Some gripes:
- Mao should not be listed under “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics”, this was a post-Mao invention and Mao’s work contributes directly to Marxism-Leninism
- Gaddafi should be removed entirely. He may be valuable as a historical figure but he is not a socialist theorist (iirc the Green Book is explicitly non-Marxist) and including him under “Socialism” is misleading to new and less informed communists
- Why share the works of the revisionist CPRF? Here is an exert from ProleWiki’s own article on them “Zyuganov and the [CPRF] support social conservatism”
Hey, thanks for the feedback.
For Mao, I asked our resident China expert and am waiting for a response; we’ll see what he says. Although I think it would make sort of a minute difference to move Mao’s card as his work was mostly about China’s material conditions and SWCC takes what he laid down; would you move Lenin because Marxism-leninism is a post-Lenin invention too? 😄
Socialist doesn’t necessarily mean marxist, and Gaddafi joins the row of people like MLK or Einstein (for whom we have only 1 work so they don’t have their own cards). Gaddafi’s writings are unfamiliar to me personally, but we talked about him quite a bit with the editorship, including people who are familiar with him, and the consensus is that he was a socialist to some extent, but certainly not a communist or a marxist.
As for the documents, our goal is to rehost every major document from communist parties around the world so as to archive them… but between what we want to do and what we have the current capabilities of doing is a lot of ground to cover lol. Sometimes we also rehost documents we intend to use as sources.
SWCC is more about the direction China took under Deng, which can be anything from praise to neutral to derisive depending on what someone thinks of Deng and that direction (I think it’s worked out reasonably well, personally). It is heavily drawn from the direction under Mao, and by necessity cites Mao, so they aren’t purely distinct but I would say that means learning about SWCC should involve reading Mao but you can read Mao without SWCC. e.g., the Black Panthers were inspired by Mao’s writings and built on them, but did not build on Deng / SWCC.
It may seem pedantic, but plenty of Mao’s writings have use outside of the Chinese context the same way Lenin’s writings can be used outside the Russian context. SwCC is by definition stuff that should only apply to the conditions in China, which I think narrows the view on the usefulness of Mao to a less informed reader.
If you’re going to be looser with the definition of socialism in that way, may I recommend relabeling the header “non-Marxist Socialism” or something like that?
I can appreciate the goal, but I think it’s a bit of a waste to do so and not have some editorial insight or at least critique of works by parties that are communist in name as this is another way to confuse new communists.
And thank you for taking the time to consider my gripes!
You’re not wrong with the SWCC, it might be to generalist a term. Likewise for the communist/socialist demarcation, I think we agree but in different ways.
It’s possible documents can confuse new readers, but I think that remains to be proven. Sometimes there’s also good analysis in places, and bad analysis in others. One thing we don’t want to do is edit the works we put in the library, which is something that marxists.org does, like editing Stalin to make him look bad. We’re strictly a publisher for now.
joins the row of people like MLK or Einstein
I think you should expand into this. Historic figures, historic figures, historic figures. Lists of scientists, activists and so on, with their pictures, with contents of various length (even if it’s just a short quote) demonstrating their support for socialists, communists, etc etc.
The biggest and most successful propaganda tool I have had in any discussion is namedropping Einstein, Nelson Mandela, etc etc and illuminating the history that liberals hide about them.
We decided to add cards for authors only after we had at least 2 works from them (but their works, like Einstein’s Why Socialism, are available in other topic cards). I agree though that it really helps having notable figures like MLK and Einstein appear on the encyclopedia.
