For those who are not familiar with the Marxist revolutionary canon, I will attempt — against all good counsel — to sum up the wildly varying traditions of revolutionary Marxism in a single, pithy sentence: Marxists believed —and believe — that the ruling capitalist class had enslaved the working class in all but name, and that the only way to truly free them of those social bonds would be through a revolutionary transformation of society that instituted equitable control of its means of production and its output.

An interesting piece that I appreciated reading. If I have any major critiques, they are that I think that Lenin's more liberal affectations (not ungenuine affectations by any stretch) were more pronounced in his earlier writings, especially when he was more fond of Karl Kautsky.

I don't mean this as a denigration of Lenin. I think that the political function of a strive toward "liberty", while correct in moral weighting, is insufficient for a revolutionary drive -- and I believe Lenin himself recognized this, after attempts at compromise with the bourgeoisie led to frustration and stagnation (see: the Provisional Government era).

It is, of course, also useful to note the role of Menshevik propaganda against the Bolsheviks, which this piece covers quite well.

Broadly, they argued that Lenin was unscrupulously power-hungry, inclined toward reckless revolutionary adventurism, impatient with the project of democratic revolution, and predisposed toward conspiratorial machinations that belied his conniving and deceitful nature.[25] These Menshevik descriptions of Lenin became the foundational bedrock of how he and his works would be evaluated by Western academics. Without access to — let alone awareness of — any alternative narrative, early Western scholarship on Lenin had little choice but to work with the only information they had available to them.

The beginnings, one might say, of the creation of a compatible "anti-revolutionary" Western Left.

The other major critique I would have of the piece is the disappointing and stereotypical arguments around Stalin's leadership, which ironically enough is such a trademark of the Western Left's understanding of the USSR as much as it is an echo of the Mensheviks. The ghost lives on.

I do have criticisms of the USSR -- honestly, who doesn't -- but I think it is misrepresenting the issue to blithely state that "censorship" is the crucial flaw in Stalin's era of leadership (I will cede some ground to the notion that "over-centralization" was a flaw, however -- but on the side of "Stalin overestimated the convictions of those closest to him, because he, like so many others of his cohort, was too much of a dreamer who believed wholeheartedly in the goodness of the communist effort")

I think the USSR (ironically, like the USA but for opposite reasons) overestimated the power of individual writings and popular culture. For the USA, the goal was to use popular culture as a bludgeon against the Evil Soviet Union. For the USSR, the fear was that too much critical writing or art or whatever would topple the Union. In both cases I believe they were wrong, but that is a bit of a tangent.

Regardless, there is a difference between speech and organizing, and in both the USA and the USSR, there were crackdowns on dissident organizing. This is often brought up as an example of the USSR's intolerance, even as the intolerance was against anti-communist actions, which of course... should probably be intolerated in a socialist state. Whatever! I am tangenting. Again.

I appreciated this section:

Overall, surprisingly little serious effort has been made to compare the repressions under Lenin to myriad similar measures taken by Western liberal governments under the extreme pressures of a domestic war during roughly the same period. In calling for energetic repression of their political and ideological opponents during wartime, Lenin and the Bolsheviks have no shortage of otherwise admired historical company.

For stating basically what I am saying above. If the actions are similar (or, at least, comparable), then we should judge by the goals and intent of the actions. The goals and intent of the United States in its myriad war crimes was to further American extraction, colonialism, racial hegemonies, et cetera. The goal of Bolshevik violence was to build a more just world. Yes, I judge those differently.

An in-depth 1-hour analysis of Lenin's vital text. It's not just history, grasping this overlooked lesson is crucial for tackling today's opportunism & most urgent political challenges.

I've enjoyed this series on the Russian Revolution disguised as Marxist analysis for a while now, I recommend this one if you're looking for a long video essay.

Behind the curtain of war propaganda, the Ukrainian working class is suffocating under the weight of increasing state violence and corruption.

Getting reasonable analysis of the war in Ukraine is a total pain in the ass in the United States, at least. I appreciate this piece for being a straightforward and well-argued analysis of the class aspects of the war.

