Lenin was exiled from his country and had to be smuggled back in by a rival nation in order to kick off the Revolution. If an American Lenin were alive today, FBI snipers would be surrounding his house.
I finished listening to the latest episode of TrueAnon, and Brace ended with a chilling point. The evolution of an increasingly inhuman American military state has produced a reactionary element in the Islamic World by the way of ISIS. Extremist military action - wherein private unaccountable security commit massacres on arbitrary street corners in Baghdad, where diplomatic envoys can be bombed on the local airport's tarmac, where predator drones assassinate entire wedding parties - it all culminates in a kind of nihilism that is staggering.
I think that the attitude towards Communists in this country has changed the kind of individual that could operate as a Lenin or even a Marx. Anything resembling leftism going forward is necessarily going to be an insurgent movement, not an academic or philosophical one. It's going to need to survive in an economy that is actively hostile toward it.
Or its going to get wiped out, much like Communism in the US functionally was after the 1950s.
His point on insurgency is true. USA's most effective socialist org, the Black Panthers, understood the importance of insurgent warfare. I just read Blood in My Eye by George Jackson, and he spoke about how in the face of such insurmountable odds' insurgency is the most effective option. It takes 10-1 force to overpower an insurgency.
There is no group in the US that rivals the panthers today, however.
Yeah an insurgent left like they are referring to is imo doomed in a lot of circumstances (and 100 percent is in our current one, I mean look what happened with the new communist movement) and even using Lenin as an example of an insurgent is pretty ahistorical and the interplay of insurgent like and non insurgent like worker forces acting in Tsarist Russia leading up to and during WW1 is very complicated and so removed from our own circumstances. I'd also disagree that the black panthers ever even got close to approaching a comparable level of power and potential to the US orgs in the 1910s and 20s (which also got crushed by capital via its own means and the means it wielded with the state).
I think that's a really ahistorical way to view Lenin and Hampton. We didn't have our Lenin (I'd argue we shouldn't have a Lenin either in the sense of his actions post 1917). But anyhow, Hampton cannot be compared to Lenin at all. Lenin was not really involved in on the ground organizing in Russia at all for many years of his life, rather there thousands of dedicated radicals organizing in their workplaces and towns (many who were killed like Hampton), combined with the crumbling tsarist state and ww1 that led to the revolution. Lenin participated in protests and wrote and distributed pamphlets (within a highly organized and developed set of anti tsarist Marxist organizations that already existed, and with funding from his mom ) while in law school, got exiled, and went to Europe for 20 years organizing and theorizing alongside help from the spd and was sent back to Russia once the revolution had already sparked off. The two situations are just incomparable.
If Lenin had been executed by the Tsar in the 1890s,there still was a massive revolutionary left carrying on created and sustained by many organizations that helped create Lenin as he was in the first place. We cannot compare that to Hampton.
Lenin was exiled from his country and had to be smuggled back in by a rival nation in order to kick off the Revolution. If an American Lenin were alive today, FBI snipers would be surrounding his house.
I finished listening to the latest episode of TrueAnon, and Brace ended with a chilling point. The evolution of an increasingly inhuman American military state has produced a reactionary element in the Islamic World by the way of ISIS. Extremist military action - wherein private unaccountable security commit massacres on arbitrary street corners in Baghdad, where diplomatic envoys can be bombed on the local airport's tarmac, where predator drones assassinate entire wedding parties - it all culminates in a kind of nihilism that is staggering.
I think that the attitude towards Communists in this country has changed the kind of individual that could operate as a Lenin or even a Marx. Anything resembling leftism going forward is necessarily going to be an insurgent movement, not an academic or philosophical one. It's going to need to survive in an economy that is actively hostile toward it.
Or its going to get wiped out, much like Communism in the US functionally was after the 1950s.
Stop listening to TrueAnon and Chapo. They're blackpilling you.
His point on insurgency is true. USA's most effective socialist org, the Black Panthers, understood the importance of insurgent warfare. I just read Blood in My Eye by George Jackson, and he spoke about how in the face of such insurmountable odds' insurgency is the most effective option. It takes 10-1 force to overpower an insurgency.
There is no group in the US that rivals the panthers today, however.
Not sure you understand the term.
Yeah an insurgent left like they are referring to is imo doomed in a lot of circumstances (and 100 percent is in our current one, I mean look what happened with the new communist movement) and even using Lenin as an example of an insurgent is pretty ahistorical and the interplay of insurgent like and non insurgent like worker forces acting in Tsarist Russia leading up to and during WW1 is very complicated and so removed from our own circumstances. I'd also disagree that the black panthers ever even got close to approaching a comparable level of power and potential to the US orgs in the 1910s and 20s (which also got crushed by capital via its own means and the means it wielded with the state).
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I think that's a really ahistorical way to view Lenin and Hampton. We didn't have our Lenin (I'd argue we shouldn't have a Lenin either in the sense of his actions post 1917). But anyhow, Hampton cannot be compared to Lenin at all. Lenin was not really involved in on the ground organizing in Russia at all for many years of his life, rather there thousands of dedicated radicals organizing in their workplaces and towns (many who were killed like Hampton), combined with the crumbling tsarist state and ww1 that led to the revolution. Lenin participated in protests and wrote and distributed pamphlets (within a highly organized and developed set of anti tsarist Marxist organizations that already existed, and with funding from his mom ) while in law school, got exiled, and went to Europe for 20 years organizing and theorizing alongside help from the spd and was sent back to Russia once the revolution had already sparked off. The two situations are just incomparable.
If Lenin had been executed by the Tsar in the 1890s,there still was a massive revolutionary left carrying on created and sustained by many organizations that helped create Lenin as he was in the first place. We cannot compare that to Hampton.
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