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1. I've been aware of it for years as an M/ML but I've never really used it. My motivation in coming to it now is that I would like to start blogging about history topics from an M/ML perspective as a lifelong major amateur history buff and I would like to use PW as both a source and a home for my research - note that I don't intend to simply post my blog articles here but I research them thoroughly and create extensive notes and it's those notes that I believe can be a contribution here. I also wish to translate articles from Spanish to English since I am a non-native Spanish speaker.
2. Marxist / Marxist-Leninist. I agree with ML thought but also I believe a core ML principle is the need to constantly modernize and update ML thought to adapt it to modern conditions and to advance an ever deeper and more scientific understanding of history and Marxist economics. To most pro-China ML's I can simply call myself an ML but in the wider western leftist community I think it can be useful to call it M/ML to indicate that I am incorporating modern Marxist theory and not simply LARPing on about Lenin (although of I course I do enjoy LARPing on about Lenin).
More than anything else, I am anti-imperialist.
3. I agree with your principles, they excite me, and I would love to endorse them as my own.
4. I am pro-China. Xi Jinping is a great leader who doesn't lead by oppression, that's western brain rot, he has formed a political consensus within China that is immensely popular and he did it without violence.
China is a socialist country in the sense of being ideologically guided by Marxist principles and a Marxist understanding of history and economics. "Deng Xiaoping Theory" is profoundly Marxist in that it recognizes the stages of economic development and the imperial conditions of the world and adapts China's system to face the material realities and challenges of a world dominated by western imperialism.
I won't deny I dislike the influence of billionaires in China and the presence of a neoliberal faction within the CPC but clearly Xi is taking them on and winning. The recent party congress leaves no doubt in my mind that the communists are in charge of China, not the billionaires.
The economic system of China is mixed with major elements of state capitalism and a highly interventionist state that maintains control and planning over development. There is of course a capitalist mode of production also in China primarily in consumer markets and in emerging markets such as high tech production. I would like to see greater CPC control over these sectors and believe that we will see increasing control exterted in the near future, but I don't dispute the wisdom of allowing dynamic market forces to develop these sectors so long as political control remains in the hands of the party.
5. Stalin is one of the greatest figures of the 20th century. He saved the world from the Nazis and then he saved the USSR from western domination, then he helped begin the liberation of Africa and he began the unravelling of the old British empire.
He was one of the most powerful men of his time and yet he clearly wasn't corrupt, his descendents are not wealthy, he maintained modest living quarters. This is truly remarkable. He refused to even save the life of his own son in WW2 since that would be giving himself advantage denied to the common soldier.
He has been slurred beyond recognition but the winds of history will blow that all away.
Most of the criticisms of Stalin are simply falsehoods or distortions. He wasn't an antisemite. He wasn't a cold harded tyrant. He wasn't an oppressor, he was a liberator. Most of the "great crimes" he committed were him oppressing the oppressors, such as the liberation of Mongolia from it's barbaric feudalism, or were driven by the necessity of Nazism such as the necessity of pushing the German military out of the Baltic's and pushing back the "white" (post civil war "whites") and Aryanist Finnish government away from Leningrad (which is somehow denied even though obviously that's what they did), and the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact well it's an uncomfortable fact that he made a tacit pact with the Nazis but he did this in response to Lord Halifax and Chamberlain seeking to engineer a Nazi-Polish alliance against the USSR, and the lands he took in this pact were not Polish lands anyway but the lands of the oppressed Ukrainian and Belorusian minorities a fact which is never included in the histories.
I could write many pages on this. I should probably stop, you probably have enough to get the idea of my position on Stalin.
But I'll add one more paragraph:
I want to add some important criticisms which is that Stalin was socially a bit of a reactionary, his leadership saw the reintroduction of socially regressive prohibitions such as criminalizing homosexuality. I think we can critize the USSR for this but when we make these criticisms (1) this is evidence of the democratic character of the USSR, it's simply a fact that the USSR of the 1930s was a homophobic society and (2) it was hardly a global outlier in this. It should be acknowledged and condemned but it is not a reason to prefer the west since the west was no different and often, in practice, much worse in their violence and oppression of socially marginalized groups.
