denpadollzz.404

୨♡୧a doll is a princess is an error is a glitch୨♡୧

[cupidxuboid]

︶︶︶ ⊹ ︶︶ ୨♡୧ ︶︶︶ ⊹ ︶︶

lamb/bunny/doll/princess (pronouns: she/her)

aesthetics i enjoy: denpa, jojifuku, moecore, morute, dollcore, dollette, yami kawaii, yume kawaii, pastelgore, pastelcore, girly kei

this is somewhat of a dumping ground sideblog, i sure hope i remember to tag thingies.

︶︶︶ ⊹ ︶︶ ୨♡୧ ︶︶︶ ⊹ ︶︶

[sweet-candy-bracelet]

[thatgenkigirl]

moodboard of my photos ^^

[thatgenkigirl]

[nyotsuba]

a LOT of tumblr banner masks ! :D sourced from pinterest and yandex, do not credit this blog if using !

[puppizai]

credit is appreciated when reposting & using : dont claim as yours !!

[penissekai]

Silly ass tumblr banner masks woah

everything permitted, no cred required unless reposting :3

[kudwaf]

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ numnoms ꒱ 6O px ׁ ͜ ׁ⠀ ֪

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ◝ 𓈒 ݁ f2u !! ⠀ ⠀ 🧁

[van1lla1c3cr3am]

this looks yummy..

[nolis-graveyard]

OH SHIT I FORGOT TO MENTION B4 THESE AINT MINE I JUST FOUND THEM ON A BUNCH OF RANDUMB WEBSTIES SORRY GUYS IF U KNO W THE CREDS TELL ME PLESS.

[decalines]

reminds me of @f4nd0m-h0pp3r ‘s blog :-)

[kanamajo]

[maagicalgirl-site]

Photo dump

[natoapologistblocker]

Whenever you talk about healthcare and quality of life achievements in socialist countries contextually and within the premise that all of this was achieved in spite of comprehensive Western sanctions and diplomatic siege, as an acknowledgement of socialist resilience and in sympathy and solidarity with the proud peoples of those countries, there is always that one piece of shit who'd say something like, "If North Korea/Cuba/etc were so great, why don't you move there?" Because in the twisted consumerist mind of the imperial citizen, a country is only worth as much as it could maximise their own quality of life by relocating to it

[gabagoofs]

"Free Tibet! I'm Woke! Free Tibet! Let Them Have The Right To Enslave Serfs again!"

[consumerofwater]

so true bestie. When we do imperialism its actually good and wholesome because we bring them freedom and progress and industry and enlightenment. These have never been used as justification for colonial projects right?

Critical support for comrade benjamin harrison for freeing Hawaii from the oppressive feudal monarchy there, true anti-imperialist hero.

[gabagoofs]

Here you go.

Educate yourself, it’s actually fun learning new things.

[read-marx-and-lenin]

Hawaii and Tibet could not be more opposite. In the former, we have a sovereign nation invaded by foreign powers and seized, with dramatic decreases in literacy and increases in poverty for the indigenous population afterwards. In the latter, we have an integrated vassal of a former feudal empire, whose local nobility when threatened by revolution and democratization tried and failed to secede because their own serfs rose up against them, resulting in massive increases in their quality of life.

The entire "free Tibet" movement is a Western campaign to try and impose feudal rulers on a population that does not want them for the purpose of undermining the Communist Party of China. If the Dalai Lama had his way, the people of Tibet would become less free than they are now.

[dre759]

For more on this read Battleground Tibet for a history of Tibet during its “independence” away from mainland China (it was about as independent as Formosa, Macau, and Hong Kong which were areas of China stolen by colonialists during the century of humiliation), the decade of negotiations between the PRC and the Tibetan aristocracy, and pretty much everything up to 2018—which is when the book was published.

[miraclemaya]

very suspicious about any talk of needing to base your politics on empathy. like any emotion empathy is very easily manipulated, and even besides that that is a meaningless statement. im sure plenty of white supremacists feel pretty empathetic about the plight of the white man or whatever

[txttletale]

hi miss healed, could you elaborate what you mean by dictatorship/authoritarian not being useful/meaningful terms? i know they're terms the west likes to tack on its political enemies, but i thought it might be a case of just misuse of terms that can still be useful, rather than outright a problem with the concept itself, so id be interested to understand your opinion. thanks!

so i don't think 'authoritarian' has any useful analytical value because every state is 'authoritarian' -- the only metrics by which one state might be seen as less 'authoritarian' than another are the metrics which privilege liberal democracy and a free market as a meaningful sort of 'freedom', which as a marxist, i don't! every state is an institution for class suppression--in the state and revolution, lenin quotes engels as saying:

