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How would you characterize "leninism" as opposed to other sub-ideologies of Marxism/communism? What distinguishes it? What specific beliefs?

So Leninism is distinguished by a couple key innovations that I find odious.

The first is Lenin's idea of the vanguard party. As I understand it, from reading Leszek Kolakowski, Lenin's idea was that left to their own devices, the majority of the working class would only ever develop "trade union consciousness" and not true class consciousness, and so a socialist revolution had to be led by an iron-willed and ruthless minority party that must (1) monopolize all political power, and (2) be uncompromisingly committed to a certain version of Marxist teleology. Any workers' faction that opposes this party or tries to operate outside of it is to be considered objectively counter-revolutionary, since the party and the revolution are one and the same. Totalitarian one-man dictatorship, and permanent mass terror are the inevitable result of this idea. Electoral democracy, freedom of speech and press, and the existence of real labor unions or cooperatives are all automatically forbidden by the idea of the vanguard party.

The second is the postwar Leninist conception of "imperialism". Leninists can never decide whether imperialism is a strictly economic phenomenon, referring to what most economists would call "foreign direct investment"; or whether it's also a political and military phenomenon, referring to the domination of weaker states by more powerful states. I don't have enough time today to fully explain all my problems here but suffice it to say here that the problem here is the one I'm always complaining about: these people believe that wars of aggression and conquest, and the domination of weaker countries by stronger countries only counts as imperialist if the country doing it is the US or aligned with the US. And therefore believe themselves to be "anti-imperialist" when cheerleading for the conquest of Hungary, Afghanistan, or Ukraine by the Russian Empire flying a red flag.

And the third is the conception of nationalism that Lenin developed which, while initially not all that problematic, would later be crystallized into a horrific collection of ideas that helped spawn what we now understand as identity politics. Leninism is certainly not the only guilty party here. Liberalism bears its own share of the blame too. And nationalist identity politics are arguably "natural" in a certain way and don't necessarily even need the encouragement of liberal or Leninist ideology to flourish into their full grotesqueness.

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lets all climb on mama

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i mean i wrote that post about a real life woman whose actual fingers i want forced in my mouth but it's great that you saw your beatles rpf bleed through the contours of my desire man. all of us are facets on the infinite gem of god's earth. personally i can't see ringo domming

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can someone please explain to me what the fuck is going on in Naturalistic Inquiry (other than the theoretical groundwork for Sokal's classic 1994 paper)

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hey quick q. is it good when the fbi starts arresting judges?

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there’s definitely a part of me that thinks it might be time to start making plans to get the hell out of dodge

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you knock on my door and hear loud barking and scrambling noises and me yelling "no!! down boy!! down!!!" and then when i open the door there is a single crab on the floor

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The Pope, desperate to avoid ever interacting with JD Vance again, went to the one place the Vice President couldn't follow: heaven.

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*to ethics board* well im sorry you feel that way (lie detector attached to me starts blaring) but i thought my experiments were benefitting humanity (lie detector has started incorporating subtle amen breaks)

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Snufkin doing whatever the fuck he does during the winter

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Thinking about the time a friend on here asked me what porn was like in the Soviet Union and I had to explain that porn was not made in the USSR not just because of morality laws but because the means to produce something like porn were entirely state owned so they were never used for that task

And I just read this paragraph

And how it relates to how difficult it sometimes is to convey how things worked in the Soviet context when talking about anything weird or cool. Like yes if you wanted to just grow up go to school get straight married work a normal job and retire, you could live a life not too dissimilar from your western counterparts. But if you wanted to be nonconformist or interesting in any way at all it was a bitch and a half!

And as someone who writes about post-soviet queers, this is something I think about a lot. Pre soviet collapse, the only versions of gay life that existed were cruising in in a few major urban centers and homosexuality in prisons. And this gives me a perspective on the USSR that aligns more with the old "totalitarian" school of thought, or its modern "post-revisionist" variant, that views the USSR as alienated, oppressive, and conformist. Which is awkward bc my advisor and really everyone who taught me are "revisionists," that is their whole academic project was about showing how normal nd even democratic the USSR could be.

Which like yeah if you were like, the local chairwoman of The People's Heteronormative Industrial Union of Old Conservative Grandmas, you could pressure your local city government to build a community swimming pool instead of a park once in a while. But that's not the same thing as a genuinely open society!!!

Its not that different from how if US conservatives got everything they wanted, every single thing, including the shit they would never ever be able to pass through congress and the courts, life would still largely go on as normal for middle class cis straight able bodied white people. But that wouldn't make it a free country. The fact that the most boring people in a society can still get up go to their jobs and occasionally get a few things they want is not some stellar indicator of social prosperity. It is on the margins that the true reality of freedom is measured.

Anyway I'm thinking about opening an article about Russian gay porn in the 1990s talking about this. About how the effort to finally make some cool shit after decades of not being able to was the real test of the effort to build Russian democracy "from scratch."

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spinning and weaving have been automated to such a degree that people forget they are necessary steps in making fabric, when they used to make up close to half of all labour in society.

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I'd like to remember Pope Francis as the Pope who called a ton of priests faggots, apologized for it, then called them all faggots again

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the libertarian fantasy of safety regulations existing due to sadistic enjoyment of government officials oppressing the innocent small business is kind of hilarious the more you think about it. I hope there is actually a guy out there who just fucking LOVES recalling unsafe food in a sicko sort of way. i'd respect him.