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Marxism is when people study why workers let their bosses take so much of the money they make even though the bosses don't do any real work.
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Jan 31, 2024 18:29
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| # ¿ May 12, 2024 10:28 |
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If you're trying to organize something in the west for some reason and the people involved are stupid enough to buy into anti-china garbage then the core of your vanguard revolutionary party is being run by people who are not capable of thinking correctly about material reality. The entire movement doesn't have to be well educated on the entirety of human history but if the intellectual core of it are worthless imperialist dogs then you're doomed from the get-go.
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Feb 3, 2024 18:15
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Mr. Lobe posted:You're a bad marxist if you want to extract value from the labor of others, everything else is on the spectrum of lifestylism that just makes you a bad communist/person, marxism as an intellectual practice is a very powerful explanatory and predictory force and you can definitely use it for evil. you better believe that the robber barons of the late19th/early 20th century were all familiar with marx Flournival Dixon has issued a correction as of 01:14 on Feb 11, 2024 |
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Feb 11, 2024 01:02
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yeah i gotta say if you expect the entirely of your movement to be made up of disciplined marxist thinkers who know what commodity fetishism is then you're probably not going to be seeing much success the vanguard party and core thinkers must be disciplined and educated but the movement as a whole just needs to be fighting for the working class
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Feb 11, 2024 01:11
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did you know that you could read 50 pages a day of capital vol 1 and imperialism the highest stage of capitalism and be done in less than a month, and end up with a better understand of the world around you and the workings of capitalism than 99% of english speaking people on the planet both faster and easier than struggling through a million small questions with frustrated posters on the internet just a thought
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Feb 15, 2024 04:31
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if you take adhd meds you can read 50 pages a day pretty easy, or you can take ephedrine+caffiene if you cant afford to go to the doctor and get a prescription
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Feb 15, 2024 04:32
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Frosted Flake posted:Also a great way to get shredded. ECA stack + Capital + Hobsbawm + Boff and you’re all set. you can listen to socialist theory at the gym too, most of it works just fine on audiobook except for kapital vol 1 because of all the math equations
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Feb 15, 2024 05:58
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if i was the kind of person whos brain was attached to his body and not floating around between lagrange points 1 and 4 at any given time i wouldnt need ephedrine to pay attention to things in the first place
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Feb 15, 2024 06:16
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reading capital isn't easy but it's easily the most important book for understanding a materialist view on economics and like the basic material reality of the world i dont remember which sections are which aside from chapter 10, which is always a good starting point if you find yourself unable to easily make it through the starting stuff. make sure to go back and reread commodity fetishism as well. when you're finished with it, if you feel like you've got a good understanding of dialectical materialism then you can look at some lenin stuff, or if you feel you need more instruction on the base philosophy of marxism and materialism i'm sure people here could recommend which of engels or marx's other stuff is most useful Flournival Dixon has issued a correction as of 20:29 on Feb 23, 2024 |
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Feb 23, 2024 20:20
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bills for gods sake read capital, if you want to learn about marxism read capital people will stop being mean to you if you read the loving book and come back with actual questions or comments about the thing itself
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Feb 23, 2024 20:42
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It's hard to overstate the impact that learning dialectical materialism can have on a person's view on the world, especially considering how in the West we are all born into insane ideological liberalism and are implicitly forbidden from thinking materially. I don't know about David Harvey specifically but most Western academics will have some kind of quibble with some aspect of Marxism in it's foundations for reasons that, to me, often seem less scientific and maybe a bit more focused on the specifics of their own historical moment. To me it often feels like people trying to think their way around the overwhelming violence of the capitalist state, and desperately trying to ignore leninism in favor of Marxism alone. What I'm saying is never trust white people I guess.
