(Thread IKs:
dead gay comedy forums)
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woke operator posted:college boys with anti-intellectual affectations ftw. anyway all is forgiven welcome to the resistance If only I were that young again. But thank you, and again, I do apologize.
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Nov 29, 2023 17:39
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| # ? May 25, 2024 18:07 |
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I offer this as recompense. (I'm certain this has been posted before, but whatever: it's great) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acT_PSAZ7BQ
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Nov 29, 2023 17:50
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reading groups don't even have to be huge affairs. one time a blogger who was living in my city posted an open invite to come join a grundrisse reading group, and like six people showed, and then basically all of them ghosted after the first meeting. so for a year and a half said blogger and i would just meet weekly in cafes to discuss chapters of early marx, and even that was quite nice. if nothing else, it helps enforce the regularity of one's reading habits
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Nov 29, 2023 18:57
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Mushika posted:You haven't answered my questions. The problem if you're in the US is the lack of a socialist mass party. It sucks and you will definitely feel that void the more you get into Marxism/materialism etc. But it's also not a problem you will solve on your own (nothing is) so just compartmentalize, don't sweat it, and look into what does exist in your area, if anything. Marxist reading groups/orgs are available in lots of areas of the US (I would say probably most major cities?)
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Nov 29, 2023 19:22
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woke operator posted:i am telling you to read wage labor and capital and participate in a local marxist organization. i am now further telling you you're acting like an obnoxious prick and to shut the gently caress up. settle down
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Nov 29, 2023 21:45
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tristeham posted:settle down mind ur business tagalong bitch
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Nov 29, 2023 21:47
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tristeham posted:settle down Nah, it was warranted.
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Nov 29, 2023 23:09
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unhappily a lot of communists are also obnoxious arseholes, so insisting that someone dipping their toes seek them out immediately is perhaps not the best advice
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Nov 30, 2023 00:50
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any excuse to avoid going outside
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Nov 30, 2023 01:37
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Real commies organizing and building the party irl, not just selling newspapers while criticizing sex workers, are among the best people I've met. Young but ambitious and disciplined, educated, hard working and super empathetic. They give me so much hope and teach me so much, not just diamat and Marxism. Def reach out to some if they're in your area.
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Nov 30, 2023 02:02
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A lot of the reason it's hard to understand marxism as a political practice is that it's foundationally unlike the standard liberalism/anarchism/fascism range of political beliefs that are accepted in the US. Those are mostly based in white supremacist/US imperialist propaganda that they put on TV, whereas marxism comes from a scientific understanding of material conditions and human history. It's why everyone says to do the reading before you should expect to understand anything, marxism is completely separate from the standard arrangement of allowed political beliefs in the west and you have to understand a lot of the basics before you get anywhere with it. If you can find people in real life to read and learn with it's great and preferable but obviously that's not always a given, and sometimes you have to settle for weird nerds on an internet message board.
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Nov 30, 2023 02:25
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I still think Howard Zinn is a good place to start for someone trying to step outside of the discursive bound of dominant ideology. Theory makes more sense when you're not trying to fit it into narratives constructed by hegemonic liberalism. Maybe he's fallen out of fashion though.
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Nov 30, 2023 02:33
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I can't speak to the effectiveness of any particular western writing as an introduction because I was vaguely on board with marxism before I read any real theory, and I started with The State and Revolution by Lenin, which is an all-timer and probably the most accessible and useful introductory text for leninism. Nothing beats Capital Vol 1 as far as it's importance goes but it's a thousand pages long, of course.
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Nov 30, 2023 02:51
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In Training posted:The problem if you're in the US is the lack of a socialist mass party. It sucks and you will definitely feel that void the more you get into Marxism/materialism etc. it's been attempted and ANSWER coalition is probably the most organized successful one nowadays. but still not an actual mass party, there have been bigger ones but none since the 60s and 70s that'd qualify in a real sense
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Nov 30, 2023 03:22
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Nevil Maskelyne posted:If you can find people in real life to read and learn with it's great and preferable but obviously that's not always a given, and sometimes you have to settle for weird nerds on an internet message board. i gained a perfectly serviceable, principled and coherent understanding of theory purely through self-education and active interactions on facebook, but yeah practice is a whole other story. “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” Practice is more of the former. Theory promotes the latter.
