/lit/ - Literature

>>18783904
That's all Marxist texts.

>>18783972
Stalin, Lenin and Mao were pretty easy to read.

Workers of the World, Obscurite!

>>18783904
Yeah didn't communists call philosophising a bourgeoise institute?

>>18784099
And they're absolutely right, it is. You think your average blue collar worker goes back home to ruminate and navel-gaze after hauling bricks up and down a construction project for 12 hours? No, they immediately wanna kick back, have a beer, a hot dinner, and hopefully get some sleep.

In a way, it's really fucked up. The low class are too overworked to contemplate their situations, and are too dependent on their meagrely salary just to survive to have a revelation, unite, and fight for their rights. The middle class are too comfy, they don't have a fighting spirit despite all of they're protesting, they're not capable of making any grand changes and fight for the lower class (whom they secretly look down on).

>>18783904
The standard excuse is that the difficult writing style forces you to slow down, and really think about things that generally pass unquestioned. But that's usually BS, of course.

>>18784170
"Whenever the cause of the people is entrusted to professors, it is lost."
- Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Bolshevik.

>>18784080
Stalin and Mao specifically wrote their works to be understandable by the common public, hence why we've got stuff like Mao's little red book

>>18783904
By the time the frankfurt school people start writing marxists have given up on the conception of "revolution through the uprising of the workers" thing for half a century.

To simplify things greatly, the perception of the possible agents of revolution in marxist circles went something like this : workers (orthodox marxism) -> vanguard parties and blanquist action in general (think Lenin) -> the intelligentsia (this is the phase in which the frankfurt school wrote) -> ethnic minorities, gay people, etc. (this is where we are right now)

>>18784225
Radical revolution is a product of pure frustration, and it never has a pretty aftermath. Literally every radical revolution either resulted in the country going to total shit, or returning to a pre-revolution state with extra frills. They destroy the system, only to then realise after it's too late that the system was the very grounds they were standing on. Gradual yet persistent change works much better.

>>18784225
Almost; this leaves out the idea of "third-worldism," where in modern capitalism the dirtiest and most dangeous work has been outsourced to poorer countries (cobalt mining in Africa, Nike sweatshops in Southeast Asia, etc.) So in a real sense, "ethnic minorities" and "workers" become linked - there is no mass of factory workers or industrial proletariat in the imperial core any more, only retail and restaurant industries which have different conditions from what Marx or Lenin wrote about. And at the same time, the capitalist class uses a superficial "diversity" in its managers (all the calls for "black-owned business," women in the military and CIA, etc) to justify their continued economic and military control over the Third World. Today, mainstream "liberals" are more ruthless capitalists than conservatives, who at least have some loyalty to religion, family or non-market-based values.

>>18784299
I think what you wrote and what I wrote fit together into one quite nicely. The Third World and the brown/black masses of the third world are the new proletariat, while the groups that are perceived to be on the periphery of the proletariat-free societies of the first world (ethnic minorities, gay people, women, etc.) are thought to be the only ones with a stake in rising up against the system. In other words : the latter rise up so that they and the third worlders will be "liberated" from the "tyranny of the first world".

>>18784299
>>18784323
Did you guys know third worldism of multiple different varieties came extensively from collaboration with ex-Nazis after the war? Lots of Germans went to Arab countries to teach them how to get their shit together, like Nasser's Egypt, where they also inspired the Grand Mufti of Palestine.

American intelligence partly funded this as a counter against the Soviets until they realized it was creating third worldism. Also Ho Chi Minh's watchword was "the nation first, then communism in the nation," and Mariategui in Latin America was basically Gramscian third worldism that didn't shoot itself in the foot by obsessing over utopian internationalism.

Third worldism had real revolutionary potential and was basically national socialism. Meanwhile what do Marcuse and '68 represent? Decadent bourgeois self-indulgence in nations already rich, and already having exported their real labour to the third world. And now the only alternative is CCP bugman totalitarianism.

>>18784323
Except none of those minorities are actually class conscious or desire communism, therefore it’s not really Marxist when there’s no economic contingency. It’s not like black people in America are organizing into militias and violently fighting for communism. They’re just marching with democrat politicians and (literally) begging on their knees to be accepted into the liberal capitalist status quo via “representation” and “diversity.” Had there been a strong and healthy communist movement comprised of minority groups then it would make sense to call them the new proletariat. As it stands though they’re just dregs and slave moralists produced by the decadence of liberal capitalism, embracing their inferiority as if it makes them morally superior to those who are “privileged” in comparison. It’s the most pathetic shit ever seen in modern history, Marx and Lenin would weep at the sight of these people.

Marxism is a pyramid scheme for high verbal bullshitters

the working class are actually very clever, they just don't believe in themselves. marxism is essentially all about self-belief and feeling confident.

>>18784356
>It’s not like black people in America are organizing into militias and violently fighting for communism.
>

>>18784356
so anybody wanna tell this guy, or....?

due to the USSR's existence, Marxism-Leninism was the dominant form of Marxism
Leninism was spawned out of Lenin's hatred for the working classes and the poor
it is an ideology specifically engineered to allow you to larp as a revolutionary and hate the people you're supposedly fighting for
thus they can get away more easily with more incomprehensible texts

>>18784439
>>18784461
It's not the 60's anymore.The only thing blacks in the first world do is try to gain a more privileged position within liberalism. That's all that the rioters demanded last year.

Books about Non-Marxist/Maoist/Leninist/Stalinist/Trotskyist communism? Communism predates Marx by hundreds of years, surely these bearded old dead fucks don't have total ownership over it?

you're being rather condescending to workers

>>18784522
Thinking that medieval peasant uprisings were proto-communist uprisings is the lefty equivalent of anachronistic nationalism being projected back into medieval times.

>>18783904
for a lot of Marxists including myself, the whole thing is sort of a complex philosophical political exercise. Once you realize the world is a piece of shit and nothing is ever going to get better it frees you up to explore the boundaries and implications of this new and exciting philosophy.

