I don't care how social media users use it, what does Lenin mean when he says it?
A reactionary is a counter-revolutionary. They want to roll back the forces of history, whether that's in a Capitalist society or a revolutionary one.
i am going to become the world's biggest reactionary by trying to revert human civilization back to when we were tiktaaliks
citing the Encyclopedia of Marxism
A political position that maintains a conservative response to change, including threats to social institutions and technological advances. Reaction is the reciprocal action to revolutionary movement. Reactionaries clamp down on the differences of the emerging productive forces in society, and attempt to remove those differences, silence them, or segregate them in order to keep the stability of the established order.
Examples of the political position of reactionaries can be seen throughout history: during the US Revolutionary War, the reactionaries were the ruling British aristocracy, who sought to maintain their feudal government over their American colonies, while the US revolutionaries sought to establish a government to represent the interests of capitalist values and practices. Hundreds of years later in Russia, the tables would turn and capitalists became reactionary while the Socialists are revolutionary.
This is to say, a reactionary is those who seek to turn back the hands of time on socio/political-economic progress of humanity.
In a nutshell: the opposite of revolutionary. They are "reacting" to the revolution by opposing it rather than supporting it or being indifferent.
The narrow spectrum of political discourse centering on culture and identity politics kinda made that avenue for expressing reactionary sentiment kinda inevitable imo
