Rev Left Radio - Marxism-Leninism: Anti-Imperialism, Scientific Socialism, and State Power

Episode Date: December 5, 2017

Amado Guzman and Matthew Carson join Brett to discuss the theory and praxis of Marxism-Leninism. Topics Include: Lenin's contributions to Marxism, Dialectical Materialism, what makes Marxism a science, The Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie, Maoism, the Bolsheviks, the concept of a Vanguard Party, Trotsky and Stalin, the Leninist view of the State, comradeship, the Philippines, and much more! Outro Music is "Comrades" by Bambu. Listen to, and support, Bambu and his music here:  https://bambubeatrock.bandcamp.com/ Intro Music by The String-Bo String Duo. Listen to, and support, them here: https://tsbsd.bandcamp.com/track/red-black Support Revolutionary Left Radio by donating to our Patreon. Patrons get access to episodes earlier than the general public. You can support us here: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio   This podcast is officially affiliated with The Nebraska Left Coalition and the Omaha GDC.

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Welcome to it in and turn it up loud Revolutionary Left Radio starts now Welcome to Revolutionary Left Radio. I'm your host Anne Comrade Brett O'Shea

and today we have on Matthew and Amato to talk about Marxism Leninism. Would you guys want to introduce yourself maybe start with Amato? Sure. My name's Amado Guzman. I'm a Leninist.

I've been a Leninist for about seven or eight years now my political background before that was coming up

in the Partido La Rasa Unida at the youth group in Albuquerque New Mexico where I grew up I began

really committing to Leninism around 2009 and that's where I am today I'm still a member of El Partido to this day

Matt? Matt Carson I got my first copy with the manifesto when I was 12 from my uncle Dan and I've been involved in Marxism in some regard pretty much since then. I wrote my first history paper in like the fourth grade on the Haymarket riots.

I've kind of been brought up in that kind of environment. In college, I was very, very much involved with reading the early Marx and Hegel. And so I got schooled in that and then I moved on. into reading Gramsci and Althuser, and that was kind of my entry into Leninism was Louis Altaxer, and really kind of solidified my involvement in Leninism around the time of Occupy. Well, awesome. I think we have a lot to cover here.

I think there's a lot of misunderstanding on the left broadly about what Marxism-Leninism is. I think it's quite easy for some people, people to just dismiss it based on stereotypes and refuse to engage with it on its own merits. So I really hope that this episode can serve as educational to people all across the left and especially those on the left that have a sort of distorted view of what Marxism-Leninism is. So let's go ahead and dive into it. What exactly is Marxism Leninism and how does it differ from Marxism generally?

Amato, you want to start? Yeah. To me, Marxism Leninism is not necessarily different from, Marxism proper. It utilizes the framework and methodology of scientific socialism. It utilizes the methodology of scientific socialism and of historical materialism and dialectical materialism set up by Marx in the situation of imperialism of monopoly capital and monopoly finance capital especially that came about at the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries. I'm going to piggy back on that a little bit. So I see

Marxism-Leninism as basically Marxism weaponized. So it's Marxism in action effectively. You know, especially the distinction today, which I think is the important distinction,

is that there's a lot of academic Marxists, right? And then there's Leninists who are usually politically active and actually doing stuff. Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. And does that stem from sort of the way Marx, I mean, Marx was certainly active as an organizer. He's exiled from country after country.

He, you know, formed the first international, et cetera. So, but Lenin is, but Lenin was actually involved in the making of a revolution. And do you think those historical facts lend themselves to, to that distinction? No. That's fair. No, no. Actually, the thing that lends itself to that distinction would be, sort of, of the academic left distancing itself from the working class and the academic left sticking with safe political talk and political action right and staying away from the broader workers movement isolating itself from that especially after 1917 is for me that's that's one of those big moments of break where you might be able to say there's a difference between as matt's put it the academic left and the

left that's constructing socialism, that's constructing new ways of dealing with the post-revolutionary society. So, you know, when you look at things like the Frankfurt School, this is sort of a reaction in a lot of ways to Leninism. It's where did we go wrong? It's where did socialism go wrong and try to pinpoint where socialism went wrong? That's a lot of why people sort of adapted. adopting readings of early Marx and trying to figure out the humanist aspects of Marx or these notions, these philosophical notions of alienation in Marx's work that are the thing that was missing in the Soviet Union, supposedly. So that's really where you start seeing the academic left distance itself from the workers'

movement and from Marxism and Leninism. And do you think the academic left distanced themselves from that based on just the messiness of actually trying to build a revolution like what's the disconnect there in your opinion i mean that's that's a really broad question um i think there's a lot of elements to it but it comes uh down to sort of like uh what what i call timeline socialism where people are constantly trying to pinpoint where the project went wrong which i think is you know the wrong the wrong thing to look at right there's people who who think that everything passed the paris commune you know it's been a complete disaster there's people who

see everything past 1917 as a disaster there's people who see everything after the spanish civil war is a disaster there's there's groups that say oh it was khrushchev's secret speech or it was you know post mount china and it was hua fong or you know deng Xiaoping you know there's always going to be people who who try to distance themselves from historical socialism and there's a myriad of different reasons but you know it's hard to pinpoint one specific one a lot of it has to do with sort of everything was going great until we fell away from the true path. And I think as this interview goes on, we'll kind of bump up against exactly what that path is and when people broke off.