>>18784531
like you are like so right, like workers spend their time like reading kant, and not like the stereotype of like drinking 12 packs

>>18784594
Marx literally did not coin the term "communism" though, Retif did, 50 years before Marx, and that's just with regards the term itself, the idea of communal ownership predates them both by, again, hundreds of years.

>>18784531
See >>18784142
It's not so much workers are dumb, but that philosophising is a leisurely activity only the middle class and elites can afford indulging. Academia itself is a bourgeoise institution by design.

>>18784323
>The Third World and the brown/black masses of the third world are the new proletariat
Pretty much. And the Chinese. Not that there aren't proles in the West, but something like 85% of the world's industrial and manufacturing workers don't live in the rich countries. China is steaming along but their per-capita GDP is like Mexico.

And Xi has read Marcuse.

https://youtu.be/KtbYoCssEnw

>>18784609
Isn't that the danger? It ensnares you and pulls you away from dirty, mundane, unexciting praxis with the "simple" workers.

I struggle with this myself because I'm a Marxist and a fascist and I've never understood the fundamental justification for mystifying meta-philosophy among Marxists. At least as a fascist I can say that the complex element exists objectively to be comprehended by those with the talent and inclination for it, in service to the Volk. If I were a pure Marxist what would I say?

I understand some counter-points, like that mere workers' mysticism without intellectual clarification dissolves into "utopian socialism," or into romanticism that might motivate for a moment but lacking an intellectual backbone is strategically vulnerable to things like the events of 1848 in the 18th Brumaire. I understand Marx's desire to clarify and to raise the proletariat to self-conscious of the correct kind rather than relying on a kind of romantic "workers' nationalism" that is easily coopted or lapses into bourgeois accommodationism. But clearly the simple act of advocating scientific socialism didn't work, because it led to bourgeois scientism in the socialist movement, even in Engels himself.

I can even sort of see why this had to be surmounted by Lukacs in the Hegelian clarification of the true scope and stakes of proletarian self-consciousness, but not only did this create another all-or-nothing mysticism, just this time of a Hegel variety (which still dominates the bourgeois intellectuals of the left as a kind of prestige occupation and form of esoteric vanguardism), it also made it so that the proletariat, or at least its vanguard, has to recognise THIS specific sense of mission or by definition it is failing to meet the self-consciousness standard.

So what's the solution? More high theory doesn't seem to be working, but anti-intellectualism and "just get your hands dirty" has been legitimately critiqued as defeatism. Gramscian tactics lead to strategic pluralism at best, heterodoxy at worst, not to a unified and orthodox International.

Again as a fascist I feel I have a solution but I want to know what Marxists say.

>>18783904
So did Marx

>>18784352
>Mariategui in Latin America was basically Gramscian third worldism that didn't shoot itself in the foot by obsessing over utopian internationalism.
That guys owns. He was a Latin American integrationist for sure though and an internationalist, just not a utopian one. It's interesting that the party which Pedro Castillo in Peru belongs to describes itself as Marxist-Leninist-Mariateguist.

Mariategui is interesting because he wrote (in the early 20th century) how the white elites in Peru didn't identify with the Peruvian nation but with white people in Europe or North America. So this kind of Marxism is both nationalistic and internationalistic at the same time, socialistic, anti-imperialist, and very woke in some ways but also socially conservative in other ways, because the white elites there are right-wing but they dress and act identically to yuppies in Los Angeles. But these guys are pro-Cuba, pro-Venezuela, etc.

It's not "Nazbol" though which is a made-up thing. But look at these guys:

https://youtu.be/pfTmuzwpBAE

They even rep a pro-Soviet military leader in the late 60s (Juan Velasco Alvarado) and are doing their indigenous song in front of some old Soviet-supplied SAMs.

>>18784678
Yeah I have been watching that with interest although when I think of South America I just think of a giant skull-and-bones over a black and white 1950s propaganda film map of the continent, because of how much the American Special Friends Committee undermined autochthonous nation formation there.

NazBol did exist (Niekisch etc.) but was fairly marginal. Pro-Bolshevism just only made sense up to a point to third positionists at the time. Admiration for the anti-bourgeois revolution yes, actual desire to throw open the gates to marauding raping Russians and their curiously non-Russian leadership, no.

Hopefully something like national socialism can develop in South America from organic conditions and not by slavishly following any external model or obsessively self-harming out of autistic commitment to "anti-racism" or whatever. I find Peronism interesting as well. He travelled to Spain and observed Primo de Rivera's Falange, and was also gladly willing to work with Allende. It's ironic, though you probably won't agree, South American communism proves the deeper truth of fascism, because "good" communism just becomes de facto fascism anyway.

>>18784142
Secretly look down on?
Openly look down on.
>Randomly change rules for polite conversation every two or three years
>Put a sticker on your subaru of the shitty "little ivy" private liberal arts school you sent your kid to
>Buy a tesla
>Buy a doodle-variety dog
>Get the new yorker delivered to your house
>Live in more expensive neighborhood away from poorer people, especially poorer white people (poor blacks or mexicans can be tolerated for a bit before they are eventually displaced but you enjoy their "authentic" "culture" in the meantime)
>Do cardio and don't lift
I could probably think of more but I don't think they secretly look down on the working class. They put an incredible amount of work and money into not being confused with the middle class (in whose eyes?). Which is hilarious, because one thing Marx was right on the money about is the inevitable destruction of the petit-bourgeoisie (defined as those who have their own means of production).
Lawyers can't get jobs, and if they do get a job they work for 60K/yr, other than a tiny proportion of well-connected wealthy ones. Doctors increasingly are employees of massive multinational corporations. Engineers are fired and replaced by low-payed H1B visa holders. Don't even try to start your own small business these days. Professors are perpetually "adjunct," or "assistant," and always manage to be cut loose before their time for tenure arrives. Administrators of our professional institutions often suck, but they are also payed pennies to carry out the destructive work of multinational capital, often for higher hours, more difficult conditions, and significantly less respect and stability than the professionals they manage. It's amazing how completely proletarianized everyone other than those who benefit from global finance capital is now, or will be in the next 5-10 years.
Even petty investors are getting closed out of the capital thing. Look at game stop and shit. None or very few of those guys are going to find themselves significantly richer after these events, and they'll definitely find a way to keep anything like this from happening in the future.
Fuck dude I'm PMC as hell, and I have to just crack a beer and hang out with my desert-rat dirtbike driving uncles and cousins sometimes because the toxic class anxiety of my PMC colleagues, which obviously comes from a subconscious awareness of their precarity, is fucking exhausting to be around.

