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Protestation (lemmy.ml)
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[-] Cowbee@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 weeks ago

Gotcha, regarding "camp." I took it to mean "campist," haha. Marxists tend to prefer the term "tendency" to describe which grouping of Marxism we align with.

As for the term "Stalinist," while Stalin himself does have some theory under his belt like Marxism and the National Question, "Stalinism" isn't really a tendency. "Stalinism" is more of a term for Stalin's policies in the early USSR, chiefly Socialism in One Country as opposed to Trotsky's Permanent Revolution, neither of which are particularly relevant today as the USSR is long-gone and we have new and different conditions.

The biggest difference between modern Trotskyites and Marxist-Leninists are in whether or not to support AES, and whether or not socialism can be achieved locally or if it must be global. Trotskyites tend to oppose AES, because in their eyes unless revolution happens everywhere, worker states decay over time and fall back to capitalism. Marxist-Leninists take the view of supporting socialism, and that in order to globally achieve socialism, we need to build it up locally, ie the more socialist countries there are, the easier it is for socialism to be achieved globally. We don't see there being an "inevitable" decay in socialist states.

Trots tend to be either in the Global North, or in pockets of South America. Marxist-Leninists tend to be found in every existing socialist state, much of Africa, and of course Asia, though Marxism-Leninism is rising quickly in the Global North as the conditions of imperialism degenerate and falter. Trots also love the aesthetics of the old-fashioned party, preferring physical newspapers, tons of hammers and sickles, while generally failing to meet the people where they are at, ie it becomes more of a LARP than a real party in my experience.

As for why I gave a genuine response, I just tend to shrug off percieved insults as long as the question seems genuine, more often than you'd expect people respond well to keeping a cool head. Just something I've adopted over time as I've gotten more uses to talking about Marxism-Leninism online and in-person.

this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2025
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