swiftessay

TODAY I'LL DRINK TO THAT!

"Oh, beware the Moscow Gold!"

Yes, it's also the guy who takes advice from the spirit of his dead dog. I'm not kidding.

You know... That's actually not a crazy thought. I'm not a professional Bible scholar but I'm super interested in the topic and read my share of books and research articles on critical biblical studies.

Some of the craziest prophetic writings in the bible are actually super anti-elite, criticizing kings and priestly leaders for extorting the poor and not caring for their people, decrying foreign and domestic opressors, etc, etc.

If you read Amos, Baruch, Ezekiel, Isaiah and so on it's not rare to find stuff like "what is the value the sacrifices in the temple have if you're starving your people?" directed at kings and other elites.

Not all of it, but some of the later stuff (exilic and post-exilic) is surrounded by crazy visions like "... the angel of lord showed me the throne of YHWH and it was awesome and terrifying and full of eyes and wheels within wheels and 200 heads", etc.

So... part of it might be a way of saying "BTW, here's the mothefucking terrifying being that's going to fuck you up if you don't stop oppressing the people...".

Of course, all that was later coopted by an institutional priestly class who couldn't give a fuck about the actual social message. But there was a lot of social preoccupation by some of the original authors.

I know a couple of liberals who L.O.V.E. to cite Du Bois around that would be pretty shocked by this quote.

If liberals knew how fucking "tankie" some of their idols really were they would completely melt.

It's ripe for some good old neoliberal shock therapy and mass privatization.

In Brazil we call that "lapada seca". I don't think I know how to translate the spirit of it, but literally it's something like "dry slap".

You say that when someone got slapped so hard you can feel the pain from afar.

Dê a ordem, camarada! <3

I used to be a left leaning socdem during my early years until early adulthood. My parents had been militant in communist orgs against the military dictatorship in Brazil in the 70s so I was very proud of the that story, which helped build this left leaning tendency. But most former communists had gone socdem in Brazil after the 90s.

I took a firm liberal dive during post-grad studies and after I began working, influenced by economic literature and also by work environment ideology. That was exacerbated by the failures our socdem government. I was still kind of "left liberal" and respectful of my family's history, but I tended to be the "progressive on social issues, conservative on economics" kind of liberal.

Until we elected an actual fascist here in Brazil.

That started unraveling a mental process that started questioning everything. My belief in liberal institutions took a hit, than electoral bourgeois democracy, than all the bullshit in economics started unraveling. I finally realized that what bugged me about liberal economics was the complete disregard for political processes. Fetishizing the technical aspects without taking into account the political processes behind them, which completely turn the theory upside down.

I went back to reading Marx ann Lenin again and... here I am.

100% agreed, comrade.

That's where we can converge. Thank you.

That's a fair point, but... Well, that's what the Leninist party organization is for. To forge this revolutionary spirit on the advanced members of the working classes and then spreading this through the class.

It will not come naturally. Class consciousness doesn't come from nowhere. We can't complain that there isn't class consciousness without actually building organizations to foment it. We need more Lenin in this conversation.

Edit:

Sorry for editing but this is an important point. As Marxists we shouldn't rely on idealism but on the material conditions for something to happen, right?

This discourse "people aren't ready for the hardships of revolution" is idealist. It pressuposes that metaphysical conditions and ideas ("being ready for the revolution") are the movers of history. As Marxists that's not what we believe. We believe that material conditions are the movers of history.

So we ask ourselves: what material conditions make people apt for revolutionary action? And we work to bring about those conditions.

That's the Leninism in "Marxism-Leninism"!!!! That's one of the great contribution of Lenin (not the only one, of course): the first steps on the theory of revolutionary organization.

That's what frustrates me about the phrase in the title. We have a lot of past theory and practice to apply for that problem. Granted: I didn't listen to the podcast. Maybe that's what he talks about later. But I think the phrase as it's written is a disservice.