>>18784323
third worldists have been predicting this for centuries.

>>18784086
kek

>>18784667
I dunno but this is why I like Mao (in a general way) because he just boils things down to basic points. And I think the way he'd look at it is that the proletariat defines the problem, basically. And I think it's the responsibility of the communists to identify with people who might not even be like them and see their struggle as the same. So I'm not Peruvian, and I don't know anything about those guys in front of the SAM, they probably have very different social and cultural values compared to my own, but I think they want national sovereignty for their country. They want to control their own country's resources instead of it just being sucked up by multinationals.

It's not my country so it's not my place to tell them what to do. They know their situation better than I do. I can only learn from them. We all have a responsibility to learn from each other in a dialectical process.

Fascism has always seemed like it has been tied up in some kind of chauvinism or imperialism. Or "my country is superior" or must dominate others, or "I don't have to listen to anyone else because I know what's best" and so forth, as opposed to a kind of socialist patriotism, you could say.

Marcuse wasn't an orthodox Marxist, he wrote critical theory.

>>18784710
>Fascism has always seemed like it has been tied up in some kind of chauvinism or imperialism. Or "my country is superior" or must dominate others, or "I don't have to listen to anyone else because I know what's best" and so forth, as opposed to a kind of socialist patriotism, you could say.
Not that anon, but this is why Tocqueville has always piqued my curiosity. He was a euro-supremacist who didn't believe in the oppression of other races....most of the time (the algerian business). Patriotism is fine, so long as your pride doesn't turn into malevolence, which it often does in a very quick fashion.

>>18784667
The present is fucked and the future is cancelled. There is no leftist activism, I think that's the Gramscian conclusion and you're correct imo in your assumptions around the first international and the brumaire. As well as the American and European New Left, if you ever want to read about their efforts and failure.
I sort of like class unity as an approach, but the DSA has always been a dead end full of social rejects and democratic party/NGO/liberal arts opportunist types (), working within their confines will just give you headaches.
Fasism really is not a solution for the same reason marxism isn't a solution right now. Our population is morally and spiritually bankrupt. You can try your putsch but no one will ever back you up and you'll be stuck alone and probably locked up, the intertia at this point is insurmountable. There's no courage. It's always down to these intangibles, we don't have the language to articulate our issues right now.

>>18784699
> It's ironic, though you probably won't agree, South American communism proves the deeper truth of fascism, because "good" communism just becomes de facto fascism anyway.
Peron is a weird synthesis of a different stuff. But I dunno, tell that to these guys. "Good" communism according to who? The Wall Street Journal? The kind that isn't actually threatening to capital? And 80% of these guys' Olympic gold medals are in combat sports so they're no pushovers. I think South African fascism is just like Pinochet or Bolosnaro fans or something. They're comprador rulers for multinational business. Whether it's "ideal" fascism according to some theory is kind of irrelevant.

Whether you think the Cubans have a fascist government either is kind of irrelevant, because it doesn't matter what anyone thinks of them except them because it's their country. And I don't think most people who think "fascism" is cool are supportive of the Cubans or Fidel Castro supporting the anti-Apartheid struggle to the hilt:

https://youtu.be/o7cZBg4c4W4

But Franco never broke ties with Castro, so there are weird little twists in history.

>>18784737
Could you not simplify it to the intangibles though? At the end of the day, if you take all the technical jargon and academic babble out, communism really is a call to fix issues that are really immediately graspable, anyone who worked hard manual labour in their life would understand it:
>you're not getting paid enough for the hard work you're putting in, and the boss will never give two shits, so you have to take control of the business yourself
That can be immediately understood by any worker.

>>18784699
But, yes, I agree that people have to figure it out according to their own conditions. The same is true in Latin America. If you try to impose on single model (i.e. the Soviets) then you start negating the whole idea of Marxism which reasons out from the particular. But if you don't like anti-racism... I dunno... the base for this in Latin America are often not white people, however you define that.

Some people freaked when BLM came out with a statement opposing the embargo, but the co-founders chant Assata Shakur's words and she has been living in exile in Cuba since her comrades sprang her out of a New Jersey prison in 1979. I think black radicals in the U.S. have historically paid more attention to events in Latin America than white leftists, generally speaking.

>>18784737
basically this

everyone is acting like we living in exciting times with vibrant political mobilization but really we’re in a period of complete and utter decadence. zero strides have been made to change the structure of the world, everything stays the same but just gets worse and worse. I don’t know where this is all leading to but it doesn’t look good.

>>18784737
Read Samuel Francis' Leviathan and its Enemies my friend

https://c2cjournal.ca/2009/06/where-marx-and-conservatives-meet-the-writings-of-paul-piccone/

>>18784748
It should be more simple, I agree. I'm honestly not smart enough to figure out why the whole thing is so fucked. I know a lot of people on the so-called left would dispute literally every word in that thesis, and may dispute the fact that marxism = leftism, and that labor power is even a meaningful goal for a leftist political project.

>>18784778
Nothing lasts forever. No empire is immortal. It's just such a shame that I won't see this rotten global system implode upon itself in my lifetime.

