I read State and Revolution for the first time last week. It could’ve been written yesterday.
Also RIP Lenin you would’ve loved Twitter, he fully writes like our most prolific posters here. That man would’ve thought Maoist Standard English was absolutely hilarious.
my favorite part of the marxist tradition is how brutally they eviscerate their least favorite guy. they pull no punches but you never get the sense they’re saying something just to get an epic own.
It’s like how i imagine a robot might do hand to hand combat: comprehensive, brutal efficiency with no showboating, terrifying to witness.
Marx v Proudhon
Lenin v Kautsky
Luxemburg v Bernstein
Mao v the entire liberal world
Isaac Newton died almost 400 years ago, yeah I think his writings about the laws of motion aren’t super accurate in the here and now
Unironically what I believed before I actually read any theory.
Reading Marx, Engels, and Lenin is equally enlightening and depressing because the capitalists didn’t change their ways at all. They only adapted to the new technologies to oppress the workers.
what amazes me is that Marx always seems to have a response to any criticism. But maybe that just means no one has changed their criticisms in over 150 years. I still hear liberals misunderstand the labor theory of value even though Marx describes it in the first 5 pages of Capital.
Whenever liberals hear the term ‘Dictatorship of the proletariat’ : 😱
Lenin is probably the worst example they could’ve used too, like I think this idea could apply better to Marx than to Lenin
That’s not to say it applies to Marx either, just how Lenin’s writings are so prescient in the current moment, State and Revolution could’ve been written yesterday
Capital could also have been written yesterday, or the AntiDuhring. They are no less prescient to the current moment than Lenin, just harder to read bc less popular in style
I do think it’s weird that people often recommend Imperialism by Lenin as one of the Marxist theory books to read early though.
On one hand, historical materialism says we should operate through the lens of current material conditions, and those are not the same now as in late tsarist Russia.
On the other hand, 99.9% of the time when people are making this argument they’re not critically examining current material conditions either and are just trying to do ideological laundering of the hegemonic liberal order.
The most “investigation” these people do is read an article on Wikipedia and declare themselves an expert on the topic. Anyone with even the most basic amount of experience in real world activism would know that the capitalism of Lenin’s time is still the capitalism of today, even if it has gone some minor visual alterations (e.g. direct colonialism becoming semi-colonialism).
People who dismiss educated and prolific revolutionaries on the basis of “they lived 100 years ago” do not deserve serious engagement.
I’ve literally had a white electoralist radlib tell me this almost verbatim at a protest
i had the same thing happen to me. I asked them whose theory I should read instead and they said Thomas Jefferson. Ok so an even deader guy and also he owned slaves.
one time a liberal told me that Marx and Lenin were outdated because they wrote in a time where everything was made in factories by factory workers
good thing we don’t have factories anymore
Yeah that shit was wack
Obviously a brain-dead take but maybe they tried to express the shift from manufacturing to finance and service in the western world while lacking the vocabulary to express it? Though this shift doesn’t make dialectical analysis and the framework around ist invalid.
This factory relations still exist at the root of the system, they’re just in the third world and China/India now. The whole finance and service system is built on the margins afforded by profit extraction there. The second that dries up, the whole façade collapses and at best those labor relations return to the financialized core, at worst we just experience famine and continued gradual collapse of infrastructure
If only someone had written a book explaining how the industrial mode of production had inherent contradictions that were going to make bank capital merge with industrial capital to unleash itself and cross international borders.
Funny how people in that thread are responding to actual quotes with ‘well, yeah, that one could be true any time’ as if that isn’t the point
Pol Pot says what?
I’m trying to figure out in the thread if this poster actually read what they’re talking about and it doesn’t look like it.
No research no conversation. Truest shit Mao ever said.
