Welcome again to everybody! Make yourself at home. Feel free to marvel at our stockpile of high-tech spy balloons. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is our weekly discussion thread!
We have our own Matrix homeserver at https://genzedong.org, and a Matrix space; see this thread for more information.
Short reading list for new MLs here. To find theory (and other books), you can use z-lib, libgen, or Sci-Hub (for scientific articles). If an article is unavailable, try the Wayback Machine.
The state and revolution is so old and yet so actual and relatable, expecially the page where he talks about how all the social chauvinists and mensheviks will create parties to fool the working class by using Liberal democracy, that’s the state of “leftist” parties in our western “democracies” today
I’m reading now it for the first time. It’s incredible (both positive and negative) how so little has changed and how prescient Lenin was. I thought the same reading Imperialism. And he’s so entertaining to read what with dunking on Kautsky and others every other paragraph.
Hahaha yes reading Lenin is so cool, both entratsining and enjoying, second best writer after Mao for sure Unfortunately we have to face the same struggles he had to face but fortunately he succeeded, so we can learn from the actions of the revolutionaries of that time and - trough a dialectical approach and careful analysis - apply it to our current conditions, for example we are really seeing the birth of a new labor movement (not only in the US! there has been an enormous strike of over 500k in the UK, I’ve personally been seeing a lot of schools being occupied in Italy where I live, a lot of- calls to action, calls to strike, a teamsters union in the city of Genoa just said they won’t ship any weapon to Ukraine) we are seeing it in the east too, for example in India, massive protests and strikes, what I think is really missing though is a Vanguard party, without a Vanguard party all of theese strikes are just temporary hindrances to capitalist production that can easily be suppressed, we should work on that but the social chauvinists and kautskyists from lenin’s time are winning. But hey, Lenin in 1917 thought they would win too! And yet a few months later the bolshevik won! So we should have revolutionary optimism and try to build a va guard party of sort.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. If social media was around in the 1910s, Lenin’s Twitter page would be absolutely savage.
I often think the same about Stalin. Both would have drawn blood. Chen Weihua better watch out.
The inverse would probably had been true, Chen would have wrote fire theory, like Lenin and Stalin
I’d download twitter only for him
IMO it could easily be called the most important political work of the 20th century.