Essentially do you see any big modern marxist public figures coming in as the “old guard” ages out? Who?
Two people in this thread say that with the internet, we can move away from “big public figures”/“big thinkers”. While I appreciate this optimism, it just sounds very anti-authoritarian, and I quote from Engels On Authority:
Why do the anti-authoritarians not confine themselves to crying out against political authority, the state? All Socialists are agreed that the political state, and with it political authority, will disappear as a result of the coming social revolution, that is, that public functions will lose their political character and will be transformed into the simple administrative functions of watching over the true interests of society. But the anti-authoritarians demand that the political state be abolished at one stroke, even before the social conditions that gave birth to it have been destroyed. They demand that the first act of the social revolution shall be the abolition of authority.
There are anti-government and anti-“big corp/business” tendencies in the US/West, which I will call “anti-authority” for now. The essense of “anti-authority” in capitalist countries is anti-capitalism, or anti-“dictatorship of the bourgeoisie”, but there is a gap in this logic that stops people from turning into marxists right away, as they might instead become anarchists. This gap in logic will not be closed just by having everyone have access to free information through the internet, as there is too much information to digest, and imperialists will also interfere with the propagation of marxist ideology.
“Anti-authoritarian” sentiments do have positive outcomes, like decentralized technologies (think internet, bittorrent, p2p, fediverse etc.), the open source software movement, but these only serve as tools, they are the means and not the end.
There are other decent figures who are younger. Vijay Prishad is only 55. We’ve got everyone in the revleft podcast family. In addition, more zoomer centered figures like the deprogram people and hasan.
Came here to say Vijay as well even tho he’s not that young he should have a good 20+ years in him still, hopefully.
No one mentioned our second habibi, HasanAbi🤤. What Iam seeing is more like stochastic forms of learning among people which lackes centre public figures. I do not think this is bad but moving forward figures who can put theory in to practice should emerge and it will.
Hasan was my gateway in and here’s hoping there’s more people to follow
I never watched his streams btw. Hakim is my only habibi.
Listening to Hakim on the Deprogram right now ❤️
These are big shoes to fill and they will of course be filled by Bad Empanada and Vaush.
Hi comrade, is something wrong with bad empanada? I watched a few of his and thought it was pretty neat. I am asking because you mention him together with vaush.
He doesn’t acknowledge PRC’s achievements, doesn’t support AES except Cuba (I think) and doesn’t align himself with other anti-imperialists. He attacks journalists critical of the west, I faintly recall a bona fide NED spook quote tweeting BE to attack the Greyzone.
Insofar as he limits himself to attacking rightists, especially the ones claiming to be socialists, he’s fine.
He calls himself socialist, supports LatAm social democracy, and defended Stalin from holodomor lies, but he constantly has bad China takes, and his streaming channel is toxic.
I’ve never seen him apologise for furthering the Uighur genocide hoax.
Who comes next? You do, comrade :)
But in terms of “folks I’ve been reading that seem to have decent takes:”
- Roderic Day of redsails.org has put out some really good pieces in my opinion.
- Peter Coffin has a mixture of good takes and bad ones. He’s stubborn on holding onto transphobia – or at least, transphobia-adjacent comments – and his “LGBTQ+ is a bourgeois ideology” take, which, so far as I can tell, may be one of those “okay, ‘technically correct’ under your framing of it, but thoroughly counter-productive seeing as literally nobody else frames the issue in this way.” Unfortunately, he’s recommended stuff from PatSoc Caleb Maupin before too. Basically, I see potential in Coffin, clouded by problems.
- What I have read of Xi Jinping – which isn’t much – has been solid.
So yeah, if you’re looking for heroes, I wouldn’t hold your breath. But there’s life to be found in the world of Marxism.
