/lit/ - Literature

>>6067780

Marx was a talentless hack,
The USSR was a catastrophe
And he encouraged cultural Marxism
Evola > Marx

>>6073095
>not explaining how and why the USSR was "a catastrophe"
>not considering historical-material conditions
>not considering other socialist nations
>not proving anything inherently wrong with "cultural marxism"
>guiding yourself on assumptions and would-be insults

>>6073095
other than maybe family what is wrong with any of those goals? When did marx even say anything like that in the first place?

>>6073095
Don't you feel retarded repeating neonazi propaganda about something you know nothing about?

>>6073068

If we're going to have one of these, can we at least agree to ignore all the bait?

Maoism then: Communism is not love. Communism is a hammer which we use to crush the enemy.

Maoism now
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sjRSBHbBws

What the fuck happened?

>>6073880
>What the fuck happened?
At least six line failures by Mao himself.

The failure to elevate Zhao En Lai in the 1950s.

>>6073095
Carl Schmitt was edgier and smarter than Evola, tho. He took Marx seriously. Evola just took Marxist theories of eras of production fiddled with the dates, added mystic elemental power names and called it a day.

>>6074141
Yeah and Leo Strauss was smarter than Schmitt but if you read him then you're out of the edgezone entirely, so

>2015
>not being a Hoxhaist

Is it just me or is Marxism being talked about more these days? Ive been seeing posters on the streets for Marxist meetings

>>6074155
You've never actually read Strauss. This is the dude who thinks being a hikko is the only political life, and that all philosophers basically agree god is bullshit.

>>6074176
>Hoxhaist
Now, that's an edgy position, better than being a trot.

>>6074181
Just you, well at least where I live is the same shit as ever, confined into Unions and Universities with the occasional "protest".

>>6074181
You're thinking about Marx, thus you see the signs of Marx that were already present.

Posters for Marxist meetings are normally put up by the worst bottom feeding churn sects.

>>6074187
I have read Strauss (and Schmitt fwiw) so

I'm not sure who you're trying to refer to in the second sentence - me? yourself? some third person? so I'm kind of at a loss there

>>6073095
>destroy spooks
What a catastrophe.

Why do we need another worthless thread? What is different about your religion since yesterday?

>>6073880
Maoism happened.
That's the west.

>>6074204
Strauss

How do I into marxism?

>>6074234
Theses on Feuerbach
Criticism of the Gotha Programme
Socialism Utopian & Scientific
Wages Price and Profit
German Peasants War
Condition of the Working Class in England
Family Private Property and the State
Anti-Dühring
German Ideology
Contribution to a Critique
Capital 1-3
Grundriesse

Then your choice of Lenin, Mao and Trotskyism
OR
your choice of Councillism, Workerism and Autonomism

>Posadism as an ideology, supports the potential for Third World revolution, is enthusiastic about nuclear war and space exploration

>Beginning in 1968, Posadas also became known for his theories concerning UFOs. If anything like UFOs existed, they could demonstrate the existence of agents able to master a very sophisticated technology, something that would be compatible with what in this planet was advocated by socialism. If UFOs existed, they could be allied in addressing some of the major problems in the earth.

>In his pamphlet Les Soucoupes Volantes, le processus de la matiere et de l'energie, la science et le socialisme (Flying Saucers, the process of matter and energy, science and socialism), Posadas pleaded that "“We must call upon beings from other planets when they come to intervene, to collaborate with the inhabitants of the Earth to overcome misery. We must launch a call on them to use their resources to help us.”

>Posadas was also thought to have a large ego as indicated by his habit of ending his articles by exclaiming "Long live Posadas!"

So we can all agree that Posadism>>>>>every other current of communist thought

>>6074246
>supporting trots
>argentinian trots

>>6074234
>>6073083

>>6074259
Space Trots though.

>>6073095
>evola
4chan is 18+

Whats wrong with Trotsky?

>>6074246
>Posadism as an ideology, supports the potential for Third World revolution, is enthusiastic about nuclear war and space exploration
literally maoism

>>6074591
> Factionalist
> Partisan
> Accuses his enemies of political purges after planning the repression of Anarchists in civil war resulting in some 600 000 dissident casualties
> Loud but unimportant
> Split international

>>6073880
> What the fuck happened?
The West never fought a cultural revolution.
>>6074069
> Mao
> Failures

Also why would Zhou Enlai need to have been elevated in 50s when he was the presumed heir and second in charge of PRC?

>>6074629
>Also why would Zhou Enlai need to have been elevated in 50s when he was the presumed heir and second in charge of PRC?

