Leftist Lit

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Xander77: Apr 6, 2009; Fuck it then. For another pit sandwich and some 'tater salad, I'll post a few more.

Anything good on Troskyist thought? I'm currently reading "My Life" and it's kinda terrible as an autobiography of a political figure and in terms of explaining what he was all about.

It doesn't spare a single paragraph to what political affiliations actually meant in practice, Trotsky recounts how he changed his ideology (mostly in terms of "I never had more than superficial disagreements with Saint Lenin") but not what said change was and why, and there are practically zero details about key personalities beyond "the people who agreed with me were smart and brave, the people who disagreed with me were politically illiterate backstabbers".

It doesn't even do a great job as a strictly personal biography. I suddenly found out "L.D" was now living with a second wife and an entirely different set of kids as he was recounting 1917.

# ¿ Sep 14, 2020 10:35

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# ¿ May 14, 2024 16:00

Xander77: Apr 6, 2009; Fuck it then. For another pit sandwich and some 'tater salad, I'll post a few more.

Baka-nin posted:

I think this Trotsky fellow protests too much https://youtu.be/hTIh_J75B3c

Why would you link to a 40 minute audio? And why would that link to an archive link rather than the text in a readable format.

Anyway - I don't know what kind of protests Trotsky made in the 30's, but at the end of the 20's he had a fairly established position - soviets and soldier committees were of course perfectly good when fighting against the Tzarist dictatorship \ "the democrats", but were definitely bad when holding back the worker's dictatorship. Simple as could be (one of the reasons why I wish he would bother to explain his politics even the tiniest bit, instead of assuming everyone are familiar with the minute aspects and focusing his efforts on vicious personal attacks with no meaningful practical examples).

quote:

And no, there despite being over represented in the arts and academics, there isn't much writing by Trots that holds up, its not an exaggeration that the majority of the stuff writing by them is aimed at their own party membership.

I thought he was Lenin's golden boy, the Bolshevik's best propogandist? Or is that part and portion of how everything written in the USSR was the "wrong" sort of communist thinking?

# ¿ Sep 17, 2020 11:00

Xander77: Apr 6, 2009; Fuck it then. For another pit sandwich and some 'tater salad, I'll post a few more.

Baka-nin posted:

I don't believe I've ever come across someone claiming he was a great propagandist before; Trots lauding him as an excellent theorist sure, but never a great speaker to the masses.

Besides his own autobiography (yeah, I know) I got that impression from Ten Days that Shook the World (it would have been utterly fascinating if John Reed actually survived to give further impressions of how the revolution turned out. As he writes, you constantly go back to that Carlin quote - "if everyone you meet is an ~~rear end in a top hat~~ contra-revolutionary capitalist stooge, maybe the problem lies with you?") and just... from general Russian culture?

# ¿ Sep 17, 2020 21:00

Xander77: Apr 6, 2009; Fuck it then. For another pit sandwich and some 'tater salad, I'll post a few more.

Someone mentioned that the big flaw with Marx's theories is the assumption (prevalent among economists at the time) that labor has an inherent value, rather than its value being determined by demand. I'm not exactly going to read Das Kapital - economic texts are a bit beyond my poor humanities student brain - but how true is that?

# ¿ Nov 4, 2020 20:13

Xander77: Apr 6, 2009; Fuck it then. For another pit sandwich and some 'tater salad, I'll post a few more.

gfarrell80 posted:

Eh, I don't know about They Live. I watched it an enjoyed it but it is a little too 'lizard people'-esque conspiracy theory. There are better leftist movies out there.

"The rich and powerful are alien lizard people subjugating humanity" is a perfectly sound allegory. It just doesn't work when morons take it literally.

A bit like "penis envy" really.

# ¿ Nov 14, 2020 07:57

Xander77: Apr 6, 2009; Fuck it then. For another pit sandwich and some 'tater salad, I'll post a few more.

neongrey posted:

Does anyone have good recs on specifically leftist stories? As in, fiction that's written by authors who know their theory and are using it as a foundation for the story being told? Most of the books in this thread are theory which is great and I'm hoovering up those books, but like, I want leftist entertainment. I'm okay if it comes off preachy, though I'd prefer it not be. If the author's pandering, I'd rather pandering to anarchists than to MLs but I'll take what I can get.

The Strugatsky Brothers, obviously. Don't have a clear idea of what a socialist post-scarcity society would actually look like, and what kind of problems it might have? Several generations grew up with this vision of, a now lost, future.

The Final Circle of Paradise and The Doomed City aren't well known in the English-speaking world, but they have two very contrasting takes on the same issue, from a leftist perspective.

# ¿ Jul 27, 2021 23:34

Xander77: Apr 6, 2009; Fuck it then. For another pit sandwich and some 'tater salad, I'll post a few more.

gfarrell80 posted:

And Dostoyevsky, while not a traditional 'leftist', certainly has his moments:

That strikes me as very generic off-label christian tosh. Badger the writer (or the character) into drawing any actionable conclusions, and once they're done jerking themselves off over how humble and spiritually fulfilled they are, it will end up with "come on, stop prioritizing your selfish worldly desires over what I want you to do for my benefit.

Orson Scott Card's "we're all the same tribe, we all have the same rules, by which I mean human rules" speech in Xenocide, if you will.

# ¿ Aug 2, 2021 07:58

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# ¿ May 14, 2024 16:00

Xander77: Apr 6, 2009; Fuck it then. For another pit sandwich and some 'tater salad, I'll post a few more.

roomtone posted:

that seems like cynicism arising from the competitive obsession being described in the excerpt. you're making an assumption that anyone who criticises selfishness or material desire is only doing it to feed their ego or wealth, which i don't agree with.

i feel silly getting into a debate about two paragraphs, i just think this:

is the kind of suspicion about how everyone wants to gently caress you over that keeps people isolated and powerless. even if it's true that they usually do, if we don't try and overcome that default position, then we stay mired in the same state of affairs.

i don't think there's anything spiritual in that except, either. seems like you're superimposing things from elsewhere.

I mean... death of the author and all that, but being only slightly familiar with the preaching of the ROC \ non-affiliated Russian christians who hemmed and hawed but ended up supporting the authority of the Tzar in the face of "nihilism", you'll see exactly where all this is coming from and where it always goes.

Edit - Let me clarify further. To anyone reading this in the 19th century, "oh, anti-revolutionary rhetoric, sure" would be crystal clear.

Xander77 fucked around with this message at 16:37 on Aug 2, 2021

# ¿ Aug 2, 2021 11:28

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