GenZedong

Basically if you take as the starting point that they do not want communism but something else (i.e. they have other reasons to call themselves communists), you invert the entire premise and start to think about it differently. If they do not want communism, what do they want? From there we can start observing facts and drawing different conclusions.

The purity fetish is very real, nothing is ever good enough for them. And if nothing is ever good enough, then that justifies you not ever doing anything to change things because what's the point.

There is no world in which the masses care about the value-form and stopping commodity production as the first order of business. It's cool theory I'm sure, but it's ultimately a masturbatory exercise. The point of theory is to inform praxis and the point of praxis is to inform theory, and everything results from that contradiction. They forget their basics so they can start being the pick me communist that knows more obscure figures than you do. Leftcoms fetishize theory -- I notice a certain amount of overlap between self-proclaimed leftcoms or ultras and post-modernists -- and don't see any real-world application in it. At least, not applications that Lenin and other figures we MLs take from haven't said. For this theory to be applied, it has to be followed like a recipe. And perhaps we could say maoists fetishize the praxis without the theory.

It's interesting because the longer I get into marxism the more pragmatic I get. Maybe that makes me a counter-revolutionary revisionist lol. Just looking at China compared to any capitalist country, and actually reckoning with the reality there -- the reality, not the numbers on paper and the theory on paper -- leads to the same conclusion always: it's not the same as in capitalism. By changing the premise, we have changed everything.

In capitalist countries, we grow for the sake of growth. Capitalism is taken to be a self-evident fact of life, that it's as good as it's gonna get, that we can just make the best of it. Companies are gonna rise and fall and everyone can get their shot if they try hard enough. In China, they see capitalism as a stepping stone, as a transitory stage. Becoming a capitalist there does not mean the same thing at all than it does in the West. They have a vision which we lack, and which we are unable to get.

But for ultras to understand and see that, they would have to actually start looking at what's happening in China in practice and leave the books alone for a bit.

We talked about maoists and leftcoms but didn't even touch Hoxhas yet lol. Maybe because they're so irrelevant. I don't understand how anyone nowadays would call themselves a Hoxhaist. Anti-revisionist, sure, why not. If you feel like you're on a mission. But to take specifically after Hoxha and uphold him as like the prime anti-revisionist, the one from which all anti-revisionism originates? I haven't read him myself simply because hoxhaists have made him so unappealing, but on top of that, the things I've heard once you peel back the veneer and actually look at his policies derived from his theory makes him look like a child that was in way over his head.

Like Stalin also fought against the revisionists and they like him, but they stop there. At around 1953. Everyone after that is a dirty revisionist. It's like for hoxhaists history stopped on that year lol

This is exactly my experience as well. I forgot to mention, especially now that Netflix adapted the Three Body Problem, twitter is going wild over the depiction of the Cultural Revolution at the beginning of the series (a teacher is beaten to death in front of an audience for teaching theory of relativity and other bourgeois science).

I was surprised (somehow I am also surprised I can still be surprised at maoists) that many of them upheld the GPCR but didn't really know much about it. How can you claim to support something you haven't investigated yourself? In China, it's seen as a failure and this is the official line of the CPC too. The author of the 3 body problem is, from what I hear, sort of a liberal though -- just something to note, like I said the government's stance is the GPCR was ultimately a failure. Some were even asking if the story of the teacher was real; apparently, it is. Certainly in some instances (over which the CPC did not have control or even knowledge) such beatings happened. Deng himself was first called a capitalist roader during the cultural revolution, and purged for it.

CPC's current stance

The CPC in the modern era has admitted the Cultural Revolution to be a mistake.[3] The CPC also states that the Cultural Revolution will never come back to China, and that the CPC has learnt extensively from it and criticised itself from it.[4]

https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Great_Proletarian_Cultural_Revolution

They also have kind of a contradictory relationship to the masses. They revere the Peruvian peasants for being poor and illiterate, it seems. This came up a lot when we posted the book, that we were doing them a disservice or whatever, that the revolution in Peru was a real proletarian revolution.

Being poor and illiterate does not make you a good person or revolutionary by default, beyond romanticizing poverty it seems they fetishize it to an extent I am not sure I want to explore.

Regarding the CPP, this is also the impression I get from talking to Filipinos. And like you said, the answer to these concerns is always "do you really believe this propaganda". They don't want to engage with it, they feel it sufficiently self-evident to dismiss. Though with that said, it seems the CPP is enjoying more success inland and further away from cities (The Philippines are very mountainous islands, it's very rural outside the cities and further inland). But even then it's all relative. And yes, they are seen as being just as big bandits as the government is.

On the asking questions, I think this is a problem in general on the Internet. I don't know if it's due to age (I find most ultras I engage with seem to be teenagers, if not in age then in mental state), but they seem to take everything as bad faith. I think this is something we've grown away from on Lemmygrad, and it has helped me see questions, even the difficult ones, as interest and ultimately refining my own opinions. We grow through struggle, we don't learn from passive osmosis. They seem to think they have struggled enough (must be difficult reading the three gonzalo interviews that exist online) and can now relax and take it easy.

When I say ultras btw I lump essentially Hoxhas, maoists and leftcoms in this, but of course there are differences between the three. Well, except maybe the Hoxhas and maos. They seem to overlap a lot, I've seen lots of Hoxhaists turn into maoists and back.