Because Mao was objectively counter-revolutionary, a personality cultist, a substitutionalist, not party-minded, and needed to be buried in a fish canning factory.

Meanwhile, Zhao had a nuanced attitude towards the actual capitalism existing in China, but had a continuous and conscious attitude of constantly elevating the power of workers themselves. Zhao was the position where a second, successful, material, revolution could have been built within China.

>>6074689
>Because Mao was objectively counter-revolutionary, a personality cultist

This is nonsense, being held in the highest esteem by the people doesn't make you a "personality cultist".

>>6074701
Tell me again about his swimming the yangzi?

Or his right-"ultraleft"-right-"ultraleft" continuous vacillation?

"Every Socialist outbreak only blazes new paths for Capitalism."
-Oswald Spengler

Prove him wrong.

>>6074720
what do you even mean

>>6074738
Fucksake, if you know this little about Mao's role in crushing the Chinese revolution…

>>6074737
The results of the Hungarian and Czechoslovak revolutions have not been reincorporated into capitalism as repressive apparatus.

The destruction of the welfare state as a space of freedom in the West has only resulted in the recreation of the workplace as a place where the value form can be contested.

Spengler's attempts to totalise history are trivially falsified.

What do you think of Zizek /marx/?

Good comrade or liberal

>>6074762

>are trivially falsified
>names temporary and small concessions by capitalists that is now being dealt with as we speak

>>6074762

Wait you just said that the welfare state is being destroyed and then you say Spengler is wrong...?

>>6074765
He views Marxism through Lacan and Hegel. I mean, its better than nothin

>>6074762

But they've been incorporated, doofus.

>>6074737
I'd like to see his mystical proof for that statement.

>>6074804

Why can Marxists only appreciate their reading of history?
Bunch of scary totalitarian nitwits.

>>6074792
>workers councils
>concessions
You're more than a bit dumb?

>>6074794
You view the welfare state as an achievement?

As it is destroyed, old terrain of struggle is once again reopened: that old terrain was never converted into capital with permanence.

>>6074804
A bird told him. Birds are important in AUC.

>>6074819

Capitalists are still in power.
They're not defeated.
It's a concession by them.
Don't get your hopes up yet, Syriza.

>>6074826

>some more commie speak

And your shit was never converted in communism with permanence.
Who is the winning team here?

>>6074811
>>6074835
Why are anti-commies so disingenuous all the time?

>>6074835
>winning team
One side needs to win every time. The other only needs to win once.

>>6074831
Workers councils have never been conceded. They have been loathed. Their destruction is the key indicative point that the Bolsheviks were in no way associated with the class movement in Russia. They are the inconvertible economic form of workers' self-emancipation.

>German trilaterial consultative committees.
Yeah no, fuck off with that chap, they're not workers councils.

>>6074846

>One side needs to win every time. The other only needs to win once.

Some bullshit Marxist utopian expectations.
I'm not gonna debate your daydreams.

>Workers councils have never been conceded. They have been loathed.

You can make a concession and still hate what you just did.
The two aren't mutually exclusive.
What is revanchism?

>>6074811
Spengler is very far from every other reading of history except Marxism. It doesn't take a Marxist to take a reading of history where the author actually comes out and says he wants you to abide his homemade bullshitry because college iz 4 fagz.

>>6074845

Because we don't wanna end up in dysfunctional system that's been thought up by liberal arts losers.

>>6074866

Spengler never said that.
And what's wrong with homemade readings of history? Can it only be legit if it was written in your precious faculty of arts?

>>6074846

i doubt you're even a worker kid, kek

>>6074762

Nice cherrypick.

>>6074885
Your doubts don't change my rent or wage.

>>6074864
Yes, but the concession that will never be made is workers councils. Because that isn't a concession: it is the abolition of capital.

>>6073095
>right wingers telling me pic related
>yeah I know
>their face

>>6074893
When someone makes a total claim any negating evidence negates the claim. This isn't cherry picking, it is refutation.

>>6074880
It's nice to have other people there to make sure you didn't make things up.

What went wrong?

>>6074917

>check out my autism

Oh yeah he should have said "most outbreaks".
Keen eye of yours.

>>6074912
>b-b-but you deny HUMAN NATURE!

>>6074919

>I need constant validation and confirmation from my commie peers

Disgusting.

>>6073880
maoists are a caricature and the neckbeards of communism
prove me wrong maofags

>>6074928
simply epic

>>6074176
Why?

>>6074928

>discouse made me human

LE EBIN UNVERIFIABLE CLAIM

I read all the shit, so you can't say I didn't try, but to simply claim we're a clean slate is as much a caricature of what we are as lolbertarian psychology.