The modern Russian federation is no worker's state. Modern Ukraine is neither. I don't see a way to interpret this war as a fight that Leftists (& especially Marxists) need to 'support' on either side. However, also and importantly, this is not a case of entirely imperialist adventure -- the government of modern Ukraine is explicitly right-wing and interested in maintaining a relationship with the imperial core. The government of modern Russia is explicitly right-wing but not interested in maintaining a relationship with the imperial core (favoring the modern coalition of BRICS, which has fair things to critique but is definitively not part of the global imperialist core).

This robbery of the working class in Ukraine is of course no new phenomenon. Just as in Russia, since the reintroduction of capitalism, “big business [has] turned the state into an institutional tool for realising the interests of oligarchic groups. There [has] emerged a peculiar phenomenon of ‘state capture’”. However, the development of full scale war has led to a shift in the nature of capture, away from local oligarchs and instead in favour of internationalised (western) capital.

It is nearly impossible to overstate how much the current political terrain of the former Soviet nations was explicitly the goal of the American-led crusade to destroy the USSR. This war would not be happening if the USSR was still around. That is not a paean toward a past that we lost as much as a statement of reasonable fact! When I see the peoples of 'Ukraine' and 'Russia' fighting each other, it is heartbreaking precisely because we have living memory of a time when these lines of identification did not bring about warfare. It was in the time of the USSR.

Although many opposition parties have experienced wartime repression in Ukraine, anti-communist and anti-socialist repression has been widespread since 2015, when a number of authoritarian laws were passed following the victory of the far right during the Euromaidan.

I do not care for the modern Russian federation, the same as I do not care for the government of the United States. It is a tragedy what happened, and it is a tragedy that continues to unfold. But to support the Ukrainian state uncritically is also deeply fraught, and I would argue not any more defensible as an ideological position.

New laws banned the Communist Party and its publications, along with any communist symbols. Singing the Internationale, the international song of worker’s solidarity, was made punishable by up to five years in prison. The use of the state to persecute the left followed severe and bloody street violence perpetrated by fascist paramilitary groups in Ukraine during the Euromaidan. Just a year before the ban on communist party activities, on the 2nd of May 2014, around a thousand fascist thugs under the banner of Right Sector (a Neo-Nazi paramilitary group) surrounded the House of Trade Unions in Odessa, setting fire to the premises where dozens of terrified workers had sought sanctuary. Right Sector members, barricaded exits and beat the men, women and children who threw themselves out of the windows of the building trying to escape. A total of 48 people were burnt alive that day, in what Right Sector proudly described as “yet another bright page in our fatherland’s history.”

Had a great depressing afternoon reading all of this and flicking through a couple different wikipedia pages. When I say things like "the destruction of the USSR was a genocide", this is why. The destruction of Yugoslavia, the ethnic genocides on its former lands, the utter lack of response from NATO or the so-called peaceful forces of Europe -- this is what the USA wanted. This is what the end of the USSR meant: death, killing, massacres of people who once were united. This was the victory of the Nazis.

The strategic aim of the “democratic” imperialist states was to turn Hitler against the Soviet Union; in a few words, to use the Nazis as a weapon against the construction of Socialism in the USSR. That was the initial aim of the so-called “allies”.

The USSR saved Europe from fascism, and they never forgave the USSR for it.

A PDF scan of a beautiful 1986 collection of Soviet art from and about the Great Patriotic War, also known as WW2.

I had never heard this before and this song slaps

If the policies of a socialist state are not based on the material conditions of that very society, it will undoubtedly fail. This is, without question, crucial to the success of socialism. The material conditions of each society differ, so of course we need to study and act upon them carefully.

This is what makes the Russia case still valuable for a global left: the trace of the desire for collective social reproduction is still damp, still excavatable. It has not yet fossilized.

No one is ever fully lost to the cause, if you can figure out how to leverage them.

