Why Marxism-Leninism?

I think it boils down to universality and the need for an ideology and a politics that can be grasped from Jalabad to Jackson, Mississippi. We need this because capitalism is a totalizing and universalizing system, wherever it touches its laws function

And without some universal framework, we lack the means to talk to the “other.” Unless we want to reject proletarian internationalism, we need to have a way to communicate across all boundaries

Despite the particularities of a given situation, we live in a world divided into classes, on a big picture those of bourgeois and proletarian. We live in a world of class struggle, and of a common enemy that can be fought with common means (to some degree)

We need a universal revolutionary ideology with a few core concepts and structures, that equips us with an understanding of the world as it exists for us all, an ability to examine the particulars, and the tools to overthrow the old world and struggle for a new world

So we need a universal revolutionary ideology. Which one? There is a trend right now of digging up every marginally successful “strategy” of the 20th century, from Gonzaloism to Autonomism, and everyone has a favorite “ism” to offer as the panacea

But many rarely bother to grasp the essential features of what made left projects from Cuba to China successful, which is to say Marx and Lenin. Those who claim to grasp it are often formalist and revisionist, playactors without a serious politics and ideology

The fact that the history of revolutionary socialism in the 20th is that of Marxism-Leninism and that most every project of any note to last for any substantial time was influenced by/claimed ML doesn’t make it the universal revolutionary ideology, but it’s a strong argument

But what is this “Marxism-Leninism”? What are the core concepts and structures of this supposed universal revolutionary ideology that we need to grasp?

It boils down to dialectical and historical materialism, the conceptual weapons that enable us to understand the world so that we may change it. They make Marxism what it is as a logic, a method, and a “guide to action”

From this we kept Marx’s brilliant analysis of the nature of capital and its world

Beyond that though, some key points:

Support every revolutionary movement against the existing order of things, always bring the question of private property to its fore

The proletariat can’t simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes

Lenin goes further and equips us with an understanding of how to carry out the revolution: the vanguard party, i.e. the use of our own political subjectivity to change the objective conditions of the world

Lenin also furthered developed Marx’s understanding of the state. The state is something that must be overcomed, a thing that will continue to exist under socialism but a terrain of combat that we must fight within to destroy

I think these are the core elements of Marxism-Leninism, the theoretical weapons that armed with revolutionaries will win socialism

As the Turkish revolutionary Deniz Gezmiş said, “Yaşasın Marksizm-Leninizm’in yüce ideolojisi!”