But what major contributions did Lenin make to Marxist theory? Yeah, as a member of a Chicano, a scientific socialist party, the greatest contribution for me that Lenin made was creating an explicit anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist tendency in Marxism. it exists before obviously there's a particular chapter in i think volume one of capital capital however you want to say it that deals with primitive accumulation where mark says you know the the dawn of capitalism happened in colonies happen in points of extraction where early modern europe enslaved and forced indigenous people to work in silver mines and the americas enslaved african people off of the west coast of africa and forced trade galleons into philippa

and Chinese world in the Pacific, but Lenin takes that analysis and puts it into action in terms of directly talking about decolonization with ending the Russian Empire and installing the Soviet Union. For me, that's his biggest kind of contribution. Yeah, no, I mean, I'm in complete agreement here. One of the things that I think I would add on to that would be his theory of state was incredibly important, whereas Marx tertiary speaks about the state and its functions, Lenin starts outlining specifically functions of state and how they operate and lays out some really foundational ways of understanding the contradictions between classes that, you know, it's evident in, you know, Marx's work too, and I'm not trying

to discount Marx's work at all. You know, I mean, the 18th Bremere is obviously a great example of that. But Lenin lays out very specific methodologies for understanding the contradictions between classes in a specific social formation and how to exploit those contradictions to the benefit of the working classes. So the analysis of the state and the anti-imperialism that Lenin brought to Marxism, what you guys would say were the two major contributions. And we'll get in later to exactly what the Marxist-Leninist view of the state is. But one thing I do want to address up front is the question of how Marxism-Leninism-Leninism

differs from Marxism, Leninism, Maoism, Maoism, and what can Marxist-Leninists learn from Maoism, in your opinion? Sure. So Marxism, Leninism, Maoism is, as tendencies go, it's a pretty new tendency, right? There's claims that it was started with, you know, R.I.M. or M.I.M., depending on who you're talking to, they generally date it in the early 1980s. The term itself, you can find it in the 1970s. but as a distinct social movement, it really emerges in the 1980s.

So what is Marxism, Leninism, Maoism? I mean, really, it's sort of a couple of base propositions that they adhere to, right? It's the universality of contradiction, universality of people's war. You know, what that actually means is up to interpretation. When you look at it internationally, I mean, most MLMs work with Marxist Leninists, just fine and show international solidarity with Marxist Leninists and Marxist Leninist revolutions. When you look at it in the Americas, specifically USA and Canada, you know, there's a lot more of factionalism happening and a lot more sort of hair-splitting theoretical stuff happening.

So I think at one level it's overstated in the Americas, but, you know, I definitely do think that there are distinct tendencies. For me, I think that it's really important to separate Mao from MLM. MLM is not necessarily something that really comes from Mao. Most of it, as far as I understand,

was synthesized really starting in the 1990s. So the claim or ability to claim a legacy from Mao is, to me, extremely kind of tenuous. What I do see from MLM is I see the same kind of idealistic errors that repeat themselves, as Matt said, concerning when you get off of the socialist project,

the global socialist project. A lot of this comes in retrospect, or as Matt said, informed by earlier theorizing about Soviet social imperialism that occurred around the Sino-Soviet split, but really by the 1990s, when groups like the Revolutionary International Movement or groups in the Philippines or India

started to synthesize and work on MLM, there became a need for a theory to explain the collapse of the Soviet Union. As a kind of ex post facto thing, the claim became that the Soviets were somehow theoretically wrong or flawed and that that flaw carried out into the end, which, in my opinion, is an idealist error because to claim that there's some kind of internal system or internal contradiction that is a historical and continues from a certain set point into the end of a phenomenon, on is not really allowing for an analysis that unpacks and deals with kind of the broader facts and features of a historical situation.

I mean, we'll get into the details of it later, but that critique of idealism and trying to get off the socialist train when things get a little messy or imperfect in somebody else's view, that that idealism critique, that extends to anarchism, that extends to quote-unquote libertarian Marxist, that extends to Maoism, that extends to a whole slew of non-Leninist forms of socialism, is that correct? Trots, too, yeah. And we'll definitely get into the Trotskyest stuff in a bit. Let's just keep establishing some of the foundational ideas of Marxist-Leninism before we get into some of that.

But yeah, I just wanted to establish that that was kind of the position that Marxist-Leninists come at Maoists from. So moving on, the Vanguard Party is a concept that comes up a lot in Marxist-Leninist theory and Praxis. So what is the Vanguard Party and what role does it play in the Leninist theory? Well, let's start by looking at the Bolsheviks a little bit. So the Bolsheviks were successful in the Russian Revolution, not because they were the biggest party, not because they had the best ideas. It was because they adopted the people's ideas and wanted to meet the people where they were at with those ideas. So, I mean, the whole platform of like Peace Land and Bread, that's what people wanted. You know, that was basically meeting the demands of the working class at the time, right?

you know, I'm paraphrasing Mao here, but, you know, Mao talks about taking a bunch of confused ideas from the working class and basically distilling it and clarifying it and giving it back to them. That's really the role of the vanguard party. I think a lot of people interpret, you know, vanguardism as sort of like, oh, you know, they go in and they just take control and start telling everybody what to do. When really it's about clarifying what the ends of the people are and coming up with a pro. program to address those ends. So thinking about the Vanguard Party, you know, there's a lot of, again, similar to everything we've talked about in terms of misperceptions. There's a lot of misperceptions, mischaracterizations, and attacks on the concept of a

Vanguard Party, the idea that a Vanguard Party creates some kind of elite, that a Vanguard party somehow is less democratic. When a Vanguard really, again, as far as I know in the Leninist representation of it, is really just the most educated in terms of socialism, in terms of materialism, section of the working class. To have a vanguard that leads your party, as Matt said, means that you are going into educational spaces, you are going into communities and learning from the people who you want to be making decisions either on behalf of or who you want to be training into your decision-making or leadership positions. So for me, that's the most important part of the vanguard class. And again,

coming from my partido with the tradition of educating Chicano people in politics and our rights against colonial state, things like that, that's a big part of the political engagement that I've had and that I kind of continue to have as an educator myself. So in some sense, the Vanguard Party is almost like an organic occurrence. It just happens to be the most quote unquote advanced segment of the working class trying to raise the class consciousness of others and lead the way. Is that a fair way of thinking about it? Yeah, and I mean also organized into a party structure.

