#lenin avenue

[russianvibesblog]

Мурманск

Полярный День

01:00 AM

[communistkenobi]

I love finding new communists blogs because you immediately have to scroll through all the posts to see if you wanna follow them or block them lmao. Anyway from what I understand you work in western academia to some degree and as a student taking some classes in the social sciences it’s such a pain in the ass trying to even bring up a Marxist perspective. How do you deal with how much pushback socialism has in academia?

I’m doing a PhD in sociology ! And please feel free to block me, we are all annoying etc 

I would say that resistance to socialist ideas is a major source of frustration for me in academia - a learning curve for me has been gearing my writing & research to work around that type of institutional hostility. It depends on the discipline as well. Given that Marx is such a titanic figure in sociology I find it easier to engage with his work openly (although you will be mocked for it lol - it’s viewed as a dead-end project in the West since the USSR collapsed), whereas more history- or politics-based courses I’ve taken have been extremely hostile to even tepid Marxist analysis. I have friends to vent to and have found other people in my discipline who are like-minded, which has helped. You will need to do a lot of tactical retreats - I’ve found that tying your analysis to state policy helps a lot, it helps you get grants, and academics trade in policy-talk across disciplines so it will prepare you for that if you want to stay in academia.

I have also been making peace with the fact that academia is not really the place to “do” socialism - it is a deeply political job, and my ideological commitments motivate me to do work and research that I hope are beneficial to the world, but I think the authority and privileges afforded to academics, not academia itself, is the better avenue to conduct political activity - participating in student & left-wing actions, giving money and resources to activist groups, using your prestigious position to publicly speak on issues, sign important documents for vulnerable people (profs are counted as authorities to sign off on name change documents for trans people in Canada for example, as well as visa and citizenship proof I believe?), things like that. There was that Canadian doctor, Dr. Yipeng Ge, who was suspended from his university position for speaking out against Israel and went to Palestine on a medical mission, Engels used his family’s money to fund Marx & socialist actions, Lenin went to law school, etc (i am NOT remotely comparing myself to any of them to be clear lol, just demonstrating that there is historical precedent for this way of thinking). I’ve done a decent amount of union + community work and the reoccurring lesson I keep learning is that there are many little, vacant positions of power sprinkled throughout the world that will help you organize and agitate above and beyond your individual capabilities. And the right wing knows this! They take over local school board committees and town halls and run for office in their local neighbourhoods all the time, often unopposed, and use that to exert terrible political influence.

I try very much to resist the “one of the good ones” mindset re: my own career in academia and is one I struggle with pretty often. being pragmatic about what academic research actually does in the world is still something I’m grappling with. Academia has provided me with an incredibly prestigious education and a lot of social capital that I hope to use for some amount of good. I’m also betting on what is essentially a lottery ticket, given how rare tenure-track university positions are, so maybe all of this will be irrelevant anyway lol. I’m not sure if that’s helpful but it’s not a settled issue for me either, so if this reads as vague or wishy-washy that’s why!

[txttletale]

healed ive been doing some very basic communist readings lately and. how do you cope with the fact that none of it seems particularly possible. how do you manage to put any of this theory into practice when the only two parties out there seem to be the We’re Basically Demsocs Party and the Sexual Abuse League. how do you not let it crush you and what ways have you found to like… manifest these ideas in your life? i guess one could say i was “radicalized” by recent events but having done basic reading (just beginner Lenin and Marx) has made me feel so much more hopeless. there’s no vanguard party and i don’t see what I can actually tangibly do to help proliferate communism. and it’s making me feel guilty for living my life, too, for doing things that I find fun and beautiful and enjoyable - there’s just the guilt of “this is a time-waster, this is brainwashing you”. do you have any assurance at all

so obviously the role of a marxist-leninist in a revolutionary situation (ie, one in which the conditions are revolutionary, in which the current bourgeois state is no longer tenable) is to be in a vanguard party at the head of the organized working class. but these things don't appear from nowhere--i think it follows that if you are in much of the world, where a revolutionary situation is not imminent in any forseeable near future, then the role of a communist is to help organize the working class and raise class consciousness through class struggle so that when such a situation presents itself the working class is both radical and organized, or capable of becoming such in short order.