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Feb 24, 2024 03:13
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I mean it comes down to the specifics of your historical moment. There's over a million people in the American armed forces, and they seem to be very poorly and weakly indoctrinated into the structures of American imperialism. If we're to set our sights as ridiculously high as to consider whether the entire armed forces could instantly be swayed to a communist revolution then the answer is an obvious no, there's a shitload of reactionary psychopaths in there and even more worthless liberal children, but if we're to consider whether a legitimate and worthwhile organized revolutionary vanguard might make use of some large number of american servicemen then i strongly doubt that such a thing would be impossible. The issue, as always, is that such a vanguard party does not exist and there seems to be very little movement toward the organization of one in a time of ever quickly approaching collapse of so many of the imperialist structures that have defined not only the american state but the world itself for longer than most people have been alive. i say swears online posted:i see volunteers as being okay with the basic idea of a state, as well as being an agent of it, as opposed to conscripts. i could also see a volunteer troop used to enact various...actions as part of a revolutionary group, but at arm's length. i could also see veterans incorporated, but an active-duty member in good standing is either a deep mole or will get you all arrested I think this would be true for police, but seems to me to be a fundamental misapprehension of what the average serviceman actually is. They call them "grunts" for a reason, they're not ideologically trained in any rigorous sense, they're not tested on their commitment to imperialism in any real way. The hosed up thing that I think a lot of westerners tend to gloss over in their apprehension of the world is that it is actually pretty easy to create a social structure in which a person is capable of performing terrible violence upon helpless people without actually believing that it is ultimately the right thing to do, there's a reason that so many troops end up with PTSD and so few police ever do. Flournival Dixon has issued a correction as of 05:32 on Feb 27, 2024 |
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Feb 27, 2024 05:29
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god loving drat it lenin makes it so clear every single time how the gently caress did westerners allow themselves to ignore lenin for 50 years im so annoyed that i had to be a leftcom dipshit for like 5 years before i ever read proper theory
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Feb 27, 2024 05:41
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You'd have to build class consciousness and, like Lenin says, you have to keep revolutionary consciousness of the proletariat tense. Currently we have zero consciousness to work with, no organization, no vanguard, nothing at all. Trying to infiltrate and recruit within the army in the current circumstances might not be productive, but in future circumstances where an anti-imperialist movement actually existed, many more things are possible than in the current moment. To write off that avenue before even doing the most basic and fundamental tasks of revolution would be ultimately foolish and self-damning. I think propaganda aimed at servicemen might be a lot more sensible in even the best circumstances than active infiltration though, that's probably pretty true.
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Feb 27, 2024 06:04
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When Bills first started posting i had written him off as someone with some kind of schizo-affective disorder who accordingly had that kind of inflated ego and self-obsession with their own percieved genius along with the inability to fully communicate a coherent idea. Then for a while the posts became somewhat readable and related to the discussion but at this point I'm back to thinking that that's the case.
Flournival Dixon has issued a correction as of 23:53 on Feb 28, 2024 |
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Feb 28, 2024 23:43
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Former Everything posted:The abolition of the draft might have been capitalists greatest bulwark against mass class consciousness, intentional or otherwise. I think about this sometimes too, I feel like whatever work it did for like racial solidarity it never feels like Vietnam did much for revolutionary potential in the states. As pissed off as everyone was at the embarrassing televised catastrophe of it all, nobody ever did anything meaningful about it, they just went full on into worthless hippy/anarchist poo poo. I guess it's around the time when the government went all in on murdering the Marxist-Leninist vanguard that was the Black Panthers so it's hardly surprising that everyone just fell back on the American default of anarchism but it's depressing to think about how blatantly the entire history of the United States is nothing but a condemnation of the ineffectual nature of all of anarchism's basic tenants yet it's still the only widespread mode of anti-capitalist thought in the nation.
