As much as I want to hate the guy, I reserve most of my loathing for Yeltsin. Gorbachev was just a fucking moron who wanted to have it both ways.

Despite being dead

I’ve got some bad news regarding Gorbachev

Maoism is generally considered to be the newer, and more effective form of modern Marxism, precisely because it takes into account that the lumpen are nonetheless a huge force, bigger than that of the working proletariat, and therefore can and should be harnessed for its revolutionary potential. The difficulty is, of course, educating the lumpen in the first place. How many extremely poor right-wing chuds do we know who enthusiastically vote and campaign against their very own class and economic interests to “own the libs”, or to stop whatever imagined group of people or movements that threaten their perceived way of life.

Mao loved the lumpen because to him they were an ideological clean slate. The modern lumpen, particularly in the imperial core, has already been ideologically indoctrinated by reactionaries as they already hold the cultural and media hegemony. Thus, they can no longer be considered the clean slate, but one must deprogram that indoctrination. We all know how absurd it is to unlearn the cultism that pervades the modern far right, from Trumpism to QAnon, to worship of authority, hierarchy, evangelicalism, and capitalism.

No revolutionary has succeeded in such a scale of mass deprogramming in an era of mass media before. It seems such an unsurmountable hill.