[...] it is sheer nonsense to talk of a 'free people's state'; so long as the proletariat still needs the state, it does not need it in the interests of freedom but in order to holddown its adversaries, and as soon as it becomes possible to speak of freedom the state as such ceases to exist.

every state uses violence to perpetuate and legitimize itself. there is no state that would let you march into the capital and declare its dissolution without deploying armed men against you -- every state is authoritarian, it excercises authority, this is a tautological statement about how states maintain their own existence.

and sure, you could then say 'well we can just call all states authoritarian', but i don't think that makes any sense. the criticism of a state 'authoritarian/totalitarian' implies that there is an alternative, a point of comparison against which the state comes short--and i simply don't think it's possible to use 'authoritarian' as a cogent criticism without having such a point of comparison (usually the US or some european liberal democracy) which in turn means buying into liberal & capitalist ideas about 'freedom'.

as for 'dictator', i have a different criticism of that, also stemming from my marxist perspective. basically, i just think it doesn't describe anything useful in terms of political analysis and massively overemphasizes the role of individual psychology and personality. i frequently criticize both anticommunist and 'stalinist' views of stalin by joking that he must have been a very busy man if he singlehandedly ate all the grain or killed all the nazis. which is obviously a glib way of putting it--but my point is that any dictator who has ever 'done anything' could only do it because they could order a government official to do it who in turn could order a department to do it that could in turn mobilize hundreds or thousands of soldiers/construction workers/bureaucrats/etc. in order to make that happen.

sure, the leaders of countries might make decisions, and in some systems an individual leader might have greater leeway than others. but there are always very clear hard limits about what they must do and what they cannot do. i am sure i can say pretty uncontroversially that mohammad bin salman has an extreme level of political control over the economy and government of saudi arabia, but if he woke up tomorrow and said 'good news everyone, we're converting the country to wicca and donating all our oil to iran' then that would not happen and he would be deposed instantly. for a more realistic example, imagine any 'dictator' of your choice saying 'well, it's time to massively defund the military' -- this would be completely fucking impossible without some kind of loyalist paramilitary organization (which then exerts its own forces upon the 'dictator'.)

and of course all that leaves aside the massive extent to which 'dictator' is politically charged. do i think that vladimir putin was democratically elected? obviously not! but i don't think that any US president has been in any meaningful sense 'elected' by anything other than capital either, and two of the last four straightforwardly lost a popular vote even by the standards of liberal democracy! i think that any political system is best analyzed in class terms, in terms of what interests the government serves in terms of class struggle and competition between global capitalists, rather than in terms of individuals or what formal power structures give out the fancy titles

tldr: as a marxist, i think that 'authoritarian' is a useless distinguisher because excercising authority is the sole purpose and function of a state -- 'dictator' is a useless distinguisher because even the most autocratic fiefdom-state is ultimately a class dictatorship first and foremost

[evil-puppetmaster]

On the ideological differences between tumblr Marxist-Leninists

I know it’s a bit silly, but I wanted to spend a little time talking about the variation in positions between self-identified Marxist-Leninists on this website. Because this is a social website with all the dynamics and cliquish tendencies that come with it, the political content of arguments between MLs on specific issues has a tendency to blend with interpersonal issues and ends up being obscured to the point that it may all appear to be interpersonal drama to an outside observer. To be sure, there is no shortage of interpersonal drama among tumblr communists, and I think all of us at some time or another have taken things very personally and handled disagreements without much grace. I don’t expect that to stop any time soon, but I do find it frustrating to see people from different ML perspectives and traditions write off other positions as uninformed nonsense only driven by internet cliques. I will admit I’ve been guilty of this myself, but I’ve been thinking about it more carefully recently. So, I want to get into the substance behind some of the disagreements we see here, not because I think it will stop any disagreements but out of hope that it can help us all at least understand where the different perspectives here come from. I’m going to try to portray this as objectively as I can, and I’ll follow up with my own position later. For now, I’d just like to establish an overview of this subject.

