In light of how Xi seems to be steering the country more left I'm left wondering how the fuck the old historical leaders were even real
like maybe it's because I live in the USA so everyone past a certain political station should be only be met with trueanon gun cock sound but it's genuinely incredible to me that anything positive about people like Chavez, Che, Allende, etc. or like Stalin or Mao could even be kinda true
It's cra-zee to me that one day some MF just woke up one day and was like: "I'm going to make this bitch right!" and went, got power, and didn't immediately turn into some self interested maniac and then went and unironically made like the entire formerly illiterate population literate, gave everyone jobs, killed all the Nazis instead of joining them and in general tried to make things not completely awful
I reminds me of an anecdote on r/communism where some guy in LatAm said he became a communist because of the stories his dad had of just being in the presence of Che where he said "he was like a superhero, but REAL"
It's like how
Maybe it's unbelievable because of my own cynicism but it's so incomprehensible to me that like....they existed. And that maybe they will again some day
It's not just you, the belief that power inevitably corrupts is pretty central to anarchism. The old 19th century anarchists thought Marx's idea of a dictatorship of the proletariat wouldn't work because they thought it's leaders would become corrupted, even if they had good intentions, and most modern anarchists are suspicious of communist states and leaders today.
I feel like it's more accurate to say that "a corruptoid, will eventually find power"
I think there are people who are not corrupt and theoretically would never become corrupted.
The problem is when the leaders change
There's a reason a bunch of archetypal stories about great leaders involve the leader being chosen for leadership rather than seeking it out.
How many times did Stalin try to step down again?
4 officially, unofficially many more according to his daughter.
Human organizations eventually become led by people who do whatever it is that leads to success within that organization, who then lead the organization by continuing to do that thing. The long-term actions of any organization are the external consequences of whatever makes people advance within it.
(If I ever get around to writing a book, this is the thesis, and the rest is an examination of different kinds of organizations, much of which is dunking on tree-shaped hierarchies.)