Video description:
In this episode of the 1Dime Radio podcast, I am joined by Donald Parkinson, co-host of the Cosmopod podcast and , editor and chief of Cosmonaut Magazine, a non-sectarian Marxist magazine that analyzes revolutionary strategy and encourages open-minded dialogue between communist factions.
Being in the center between ultraleftism and rightist communism, Donald does not fit into the categories of the classic leftist factions and their associated tropes. Avoiding dogmatism while still being an unapologetic revolutionary Marxist, Donald offers a good-faith critique of Marxism Leninism today that MLs and all leftists could learn from.
This podcast serves as a friendly critique of Marxism-Leninism today and the ideology of “anti-revisionism.” In particular, we critique ways in which Marxist Leninists and Maoists approach history and questions surrounding the Soviet Union, China, and “Actually Existing Socialism.” We critique Marxist-Leninist historiography by critiquing Grover Furr, a writer who is frequently cited by MLs as to why Stalin “did nothing wrong” or that all of the atrocities in the USSR did not happen or were inevitable.
While it is easily to dismiss the rising popularity of Stalinism as just a bunch of online “Tankies” (A term which has been bastardized by liberals), we believe it is important to take Stalinist trends on the left seriously and study history in a way that does not regress into binary thinking.
I’ve been listening to this on and off today and each time I thought people here would hate it lol
That said I think there’s a lot of fair points to self crit to
you don’t see too many people who claim to be just Marxist communists, I guess :pika-pickaxe: or :bordiga-despair: , I think the tradition is highly concentrated in grad school / read too much theory / holier than though / new left / Jacobin types … some of the points are interesting, but a lot of it is just very navel gazey
the last time I listened to something Cosmonaut adjacent it made be go :jesse-wtf: too I think I need 13 more years of grad school to understand them
Yeah Cosmonaut has a lot of content that’s thicker than mud to read through, at least some of their podcast stuff is easily digestible
I’m only a little half way through still, I tend to like introspection but given this is a 2.5 hour podcast I can see it going beyond that
I know this 1dime guy is a friend of 2nd thought, I think this guy would be the first guest that would cause a backlash appearing on the deprogram, his critiques of MLs are really shallow and a bit :LIB: even, they are also doing the thing where they are basically saying every left wing ideology is flawed besides their brand of just the Marx hold the rest “pure, unadulterated” Marxism which they never elaborate on and constantly punching left. Really weird vibes, listened to another episode of theirs, I don’t get the appeal at all, really reminds me Jacobin, I’ve honed my craft to be able to be the most annoying person you ever met in a Brooklyn book store :brainworms: .
Which critiques do you think are shallow? Also, I don’t think they are saying they follow a “pure” Marxism, they seemed pretty non-dogmatic to me at least.
They basically espouse Andrew Yang level let’s not move right or left let’s move forward, but for “communism” . It’s almost comical to go out and claim revisionism is bad, but anti revisionism is also bad, and for that matter anarchism is bad, trotskyism is bad, ML is bad, maoism is bad, left comm is bad, when you say every tendency is bad, there is clearly no room for thought other than your enlightened centrism within Marxism that is pure and untainted by identifying with a coherent set of beliefs. I think most of it just boils down to people don’t like the USSR they remember gulags first so we shouldn’t talk about it and then goes and lists how every ML head of state was bad and totalitarian and it’s dumb to bother with any of them bc ppl don’t like them.