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Nov 30, 2023 03:25
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Mechafunkzilla posted:I still think Howard Zinn is a good place to start for someone trying to step outside of the discursive bound of dominant ideology. Theory makes more sense when you're not trying to fit it into narratives constructed by hegemonic liberalism. Maybe he's fallen out of fashion though. I've only ever heard good things about a people's history of the united states.
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Nov 30, 2023 11:19
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RedSky posted:I've only ever heard good things about a people's history of the united states. I thoroughly enjoyed it, but it has been many years since I read it.
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Nov 30, 2023 16:37
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It gets an anti-imperialist message across while still being largely accessible.
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Nov 30, 2023 16:49
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richard wolff interviewed someone on his show this week who was complaining that capitalism hijacked the american empire to serve corporate interests rather than the interests of the american people 
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Nov 30, 2023 17:22
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fart simpson posted:richard wolff interviewed someone on his show this week who was complaining that capitalism hijacked the american empire to serve corporate interests rather than the interests of the american people That's a mighty big disconnect right there.
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Nov 30, 2023 17:31
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fart simpson posted:richard wolff interviewed someone on his show this week who was complaining that capitalism hijacked the american empire to serve corporate interests rather than the interests of the american people Strasserism is back, baby!
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Nov 30, 2023 17:33
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so I have a question for people: I had a friend reach out to me about their 15-year-old brother, who is interested in anti-capitalist and socialist reading material and doesn't really have any idea where to start. they reached out to me because I have been involved in various communist parties and organizations for a very long time, actually ran a brick-and-mortar Marxist bookstore for a time in my 20s, and am fairly well read on the subject. the problem with that is that, well, I have been doing this for a very long time. I have been actively involved in the movement for over half my life and am rapidly approaching middle age, and my brain is broken to the point that I'm not certain I trust myself to know what's accessible to a layman anymore, especially not a layman who is an actual child. I know what materials I would recommend to a complete beginner in a guided setting, as part of a reading group, but when asked what accessible material I'd give to a high school student to just read on their own, I am honestly not sure. I keep second-guessing my recommendations out of fear that they're too dense or too boring or that they're not going to want to sit down and read something written in the 19th century whose introduction and preface is longer than the actual text. Does anyone who isn't an out-of-touch old like myself have any recommendations? Normally I'd invite someone to a reading group of the Manifesto and Engels' Principles of Communism (we have always done them together as a set) and answer any questions they have and go from there, but, like, I know I sure as poo poo wouldn't have sat through that when I was 15, so it's probably not the best option here. So far the only thing that's come to mind is Zinn's A People's History of the United States, because it was the first lefty text I read in high school, but there's got to be something better out there.
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Dec 2, 2023 02:41
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I feel like the manifesto makes sense. It's like 12 pages and a litmus test if they're down to read anything at all, yeah? Idk I've never tried to give literature to a zoomer teen either.
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Dec 2, 2023 02:53
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capital
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Dec 2, 2023 02:56
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This final section of Vol. III on the wage-profit-rent Trinity is pretty interesting. Wildly incomplete but Marx trying to tie everything together is commendable albeit lacking. Or maybe my eyes are just glazing over from the density of what he's attempting to review in like 10 pages..
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Dec 2, 2023 02:58
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Is the kid one of those kids who can read and think and is probably going to grow up to be an academic or are they like a normal person I have no idea how to get a normal person to learn about history and scientific materialist thinking at age 15
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Dec 2, 2023 02:59
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mila kunis posted:I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Marxism, is in fact, Engelsism/Marxism, or as I've recently taken to calling it, Engelsism plus Marxism. Marxism is not a framework of political economy unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning Engelsism system made useful by the Engels translations, correspondences and vital system components comprising a full framework of political economy as defined by Ricardo.