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Feb 28, 2024 23:57
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it's just so obvious that it's not a threat is the thing that kills me
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Feb 29, 2024 00:05
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he's joking, that's a totally different book from Marx's capital lol I've not read it but it sounds like it's just a big explanation of why capitalism creates inequality and not a comprehensive explanation of the foundations of economic reality like capital vol 1 is
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Apr 1, 2024 05:01
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mila kunis posted:annoying archaic language and other obfuscations getting in the way of understanding something isn't useful or productive and no socialist should have that attitude. While I agree that it's important for people who are not literarily or academically inclined to engage with marxism, i also don't think capital vol 1's issue is the language or writing of the thing. The part that makes it difficult to get through for some people is that it's essentially a scientific textbook for some portions of the thing, and most normal people just don't read through scientific textbooks that often. If anyone reading it has a hard time understanding anything they can always ask in this thread but for the most part it's best to just keep at it, the overall argument of the thing is pretty illustrative of how to think about economic relations even if you don't memorize perfectly all the specifics of each part of it.
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Apr 1, 2024 05:42
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crazyvanman posted:I need to explain commodity fetishism to some people, and I want to make sure my own understanding of it is in order, more or less. By way of disclaimer, I'm new to thinking about this, so there may well be errors in the below description. It's one of those concepts which I've heard from different angles over the years and never quite grasped how I was supposed to align those different angles. What I type below is my current understanding, and is partially just a practice attempt for me to type it out. However, if I have anything glaringly wrong feel free to point errors out. Depending on your audience that could be a pretty serviceable explanation. People are generally confused by the term because they think of fetishism in regards to the sexual term rather than the religious one, but I dunno if your audience is going to be receptive to a quick explanation of what a religious fetish is. crazyvanman posted:Can I also use commodity fetishism to explain why people will pay more for this can of coke than a cheaper, supermarket's own brand of coke, even though they are made of the same ingredients? Because I am invested in the fetishisation of commodities, and because I see them as either a) satisfying some desire I have or b) saying something about myself that I want to say (or probably both of these at once?), I pay the extra money for the pretty much identical commodity. I wouldn't generally use commodity fetishism to explain branding because I think of that as a more complex social function that isn't directly a result of commodity fetishism but as a result of cultural and social structures created by the marketing team (ostensibly). Commodity fetishism is a part of the foundation of what makes it work but I don't think of it as being a direct line between the two. The labor put in to the thing to create the brand is more significant to me for creating the value of the brand because commodity fetishism isn't being applied specifically to that object, but to all objects in the market and makes for kind of a foundation for how people view things they purchase. Wallace Shawn's quote on it is evergreen, you may find inspiration within: quote:"One day there was an anonymous present sitting on my doorstep—Volume One of Capital by Karl Marx, in a brown paper bag. A joke? Serious? And who had sent it? I never found out. Late that night, naked in bed, I leafed through it. The beginning was impenetrable, I couldn't understand it, but when I came to the part about the lives of the workers—the coal miners, the child laborers—I could feel myself suddenly breathing more slowly. How angry he was. Page after page. Then I turned back to an earlier section, and I came to a phrase that I'd heard before, a strange, upsetting, sort of ugly phrase: this was the section on "commodity fetishism," "the fetishism of commodities." I wanted to understand that weird-sounding phrase, but I could tell that, to understand it, your whole life would probably have to change. It's a big concept but I've always found it most potent of a concept in explaining people's separation from the processes of labor that create the things they purchase, rather than trying to explain the exact numerical value of the price and to what degree it's been inflated.