To start, we have to acknowledge that Marxist-Leninism is not a specific set of positions, but an organizational and analytical scheme based on democratic centralism and dialectical materialism. It entails some underlying assumptions — for instance, that all states are dictatorships of the ruling class, that socialism must follow from a dictatorship of the proletariat, and that revolution is required to overthrow the ruling class, etc. — but ML organizations may reach different conclusions on strategy, priorities, and partners based on their specific conditions, organizational histories, and analyses of the current correlation of class forces. This results in a natural variation of stances between different MLs, especially those who belong to different organizations or organize in different countries. On tumblr, we see a lot of examples of such variation, and of course many users who do not participate in ML organizing who attach themselves to one or another version of ML analysis. (That’s totally fine by the way, I don’t mean that as a criticism of tumblr communists who don’t belong to an org — it’s good for the analysis of a would-be vanguard org to reach beyond its members!) The reason I am saying this is to clarify that neither of the positions I will explore is more or less ML than the other — both are conclusions that ML parties have reached through democratic centralist application of dialectical materialism, even though they aren’t necessarily being directly advanced on tumblr by the parties themselves.

So, let’s get to the substance.

The subject that causes the most conflict between tumblr MLs is internationalism, and what it means to be anti-imperialist. This reflects a very real split in the global communist movement. Here, we see most tumblr MLs (and most real-life ML organizations!) adhering to two different tendencies, which I will here refer to as Orthodox MLs and Tricontinental MLs. (These are not established terms, but I don’t know of any better names for these tendencies.) Of course, there are more tendencies than just these two, but they are two of the dominant currents among communist parties globally, and certainly the two most represented here on tumblr.

Orthodox MLs

The Orthodox ML position, as I understand it, essentially extends Lenin’s 1916 definition of imperialism to the present. Imperialism is viewed as a global economic system defined by monopoly capitalism, finance capital, and the territorial/logistical division of the world among rival imperialist camps. This position acknowledges the US-led camp as dominant, but still considers powers like Russia, China, and Iran to be imperialist competitors who should not necessarily be supported in opposition to the US (there may be conditional or tactical exceptions, but they are rare). Typically, Orthodox MLs will condemn the US camp’s aggression, but are either agnostic or hostile to the governments and organizations that lead resistance to such aggression if they are not communist themselves. For instance, they will typically affirm the right of the Palestinian people to resist Israeli aggression, and they will support the PFLP, but they will oppose Hamas as an organization and consider its Islamist character to be incompatible with working-class internationalism.

Orthodox MLs also have strict standards of what ruling communist parties are deserving of support based on whether or not they are pursuing purely socialist economics. The use of state-regulated market economies — which is the line pursued by most surviving communist-led states — is viewed as an unacceptable distortion of communist thought. In this view, current conditions are adequate for implementing a planned economy, which they view as the fundamental expression of anti-imperialism. When states like the People’s Republic of China turn to market economics for strategic purposes — including the presence of monopoly capital, finance capital, the export of capital — and compete for influence abroad, Orthodox MLs view this as a surrender to and endorsement of the imperialist system. The PRC is considered a capitalist state, regardless of the Marxist-Leninist political structures of the ruling party.

In this view, there is no anti-imperialist camp of states. The primary contradiction remains capital versus labor; national liberation struggles are important, but only insofar as they are led and waged by the working class. Anti-imperialist action only exists in the form of struggle against the ruling classes. The only enemies of the US-led camp that are viable allies are those that oppose any kind of internal capitalist development. It is important to maintain diligent criticism of any participant in the global system of imperialism and be vigilant to oppose bourgeois nationalist or state capitalist tendencies.

Tricontinental MLs

The other tendency present among tumblr MLs is what I’m here calling Tricontinental Marxism-Leninism (I am using this name to note this tendency’s roots in the 1966 Tricontinental Conference in Havana, which gathered anti-colonial and anti-imperialist forces from across Latin America, Africa, and Asia. The Tricontinental Conference is really the historical root of this tendency, and it is already frequently invoked by proponents of this framework.) (Shout out to comrade Vijay Prashad and the Tricontinental Institute.) These MLs view imperialism as substantially changed since Lenin’s definition in 1916. In this view, imperialism is no longer simply defined by the struggle for dominance between rival powers, but rather is defined by the hegemony of the United States and its allies/subordinates since 1945 (and intensified in 1991 with the collapse of the USSR). Rather than a competition of rival capitalist peers, global finance and military power are dominated by the US-led camp. This amounts to a single imperial core extracting surplus from the vast periphery (alternatively framed as the Global North which extracts wealth from the Global South). The imperial core’s control of global finance creates unequal conditions for competition, such that even other capitalist economies are burdened by structurally unequal currency exchange, crises of debt, and vulnerability to economic sanctions. States and organizations that oppose this US-led hegemonic world order are thereby considered at least tactically anti-imperialist regardless of their internal contradictions or economic structures. Support is extended to opponents of the US-led world order whether or not they are communist or socialist themselves. Any state that attempts to nationalize its resources and industries and develop them outside the direction of the US camp, even through capitalist means, is resisting the global imperialist system as it exists today.