>>18784800
on one hand I worry that an actual implosion would lead to unparalleled amounts of suffering and I wouldn’t want to live through that

On the other hand that means we’re just going to watch everything melt down into a cesspool of misery and we will never watch anyone revolt against it in our lifetime, which is also a sort of hell

>>18784797
-which is why you do not concern yourself with what bourgeoise academics think when you approach the boots-on-ground workers for praxis. The opinions of the ones actually being actively exploited are the only ones that matter. The opinions of cushy middle-class academics literally do not matter because they have no power to bring about revolution, that power resides solely in the middle class, therefore you have to communicate your ideas in simple ways that cut really deep.

>>18784810
that power resides solely in the lower class***

>>18784783
thanks for the rec bro I'll check it out.
>>18784778
Hey, at least total nihilism towards the political future lets you better understand Christian theology and explore various coping mechanisims. Since realizing the left was a total waste of time I've managed to hit 1/2/3/4 all for 5x5s, read some great fiction, wife and I are talking about starting a family. All in all, my chill PMC existence is going to be comfortable. That becomes a worthy goal once you get to the awareness you've articulated.

Critical Theory is an academic pyramid scheme of people writing needlessly impractical, jargonistic bullshit in layers and layers on top of each other over decades with no one ever saying anything that ever actually gets implemented in the wider public sphere. Academia is by and large a waste of time compared to actually changing shit in the real world.

>>18784818
>Since realizing the left was a total waste of time I've managed to hit 1/2/3/4 all for 5x5s, read some great fiction, wife and I are talking about starting a family.

This is actually one of the number one metapolitical methods. Things are going to get way worse before they get better, and in the end we will go through things we can't even imagine yet, things that when they do happen will make people think "welp this is it, we're fucked." But people will survive, and much of that will come down to values and virtues neglected by modernity, like raising ten children with healthy strong souls who can educate and support ten more families, and so on and so on. Every one of these people has the chance of being a natural leader or of finding things other people couldn't find to help save humanity from the darkness, and every one who doesn't do that will raise ten more healthy people who might.

It even comes down to things as simple as not letting your children and friends be depressed neurotic serially unhealthy fat sexually pathological fuck-ups. How much will future historians look back at us and think, "no wonder it was so hard for them, 30% of them were schizophrenic from birth control pills in the water and the other 70% had an atrophied medulla because of lifelong plastic absorption through the skin"? Maybe it won't be those exact things, but it will be something like that. Part of our job is to trust in nature and resist this invisible enemy. Create the strong arm that can hold the torch in the darkness for as long as is needed.

Unironically Evola is great on this mindset. Men Among the Ruins and Ride the Tiger are for two different kinds of strategies for surviving the dark age. Orientations is an even shorter introduction, about orienting oneself to be a lighthouse for those who need it. Francis is just about fighting back with every such metapolitical means that can be found, but really, all that comes down to finding and creating healthy people and helping them resist the disease.

>>18784810
What I was talking about earlier is that "cushy middle class academics" are going to very quickly become a thing of the past. Proletarianization.
But overall we agree dude. Somebody should start an AM radio show or go on Rogan or something

>>18784825
Critical theory is quite literally just a cope and a scheme. When the communist revolution didn’t occur and people didn’t become globally class conscious, leftists just had to invent a million analyses of society to explain why people didn’t care. Now the Left is stuck in a position where they keep having to rationalize why their garbage ideology doesn’t work and perpetually depict people as oppressed by external forces thus incapable of using their own agency to revolt. Consequently they worship inferiority and oppression and have strayed farther and farther from material analysis, effectively nuking the chance of actual revolution since most leftists don’t care about economics anymore and are the most degenerate and weak people in the world generally. Maybe one day they’ll realize Marx was wrong about communism and you don’t need to keep worshiping him in order to effect real change in the 21st century, especially considering leftists hardly have anything in common with Marx anymore

Thank you Marcuse & friends for inadvertently killing the revolution

>>18783904
Have you heard of the concept of the vanguard?

>>18784702
>because the toxic class anxiety of my PMC colleagues
Can you say more about this?

>>18784879
>Thank you Marcuse & friends for inadvertently killing the revolution
Uhh... anon

https://youtu.be/T5t3DC8RbOw

It's funny to me... like these Frankfurt School guys were critical of currents in the West at the time and how capitalist societies destroy people's spirits and that has somehow been attributed as causing those currents (even by some Western leftists) while Xi Jinping is like "oh, Marcuse, he had a lot of insight" and is quoting him in his speeches while PLA soldiers do transporter-erector-launcher moves with their bodies and other Command & Conquer Red Alert shit.

I think people are deeply wrong somewhere, but it's hard to even say where they're wrong because it's like... structurally wrong from the beginning so I don't even know where to start. It's really funny this has all happened though.

https://youtu.be/sxcE8a5X9aE?t=121

>>18784678
Why do socialists think just because someone skin is brown they're doing socialism? Castillo is just a South American succdem.
>pro-Cuba, pro-Venezuela,
Because they're fucking idiots drinking the kool-aid. Malcolm Caldwell is one the most famous examples, and what that leads to.

>>18785107
Pedro Castillo is just like the Khmer Rouge huh. The Shining Path would be a better analgoy. But this stuff about succdem, socialism, or whatever, I don't think they care. Why do rightards shit on people in the Global South when they elected popular, working-class leaders? It's like socialism is only supposed to be for Europeans as they sweep their gaze over the whole world and dismiss everything else like it doesn't matter.

That smells like BS to me.

And he appointed a Marxist economist as his prime minister and a former guerrilla from the 60s as his foreign minister. But he just got elected. Cut him some slack. I think they know their situation better than I do. They don't need me to go "oh but don't you know that this isn't 'real socialism' and blah blah blah," like it's not pure enough, and I'm somehow an authority because I'm racking up the victories from my jungle command post as I speak instead of posting on 4chan.

