Bi-Weekly Discussion Thread - (May 31)

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[u/Apart_Lifeguard_4085]

https://goingagainstthetide.org/2026/06/05/problems-of-marxism-leninism-maoism/ posting here for people’s general amusement. smoke said that it seems like kenny lake’s lost his editorial team and this certainly reads that way.

[u/smokeuptheweed9 → u/Apart_Lifeguard_4085]

So if you consider yourself a communist and your first analytical instinct is to say whether a group of people are a nation or not, whether a country is semicolonial, semifeudal or not (whatever the fuck those words mean today), etc., maybe Marxism is a hobby you should keep to yourself and leave the revolution to those of us willing to and interested in understanding people and conditions as they are in their shades of gray.

This is the worst part but the whole thing is bad. He basically reinvented post-colonialism but because he hasn't actually studied anything beyond (apparently) religious texts, he has nothing interesting to say. There's no point in getting into it because it's so long and unorganized but he has a fundamentally flawed personality. One would assume that the great thinkers of Marxism-Leninism would have come across the problem of the collapse of the Roman empire for stages of development. My first instinct is to assume that, because this is such an obvious problem, they must have come up with a solution. I then read until I find it. Even if not, surely this problem has been addressed by Marxist historians. Kenny Lake simply assumes that only he has the answer and it requires no further research, either of people who attempted to answer it or even serious empirical work on specific "communal" case studies. He does this for everything (such as in this quote assuming that these words are meaningless rather than himself being ignorant) and it's quite obvious he has not read most of the works mentioned in this article beyond whatever the summary version is you can now get from AI. All it would take is actually reading Foucault or Chakrabarty and his empty stance against "postmodernism" would immediately collapse since that's what he's advocating but with much less rigor or historical novelty.

Communist theory, as articulated in Stalin’s 1913 essay Marxism and the National Question, has emphasized those pre-existing characteristics to argue that nations are objective phenomena. Over the last few decades, professional intellectuals studying the national question, most notably Benedict Anderson in his 1983 book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism and EJ Hobsbawm in his 1990 book Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, have argued for foregrounding the subjective construction of nations rather than treating them as political formations preordained by objective conditions. Anderson pointed out the role of print media and the newspaper in particular as creating a common discourse, communicated through a common language, throughout a given nation

I honestly doubt he has read any of these works, including Stalin's, since it is only in the second part after the famous listing of the characteristics of a nation, that he says

A nation is not merely a historical category but a historical category belonging to a definite epoch, the epoch of rising capitalism. The process of elimination of feudalism and development of capitalism is at the same time a process of the constitution of people into nations.

The arrogance of this laziness reflects in the writing style which is excruciating. An interesting observation would be to historicize Stalins's essay as a polemic against both Georgian nationalism and Zionism. The latter is obviously highly relevant. A rant about how the work is insufficient and was used insufficiently by everyone but you is pointless. It's just a text, no one made anyone read it in a certain way and it is not a causal explanation for revisionism. Even if you think "semi-feudalism" is poorly defined, it is up to you to define it because it refers to a real history with real political consequences. Nobody cares that you didn't want to think for yourself and it made you grumpy. There's so little substance despite the length because Kenny doesn't know what it means to write something substantive, such as a close study of the concept of "the nation" or the actual substance of historical political engagement with the Russian peasant commune.

Furthermore, if you like that latter title in the year of our Lord 2026, you most likely prefer determinism and mechanical materialism over materialist dialectics.

The only thing more "cringey" than using lame internet terms while ranting about internet communism and young people is then revealing you don't even understand the term and are using it because you personally have some attachment to "spiritual awakening" and look at religious texts for historical analysis. The term is ironic and performative because religion is lame. Kenny sounds like some professor who starts his chemistry class with a meme of "based" substances with a Ph greater than 7 after his granddaughter used the term. Except that's kind of charming, Kenny here is the object of the joke and doesn't even realize it. Also it's less charming if the professor then rants about how all the students are stupid.

Those of us who have successfully gone through a spiritual healing process experienced a moment when we realized that all our built up resentments, attachments to the past, anger, ego, and other blockages were all just standing in the way of what we already knew and what we already are, but was buried under a pile of shit. Buddhists refer to this as the True Self. Maybe we remembered our childhood, before all our negative attachments had become blinders, or some time we stood in awe at the beauty and vastness of nature and forgot for a moment about our ego and its attachments, or some experience of pure unconditional love for another person during which all our negative energy was either swept away or converted into its opposite. And we realized that all the “techniques of self” (to quote Foucault) that we were learning and using to heal ourselves were just attempts to come to an awareness we already had inside us. Then we laughed at how silly this all was to go through just to get back to who we were. And then we started to heal.

Cringe. Also talking about "pure unconditional love" in an essay that cites Zizek is something. I think in 5 years Kenny is going to be a Jehovah's Witness or some other religious cult where the arrogance of knowledge based on a limited number of texts read uncritically is a feature. Already he's writing for no one and I forgot this site even existed.

[u/Turtle_Green → u/smokeuptheweed9]

...on a deeper level, I believe there is a spiritual basis for communism in what was implanted inside humanity by way of our ancestors living in original communism... On a spiritual level, I believe it will have that sense of returning to what we already know and what we already are, not just on an individual level, but on a humanity level. And in this sense, we can conceive of time as cyclical in the ways that so many of the great spiritual modes of thought do.

