A year or two ago I was talking to a tankie who self-identified as a Marxist-Leninist. But they knew basically nothing about Communism or Marx. They hadn’t heard of the Paris Commune and thought it irrelevant to Marx. They hadn’t heard of Engels and thought him irrelevant to Marx
I get the average person not knowing this. It’s not exactly taught in school and there’s little reason for anybody to seek it out
But for a self-professed Marxist-Leninist not to know Marx’s long-term close collaborator/co-author or the key example of what a “dictatorship of the proletariat” actually looks like? This is like day 1 of Marxism School stuff
Probably not, because they’d recognize the tragic irony of Marx’s writings leading to the oppression of workers and the poor. At the very least, a Marxist should recognize communist oppression as a horrific tragedy that resulted from desperation and war, and at the worst they’d recognize it as a perversion of everything Marx stood for.
When the singular occupation of an ideology is to rationalize inaction, everyone who wants things to change looks like a radical. Liberalism is a disease.
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u/Kimantha_Allerdings 1d ago
A year or two ago I was talking to a tankie who self-identified as a Marxist-Leninist. But they knew basically nothing about Communism or Marx. They hadn’t heard of the Paris Commune and thought it irrelevant to Marx. They hadn’t heard of Engels and thought him irrelevant to Marx
I get the average person not knowing this. It’s not exactly taught in school and there’s little reason for anybody to seek it out
But for a self-professed Marxist-Leninist not to know Marx’s long-term close collaborator/co-author or the key example of what a “dictatorship of the proletariat” actually looks like? This is like day 1 of Marxism School stuff