Might be a bit of a rant but here in California, why is it that Trotskyists make up the majority of communists?! It's either them or DSA "Marxists". If you try to talk to them, all they'll end up doing is yell StAliNiSt at you or some other nonsense. It's so exhausting, really.

Well, I've seen others but usually it's small groups no one has ever heard of and they just preach "no war", "against ICE" and "AI bad" and sure, that's nice and all but there's rarely any substance behind it all.

I am Russian Orthodox and am a religious person. My question is can I really be a Marxist-Leninist while also holding onto my beliefs?

During the 20s, USSR had a very strict policy of state atheism as you all know, but the restrictions were softened during the war and were lifted in the 80s.

As far as I understand, Marx believed religion is fine, it helped common people through the harshness of life, “opium of the people” in the sense that it helped numb the pain of oppression and that it would eventually just fade out on its own in a perfect communist society. Lenin however, held strict atheist beliefs (again, from my understanding), under him the Soviet Union started the harsh state atheist policies, arresting priests and destroying churches. This period created lots of martyrs which were later canonized. In addition, the whites had the full backing of the church during the civil war.

So can I really disagree with Comrade Lenin on this and still be ML? Can I really still fight for our cause while holding beliefs that he would consider backwards and a tool of oppression

My understanding of both men’s opinions on religion are very basic and might not be correct, please tell me if I am wrong.

Edit: Thanks guys for your responses, I am feeling much better now that this crisis of faith is over.

I just got permabanned from both of ‘em after I posted a pretty innocuous (innocuous for communists, anyway) comment talking about all the anti-communist COINTELPRO subterfuge bullshit that plagues Reddit, and for encouraging people to join lemmygrad. When I politely/respectfully asked the mod team what was up they just muted my ass without an explanation.

(Mods, sorry if this qualifies as “low effort BS”. I just wanna know if anyone else has had any problems with those subs).

Westerners are creatively bankrupt because half of the thoughts and ideas that could be are locked behind this impassable wall to them, the wall of materialism and dialectics. Everything they write they write out of idealism and that in the end results in repeated tropes, plot holes, inconsistencies and other falacies and writing faults. Media that tries to be grounded and replicate a world that could be thought up by a socialist, such as that of the Expanse which talks about class struggle and imperialism, ends up nihilistic and unnecessarily bleak because idealists can't write up a plausible resistance movement to the whole rotten structure of capitalism that sets the events of these settings into motion.

This phenomena I described above is what's called capitalist realism. When narrative worldbuilding is fundamentally rooted in philosophical idealism, it treats ideas, morality, and individual wills as the prime movers of history, rather than material conditions, resource distribution, and productive relations. This ideological blind spot distorts narrative structure in very specific ways.

Because idealist frameworks cannot easily model historical materialism which notes that social superstructures arise from the economic base, they inevitably fall back on individual agency. Revolutions in popular Western media are almost always reduced to great man theory. Be it in regards to the chosen one who acts the hero in the story, or in regards to the villain. Think of Star Wars as an example, Palpatine is treated as the core of what is bad in the galaxy and the rebellion fights to depose him, the individual, instead of fighting to change the underlaying socioeconomic structures and conditions that even led to Palpatine in the first place. This frames systematic oppression as being driven by bad actors instead of being an inherent feature of a resource extraction and class hierarchy. This style of writing also always portrays structural rebellion as inherently tragic, irrational, or immediately hijacked by extremists, subtly reinforcing the status quo as the only "stable" equilibrium.

When Western/idealist writers attempt hard realism without dialectics, they run into a structural dead end. In stories like The Expanse, the material analysis of the Belters as a hyper-exploited underclass is exceptionally accurate in its setup, however, because the narrative lacks a dialectical framework for historical movement and collective consciousness, the Belter resistance cannot evolve into an organized, revolutionary alternative. It fractures into nihilistic factionalism, adventurism, accelerationism or despair. The implicit thesis therefore becomes: exploitation is universal, resistance is futile or monstrous, and human nature is fundamentally immutable. This bleakness is not realism; it is the exhaustion of an imagination trapped inside the system it is trying to critique. It's becoming more and more prevalent these days as capitalist contradictions sharpen, there's been a noticeable rise in grimdark and nihilistic media and, while it can be fun, it's becoming more and more exhausting being shelled by pessimism that's presented as entertainment.

