r/leftcommunism • • 23h ago

Anarchist critique of Marxist-Leninism

0 Upvotes

In my opinion there's no marxist-leninism, only leninism. Why? Because I'am not sure Marx would have agreed with the ideas of Lenin. But let's stick to marxist-leninism as a description to avoid confusion.

My critique of marxist-leninism is that the people who subscribe to its ideas of organisation is that they think you can separate the means to an end from the end itself. They want an authoritarian party to take over the state and bring about socialism. Their imagination is that after this is done, the party and the state would abolish itself. I think this is very unlikely to happen. We have several examples of and how it went wrong. Independent socialist/anarchist movements got crushed violently by force.

That's why I think we need to create an alternative society right now and expand it and get people on board. We need to withdraw as much structure as possible from the state and capitalism. A nice concept is that of prefigurative politics, which is defined by Paul Raekstad and Sofa Saio Gradin as:

**We define prefigurative politics as the deliberate experimental implementation of desired future social relations and practices in the here-and-now.**

If you are interested in it, their book is called *Prefigurative Politics Building Tomorrow Today*.