this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2026
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Marxism-Leninism is dangerous to the ruling class because it's true, understands the world in an actionable way, and stands to end all of class society.
the extent to which the ruling class has convinced us that it's dangerous is surprising sometimes.
i learned about marx because my teacher & my father reacted VERY strongly when i asked my teacher who marx was and she called my dad to "warn" him.
if they had neutral (or maybe even positive) reactions, i probably wouldn't have bothered to search for him online at the school library.
Yep! Often times reaction backfires.
What. The. Hell. That’s actually crazy. I wonder what country that is…
In my highschool we actually had to study him. And it was far from a ☭ country
To be fair, if you weren't raised in a socialist country, it's almost certain that you were taught a caricature of Marx and Marxist thought.
He was treated as an important philosopher and was a recurrent author used to criticize the current system. and we used a lot of excerpts from his manifesto, das Kapital…
But he wasn’t seen as you’d depict him in communist countries. We confronted his ideas with Arendt’s for example…
Ultimately, we weren’t taught that he was bad or good, we were just taught his thoughts among other philosophers’ and we used them to write our own essays, form our own opinions.
Without knowing how that was done, it sounds like it just as easily could have been done deliberately to demonize him, by comparing him to Arendt's theories.
I translated an online course with deepL, that sums up what we've seen on him (allegedly, I don't remember exactly as it was back in high school!):
https://hastebin.ianhon.com/a13c
Sorry, didn't find any other way to paste this long ass text without polluting the comments so I used this.
Actually not the worst way I've seen him taught, far from it in fact.
I was born and raised in the United States and my school's history books mentioned his name alongside Hitler, but didn't say why so I asked.
Excuse me? Alongside Hitler?? Im so sorry, the United State’s education system is fucked up. Well I guess it isn’t that surprising. You were also taught that WWII was won by the great and powerful USA.
yes i was and that's the context of why i asked my teacher about marx; it don't remember exact wording, but it was to the effect that evil people like hitler and marx had fooled europeans in the past into committing many atrocities so the united states created the un so that the united states wouldn't have to keep protecting the world by itself.
I had never realized how much propaganda they feed the children in the US...
the isreali children get it much worse
Definitely yeah they're on another level
Mahmood Mamdani, father of the newly elected mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, shared how he was introduced to Marx:
I was in my room. There was a knock at the door. Two gentlemen in trench coats and hats said, “FBI.” I thought, “Wow, just like on television.” They sat down. They were there to find out why I had gone – because this turned out to be big – it is after Montgomery that King organized his march on Selma. They wanted to know who had influenced me. After one hour of probing, the guy said, “Do you like Marx?”
I said, “I haven’t met him.”
Guy said, “No, no, he’s dead.”
“Wow, what happened?”
“No, no, he died long ago.”
I thought the guy Marx had just died. So then, “Why are you asking me if he died long ago?”
“No, he wrote a lot. He wrote that poor people should not be poor.”
I said, “Sounds amazing.”
I’m giving you a sense of how naïve I was. After they left, I went to the library to look for Marx. So that was my introduction to Karl Marx.
https://www.warscapes.com/conversations/conversation-mahmood-mamdani
so you're saying that it would be praxis if i had a child so that they can get elected and spread socialism throughout the country; thank you for the idea comrade. lol
Can you tell me shortly how a marxist-leninist society would look like? I guess not like the Sovjet Union?
The Soviet Union, Cuba, DPRK, Laos, PRC, Vietnam, and former non-USSR socialist states in Europe such as the GDR were and are all examples of Marxism-Leninism being applied to establish socialist society. What makes you think the Soviet Union isn't an example? At a fundamental level, Marxist-Leninists seek to establish an economy where public ownership is the principle aspect, and the working classes are in control of the state. At a more detailed level, however, this can look very different depending on local levels of development, history, and unique material conditions.
Because the Soviet Union was an autocratic surveillance state wasn't it? At least that's what I learned about GDR and projected it to other communist states.
The Soviet Union was a democratically run socialist economy, as was the GDR. First-hand accounts from Statesian journalist Anna Louise Strong in her book This Soviet World describe soviet elections and factory councils in action. Statesian Pat Sloan even wrote Soviet Democracy to describe in detail the system the soviets had built for curious Statesians to read about, and today we have Professor Roland Boer's Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance to reference. Further, surveillance in socialist countries pales in comparison to modern capitalist surveillance and data harvesting.
