/lit/ - Literature

just read a summary of what class consciousness means then a bunch of literature about rich faggots like brideshead revisited until you get through your fucking skull that capitalism is an absolutely retarded cuck game and 99% of economic right ideology is gigabrainlet tier in 2020 then become blackpilled and kill yourself

>actually reading Das Kapital

your fellow theorycels who talk about roping the bourgeoisie are bougies themselves who need to dilate

>>16973928
>believing that the whole of society should revolve around your material interests
Class consciousness is just political narcissism.

>>16973928
I don't know what to believe
everything seems simultaneously true and false
every time I find some kind of footing it gets pulled out from under me
help

>>16973948
I don't think you know what class consciousness is.

>>16973954
As far as I can tell, it’s the widespread development and adoption of a collective identity based around class and motivated by class interests. On the individual level, those interests are exactly what I described.

All the Communist Manifesto does is talk about how awesome capitalism is.

I was very surprised. Marx just kept mentioning everything I like about how the world works.

Communism, like so many other things, is great in theory but always gets fucked up in practice.

The biggest flaw that commies have is there no mechanism in their plans post-revolution to prevent a cunning, power-hungry asshole from taking power. And, surprise surprise, this is what has happened in the aftermath of every single communist revolution. Stalin. Mao. Castro. Pol Pot. All these power-hungry assholes that, once the commies were actually in power, proceeded to kill all their rivals, consolidate power, and rule their countries with an iron fist. And the really funny thing is that the first ones to be killed are always the "true believers." The intellectuals, the good-hearted reformers, everybody who's actually in it to help the working-class and bring about a worker's paradise on Earth. They're ALWAYS the first ones to get knifed in the back.

About the only halfway-nice commie leader was Ho Chi Minh, and Vietnamese communism isn't really super gung ho about actual communism, it's more just an expression of anti-imperialism. All the rest were monsters.

>>16973987
Class consciousness = awareness of how much class really matters, from economic to social reasons, that's it. Once you realize how much class shapes a person and how hard the bourgeoisie are rawdogging this entire planet, libertarian bullshit or complaining about DEM PROGRAMS becomes an absurd cartoon. You don't have to be a commie to be class conscious either.

I will let one of the theorycels tell you more, I mostly just absorbed it through reading literary fiction t.b.h. lole

>>16973928
I see where communists are coming from, but the fact that they don’t go full kazynski with their worldview loses them a lot of credit. They want to have their cake and eat it to.

>>16974013
american coasties are proof that pol pot was right about urbanoids, his only flaw was retarded agrarianism

>>16974035
The requirement for placing such a priority on class is exactly what I described. I’m not a libertarian and am very much a supporter of welfare programs but from an anti-communist perspective.

>>16974053
they used to kill people all the time, you are right that they became a meme once they stopped putting bombs on street corners. the c*pitalists won and now "commies" are good little goys who tweet about BLM on twitter. and antifa is so disorganized and incoherent that they hardly count.

Read these, some of the best Marxists abandoned the internationalism and sappy "abloobloo everyone should get free weed" elements and shifted focus to the war against international finance
https://counter-currents.com/tag/breaking-the-bondage-of-interest/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Sorel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peronism

>>16973841
>IDK BREHS Marxism doesn't look that bad.
You only have to read to know that marxism is better than capitalism. The fact is that countries are not governed through good modes or by the best politicointellectual model. Real politics is way harder than that; anyway, everything is better than capitalism, thing that all but US mongrels know, since all the ancap altright jews are from USA.

>>16974063
it seems like you are conflating it with identarianism though. ignoring someone's material background and their desired policies is like ignoring the jew when he says "us whites" must go extinct, class is a reality that cannot be ignored.

or to put it another way, imagine that meme that goes "we want more government" then has police beating up the lefties labeled "more government", except it's flyover republicans saying "capitalism is good, there's nothing wrong with having almost all the money" then a bunch tumblr haired queers and bankers labeled "the people who have almost all the money"

>>16974075
I was talking about the fact that they think they are entitled to the fruits of industrial society, but shouldn’t have to deal with the shitty aspects.