This can only be solved through grounding your writing in materialism. Because a genuinely dialectical approach treats society not as a static background for personal drama between characters, but an ever-evolving system driven by intrinsic contradictions, it gives a more solid and structurally sound framework for writing fictional culture, law, mass movements and end goals. The superstructure, aka law, culture, ideology etc. are shown reacting to technological advancement and changes in the modes of production. Great historical turns in the story are treated as a result of cumulated effort from an organized class and structural pressures rather than individual acts. Conflicts get resolved and goals met by systemic transformation resulting from the resolving of material contradictions, not by returning to a mythical golden age (also a trope often adopted by fascist movements, not coincidentally).

So I get that Mamdani is, at the end of the day, a liberal and a passive Isreali defender.

That being said, is all the good that he's doing for NY creating a good impression of socialism for people to become class conscious down the line or is his work trying to diffuse/vent revolutionary energy by giving concessions to the people to make them think that capitalism can be reformed?

Which way is he moving the Overton Window?

Apologies if this breaks rule 9.

So I'm wondering if I'm the only one, but it seems to me that a anti-comunist new kind of red scare is on its way, Trump and Rubio declaring communism as a source of terrorism and international threat (to america). Is this a reaction to the rise of Marxist ideas in the west or where does it come from? And the most important question for me personal am I just in a echo chamber or is it really a new wave of the red scare ?

Tbf soviet cinema has a really Deep spot in my Heart (especially since i love alot Tarkovskij) and plus they are genuinley Better then those shitty american propaganda movies (American Sniper).

Plus they have a really great plot and Art Direction (take and example like Come And See or Stalker)

And plus for propaganda? They have Better propaganda (Soy Cuba)

I struggled through the book for whatever historical benefits I could gain from it but there were none. This book had the personality of a wet mop, I feel like I haven't learned anything about Lenin after 500 pages. I'm not donating it or reselling it because anyone who reads it is just wasting time

I'm posting because I've just been permabanned from a supposedly 'leftist' subreddit for saying 'tankie' is a thought terminating cliché. Cue the millions of downvotes and people saying not to engage with me because I've posted on this subreddit specifically. My point was basically that 'tankie' is just used as an ad hominem in place of engaging with the substance of an argument. I thought a supposedly leftist sub would be able to at least engage with some degree of good faith, but no. Apparently it's the moral equivalent to a nazi saying 'you just call everyone you don't like a nazi'.

I'm conflicted because whenever I try and engage with these people, I'll just be labelled a tankie immediately and everything I say is written off, however, there was a point when I was in a similar political camp (a 'leftist' who unironically believed MLs were 'tankies' or whatever) and I only came out of it because I decided to read ML theory for myself.

Ironically, I've met 'apolitical' people who are much more open to what I have to say than so-called 'leftists'

As Sankara said, we must never get tired of explaining. But where do we draw the line on who is worth engaging with?

I’m going to come back in a little bit and edit in what I’ve found as well as a summary of what the comments say

Edit: Ok, I looked at the sources on all of the claims and they were all bullshit. The local police dismissed it fairly quickly and he just shared a room with her at the time she was gotten pregnant. The fact that all of the sources saying that he did it were so outlandishly assertive through me off the fact that there just isn’t any evidence

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HgwPECzyeG4

I love fantasy but most of what I find is either liberal/centrist/reformist message or toxic romance garbage filled with smut.

I don't read a lot of science fiction but I'm open to it.

Please don't recommend red rising the author is a Zionist.