What is now visible in the provincial factories and metalworking plants of post-2022 Russia is, I argue, an attempt to reconstruct something functionally analogous — not by the state but by individual firms, not through the mechanisms of Soviet paternalism but through an uneasy combination of Soviet idiom and neoliberal discipline. [...]

This sceptical realism is, in E. P. Thompson’s terms, a form of moral economy: an operative understanding of what is fair and what is not, what obligations employers owe to workers, what the minimum terms of dignified employment consist in. It draws on the Soviet legacy not as nostalgia but as a set of standards — imperfectly realized, often betrayed, but remembered — against which present conditions are assessed and found wanting. The vernacular socialism that others have traced in Russian working-class culture is not gone; it is simply subterranean, surfacing in the calibrations of people like Misha rather than in explicit political contestation.

emphasis mine.

Our relationship to the Soviet Union is simple. The USSR was the first country to build socialism, and we believe that we should analyze the Soviet experience in order to prevent the restoration of capitalism in the future, as it happened in the Soviet Union. Therefore, there is no reason to idealize or, on the contrary, try to abandon the Soviet legacy, as many “leftists” like to do. This is a wrong approach and has no practical utility.

Really deeply well-told interview with members of the Worker's Front of Ukraine, an explicitly Marxist-Leninist organization within Ukraine that is working against the current war. I very much appreciated the RFU representatives clear-eyed analysis of the current war as an imperialist conflict between NATO and the (imperialist, post-Soviet) Russian State.

I cannot imagine how hard and brave it is to be an avowed Marxist-Leninist in Ukraine these days. It's scary enough in the United States, but we are not quite yet at the stage where the state is killing you in the streets for it. The notes about international solidarity with underground and aboveground groups in Russia was also fascinating -- I think this is a great blueprint for how to organize in imperialist nations. Build the party, educate the people, refuse to participate in nationalist-chauvinist activity.

In fact, fascism is an open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic, and most imperialist elements of financial capital. Different fascists may think differently about women, gender, and LGBTQ+, but that doesn’t change the essence of fascism. As for us, we consider all those issues as parts of the issue of the proletariat. No more no less. You cannot free women without freeing the working class. Period.

The Ukrainian delegations in the early Soviet union were some of its most ardent supporters. I wish one day that we will see that again.

Therefore, to truly defeat imperialism, we must carry out a socialist revolution and defend our military-industrial complex, which has been destroyed by the capitalist regime in 30 years of “independence.” Precisely when private ownership of the means of production is abolished and the dictatorship of the proletariat is established, only then will we be able to truly defeat imperialism, both Russian and Western.

The Soviet Union carried the overwhelming weight of the war against fascism.The Eastern Front dwarfed the Western one in every measure that mattered. The Red Army faced and destroyed roughly 80% of the Wehrmacht's combat power. The Soviet people lost over 27 million lives — military and civilian alike. That is more than 60 times the combined military deaths of the United States and Britain. The Red Army stopped the Nazis at Moscow and Stalingrad, broke their back at Kursk, liberated Auschwitz, and planted the Victory Banner over the Reichstag in Berlin.Without the Eastern Front, there would have been no D-Day. Without the Soviet sacrifice, there would have been no victory in the West at all.

The right-wing push to “shrink the government” meant displacing the costs of social reproduction onto private households and privatizing many of the state’s administrative capacity. What came of that was a new practice of citizenship where the ideal of public deliberation over the organization of society gives way to what Berlant calls the privatization of citizenship where “acts that are not civic acts, like sex, are having to bear the burden of defining proper citizenship,” and issues regarding personal morality are central to public discourse.

A bit academic-brained and makes the mistake of assuming that communism died with the USSR, but other than that has some interesting insights.

Joseph Stalin was a great man; few other men of the 20th century approach his stature. He was simple, calm and courageous. He seldom lost his poise; pondered his problems slowly, made his decisions clearly and firmly; never yielded to ostentation nor coyly refrained from holding…

A major theme in Bolshevik literature was the transmutation of flesh to metal. In the communist imagination, the fires of revolution could forge a metallized man. No one better personified this than Stalin, the “man of steel.” In my latest article, I explore the power of a name.