r/theredleft

I am looking for Socialist publications (newspapers, blogs, magazines, etc). I am specifically looking for analysis of current world politics. Any suggestions?

I'll start with some disclaimers:

1. at least as I see it, a majority of posts in this subreddit come from users that can be identified as maximalists, mostly anarchists or left communists.

2. Their critiques to ML positions are valid, in the sense that they come from their own ideas and they make sense for them.

3. As an ML, I will obviously have a different perspective, but I still believe that this is a debate that is somewhat worth it.

With that out of the way, I think there would be a huge problem for MLs to accept the framing of the USSR or the PRC as "Lesser Evils“. A lesser evil argument usually comes from the comparison between two options which are both "bad" in some ways. A typical examples is the "voting argument": in order to avoid the victory of a fascist candidate, it is better to vote for a social-democrat candidate. The Soc-dem candidate is still bad, but they are better than the fascist one.

This is not how ML argumentation regarding the USSR or the PRC proceeds. Instead, what we think is that the USSR and the PRC were socialist experiments, and therefore they were good. That doesn't imply that they cannot be criticized. The USSR ended up falling, and at least the 1949-1976 period of Chinese Socialism also ended (not gonna discuss the 1976-contemporary period because that one is more controversial). So for an ML, a critique of these experiments involve understanding why they failed, while recognizing that they achieved great things and were a step forward for our understanding of how to implement socialism. This is not a lesser evil argument. Maybe it can be considered a "not as good as we would like" argument.

On the other hand, from a maximalist perspective, anything that doesn't correspond to their standard of socialism (either from a left com or anarchist perspective), is somewhat bad, and therefore, any defense of the USSR or the PRC is, in fact, arguing for a lesser evil. In this perspective, the argument "the USSR was good, but it could've been better" gets turned into "the USSR was not as bad as a capitalist regime".

It is also important to distinguish the ML position on the USSR and the PRC specifically and on other states. For example, some MLs say they "critically support Iran because Iran opposes US Imperialism". That CAN be construed as lesser evilism: nobody believes that Iran is socialist or is on the way to becoming socialist, but it is argued that supporting Iran is a way to oppose US Imperialism, and therefore contributes to the general objectives of socialism. It is a "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" policy.

So, in conclusion, I don't believe that from a ML framework it would make sense to characterize our position on the USSR or the PRC as lesser evilism at all. What is important to engage with, if one wants to criticize the ML position, is with the meat of the arguments: How should transitional states work? For us MLs, in the historical context of how the USSR and the PRC came into being, the level of top-down initiative and state building made sense, although they were not perfectly applied. But in a maximalist positition top-down initiative and state building are always bad. Either because, as Bakunin and his followers would argue, any state is oppresive and thus transitional states are always bad, or, from a left com perspective, transitional states should involve direct democracy from workers organizations at all times. The three positions are, to me at least, valid ways of understanding Marx and Marxism or Anarchism, and the real debate is which position is correct. Not a debate about what constitutes lesser evilism, of what "Marx really thought", which are just proxies for the real questions that we should be asking.

I've noticed many people, mostly in subreddits where places like the USSR or PROC are discussed, tend to go about opinions of them in a nuanced, yet slightly stunted way. They acknowledge the flaws of either country, but then go ahead and say that they're still a net positive.

I guess this is true... but am I the only one kind of put off by this? Isn't communism all about rejecting that kind of "one shitty thing over another shitty thing?" Is something really socialist if it compromises its ideals for the sake of some kind of security?