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Apr 11, 2024 13:56
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It depends on your audience, I wouldn't try to extend that metaphor in a disciplined marxist setting. If you're speaking to someone with whom you can afford ideological play then I could see the possible benefit, but if you're speaking to someone more likely to take an academic or scientific approach you'd likely lose ground through a loose metaphor like that. I'd avoid presenting such a thing as theory rather than play for worry of mixing the two in the reception of the audience. I can't speak to the efficacy of metaphor and thought play without a basis in theory and materialism because I learned those things first, but they can be enjoyable and productive with an audience that's already going to be a bit on board with you. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuBe93FMiJc Network is a great movie by the way. Flournival Dixon has issued a correction as of 16:29 on Apr 11, 2024 |
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Apr 11, 2024 16:25
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marxism points forward, preferably the economy didn't exist back then anyways
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Apr 15, 2024 02:12
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Chomsky came up with manufacturing consent, which is an incredibly useful tool for explaining how the media works, but also he was friends with epstein and is probably a pedophile or something (and an anarchist, which is even more damning from an intellectual standpoint). Sometimes bad people can be right about things in the world, I don't think much of althusser's writing was about how it's good to have psychotic episodes and strangle people.
Flournival Dixon has issued a correction as of 22:11 on Apr 24, 2024 |
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Apr 24, 2024 22:07
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Trotskyism these days has become kind of a broad and vague term and essentially meaningless. Trotsky's ideology just wasn't very workable and didn't pan out in history, and now that that moment is over it's pretty irrelevant either way because there's no current material equivalent for the early USSR that exists right now (and likely there never will be again for obvious reasons). Most of them are people who bought really hard into the anti-communist propaganda of the western empire about stalin being just as bad as hitler and desperately need a political category to distance themselves from stalin and post-stalin ussr. It's not exactly forward thinking or useful in general. The same applies to propaganda about the perfidious chinese or the violent machismo of the cubans and they want to distance themselves from those too. He's kinda a historical lifeboat for people to latch onto when they realize that liberalism is bad but can't escape from the goofy ideas they've been exposed to their whole lives so they pick a guy who got killed but totally had it right all along you guys. Usually people who bring up trotsky seem to be just looking for an excuse to argue over historical events that don't matter very much to the present moment or they're bought into some silly anarchist ideas but realize on some level that anarchism is the stupidest poo poo a person can believe so they go to trotsky instead. Flournival Dixon has issued a correction as of 04:23 on Apr 25, 2024 |
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Apr 25, 2024 04:19
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I guess I'm not answering anything about the specifics of trotskyism but like the idea of a world revolution and some kind of active war against the international bourgeoise emanating from a socialist state was kind of a stupid idea even before nuclear weapons existed?? Like it'd be great if nations didn't exist and we could all just be on the same page at the same time and spontaneously decide to overthrow capitalism but it's just not how anything actually works. It almost feels unscientific to act like capitalism can exist indefinitely in the first place and that its failure is not inevitable, which is surely disproven by the development of neoliberalism and the hilariously failing empire we currently inhabit.
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Apr 25, 2024 04:34
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Lasting Damage posted:dgcf already did a great job describing the who and the what, but it might also be helpful for you do describe some of these ideas they have that you like, to make sure other posters understand what you mean by Trotskyism. I'd be interested to hear what specifics of it sound appealing, to me it feels like it appeals to countermaterialistic anarchist style moralizing but I'm far from like the average normal person when it comes to thinking about politics and how things should work as opposed to how they actually do according to my understanding of history and material reality. People in this thread might poke fun at you for elaborating but nobody's going to be that mean unless you're a real dipshit about it and refuse to read capital for months and months and months on end all the while insisting that you've found the specific anti-coat equation that disproves the whole thing.
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Apr 25, 2024 06:44
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| # ¿ May 12, 2024 10:28 |
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I think there's a mismatch there regarding the underlying concept and the thoughts (or lack thereof) going on in the minds of the reactionary culture warriors. Ultimately commodity fetishism is meant to divorce the thing from the processes of labor and relations involved in creating and selling the thing, so using an example where the commodity is being brought back into relation with the company that made it might be a bit counterproductive to explaining the concept. The chuds are usually saying something like "look what you did nike" or whatever, which is pretty different from focusing their hatred on the object itself as if it were a little god with it's own power to compel their actions. I have had three standard drinks tonight but I think I'm right.
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Apr 28, 2024 03:21
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