Which parts of MLism do you find lacking or outdated in the 21st century?

For me personally, and I don't know if it is ML per se, it would be the focus on (physical) workers and a lack of focus on office workers. My own party does this as well.

I get where it comes from, but to act as if a lot of people working whatever kind of job in an office are somehow less beneficial to our cause is a bit weird. I always think we are missing out on a lot of potential members.

Actually just be an human peeve rather than a theory one, but I feel like a lot of MLs haven't moved on from the fall of the Soviet Union and place disproportional emphasis on remembering a state that no longer exists compared to the support of current AES (except for China) and socialist movements. It's very rare to see any discussion of either Cuba or new socialist movements in America or Africa for instance, and when they pop up it's only when the Eye of the Washington Post sets its gaze upon them. In a sense, I think a lot of MLs (not educated enough to call myself one of them yet) fall a lot into the trap of talking about things libs care about more than what we should actually care about.

There is a lot of dogma from past socialist experiments. And while the successes of the USSR should be defended, many MLs get carried away with the defense and act as if Lenin and Stalin were omnipotent and their theories on organizing and revolution are able to be perfectly replicated anywhere. We must ultimately remember that the USSR had many failures, had material conditions and obstacles unique to them, and that Lenin -- while a brilliant analyst of imperialism -- was a human, not a god, and that he wrote from a particular insight with the intent of revolutionizing his particular society.

That's not to say past theory should be discarded. We gotta continue to study and be the messengers of this knowledge. And it's also not to say we have license to be eclectic and undisciplined in our takes and our praxis. But even though history is currently rhyming and all that, we live in a notably different world in terms of our technology, collective awareness, We need to forge NEW theory suited to OUR material conditions. Especially for us comrades in imperial core countries. Take our cue from the rest of the global south and ADAPT the theory. Stop treating it like dogma.

One example in my maybe-unpopular opinion, is that we can actually learn from current anarchist tactics of organizing rather than wholly dismissing them because they are anarchists. Yeah I know, a lot of them (as evidenced here recently) are annoying in their lack of proper geopolitical analysis and their idealism, but they're also leading the struggle in plenty of areas of resistance (Cop City in Atlanta). We shouldn't take that for granted and we can learn from them just as much as they should learn from us. In this day and age, with the unique opportunities and setbacks we are confronted with regarding online surveillance and social media, strong centralization of our movement might actually not be appropriate right now.

I am not convinced that international class war should be practiced, especially in the modern era. The reality is that countries where a socialist revolution succeeds will most likely be economically malnourished; so, instead of publicly waging class war on nearly every country in the world and letting yourself be isolated and slowly asphyxiated, it's better to work with these nations to some extent and acquire the appropriate technological know-how and other means of production. Proletarian internationalism, in the form of making donations to people-centric governments or sending rescue teams after some natural disaster, is acceptable; however, military alliances and other burdening constraints based on ideology should be avoided at all costs.

As for China, I would say that it's socialist because of instead sharpening the contradictions between capital and labour as what is occurring in countries, like the US, the Chinese state is resolving them to their logical conclusions. The most important aspect of this is preventing the move from the real economy of industrial production and consumption to the fictitious financial economy, like what exists in the US. For example, the de-industrialization of the US primarily occurred because of the antagonism between decreasing amount of profit and rising wages, but this is not what is occurring in China. Instead of exporting all low-value manufacturing to poorer nations so monopolies can make even more profit, the Chinese central government is automating that level of manufacturing and taking away the privileges that the domestic industrialists have enjoyed so far; thus, we can see that the primary internal contradictions are slowly being resolved, and that China is increasingly heading into the type of classless and harmonious society that was described by Marx and Engels.

Something that has been on my mind as I have been diving more into theory is what will happen to those that choose not to work "after the revolution."

I feel like at the time of Marx or Lenin, it was understood that manual labor war paramount to a productive society and the automation of the time made production more efficient with less manpower needed. But there was still this emphasis on how everyone will be a productive member of society in order to "earn their keep." The USSR, of course wasn't able to be 100% automated. So, I get that.

But we are in the early stages of an era of automation where there are going to be a lot less jobs needs that not everyone will be employed. But I also think that is a good thing. It's, imo, the obvious path our society needs to be striving for. Fewer people working, and less work needed due to fully or nearly fully automated systems of things like food or clothing. After all, we won't be striving for that infinite growth factor anymore.

The only thing I think I have seen that is close to an answer is that we will be working less so we will have more time to create. But that suggests that we will all still work but only, say 16 hours a week instead of 40-60. I think this definitely opens the opportunity for those that choose not to work, but do we call those people "parasites" and shun them? I don't think so. But I also don't know if this idea is fully realized in any text. At least not in any I've read yet.

Maybe this whole thing is just naturally lumped in with the old state "withering away"? Sorry for the sort of stream of thought comment btw.

I always felt as much as ML and other adjacent ideologies maintain that they are materialist, in effect they don't act as such. This is partly informed by my experience online and in in-person organizing.

There's a significant ignorance of the physical and natural sciences which do well to inform a materialist perspective. When I have brought up points from Biology, Physics, or some things which are more contemporary like Psychology (and the effectiveness of therapy) I have largely been brushed aside. I have some education in these areas, and I feel that many of the MLers I interact with have very little. Dialogue becomes nearly impossible as I am hitting heads against ideology as opposed to empirical evidence. This may be due to my background in the sciences as compared to the many individuals I interact with in-person (I don't know about online) having humanities and arts backgrounds. Of course when I was in the space where the people who were well versed in the sciences or engineering were around, I'd hear similar ridicule against people who were less technical.

My hope would be at least among MLers that there would be space for critical thought and discussion but that has not been the case. In fact technical people who have a less coherent understanding or ideology, more or less piecemeal, at the very least seem more amenable to discussion relating to non-human materialist phenomena. Though there is often moral bankruptcy involved as well unfortunately.

Roland Boer, Friedrich Engels and the Foundations of Socialist Governance may be of interest: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-16-4695-9.

I think there's a lot of difficulty in MLism discussing social relations that are relevant to revolution and reaction but aren't directly explicitly related to the means of production. Intersectionality does a good job of exposing those relations, but MLism struggles to incorporate these relations into a coherent framework that can easily be picked up.

Thus, we have confusion among MLs about how to express the division between the white labor aristocracy and the proles and lumpen of color. We have confusion about how to name oppressor and oppressed and discuss how oppression reproduces society. We struggle to incorporate the insights of Fanon and Freire without opening the door to revisionism. We do our best to do this, but MLism in my experience lacks the language and potential the concepts to handle these other relations gracefully.

If anyone has a good way of navigating what I am describing, I would be super grateful for some pointers.