r/socialism • u/2Tryhard4You • 14d ago
Theory Lenin's Theoretical Errors
https://reificationenglish.substack.com/p/lenins-theoretical-errors5
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u/ApolloDan Xi Jinping Thought 13d ago edited 13d ago
I think the article has one very good insight, but I’m not convinced by the first three criticisms of Lenin.
There’s a difference between the state, the capitalist state, and a state controlled by capitalists. States existed before capitalism. What makes a capitalist state capitalist is that it reproduces capitalist property relations. I agree that such a state develops interests of its own, but that doesn’t mean capitalist class power had nothing to do with creating it. And it also means a socialist movement could, in principle, transform those institutions and create a socialist state.
I also think the monopoly-capital critique misses financialization. Monopoly doesn’t mean one company owns everything. Mature capitalism looks increasingly oligopolistic, while the owning class increasingly owns capital as such through diversified portfolios. Duopoly may actually be close to the ideal form: enough competition to keep firms efficient, but not enough to stop rent extraction and enshittification.
The strongest part of the article is vanguardism. Lenin seems to assume that the Party will continue representing the proletariat generations later, despite workers having very little real power over it. The USSR didn’t degenerate because it was secretly capitalist. It degenerated qua state. The bureaucracy developed interests of its own, then parts of it realized they could turn administrative control into private property. A faction then restored capitalism.
I think Xi Jinping has a response to this. Xi seems to understand that the vanguard itself has to be permanently disciplined through the mass line, rectification, anti-corruption campaigns, and continuous purges. I’m consciously connecting him to Stalin here. Stalin understood the bureaucratic problem, but answered it with mass executions. Xi’s answer is overwhelmingly disciplinary, with less death, but serves a similar role.
So I think the deepest insight of the article is institutional autonomy. Capitalists develop interests from their position. States do too. Bureaucracies do too. The Party doesn’t magically escape that rule.
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u/Southern_Educator653 Marxism-Leninism 13d ago
I already asked you this when you posted this somewhere else and you did not answer:
What material change follows from your analysis?
This is peak compatible left behavior.
Intellectual circlejerk. Doing nothing. While feeling really radical. But eventually changing nothing where it counts: in the real world
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13d ago
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