>>6074930
Not all Maoists, it's just that the people who cosplay communism tend to end up as Maoists for some reason.

>>6074924
Here's a clue, if you want to be treated seriously as a historian, make small provable claims.

>>6074940
All of the crazy of Maoism.
All of the cuisine of Albania.

>>6074946
this
maoists and especially MTWs are LARPies

>>6074689
>Because Mao was objectively counter-revolutionary, a personality cultist, a substitutionalist, not party-minded, and needed to be buried in a fish canning factory.
I'm not against Zhou but this is reactionary nonsense.

>>6074941
>to simply claim we're a clean slate
Nobody is claiming clean slates when they say there's no human nature. It's not like you have history on one side and empty human shells on the other; humans are immanent to history, that's the point of anti-humanism.

>>6074949

Goes to shown you haven't read much 19th and early 20th century writers, or you judge their style of writing by the one of today.
They loved to make such bold claims because it gave it a nice literary flavour.

>>6074962

Except you are.
Otherwise the ebin "haha, dey believe in human nature xD" meme /lit/ is forcing wouldn't be there.

You never define what IS human nature then, even if it is so "unimportant" as you claim.

>>6074923
The capitalist roaders and their ultra-left stooges defeated the USSR and made China retreat to capitalism, though the communist spectre is still in Chinese politics.

>>6074966
Yes, I've read them. And it is metaphysical trash rejected by the discipline.

Please tell me how the birds telling Spengler undemonstrable and trivially falsified claims is a basis for believing Spengler's account of the world. Please tell me why we should believe a man who advocates inspiration, makes false claims, and has no evidence?

The end of fairy tales is the beginning of history. There are many respectable reactionary and conservative historians who agree on this point.

>>6074954
Maoism is revisionism

>>6074940

https://theredstarvanguard.wordpress.com/2011/06/11/a-brief-guide-to-hoxhaism/

What's with college kids and their "worker solidarity"?

Fuck this readers' romanticism for real.

>>6074982
are you really that detached from reality?
>muh ultra left splitters
>muh revisionist

holy fuck everything after Lenin was complete horseshit.

>>6074982
Yeah, the capitalist roaders defeated the USSR before its formation. In 1918. By crushing the political power of the workers councils, and finalised this in 1919 by crushing the possibility of a 3rd revolution against social democratic capitalism.

China retreated to capitalism in 1949.

>>6074993
Most college students are the children of workers, and will become workers. Their fantasy about workers solidarity is that they are not in fact workers. They seek to enjoy demonstrative (ideological) Marxism or progressivism or radical liberalism, to cement their enjoyment of their fantasy that they are not in fact workers, when they are.

Denying the real they continuously replay the fantasy by outsiding themselves from their own struggle, instead of burning down the sports team's facilities and the administrative block that suck their tuition money and leave them as debt slave indentured labour.

So that's why: they seek to deny their own condition by projecting it on another. Like fucking a woman exactly like your mother.

>>6074986

>The end of fairy tales is the beginning of history.

I couldn't have tipped my fedora any harder.
But seriously, any white dude who goes on a somewhat religious outlook gets all the hate from this side of the spectrum.

You guys have read to many 'critiques' of New Age bullshit that any spiritual point of view is seen as fluffy bird singing inspired and tree hugging hippie nonsense.

>>6075023
>birds aren't important
Read more about rome you horrible cunt.

It isn't the religiosity that is causing this hate, it is the pretence that religious thinking is appropriate thinking in relation to history. Religious thinking has its sphere: theology, where it rules as queen.

>>6075051

>implying religion without an outlook on the human past, present and future can exist

>>6074980
>Except you are. Otherwise the ebin "haha, dey believe in human nature xD" meme /lit/ is forcing wouldn't be there.
You're not making any argument here.

>You never define what IS human nature then
"human nature" (in quotes) is a historical a priori, meaning we neither get to freely choose who we are as liberalism wants you to believe, nor is there some universal (human nature in the full sense) which is would be pure platonism.
>even if it is so "unimportant" as you claim.
But anti-humanism is saying that human nature is unimportant but that there is none.

>>6075075

>human nature doesn't exist

Ok, nice try to sell me that caricature again.
Coming from the guy who hates unverifiable nonsense.

>>6075075

>"human nature" (in quotes)
>(in quotes)

What is this bullshit?
Go fall from a set of stairs you pretentious cunt.

>>6075068
>>implying religion without an outlook on the human past, present and future can exist

Firstly, Buddhism.

