No problem!

You’re pretty close, generally. Pol Pot wasn’t a Marxist at all, though, the Khmer Rouge rejected Marxism, and his form of “communism” was deeply anti-materialist and was idealist in nature. He was also stopped by the Vietnamese. Hoxha is Hoxha. The Korea bit and USSR/PRC bits are of course oversimplified, but broadly accepted as correct.

There are issues within PSL, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t overall a Marxist group. The issues in PSL are largely varied by locality. At the moment, they are still at the forefront of agitation for Palestine, and do other cool work like labor organizing.

As for Xi Jinping, he’s a Marxist, undoubtedly. The PRC has a Socialist economy, the large firms and key industries are overwhelmingly in the public sector. They have a long way to go to abolish commodity production, but they are well into the process of centralizing all of the means of production and developing the productive forces to aid in that task, eventually allowing for commodity production to be ended. I wrote a bit more on the subject than this oversimplification here, but I am more than willing to answer any questions you may have.

From what I can gather, it seems you aren’t super familiar with Marxism beyond some of the basics, so you are definitely not alone in seeing China as some form of Capitalism just because it still has some private property and participates in global markets, but those complaints are generally resolved by reading Marx, Engels, Lenin, etc.

You could also use it as a learning opportunity, explore Marxist thinking and viewpoints.

Sounds like Blackshirts and Reds did its job! As you point out, its biggest strength is also its biggest weakness. In being a short and direct cry of support for revolution in the wake of the dissolution of the USSR, which set Socialism back dramatically at the time (especially because the 90s really did seem like China had abandoned Socialism, when we now know that that wasn’t the case and Deng’s gamble paid off), it also skimps out on thorough analysis and deep historical account.

I want to add that the purpose of my list is to equip the reader with solid foundational knowledge of Marxism-Leninism, so that the reader may better make up their own conclusions and further explore theory and historical texts (though I do include a section on history later).

As for Envisioning Real Utopias, I hadn’t heard of it until you told me, truth be told. My immediate reaction to trying to establish cooperatives to “overcome Capitalism” is that it doesm’t work like that. Cooperatives are better in that they avoid the excesses of standard firms, but since they fundamentally rely on exclusive ownership there is a barrier to scaling, and a lack of a collective plan. It merely repeats petite bourgeois class relations, an individualist view of the economy rather than a collectivist, resulting in an economy run by competing interests rather than being run by all in the interests of all. I actually wrote a comment on the communist perspective on cooperatives a few days ago.

I also think that, eventually, you’ll want to read Anti-Dühring. Engels counters the cooperative model from a Marxist perspective. It’s the much larger book the essay Socialism: Utopian and Scientific comes from, so if you’re down for a challenge you can read Anti-Dühring instead of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.

Ultimately, it boils down to 2 possibilities, neither of which are good for the cooperative model:

1. We try to build cooperatives within Capitalism, and establish our “seed bank” cooperatively. This runs into several errors:

-The state will dismantle any legitimate threat to the Capitalists if Capitalists cannot find a way to profit off of this new development

-Cooperatives alone are not enough to overcome Capitalism, rather, they replicate it in a different form

-Production is already extremely complex and monopolized, the age of small businesses growing to huge powerhouses is dying. Cooperatives will always be at a disadvantage when competing with established businesses

2. Cooperatives are the basis of a Socialist economy, where the workers have dismantled the Capitalist state and hold power over Capitalists, also called “Market Socialism”

-Cooperatives compete and eventually begin to replicate bourgeois class relations, if the public ownership of the economy is not the dominant factor, ie in control of larhe firms and industries. A few cooperatives would scale and create a new Capitalist relation.

Those are just my perspectives based on your summary. Cooperatives certainly aren’t bad at all, and are a part of Socialist economies as a minority of the economy, like Huawei in China or the collective farms in China. However, public ownership is still the key factor, as it goes beyond the profit motive and into allowing humanity to finally direct production for the needs of all, and not for the profits of the few.

You’ll have plenty of time to develop your own opinions, cooperatives are certainly better than traditional firms, but you’ll find Marxists typically don’t agree with “utopia building” and other cooperative forms of ownership, and you’ll best see why generally in section 2.

Won’t find me weeping for an active defender of genocide being put in the cemetary.

🦀 🦀 🦀

I’m aware

Let me guess, you think being a Marxist is evil?

Lemmy.world frequently calls Lemmy.ml evil, yet to our knowledge only a Lemmy.world mod has gone on to become a domestic terrorist, a Malthusian no less. It points to hypocricy.

Fantastic, glad you liked it! Any thoughts or questions you might want to offer? Selfishly, feedback for my list is always appreciated, I like tweaking it from time to time, haha.

I think you’re using your own personal experience with Marxists in your area as a blanket to generalize. Marxists as a general rule don’t spend all their time hypothesizing about future society, but practice labor organization, protesting, and building dual power (similar but not the same as prefiguration). The Black Panther Party, Marxist-Leninists as we all know, was famous for directly going out and feeding people, and protecting them from the State. The Party for Socialism and Liberation is at the forefront of the US-based pro-Palestinian protests. Marxists do get the here and now done.

Your personal experiences are giving you a malformed view of the broader US-based Marxist movements, which are recovering from the heights of the Red Scare. They are also missing the global context, Marxists currently govern many countries like China, Cuba, Vietnam, etc, and China in particular is becoming more and more important in the world context, which has an impact on US-based organizing as well.

I think you’re running into resistance because you have painted Marxists in general with your experiences of one subset of the particular.

The point is to show that anticommunists complain about Lemmy.ml like McCarthy, but it ended up being a Lemmy.world mod that committed Malthusian terrorism.

Believe it or not, Lemmy.ml is federated with many instances.

Usually is more common on Hexbear and other more explicitly Leftist instances, I don’t typically frequent slrpnk.net so I am not sure if that terminology has spread there. If it hasn’t, it’s likely due to defederation and whatnot, IMO. Just spitballing, but I’ve seen stormfront.world frequently enough.

Mander.xyz is a better instance for science than Lemmy.world anyways.

Seems to be pretty effective, sitting at 76 upvotes and 9 downvotes as viewed from Lemmy.ml. Seems the random and baseless assertion of Russian propaganda is less effective.

Typically Leftists on the various Lemmy instances.

Yep, it’s Malthusian nonsense.

I don’t really think it’s brigading to participate on threads you’re federated with. If comments on threads federated with Hexbear are active, Hexbear users see them, and as Hexbear is a large instance, this appears as brigading, but is just a natural element of participation in federation. Some instances are hostile to Communists, so they didn’t want a bunch of Communists on every thread, so they defed.