• purpleworm [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
    23·
    17 days ago

    I think it’s ridiculous to put Davis as high as Hampton, and if Davis can be as high as A, Mao and those above him go in SSS. And then Ture and Parenti are in B?? Below Davis??? Parenti grievously erred in supporting Gorbachev, Davis grievously erred in supporting Kamala fucking Harris.

    Completely unrelated, it’s like a caricature of grade inflation that S is now just A, though I guess that’s been true for many years now. I think S should be reserved for cases that exceed the scale, which at best you could argue for the first three but really, from a Marxist perspective, should not apply to anyone because it suggests a fundamental inadequacy of the scale that a person could simply uniquely exceed your ability to measure people. A scale where almost 20% of the entries exceed the scale is probably a bad scale.

    • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      18·
      17 days ago

      Honestly, Davis didn’t do much relative to most people on this list. Pretty much all Black Radicals that people know like Malcolm X, or George Jackson or Mumia Abu-Jamal did more than her. Even going strictly by Marxism since not all Black Radicals were Marxist, she’s not a major political figure and she didn’t theoretically contribute anywhere close compared with someone like Gramsci. Meanwhile, Dr. Huey P. Newton was the cofounder of the BPP on top of adding his own theoretical contributions (the revolutionary potential of the lumpen-proletariat in settler/colonial contexts, intercommunalism).

    • TheBroodian [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
      17·
      17 days ago

      I think it’s ridiculous to put Davis as high as Hampton, and if Davis can be as high as A, Mao and those above him go in SSS. And then Ture and Parenti are in B?? Below Davis??? Parenti grievously erred in supporting Gorbachev, Davis grievously erred in supporting Kamala fucking Harris.

      Came here to post literally this, thanks for beating me to it.

  • bort [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
    21·
    16 days ago

    Wild to put the revolutionary father of a socialist nation of over a billion people on the same level as leaders of some minor American political party.

    No disrespect to Fred Hampton et al. but to place them equivalent to Mao or even Sankara just seems wildly American-centric.

    • purpleworm [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
      4·
      16 days ago

      I would definitely put the best of the BPP below Mao in part because that’s what they would say themselves – that the Chinese communists and Mao specifically were a model and an aspiration to them.

      I don’t think it makes that much sense to put them below Sankara though, because Sankara was the face of someone else’s military coup, tried to do socialism for 5 years, accomplishing some lasting reforms but evidently not really fixing the basic issue of the proletariat not controlling the state, and then was killed via military coup by the same guy who organized the first one and had his attempt at a socialist government washed away.

      It’s true that Fred Hampton, etc. failed to topple the US government, but they weren’t coming from positions of already having significant power in the government and military, and actually did grassroots organizing against the most powerful state in world history before its domestic intelligence agency, which itself described Hampton as “Messianic,” assassinated him.

      As a demonstration of what Marxists should do in a capitalist state, the better Panthers are a much stronger example, but Sankara gets points for enacting some good reforms during the brief period when the military allowed him to be the face of their power. Tier lists in this context are a crass joke, but I think if the scale is so broad that with 7 tiers Pol Pot is somehow even mentioned, putting Hampton and Sankara in the same tier seems fair to me.

    • Keld [he/him, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
      13·
      17 days ago

      Okay but Trotsky was also an innovative commander and he’s justifiably pretty far down. I don’t think this is just ranking military prowess. It’s a vibe off.

      • ComTur@lemmy.mlEnglish
        7·
        16 days ago

        Trotsky was also an innovative commander

        Could I have more information on this please? :)

        I have been listening to the Proles Pod on the Stalin eras recently. They mentioned how Trotsky’s indecision during the conference for the treaty of Brest-Litovsk (indecision they attributed to Trotsky’s firm belief in world revolution which made him refuse to initially engage with imperialist powers) cost the Soviet government additional parts of Ukraine, Finland and Poland.

        Because of that I was left with the impression that he was a bit ineffective lol but I actually don’t know that much about Trotsky’s military accomplishments truth be told

        • Keld [he/him, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
          11·
          16 days ago

          Honestly i dont want to over praise him. But he did oversee the reorganisation of the red army, turning it from a looser structure with elected officers into a professional force, reincorporated the tsarist elements and introduced the political officers to keep the former whites in the armed force under communist control. You basically can’t read anything about the red army or the Russian civil war without running into that part.

          • ComTur@lemmy.mlEnglish
            4·
            16 days ago

            Thank you for the concise answer!

            Without over praising him either, I can see how such organizational changes could prove very beneficial during the first period of the Soviet government when facing threats from multiple sides

        • purpleworm [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
          3·
          16 days ago

          The critical distinction here I think is that Trotsky did a very good job of organizing the army, but his ideas for things like diplomacy were always garbage.

  • bort [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
    14·
    16 days ago

    my list would be:

    S - Marx and Engels for being the OGs, Lenin for doing it first

    A - Mao, Stalin, Ho, Castro, etc. - they all actually did it

    B-E - Unsuccessful leaders and major players in successful movements, plus major theorists; people like Zhou and Guevara can go here, Xi and Kim-the-younger too, probably the Black Panther leaders at the lower end

    F - Weird losers, Pol Pot

    • purpleworm [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
      21·
      16 days ago

      Because he was installed by a military coup mainly organized by someone else, was in charge for 5 years, and then was killed by a second military coup organized by the same guy who organized the first one, dissolving the socialist government and replacing it with a capitalist one. If it was a ranking for speeches, Sankara gets top marks, but clearly there were some critical failures in his Marxism.