>>18784737
>>18784667
The problem is that you people are idealist;
>"THE VICTORY OF DEMOCRACY.—All political powers nowadays attempt to exploit the fear of Socialism for their own strengthening. Yet in the long run democracy alone gains the advantage, for all parties are now compelled to flatter“the masses”and grant them facilities and liberties of all kinds,with the result that the masses finally become omnipotent. The masses are as far as possible removed from Socialism as a doctrine of altering the acquisition of property. If once they get the steering-wheel into their hands, through great majorities in their Parliaments, they will attack with progressive taxation the whole dominant system of capitalists, merchants, and financiers,and will in fact slowly create a middle class which may forget Socialism like a disease that has been overcome."
Socialism has no appeal anymore because capitalism has created a large enough middle to starve off revolution. You people appealing to outdated economic theories because don't you objectively analyze current conditions. Being content with life is so easy for so many people nowadays because of how easy it is for consumerism solve peoples' basic needs. You people don't seem to realize you simply don't have the right type theoretical tools to face the issues you have in life. And, you're too arrogant to admit it.

>>18784960
they're more downwardly-mobile and precarious then they like to pretend, but on some level they must be aware and insecure of that economic fact, so they posture. It's annoying.
Try as it might, the PMC consistently fails to reproduce itself across generations.

>>18785135
>Pedro Castillo is just like the Khmer Rouge huh.
The analogy applies because you're a useful idiot who romanticizes political causes - you're just a walking propaganda machine for tyrants.
>Why do rightards shit on people in the Global South when they elected popular, working-class leaders? I
He wasn't even popular - he barely won. And so fucking what if he serves the "working-class" ; workers are the lowest members of society, the least deserving, the least impressive, least intelligent members of civilization. Society becomes decadent, degenerate when the destined slaves of the lower classes start giving the orders on how society should pander to them. It infects it with their pity, their weaknesses and whiny sorrows. When there is no elitism or aristocracy in society - the profligates, and managing the technical problems of their feeble, replaceable existance becomes law of the day. Life becomes boring and nihilistic - nobody wants to do something worthwhile anymore keep people "happy."

The concept of "workerism" is ridiculous in itself because you are just moralizing pauperization. Work in itself has no honor - its simply a means of existence for every organism, a futility effort that's wasted away in vain as you become closer to death. You have just deluded yourself into turning a natural, biological process into a ritual worth praise. Its ridiculous. Mere existence is not valuable, mere work, is not valuable either - its the type of work that you do on this Earth that you do makes you stand valuable. What can you do that no other human being can do is what makes men great, makes values worth pursuing, makes actions worth doing - not the virtues they share with the common man.

>>18784531
workers are too smart to read jargon soup from puffed up academics

>>18784879
>only my bourgeois subject should analyze society and anyone else that does so in a critical rigorous manner, working through the avoided and actual visible contradictions is a cope

Meanwhile the recurring crises are slowly eroding the confidence in economics as a discipline and showing how it doesn't question its priors and is a pseudoscience that serves to prop up capitalism. The right is constantly more concerned with Dr. Seuss and Mr. Potato Head along with other empty culture battles rather than things people are genuinely concerned about without offering any vision or solutions to the present and looming issues. This is an actual inferiority combined with false sense of oppression. They're unaware io their own degeneracy, ignoring their fellow man while larping as a christian in exchange for greed and selfishness; weak by having their stupidity channeled into performative acts generated by their dumb propaganda handlers, puffing their fat burger'd and fried selves into thinking they're bigger than they actually are.

The US's failures are constantly passed over in silence by the right wing hype-men, who get rich off of offering delusions. Millions were nearly evicted and the system is showing its cracks. Liberals don't get off scot-free, who see POCs becoming billionaires as progress.

Millions maybe hundred of millions were radicalized the past year and were given a true glimpse into the system and who it really prioritizes. There's nothing you can do about it.

>>18785220
>Meanwhile the recurring crises are slowly eroding the confidence in economics as a discipline and showing how it doesn't question its priors and is a pseudoscience that serves to prop up capitalism.
Not really? Delusional socialists like Bernie Sanders, and DSA members keep losing their elections - like Turner. The electoral pretty moderate, and have no time with this alarmist non-sense spewed by socialist activists from brookyln. You just don't appeal to the average worker as much you think you do. Class simply isn't everything to people.
>ignoring their fellow man while larping as a christian in exchange for greed and selfishness
Altruism is the selfishness of the weak, the pious paupers who lament their biological inferiority to survive.
>Millions were nearly evicted and the system is showing its cracks.
Blame the government for shutting down businesses, and blame people like you who spew conspiracy theories, just as much as conservatives do, to explain way your personal responsibilities. Its so easy to blame politicians - but who votes for them? You do. Who is ultimately responsible for your life? You are.
>Millions maybe hundred of millions were radicalized
Stop smoking pot and get off twitter.

>>18785202
Yeah, but just smrt enuf for the latest O'Reilly shitrag am I right?

>>18785135
>Marxism is the ruthless criticism of everything that exists
>NOOOO YOU CAN'T CRITICIZE MY THIRD WORLD SHITHOLES

>>18785162
I mean, in what way do they posture? What does their posturing look like?

>>18785220
Something I do wonder, what will the 20s look like. In the past two years ive seen fragments of the right wing evolve and change. Some willing to question capitalism and others outright attacking the various flaws of capitalism directly. What would have been high heresy a few years ago is now becoming more of a regular part of discussion. Increased disdain with the established right wing political entities and talking heads, in fact the only part of the right wing that seems at all consistent is the racial element, xenophobic aspects, and vehement hate for old style communism.
At a glance they are still the same but with the older generations dying off and inbound economic deterioration they will inevitably start to mutate into something other than what they are now. For all we know they could end up looking like classical fascists with genocidal tendencies

>>18785279
outlined it with my list

>>18785285
I think more and more people in America are becoming aware of the manufactured nature of news media and the political positions offered as exclusively possible or acceptable. So out of that you would expect more questioning of capitalism from "the right", but "the left" seem to be holding on pretty tenaciously to things like identity oppression politics and support for indiscriminate immigration. That would be the only reason I can imagine for any more extreme racial antagonism from the "other side", and I find fascism with genocidal tendencies pretty improbable.

