Sexy Lenin & e-smoking Stalin spearhead Russian Communist Party election drive
The Russian Communist Party is sexing up its bid for parliament with a poster campaign depicting the Bolshevik leader, Lenin, as somewhat of a stud in an attempt to draw in younger voters.
The party, often considered to be the party for pensioners, is giving its image a remarkable overhaul in a new poster campaign which also includes an image of dictator Josef Stalin smoking an electronic cigarette and Karl Marx quoting Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Regional offices of the party are being asked to distribute the posters ahead of the Duma elections in September, according to the Life Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party Vadim Solovyov, as reported by L!fe.ru.

Lenin is shown as a young man carrying a laptop, accompanied by an attractive woman with a mobile phone - both are wearing jeans and, appropriately, red tops and red accessories.

Above the image reads the slogan, “There is such a party”.



Chief designer of the Communist Party, Igor Petrygin-Rodionov explained to L!FE that he wanted to "revive" the image of Lenin as a handsome, educated and athletic young man.

“He had charisma and energy, including sexual. This is an image of youth, soundness and intellect. He is such an energetic character, maybe even a sex symbol,” he said.

Solovyov explained that the basis for this element of the campaign is to reach out to the new generation of voters who are not familiar with the communist leader who came to power in the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.

“Their perception of him should go through symbols understandable to them,” he said. “For us, Lenin is not only an individual, but a symbol of the Communist Party as well,” he added.



Sexologist Eugene Kulgavchuk told L!FE that a leader really needs to attract the attention of the female audience, who seek strong men and this rebranding of “Grandad Lenin” has the potential to connect with the youth who will find it easier to identify with this young man on the cusp of leading a revolution.

The quest to modernise past communist figures doesn’t end with Lenin - although the posters suggest he’s the only one up to the task of bringing sexy back.

Petrygin-Rodionov also revamped the famous image of Stalin smoking his pipe by replacing it with an electronic cigarette and shows Karl Marx in a leather jacket accompanied by Arnold Schwarzenegger’s iconic Terminator quote, “I’ll be back”.





Propaganda was used extensively to promote the Communist Party in the Soviet Union so the use of such provocative images may come as little surprise.

It was reported last month that Stalin’s image would be used to bolster party support ahead of the upcoming election. This comes at a time when public support for the former dictator has increased, according to a public opinion poll conducted by the independent Levada Center in December 2015.

The KPRF have been gender and sexual chauvanist shits but this is still entertaining. For a serious Russian cp, check out Russian Maoist Party

glomper_stomper posted:

the russian communist workers' party of the communist party of the soviet union is actually the good one, OP.

those are now both part of the Russian United Labour Front

I'm ambivalent towards groups whose line is based on Soviet Union restorationism. It lends itself well to social-imperialism, and where Russia is an reemerging imperialist power, this could lead to some serious errors

HenryKrinkle posted:

SparksBandung posted:

It lends itself well to social-imperialism, and where Russia is an reemerging imperialist power, this could lead to some serious errors

do you think the USSR was social imperialist at any point? because social imperialist theory itself can lead to errors such as support for Pinochet and alignment with the US such.

Yes, but that alignment with the US should follow is not a conclusion I support nor do I think it logically follows from recognizing that the Soviet Union pursued social imperialism in its later years, forestalling revolutions in places like Greece and not providing the DDR debt relief. Nevertheless three worlds theory is still bad.

On Maoist foreign policy

Regarding the present conditions in Russia

aerdil posted:

social imperialism is some trot shit.

pretty sure it's maoist by any definition.

there are way bigger errors like UNITA in angola and pol pot in cambodia, as far as i know

Nobody is brushing over that. Though it would be equally bad to brush over the stagnation of the world communist movement under the post-Stalin SU. Chinese foreign policy degenerated even before the roader/revisionist period, but I was always under the impression that Kampuchea warmed to them, not the other way around.

anyway, the concept of social imperialism is completely idiotic in the present conditions and only comprehensible to cold war-type politics.

I agree, but since New Soviet Union-type politics are effectively cold war LARPing, its important to point out how that went down and how this particular type of nostalgia informs modern political positions informed by it.

during a global discourse between two powerful and distinct modes of production, two prospective world-systems, it was necessary for communists who delineated from the soviet orthodoxy, sometimes coming to blows with soviet-backed parties who had given up armed struggle, to instead lean on the chinese communists for arms and support. in that pure maoist position, it's necessary to see the international movements of the soviet union as inherently imperialist, rather than internationalist.

here I think we pretty much agree, with the exception that I think there were serious errors in soviet revisionism that led to deformations in the construction of socialism, especially in the Eastern bloc (though this is understandable given that their revolutions were in many ways imported after ww2 in to less than ideal territory).

and to benefit from the contradictions arising from the newly formed relations between china and the west. i think this was the essence of the maoist split during the late 20th century and a theory that immediately collapsed as soon as the soviet union was overthrown

Here I must disagree though. Maoist movements emerged in many places long before the warming with the west, and in the modern global peripheries they persist especially in Peru, India, Palestine, Turkey/Kurdistan,the Philippines, and Nepal. The (admittedly limited) influences of Maoist thought on the Vietnamese and Cuban revolution and the Guevarists like FARC and Venezuela's Tupamaros shouldn't be ignored either.

there's no longer any sort of contradiction to play off of. most of the groups that formerly relied on soviet or chinese support have collapsed in a big dumb heap of reformism or taken to a kind of bloated nostalgia.