The Soviet union was a donut empire in service to Russia. It was an autocracy disguised as communist.
The Soviet Union was a socialist economy, where the working classes were dramatically uplifted and in control of production, distribution, and the state. It wasn't simply "disguised" as socialist, such a reading requires believing the working classes in eastern Europe to have been too stupid to comprehend their own oppression. The actual truth of the matter is that the working classes became highly educated, with literacy rates going from 20-30% to 99.9%, and free education to the highest levels. For what purpose would an alleged "autocracy" mass educate the working classes, rather than keep them under-educated and docile?
I don't trust the statistics of a state that let millions inhabitants starve to death.
How exactly was the normal worker in control of production? Wasn't it more like production was in the hand of the state, which in fact was very hierarchical?
They didn't "let" millions of inhabitants starve to death, they did everything they could to alleviate it. Russia was notorious for frequent famine and starvation prior to collectivization of agriculture, and ended famine once and for all once it had. That's a major contributor to the doubling of life expectancies in Russia:
Moreover, contemporary historians rely on statistics provided by the soviets, fact-check them, and find them to be very reliable.
As I explained earlier, and will copy again, the state was run by the working classes. Socialism is not the absence of hierarchy, you're thinking of anarchism. First-hand accounts from Statesian journalist Anna Louise Strong in her book This Soviet World describe soviet elections and factory councils in action (as I'll show at the end). Statesian Pat Sloan even wrote Soviet Democracy to describe in detail the system the soviets had built for curious Statesians to read about, and today we have Professor Roland Boer's Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance to reference.
All in all, the version of the Soviet Union that exists in your head is a work of fiction.
Literacy rates in the baltics were already at 91.1-91.6% before being invaded by the Russians disguising as communists.
Not evenly so across the whole of eastern Europe, and moreover socialism dramatically uplifted the baltics as well.
And Britain dramatically uplifted India. Same shit. Colonialism branded as communism.
No? Britain's colonialism resulted in vast amounts of surplus extraction and millions upon millions of deaths. The Baltics were treated unfairly in that they were used to showcase the effectiveness of socialism, and recieved a great deal of support.
Per this effortpost by @yogthos@lemmy.ml , with sources:
Considerable increases in industrial production https://www.britannica.com/place/Baltic-states/Soviet-occupation, https://www.britannica.com/place/Baltic-states/Soviet-republics
I'm not disagreeing with your point, but colonialism doesn't require millions of deaths. It requires external rule without consent of the people
Colonialism also requires extraction of surplus, and if you read my edited comment you can see that the opposite was the case. There was real frustration in the Baltics specifically, but ultimately the socialist system was uplifting and democratic, while British colonialism was the opposite.
So forced collectivization and requisitioning of land, goods and production facilities isn't extraction? Political repression, censorship and demographic engineering are democratic? I'm not against communism, I'm against the Soviet union.
Implementing a socialist mode of production is not the same as extracting the surplus and natural resources of a country to the detriment of their development and economic health. The Baltics gained unequally from the soviets, not the inverse. Capitalists and fascists were censored and repressed, yes, but this is often necessary for any revolutionary society to do with those who would support reversion to the previous system, just like those who wish to bring back feudalism following bourgeois revolutions.
The USSR brought dramatic democratization to society. First-hand accounts from Statesian journalist Anna Louise Strong in her book This Soviet World describe soviet elections and factory councils in action. Statesian Pat Sloan even wrote Soviet Democracy to describe in detail the system the soviets had built for curious Statesians to read about, and today we have Professor Roland Boer's Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance to reference.
How could they have materially been more democratic in a way that would satisfy you?
When it comes to social progressivism, the soviet union was among the best out of their peers, so instead we must look at who was actually repressed outside of the norm. In the USSR, it was the capitalist class, the kulaks, the fascists who were repressed. This is out of necessity for any socialist state. When it comes to working class freedoms, however, the soviet union represented a dramatic expansion. Soviet progressivism was documented quite well in Albert Syzmanski's Human Rights in the Soviet Union.
In what way were they more repressive than their peers?
When you seem to cry about supposed "colonialism," where the "colonized" gained more than they produced, it reeks of malformed analysis.
Forced collectivization only has negative connotations if you're the person who owns privately that which is worked socially.