Also the relocations of ethnic groups within the USSR I think is a highly regretable policy choice, but again here while I critize these decisions it was not at all worse than the reservation system for American Indians, British genocides in India, the segregationism of the USA and British southern Africa, or the genocidal "White Australia" policy so again I think we can repudiate those policies of the USSR while recognizing that on the "score card" of the era it wasn't a reason to prefer the west.
Finally the gulag system was harsh, but here again most of the deaths were due to the precarious food situation and the privations of WW2. The worst years for gulag deaths were the 1932 famine and 1942 which also saw food scarcity and of course the German POW's who made up most of these deaths were half starved by their own generals before being allowed to surrender which is an adequate explanation for why these years saw high rates of death. By the end of the gulag system the death rate was down to 0.5% which is comparable to the 0.4% of the modern US prison system and that was achieved in the years immediately following WW2 so the idea the gulag system in comparable to the Nazi death camps is just odious. Around 800,000 lives lost in that system under Stalin's rule if we exclude German POW's and most of those deaths due to generalized famines. The gulags were harsh of course they were and I am not at all supportive of forced prison labor but the fact is that these were harsh decades for the soviet union so I am certainly not going to say I approve of these prison camps but I do object very strongly to the propagandistic efforts to equate the prison system of the USSR with the Nazis.
Ok shit I really did write too much. Or not enough. The life of Stalin and a thorough exploration and documentation of it's policies and practices could fill a wiki all of it's own.
Stalin was based.
6. Gender is a component of identity, and human identity is an exceptionally complex phenomenom that cannot be reduced to a biological determinism based on sex alone.
Marxist's should support the LGBT community as this community seeks their own forms of liberation and in their opposition to traditional power hierarchies, mostly the patriarchy.
Early Marxists and early Bolshevik's understood this and were remarkably progressive in their attitudes towards the LGBT community. As I wrote above, I think it is regrettable that the USSR reversed their position on this and returned to socially reactionary policies, but of course we can understand this as the democratic nature of the Soviet system in that it was adopting and expressing the socially conservative views that were prevalent in the USSR at the time. I wish they did show more leadership here, but they didn't.
We can applaud East Germany as the most progressive state towards LGBT issues in the world until it's absorption into the far more socially regressive West Germany. The leadership on this issue that the party showed, deeply humanist and materialist understanding of human nature and to very quickly cease treating homosexuality as some kind of disorder, this demonstates the transformative power of Marxism and the party to advance strongly and correctly on these social issues.
I would add that it's wrong to confuse the LGBT struggle with the Marxist or the anti-imperialist struggle. It's an important struggle in it's own right and it deserves enthusiastic support for it's own sake but it is not the anti-capitalist struggle or the anti-colonialist struggle.
Western imperialism is often justified on the basis that the exploited states are often socially reactionary, which is a natural consequence of them seeking to preserve their cultural identity in the face of western imperialism but it does often result in the unfortunate effect of hardening views against modernity.
Of couse the way the west uses the LGBT issue as a bludgeon against poorer nations, and the same happens with feminism.
This doesn't mean we should oppose LGBT rights or oppose feminism in places like Iran. What it means is that we need to highlight the way the west uses these issues as a flimsy justification for imperialism. Like in Afghanistan, as they were pulling out suddenly we are told the war is all about little girls being able to go to school. Of course that is an important thing to strive for but (1) it is ridiculous to pretend that is why we invaded that country and (2) bombing the shit out of their villages does not improve their education outcomes.
I think you can feel where I stand on these issues. I think you can also see that I tend to just go off as I write. I am actually capable of editing myself down to core points when I need to but when writing to other Marxists I am not afraid to load up the language to explore a topic thoroughly. Hopefully that isn't annoying for you but I thought in answering these questions being as detailed as I can is useful.