And the party structure, right, is not necessarily some kind of hierarchical nightmare, but really when we think of a party structure, I think of it at least, and I think that it falls into the Leninist idea of it. But you can't do everything for everybody at one time. The party structure allows you to be effective where you are and know, that there are other comrades who are working in their fields and their areas where they have effect or where they have understanding of the lay of the ground and the needs of people. So you don't have to be everywhere at once.

Not everybody needs to be some kind of legendary, revolutionary hero. You can be a working person who works, learns and teaches, learns from, and teaches with the working class. I totally, I like that idea. So moving on to a sort of controversial topic. I know there's a lot of pushback on this idea. and there has been historically as well. But the notion of scientific socialism, can you please clarify what scientific socialism is and what makes Marxist-Leninism a science? I want to start with what is a science. So in the broad sense, a science is a set of practices

and discourses that produces objective truth claims. I mean, in the most general sense, that's what of sciences. So if we're speaking about sciences, I think it's important to get to that first. So if we're looking at science in the broad sense, I don't think that it's preposterous to talk about methodologies in understanding histories of particular places, looking at world systems, looking at how economies function as sciences. I don't think it's a ridiculous claim. The next thing I want to bring up is, Brett, have you ever measured a table? I have not, but I can think about how that would go. Right. You can measure a table, right? And you can have three different people measure

a table, and you'll come up with three different measurements that might be slightly different, right? Depending on the instruments they're using and their vision and all sorts of things, right? Right. You've also bought a cup of coffee, right? Many times. Sure. I can tell you the exact price of that coffee. I can't necessarily give you that precise of measurement of a table because economies have mathematical relationships that occur that can be scientifically analyzed there's objective truths that emerge at the point of exchange so there's an objective value that's reached when you exchange a cup of coffee for a dollar

78 there's an objective truth that emerges there right that's measurable so there really is a very scientific basis for understanding how an economy functions. And people who scoffed that, I'm kind of confused by. Because I think it's a pretty basic thing to understand that there are mathematical relationships that are stapled on top of our material world that we use to understand and organize society. And studying those things, I mean, that's a science. now you can claim it's a social science sure anything involving people and how they're organized is a social science fine i mean i'll give you that but i don't think that it's less objective than say studying cellular biology in fact i'd say it's more objective because we have numbers we can

look at that are exact they're very precise numbers we have scientific data sets that we can produce no problem by looking at an economy and we can come up with very, you know, very objective data based on that. And that data can be very precise. When you measure something like Mount Everest, which they do, right, they measure Mount Everest every once in a while and they come up with varying different numbers. I'm saying scientists measuring Mount Everest are less precise than the number that you get when you exchange money for a cup of coffee. When you're studying an economy, there are objective truths at the base of it. And you can extrapolate different theories of what's happening.

But either way, the numbers are there and objective. And I would say, in fact, more objective than, say, studying cellular biology. So for me, is going to come at it from a completely different angle. Yeah. I'm ironic. I will. So for me as a historian, one of the things that we think about when we think about science is the fact that Marx really is the first social scientist in any kind of modern sense. What we have with Marxism and what we have with the scientific socialism that Marx starts is a set of reference that create a methodology for understanding history. For understanding history, not just as history in terms of what at that point was like a sort of headguessing. nation and the formation of nations that were always kind of floating around in the ether's ideas through the francs to france but rather thinking about history as a set of interactions relationships and of course modes of production that interacted with each other and that work together

in cooperation and in conflict or contradiction to create and change the lives of people, the direct conditions and lives of people. For me, that's the most scientific kind of core of Marxism. And looking to the fact that these bourgeois fields like sociology or history, well, put the finger at myself or my field anyways, have to take into account this more methodologically rigorous process and way of understanding history because of the power of Marx and eventually Marxism Lenin is.

is very clear to establishing the scientific nature of this socialist approach. In the same way that Darwin sought after the laws of biology and the laws of how organisms evolved in other organisms, would you say it's fair to say that Marx was trying to do that same thing with history and try to understand the laws of history and how history unfolds, and that's what in part makes it a science? I would say that part of that was his intent. And I would also say that what Marx does in doing that search for laws, if that's what he's doing all the way, is he finds that there are not a lot of hard and fast laws.

What really happens is people make history and the conditions that they exist in. The idea of these big universal laws, which, again, comes from Hegel in our most kind of direct sense, but which had been a part of European and Enlightenment thought before that, really kind of comes to an end with Marx's inquiry. If Marx did start out trying to find laws, what Marx finds instead is a complex system of interactions, almost an ecology, of factors that create history in a complex way. What Marx does in Capital, which is really neat in the first couple of chapters, is basically sets out, look, there's already these mathematical relationships that are emerging in exchange. I mean, there's already these mathematical relationships that are emerging. they're all human constructed and that's that's not that profound you know it's it's it's it's pretty basic right but at the same time you have to understand the methods and apparatuses we have for studying the world all emerge out of these economic activities you know

in a way understanding the history behind these sciences and the economies behind these sciences is just as fundamental as understanding the sciences themselves. Absolutely. To understand that science happens in a place that's created by labor, right? In laboratories that are constructed by laborers with tools that are made by laborers and which do not serve laborers creates a scientific question of who is this science for? How is this science really a science when, There's an exclusion or a silencing of this huge part of the scientific function in what ultimately is the bourgeois published conclusions of the scientific inquiry.

And Marx, of course, absolutely goes hard and deals with it in the way that Matt talked about in terms of saying these things are socially constructed and not socially constructed in kind of an airy or immaterial way, but they're socially constructed as in society works towards a certain point to literally construct the site. of this inquiry and it's not necessarily reflected in that inquiry so really truly thinking about scientific processes in a way that gives voice to working people who also help to create them or are fundamental more than even helping fundamental to this inquiry yeah and so you know and when we think about sort of you know mathematics and sciences and these kinds of things you look at like the ante during angles right one of his big fundamental things is is it's coming from the material world, right? Mathematics emerges from study of the material world.