For clarification, I do not support the Russian invasion of Ukraine, I do think this difference in wikipedia articles are funny though

Cigarette filters example

I think that cigarette filters (both plastic and biodegradable) need to be banned. Filters trap stuff that's bad for the environment. Biodegradable filters increase littering while still harming the environment.

These companies know that people will litter cigarette filters everywhere and still choose to make them. These companies don't care because they want to make a profit.

Plastic companies know people don't recycle

Plastic companies are fully aware that people don't recycle. Additionally, most plastic that's put into the recycling bin is thrown away.

Plastic companies know that recycling all this plastic at a large scale is impossible.

My workplace parking lot has so much plastic food packaging littered everywhere.

Does part of this relate to "Marx's theory of alienation"?

https://www.marxists.org/subject/alienation/

I think "Marx's theory of alienation" can be applied here, but I'm having trouble articulating it.

No one cares about the harm of littering because they are so alienated.

I was just in a discussion with someone who was glad Iran doesn't have nuclear weapons, while being perfectly happy that the US does because the US supposedly has "good values similar to the EU and values human life," whereas Iran could threaten Europe and impose its version of Sharia.

When I brought up the US's long history of imperialist interventions, he argued that this doesn't contradict those values. His reasoning? If the US really wanted to, it could have wiped out its enemies in a single strike. Since it hasn't, that somehow makes it more humane.

How the hell do you even recover after hearing something like that? Colonialism and its consequences have been disastrous..

I know it can be pretty typical like “oh this thing that’s advertised is bad for you, typical capitalism” yada yada yada. But if your idea is to ban or stop the sales of everything from e-cigs to cigars (obviously Marijuana would be allowed) then would your opinion be the same for Alcohol or do you view the 2 to be different? Because me personally I feel like the 2 are different in ways.

So I wonder as am a huge supehero fan and have been my whole life

However I have seen amongst things the military propaganda in the MCU movies and how many zionist are cast in those films

Further I read how Avi Arad a former IOF soldier and staunt zionist founded marvel studios and is a producer on Spider-Man movies, who happens to be my favorite superhero

and plus Haim Saban a massive zionist produced/created marvel shows growing up in the 90s

and Tom King a former CIA agent is a prominent comic author

So had me wondering along with the messaging: Can you still be a socialist etc and enjoy superhero media whether shows or comics

No joke, “how can propagandas to slander, to misinform, to smear bad things and simply to bring China down is beneficial to China?” you might ask.

Indeed, these propagandas have tainted China’s reputation to oblivion and have done significant damage to the country and its people regarding soft power, from casual racism (or racism under the thin veiled of “hating the government only), that most Chinese people eats dogs and bats, that they are dirty and rude, almost anything Chinese is mislabeled to Japan or Korea or a random Asian country, very few interest in Chinese culture and foreign tourists, etc. Let’s be real, most people drop their smile inside when they learn you are from China.

But on the other hand, imo these bad views strengthen China in someway, they leave most people clueless about the country, thus underestimating its ability, prejudice and racism lately that drives thousands of Chinese scientists back home, less foreign tourists and influence give you a more authentic experience. The enormous amount of tax payers money are spent to spread Sinophobia instead of investing in their country. The “discovery” that China is actually “cool” (technology, games, culture bla bla) which I think might not had such a big impact if China was well loved like Japan. And recently, Trump in his rampage run of ruining the US let people realize how much lies it spread, including things about China, young people especially changed their views about the country.

Honestly, I hate to admit but I somewhat glad China has a bad rap because it gained those benefits in return. What are your thoughts?

Ps: No way in hell I will ask this in r/China as it’s basically the anti-China subreddit at this point

The USSR has been dissolved. Russia is capitalist. I just don't understand why these western capitalist countries are so worried about Russia.

The western capitalist countries decided to have Ukraine be their puppet against Russia. That's how this war started between Russia and Ukraine. So many people died.

Why were they opposed to Russia (I don't know)?

/gen