"Imagine" is the most perfect distillation of liberal philosophical idealism, i.e. the notion that the world's problems are caused by people just having wrong ideas and if everyone could simply 'imagine' a peaceful world it would happen, rather than problems being the inevitable outcomes of current material conditions as determined by the dominant economic system.
CascadeOfLight
joined 2 years ago
Would you say Ukraine was "preparing for a possibly (sic)" when its Nazi special forces were creating Hitlerjugend-style child soldier training camps?
'The vanguard' IS the workers driving the revolution. The vanguard party is the most advanced section of the workers, the workers that have read the most theory, have the most experience and have the most developed skills of organization. Saying they should just "act as advisors" is saying they should wait for the workers to spontaneously develop another different organization for them to give suggestions to - but then doesn't that organization just become the new vanguard, which should also stand aside and act as advisor instead of leading?
Though having just said that, at the moment of revolutionary potential, how is "taking the role of advisors" any different to "leading"? The Bolsheviks didn't coerce the workers into following them (indeed, how exactly could they have done?), they didn't grab a magic crown that assigned them the position of "leaders of the revolution" and all the other workers just had to fall in line - the workers gave their support to the Bolsheviks, chose to listen to their ideas and carry out their tactics, because they had proved through their achievements that they were the best and most capable party, in terms of bringing the changes that the workers wanted to fruition.
The conditions of bourgeoise society caused the formation of various organizations claiming to fight for the workers. Out of all these different possible options, only the Bolsheviks gained the support of the mass of workers - and they did so by having the most advanced theories, combined with the most experience of organizing, resulting in their deployment of successful tactics (all of which Trotsky himself was involved in!) So, in retrospect, out of all the other parties that fell by the wayside, we can say they were the vanguard party.
Now, that all said, I can see how there could be a misapprehension of what the vanguard is, mainly because of the state of the current Western left. People talking about and concerned with the "dangers of vanguardism" are themselves most likely Westerners that haven't read theory or history, and probably still believe Western lies about communist states and communism in general. For such people, the only communists (and probably leftists of any kind) they will have interacted with will be intellectuals and academics, so their understanding will be skewed - they likely assume that 'the vanguard party' simply appears fully formed out of communist professors and talking heads and then 'descends' to take control of the workers movement, rather than arising from it organically. This is compounded by the fact that, in the west, the workers themselves are likely to be hostile to communist positions because of the advantages they enjoy from imperialism. So to them, the idea of 'vanguard' and 'workers' being separate entities is natural.
But fundamentally, it infantilizes and steals the subjectivity the workers - a very common problem in the Western and 'New' Left, exemplified by George Orwell's Animal Farm for instance - implying that the vanguard should "choose" to stand aside and "let" the workers do what they want as if the vanguard could stop them! All the vanguard CAN do is point out how the workers can get what they want, and present a compelling enough, evidenced enough argument for their solution that the worker filled with revolutionary zeal, the active burning need to tear down an unjust world, will agree with them.
This ended up a little long because I haven't got time to make it shorter, but I hope I got the point across without too much repetition. For more reading about the pitfalls of Trotskyism, I recommend this short article as well as the book it's based on.
Should've taken a left turn 
Reminder that for all the propaganda about communists 'not valuing human lives', the death toll of the Soviet space program vs the US is 4 to 15.
If you include accidents in training, the ratio is 6 to 24.
The US was always the one engaged in the 'human waves' style of space exploration.
In a weird twist of etymological fate, they both come from the same root.
'Burger' obviously comes from 'Hamburger', which is named that not because it has ham in it but because it was the regional dish of Hamburg, imported to the US by German settlers along with such USian cultural icons as beer and pretzels and the Protestant Work Ethic. Hamburg uses the German suffix 'burg', originally meaning castle or fort but later just meaning 'town'; that word has the same Proto-Indo-European root as the English words 'borough' and 'burgh' (e.g. Pittsburgh, Edinburgh) and the French 'bourg', as in Luxembourg.
So 'bourgeoisie' is French for, basically, 'townies', because as they were merchants and workshop owners, the towns were where the bourgeoisie lived. And the English equivalent word would be 'burgher', thus burgers the food (and 'burgers' the slang for USians) could be directly translated as 'bourgeoisie'. And therefore the US was simply always doomed to be the strongest bastion of world capitalism!
So this will stop fascists who like fascists shit from facing the slightest repercussion to their public image, but I assume the back end will still be open for scraping by feds who want to compile lists of dissidents.
Holy fuck, just crouching there in the open! What was going through the third guy's head? (Besides the bullet of course)
If his response to two guys getting owned right in front of him is to just sit there fully exposed in every direction, I'm surprised he even a brain in there to hit.
Ah man oh no, I literally specifically promised a close friend that there would be Pringles after the revolution! 
I'm not making this up, they were like "yeah, well capitalism brought us nice things like Pringles" and I said it was THE WORKERS who bring us Pringles and we could still have them after we overthrew the capitalists. And now you're telling me we can't??
When the bullet is about to enter your head, you say the word "stop", make a choice to avoid these consequences and then do a positive visualisation of a time you weren't being executed for your crimes
I suppose I should say "radlib", but as this post shows he's clearly against an actual organized revolution.
Pointing out the problems of the system is still well within the bounds of the leftward edge of liberalism, as long as the solution given shepherds people back into the fold of nonresistance. Electoralists who insist that Bernie or AOC or whoever could fix the problems of the US, if only they could get some kind of New Deal through that danged Congress, are playing the same game. As are environmentalists who cry about climate change but but don't connect it to the fundamental mechanics of capitalism and never go beyond individual acts of defiance. And they don't even have to be doing it cynically, they just have to be unable or unwilling to see beyond the limits of their current understanding, as imposed on them by the material conditions of their life. Such as, the life of a millionaire rockstar.
Charitably, one could go so far as to call him a utopian socialist, but that still doesn't mean anything if he doesn't investigate any further into the real conditions of the world. All he can do is idly daydream and "imagine" a better world without suggesting any kind of next step or concrete plan to create a better world - indeed, the people who are actually trying to do something are the subject of ridicule. And more than that, someone can listen to Imagine, daydream about a better world, be satisfied with how good they are for wishing the world was a better place, and then go straight back out into capitalist society with an untroubled conscience. Like, Imagine came out 53 year ago, the official youtube upload from 2016 alone has 306 million views - how many of those people did it set off on the path of communist revolution?
I don't want this to feel like I'm bashing you for liking the song, if it's meaningful to you then cool, it has a good sound and the lyrics do conjure an objectively good world, plus by being here you're already reached a far more radical level than the vast majority of westerners. But it actually has no content beyond what can be recuperated into the system that created it, especially in the context of the rest of his work and his cultivated hippie persona.