It's not the inverse. And it comes from a very specific history, right? I mean, the reason why we have a base 10 system isn't some mystery to us, it's because we have 10 fingers. Right, right. It's an easy way of organizing mathematics. Yeah, that's fucking extremely fascinating.

That's always a question that, as a Marxist myself, I've struggled with and I've struggled to articulate, but I think that both of you did a really interesting, good job of articulating that. It's an interesting thing, and I think it leads well into this next question, which perhaps plays a role in that previous one, which is what is dialectical materialism and why is it important? It's actually a very relatively simple kind of position. The idea is simply that ideas come from material conditions.

Rather than thinking about ideas and forming material conditions, the ideas and ideologies and knowledge base of certain societies or all societies come from the material conditions within those societies as I was talking about earlier in my example of the workers who create scientific instruments and sites of science the ideas and the scientific revelations that come from that work come from that work they don't it doesn't work the opposite way yeah so I mean so this is the whole thing when when people People talk about like, oh, Marx's Hegelian roots and the Hegelian dialectic, you know, Marx basically just says the opposite of what Hegel said is true. You know, whereas Hegel thought society was materialization of rational thought, man's reason being deployed on the world, right?

Marx says quite the opposite, right? Mark says, no, our ideas are basically a reflection of the conditions of our lives. that's it that's it's not this mystical thing like the force that binds the universe together it's it's really basic yeah so he can he kind of brought hey i mean the quote goes he turned hagel on his head but he brought him down to earth and it's like it's not these abstract thoughts that irrationality or whatever that that dictates how things unfold in history but it's the direct material basis of any society that dictates how that society unfolds is that a is that a fair way of thinking about it? Sure. Well, you know, it's like, um, think, think about how laws get made. You know, laws don't get made because people have lofty ideas about how the world should work.

I mean, there's definitely rationalizations around them and discourses around them and stuff like that. But ultimately, laws get made to protect relationships that already exist. That's, that's exactly it, right? So there's these relationships that already exist, you know? When, uh, the statute of Anne in 1709, for instance, right? So we're talking about early copyright in Britain. There were already people in the Copywriters Guild who had specific interests they wanted protected. There are already people printing things

and they had specific interests that they wanted protected. And that law is a reflection of their interests. You know, it's couched in terms of the individual and all sorts of, you know, liberal ideology. But ultimately, it's about protecting very specific people's economic interests. Yeah, and speaking of liberalism and in contradistinction to materialism,

there's this notion of idealism or liberal idealism. And I think people sometimes struggle with being called an idealist, the colloquial term, you know, just means that you think of these beautiful, romantic ideas. But in Marxist, Leninist thought, in Marxist thought generally, idealism is a very specific thing, and it's the sort of opposite in some ways of materialism.

So could you guys go ahead and touch on what idealism is and maybe how it manifests itself in the liberal context? Great segue. Idealism is pretty much just the inverse of what we just talked about in terms of material dialectics. Idealism believes that there are ideas and concepts that move forward the wheel of history and time in the world and that every movement in history leads to a more fuller understanding or realization of that ideal.

Yeah, so, so like the idea of, you know, Barack Obama loved quoting Martin Luther King about the arc of history. Fukuyama, Francis Fukuyama loves talking about the end of history or didn't, you still love talking about the end of history. as sort of like as an unfolding towards greater freedom and greater personal liberties or you know it's sort of history has its own trajectory that's sort of we just have to bite it out and things are just going to get better I think that's that's that's again the same kind of Hagellian rationality right it's it's history is unfolding and human rationality is winning out yeah and I and I use the example of, because everybody in the United States is familiar with the notion of the American Revolution. The idealist, and correct me if I'm wrong, but the idealist approach to the

revolution in America would be a few great men had ideas about how the world should be based in liberty and freedom and quote unquote equality. These are slave owners we're talking about just as a side note. But their ideas are what pushed history forward, and that's what left feudalism and created capitalism and bourgeois democracy was a few good men with a few good ideas and that is a totally liberal idealist approach to history well i mean and you know when we look at the founding fathers you know those quote unquote founding fathers you know these these guys had very specific economic interests and and most of their new fangled ideas were adopted full whole cloth from british parliamentary law right the british had been

had just finished their own bourgeois revolution and you know obviously they didn't just get rid of the monarchy or anything like that but they had their own bourgeois revolution and the u.s followed suit that was that was basically it it was it was them and i mean again like so we can go back to the statute of anne right so 1709 copyright law outlines very specific uses and it's it's the basis of copyright law that we still see today right when you look at the first copyright um american copyright act it is whole cloth word for word the statute of anne the difference is they include maps and atlases right that's the only difference right obviously there are some serious uh consequences to that but ultimately they saw intellectual property in the exact same way that the british did and it's this isn't some like oh we have these new ideas about how property and liberty work no it was the exact same ideas exactly yeah and i and i i do

Idealism is, I just want to harp on this a little bit because I think it's important, and I know when people radicalize and they move from liberalism to more leftist forms of thought, this idealism can get stuck. And like you said, there's an infinite amount of little ways that idealism creeps into our minds. And that's the way that we think about history, we think about current political events. And so I think it's really important for people to kind of understand this distinction. And I guess just another quick way of highlighting it is the rise of fascism. The liberal idealist way of looking at it is, again, based on ideas. Bad people with bad ideas marching in the streets. The materialist way of understanding fascism would be to look at how capitalism creates the conditions for fascism, how capitalism incubates the hierarchies of race and gender, and that when capitalism is in crisis, these movements come to the fore as authoritative, violent ways of reinforcing those hierarchies that have been bred in capitalism over the years. Well, fascism is, I mean, fascism is basically the revenge of the petty bourgeoisie. Like, that's basically what fascism is.

