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“Perhaps Your Highness has believers here who still offer worship.”

Tian Guan Ci Fu Vol. 6

Part 1, part 2

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“He no longer believed in anyone, especially himself.”

Tian Guan Ci Fu Vol. 6.

This is the second part of this drawing

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Take the blame in your bloody hands

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Beautiful symphony

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in my room straight up reading it.... and by "it" letgs just say... my lenin

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Finally posting Wu Ming on a Wednesday...

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the eye-rolling god

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gotcha prompt of wu ming x prince!xie lian for @/x_tobefree_x over on twitter <3

[ID: heaven official's blessing fanart, split into two panels. in the first panel, wu ming stands with his arms crossed, his sword tucked against his shoulder. his hair is braided, and he wears a white smiling mask that has red accents around the eyes. a speech bubble says “?” surrounded by blushing marks. in the second panel, xie lian, in his crown prince outfit, looks at wu ming, cheeks flushed and mouth agape. in the background, someone calls “dianxia!”, repeating it again (“dianxia?”) until the words become intelligible. xie lian ignores them. end ID]

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The forgotten god and his last believer

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none of these words are in communist manifesto

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niceys positive anon!! i don't agree with you on everything but you are so clearly like well read and well rounded that you've helped me think through a lot of my own inconsistencies and hypocrises in my own political and social thought, even if i do have slightly different conclusions at times then u (mainly because i believe there's more of a place for idealism and 'mind politics' than u do). anyway this is a preamble to ask if you have recommended reading in the past and if not if you had any recommended reading? there's some obvious like Read Marx but beyond that im always a little lost wading through theory and given you seem well read and i always admire your takes, i wondered about your recs

it's been a while since i've done a big reading list post so--bearing in mind that my specific areas of 'expertise' (i say that in huge quotation marks obvsies i'm just a girlblogger) are imperialism and media studies, here are some books and essays/pamphlets i recommend. the bolded ones are ones that i consider foundational to my politics

BASICS OF MARXISM

friedrich engels, principles of commmunism

friedrich engels, socialism: utopian & scientific

karl marx, the german ideology

karl marx, wage labour & capital

mao zedong, on contradiction

nikolai bukharin, anarchy and scientific communism

rosa luxemburg, reform or revolution?

v.i lenin, left-wing communism: an infantile disorder

v.i. lenin, the state & revolution

v.i. lenin, what is to be done?

IMPERIALISM

aijaz ahmed, iraq, afghanistan, and the imperialism of our time

albert memmi, the colonizer and the colonized

che guevara, on socialism and internationalism (ed. aijaz ahmad)

eduardo galeano, the open veins of latin america

edward said, orientalism

fernando cardoso, dependency and development in latin america

frantz fanon, black skin, white masks

frantz fanon, the wretched of the earth

greg grandin, empire's workshop

kwame nkrumah, neocolonialism, the last stage of imperialism

michael parenti, against empire

naomi klein, the shock doctrine

ruy mauro marini, the dialectics of dependency

v.i. lenin, imperialism: the highest stage of capitalism

vijay prashad, red star over the third world

vincent bevins, the jakarta method

walter rodney, how europe underdeveloped africa

william blum, killing hope

zak cope, divided world divided class

zak cope, the wealth of (some) nations

MEDIA & CULTURAL STUDIES

antonio gramsci, the prison notebooks

ed. mick gidley, representing others: white views of indigenous peoples

ed. stuart hall, representation: cultural representations and signifying pratices

gilles deleuze & felix guattari, capitalism & schizophrenia

jacques derrida, margins of philosophy

jacques derrida, speech and phenomena

michael parenti, inventing reality

michel foucault, disicipline and punish

michel foucault, the archeology of knowledge

natasha schull, addiction by design

nick snricek, platform capitalism

noam chomsky and edward herman, manufacturing consent

regis tove stella, imagining the other

richard sennett and jonathan cobb, the hidden injuries of class

safiya umoja noble, algoriths of oppression

stuart hall, cultural studies 1983: a theoretical history

theodor adorno and max horkheimer, the culture industry

walter benjamin, the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction

OTHER

angela davis, women, race, and class

anna louise strong, cash and violence in laos and vietnam

anna louise strong, the soviets expected it

anna louise strong, when serfs stood up in tibet

carrie hamilton, sexual revolutions in cuba

chris chitty, sexual hegemony

christian fuchs, theorizing and analysing digital labor

eds. jules joanne gleeson and elle o'rourke, transgender marxism

elaine scarry, the body in pain

jules joanne gleeson, this infamous proposal

michael parenti, blackshirts & reds

paulo freire, pedagogy of the oppressed

peter drucker, warped: gay normality and queer anticapitalism

rosemary hennessy, profit and pleasure

sophie lewis, abolish the family

suzy kim, everyday life in the north korean revolution

walter rodney, the russian revolution: a view from the third world

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You called but there was no answer