that means that working within non-party organizations (unions, activist and mutual aid groups, grassroots campaigns) with the intent of learning the tactics of organization and radicalising the people around you is a meaningful participation in the class struggle. as much as i say 'get organized' and believe that a proletarian party is the best and most powerful vehicle for revolutionary action, that latter belief is of course to be taken and adapted for the situation.

do not be hopeless because you have read lenin--instead, be aware that when lenin was writing much of what he wrote, the situation of socialist parties across europe was dire. criminalized, divided just as they are now, replete with the exact kind of reformists you're complaining about (as well as adventurists). what lenin wrote about was not just a theoretical ideal party that did exist in his time, but instead the blueprints for the party he had a hand in creating. realize that lenin genuinely believed during periods that he would not see revolution during his lifetime.

organize with whoever you can, in whatever arena you can, and participate in the class struggle. develop the skills and understanding of the methods of struggle, even if trade unionism or climate activism alone are not sufficient vectors by which the contradictions of capitalism can be resolved, they are avenues by which your class consciousness and that of those around you can be honed and sharpened. find the most radical body around you and join yourself to their struggle--a vanguard party should emerge from the struggles of the working class, it should be an organization that serves as a vessel for effective action. you do not have to tie yourself to the decaying and rotting shambling zombie parties of the 20th century to participate in the class struggle--we as communists owe these organs no loyalty if they are not equipped for the realities of class struggle.

i'm lucky in that there is a small but dedicated group of marxist-leninists i have been able to join up with and work with. if that's not the case for you, conduct the struggle within anarchist collectives or trade unions or solidarity campaigns, while always keeping your true goal in mind. the class struggle unfolds across a multitude of arenas--as long as there's someone you can organize alongside on something, you are not powerless in your capacity as a revolutionary communist. good luck, comrade.

[sovietpostcards]

Tikhvin Church on Lenin Avenue in Moscow. Photo by V. Krylova (1970s).

[pattern-recognition]

that one post in defense of marxism leninism against anarchists who admonish us as all power hungry sycophantic warmongers, why would we ally with the oppressed if we just want power when there are easier avenues etc, is totally correct and true but also i do want to kill people. i want to do that also.

[scavengedluxury]

Santa Claus visits the Közért store on the corner of Corner of Erzsébet (then Lenin) boulevard and Rákóczi avenue, Budapest, 1957. From the Budapest Municipal Photography Company archive.

[mariacallous]

Ukrainian officials surmise that the real reason for the demolitions is to cover up evidence of war crimes. Petro Andryushchenko, an aide to Mariupol’s mayor, has repeatedly claimed that many of the city’s destroyed high-rise buildings contained 50 to 100 bodies each. 

The occupation authorities demolished the remnants of the Mariupol Drama Theater in late 2022. All that remains is a portico with a pediment and sculptures of grain farmers and part of the amphitheater, basement ceilings, and the foundations. Many of the bodies of those killed in the theater bombing were allegedly left inside. “All the people are still under the rubble, because the rubble is still there — no one dug them up,” Oksana Syomina, a Mariupol resident who survived the bombing, told the Associated Press. “This is one big mass grave.”

An aerial view of the destroyed Drama Theater. Mariupol, February 2, 2023.

ALEXANDER ERMOCHENKO / REUTERS / SCANPIX / LETA

Occupation officials claim they plan to turn the theater into “the most modern venue in the Donetsk People’s Republic” (Russia’s official term for the occupied territories in Ukraine’s Donetsk region). Earlier, the ruins were hidden behind fabric-covered scaffolding emblazoned with the portraits of Russian writer Leo Tolstoy and poet Alexander Pushkin.