Obviously, in the Weimar Republic, right, you know, it wasn't a working class movement. It was the shopkeepers, the middle managers. It was everybody who was left out during globalization, which globalization isn't a new thing. That's exactly what imperialism is, right? so it's these guys who get left out in globalization and gee whiz they don't have their cushy jobs anymore and they don't want to work like everybody else so what do they do they uh they organize in some really horrific ways and i think we see that we see that in venezuela uh currently we see that now here in the united states i mean it's it's it's happening i mean that's it's real

that's exactly what the new white nationalist movement is it's the quote unquote alt right these are these are all you know college educated white dudes who feel like they deserve their middle management positions and everything else, right? While we're on the topic of both fascism and idealism, I think one of the things that we can really look at in a connection between liberal and bourgeois idealism and fascism is fascists are obsessed with the idea of degeneration. And you can see very similar things in the bourgeois idealism that predates and follows fascism. The idea being that there is a pure idea and the pure idea is somehow corrupted or not lived up to in practice.

You can even see it if we're talking about the founding fathers. There is an entire kind of school of apologetics for them saying, well, yes, they were slave owners, but their ideals were very good. They just had to live in their historical times. And you can see this kind of conversation where, again, there is this immaterial ideal that is somehow kind of polluted in terms. terms of how it's practiced and how the historical situations and circumstances around an ideal somehow harm it and create these bad things through the perversion of an ideal. And so you can see, I think that you can make a pretty clear connection between how this understanding of the world idealism functions and some of the worst pieces of the last

100, 150 years of our history. Right. Yeah. And that's, I'm glad you, I'm glad you brought. up the whole degeneration piece. Absolutely. So, you know, when we look at, say, American liberalism today, we look at, you know, MSNBC talking about the death of the middle class and how things used to be better. You know, it's kind of like, well, for whom and, you know, how, right? It's like these ideas of there was a good society and it's been corrupted.

And it's really about finding out who the enemy in this, in this situation is and targeting them, right? Obviously, on MSNBC, it's the conservative movement. On Fox News, it's it's these secular progressives. So, I mean, it's, but ultimately liberalism has, and I mean, liberalism in the broad sense, has this idealistic approach to dealing with these things. And that idealistic approaches about how there's a good idea and it's malformed. and destroyed in the world. The world corrupts these good ideas. Yeah, that's extremely fascinating.

Both of you extremely well put. I mean, I think we could do an entire episode of just laying out examples of idealism and work. But yeah, I think that's both really good. And the idea of degeneration, of the purity of ideas being degenerated by certain influences is a wonderful way to highlight what idealism is. But moving on a little bit because we have to,

What is the Marxist-Leninist view of the state? And how does it differ from liberal conceptions of the state? I'll let Matt take that one. This is extremely my shit. So the state, I'm going to start with, okay, so a lot of people read Max Weber in college and the famous sociologist. And he has sort of a notion that the state is a monopoly on violence. this idea of the state's adopted by liberals it's adopted by a lot of anarchists too frankly it's this idea that it's like these these bodies of armed men are what make the state and what make the state work right it's these guys who are just able to use violence to coerce everyone into doing things you know and you can say it's good or bad and put all sorts of value judgments on it but no matter what those core ideas are still there right so that doesn't explain how a school functions. No one has to, you know, I mean, to get kindergartners to sit in a row, you don't have

to hit them. I mean, children early on learn to call and respond, sit still, be quiet, line up, listen to bells, all these kinds of things, right? I mean, this is a pretty fundamental part of our lives. I think all of us have experienced us, right? So, you know, how do you explain that? you can't explain that with just brute violence the state's much more complex than that liberals generally speaking describe the state and theories of state

in terms of formal distinctions between the state proper and you know like the government and the rest of society the public private distinction which is you know a purely bourgeois distinction what I think Marx's Leninists have done and they continue to advance this theory

and I don't think this you know ended with, you know, Lenin or anything like that, this theory continues to change and get better is start describing the state in terms of a set of instruments deployed to protect the bourgeoisie and to protect the relationships necessary for capitalism to continue. So when you look at the state in terms of a set of apparatuses deployed on a population, which, of course, population is also something that's constructed by the state. It's based on data sets gathered and produced by the state. When you start looking at the state in those terms,

you can start understanding its function in much more interesting ways. If you look at the functions of a school and the functions of a local newspaper, you start realizing, okay, gee whiz, this is about producing and reproducing these specific types of relationships, right? People need to understand that businessmen are important and they're good guys who help us out. And, you know, the small businessman isn't he important and great and aren't they terrific? And, you know, entrepreneurship, that's an important thing to learn about. And, you know, those are the kinds of values that are, you know, basically exalted in a school setting but also in the newspaper, right?

There's these sets of ideologies that are deployed. It's not just violence. Obviously, violence is a huge part of capitalism in the state. It's specifically used on oppressed nationalities in egregious ways, mostly because the state doesn't necessarily consider them to need that kind of ideological education. That ideological education isn't necessarily part of their upbringing, right? They need to learn to sit down and take orders and, you know, sit down and do your job, that kind of stuff, but they don't need to learn the same kinds of relationships that

bourgeois children need to learn. So really it's about deploying and reproducing class. And it starts in class distinctions, you know, obviously like class isn't hereditary in the sense that like monarchies in the olden times were these hereditary, you know, there were hereditary classes where, you know, you'd be born a peasant and you would live a peasant through the rest of your life. You know, we have our Horatio Alger stories where people become obscenely rich from, you know, middle class backgrounds or whatever and isn't that special. But the distinctions of class start in less formal settings than just work, right? Obviously, Marxists think of class in the terms of relations of production. You know, you're working class because you earn a wage and you go to work

