:kind-vladimir-ilyich:

Like most taglines, it's just finessed from a dril tweet

Despite being dead

I've got some bad news regarding Gorbachev

"The German brainpan is simply incapable of understanding any form of democracy"

Speaking of P**er C*ffin, what happened to Ashley?

It's like an offensive fictional depiction of a Latino stereotype in a poorly written novel.

"How do I let the reader understand this character is Cuban? I know, I'll have them randomly interject in Spanish when speaking English, a totally real thing people do"

Just join the cops and make them less bad :thumb-cop:

Up until the fall of the USSR it was Trotsky = GOOD communism (not like the BAD communism of the USSR) particularly in European nations building up a veneer of political and ideological distancing from the USSR. It was characterized by constant critique of the USSR, China, and basically any AES nation as "not being REAL socialism/communism/whateverism" and sustaining a nominal love of human rights and anti-authoritarianism (free Tibet, free Afghanistan, free Czechoslovakia, free Hungary, etc). In practice it turned a sort of blind eye to all but the most overt forms of military imperialism from the NATO powers, which is why to this day you'll still have Western socialist leaders like Corbyn take the occasional pro-western stance in the name of human rights. But as Fakename_Bill said these distinctions are now irrelevant in the fall of the COMINTERN, the USSR, and the 4th International. Communism today is mostly led by China, Cuba and Vietnam, all whom have detoured significantly from the dogmatic lines drawn by the USSR back in the day. Any newly resurged movement will either borrow from these AES nations, of will have to forge a new path by necessity. It's not 20th century Russia anymore. Perhaps one day there may be a Fifth International to establish how we should build socialism in the future, and we can (and should) invite the ancoms, syndies, communalists, and so on, but we'll need to build it first.

Maoism is generally considered to be the newer, and more effective form of modern Marxism, precisely because it takes into account that the lumpen are nonetheless a huge force, bigger than that of the working proletariat, and therefore can and should be harnessed for its revolutionary potential. The difficulty is, of course, educating the lumpen in the first place. How many extremely poor right-wing chuds do we know who enthusiastically vote and campaign against their very own class and economic interests to "own the libs", or to stop whatever imagined group of people or movements that threaten their perceived way of life.

Mao loved the lumpen because to him they were an ideological clean slate. The modern lumpen, particularly in the imperial core, has already been ideologically indoctrinated by reactionaries as they already hold the cultural and media hegemony. Thus, they can no longer be considered the clean slate, but one must deprogram that indoctrination. We all know how absurd it is to unlearn the cultism that pervades the modern far right, from Trumpism to QAnon, to worship of authority, hierarchy, evangelicalism, and capitalism.

No revolutionary has succeeded in such a scale of mass deprogramming in an era of mass media before. It seems such an unsurmountable hill.