The occupation authorities have also restored the Soviet-era names of certain squares and streets (renaming Peace Avenue and Freedom Square after Bolshevik revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, for example), painted over the well-known Milana mural, and dismantled a monument to the victims of political repressions and the Holodomor (a Soviet-engineered faminethat killed millions in Ukraine). Occupying forces also burned and looted the library of Mariupol’s St. Petro Mohyla Cathedral, a Ukrainian Orthodox Church known for its decorative Petrykivka paintings. 

Reimagining Mariupol: A Ukrainian design team develops a new vision for reviving the seaside city Russia destroyed 

[sivavakkiyar]

okay here’s my hot controversial take: the “problem” with Dr Ambedkar’s writing, kind of like Marx and Lenin, is that he was funny. Ironic, sarcastic, witty and etc. He’s always clear about what he intends, but this opens a lot of avenues for opportunistic bullshit

[illalmusalliin]

#10. Estados

I didn't really have a name for this neighborhood, but since I focused on US States, I named it "Estados"

Again, I scanned the sheet before I filled in the names. So here are close-ups and street names!

My 10th sheet. This one is all over the place. Northwest corner: Names from Thawrah neighborhood such as Huey P. Newton Avenue, Thomas Sankara Avenue, Marsha P. Johnson Avenue. Northeast corner: Names from Al-Ma`sumin neighborhood such as Calle de los Profetas, Calle San Elías. East side: Names from the Borikén neighborhood such as Calle Jayuya, Calle San Sebastián, Calle Trujillo Alto. Randomly, we have Che Guevara Road and Vladimir Lenin Avenue. We have two main parks named after places in Catalunya (Montjuic and Illes Balears). All with US States sprinkled about the sheet.

[panelki]

Altai Regional Drama Theater named after V. M. Shukshin Barnaul, Russia The modern building of the theater was built in the main square of Barnaul according to a standard project developed by the Central Scientific Research Institute of Experimental Design for Spectacular Buildings at the very end of 1972 (architects N. Kurennoy, A. Gorshkov, A. Laburenko) with a wide ceremonial staircase leading to Lenin Avenue. The theater building is adorned with a sculptural composition (sculptor — People's Artist of the RSFSR Georgy Neroda), a mosaic panel, frescoes on the ceilings of the foyer and the auditorium (artist — Yakov Baturin), and colorful stained glass windows. The grand opening of the new theater building took place on February 11, 1973, with the premiere of the play "Salavat Yulaev" by M. Karim. The theater houses a Theater Museum with a permanent exhibition, artistic and museum exhibitions are held, and guided tours of the theater are conducted. In 2006-2007, a large-scale reconstruction of the theater building was carried out. 📍Altai Krai, Barnaul, Molodezhnaya St. 15 #Barnaul #Russia

https://52.nn.org.ru

[ironickrempt]

ALSO: This type of thinking has led, and will lead to an utter FAILURE to address the systemic issues which create billionaires, nazis, police, etc.

It is just a spicier version of how the most milquetoast of liberals think: That the existence of these positions/avenues of power are not inherently bad, it is simply that bad people have reached these positions. That if we get rid of the bad people, and replace them with good people, everything will be good forever.

The assumption that "badness" is inherent, that you, surely, could be trusted with power, and with deciding who else may be trusted, it will condemn your movement to failure.

Just see how the vanguard parties around the world have fallen, often back to capitalism, despite their revolutionary founders. Lenin may have truly believed in the revolution, in sexual and artistic liberation, but that didn't stop the next guy from siding with Franco.

i wish ppl on this website, and within leftist circles in general, were a little less gung ho about making jokes or statements like "billionaires arent people" "nazis arent people" "police arent people"

there is no level of evil where a human stops being a human. if you decide to kill them for their crimes, then you are killing a human. and sometimes that is justified! oil execs and war profiteers have destroyed countless lives in service of their own sick greed, and given the chance to enact that same violence on them, id probably pop their heads like a pimple.

but it is important that we do not shy away from the reality of that choice. it is a human life that is being ended. a person with interiority, feelings, family.