every day and you do that. Or you're bourgeoisie because you live off of just capital. You just own things and that's how you make your money, right? But the distinctions, start and the relationships start in the schools. They start, you know, on Nicktoons and the Cosby Show. So the state is a large set of apparatuses that aren't centrally controlled. So it's not that the state is like, you know, like the centrally planned, you know, top down hierarchy that's like a, you know, pyramid scheme or something like that with, you know, the big eye of raw at the top. It's not the Illuminati or anything like that. Instead, it's a set of different apparatuses that are controlled by the same classes of people. So they have their

own interests and there's conflicts within the state, obviously, right? There's contradictions between the different smaller ruling classes, right? You know, some landlords don't have the same interests as the newspaper owners or, you know, the landlords aren't going to have the same interests as maybe a tech startup, but there's enough commonalities that there's a structure to it and there's a stability to it. So in some sense, like to dilute it and make it more simplified, but it's a tool of class domination. And the Marxist-Leninist view is that the capitalists under bourgeois democracy have control of the state. It's the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. And Marxist-Leninist revolutions aim to take back control of the state by the

proletariat and rule the society in favor of that class and ultimately destroy class society altogether is I mean hyper simplified of course but I'm just trying to if I can make an interjection I think one of the big things that anti-Leninist or anti-Marxist leninist or anti-scientific socialist however you want to call it arguments about whether or not we maintain the state don't take into account is the very nature of switching the class character of the state dissolves the older state and you can see this just even as simply

as kind of thinking about the juridical aspects of post-revolutionary states. The USSR was not Tsarist Russia. Zeris Russia was dissolved. China after its successful revolution was not the China run by nationalists nor was it the China run by Japanese occupations and occupiers.

So to think about the state as a continuous a historical phenomenon that is maintained even after a revolution is kind of fishy even to me switching the class character of the state in my opinion in effect dissolves the previous state formation yeah so so when we talk about the state and we talk about it in terms of a group of armed men you know what I mean like okay well yeah does the state dissolve after a socialist revolution? No, there's still, you know, groups of armed people who are protecting the social order, right? Okay, sure. I guess if that's your definition of state, then the state's going to continue to exist until, you know, there's no more enemies of socialism trying to destroy it

from the outside, right? But if you look at the state in terms of a set of tools for class control, yeah, I think that, you know, I think that the state is transformed in in some very serious ways. And I don't think that you can really call it anything close to a capitalist state. And what are the consequences of disowning the state or in the midst of a revolution to just toss the state aside

as something that is the enemy and something to not be picked up by the working class? That's a great question. Do your children have any diseases? You know, do you have seniors that are dependent on Social Security? you know are we tossing those people aside too it's one thing to talk about

abolishing the police that's that's one thing right or you know deposing the police right that's that's one thing that's one conversation but when you talk about destroying the state we're also talking about the welfare state and I'm not willing to just destroy it

I want to strengthen it I want that to be a much better set of institutions you know I'm not interested in destroying Medicaid. I want Medicaid expanded, you know? And I don't mean that in the sense of like, you know, the Social Democrat approach necessarily, right?

But I don't think that destroying these institutions that are necessary, at least temporarily, until we replace them with better systems, I don't think we can just toss those things out. And I think it's sort of, sort of a macho, I'm going to say it's like a macho broish kind of attitude to take towards this kind of stuff where it's like well I'm fine because

I'm 20 years old and healthy and that's that's that's I mean that's extremely interesting and that actually I have lots of anarchist friends you know I have I organize and have friends with people all over the left but that's exactly what brought me out of anarchism and moved me towards Marxism was almost that exact thought is like if we you know the revolution happens we take down the state and we just let it all go to localism, you know, to build up alternative forms of social organization, blah, blah, blah, whatever. But in the meantime, people are depending on that Medicaid check. People need a robust health care system to take care of them. People need their kids to be, you know, fed and clothed and have transportation. And in some sense, you just can't smash the state

without harming lots and lots and lots of innocent people. I understand, I understand the urge on some But at the same point, like you have to understand that people depend on a sort of system that makes sure that everybody's taken care of. And what is that if not the state? And to an extent, this is, you know, something I don't like getting into, which is sort of like what if scenarios. But, you know, I mean, how are we going to take care of diabetics? You know, that's, that's a really basic thing. I've got friends who are diabetics. I'm quite fond of them and I want them to do well. You know, I want us to be able to take care of people. This isn't about my personal. fantasies of violence and rebellion. It's not about that, right? This is about the conditions of real people's lives and improving them. And if we can move past

our own childish fantasies about this stuff, I think we can actually start having a serious discussion about how do we solve a problem like the state. Amato, do you have anything to say before we move on? I think that one of the things that we have to understand about these state arrays too is

how much they're responsible for creating the world and the way that people can imagine functioning. One of the deeper things that I think about a lot is, as a Chicano, I think a lot about our indigenity, how much of our indigenity is processed through these state kind of lenses and thinking about how the state views, as Matt mentioned, oppressed nations and what the state creation of oppressed nations means and how that then in turn creates, you know, very real divides between people's statuses as enrolled members, as non-enrolled members, whether or not people count in one demographic category or another. And one of the things that we really need to think about is moving beyond that simplistic

idea of a state being kind of only made up of force and thinking instead about how the state makes it powerful. for people to believe in it, and the capitalist state, I should say, you know, obviously the proletarian and a revolutionary state has similar identity creation possibilities within it. But thinking really hard about teasing out the ways in which state constructs identities and the ways that the bourgeois dictatorship arrays kind of its colonized and subject people is really worthwhile thinking about as a kind of subcategory of. kind of leftist or communist or Leninist thought. So yeah, I want to touch on that too. I think that that's a really good

point. The deployment of state benefits based on someone's status and in a community and in a supposedly sovereign nation within the United States right? The state

deploys identity right in very serious ways and with the removal of the state, you don't just abolish these different, you know, identities and the bizarre racism that's been produced around them as well. If the state's abolished tomorrow, you know, I mean, white nationalists are going to have a field day, right? I mean, like, that's the thing. You're just playing into the hands of our enemies. It's like, okay, so we abolish the state. You think the capitalists aren't going to retake things real quick?

or maintain the racial categories that are already used and naturalize it, you know, right? The state's gone, but people are going to be like, well, actually, you're still this and I'm still that. It's going to continue. So there needs to be a revolutionary, proletarian structure, a state that says, hey, actually, that's racist. And by the way, we're working towards the goal of decolonization overall. And that's the thing. I mean, one thing we can learn from revolutionary Russia, right, is that they had one of the most successful affirmative action programs like human history. I mean, they use the state to guarantee education for people.