Given this framework of imperialism, Tricontinental MLs are more sympathetic to the strategic employment of state-controlled market economics and capitalist development by communist parties in power as a means of surviving this era of imperialism defined by the singular hegemony of the US-led camp. In fact, this tendency’s stance is that doing so has proven to be an effective strategy for maintaining state power under constant assault from the imperialist camp. They see this as strategy developed by ML parties that has proved more effective at not only surviving but internally developing to the point of reducing reliance on the international economic and financial systems under the control of the US-led bloc. This option maintains communist control of state power such that a transition to planned economics can be made when US hegemony over global economics and finance does not represent such an existential threat to socialist development. In this view, even where physical and logistical conditions exist to create a centrally planned economy, geopolitical conditions may not yet exist to maintain one, as the US capacity for asymmetrical warfare is perceived as a significant threat to states openly defying the capitalist world economy. This is not to say that all MLs of the Tricontinental tendency agree completely with every aspect of such an analysis, but they see it as a viable strategy and an acceptable retreat from planned economics.

In this tendency, there is a clear imperialist camp upholding and controlling the exploitative global economy that extracts wealth from the periphery. The organizations and states that resist this camp do not necessarily make up a single camp themselves, but they are natural allies in the struggle against the imperialist system as it exists today. This means that MLs following this line of analysis will more freely support national liberation movements and economic frameworks that oppose US-led imperialist extraction, even if this means support for bourgeois nationalist or religious actors. These MLs will maintain critical support for Hamas, the People’s Republic of China, the Sahel States, the Islamic Republic of Iran, etc. etc. and treat them as allies in the anti-imperialist struggle. Internally, Tricontinental ML organizations will not shy away from critical analysis of allies, but they are highly averse to doing so in public, as they want to present themselves as reliable allies as well, who can be trusted not to slander or weaken the rhetorical position of other anti-imperialist forces. While often perceived as knee-jerk and uncritical cheerleading by Orthodox MLs, Tricontinental MLs would argue that such criticism is better handled internally, through party channels and in conversation with comrades, rather than aired on social media.

A geographic note on these tendencies

These tendencies are dominant among MLs in different geographies. The Orthodox ML tendency is particularly dominant among communist parties in Europe and parts of the former Soviet bloc. The KKE (Communist Party of Greece) is arguably the most influential party promoting this tendency, and most ML parties in Europe follow this line, with few exceptions. Outside of Europe, however, its influence is small and diminishing. By contrast, most influential Marxist-Leninist organizations in the global periphery tend more toward the Tricontinental approach. In these contexts, the US-led world order is experienced as a more immediate and significant threat than the national bourgeoisie or clerical forces. This makes sense: communist parties operating under the shadow of direct US intervention, neocolonial debt structures, or military occupation are more likely to see anti-imperialism as the immediate priority, while parties in the imperial core — where class struggle is less directly mediated by national oppression — are more inclined to focus on the capital-labor contradiction as the priority. The Orthodox tendency used to be dominant among USAmerican MLs as well, but that has been upended by the sustained growth of the PSL (Party for Socialism and Liberation), which adheres very closely to the Tricontinental framework and is driven by solidarity with comrades in the periphery. This is unusual for a party based in the imperial core, and it reflects a conscious political alignment with national liberation movements both in the Global South and within the borders of the United States.

How all of this plays out among tumblr MLs

Because nobody really uses this language to describe these tendencies, a given ML’s position may be extremely unclear — someone who describes themselves as “Marxist-Leninist” or “anti-imperialist” may well fall into either camp, but they are essentially working with different models of imperialism and conflicting levels of flexibility versus doctrinal rigidity. On a site like tumblr, where users are anonymized and generally not open about specific party affiliations, this leads to many misunderstandings between MLs working from these very different analytical viewpoints. These are usually accompanied by arguments that completely misunderstand the other position and write them off as “left communists,” “campists,” or other such thought-terminating refrains that miss the substance of the disagreement. We should continue to disagree about this — such dialogue is healthy — but I think we need to come at it from a clearer understanding of the traditions and analyses at play. I’m hoping this post will, at the very least, help clarify and contextualize some of the arguments we see around here.

I sincerely thank you if you’ve read this far! I’d like to know what you think about this framing and I welcome feedback and criticism♡