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this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2024
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chapotraphouse
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What MLMs have ever seized power or formed a state?
The USSR was a Marxist and Leninist revolution. Mao was a Marxist-Leninist. Cuba's revolution was more broadly socialist until it won and was forced to defend itself from imperialism, at which point it adopted Marxism-Leninism officially. Juche is a subcategory of Marxism-Leninism and derives from it. May I remind you that MLM is a creation of Gonzalo and the Shining Path and created after the death of Mao.
I will give the Trotskyists some credit for being broadly involved in the pink wave in Venezuela, although that also was broadly Democratic Socialist. Venezuela and Bolivia seem to be exceptions to the global rule though, it's exceedingly rare for democratic socialists to win electorally and then maintain power.
In the imperial core itself democratic socialism is not possible and basically always results in social imperialism. If it doesn't, like Corbyn, it will be destroyed.
Honestly I saw "dozens" and assumed you were counting a bunch of dubiously successful MLM/third worldist projects, because how else would you get above, like, four.
I'm interested in what it means to you to "press the socialism button" or to "maintain power". There's some line that needs to be drawn.
After reading that list, it seems peculiar how you start Vietnam at 1945 but not Laos, how you start Cuba at 1975 instead of 1959. And that's leaving alone how the USSR was largely a successor state to the Russian Empire and was the result of the same party/faction operating in different "national" contexts but the same state context.
In some of the cases on this list it was a consolidation of power in a revolutionary context, rather than toppling a bourgeois government.
Is the line drawn at a successful revolution, or is the line drawn at winning an election, or something else entirely? And where do examples like Ghana and Zimbabwe (and maybe Nepal and a few others) fit in?