They use the state to guarantee rights for people in ways that the U.S. tried to adopt to some extent even, right? I mean, a lot of the civil rights programs that you see in the United States are basically a reaction to the USSR, right? It's people adopting the exact same methods and trying to push through the bourgeois state some of the same kind of programs that exist in the USSR. And I think that's something that goes really unnoticed and untalked about is this notion that, you know, during the Cold War, when you had this international communist movement, that it actually, kept capitalists at bay in some sense. Even in capitalist countries, they had to make concessions to the working class because they feared the working class doing to them what they did in Russia. And with the collapse of the Soviet Union, you see roughly the rise of neoliberalism, and that's not a mistake, precisely because the threat is gone. You know, Francis Fukuyama

talking about the end of history. Communist threat is gone, and so we can do whatever we want. And here we are in 2017, neoliberalism ravaging the globe, and people are wondering what happen? Well, in some large part, the end of communism is what happened. All right, so moving on now, we're going to talk a little bit about this major split because I do think it's important and I think a lot of people harp on it a lot, especially on Left Book for better or worse. But there is a split that occurred between Marxist Leninists who upheld Stalin and Marxist Leninist who upheld Trotsky. Why did that split occur and what are the differences between those two camps today? I'd like to clarify one thing real quick. There was a split between Marxist Leninists and Trotskyist.

Got them. Again, it's very much indicative of some of the problems that we've talked about before. And in idealist conceptions of revolutions in history, most of the popularity of Trotskyism comes from the challenge of real socialism, starting in 1917, and heading into the 1920s when people from Emma Goldman all the way up to Trotsky start to say well this revolution is not exactly what we want and it turns into a split which pop becomes very popular in the western world where trotsky does a fair amount of evangelization for his position from what i understand trotsky is seen as kind of a marginal figure after that point in

the soviet union after his exile and his losing of elections but there's something very appealing to the counterfactual idealist way of understanding history that says well this idea this revolution degenerated this revolution did not do what it should have done uh and if things had been different if history had been different if trotsky not stalin had been in power everything would have been great and we would have had worldwide socialism number one that's a counterfactual number two all of a sudden we're back in this very comfortable and familiar idealist territory and It's not a mistake, and it's not a coincidence that this happens, that this seems to be how this rhetoric and how this split is kind of carried forward. Yeah, I mean, with the whole conversation about Trotsky, it's really uninteresting.

And the whole Trotsky-Stalin debate, I think, is even less interesting. You know, it harkens back to, you know, great man theories of history. It's like these great intrepid men are the ones who make history, you know. And the reality, of course, is the Soviet Union was made by millions and millions of people. It was millions and millions of people organizing their lives and creating a new society. You know, there's not much I can really say about Trotsky. He's not a particularly exciting figure. But would you say, because I think the interesting thing there is that there's a tendency on both sides of that particular debate of emphasizing the role of one person, whether you're defending Stalin or defending Trotsky.

and that's the fundamental issue you have with the debate, not that you're taking one side over the other. I think there's sort of an ironic, you know, kind of adoption of Stalin and rehabilitation of Stalin that's happened. And, I mean, it's more like, you know, there's all these really terrible Western histories that have been done of the USSR, particularly post-Lennon. And I think a lot of the Stalin stuff comes from sort of

just kind of rejecting that narrative and rejecting kind of the really, poorly done histories that were, you know, at times funded by the U.S. State Department and by MI6 and all these kind of weird stuff, right? But, you know, I just don't think it's a particularly valuable debate. I really don't. Yeah, I kind of feel the same way. I mean, you know, you can have your positions, but, like, in my opinion and in my experience, the best criticisms of Stalin come from Marxists, come from Marxists, the way of putting him in his proper context and and having those critiques like it's not it's not like marxist leninists are just

personality worshippers who just think Stalin was this wonderful god that led everybody into a perfect revolution of course not but the the conversation around those issues gets so diluted and so black and white and so non-newance that it's just it's exhausting and it's super unproductive well it's also idealistic right it really directs back into this history being about individuals and individual will uh who gives us shit. The majority of Soviet people of people living in Soviet republics

fought off fascism in great sacrifice and in great sacrifice of numbers but literally toe to toe defeated capitalism in the greatest front in military history, the largest military front in human history

and we're stuck with this fight between two people it doesn't really make sense to me either. Another phrase and concept that's often used, especially in debate, is this concept of actually existing socialism. So can you go ahead and flesh out what that is? Again, this is a distinction that's made between, you know, the ideal of socialism and the actual material reality of socialism, right? So that term, of course, is distinguishing that socialism has in fact

existed first and foremost, and that it's something that we can actually study and look at, and we can actually look at the history, and actually draw conclusions from it. Amato, you got anything you want to say about actual existing socialism? So I've heard a criticism of the term recently, which has kind of got me to step away from it, and maybe it's not a fair criticism, but some people have told me that it's a remnant of the Sino-Soviet split, that the USSR utilized it to attack China. if that's the case and I think I saw some compelling

evidence that it was I think we can move away from that and really think about socialism as a historical phenomena and really thinking about what happened in socialist construction over the 20th century since