"The left" in America seem too willing to liquidate any kind of national, popular consciousness. All this South American and third world stuff may be well and good, but I don't know much about it, and how does it relate to America? If "the right" continue to open up to questioning capitalism it will become less clear what is keeping them in that box at all except resentment from the "CIA left".

>>18785362
about the american left, I frequently find myself thinking if kaczynski was right about the natural rebellious tendencies with the current state of affairs being redirected from becoming a threat to the current system and instead pushed towards movements that are either neutral or perhaps helpful to the system. Ted was completely nuts though but he said a lot of interesting things
How many left wing americans give a damn about the plight of the worker? From what I can gauge its always something either irrelevant or detrimental to the worker, and sadly with the US being a global exporter of ideology these same irrelevancies that plague the left have proliferated through most of the first worlds left wing, although i wonder how these ideas fare outside of the first world in places like latin america

>>18785248
>The electoral pretty moderate
"In the Axios/Momentive poll, which saw 2,309 people in the US surveyed between 11 and 15 June, socialism, 41 per cent of all adults said they viewed socialism positively, rising from 39 per cent in 2019." -independent.co.uk
Young right wing are also more skeptical of capitalism than before.
>Altruism is the selfishness of the weak
Go inawoods by yourself, seperated from the rest of society and we'll see how superior you are and how long you last. Before 10,000 years ago people lived with and shared things with each other with no rulers or class division. You've merely accepted the logic of the current atomizing system. Congrats.

>Blame the government for shutting down businesses
Whether you want to admit it or not, people would still have changed their behavior even if the government somehow did less than it already has.
>conspiracy theories
Uh where? Please don't tell me you're a centrist.
>Its so easy to blame politicians - but who votes for them? You do. Who is ultimately responsible for your life? You are.
Clearly it's not just the politicians that are the problem but a lot of other things. Everyone knows the money in politics is an issue.

Birth and circumstances influences a huge part in how someone's life turns out, who they know as well and all. Society also plays a part in how people act to a certain degree, this can't be denied, as just merely looking at the world proves this. Just like a person can be the reason for their failings, society can be that too and hold someone back as well.

>>18784522
Fourierism was all the rage in the antebellum Boston intelligentsia. I believe it also was popular in continental Europe. In England they had Chartism, but I know little about that. Of course medieval Europe more or less solved this problem with the monastic system and the Shakers were a vestige of the same thing in Protestant America. Dorothy Day seemed to attempt a similar concept in a more modern context but I know very little about her work.

>>18785427
They also had Owen in England. Some of it was really interesting kibbutz/commune shit and Europeans in the 19th century were weirdly willing and able to get funding to go set up a socialist utopian experiment in South America or some shit.

The Wandervogel were also interesting and full of experiments related to the "back to the land" movements, e.g. Walther Darre's resuscitation of the German peasantry under the Nazis, which is the model of all modern ecologically conscious government. The Nazis basically invented green parties.

Counterculture only got turned into hippie faggotry in the 1960s to derail it. Free love elements were always in it, but it was always capable of being perfectly respectable.

>>18784667
>I'm a Marxist and a Fascist

Uuuuuh

>>18784299
>in modern capitalism the dirtiest and most dangeous work has been outsourced to poorer countries (cobalt mining in Africa
you dont think they mine cobalt in africa because thats where the fucking cobalt is?

>>18785285
Hard to say. As the newer generations move away from brute capitalism, which was such a focus for so many years with the red scare and all, it's hard to imagine where the pivot would be other than a larger emphasis toward insular isolationism and rara nationalism. Fascism? Don't really know. The surveillance apparatus is already there. I would expect more fear mongering and more blaming the left as the US regresses into economic deterioration and climate catastrophe. All things warned about before of course. Infrastructure is getting worse and there aren't any prospects for a huge project or anything.

The lack of long term thinking is what will bring it down. Nothing changed as the Amazon factories rose up and strip malls have lined from coast to coast, without much of anything left to posterity to wonder what the egotism was all about.

>>18784678
Ironically, Pedro seems to be more aligned with what in Europe would be Le Pen or even Vox. However, as a Latin American who has seen the harm of leftist politics in the region, I cannot but lament the fact that the left has become more populist and patriotic than a so-called right-wing, something which understandably attracts the mass of workers, who, after electing those leaders and gazing in disappointment, have to see the consequences of their mistaken choices.

>>18785448

>>18785404
You don't need to rely on Ted, you can follow the money to some extent and make inferences based on the known history of intelligence agencies, foundations and elite associations. isgp-studies.com is a good resource. Here is one paper on foundation funding of left media and think tanks from 2007: https://irasilver.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Reading-Foundations-Feldman.pdf

Really a lot of this comes back to common sense. You know the people making the big decisions are not your friends. Indiscriminate immigration and "refugee" resettling provides them with cheaper labor and undermines unionization, raises crime levels in many cases, and replaces declining native population levels. You know these are the most powerful people in the world, in history, and do not want to be seen that way but as public servants, philanthropists, defenders of their country. They will behave accordingly.

