This is a hard pill to swallow but if you don't just read Lenin's pamphlets and theoretical works you'd realize he was actually a very ruthless, Machiavellian, and hypocritical person who neither represented the "bolshevik" (majority) of the population, nor even the proletarian minority in the cities. The SRs were much closer to a majority of the country and the Mensheviks (ironically "minority") were much closer to representing a majority of the proletariat. This is why Lenin dissolved the constituent assembly after the October revolution and betrayed his promise to the SRs and Mensheviks of a coalition government despite "supporting" it for years running around with the slogan "All power to the soviets." Which btw he led a war against the soviets while also claiming to represent them. The more history you read and the less theory you read the more you'll understand this. I know it can be hard to see past soviet hagiography, especially when the alternative histories are mostly cold war dogshit that overly slanders Lenin and everyone to the left of the Monarchists. You might say "well he won" but you have to accept he set up a govt. that couldn't even last 80 years. If all his ruthlessness resulted in a party dictatorship that was easily subverted from within by Khruschevite revisionists, then Perestroika revisionists, then fucking Yeltsinites, what was the point?
271 posts and 49 image replies omitted.>>2368352and that's why it's useless
it's just random retard tacking on a bunch of eclectic crap onto poor marx's theory, for completely retarded reasons
>i'm going to reconcile marx and nietzschehow about you kill yourself instead?
>>2368397To purity fetishist idealist allergic to realpolitik and addicted to losing with their martyrdom fetish might see this as an issue.
In reality communists on average communists are good people, who must learn to be more evil and ruthless.
>>2369512It depends how you define “Machiavellian”; to me it’s more or less understanding political power irrespective of the idealized stories we tell ourselves, and to the popular imagination it’s “being a disloyal backstabber” but I think the irony is that if you read The Prince it’s an incredibly honest book, brutally so. It doesn’t tint itself with any idea of morals, it just asserts “this is how power really works.”
Lemme provide some context. Machiavelli didn’t invent the concept of a “guide to rulership” there were plenty of them at the time, it was a whole fucking genre. What Machiavelli did, however, was create a guide to rule that divested itself of all the propaganda kings were saying about themselves. Other guides would be useless horseshit like “Oh a king must always tell the truth!” Or “a good king should be fair to everyone!” If you want a comparable example—Richard Wolff often talks about how economics was mostly useless to the business world because it mainly functioned as a kind of propaganda; teaching young Americans at least that American Capitalism had achieved a perfect equilibrium between workers and owners. They had to create a bunch of other fields to talk about the ugly business of how business works because economics was useless by design.
And Machiavelli? The nobility hated The Prince; in no small part because he hurt their fucking feelings. They wanted to pretend they were Knights in Shining Armor, virtuous, etc. Machiavelli showed them what they were. He made them do fucking mad that even generations after he died, you still had aristocrats like Frederick the Great trying to write “debunks” of Machiavelli and reassert: “no we’re actually good people and not just warlords!”
Kind of parallels Marx, don’t it? Capitalists still are trying to “debunk” him but their rebuttals amount to trying to re-mystify people. Jordan Peterson said of Marx that he was dumb for thinking bosses exploit workers because businesses would fail if they went out of their way to treat workers poorly. It’d be like responding to Machiavelli with “well if I was a dishonest king I’d be overthrown by an honest one!”
I’m pretty sure Zizek has this example where Lenin got some letter from a liberal party during the revolution asking if they were free to express their disagreement and he responded with something like “yes, just as we’re free to shoot you.” That seems very in line with Machiavelli; liberalism likes to obscure the violence inherent in itself with endless parliamentary debates, Lenin was having none of that. Just straight up “we’re doing socialism and if you got a problem with that you’re welcome to try to fight us over it.”
>>2369472Representation is a retarded concept and pretty much any half literate Marxist should understand this
If you support representation you aren’t even backing the non-communist political formation known as democracy, considering representation is more or less the opposite of democracy
Not an ML appealing to idealism again 😭
>No see I voted for this person to get to make the decisions instead of me and anyone else that voted for them, so when they make decisions, actually that is ME making decisions because we are the same, because the little piece of paper told me they are actually an avatar of my will 🥳 >>2369612> collaborating with the bourgeoisie and promoting the interests of the Nation and the People (class collaboration)The highest state of collaboration with the bourgeoisie - nationalizing all land and factories.
But wait, it's not as simple as it looks! It means that MLs have nationalized everything to become CAPITALISTS! Or to supply goods to foreign capitalists, I dunno. Thing is, you have to understand, is that MLs are bourgeois, and those allying with kulaks, I mean, farmers who are getting genocided by MLs, are not bourgeois!
>>2369571One of the interesting things in The Prince is that Machiavelli implicitly attacks feudal relations as actually being against the ruler's interest because they dilute his power compared to having an administrative bureaucracy.
