There are other decent figures who are younger. Vijay Prishad is only 55. We’ve got everyone in the revleft podcast family. In addition, more zoomer centered figures like the deprogram people and hasan.

Lemmygradians

Two people in this thread say that with the internet, we can move away from "big public figures"/"big thinkers". While I appreciate this optimism, it just sounds very anti-authoritarian, and I quote from Engels On Authority:

Why do the anti-authoritarians not confine themselves to crying out against political authority, the state? All Socialists are agreed that the political state, and with it political authority, will disappear as a result of the coming social revolution, that is, that public functions will lose their political character and will be transformed into the simple administrative functions of watching over the true interests of society. But the anti-authoritarians demand that the political state be abolished at one stroke, even before the social conditions that gave birth to it have been destroyed. They demand that the first act of the social revolution shall be the abolition of authority.

There are anti-government and anti-"big corp/business" tendencies in the US/West, which I will call "anti-authority" for now. The essense of "anti-authority" in capitalist countries is anti-capitalism, or anti-"dictatorship of the bourgeoisie", but there is a gap in this logic that stops people from turning into marxists right away, as they might instead become anarchists. This gap in logic will not be closed just by having everyone have access to free information through the internet, as there is too much information to digest, and imperialists will also interfere with the propagation of marxist ideology.

"Anti-authoritarian" sentiments do have positive outcomes, like decentralized technologies (think internet, bittorrent, p2p, fediverse etc.), the open source software movement, but these only serve as tools, they are the means and not the end.

These are big shoes to fill and they will of course be filled by Bad Empanada and Vaush.

Zizek! I'm kidding, but maybe the answer is not in the West, but elsewhere, and maybe the media just doesn't pay attention to them because it is in their best interest.

No one mentioned our second habibi, HasanAbi🤤. What Iam seeing is more like stochastic forms of learning among people which lackes centre public figures. I do not think this is bad but moving forward figures who can put theory in to practice should emerge and it will.

Who comes next? You do, comrade :)

I actually think that with the internet and everything, we will gradually move away from "big thinkers". Sure, there will still be people producing decent theory, but i just can't see in the current world a russian revolution like scenario when whole shifts at factories would meet up to read Marx.

I believe we will move towards a sort of "crowdsourced" theory where the main theoretical line is born organically out of continuos communication and discussion until we eventually get to a point where most contradictions and disagreements are solved. At that point the "big thinker" and his work will be one of many inputs, and not some sort of ideological hegemon.

Sort of like it is happening on here. We didn't read the same stuff, but with time the community shaped itself to a point where we substantially agree with each other on pretty much everything.