>>16973841
Here OP. This is babbys forst Communism.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/harman/1979/marxism/index.html

It's Chris Harmans very short intro for one totally unfamiliar with Marxism. It's great

honestly, how dumb do you have to be to fall for the meme of a "classless stateless egalitarian society" that just happen to inherently require nightmarish levels of totalitarianism to implement, making it completely self defeating

I swear, people only fall for communism because they get swamped with so much of all sorts of fanciful economic theory that they become distracted and lost in it all, and become the very definition of "can't see the forest for the trees"

>>16974177
I think it's pretty telling that Marx talks more than a little about how great the worker's paradise is going to be, but he never really describes the means by which it comes into reality.

I mean, I can wax poetic about how great my perfect fantasy world would be, too.

>>16974177
About as dumb as Einstein, Hawking, Chomsky, MLK. Idk...

>>16974146
Yeah all the shit around us that we take for granted doesn’t just sprout up because it will help us. People are finding ways of getting you to transform your energy into a commodity that they can use for their own goals and all the nice technology shit is just a mechanism of that.

>>16974075
It is amazing watching them cry on about how the fbi lists the far right as the the greatest terrorist threat. It’s like their heart isn’t in it anymore.

>>16974188
it really is the greatest scam in history, the irony is its completely and utterly exploitative of the working class, working class people get promised paradise and/or mixed up with all this economic theory if they need more convincing, next thing you know they're selling their country out and gunning down their neighbors or sending them to Siberia for a dystopian nightmare dictatorship

its basically just a really elaborate Nigerian prince tier scheme to get folks to hand over their nation and their people to some group of people/person

>>16974146
what if i told you that what the wealthy are actually doing to acquire all their wealth is so insane and unethical that we could literally be living in a technofuturistic paradise right now if somebody put a boot up their ass

>we can't afford to do x! it will ruin our businesses and prosperity!

the porky devil's greatest trick is convincing you that what he does is less damaging to your society than universal healthcare + education and living wages and social programs. we can afford it. several times over. forever. if we had the wealth they steal daily via shady as fuck investments, corruption, and literally enslaving third worlders.

>>16974314
what if I told you healthcare and education and decent wages is not communism

>>16974336
what if i told you i wasn't a communist, and was just using that tone because those who are not class conscious tend to fall prey to libertarian b8, and that you don't have to be a communist to be a marxist.

>>16973841
>start with the communist manifesto or is there something a little bit more palatable for newbies?

I choose to believe this isn't a joke, lol

If you're serious (or in high school or something), the Manifesto is a call to arms for an industrial class which doesn't really exist anymore - it's meant to appeal to your anger at working 80 hour weeks for dirt wages living in slum conditions.

If you want to read the good stuff of Marx, read the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (The Paris Manuscripts) and Alienation. Don't bother with Capital - it got too many things wrong to be worth reading unless you reallly want to wade into Marxist circles (even then, you can probably save some time and just get away with googling "commodity fetishization" and other topics as you come across them. Also, you should probably give Hegel a cursory google before reading Marx).

Welcome to the struggle comrade

Communism is just a silly meme. It's important to remember that capitalism was defined as such by communists. The western intelligentsia will tell you capitalism started in the last 500 years, when in fact sand niggers have been practicing capitalism since before wypipo had a civilization. Communism was a failed prediction, not an economic system. It's a shame that politicians decided to use Marxism as a tool to depose and replace ruling classes. A cursory read of Raymond Aron will explain how such a silly utopian dogma still persists in the minds of so many Starbucks baristas and trust fund crust punks.

>>16974146
>You can't criticize capitalism, you use an Iphone!

I love reading through threads like these because it's so clear you don't even keep up with leftist circles. Half of the major works of the last century are either gasps for a return of the radicalism of the first half of the century, or explanations of why the revolution will not come and discussions on what to do about it.

>>16974376
>it's so clear you don't even keep up with leftist circles

you could have phrased that a lot less faggy

>>16974376
>or explanations of why the revolution will not come and discussions on what to do about it.
Im curious, what do they say about this?