if we stop considering any group as people, even a group defined by their own evil actions, then we are drawing a line to divide society into persons and non-persons, and stating that those non-persons do not deserve to live.

i hope i dont need to explain why that is a dangerous position to take.

these people and all of their evil, their greed, their hatred, are just as much a part of humanity as art, culture, language, food. they are a part of us that has grown malignant and cancerous, and like a cancer, they must be excised for the sake of the whole--but they are still a part of us, made of the same stuff as us, down to their cores.

evil humans are still humans.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"Norman leaped off the platform and began to fold it up. Some of the youngsters hastened to help him; whether or not they understood what he had been saying, they were at least ready to give him a hand. In a way you could say the same thing about Sy and Bernice, even though they swore fidelity to Norman’s faction. He had the uncomfortable feeling that with all their knowledgeable talk about the need for an American radical party, and a real break with the traditional fixation on Russia, they were smitten with him as a dashing figure, more glamorous than the Marxist logic-choppers with whom they had grown up.

Still fresh from Mexico, where he had been first pick-wielding archaeologist and then pistol-toting bodyguard to Trotsky, he possessed for them the added attractiveness of having gone to college out of town, in Ann Arbor, of having played football there, of having his own place on 113th Street. They could not possibly have understood that he still felt trapped in the middle-class and had been attracted to the revolutionary movement as a possible way out of experienced middle-class agitators like himself, whose principal working class like Sy and Bernie, would have invested him with an additional appeal: the man of quality voluntarily disassociating himself from his origins in order to better serve their common ideal.

Sy was pleased. Loaded down with literature, he shook hands somewhat awkwardly and then turned to help his girl friend with the dismantled speaker’s platform. Norm waved farewell to them both and hurried off to the 175th Street station of the Independent subway.

He had to change after one stop, at 168th Street, for the Seventh Avenue. Here, beneath the Presbyterian Hospital complex, he joined the walking wounded of the great city and its bastard civilization: invalids returning from treatment of banal or exotic complaints, visitors to the afflicted, sniffling relatives, and the motley mass of workers coming home from a sixth day of work downtown—or leaving home, carrying night lunch in brown paper bags, for nameless labor in deserted office buildings or sheeted and eerie department stores. Even if they had not yet been affected by the new war declared in defense of an obscure territory, they were nevertheless abstracted and unsmiling, enfolded in the private problems that bore on them more heavily than the far-off Nazis.

It was already too late, he was realistically convinced, to keep Americaout of war, no matter how many committees were formed, no matter how enthusiastically Russia’s admirers now embraced isolation. The trick would be to transform what had been learned from the betrayals and the miseries of the Thirties into a new movement that would do what no one else was doing: fight on the one hand against the war and the obviously inevitable military dictatorship and postwar depression, and at the same time against the fascist poison that had already infected the isolationists and the Stalinists.

The odds were that it was a hopeless effort. But did that make it wrong to try? You had to do what was indicated by history, as well as by logic and passion. Most painful was the quality and insufficiency of his own comrades, an ill-assorted handful of inexperienced middle-class agitators like himself, whose principal asset was their stubborn refusal to concede that radical politics would end with the ending of the Thirties.

They proposed to attract to their side Communists whose sensibilities were still live enough to be shocked by the Nazi-Soviet Pact; Socialists who also refused to make common cause with racists; trade-union militants who did not propose to quit fighting, simply because they might embarrass the Administration; and young idealists like Sy and his girl, overwhelmed by the clarity and inner logic of a Bolshevik Leninism, that, like Catholicism, seemed incontrovertible once you accepted its first premises—but too humane nevertheless to follow blindly the dictates of the old man in Mexico, much less the tyrant in Moscow.

It was not much—a little group of Akron rubber workers, a roomful of Chicago students, a couple of old militants on the Mesabi Iron Range, some second-generation Wobblies here and there—but it was what they had, and it included people who were not simply more good than bad, but in all honesty, he believed, far ahead of their contemporaries in intelligent self- sacrifice and dedication to principle.

…..

