prolcon
4th December 2012, 21:27
Comrades leftist,
I'm a lurker, very recently turned a member. I'm more than a little hesitant to make a political statement, since I get the feeling from what I've seen that those who identify as I might politically tend to not to receive warm welcome.
I'm a Southerner only in the most desperately technical sense; I'm a resident of the Big Rotten Peach. It's a city that was known for being "too busy to hate" during the middle of the last century, a bastion of progressive attitudes, and now it's known as one of the foremost centers of sex-trafficking in the country. You may remember ours as the iteration of the Occupy Movement that left when the city politely asked them to. (I never set up camp, myself, but I participated in related protests against home foreclosures.) You get the sense that working people in this city have a sense of class, however underdeveloped it is. Students in particular have a sense of their being a class in opposition to oligarchy.
I'm a Marxist. The Marxist method of analyzing history and class is empowering to those of us who produce for a living. That said, the conclusions I draw from Marxism fall on the Leninist end of the spectrum. Keep in mind that the spectrum of Marxism is quite vast and the problems of Leninism are a little more nuanced than most on any end of the spectrum tend to acknowledge. I'm very interested in the history of the Soviet Union and the Bolsheviks, as well as the ways in which this history may have effected the paths of other Communist parties all over the world. All this said, I reject the model of anti-revisionism as a method of correcting "revisionist" trends. All "revisionist" trends have their roots in historical, material conditions, and they are not the product of individual ambition or error. It's definitely true that certain individual attitudes and positions arise from personality, the broadest trends of states are material in their conception. I'm not here to dismiss the endeavors of socialistic states as capitalist any more than I'm here to insist that they represent perfect implementations of socialism. (For example, there is much about China to critique, but I'm unwilling to dismiss the endeavors of her Communist Party and working class to progress toward economic and social justice as wholly "capitalist" and fraudulent.) Likewise, I'm not here to rehabilitate the image of Stalin, as much as I take an interest in alternative conceptions of him and the USSR during his lifetime. Stalin's USSR and Hoxha's Albania are subjects of interest to me, but it isn't my job (nor do I have the inclination) to convince anyone of the tentative conclusions I've drawn about them, especially if others have already come to their final conclusions about them.
My interest in modern Marxism lies primarily in art. I'm fascinated by historical attempts to explore the Marxist method and conception of the world through art, particularly through Constructivism, its predecessors, and some ideas explored by the Situationist International. I want to explore Marxism through art, as well, and I feel inspired by these old movements, particularly in their deconstruction of bourgeois/neoliberal conceptions of society. I'm interested, also, in socialist realism as a literary method; the analogous visual methodology strikes me as kitschy.
I feel a little disgusted at having written so much about myself, but if there's a time and a place to do it, it's here and now. It's my hope that I can come to a better understanding of the Marxist methodology by exploring it with comrades throughout the spectrum, and that it may be possible to parse a common method between disparate positions.
In before "Glorious exposition, comrade!"
prolcon
I'm a lurker, very recently turned a member. I'm more than a little hesitant to make a political statement, since I get the feeling from what I've seen that those who identify as I might politically tend to not to receive warm welcome.
I'm a Southerner only in the most desperately technical sense; I'm a resident of the Big Rotten Peach. It's a city that was known for being "too busy to hate" during the middle of the last century, a bastion of progressive attitudes, and now it's known as one of the foremost centers of sex-trafficking in the country. You may remember ours as the iteration of the Occupy Movement that left when the city politely asked them to. (I never set up camp, myself, but I participated in related protests against home foreclosures.) You get the sense that working people in this city have a sense of class, however underdeveloped it is. Students in particular have a sense of their being a class in opposition to oligarchy.
I'm a Marxist. The Marxist method of analyzing history and class is empowering to those of us who produce for a living. That said, the conclusions I draw from Marxism fall on the Leninist end of the spectrum. Keep in mind that the spectrum of Marxism is quite vast and the problems of Leninism are a little more nuanced than most on any end of the spectrum tend to acknowledge. I'm very interested in the history of the Soviet Union and the Bolsheviks, as well as the ways in which this history may have effected the paths of other Communist parties all over the world. All this said, I reject the model of anti-revisionism as a method of correcting "revisionist" trends. All "revisionist" trends have their roots in historical, material conditions, and they are not the product of individual ambition or error. It's definitely true that certain individual attitudes and positions arise from personality, the broadest trends of states are material in their conception. I'm not here to dismiss the endeavors of socialistic states as capitalist any more than I'm here to insist that they represent perfect implementations of socialism. (For example, there is much about China to critique, but I'm unwilling to dismiss the endeavors of her Communist Party and working class to progress toward economic and social justice as wholly "capitalist" and fraudulent.) Likewise, I'm not here to rehabilitate the image of Stalin, as much as I take an interest in alternative conceptions of him and the USSR during his lifetime. Stalin's USSR and Hoxha's Albania are subjects of interest to me, but it isn't my job (nor do I have the inclination) to convince anyone of the tentative conclusions I've drawn about them, especially if others have already come to their final conclusions about them.
My interest in modern Marxism lies primarily in art. I'm fascinated by historical attempts to explore the Marxist method and conception of the world through art, particularly through Constructivism, its predecessors, and some ideas explored by the Situationist International. I want to explore Marxism through art, as well, and I feel inspired by these old movements, particularly in their deconstruction of bourgeois/neoliberal conceptions of society. I'm interested, also, in socialist realism as a literary method; the analogous visual methodology strikes me as kitschy.
I feel a little disgusted at having written so much about myself, but if there's a time and a place to do it, it's here and now. It's my hope that I can come to a better understanding of the Marxist methodology by exploring it with comrades throughout the spectrum, and that it may be possible to parse a common method between disparate positions.
In before "Glorious exposition, comrade!"
prolcon