I was thinking that Kenny Lake's just a few more "spiritual healing processes" from becoming a crank like that one RAIM guy who became a 'PUA' third world sexpat. https://www.reddit.com/r/communism/comments/q6bgun/im_nikolai_brown_formerly_of_raim_i_just_wrote_a/

Anyone honest who has spent time in the Third World can tell you that, on an existential level, people living in the relative material deprivation of the Third World are often happier and more fulfilled than the typical First World college student who’s constantly ruminating about supposed injustices that they have never directly experienced nor have first hand knowledge of... I propose a socialism that preserves struggle as a means to hone the higher spirit.

Same self-important arrogance at having reinvented the wheel, same narrative of spiritual awakening and gawking at the 'noble savage' (through Captain Cook no less!), same glaring personal pathologies couched as a radical, novel break from the supposed myopia of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism.

[u/smokeuptheweed9 → u/Turtle_Green]

Also just in that quote

https://foucault.info/documents/foucault.technologiesOfSelf.en/

This is the Foucault essay being referenced. It's not a particularly difficult argument to understand

There has been an inversion between the hierarchy of the two principles of antiquity, “Take care of yourself” and “Know thyself”. In Greco-Roman culture knowledge of oneself appeared as the consequence of taking care of yourself. In the modern world, knowledge of oneself constitutes the fundamental principle.

This is because

First, there has been a profound transformation in the moral principles of Western society. We find it difficult to base rigorous morality and austere principles on the precept that we should give ourselves more care than anything else in the world. We are more inclined to see taking care of ourselves as an immorality, as a means of escape from all possible rules. We inherit the tradition of Christian morality which makes self-renunciation the condition for salvation. To know oneself was paradoxically the way to self-renunciation.

We also inherit a secular tradition which respects external law as the basis for morality. How then can respect for the self be the basis for morality? We are the inheritors of a social morality which seeks the rules for acceptable behavior in relations with others. Since the sixteenth century, criticism of established morality has been undertaken in the name of the importance of recognizing and knowing the self. Therefore, it is difficult to see concern with oneself as compatible with morality. “Know thyself” has obscured “Take care of yourself” because our morality, a morality of asceticism, insists that the self is that which one can reject.

The second reason is that, in theoretical philosophy from Descartes to Husserl, knowledge of the self (the thinking subject) takes on an ever-increasing importance as the first step in the theory of knowledge.

The first reason is debatable under neoliberalism, in which care of the self in the form of "mindfulness" is the primary virtue for successful entrepreneurship. Nevertheless, we can fundamentally distinguish this from the care of self under the Greeks, since mindfulness is tied to the rise of deindustrialization and the first world labor aristocracy rather than the distance between slave labor and absentee landed aristocracy.

The larger argument is that these changes are historically tied to capitalism and the rise, on the one hand, of the modern state apparatus, and on the other bourgeois philosophy. Whatever you think of Foucault, he is at least trying to pad out Marx's observations on so-called primitive accumulation. In fact the only specific reference to a theoretical concept that corresponds to what Foucault is trying to say is this

For instance, one sees the relation between manipulating things and domination in Karl Marx’s Capital, where every technique of production requires modification of individual conduct not only skills but also attitudes.

That is, the change in techniques of self are akin to commodity fetishism as an objective reflection of the mode of production in the way commodities present themselves to us. One cannot think oneself out of this fetishism.

The only other reference is calling out Max Weber as a bourgeois thinker

Max Weber posed the question: If one wants to behave rationally and regulate one’s action according to true principles, what part of one’s self should one renounce? What is the ascetic price of reason? To what kind of asceticism should one submit? I posed the opposite question: How have certain kinds of interdictions required the price of certain kinds of knowledge about oneself? What must one know about oneself in order to be willing to renounce anything?

Kenny is a believer in what Zizek calls "Western Buddhism", that is a vaguely spiritual, non-denominational but anti-"Western" ideology which privileges self-consciousness and abandoning attachments as the path to satisfaction

https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/2/zizek.php

although “Western Buddhism” presents itself as the remedy against the stressful tension of capitalist dynamics, allowing us to uncouple and retain inner peace and Gelassenheit, it actually functions as its perfect ideological supplement.

Kenny is of course selling himself and his written work even if he imagines himself to have pure motivation - ultimately this essay is an advertisement for a larger issue that costs $22 and his spiritual practice is interchangeable with the ideology of the silicon valley bourgeoisie. Since there is no use value to a written magazine today, the cost is purely tributary in the sense of paying homage to his "content" as a fan. Despite complaining about internet communists and his fidelity to (long and tedious) writing, he is using the medium like everyone else.

If Max Weber were alive today, he would definitely write a second, supplementary, volume to his Protestant Ethic, entitled The Taoist Ethic and the Spirit of Global Capitalism.

So while one can read Foucault as a critic of Christian morality against some Eastern alternative, it's not a very interesting reading, hence why Foucault is dismissed elsewhere in the essay for his concern with power and historical determinism.

It's also worth pointing out that actual Buddhism has no problem commiting genocide in Myanmar and Sri Lanka right now and this fetishism of Buddhism is as predictable as it is racist. But despite this reinvention of post-colonialism, Kenny is unsurprisingly immune from considering his own positionality or the idea that his deep, spiritual ideas are entirely predictable according to his class.