Charles Post's Actually Existing 'Socialism' – A Critique of Stalinism is such a mess of ideological nonsense, category mistakes, and predictable Trotskyist adages that, as one of my comrades pointed out, it must have been rushed to publication since Post, regardless of his flaws, is usually much more rigorous. In a context where people are turning to variations of Marxism-Leninism that are decidedly not Trotskyist I suppose it is natural that academic Trotskyists, who have worked hard to control the discourse about Marxism in the imperialist metropoles, would react with alarm. Post's article thus functions as a banal work of confirmation bias in that it repeats what Trotskyists have told themselves for decades, which just so happens to run parallel to the "common sense" of bourgeois ideology. As I've been arguing for a while, "Stalinism" has to be one of the worst conceptual categories and Post proves, yet again, that this is the case. Genera
Marxist-Leninist-Maoist reflections