I’ve recently been reading anti-dühring and a bunch of writing from Marx and Engel and I continue to run into this problem where I realize how insane it is for someone to call themself a socialist after listening to a couple lectures and articles and reading the communist manifesto and maybe wage labor and profit and some excerpts. It’s maddening in the sense of, imagine someone being a fan of space or a general thing of physics and only knowing the very basic premises but not the details in of themselves, and if you yourself were a physicist and knew the details and listened to an explanation of physics by someone who knows only the most basic generalizations of the topic. Theory and especially materialist theory and dialectics is basically a socio-economic science, you can’t grasp materialism in just a short video that simplifies things like so many science and physics type videos out there.
On top of that there’s an entire history of socialism from the utopians like Saint-Simon, Fourier, Robert Owen, Weitlung. That history is Socialist history, Communist history, how does one not try and understand their history in order to understand their own beliefs? Libertarian Socialist? What’s that even? It sounds like an Idealist philosophy if anything. All I know is that there are two camps of Socialism, the Idealists and the Materialists, the Idealists being: all the flavors of the anarchos such and such. The Materialists being: Marxist Leninists, MLMs. The idealist socialism and this seems to always be the case is they’re usually people who’ve not read much theory or has read some but not enough to get a good grasp of historical materialism or dialectics and attempt to ascribe their vague abstractions of what is their personal ideas of justice and not a materialist justice based on socio-economic conditions and the solutions to reconcile antagonisms in a society, specifically class antagonism.
What sucks of this knowing too much is that like any person who has a good grasp of a subject one can’t help but want to constantly try and correct someone who is totally wrong. An example of mine is where I met an “anarcho-communist” recently and asked out of curiosity what they read and they told me they didn’t much read because they don’t like reading and instead mostly watch YouTube videos, I didn’t say anything because I wasn’t gonna get into an argument with someone who sees themselves as a comrade but I can tell you it was frustrating. It’s like someone saying “I know everything there is to know about feudal society, they had like knights and stuff, I know cuz I took one course on it”.
That’s just it, narchos don’t think it’s a science. They’re petit-bourgeois. They’re used to ordering things off a menu, and they think government works the same way. “Today I’ll have a classless stateless society, with none of that icky violence stuff. And a bottle of red wine.”
Yep basically if someone were to ask me what type of socialist I am I would answer simply: I’m a Communist. If they were to ask further questions I would simply say, my method of application is Marxist extended to Leninism extended to Maoism, theories built on each other based on the developing world, a world which doesn’t exist in a vacuum. An interesting question to ask the Anarchos is, okay what’s your theoretical method of application? Show me your theory in practice, show me how those societies adapted their methods or revised their methods according to their changing material conditions.