v.i. lenin - c or d?

An open goal, how could they miss.

i know no human is singularly responsible for all the bullshit but he comes across as such a dickhead in his writings & actions I blame him anyway

the bolshevik revolution could be more fairly described as a coup. the majority of the toiling masses of the Russian empire were peasants, they supported the SRs. the bolsheviks had their support in the cities, and that won them the day. Lenin (and Trotsky's) response to the anarchists, the SRs, the worker's opposition, the Kronstadt sailors etc. give you the absolute measure of them both.

all power to the soviets just kidding lol

it’s easy to fault lenin & co for not abolishing capitalism

tbf Lenin & co were pretty busy abolishing people

he didn't really care about the proletariat except as an "agent of historical change." that is, he cared about them as a class; not about the lives of individual workers. and if anything he was negatively disposed toward russia, calling it a backwards peasant country and things like that. there is no way to see the world that is more alienating than how lenin saw it.

there is still something fascinating about the bolsheviks though, and the way they bent theory self-survingly while still being pedantic dogmatists. the debates they had, read today, seem like those of medieval theologians. so deep in an insular discourse.

Whomst among us has not referred to Russia as a backward peasant country, tbf

Seems like fair comment in 1917, no?

Trotsky's attention to and love for literature helped him position theoretically how Bolshevism was intrinsic and inevitable in the nation of Pushkin, Gogol, and Dostoyevsky. It didn't make him any less dogmatic or malevolent.

it's too bad orwell has been appropriated by conservatives because he essentially had it right. the icy, inhuman way people like lenin wrote about the world wasn't just a quirk, it was a hint at the underlying brutality, or capacity for brutality. bertrand russell saw the same thing when he went over to the ussr in 1920 or thereabouts.

however, if i was a russian factory worker when lenin swung into town in 1915, i would likely have joined the bolsheviks. by that point, the soviets were de facto controlling petersburg anyway. kerensky's government had no real authority except through the soviets and they were threatened all the time by deeply reactionary forces such as the black hundreds. "all power to the soviets," in that moment wasn't really an abstract experiment. it was already happening, why not formalize it?

but then, yeah, the soviets didn't end up actually being allowed to govern.

treeship, you write so crisply here. I could keep reading you in this and the Shelley threads. Please follow this lead in the politics threads!

It is precisely now and only now, when in the starving regions people are eating human flesh, and hundreds if not thousands of corpses are littering the roads, that we can (and therefore must) carry out the confiscation of church valuables with the most savage and merciless energy.

a very large number of local clergyman and bourgeois must be arrested and put on trial. The trial must end in no other way than execution by firing squad of the most influential and dangerous Black Hundreds in Shuya, and to the extent possible, not only in that city but also in Moscow and several other clerical centers.... the greater the number of representatives of the reactionary clergy and reactionary bourgeoisie we succeed in executing for this reason, the better. We must teach these people a lesson right now, so that they will not dare even to think of any resistance for several decades.

we've all fired off ruthless and bloodthirsty emails to the politburo after that 2nd bottle of vodka - don't judge!

xpost
lol that is the most professorial post I've ever seen on this site!

I didn’t know about the sex worker genocide thing. Amazing what they don’t teach us in school.

— Don Hughes 🦌 (@getfiscal) April 22, 2020

tankies totally a real issue on the left ftr, baffling how many otherwise right on ppl will go to bat for North Korea and, more bafflingly to me as it clearly bears almost no traces of a communist nation in 2020, China as well

I don't know where you come across all these people.

lol I know some IRL, I was at lunch last year where one friend suggested North Korea was up to some shit and my tankie friend rolled his eyes and really condescendingly said "oh, that's not true" about whatever shit Kim was up to that week

Who knows what is Kim up to on a week -by-week basis though? I'd be up for querying the sources of the suggestions (depending on what they were).

i don't think he gets the benefit of the doubt

neither does lenin by the way. there is ambiguity about whether he actually ordered a "massacre of sex workers" but, regardless, he did preside over a policy of terror.

It's not giving Kim any "benefit of a doubt" to query misinformation that could be used to build a case for any kind of action or increasing tensions xp

Is no-one going to stick up for Lenin in his own thread?

i mean, i have done that throughout this thread in a heavily, heavily qualified way.

there are amazing posts in here, way up, from difficult listening hour.

More classic as the world gets shittier to live in.

― xyzzzz__, Wednesday, 27 November 2019 bookmarkflaglink

xp

Citoyens, vouliez-vous une révolution sans révolution?

China and NK not really comparable in a lot of important respects

I agree they're not! Which is why tankies who love both are so maddening.

I accept that we must be cautious regarding misinformation but really you'll find ppl who just systematically deny any bad news on N Korea whatsoever based on that, when there's plenty of evidence that it's a terrible regime that doesn't come from US media. Also these types inevitably bust out the "oh sure, but AMERICA isn't a threat to world peace??" line even in discussions amongst leftists where it's a given that yes, America is that. There's a lot of knee-jerk enemy-of-my-enemy reasoning.

Which is why tankies who love both are so maddening.

tanks don't really have a coherent ideology beyond "if Big Bad Empire says it's bad, it's probably good" iirc

I dunno, there's some smart tankies with well thought-out arguments etc who when it comes down to it are like "stalinism was cool and contemporary china rocks, yay communism". Domenico Losurdo a good example

tbf the only people I've chatted to who stan for china are chinese citizens. china seems v interesting from an economic & governance point of view

I don't know, I must get out more and meet all these pro-Chinese non-Chinese people and DPRK cheerleaders - or not, preferably.

Comparing China in 1920 to China in 2020, it's no cause for wonder if Chinese citizens are willing to accept many of the drawbacks and difficulties presented by their government.

Accepting the drawbacks doesn't seem like much of a choice for Chinese citizens.

Accepting the drawbacks of an Indian democratic capitalist system isn't much of a choice to a huge underclass there either, you could go on forever here!