ZahnZee

"The epistemic problem with Lenin's Vanguard is simple: once a party claims it knows the working class’s “real” interests better than workers themselves do, it has a ready-made excuse to overrule, discipline, and silence workers in the name of their own emancipation." - excerpt from my upcoming essay; Lenin's Vanguard: A Marxist critique.

6 days ago (edited) | [YT] | 14

ZahnZee

"Lenin’s vanguard did not, in the end, organise the working class as a ruling subject. It organised the labour of the working class. It took the real pressures of war, collapse, and counter-revolution and answered them with a party that claimed a special right to know the class’s interests “from without” (Lenin, 1902). Once that claim is fused to state power, “soviet power” stops meaning the self-government of workers and starts meaning the administration of workers through production targets, labour discipline, emergency decrees, and the policing of dissent in the name of the class (Lenin, 1921; Goldman, 1923). What follows is not the withering of the state into popular control, but the hardening of a party-state that directs accumulation on behalf of the workers from above (Lenin, 1917a; Luxemburg, 1918). That is why the vanguard can seize the state and reorganise production, but cannot abolish itself: it becomes the self-sustaining manager of the productive forces and real working power threatens that organisational structure (Marx, 1875; Trotsky, 1930). This was a reprieve from private capital, and did not represent a break from the social relation of capital because the working class remained an object abstracted from their own labour." - excerpt from my upcoming essay; Lenin's Vanguard: A Marxist critique

1 week ago (edited) | [YT] | 12

ZahnZee

Was just told I was being made redundant from my job at the end of the year. Loosing your income just before Christmas always sucks, but with my wife expecting our first child in early March, I've a stressful scramble to try find a new Job since it's not just my head I've to keep a roof over now.

I at least have 2 weeks to try push through and try land something but it'll be tight. I'm lucky since most get no notice, and are out on their asses immediately so having a full pay check for December is massive: I'm still one of the lucky few.

if you've ever enjoyed what I do, or at some time appreciated an essay, podcast, speedrun ect. Now more than ever, I'd appreciate your support. www.patreon.com/ZahnZee/membership

1 week ago | [YT] | 17

ZahnZee

The closing section from the script of Episode 1 of my "Lenin's Vanguard - A Marxist Critique" (that whoops, turned into a series)

"...The rest of this essay follows a fairly simple arc. First, I track how the Leninist vanguard emerges as a plausible answer to a specific historical problem. Then I follow what that form actually does once it has a state in its hands. Finally, I ask what is left of Marx’s demand that the working class emancipate itself, and what kind of organisation could honour that demand today (Marx 1871; Marx 1875).

Episodes 2 looks at the conditions under which Lenin is thinking: Tsarist autocracy, uneven industrialisation, and the strange mix of underground circles and sudden mass uprisings that defined Russian politics. It also takes seriously the trauma of the First World War, when the great socialist parties of Western Europe voted for war credits and lined up behind their own ruling classes. For Lenin, that betrayal proves that “spontaneous” working-class politics and the mass parties of the Second International can slide very quickly into nationalism (Lenin 1914; Lenin 1916). Episode 3 then stages the theoretical confrontation: Marx’s insistence that the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself, grounded in the experience of the Paris Commune (Marx 1871; Marx 1875), against Lenin’s “party of a new type” in What Is To Be Done? and the vision of soviet power in State and Revolution (Lenin 1902; Lenin 1917a). This is also where I bring in early Marxist critics like Luxemburg and Kautsky, and council-communist arguments for workers’ councils as the true subject of emancipation (Luxemburg 1904; Kautsky 1918). By the end of Episode 3, the key question is clear: Is the subject of emancipation in Lenninism still the class, or has it become the party?

Episode 4 traces the sequence from the creation of the soviets in 1917, through the October insurrection, to civil war, War Communism, and the decisive moments of the Workers’ Opposition and the Kronstadt rebellion (Kollontai 1921; Avrich 1970). Here the abstract problem of “who acts?” becomes very concrete: factory committees and trade unions demand real control over production; sailors at Kronstadt call for free soviet elections and an end to party monopoly; the party leadership answers with bans on factions, and with artillery. Episode 5 follows the same form into the 1920s and 1930s: the New Economic Policy, the growth of a party bureaucracy, the codification of “Leninism” and “socialism in one country,” forced collectivisation, crash industrialisation, and the rise of a managerial layer that directs labour and accumulation from above (Stalin 1924; Cliff 1964). It also looks at the international side: the role of the Communist International, the response to Fascism and Nazism, and the way national and colonial revolutions are organised under party and state leadership (Trotsky 1938; Lenin 1917b). In these Episodes, the vanguard is no longer a small conspiratorial group under Tsarism. It is a social stratum fused with the state and acting, in many respects, like a collective capitalist class.

