Right, if you haven't seen it it must not exist. Are you from Missouri? If that level of radical skepticism works for you, good on ya. Personally, I don't conflate things that I don't know with things that can't be known.
A trained Marxist is an activist, it's really that simple. The point is not to interpret the world but to change it yada yada yada. A Leninist is a Marxist who believes the proletariat is too economically comfortable to bring about the revolution and therefore an intellectual vanguard of "trained" revolutionaries (marxist activists) are required to lead the way. Time to hit the books!
I've seen those before. So a basically unknown neo-marxist group gloms onto a grassroots movement. So what? Are you daft enough to think they speak for them now?
And, ffs, what does on earth does "trained marxist" even mean? I repeat my question: is it like a "trained capitalist"? If not, why not?
I'm yet to see anyone describe themselves as simply a 'trained Marxist' without any indication as to what that might mean specifically, other than these BLM leaders. A 'trained Marxist guerilla'? Sure. A 'trained Marxist economist'? Sure. 'Educatied in Marxism'? Sure. Even just a 'Marxist', sure. But even with the Leninist part (which the quote doesn't specify - there are plenty of non-Leninist Marxists about) it's unclear what it means to be a 'trained' one. It's not as though there's a 'Marxism coach' somewhere who trains you on understanding the significance of the ratio between constant and variable capital or the labour theory of value.
It's hilarious because it's so vague, not because there are guerillas or revolutionaries who have been trained by Marxists in agitprop/organizing/guerilla tactics. In short, what's the difference between being a 'trained Marxist' and 'educated in the works of Marx and Engels'? If I heard someone describe themselves as a 'trained literary critic', I'd think exactly what GP pointed out too.
My comment is just as much a criticism of the vagueness of the BLM leaders as it is the people who accept them at their word without even inquiring into what it means. For all we know, they could literally just be holding a philosophy degree completed with a Master's project in an aspect of Marxist philosophy.
> A "critique" that seems to have never really "worked yet" or burned itself out every time?
You've probably been duped by Leninist propaganda into mistaking Leninism and its descendants for Marxism (and, moreover, apparently the sole actual Marxism.) Leninism is, at best, a radical revision of Marxism in a attempt to erase the prerequisite for a developed capitalist economy with broad working class class consciousness.
The actual place Marxism, and not radical revisions like Leninism and its descendants, has had an effect is throughout the advanced Western states where capitalism -- the late-19th Century system critiqued by Marx -- was universally dominant, where it formed the core energizing various movements against that system, including particularly the labor movements, resulting in the replacement of the capitalist system Marx critiqued and the emergence and then dominance of the modern mixed economy, which while certainly not the end-state Marxism was directed at is clearly comprised of steps in the direction Marx called for.
It's not as funny when you get to live under the rule of well trained Marxists. Hundreds of millions of them have been produced over the last century. Look into a history book or just ask around.
I can at least appreciate someone who advocates for non-Marxist or Leninist forms of communism or just socialism in general. But there has been a remarkable rise of young people who now defend Leninist communism!
I think for a lot of people, it's intellectual junk food. A Marxist revolution has a low risk of actually happening in the modern world. And rather than educating yourself on policy and working on advocacy, you get to play in a fantasy world where you don't have to do anything except fight the conspiracy suppressing a natural egalitarian world order.
Here's the danger of making assumptions about people you don't know on the internet. As it happens, I not only read the manifesto, I was born and raised in the country that had the study of the discipline of "Scientific communism" a requirement for getting any higher education:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_communism
So I have a very good reason to assume that my background in both theory and practice of Marxist regimes is no less than yours.
While one could have legitimate differences on the merits of teaching of Marx, it is obvious to any informed person that they were presented as the scientific basis for building new kind of society both in theory and in practice. Even if the theory was false and the practice made it degrade into dogmatic repetition of meaningless drivel, it was still presented as the scientific approach and meant to be so.
That looks vastly superior to the above, and I'll make an effort to watch it. Thanks for the source.
Edit:
Ok so first of all, I think I should state that I am not a Marxist. I'm of the liberal persuasion, in that I think free markets with a good social safety net is the current optimal economic and political structure. That being said, I like to understand Marxist criticism of the above.
