@KitRedgrave yeah i've seen people say "don't even call yourself a ____ unless you've read *posts a list of 150 books and articles*"

it's all about the transitional program. finding a way to meet people where they are and bring them over to socialism. not demanding that people obtain a certain Leftist Power Level before they are allowed to be socialist.

@KitRedgrave well now i'm on theory talk, might as well keep going...

the marxist (well, actually, hegelian) tool for analyzing this issue would be dialectics - the understanding that most things in this world aren't straight forward, aren't Just One Thing - everything has contradictions, everything is changing.

you might've seen the "thesis, antithesis, synthesis" format around - that's the classic hegelian dialectic. you propose a thesis, you propose a contradicting thesis based on the evidence, and you combine them into a synthesis that explains them both.

if you want even more reading, this pamphlet from the Marxist Workers Party of South Africa is a fairly good introduction to dialectical materialism, the combination of hegel's dialectics with historical materialism that is the main thing that makes marxism what it is: http://marxistworkersparty.org.za/?page_id=659

@KitRedgrave (i'm a trotskyist. which technically means i'm an ml, because i like marx and lenin, but tag out when stalinist and maoist shit starts showing up. trotsky held the position of permanent revolution, in contrast with stalin's stagism, proletarian internationalism in contrast to stalin's "socialism in one country", a socialist society run by mass participation in council democracies (soviets!) in contrast to stalin's bonapartism, and a general agreement with MarxEngelsLenin's views on the state, that it is a tool for the proletariat to use to remove the bourgeoise and eliminate class conflict, instead of the weird nationalist worship of the violent tools of the state that MLs love so much)

(if i might interest you in some light reading on the matter: https://www.socialistparty.org.uk/socialism21/)

@KitRedgrave a non-exhaustive list of the primary flaws of MLs reasoning that leads them to their conclusions are

stagism, the belief that societies that have not yet achieved advanced capitalism must pass through capitalism before reaching socialism. this is why stalinists backed capitalists a lot of the time, and is how china can get away with calling themselves socialist when they are a peculiar form of state capitalism

socialism in one country, which is self-explanatory and opposed to internationalism

bonapartism, that a socialist society needs a strong leader who is a "hero to the people" who the party and government should fall behind without question.

the worship of the state, the idea that the state needs to be as strong as possible to fight counter-revolution, in contrast to the "withering away of the state" that engels described

@KitRedgrave this take is in different language talking about idealism vs materialism, or utopian socialism vs scientific socialism. engels' "socialism: utopian and scientific" is a great reading on the topic, short and accessible.

i would say this take is honestly more applicable to anarchists than MLs. the problem of MLs isn't that they don't try to base their ideology on material fact (marxism very much stresses a historical materialist view on history as a way of developing accurate theories of how to change history), but it's that their analysis of history is flawed which leads to wrong conclusions.

anarchists tend to base their ideology not on material facts of how to change society but on idealist views of how society should work, which is the exact thing that marx came on the scene to address (marx's whole thing was that he was a former hegelian who broke with hegel's idealism to found materialism)