/lit/ - Literature

>>21758417
>probably don’t understand Marx
If you wanna read something funny, Engels wrote in the 1850s that there would be a revolution in the future and the people who did it would fuck it up because they didn't really understand it, and then a reaction would set in, and people would come to think of communists as a bunch of barbarians. But that didn't matter because they wrote everything down in advance. Also people in the future would be pressed to make communist experiments before they were really ready for it.

And if you think about it, it's like yeah that's pretty much what happened. There was another letter from this Scottish aristocrat about talking to Marx and relaying what he heard to Princess Victoria (not the Queen, one of the princesses), and the aristocrat told Marx that if there was a revolution in Germany that brought down the militarist system there (which Marx thought was inevitable), then it would still be a long way off before his ideas could be put into practice, and he was like "yeah, but it's just a step on the road, all great movements take a long time." Which sounds like a cop out, but you can see why people are still reading this stuff. They also pretty accurately predicted WWI, even around 10 million dead, and there was basically no stopping it because of the runaway outbidding of armaments by the different European powers which, once it set in, became impossible to escape from.

>>21759054
>considering that our reality is not only a material one but also a emotional and spiritual reality, people do all sorts of irrational and non materialistic things all the time
Have you ever seen people fighting over the napkins at a McDonald's to take them and then sell them to make a profit? If you see someone doing that, that'd probably be a sign of mental illness.

>>21759233
>there was this one quote i love of him but i cant remember rn, it boiled down to "every social system will exhaust all means of existence, every possible combination, before giving away and collapsing"
Dante's Inferno

>>21759233
>american hegemony is slowly fading and we're already seeing BRICS emerge and helping (for some reason) other countries
I think the U.S. is gonna more and more go into Starship Troopers fascism as it tries to cope with that. China is the main target because they thought it'd turn into another Japan which is kept in a weak position (also they have growing infrastructure problems too) once its exports became too competitive, but China largely prevented a financialized economy by keeping capital subordinate to the state. This has completely shocked the U.S. and 40 years of neoliberalism hasn't prepared the empire to handle it other than militarily.