism, where the west plunders the global south and shares the spoils among its people, as “wealth redistribution” is an utterly tortured use of the English language.

You’ve proven nothing, only that you don’t understand imperialism or Marxism. Russia and China are allies, and the Russo-Ukrainian war is not a matter of imperialism on Russia’s part, but instead the west using Ukraine as they use Israel.

That’s absolutely terrible. I hope they can find everyone under the rubble and save as many as they can.

It’s perfectly possible, it just requires the downfall of imperialism as committed by the west at mass scale, and the adoption of renewables and smarter city planning, combatting desertification, etc. as seen in countries like China.

Nope, I am not confusing correlation with causation. Industrialization and development is what drives the increase in life expectancy, as this is directly related to access to medical equipment, food, housing, and more. The west achieved this by exploiting the global south, which is why the global south did not see the same leaps in life expectancy. The Soviets achieved this via pro-social policies and central planning, on their own labor. The soviets were anti imperialist and de-colonial.

As for the disollution of the USSR, it’s complicated. In any case, it was the adoption of capitalism and the ensuing plunder by the imperialist west that created the economic devastation that caused the skyrocketing prostitution. Socialism did not cause it, capitalism did.

As for the PRC, no, it is not “hybrid state capitalism.” By “most economists,” you mean purely western liberal and neoliberal economists. Socialism is a mode of production and distribution where public ownership is the principal aspect of the economy, and the working classes control the state. This is true of the PRC, Cuba, DPRK, Vietnam, Laos, and former USSR. Communism is a post-socialist mode of production, and has not yet existed. Rather than being behind China, communism is in the future.

As for Marx, his predictions are coming to pass, and he has not been “debunked.” I’ve seen the nonsense neoliberals and liberals allege against him plenty, I’ve been a Marxist for years. It has not been capitalism that has uplifted the proletariat, but instead capitalism that has systematically underdeveloped the global south, swelling the welfare states in the imperialist west, while socialist countries like China have been lifting billions from poverty.

You are erasing imperialism from the equation because it immediately causes your argument to fall apart. Many countries around the world have gone through revolution, as Marx correctly predicted, and billions now live in socialism.

As for Russia, it was imperialist under the Tsar. The Soviets abolished the Russian Empire, and the Russian Federation has no colonies nor neo colonies. The Russo-Ukrainian war is not imperialist in nature, it’s resolving the conflict between the Donbass region and Kiev as sparked by the Banderite coup in 2014, backed by the west.

As for China and Russia, they have great relations and mutually benefit.