Member of the rat pack. The poster is almost ninety years old and does evoke a Trotsky as a sort of hipster of the digital age; rappy, street savvy, beat box man who bears a smattering of resemblance to Sammy Davis Jr. Maybe add some graffiti and a few Shepard Fairey posters, “obey” and we have a man in contact with the action; hardly what pundit Paul Fussell called the “out of sight” gang, the super rich ivory tower revolutionary. No, Trotsky’s appeal as brand icon would be to the ethnically complicated and emotionally fragmented, and OWS leader and “shock doctrine” pop culture figure.
Source:Wiki. ---: White Army propaganda poster from the Russian Civil War era (1919), depicting a caricature Leon Trotsky (as a large demon like figure with bright red skin.) and Chinese soldiers (below, wearing braids and blue and gold uniforms). There was a notable number of them in the Red Army. They are depicted executing a prisoner and shoveling bones. Texts are in pre-reform Russian orthography.---
…an individual in touch with a populace without financial security, anxious about technological unemployment, and without the assurance of some genuine prospects for the future. Trotsky’s army and twitter kingdom for a loud hailer, that would allow Trotsky to engage in his ability to burnish street credibility and social capital by rubbing shoulders with surrealists like Andre Breton and radical artists like Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo.
Trotsky incarnates a sort of pop culture messianism, the next big thing. A messianic impulse that can be very dangerous,messianic violence, but it can also be very positive, to help keep our optimism and idealism intact and to work towards improving the world; even if Trotsky’s messianism was almost Dada, nihilistic in nature, a break from tradition, the “new man” that the Zionists would run with that would cheat perfection out of its flaws.
Here is how Trotsky formulated this approach in a personal letter to James P. Cannon: We work with the most correct and powerful ideas in the world, with inadequate numerical forces and material means. But correct ideas, in the long run, always conquer and make available for themselves the necessary material means and forces. Trotsky’s ideas derive their power from the same source as Lenin’s: both are the correct expression of the struggle of living forces, first and foremost of the liberationist struggle of the proletariat. They represent not only the product of profound theoretical analysis (without which it is impossible to understand reality) but also the unassailable deductions from the march of history for the last hundred years (that is to say, from 1848 when Marx and Engels first expounded the laws governing the movement of capitalist society). There are ideas and ideas. As against the correct ideas of Marxism, there is also the power of the false ideas. The former serve the interests of progress, of the world working class; the latter only play into the hands of reaction and deal untold injury to workers all the oppressed and to society as a whole. False ideas, like correct ones, do not fall from the sky. They, too, express one of the living forces engaged in struggle, namely: the camp of the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie.---Read More:http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2010/04/04/history-of-the-marxist-internationals-part-5-trotskyist-origins/ image:http://www.american-buddha.com/diego.photo5.htm
ADDENDUM:
Leon Trotsky: “In not more than a month’s time terror will assume very violent forms, after the example of the great French Revolution; the guillotine… will be ready for our enemies… that remarkable invention of the French Revolution which makes man shorter by a head.” …”Root out the counterrevolutionaries without mercy, lock up suspicious characters in concentration camps… Shirkers will be shot, regardless of past service…”
…”We have to run a hot iron down the spine of the Ukrainian kulaks – that will create a good working environment.”
…”As for us, we were never concerned with the Kantian-priestly and vegetarian-Quaker prattle about the ‘sacredness of human life.’”… “The Red Terror is a weapon utilized against a class, doomed to destruction, which does not wish to perish… the Red Terror hastens the destruction of the bourgeoisie.”
“… the road to socialism lies through a period of the highest possible intensification of the principle of the state… Just as a lamp, before going out, shoots up in a brilliant flame, so the state, before disappearing, assumes the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., the most ruthless form of state, which embraces the life of the citizens authoritatively in every direction…”
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