Episode 6 asks, quite bluntly, what actually withered in the Soviet experience: the state or the capacity of workers and peasants to act as subjects in their own name. It sets State and Revolution, and Marx’s writings on the Commune against the reality of a hypertrophied security apparatus, a permanent bureaucracy, and a one-party system, and it uses both sympathetic and hostile witnesses to name what the vanguard became (Luxemburg 1918; Trotsky 1937; Goldman 1923; Cliff 1964). It also looks at how that apparatus decomposed into the post-Soviet Russian Federation, with party and state officials turning political power into private ownership. Episode 6 then turns outward and forward. It tracks how the logic of substitution survives in new forms: in a left geopolitics that treat rival capitalist states as “our” camp; in discourses that write off workers in the core as hopelessly bribed or backward; and in digital platforms, NGOs, and professionalised campaigns that coordinate people’s lives and politics from above. Finally, it sketches the outlines of non-substitutionist organisation under fire: councils, unions and movements that hold on to revocability, rotation, transparency, and internationalism from below, even in crisis.

The point of this roadmap is simple. I do not wish to produce a moral fable about good or bad leaders. I am trying to follow a form of organisation; from its birth in Tsarist underground politics and the disaster of 1914, through revolution and civil war, into bureaucratic state power and eventual collapse, and to ask whether that form can really be reconciled with Marx’s demand for self-emancipation. The rest of the essay is the long version of that question."

2 weeks ago (edited) | [YT] | 24

ZahnZee

"The vanguard can seize the state and reorganise accumulation, but it cannot abolish itself so long as the working class relates to that state as an object rather than as the expression of its own class power. In its current form, the vanguard is a theory of socialist statecraft. To be truly revolutionary, the vanguard would have to build into itself a mechanism to wither and be reabsorbed into the working class; something all theories of statecraft resist by necessity."

An excerpt from my essay "Lenin's Vanguard - A Marxist Critique"

3 weeks ago (edited) | [YT] | 15

ZahnZee

I'm in development hell. I've started the following projects, all in varies states of completion. My plan was to get "Irish Governments Housing Plan 2025" out this weekend but then I started working on a few others. Pray for me!

Essays in the Pipeline:
1. Lenin's Vanguard - A Marxist Critique
2. Ireland, NATO and Neutrality
3. Irish Government's Housing Plan 2025
4. Final Fantasy X - Necropolitics
5. Final Fantasy VII - Empire
6. The Libidinal Economy of Barret Wallace
7. The(Hegelian) Lighthouse - Robert Eggers

3 weeks ago (edited) | [YT] | 9

ZahnZee

AI Is creating billions in revenue*

*by saving on wages previously allocated to salary. Workers are being robbed!

1 month ago | [YT] | 11

ZahnZee

Took a break from "IRELAND, NATO & NEUTRALITY" since the Irish Government released their new National Housing Plan "Delivering Homes, Building Communities 2025–2030" and, well.... I had thoughts. I'm 12,000 words into a draft and just need to refine it down. Hoping to have that recorded and uploaded this week then back to fleshing out "IRELAND, NATO & NEUTRALITY"

1 month ago | [YT] | 9

ZahnZee

"IRELAND’S NEUTRALITY & NATO"
First Draft currently sitting around 7000 words

1 month ago | [YT] | 5

ZahnZee

Can a national liberation struggle build a workers’ republic, or does it just repaint the fence around capital? This video walks through James Connolly’s test for a “socialist republic,” reads the 1916 Proclamation alongside the Irish Citizen Army constitution and the First Dáil’s Democratic Programme, and sets the Irish debate against Luxemburg, Lenin, Kautsky, and Bukharin. The claim is simple: nationalism only carries socialist content when property, power, and administration are remade in the hands of producers.

1 month ago | [YT] | 2