Well yeah, like soviet nostalgist politics, and with the exception of active people's wars and\or revolutions informed by ML(M). Nepal might improve, and I'm optimistic about the Philippines.

militant communist groups are bought and sold daily and the ones that have managed to survive have only done so through the support of the masses, the study of present conditions, and the commitment to independent lines.

...agreed. Though I think the point you're making here is that maoism is outdated pro-China anti-revisionism which I would disagree with, as MLM as been extrapolated to other contexts with good success. Also we shouldn't forget the whole class struggle continues under socialism thing

blinkandwheeze posted:

if understood on their own terms, if they were accurate then, they are accurate now, unless you believe the validity of material analysis is subordinate to the demands of political expediency. that's not to say these necessarily were correct or accurate theoretical positions, but i really question this stance which acknowledges some contingent accuracy of these concepts while simultaneously reducing them to purely realpolitik manoeuvres. I don't understand how this position is sustainable without characterising the groups you're talking about as either idiots or liars.

Most so-called Maoist analysis, as far as I'm aware, is good. If social imperialism is bad analysis, it's an exception to the rule. It would mean we are dealing with an analytical blind spot, one that happens to relate specifically to the Soviet Union, and one that arose in the post-split context. I can't see why we should ignore that context if we want to understand how and why the analysis went wrong. And surely that's what we're talking about here - trying to explain a mistake. Groups can make mistakes without having to be either idiots or liars.

blinkandwheeze posted:

this approach - a refusal to engage with the theoretical output of revolutionary movements on their own terms - almost always ends up privileging the theoretical discourse and output of western academia as the primary metric for determining what positions are relevant or comprehensible

babyhueypnewton posted:

I'm pretty open to changing my ideas but the idea is that 'social imperialism' was mistaken based on any real analysis of imperialism as a world system based on Lenin's categories of financial monopoly capitalism but that this analysis led to real theoretical advances in Maoist political economy starting with the Great Leap Forward and culminating the Cultural Revolution. I agree this kind of position is pragmatic (in the worst way as in opposed to truth itself)

Well, surely we can do better than that. Can't we instead analyse this incorrect theory of 'social imperialism' to find the kernel of truth - the actual material conditions it attempted to describe - and see if those subsequent advances can be better understood as successful responses to those actual material conditions in spite of flawed theoretical grounding?

Petrol posted:

I can't see why we should ignore that context if we want to understand how and why the analysis went wrong. And surely that's what we're talking about here - trying to explain a mistake. Groups can make mistakes without having to be either idiots or liars.

i don't disagree in a general sense with the validity of seeing the theoretical position we are talking about here as a flawed theoretical position influenced by the context of material conditions

However, reducing it in its entirety to a single pragmatic political manoeuvre reduces its theorists to the point of absurdity. yes, you can make a mistake without having to be an idiot or liar. but to produce and develop extensive and rigorous theoretical works and material investigations across the span of decades, purely as a plea toward chinese material support that they did not even receive?

the most militant adherents of the social-imperialism thesis were rewarded almost nothing for their efforts, and their insistence on pursuing people's war led them into direct contradiction with chinese political line following the rightward turn of chinese foreign policy in 1971 onward (largely coincident with the marginalisation and disappearance of lin piao). the cpi marxist-leninist received at most a handful of positive mentions in the chinese press of 1969, followed by official denunciations in 1971 and eventually a cessation of any mention at all. china in fact provided backing to the pakistani military junta in 1971, directly opposing the maoist line of support for east bengali independence. the communist party of the philippines were pledged only two very small shipments of arms by the chinese state in the span of 1969-1976 and both were seized by local authorities

chinese international support in the height of the development of maoism internationally was not in fact concerned with supporting insurgent communist movements aligned with the maoist position (as such the critique of social-imperialism) but rather tended toward bourgeois-nationalist groupings as a pragmatic manoeuvre against similar efforts by the ussr

this should also serve as a rebuke to the understanding held by henrykrinkle of a necessary correlation between the social-imperialist thesis and the chinese line on foreign policy throughout the 70s. most international adherents of the social-imperialism thesis were instead advocates of the "left" cultural revolution phase of chinese foreign policy from the period of 1967-71 which at least vaguely directed rhetorical support toward people's war internationally

this is why i think this kind of crude analysis is unsustainable without a basic chauvinism toward the theorists in question. it's assuming that huge sectors of the revolutionary movements of the latter half of the last century, spanning across the globe, were simultaneously directing a substantial portion of their theoretical framework and material analysis to a single pragmatic political gesture that did not even indicate that it would result in material dividends

we don't even have to wait to see the erroneous conclusions this kind of crude determinism leads to. we can already see this with the huge inconsistency between glomper's assertions of the "incomprehensibility" and irrelevancy of such positions and their adoption by the leadership of huge swathes of mass revolutionary efforts internationally. to outright dismiss them as no longer comprehensible relics of a particular long irrelevant pragmatic political gesture is absurd

what better metric of "comprehensibility" could we possibly forward, that is superior to their adoption by genuine revolutionary mass movements internationally? this continued advocacy does not necessitate such a position being correct but at the very least it means they continue to be serious, relevant and comprehensible conclusions

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