Ducking his head, Norm hastened over to the national office. His comrades rented a corner building in the warehouse-secondhand bookshop area south of the Square. The street floor was occupied by a plumbing-supply house, its unwashed windows half-concealing a clutter of pipe joints, elbows, and upended water closets, their dangling guts corroded and mute, as if dug up from some extinct civilization like the shards he had hunted with such assiduity only a year or two earlier.

Above this midden heap of almost-junk, the windows of the upper three floors were covered with exhortations to Build Socialism and Vote For Workers’ candidates. Already faded and curling, the posters, with their promises of a happier future, attracted scarcely any more attention from people too intent on their own miseries to look up and read portents and claims than did the flyblown plumbing reminders of a hydraulically functioning past.

The interior of the building was alive, though, from the moment you pulled open the scarred door and felt the rickety steps vibrating underfoot in sympathetic rhythm with the mimeograph’s clockety-pockety-clockety. At the first landing, a hefty young man nodded to him between shouts into the pay phone, doodling on a plaster wall already adorned with graffiti. Norm continued to climb, past the second floor where boys and girls in their teens sang and argued among themselves while they filled bundle orders and cranked the mimeograph. Past the third floor too, where he himself had a desk for his journalistic works. On to the top floor, where the national leadership, in somewhat more remote austerity, surrounded by maps of the United States and the warring world and by ancient posters of the Russian Revolution, met to plan and to scheme for their few thousand followers.

Here you had to watch your step—not only because the floor was actually giving way here and there, threatening to drop the leaders down onto the heads of the writers like Norm, who strove to publicize them and their ideas, but also because one man watched another: rumors of a split, the plague of every radical group, rent the air, and those who were already working to build a new party from elements of this one were narrowly watched by the loyalists.

Norm stopped first in the cubbyhole office of Comrade Hoover. The bald, saturnine Negro, veteran of three earlier socialist groups and early organizer for the steelworkers and then the auto workers, had declared himself for those who planned to build a new party; but because he never stooped to personal attacks and still retained certain connections within the labor movement he had a wide respect on all sides. Hands locked behind his head, Hoover regarded Norm quizzically.

“Well,” he said, “what’s on your mind?" 

“Don’t you want to know how the street-corner meeting went uptown?”

“Not particularly. I’ve been told that you do a good imitation of Dworkin.”

Norm flushed. At the same time he had to laugh: Who didn’t do a good imitation of Dworkin? Their brilliant leader’s brain, tongue, and arm moved like cleavers, chop, chop, slicing through the stupidities that he destroyed with relish, his ruthless wit terrorizing the opposition within the movement and humiliating the hecklers without.  Only a few, like Hoover, could sit back and assess Dworkin coolly—and even Hoover had chosen to associate himself with Marty Dworkin’s faction, seeing in it the hope for a new radicalism freed from the crippling attachment to rigid dogma.

“Is Marty here?”

“He’s with a man from The New Yorker. The way the kids are hopping downstairs, you’d think the barricades were going up on 14th Street.”

“Well, you can’t blame them. That’ll be a good break for us, an article in The New Yorker.”

“A good break my foot.” Hoover tilted back in his scarred swivel chair. His bald brown skull caught the light from the dusty window; the back of his head rose alarmingly, as if it had been squeezed in a vise. Even atilt and at ease, he was a man of great force and dignity; unlike Marty Dworkin, the dapper debater, with his hairline moustache and wicked grin, it was difficult even to think of him, much less to address him, by his first name. True enough, Marty was the public figure, the theoretician and writer, even the international figure; but when you thought of him or spoke of him, respect was almost always mixed with mockery.

With Hoover it was different. Neither witty or fiery, he was upon occasion sardonic, as in his deliberate choice of nom de plume. And far from being a cafeteria intellectual or street-corner hotshot, he was dismayingly tough, he knew the labor movement. For a small organization, he was as precious as money in the bank.

He said coldly, “Now Dworkin is sitting there with him, charting. And all those brats downstairs are hopping up and down because some journalist is going to write us up for a comic magazine.”