>>16973841
Communism is an inevitability but requires AI and post-scarcity. Strauss's Economics 2.0.
It was foolish to pretend to implement it before we even had computers.

>>16974594
Commies screwed the pooch, we'll never actually, exactly get communism now because the ruin and bloodshed of the 20th Century has rendered the idea radioactive. All these stupid Millennials and Zoomers who are unironic communists are all going to make it worse, too.

Actually, I think in general it's very ironic that it's the working-class, the class that communists purport to want to help the most, who are most repulsed by the idea of communism. It's very ironic and very funny. Orwell talks a lot about this, the idea that socialists and communists actually repulse the working class and that, as a result, socialists and communists have great contempt for working-class people.

>>16974407
Almost nothing useful imo - there's been really excellent breakdowns of how even protests and protest symbols are coopted and rendered impotent by capitalism, and the next-order alienation of a system in which even protest is becoming a tool of the regime being protested, but in terms of concrete strategy around this, it's just a retooling of 20th century tactics. New contradictions in society to exploit, new opposing binaries to subvert - but overall, there's a sense that something a system this alienating has to break sooner or later and we just have to be ready for it.

If you want the most up to date English language manifesto, read K-Punk's Capitalist Realism - it's short and I think portrays the modern left's position pretty well, one of exhaustion and hopelessness but a belief that that hopelessness is the very thing which will crack and bring forth the next phase in societal development.

I should say, there are still plenty of orhtodox Marxists lying around, but they really only hold sway in developing countries where working conditions are still abysmal enough to take up arms against.

>>16973841
Socialism, Utopian and Scientific
A Reader in Marxist Social Science
A Reader in Marxist Philosophy

>>16974708
What do you think of religious Marxists? Guys like Cornel West. Or the whole "LeftCath" phenomenon. Is abandonment of Marxism's atheism the key to recovering a belief in the way forward?

>>16974779
I think religion holds a lot of revolutionary potential, particularly in that Christianity and Islam already have a language of martyrdom.

But, no, I don’t think giving Marxism spiritual dimensions is anything more than coopting church power. I certainly think there’s less enthusiasm about abolishing religion all together, but if we want to democratize labor (which calls for democratizing broader society), we have to keep our crosshairs trained on capital above all else, and that means targeting religious centers of power as well

>>16973950
Move faster and smarter

>>16974624

Most of the rhetorical thrusts made in this post are wrong, although some truth comes out in the second graph. Generally, your feelings and ideas are wrong.

You begin with the self-defeating complaint that we'll never get communism now (as if this is supposed to be a desirable end at all) because of the failure of historical praxis, which you concede. You continue to undermine the desirability of communism in your own terms by owning the idiot kids as "unironic communists", making the system you yearn for less appealing.

Your second graph is a bit better since the peasantry (not proletariat) naturally and correctly distrust the commie strivers, whoever they may be, and the commie strivers resent the peasantry (not proletariat) for not behaving properly. This tension is unironically related to the jewish element in historical communism versus the goy horde. TWO DIFFERENT FORMS-OF-LIFE. For a good fable on this point, watch the film Barton Fink. Barton Fink tries to write a story for "the common man", idealizing him in the abstract, but when confronted with him, grows disgusted with him. The best part is how good protestant-ish John Goodman manhandles Fink and eventually goes on to become a demon (from Fink's POV), a force of nature.

And then, there's always the odd image choice which betrays the poster's psychology, or locale, or state of mind.

>>16974818
>But, no, I don’t think giving Marxism spiritual dimensions is anything more than coopting church power. I certainly think there’s less enthusiasm about abolishing religion all together, but if we want to democratize labor (which calls for democratizing broader society), we have to keep our crosshairs trained on capital above all else, and that means targeting religious centers of power as well

Ohohohohoho as a reactionary this makes me smile.

You'll never banish religion from the world, and if you are committed to making religion your enemy you are always destined to lose. Men will die for their religious beliefs, in a way they never will for economic and social paradigms.

Your side must either make peace with religion or you must consign yourself to continued defeat. Religion isn't going away. If you keep making it your enemy you will lose into infinity.