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Dec 2, 2023 03:00
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Nevil Maskelyne posted:Is the kid one of those kids who can read and think and is probably going to grow up to be an academic or are they like a normal person it's a kid who is specifically asking for socialist literature so probably not a normal person lol
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Dec 2, 2023 03:02
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Mister Bates posted:it's a kid who is specifically asking for socialist literature so probably not a normal person lol imo if you can find out what he is interested in maybe you can use that as a starting point? i think the communist manifesto would be good starting point too, it's fairly straight forward
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Dec 2, 2023 03:08
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Mister Bates posted:so I have a question for people: I sorta agree with the history book approach. If I was starting from dumbass, I'd read history books that are sorta well written instead of dry bullshit. You could just make it a throughline going backward of poo poo that is actually readable. i.e. The New Jim Crow, Black Against Empire, Wars of Reconstruction, Slavery by Another Name, etc.
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Dec 2, 2023 03:11
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Nevil Maskelyne posted:I have no idea how to get a normal person to learn about history and scientific materialist thinking at age 15 the book has to actually have a narrative and be well written, horror of horrors...
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Dec 2, 2023 03:13
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people’s history is probably the best entry place that’s not entirely theory based. maybe killing hope afterwards as a one-two punch or do what I did as a high schooler and read LF. link them to the debeers is the worst company on earth thread
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Dec 2, 2023 03:15
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Mister Bates posted:it's a kid who is specifically asking for socialist literature so probably not a normal person lol as western society continues to crumble, it will become more and more normal
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Dec 2, 2023 03:32
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History is definitely the best place to start. Find out what they are interested in.
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Dec 2, 2023 04:20
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i got into marxism via the norwegian social-democratic movement and military history back in the day, though notably a lot of adults in my environment growing up were radical lefties the yugoslav wars and then afghanistan and then iraq were the first political issues i remember thinking of as political issues, and when you start from there it becomes common sense to be preoccupied with imperialism and then the world-capitalist system. if you're an american these days i think that healthcare and the extreme visible poverty of important parts of the country are good ways in. possibly one could go for some of the classical american leftie novels, e.g. steinbeck or hemingway or someone if the kid in question is open to novels
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Dec 2, 2023 12:17
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In Training posted:I feel like the manifesto makes sense. It's like 12 pages and a litmus test if they're down to read anything at all, yeah? Idk I've never tried to give literature to a zoomer teen either. i read it at roughly that age and caught nothing, and i think it's because i hadn't been working to not die. depends on if said teen is working for honda or something
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Dec 2, 2023 15:42
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Brain Candy posted:i read it at roughly that age and caught nothing, and i think it's because i hadn't been working to not die. depends on if said teen is working for honda or something yeah same, i read the manifesto at that age but didn’t “get” any of it until i had been working for a few years
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Dec 2, 2023 16:05
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V. Illych L. posted:i got into marxism via the norwegian social-democratic movement and military history back in the day, though notably a lot of adults in my environment growing up were radical lefties I like the world to make sense (in an "able to explain why things happen" kinda way), Marxism is the only theory I've come across that is able to explain certain phenomena in a way that seems logical and that makes sense to me.
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Dec 2, 2023 17:15
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Mr Shiny Pants posted:I like the world to make sense (in an "able to explain why things happen" kinda way), Marxism is the only theory I've come across that is able to explain certain phenomena in a way that seems logical and that makes sense to me. I was discussing this the other day with friends Marxism works in that sense to people because of dialectics. Dialectical thinking doesn't need to be formally trained, inducted, whatever - but I find that it needs a certain knack to flourish, so to speak. A thing that makes the person able to look around themselves and go "this poo poo isn't happening because it simply does". Nobody needs Capital to realize that they are oppressed as workers. What Marxism is does is to give intellectual tools to look around the world and notice the tapestry of interweaving historical threads of cause and being, which helps to understand our place and time much better than a simple march of names and ideas. Dialectical thinking is powerful because it runs a bulldozer through Cartesian (or crude Aristotelian) thought, which is to stop making things in reality linear, sequential, discriminate and consistent; things happen in simultaneous and contradictory form, all-at-once. That provides us with better means to talk about and elaborate on complex poo poo that is far more approximate to reality.
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Dec 2, 2023 18:08
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| # ? May 25, 2024 18:07 |
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Marxism's use as a framework for understanding reality and relations stands in sharp contrast to every other political thought I've ever read, reactionary thought, liberal thought, none of them offer anything remotely like the usefulness as an analytical tool that Marxism does. It's really apparent when you read some of what passes for intellectual thought on the right, it's all so barren of...anything, really.
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Dec 2, 2023 18:19
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