1917 instead of really kind of taking a dogmatic approach that says you know degenerated worker state or revisionism or all these other kind of categories of considering socialist nations, not socialist, or somehow characterizing them as not socialist. So the final question, before we wrap up, we're way over time,

but it's totally fine because I think there's so much good stuff in here. But, you know, it is the 100-year anniversary of the October Revolution. So why, in both of your opinion, is Marxism, Leninism still relevant today as it's ever been? Marxism, Leninism is still relevant because it wins, whereas there are a lot of different tendencies out there that have all sorts of fantastical ideas about how revolutions ought to work. Marxism-Leninism is the methodology that has consistently led to successful revolutions. For me, what I think about a lot, I think about comradeship and I think about international solidarity. In our worst moments, even under Trump, even under the deportation of millions of people and the frequent murder of indigenous and black people in the United States of America, I find power in thinking about the last hundred years and the way and situations our comrades dealt with and triumph and won and dared to win, even in the situations where they didn't win. But you think about the situation against czarism and being the only single socialist nation for about 20, 30 years.

that the Soviet Union face all the way up into defeating the Nazis again, toe to toe in open combat. You think about the situation that the Chinese Communist Party faced with the destruction of its numbers and the long march.

You think about the, what, 20 years struggle, 30 years struggle that Vietnam had to become a socialist nation. All of these people are our comrades, our Korean comrades, and facing absolute nuclear devastation as a outcome to the war.

War of the United States and the United Nations is supposedly neutral international force invading and then also threatening with nuclear weapons. I think about our comrades and our Marxist-Lennist comrades all around the world and through the history of the 20th century from 1917 till now, the 21st century as well. And I find power and inspiration in that as bad as things can get for us, we have millions, if not billions of comrades who have fought their heart. artist to make the world that we live in now. And it may not be a perfect world.

You know, we're not looking for a perfect world. At least I'm not. I'm just looking for a world where I can find some way to make a difference. And thinking about the experiences, the experiences and lives of those comrades is extremely helpful to me. And I want to be in solidarity with them. So I understand how they viewed the world and what the platform they used. And that unavoidably and unmistakably is Leninism.

Beautifully said. you know people talk about big big tent intersectional politics a lot and sort of like you know what's how we're going to be intersectional how we're going to address this how we're going to address this Marxism-Leninism has been the most successful at that and it is the big tent right Marxism and Leninism is the big tent and that's the thing that the people don't necessarily grasp specifically in the American context when you look at the rest of the world and you look at progress on social values on economic values, on any front that's really important to people, right? When you look at active anti-racism, these are the Leninists moving history here. This isn't done by well-intentioned liberals. This is done by hardworking people organizing themselves.

And I think that's really the thing that a lot of people miss out on when they look at Leninism is they think of it as sort of like, oh, it's one of many tendencies, especially, like, again, in America, right? But you look around the rest of the world, and, you know, they're all Leninists. I mean, you can distinguish MLM from Leninism in the American context in a much more fluid way than you can, say, in the Philippines who shouts out solidarity to the DPRK all the time. You know what I mean?

Yeah, I think that ultimately it's the big tent. and it's big tent politics, and it's continuing to be the big tent, and it will continue to be the big tent in the future. Well said on both your parts, and a little fun fact is behind the United States, when we look at our data for this show and see which countries download it the most, right behind the United States is the Philippines, and only after the Philippines, as Canada and England and Australia, English-speaking countries follow, so that's an interesting point to end on. Thank you both for coming on so much. I really appreciate it. I know this went a little over

time, but your dedication and your willingness to sit through and trudge through a lot of these concepts is seriously, I really appreciate and I think our listeners will as well. But before we leave, do you guys want to toss out any recommendations for anyone who listen to this episode and wants to learn more about anything we've discussed today? You know, we're on Facebook. We have a bunch of joke groups that you can join. We also have socialist discourse, which is a Facebook group you can join both me and Amato are in there we're happy to talk to you guys anytime

solidarity to our comrades in the Philippines I'm a historian so I do a lot of historical reading the most recent works in American history including the half has never been told and River of Dark Dreams

really challenge us to rethink the way that America is seen and interpreted not only in internally, but through the globe. So I really recommend just seriously trying to think about history as a way to understand the world. And it doesn't necessarily need to be history written by Marxist people. One of the big things that I think about is, you know, me and Matt both. We became friends on the basis of kind of our voracious reading. I don't know if I'm as voracious anymore, but we definitely read a lot. But I really recommend read as much as you can. can study as much as you can, even if it's not in the context of school, all of these things that we've talked about today, I didn't learn that in the context of school. They don't support this kind of learning and knowledge in Española, New Mexico's public school system and

Albuquerque, New Mexico's public school system, and certainly not in the colleges, which are really kind of focused on remaking bourgeois society and bourgeois life. Work with people that you can study on your own. Think critically about what you read. and always be willing to learn more. Absolutely. And I hope in some small way that this podcast helps people do that. So, anything, any last words? I just wanted to say, like, because every time a motto goes, I want to respond because I think of something.

You know, a lot of younger people, like, ask stuff like, hey, what should I think about this? And that's really the wrong question, right? It's not about what you should think about something. It's, hey, what methods are there for thinking about things? And a lot of people, when they get involved in left politics, start shutting themselves off and only reading stuff from their tendency or whatever or stuff that their friends approve of and stuff like that. And it's really dangerous. You know, you should read everything you can get your hands on. Even if you don't agree with it, you should understand the arguments, right? You should understand the logic behind it. Because you're way better off understanding not just, you know, your own position. but understanding your enemy and understanding the disparate different nuances that different people do take on positions and really coming up with your own conclusions you know you don't agree with everybody on everything to be a good comrade and those and those arguments that you

have with people if they stay principled you can grow from and learn a lot from i really encourage people to not just adopt a line, but to understand the line. Well said, and, you know, from my perspective, both of you are serious comrades of mine. I respect and value your insight, and I thank you both for coming on the show. It means the world to me, and I hope our listeners get a lot out of this episode. Thank you very much. Thank you, comrade. Benceramos.

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