Comment on Funny, those guys don't usually agree on that much
Drivebyhaiku@lemmy.world 4 months agoI believe what you are referring to is Communism. Let us divorce at least the name of a singular man from a body of work that by your own admission is made up of a number of different writers on the subject just as the elaborations on Newtonian Physics is considered also a part but not whole of Classical Mechanics.
The reductions of bodies of political thought to singular authors is often used to exclude others. Very often on this platform I am told that I am not a Socialist because I am not a Marxist simply because he simply coined a term to a body of thought that predated him and extended far beyond him so why should I extend to Marx the authorial intent by the political realm of thought baring his name? If you said you were a Maoist or a Leninist or a Chavezist would I not conclude that you are in agreement with their very specific realms of their personal philosophy?
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 4 months ago
If we had a collection of competing working applications of communism, that would be easier. But trying to divorce it from Marx is a bit like trying to divorce capitalism from Adam Smith or the more modern Anarcho-Capitalist attitude from Rothbard and Rand. Like talking about Protestantism without mentioning Martin Luther.
Show me a fully realized anarchist state and we might be able to talk about Peter Kropotkin or Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. But anarchists from Republican Spain to the Bodo League of Korea to American Native Tribes were wiped out by fascist militarism.
You could draw sharper lines between Leninism, Maoism, and Chauvism, but you’d still start from their common Marxist heritage.
They’re influential for a reason.
I mean, you can call yourself whatever you want. But I see the term “Socialist” pitched around to describe everything from corporate liberalism to primativist anarchism. If you want to talk about AES states, you’re talking about countries that rooted themselves in Marxist philosophy.
If I said I was a Maoist, I just didn’t agree with anything in Mao’s Little Red Book, I would not blame you for calling me a bullshitter.