I had a "leftist" lib recently who tried to argue that Lenin would have said to vote blue no matter who on the basis that he argued for participating in bourgeois democracy, after I linked him to theory he wrote about it. When I pointed out that Lenin called for such participation in a revolutionary communist party, he responded that the people weren't ready to support that yet. When I pointed out that Lenin's whole argument was based on the premise that the masses were not ready to support the communists and the point of participating was to promote the message, he accused me of, "Blindly following Lenin, regardless of material conditions."
Moralists don't have beliefs. They'll happily call themselves leftists and adopt whatever stance, say whatever sequence of words they think will ingratiate themselves to you and convince you to vote blue. I think it could be an fun bit to intentionally bait them into adopting bizarre stances just to see what the limits are. Like, what if I just started pretending to be super into Kantian ethics so they can all pretend to be Kantians and argue about how Kant would tell you to vote democrat?
that Marx isn't doing some kind of esoteric theological analysis. Don't mystify it! He's logically looking at the dominant mode of production, identifying the internal contradictions, and critiquing it.