“A good press won’t do us any harm with the middle-class liberals.”

“The only thing that will do us any good with liberals or anybody else is results.” Hoover scowled and passed his palm over his skull, as if it had hair worth smoothing down. “What I can’t seem to get through you guys’ heads is that all this talk-talk, all these sessions with journalists, won’t amount to a hill of beans. Not unless you speak with authority as revolutionary workers’ leaders.”

Hoover’s surface anti-intellectualism was alarmingly like that of certain self-styled Bolsheviks—except that in his case it was not a fake hardness or hatred of mental accomplishment. Indeed he was a man filled with quiet but intense admiration for the genuine accomplishments of novelists as well as mathematicians. What he detested was pretense and bombast. What he dreamed of—if you could think of such a man as a dreamer—was a community of people who thought, decided, then acted, without further ado.

With suspicious kindliness he concluded, “Now I know you mean business, unlike some of these dentists’ and milliners’ sons and daughters we’re stuck with, playacting at being revolutionaries. They wouldn’t know a barricade from a barroom. And they’re the ones Dworkin caters to, with fancy names like the locked-out generation.”

“That’s what I’m here to talk about, with you and Marty. I’ll make it short: I want to get into the labor movement.”

“Have you got guilt feelings too?”

“Maybe. That’s not important. Now that the war has started, I have a greater sense of urgency. I have to be where the action is, working in a shop where I can contribute something more substantial than—”

“More substantial? Do me a favor, will you?” 

Norm nodded, and leaned forward, hopeful of a special assignment.

“Spend a little time learning, before you run off with a red flag in your fist and your feet going every which way, like Charlie Chaplin in that movie.” Hoover scowled. “If there’s one quality this outfit is short on, it’s humility.”

Hot-faced, Norm protested. “I don’t think you have any reason to accuse me —

“I’m not accusing. But there’s people like that all around you. Your first responsibility is to show them what discipline means. You don’t have to tell me that we’ve got to get some of these young blow-hards into the shops, and let them use their big lungs in union meetings. But we’ve got to do it in an orderly fashion, and we’re not going to strip the national office of people with skills like yours. Who’s going to put out the paper, the youth? They don’t even know how to give it away, much less sell it, much less edit it. When the time is ripe, you’ll hear from us.”

“In the meantime …”

“In the meantime I thought you were serious about becoming a labor journalist. Well get on with it, man. And if you’ve got heartburn, talk with Lewis, not me.”

He had been hoping too to discuss an article with Hoover before sitting down to write it up for the paper, but now he felt himself definitively dismissed, and he left the office with no further talk."

- Harvey Swados, Standing Fast: A Novel (1971, 2013 Open Road edition)

[bearkunin]

Outside of the Locked Tomb Fandom I'm going to inevitably end up writing a lot about political concepts, so I'm just going to kick things off by posting about my understanding (at the very least) of the historic context of some of the key movements for easy future reference. I'll kick off with a post on...

Social Democracy

Social Democracy arose in the late 19th century as a socialist movement with the aim to abolish capitalism. The first main party was the German Social Democrat Workers Party in Germany (later, the Social Democratic Party), which adopted Marxism into its platform. This was not a moderate position. A colourful quote from the revolutionary Zaichnevsky calling for a social democratic Republic in Russia in 1862:

To your axes!' and we shall kill the imperial party with no more mercy than they show for us now. We shall kill them in the squares, if the dirty swine ever dare to appear there; kill them in the avenues of the capitals; kill them in the villages. Remember: anyone who is not with us is our enemy, and every method may be used to exterminate our enemies.

Following Marx's (and Engel's) death, the two big names that emerged in Marxism were Kautsky and Bernstein. Kautsky led the school now known as Orthodox Marxism and was basically mainstream socialism until a little upstart revolutionary called Vladimir Lenin came onto the scene.