I don't think that this is a really good or compelling argument with regards to "post-modernism". Basically, the gist of it is that Marxism says X, X has empirically failed, far-leftists chose a childish reaction of not acknowledging the facts and so they embraced post-modernism to avoid having to deal with it.
The argument fails on several dynamics.
First, it fails to acknowledge that there are multiple political theories within Marxism itself. The Soviet Union, for example, started from Leninism, and there are quite a lot of Marxists that reject that. This allows him to claim that the failure of one type of Marxist thought is equivalent to it all failing without having to actually support that argument. Its pretty intellectually dishonest.
Second, he really doesn't seem to understand some of the core things about Marxism. In particular, he boils down the notion of exploitation to a moral argument, using the colloquial definition and emotional reactions of the term. But Marx used the term in a descriptive manner to describe how value created by a worker did not go to the worker but to their employer. Neither does Marxism necessarily involve central planning by the workers which he seems to suggest. It also isn't necessarily focused on sharing. There can still be markets in a such a market-based, Marxist economy, but the products would be produced by companies that are owned and ran by the workers at those companies.
Third, he does not really do any sort of deep analysis of capitalism. In particular, he talks a lot about material conditions in capitalist nations vs the soviet union and prescribes things like purges to marxism. But what is elided is the fact that capitalism has also done some pretty terrible stuff in third world countries. All of that is simply ignored in the argument.
Fourth, he says post-modernism is embraced without any real evidence. I can't say that the far left is any more post modern than it was in the past, and that statement was just dropped there without any support.
Fifth, he says that post modernism was embraced to avoid facing the facts. This is also not evidenced. It could be that those with different perspectives are just looking at different things and facts and are weighing things differently.
He uses 1-3 to try to argue that these beliefs are obviously wrong and not supported by reality and then 4-5 to say that a certain set of beliefs are due to child-like rejection of the facts.
In other words, his argument is poor, he is incredibly dismissive the people he is criticizing, and is not doing intellectual due-diligence with his arguments.
The idea of somebody being a "trained Marxist" is very funny. Personally, I'm a 4th degree Historical Materialist and I'm training for the 2nd level Communist obstacle course
> Marxism–Leninism follows the ideas of Marxism and Leninism
Well, that's the marketing PR of Leninism, which has been uncritically accepted by those who oppose both Marxism and Leninism without really understanding either. Leninist vanguardism, in reality, rejects a number of fundamental elements of Marxism in order to bypass essential preconditions -- such as the existence of a developed capitalist society to build on -- in order to develop a theory of how to pursue goals similar to those expressed in Marxism in places where the essential prerequisites Marx saw were not present.
Just studying Marxism is an individual act of revolution. The mental impact on one's mind, when you finally get it, is irreversible. "Class Consciousness" is a revolutionary virus of the mind.
Thank goodness for a healthy mental immune system, then. Proponents of Marxist thought seem to believe that because they've found there's a different way of looking at the world that explains some things better than their default view, it must thus be correct in all respects. Pointing out that one has simply swapped one kind of tunnel vision for another tends to be poorly received. This is not to say the study of Marx is without value, but I'm being a lot kinder to Marxism here than Marxists are towards their perceived 'class enemies'.
Anyway yes, the reading list is underwhelming. 4 works about Mao, but nothing by Mao himself, or by Che Guevara? Disqualifying fail.
On Guerilla Warfare by Mao Tse-Tung
Guerilla Warfare by Ernesto Che Guevara
Coup d'etat: a practical handbook by Edward Luttwak
The Authoritarian Specter by Robert Altermeyer
On the psychology of military incompetence by Norman F Dixon
That should see you through the practical end of things.
48 Laws of Power and other books by Robert Greene are good introductions to political strategy, along with Machiavelli's classic The Prince. A look at the aftermath of the French revolution is probably good idea as well if you intend to retire peacefully.
A trained Marxist is an activist, it's really that simple. The point is not to interpret the world but to change it yada yada yada. A Leninist is a Marxist who believes the proletariat is too economically comfortable to bring about the revolution and therefore an intellectual vanguard of "trained" revolutionaries (marxist activists) are required to lead the way. Time to hit the books!
reply