See I’ve always been wondering how the academics would end up co-opting Lenin one day … Marx continues to be thoroughly co-opted of course, but the naive part of me thinks, well, Lenin who relentlessly fought the liberalization of Marx and all championed the “scaryyyyy violence” “dictatorshippppp (of the prol)” stuff can’t really be co-opted, right? :agony-soviet:
(imm sure they’ll find a creative way to do so when some material conditions compel …)
I think there's already a partial co-option, which you see with anti-Stalin takes - where it was big bad Stalin who ruined everything, but Lenin was cool and if he had lived, the Soviet Union would have magically been better and not had any purges or famines. You see this kind of stuff with every socialist who died (or was otherwise removed from positions of power, like Trotsky :pika-pickaxe:) too early to do much stuff (although Lenin actually did a lot, it's just that the people dropping these takes haven't actually read anything) - people who lack proper materialist analysis will just assume that bad decisions happen because the people in charge are evil, and not because there's actual material conditions underlying things, and so if a different guy happened to be in charge, the bad things would have simply not happened.
it's like... someone's removed the part of your brain that remembers that... with some kind of... pick, perhaps of an ice-breaking variety :trot-shining:
Anything leftist or leftist-adjacent must be coopted or murked beyond recognition
See I’ve always been wondering how the academics would end up co-opting Lenin one day … Marx continues to be thoroughly co-opted of course, but the naive part of me thinks, well, Lenin who relentlessly fought the liberalization of Marx and all championed the “scaryyyyy violence” “dictatorshippppp (of the prol)” stuff can’t really be co-opted, right? :agony-soviet: (imm sure they’ll find a creative way to do so when some material conditions compel …)
I think there's already a partial co-option, which you see with anti-Stalin takes - where it was big bad Stalin who ruined everything, but Lenin was cool and if he had lived, the Soviet Union would have magically been better and not had any purges or famines. You see this kind of stuff with every socialist who died (or was otherwise removed from positions of power, like Trotsky :pika-pickaxe:) too early to do much stuff (although Lenin actually did a lot, it's just that the people dropping these takes haven't actually read anything) - people who lack proper materialist analysis will just assume that bad decisions happen because the people in charge are evil, and not because there's actual material conditions underlying things, and so if a different guy happened to be in charge, the bad things would have simply not happened.
They can’t help but want the Great Man, the singular.
Trotsky. Of course. Freaking Trotsky. I don’t know why but I always forget about Trotsky.
it's like... someone's removed the part of your brain that remembers that... with some kind of... pick, perhaps of an ice-breaking variety :trot-shining:
How many days until whoever owns that turns it into an NFT …