After Vladimir Lenin shot to worldwide fame with the Russian Revolution, he would have a very prominent feud with "the renegade Kautsky" about the role of violent revolution in achieving socialism. Kautsky would come to use "social democracy" and "socialism" for his movement, and "communism" to refer to Lenin's Bolshevism. Social Democracy according to Kautsky was a workers' led socialism, building up a mass party, while "communism" was dictatorial and in the vein of the Blanquists. This feud is when you began seeing a real split and animosity between "Social Democrats" and "Communists"

Bernstein, the other then-big figure but now even less known than Kautsky, is probably the person who drove the break between "Social Democrats" and "socialism" as a whole. Although a socialist, and a prominent Social Democrat, Bernstein would reject a number of key points of Marxism - most notably the need for revolution and dialectical materialism. Instead, he entrenched socialism in ethics and promoted the possibility for achieving socialism through reform. Rosa Luxembourg's *Reform or Revolution?* is a response largely to Bernstein, where she chastised his reformist approach. This marks another significant tiff in socialism.

Social Democracy then became synonymous with a reformist movement, with an emphasis on ethics rather than historical materialism, and counterposed to USSR style communism. It would quickly find an ally in social liberalism, in particular due to the shared antagonism to Soviet authoritarianism. By the 1970s, social democracy had all but abandoned its Marxist roots. It's focus on the ethical increase of workers' wellbeing, rather than transforming the mode of production, saw it adopt third-way policies and work within the bounds of capitalism. From then on, social democracy became synonymous with capitalism with a hefty welfare state.

With the triumphant economic turn around of Thatcher's Britain and Reagan's America, shortly followed by the utter discrediting of Soviet communism with the collapse of the USSR, a large number of parties with roots in social democracy embraced markets as the driver of welfare. This is essentially when social democratic parties like Labor and Labour in Australia and the UK became "neoliberal", because they fully accepted the underlying belief in the benefits of competitive markets.

This is also why you can find some political parties which are pretty clearly pro-capitalist still have references to "socialism" in their platforms or manifestos, or in some cases, their names like the French Socialist Party.

So for my purposes: social democracy is, at least now, a capitalist ideology albeit not wedded to the idea. Rather, it seeks the material improvement of the conditions of the working class, and is happy to use a free market liberal economy towards these ends. It now has many overlaps with "liberalism" broadly, but had a different starting point: not with individual liberal rights, but a more utilitarian approach to welfare.

[emiliaaaaa]

a different kind of list... I can’t write about myself without also writing about Trotsky and Lenin. Without writing about Frida and Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie and White Christmas and the King and I. Without the Black Panthers and the Chicano Moratorium and Vermont Avenue in Los Feliz. And Russia and the Pinkertons and Berkeley High and Transfiguration. And Gloria Anzaldua and the Great Migration and jazz and blues and Alma del Barrio and Che and Cuba and Nelson Mandela. And basketball and passing and segregation and pullman porters. And cancer and education and organizing and being an academic and dying before he could finish his dissertation. 2-7-23

[libertineangel]

Also, the IMT/RCI specifically is sketchy as hell. Multiple allegations of cult-like behaviour, coverups of sexual harassment in multiple chapters, including allegedly from founder Alan Woods himself, who once explicitly claimed that the accusations of anti-Semitism against Jeremy Corbyn were a plot by Israeli Mossad agents in London.

Even aside from all that, having been to a recruitment meeting and got their members' handbook I have absolutely no faith in them as a vehicle for revolution because their primary avenue of work is selling their newspaper on the street, there's even a whole chapter of their handbook about how important it is, which is simply absurd for 2024 because nobody buys newspapers here anymore, they never sell more than a couple of papers in hours of work and stick to the tactic in dogmatic adherence to Lenin's 1917 words on its importance despite how plainly the material conditions no longer support such a notion.

hey, do you support the IMT?

They changed their name, they're now the "Revolutionary Communist International". I'm not a Trotskyist. I don't consider Stalin and Mao to have been so revisionist as to constitute a theoretical break with Marxism or Leninism, and Trotsky's interpretation of permanent revolution seems to be pretty clearly a left-wing deviation.

[counterballancing]