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[–] 63 points 8 months ago

Missing frame; where Lenin says, "yeah, me too".

The man showed up in town after the February 1917 revolution, and then couped the interim government, ignored the free and fair election of November 1917, going so far as to having the winners arrested, you know, the actual communists. Then Lenin invents Vanguard parties (dictatorship) to keep the wrong sort of communists from every holding actual power.

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  • [–] 28 points 8 months ago (2 children)
  • [–] 10 points 8 months ago

    Well I came to make Tim jokes, but since that's been covered:

    In no longer pretty cities
    There are fingers in the kitties
    There are warrants, forms, and chitties
    And a jackboot on the stair

    Sex and death and human grime
    In monochrome for one thin dime
    At least the trains all run on Tim
    But they don't go anywhere…

    • Alan Moore. "Vicious Cabaret" - V For Vendetta
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  • [–] 16 points 8 months ago

    Also Lenin: "I am the proletariat."

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  • [–] 8 points 8 months ago (2 children)
  • [–] 12 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    Are you joking? Lenin was an autocrat from the get go. Ask the Mensheviks, or the left SR.

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago

    That's the thing about dictatorships, is eventually it starts being the wrong kind of dictatorship

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (1 child)

    I always thought "dictatorship of the proletariat" meant "the proletariat is going to have a dictator" rather than "the proletariat is going to be the dictator". Turns out this is exactly what Lenin meant, too:

    The scientific term 'dictatorship' means nothing more nor less than authority untrammeled by any laws, absolutely unrestricted by any rules whatever, and based directly on force.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago

    For anyone interested, here is the article. You can read for yourself how Lenin builds an argument that differentiates personal dictatorship from class dictatorship and how an ademocratic dictatorship is different from a socialist dictatorship.

    There's no way you can read this article and believe he is arguing fora personal dictatorship or a minority class dictatorship against the will of the majority. But since this quote is only compelling without context or without realizing it doesn't actually mention the proletariat, here's another, better contextualized quote that is far more aligned with the theoretical arguments in the text.

    The point is, however, that there is the dictatorship of a minority over the majority, the dictatorship of a handful of police officials over the people; and there is the dictatorship of the overwhelming majority of the people over a handful of tyrants, robbers and usurpers of the people's power. (Emphasis added)

    This is what Lenin meant.

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