It’s kinda weird to have tons of huge portraits of just 1 person instead of art celebrating the masses or many different people or whatever.
I understand the impulse but now that we know enough to know that great man theory is a harmful way to think about events, how do we prevent large populations from falling into that hero worship mindset in future communist countries?
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Deconstructing the umbrella concept of "leadership" as bourgeois ideology and separating its components into the domains of teaching, mediating, public speaking, facilitating proceedings (parliamentarianism), strategizing, etc.
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Not letting someone hold the highest position in more than one of these domains.
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Definitely not having any organizational choke points by allowing one (human, biased, corruptible) person to have dominant sway over an organization. No more chains of command as we know them; we're not going to fight capitalism with capitalist atructures; we're going to fight capitalism with socialist structures.
One simple example shared across many First Nations from the east coast to the Texcoco basin is the separation of powers of the war chief from any civil governance.
The truth is, even most anarchists don't do this, because it does allow for hierarchy, albeit a curtailed sort of it.
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Cults of personality are a reactionary tendency of the peasant class in the revolution. They are generally illiterate, uneducated, and insulated from mass culture so they fall into traps like that. Once a country proletarianizes, such as in Cuba or China, the tendency disappears because the peasants become educated and socialized and they realized that they (their class) was more important to the revolution than their leaders.
In Cuba cult of personality is actually banned, people still created music and paintings about Fidel and Che.
It's a difficult issue for sure, you can't really have a successful revolutionary struggle with out competent leaders (at least as far as history can inform us) and we can't expect people not to admire those leaders and develop a sort of parasocial relationship with them.
Also leaders are a shorthand for a longer set of ideals that they advocate
If you read about Stalin's efforts to prevent a cult of personality forming around him you learn that it's nearly impossible because symbolic figureheads allow individuals to distill emotional resonance into singular focus. Another good example would be Commandante Marcos, who REALLY went as far as possible to avoid a cult of personality, to greater, but still limited, success.
Yep - he really went all the way with it - Commandante Marcos is now a historical personality.
Whatever Cuba did and continues to do. Upholding Fidel, Guevara and so on but not glorifying them with statues and monuments and the people having photos in every home.
Just a little bit of pushback is probably all that's necessary to stop people putting stuff up by themselves. You just have to make it cringe, embarrassing, something that's just a little weird to do.
Put a scene or two in widely popular tv shows that has someone acting a bit embarrassed by the behaviour. Over here in Britain you could put anything you want in the soaps and it would get picked up in the population, as long as you don't go overboard with it a little injection into popular tv here and there would do a lot for injecting ideas or beliefs into the general population. This has to not be done in a cringe way in and of itself though, subtlety is very important.
I think if you have a leader popular enough for people to want to put pictures of them in their homes, they could probably just tell their people that they thought it was weird and please don't do it.
lol wait until you find out how pretty much every leader has wanted to be cremated and forgotten. Invariably they end up bunged in a mausoleum.
The people want what the people want, and the people want giant busts of Lenin.
Why not both?
The USSR had plenty of art celebrating the masses. It also had art celebrating revolutionary leaders of the masses.
Humans also really love personifying things. Why try to reject that? Particularly if it helps with mobilising and organising people.
The issue with ‘great man theory’ is it subsumes the currents of history to the decisions of the individuals involved.
To put it a different way, ‘men make history, but not in circumstances of their choosing’.
Make a mascot instead. Or two of them. Hammy the Hammer and Sicko the Sickle (they're lovers)
