Are young leftists reading theory togather in structured environments or is it all youtube and tiktocks?
This part is easy to answer
Marxist leniinisims but with all the historical ml positions jumbled up into one not coherent thing like someone trying to rehabilitate stalin but in the same breath say deng is good and ok but krushchev bad and also Gorbachev bad
This is just the correct take from orthodox Marxists
I was about to say, if this site even has a party line, that's it.
I'm less old, and I'm in a party, but I've also noticed that it's not so hard to get people to turn out for actions and events, but it takes lot more work to get them engaged in the boring shit, like running meetings and keeping notes. That applies to young people as well as old, and I've not run into many older people inside the US with coherent politics that aren't just ghouls. I known a few old communists, and I've sat through my share of trot meetings.
trying to rehabilitate stalin but in the same breath say deng is good and ok but krushchev bad and also Gorbachev bad
I read this as people viewing history with fresh eyes, given the understanding of what happened after. Like I said I've sat through my share of trot meetings, I heard a lot of Stalin being brought up in completely unrelated topics. It's just dogmatism to be obsessing over in-fights from like a hundred years ago, I prefer to just say 70% good, 30% bad and move on. Deng I think gets a lot of credit because China has managed to lift itself up economically through that- without giving fully over their politics to liberals.
Considering Gorbachevs involvement in the dissolution of the USSR, I don't think it's unreasonable that he gets scorn.
what do you think the contradiction between being pro stalin, pro deng, anti kruschev and anti gorbachev is, considering it is essentially the position of the communist party of china
I have noticed certain ML/MLM’s who will stan the modern Dengist economy of China, but then will also shit on market socialism for being reformist or too acquiescing to liberalism. Which feels like it’s embracing Dengism out of a default support of socialist states without understanding Dengist economics. Or to put it another way, there’s a contradiction in saying that traditional, Soviet Marxist-Leninism had no problems and didn’t need to be changed, but also that the Dengist reforms were good and needed.
Of course, it’s completely valid to argue that Kruschev’s path of change was fundamentally flawed while the Dengist one was proper.
it’s completely valid to argue that Kruschev’s path of change was fundamentally flawed while the Dengist one was proper
I think that is the typical argument. Basically, in the situation in the USSR at the time, there was no need to do what Khrushchev did (IMO, some changes should have been done, but not what was done), but the correct reforms were taken in China, given their situation (I'm not 100% on board with that, but I am somewhat on board). That's the default ML line these days.
Let's be honest here the American left has always been confused. Theres always been a tension between conditions producing commies, and those commies trying to piece together an education. Lenin talks about this exact thing in I believe the events of the 1890s producing a lot of commies, but everybody picking up their education from pamphlets. And psl and dsa are both somewhat confused as well. This is the whole point of developing a vanguard because actually figuring out what to do takes essentially the discipline of a near full time job that not everybody will be willing to do.
People citing old Soviet archives to support their niche historical take aren't organizers, they're just people with an interest in communism and should only be taken seriously as such.
Like you say, we have a generation of leftists getting educated mainly online through disparate sources rather than through a party program. They're gonna be eclectic. I'm a milineal so I'm guilty of this too, though I do irl Poli-ed with my org.
But also the old party formations in the US have ended or changed significantly from the 80s from what I understand. I don't know enough to comment on the exact effect that would have, but I think to some extent we're still all responding to 1991 and haven't settled on firm ground yet.
(The out of context quotes thing is something I've noticed more and more as I've gotten deeper into history/theory).
My thinking is this chaos could be good to stir up ossified ideas, but only if it's grounded within actual organizing with other leftists irl.
I mean, a few things to unpack here, but broadly I would say that they're young and still learning, and that they are organizing in a weird new way via the internet. I think broadly we agree that the Internet is maybe not the best place to organize but I also recognize that not all of us have lived and experienced the modern Internet for our whole lives like they have. I think they ARE organizing...they just aren't doing it in a way that's necessarily recognizable to us. I think the downside of that is that we don't really know if the way they're organizing can be effective or not, because it hasn't really been tried. But the upside is probably they're going to get away with it a lot longer. If you got 1000 PSL members in a room you'd get raided by the FBI, but they can get millions talking on tiktok and discord and YouTube comment sections without the government even noticing.
Mostly I'm in favor of supporting them and if they pop off I'm already ready to go with them. Meanwhile continue to do the kind of organizing that we know works just in case.