In some ways I read The Prince as kind of weaker european version of The book of Lord Shang; The implicit goal is to consolidate the government into an administrative structure where legal, military & policing power are handled in a formal & unitary way (not relying on devolved military/policing power to aristocrats; Interestingly one could see anti-capitalism as means of removing the devolution of economic power to capitalists)
>>2369612class collaboration is the literal definition of calss hegemony or DOTP not that the blackshirt leftkiddies would now anything about that
>>2369760trvthnvke the prince is a hidden revolutionary masterpiece
>>2369760I recently watched a very interesting vid on machiavelli life, the politics in florence and the wars in the regions, and how his experience shaped his views. The man was pretty darn smart and clearly understood public interest directly clashed with corrupt elites (because he had to deal with it) and necessitated a popular armed force independent from financial and noble power.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXfl56nB0Us (its in french and I dont think its even auto translated, a shame because this guy makes really amazing historical vulgarization, focused on warfare but not neglecting the importance of the politics, and even social analysis)
>>2258346The early CPC was massacred by the KMT (thanks COMINTERN!) and pragmatically became a peasant's revolution (Lenin btfo). Mao literally says that the PRC is a collaboration between the national bourgeoisie, petite bourgeoisie, peasantry and worker class. To pretend it was pure real communism at the start seems absurd.
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* In fact, I hadn't made this connection before but Lenin exemplifies some parallels to the hacker mindset, which isn't particularly surprising given that Lenin was a lawyer (there's a lot of shared skills, just with computer code instead of legal code - understanding rules and finding the loopholes).
When I say wildly-experimenting, that doesn't suggest a lack of knowledge, understanding and awareness of the material situation. It's an (exaggerated) way of trying something which makes sense to try, figuring out why it wasn't effective and then adjusting tactics:
>At every stage of the struggle, Lenin would look for what he regarded as the key link in the chain of development. He would then repeatedly emphasise the importance of this link, to which all others must be subordinated. After the event, he would say: “We overdid it. We bent the stick too far,” by which he did not mean that he had been wrong to do so. To win the main battle of the day, the concentration of all energies on the task was necessary.*In case anyone needs it clearly stated: This is not a criticism.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1975/lenin1/chap02.htm>>2373472let's see
>lenin participated in factory agitation during the 1900s>was exiled for his political activity>went back to russia to participate in the 1905 revolution>emigrated after that to switzerland and was stuck as a russian citizen surrounded by participants in the great war>still wielded influence on the ground via people like stalin>went out to russia at the first possibility even if it meant that he was giving the counterrevolutionary press material by using a german trainyeah really fucking posh of him to be a men making his own history, but not making it as he pleased. real fucking gay of him not make it under circumstances chosen by himself but under circumstances existing already given and transmitted from the past
>>2373495That's a stupid way to interpret my post, but look: Khrushchev was a peasant, it was the only time in modern history when a peasant became the president of a great power.
Lenin was a petit bourgeois urbanite lawyer who never worked with his hands one single day in his life.
You MLs always bitch and moan about "intellectuals", yet you idolize petit bourgeois intellectuals and hate the farmer.
Khrushchev couldn't have become a president without Lenin though, I'm absolutely willing to admit that.
>>2373504Oh no, poor Leninero getting a special diplomatic convoy by the Germans, some newspapers said bad words :(
Guess he had to purge all the other left factions for this.
And sure he participated to the 1905 revolution, and didn't get exiled to Siberia like his other comrades. He had the money to live comfily in Vienna and Switzerland.
Then he come back, and suddenly he is a prole, taking control over the workers' councils because he feels like a prole, you know?
Face it, Lenin was a Machiavellian opportunist, and you can see it in his texts by the way he smugly smears his socialist rivals. He was still an intelligent person, and did some good things for Russia, but he was far from perfect, just face it instead of soyfacing like religious believers.
>>2373528So, you're basically making some kinda aesthetic, moralist and etiquette based complaint that lenin wasn't a heccin real worker and also a meaniehead?
What is this incoherent, inarticulate whining? Do you have any concrete criticisms of what he actually did in his capacity as a revolutionary, so that you can convince us instead of begging us to "admit" random things?
>>2373547It's on "him" (wink wink) to explain how he was an opportunist compared to, for example, any other left faction or a figure in one of those left factions. which exact policies were opportunistic?
btw "opportunism" means conceding to the bourgeoisie, but western marxists seem to use the term in the meaning of "not being a dogmatic, idealistic retard"
>>2373528>Guess he had to purge all the other left factions for this.unironically speaking the fact they where destroyed by the bolsheviks despite supposedly being more popular and revolutionary kinda goes to show they never where gonna make it anyways if it wasn't Lenin it was gonna be the whites
>Lenin was a Machiavellian opportunistOP criticizes the machiavellian Lenin (as if that was a bad thing) and completely ignores the fact that the other leftist factions are a perfect example of what happens to you if you don't adopt this attitude
Lenin took every oportunity to advance the revolution unlike the other factions who failed at every step but he never did anything for his own personal gain literally every step put him in more dangerous possitions
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