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wu ming my beloved

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people always talk about how disconnected xie lian is from his body after the temple but i havent seen anyone talk about how disconnectrd he is from his own narration in book 4. after he leaves the temple there is no internal monologue or any tangable thoughts until he gets home and realises he cant tell anyone and cant even pretend things are fine. it becomes even more obvious after his parents die-the complete lack of an internal monologue or thought process, he's just drifting. an adition from the revised novel i loved is when he sees wuming's flower and he feels something inside him stirr up and IMMEDIATELY drowns it, refusing to even acknowledgeit. it becomes obvious how he's refusing to process things because he would have to think of what he is currently doing, what his plans are and what led him to that point-he'd have to think about what was done to him in the temple and he refuses to do that. and that lack of internal narration does exactly that.

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The birth of Lenin 155 years ago reminds the best of our class, the reddest flowers, that, more than anything, there is a science that has embroidered a thread throughout history, linking our collective beating hearts and minds through the "admirable combination of sober scientific analysis of objective conditions and the objective process of evolution with the most emphatic recognition of the importance of the revolutionary energy, the revolutionary creative power and the revolutionary initiative of the masses, as well as, of course, of individuals, groups, organisations and parties that are able to establish contact with the masses" that is Marxism-Leninism.

Every year that passes it becomes more and more important to remember Lenin and every long gone revolutionary with a cautious lense, at least outwardly. The longevity of his achievements has lended his personality an inmortality of sorts, one that is vulnerable to indulge in a simplistic lens. We don't stand on the shoulders of giants, we stand at the forefront of more than two millenia worth of class struggle and economic development, which has sporadically brought certain personalities to the forefront of their moments. There could not have been a Lenin 50 years before his time, just like there could not have been a Marx 50 years prior. It is the course of class struggle that shapes our consciousness, and afterwards it's those conditioned consciousness that shape history.

Not to say we should throw Lenin to the wayside and light altars to the neverending march of economic history instead. But rather, admire Lenin as one of the people most aware of his own place in the state of the class struggle in his time, like Marx and Engels in their own time. I think this is what's most admirable about Lenin. He lived through three revolutions, one of which failed and another that triumphed for another class. But the incredible long time spans in an individual's perception did not deter Lenin and the party he lead, because eventually, "the fact remains that for the first time in hundreds and thousands of years the promise “to reply” to war between the slave-owners by a revolution of the slaves directed against all the slave-owners has been completely fulfilled—and is being fulfilled despite all difficulties" And this victory was enabled by the scientific understanding of the class struggle and its articulation towards the victory of the working class over all forms of exploitation, by solving the theory-practice schasm that had plagued the worker's movement since the very beginning.

I think this is what's most important to remember this 22nd of April. I see it every so often in my daily application of my continuous education in revolutionary marxism, an understandable dissolutionment with how stagnant our efforts seem to be. But every time I take a step back, even in the order of a few years, clear progress is being made. One day all our small quantitative changes will result in a qualitative change that will be comparable to the strike the bolsheviks delivered to capitalism all those years ago, and never without passing through our own 1905s, splits, repression, and more. Even if Marx and Engels seemed to underestimate the longevity of the bourgeoisie's reign, their undertakers still wait at the other side of the door.

Which is why I find value in remembering and celebrating people like Lenin. They were living proof of the future that awaits our class, once it finally manages to negate itself and do away with class society altogether. I see Lenin's shadow in every meeting, every analysis, every criticism and every commemoration. "Constructive generations think of the past as an origin, as a cause. They never think of it as a programme"

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there will be a show with two guys in a fucked up power dynamic that is the core of their relationship and all the posts will be like "i love them but i hate the power dynamic" and all the fic is like "what if there was no power dynamic" or "what if the power dynamic was switched". like okay actually i think the imbalance is fun and awesome. anyone else