>>18785426
>Please don't tell me you're a centrist.
Not the anon you were arguing with but do people really think the only 'centrists' are people with "no convictions or beliefs"? Theodore John Kaczynski can be identified as a (radical) 'centrist', but I couldn't image anyone trying to claim that TJK has no serious convictions or beliefs. That anon said that
>Altruism is the selfishness of the weak
How is that not a conviction or belief (maybe you're just using some image you found elsewhere but you posted it so I'm holding you to it)? As if falling in between left-wing and right-wing economics or in between social progressivism and conservatism, or not feeling strongly for an extreme manifestation of either, makes you some wishy-washy faggot that doesn't want to argue and just thinks we should all democratically work things out. This is also me raging at (fellow) teenagers/young adults who think that anyone without an ideology to proclaim is not invested enough in the issues plaguing society. Also,
>Before 10,000 years ago people lived with and shared things with each other with no rulers or class division.
Don't know why this is at all relevant. Before 10,000 years ago some people also lived alone and did not share things. Before 10,000 years ago, rape as a means of reproduction was probably a relatively common occurrence.

>>18783904
>Marxist
>obscurantist
pick two. if they told the truth they wouldnt be marxists

>>18783904
It’s not for workers. It’s for urbanite 1% scum like most Marxist stuff. Only good Marxist(Pol Pot) coincidentally didn’t read Marx.

>>18784667
is that you?

>>18785652
Rougechads...I kneel...

>>18784710
>Fascism has always seemed like it has been tied up in some kind of chauvinism or imperialism. Or "my country is superior" or must dominate others, or "I don't have to listen to anyone else because I know what's best" and so forth, as opposed to a kind of socialist patriotism, you could say.

Just because you think yourself to be too good for it doesn't mean that others won't do it and eventually obliterate your society with their advantage of social cohesion and rootedness (however false it might seem to outsiders - whether it's faux-rootedness or real rootedness is besides the question).

When in doubt, follow Israel's example.

>>18785192
>you're just a walking propaganda machine for tyrants.
Oh, I'm the walking propaganda machine for tyrants while you're posting about people deserving to be slaves to an aristocracy. Gimme a break. All I'm saying is that guys like this powered that cowboy peasant teacher into office and I don't think they care what you or I think about them or their country:

https://youtu.be/_v1vWEIJ8YM

And where have I romanticized these dudes? Hauling copper out of the side of a mountain doesn't look very romantic. All I'm saying is, they know what's best for them, so it's not up to me to say "oh well don't you know that Pedro is not a real socialist" or something. It's just dumb.

Chilean copper miners might go strike now too at the biggest copper mine in the world. Probably will add to supply shocks. There's probably a whole bunch of it in the computer or phone you're typing on.

>>18785734
I'm aware others try to do it but you have to be careful about becoming your enemy to defeat your enemy. And I'm not sure if Israel will survive from a long-term point of view. It seems strong now, but it's like a crusader kingdom. Give it a few more decades or a century? Well, I might be wrong.

Everything turns into its opposite eventually. The weak and divided become united and strong. The united and strong become divided and weak. Oppression leads to revolution.

>>18785758
>you're posting about people deserving to be slaves to an aristocracy
They're slaves because of their biology - not legal fiat. They don't have the intelligence to be anything else. A retard like you thinks people with down syndrome deserve to be rulers when they are only fit to push rocks. When I speak of "slaves" - I speak the lower class, the under-deserving, the cogs in the machine who were born to be nothing else - that is your fate and fate. Marxism is just seducer for people who can't accept their fate to be ruled, and wish to take revenge for it.

>>18785758
The world ought to be ruled by philosopher kings, polymaths and distinguished warriors who can cultivate into the masses virtues that make them strong. A bum who can only shovel coal isn't worthy enough to rule; his black lungs can't produce great enough joys for this world.

>>18785773
>you have to be careful about becoming your enemy to defeat your enemy.

Why?

>>18785774
Externalizing and projecting evil and prophesizing a paradise-like utopia isn't how I look at it. Maybe some people do that and call themselves Marxists. But I think that's kind of like a secularized Christian messianism with this "good / evil" business where people split the world into Manichean categories, or there's a metaphysical all-mighty god who rolls the dice and we are created by him and we have souls and we are gonna live in heaven if we play his game nicely and so on.

But unless you're a subsistence farmer or a peasant, then things have changed. If you work a retail job or punch keys on a computer for pay or hand people bags of food out of a window, then I think that's evidence that the world doesn't consist of static, unchangeing categories, as if one thing can never change into another and that's "human nature."

>>18785794
Not him but caste systems that aren't open to merit and new blood just produce faggot oligarchs who are worse and more soulless than any peasant. At least peasants have earthy instinctive attachment to blood and soil. Oligarchs are a cancerous tumor.

Any nobility that relies on blood and legal privileges (privilege - privi-lege, private law, non-universal law, special laws for special faggot boys who gamed the system) immediately corrupts and produces faggot children who siphon money from real human beings so they can go to Coachella every year and other niggerrich behaviors.

>Nobility is defined by the demands it makes on us — by obligations, not by rights. Noblesse oblige. "To live as one likes is plebeian; the noble man aspires to order and law" (Goethe). The privileges of nobility are not in their origin concessions or favours; on the contrary, they are conquests. And their maintenance supposes, in principle, that the privileged individual is capable of reconquering them, at any moment, if it were necessary, and if anyone were to dispute them. ... It is annoying to see the degeneration suffered in today's speech by a word so inspiring as "nobility." For, by coming to mean for many people hereditary "noble blood," it is changed into something similar to common rights, into a static, passive quality which is received and transmitted, something inert. But the strict sense, the etymon of the word nobility, is essentially dynamic. Noble means the "well known," that is, known by everyone, famous, he who has made himself known by excelling the anonymous mass. (Ortega y Gasset)

Whatever comes next, it has to integrate the demotic principle of healthy respect and love for the people. The fuhrer isn't a tyrant king of an autistic rich daddy's boy who decides to invite Plato to his Syracusan or Medicean court so he can try some social experiments from his favorite philosophy twitters, like that queer Thiel is trying to make himself into. We are past that kind of behavior now. The fuhrer either serves the people or he isn't a fuhrer. No more idolizing dandy noblemen or their even more pathetic wannabe dandy successors, the petite bourgeoisie.

