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any other reading posture is revisionist
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this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2026
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Where can I read some examples of Lenin's humour? Without having to read through all of his works of course
State and Revolution reads like a Twitter thread. The whole book. It could’ve been posted by any online leftist in its entirety and fit right in.
Call-outs of his contemporaries basically calling them libs, scare quotes galore, referring to social democrats as “social chauvinists” every time he brings them up, references to previous posts. Lenin really was one of the OG posters.
RIP Lenin you would’ve loved Maoist Standard English
Me when I'm in a Kautsky hating contest and my opponent is Lenin
"Amerikkka is the epitome of dekkkadence and it's social chauvinist "left" is no different! I will now be deconstructing the arguments of one 'BigDaddy69' in explicit detail!"
This is unironically exactly what State and Revolution is. Including BigDaddy69, because all of these people were using ~~screen~~ pen names!
my favorite is "present-day "Social-Democrat" (i.e., present-day traitor to socialism)" He's just so sassy.
"All the social-chauvinists are now “Marxists” (don't laugh!)."
wait THAT'S where that emote comes from?!
Yup! Its a good book! You should read it when you can.
I've read a good bit of it myself. It can be difficult to follow at times, which isn't surprising seeing as it's well over 100 years old and translated from Russian. I found myself having to stop occasionally to try and comprehend what he was getting at exactly.
It's very good though for sure. Also really interesting from a historical point of view because it was written when WW1 was ongoing and the turmoil in Russia was just beginning.
I plan to! I washed out of reading Capital with the weekly reading group early this year after a few chapters (it was my second attempt), but in these last few months I've built up a daily reading habit where I've been reading books (paper books!) for at least an hour a day. I'm mostly reading standard nonfiction stuff with a bit of fiction sprinkled in, but I plan on gradually adding more challenging works, and I figure by next year I'll have trained my brain enough that I'll have the stamina to take on Capital. I did actually enjoy and learn from the few chapters that I read, but I wasn't ready to handle that heavy a text yet.
Dude wrote a whole book calling his contemporaries in Europe baby-brains. This bit is always darkly funny to me, knowing how correct Lenin was:
These German communists are talking a lot of shit for a party that hasn't even created a DotP yet
I do want to point out here that what Lenin is saying is that it is silly to argue for not engaging with electoralist politics in a bourgeois state as a marxist.
The average hexbearian is probably closer to the left communist side than Lenin on this issue.
Yeah, he argued to use the visibility of liberal "democracy" to highlight its flaws and push socialist ideas onto the people, while recognising how useless it is for reforming our way into socialism. At least that's how I understand it, he wasn't saying it was completely useless and we should abandon it entirely, but use it as a source of free publicity basically, talk about it and how it won't provide for the people, use it to agitate and educate.
Understand the system and the walls put in place to prevent socialists from gaining power within it, so we can use it to our advantage instead, like everything else, the bourgeois won't play by their own rules, so we shouldn't either, we should use every advantage that we can get, because we'll need it in order to overthrow capital. What we need to is what gets us a successful revolution, not what feels good or allows us to have intact ideals.
I could be wrong though, sometimes I find Lenin so easy to understand (in the broad strokes at least) that I think I might be getting it wrong, because it seems so obvious that I can't understand how there's so much room for argument about what he "really meant".
You're spot on
In all fairness, he wasnt talking about contemporary America.
I think people tend to believe Theory is hard to read and not fun. Capital is hard to read and not fun. Everything else is fairly breezy and they tend to throw a few jokes in. If you can read an effort post, you can read theory.
Reading capital atm, can confirm that it is hard and not fun. The amount of times I have had to reread an entire page because I simply did not comprehend it at all is staggering. Very informative and necessary read though. I am only 160 pages in and I already feel like my grasp of marxist economics is significantly more concrete.
You csn feel your brain get bigger as you read and its rewarding for that.
You would know, GalaxyBrain.
What you would know seems like a crime against nature, Comrade Sharkfucker
Nuh uh
I dont condone the practice but I cant help but admire the bravery.
I wish I could link you a website but I am mostly just finding jokes about Lenin rather than Lenin's jokes. I think some of his best snark is found in The State and Revolution if that helps. It's pretty short too and was the first work of leftist theory I read. Not a bad read at all.