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any other reading posture is revisionist (thelemmy.club)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/memes@hexbear.net
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[+] 18 points 3 months ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (23 children)
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  • [–] 40 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (4 children)

    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

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  • [–] 20 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    "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!"

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  • [–] 29 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    "All the social-chauvinists are now “Marxists” (don't laugh!)."

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  • [–] 28 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    wait THAT'S where that emote comes from?! lenin-dont-laugh

    What is now happening to Marx’s theory has, in the course of history, happened repeatedly to the theories of revolutionary thinkers and leaders of oppressed classes fighting for emancipation. During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it. Today, the bourgeoisie and the opportunists within the labor movement concur in this doctoring of Marxism. They omit, obscure, or distort the revolutionary side of this theory, its revolutionary soul. They push to the foreground and extol what is or seems acceptable to the bourgeoisie. All the social-chauvinists are now “Marxists” (don’t laugh!). And more and more frequently German bourgeois scholars, only yesterday specialists in the annihilation of Marxism, are speaking of the “national-German” Marx, who, they claim, educated the labor unions which are so splendidly organized for the purpose of waging a predatory war!

    wowee

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  • [–] 20 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    Yup! Its a good book! You should read it when you can.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago

    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.

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  • [–] 25 points 3 months ago (11 children)

    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:

    Should We Participate in Bourgeois Parliaments?

    It is with the utmost contempt—and the utmost levity—that the German “Left” Communists reply to this question in the negative.Their arguments? In the passage quoted above we read:

    “. . . All reversion to parliamentary forms of struggle, which have become historically and politically obsolete, must be emphatically rejected. . . .”

    This is said with ridiculous pretentiousness, and is patently wrong. “Reversion” to parliamentarianism, forsooth! Perhaps there is already a Soviet republic in Germany? It does not look like it! How, then, can one speak of “reversion”? Is this not an empty phrase?

    These German communists are talking a lot of shit for a party that hasn't even created a DotP yet weird-bolshevik

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  • [–] 12 points 3 months ago* (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 14 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    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".

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  • [–] 10 points 3 months ago (6 children)

    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.

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  • [–] [S] 5 points 3 months ago* (5 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    You csn feel your brain get bigger as you read and its rewarding for that.

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  • [–] [S] 5 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    You would know, GalaxyBrain.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago* (2 children)

    What you would know seems like a crime against nature, Comrade Sharkfucker

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  • [–] [S] 11 points 3 months ago

    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.

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