Doesn't mean gay ass tranny hedono-communism is the legitimate alternative, either. But no oligarchs.

>>18785830
The third- and fourth- generation children of privilege are truly repellent creatures, just look at George P. Bush, or Wyatt Koch's "fashion career." The average truck-driving yahoo who works at the dollar store has more dignity than this.

>>18785852
The inevitable degeneration of embedded privileged classes is proof that God loves us. It's like a guaranteed weapon in the hands of any people struggling for freedom. You may not be able to count on your landlord being incompetent in suppressing rebellious peasants, but statistically speaking, you can sure as fuck depend on his grandchildren being retarded spendthrift women who aren't even strategic about maintaining their power.

>>18784142
Philosophy used to be a priestly and ruling-class institute, so not really. The bourgeoisie only picked philosophy up after the churches were closed and middle class secular universities opened up. And nowadays there is no real distinction between proles and bourgies. Proles can easily get grants to go to high tier universities if they're gifted enough, if not they can go to regular universities thanks to government loans. Philosophy is basically a fourth-estate business now, it's not even restrained to the bourgeoisie.

>>18785652
Pol Pot really did nothing wrong.
But what about the births during that same period? Surely you have to take into account the fact that while people die, new people are being born?

>>18785817
Because this is what you get. The right are kinda like... doomed, I think. Or they see a prophecy of the future but they don't realize that their actions were decisive in creating the future they were frightened about in their nightmare in the first place. It's like Novikov self-consistency principle or the 12 Monkeys or something where any projections backwards from the future are part of the history already.

In fact the right-wing of late has been the most homogenized and integrated into capital version of the right wing there has ever been. Trump was basically the end of the right believing there could be an economic order outside of what we have now, not by any conscious admission, but rather a game of pretend where they pretend they created a resurgent industrial America when they did nothing even close to that, so they can now move on from the economic issues forever and just be content to the neoliberalism they have been fully integrated into. Of course this has meant that they've become totally enthralled with cultural battles as a result, and then been consumed by them.

It would've been better for them if they just stayed out of that instead of being spurred on by grifters looking to make a buck. Or maybe it's like debt. The right brought money from the future forward to today and then went bankrupt.

There's more to be said here (since we're talking about the Frankfurt School) about how culture is being more and more integrated to the production level of society -- as in, the base is cannibalizing the superstructure to try and bring about some capacity to maintain profit off of culture. This is by no means new of course, but we now exist in a true "culture industry" where artistry is largely gone in favor of massed corporate production of predictable and repetitive art pieces that can be counted upon to bring in large-scale profits from their production.

This also means that, increasingly, more and more middle-class people in the first world countries are being "forced" into politics, but as a kind of entertainment of spectacle. This is why you get all this right-wing obsession with aesthetic being critiqued in the same way they critique all of the media they dislike, because to them the media and the politics are basically the same thing in their minds.

I'll be back later, but about becoming your enemy... you know who else tried to become their enemy to defeat their enemy? The Soviet Union. They become obsessed with the superpower game and seeking hegemony. Or the arms race. But the U.S. could outspend them so it was a losing game. So why would you mirror your enemy? Their system was the best, they said, and it's a one-stop model that everyone can adopt. We don't have to listen to anybody, or learn from anyone. Marxism became a dogma instead of a living, breathing thing, and sooner or later, they negated Marxism. Well it was the first attempt.

>>18785918
Related

>>18785936
>in contrast to orthodox Marxism, Marcuse champions non-integrated forces of minorities, outsiders, and (((radical intelligentsia))), attempting to nourish oppositional thought and behavior through promoting radical thinking and opposition.

Just wanna say this is a lovely thread lads

>>18785944
The left's fetish for Jews as the ultimate victims, and its terror of "sliding into fascism" by ever criticizing them is the most effective thought control technique ever created

Why assume that anyone who earns a wage from an employer is unable to read dense theory?

Ngl guys I fucking love how Post-Modernism allows every single aspect of reality to be viewed from every single perspective possible, even made-up ones, and still have value; seeing people cope from their inability to accept some flaws in political thought they admire or identify with or accept some aspects from other schools of thought into their own makes them seem so stunted


>>18785510
Damn son

>>18784356
this

Back in the late 19th early 20th century labour union days workers did read Marx

>>18786105
In the US though?

I get it's difficult maybe from an Australian's (my) point of view cause I very readily put America as 'the developed west' as a whole, but I would've thought the red scare was already in motion even during the early 20th since people were very fond of their capitalist ideals

>>18785918
Very good post anon

I especially agree about the point describing that endless 'culture war' that seems to be all the rage nowadays compared to systematic change in relation to work

>>18786109
Unlike most other Western countries America hasn't ever really had a democratic socialist labour party but they did have lots of union activity like the IWW and so on especially around the Depression era.

>>18786125
Yeah

Idk I don't really know too much of the history, but to me it always feels like the idea of even Unions being a POPULAR feature of society in America feels unreal

>>18783904
What did he see that made him look so sour?

>>18785918
Yes. People haven’t accepted that the turmoil with Trump was just a final cope for America. The Right is dying and can’t survive the socioeconomic developments of the globalized world, and they aren’t even willing to interpret things any differently to save themselves because they’re still committed to outdated 18th century liberal philosophy and 20th century capitalist worship. It’s not even worth taking them seriously. As usual when the system fails they’ll react with genocidal rage because they refuse to come up with a better way of life.

>>18785912
Yes. This is why the image is wrong.

>>18786145
>I don't really know too much of the history
Obviously not.

>>18786938
lol
The Virgina Mountain revolts and such just seem very un-American when compared to most of the 20th century and such is all I mean to say

So go read Dubofsky, or the history of the CPUSA as a history of its trade unionists.