Secondly, theology deals with sacred texts, not social reality. For social reality you want religious studies, which remarkably, plays by the disciplinary rules of historiography, sociological methodology, anthropological methodology and archaeological methodology.

Theologians are often informed by other disciplines, like what was actually happening in the Levant around 1000BC, but in relation to sacral space declare that sacral realities may vary from—for example—the archaeological reality that high places were dominated by polytheistic sex cults, not by post first temple written male YHWHism.

>>6075093

What is the Maitreya?

>>6075083
Read history. Ways of living, thinking, and perceiving change radically and to the core. That's why the Greeks are such a big enigma for us, even though they're supposedly the foundation of the West.

>>6075087
Just preventive measures because some people are really bad at interpreting language.

>>6075116
>Maitreya
Corrupt hinduism and a misreading of immanence.

Marxism is the opium of the intellectuals.

>>6075093

And theology does deal with social reality.
You haven't been reading much of it.

All the other shit you wrote was a nice way to look informed, but in actual fact religion is inseperable from organizing social reality, it's intrinsic to it and it dictates the outlook in both directions.

>>6075123
The Greeks are enough of an enigma that Robert Graves could eisegesize his ball-busting fantasy into them. We have no good idea about whether Greek women were domestically (oikonomically) disempowered or not.

>>6075126

>muh pure original buddhism

Nice protestantism, faggot.
I expected nothing else from a Marxist.

>>6075123

You focuss too much on the differences and too little on the communalities.
Humans still would tap that ass in any time and place.

That's some human nature right there.

>inb4 this is getting too vulgar, I feel like I'm gonna faint

>>6075137
I see you're misreading the actuality of peasant religiosity in medieval Europe. Is there any instance in which your idealism will not obscure your view of social reality? EISEGESIS, EISEGESIS EVERYWHERE.

>>6075126

Except the Buddha himself claimed all these eschatological "addenda".
So not a misreading.

>>6075144

And what have medieval peasants got to do with this now?

Is Catholicism less Christian because of its pagan elements? Do you want to go have this discussion now?

None of you are intelligent.

>>6075144

>there is a view of social reality without ideas/ideals/idealism

kek, and here's the dude talking about "le scientific perspective dis homeschooled augur in early 20th century germany couldn't have"

you're really some sophomoric fuckboi.

>>6075153
This. The level of discussion on /lit/ has degraded considerably since the incident with Katie. An influx of redditors, most likely.

Well, at least you're making me feel better about myself. I was going through a low point recently where I actually entertained the possibility that I might not be a genius. There's a bright side to everything, I suppose.

>>6075145
>Except the Buddha himself claimed all these eschatological "addenda".
>So not a misreading.

I see you have no understanding of the textual transmission of Buddhism. GJ! Add bad theology to your bad historiography. Soon you'll have a negative degree in the humanities!

>>6075140
>You focuss too much on the differences and too little on the communalities.
The more you ignore the difference the more empty statements about commonalities become. Like this:
>Humans still would tap that ass in any time and place.
Without context this doesn't tell us much. It is only when you start to pay attention to the concrete practice of tapping that ass that the statement starts to mean something e.g. stoic way of tapping that ass versus ours.
To use an analogy, it is true that bugs and humans are both animals, yet the category of an animal is meaningless by itself, neither does it exist by itself like Plato's Ideas. To say otherwise is basically Platonist Darwinism.

>>6075149
Catholicism never existed until after protestantism. Peasants controlled their own religiosity in Europe. Protestantism and counter-reformation Catholicism were both inventions by Princes to destroy peasant religiosity.

And yes, this is a discussion to have now, because it is fundamentally about class in medieval Europe.

>>6075162
Trivially and fundamentally self-contradictory ideologies are necessarily less useful in a false explanation of reality than ideologies whose flaws mean they are closer to reality than the prior while never meeting it.

>>6075174

Excuse me faglord, but the "falsely attributed to the Buddha" argument won't save you from horribly incorrect about the Buddhist canon.

Plus, it matters shit what the "actual Buddha" said because it doesn't matter since Buddhism is as it is now and that's all that matters, not your Anglo-Saxon induced protestant urges.

>>6075180
It saves me if my construction of theology is, as indicated above, a populist revolutionary one based in the praxes of the labouring classes.

Get fucked you tool of the princes.

>>6073095
capitalism destroys family/religion/nation more effectively than any other ideology. Destroys private property too as wealth goes up the way and social mobility down.

>>6075175

>Without context this doesn't tell us much.

Well of course humans never develop without a "context" because without one we'd be food for wolves.
There is nothing profound about all this "iz le social that constructs who we are" crap because we have always, from common ancestor with chimpansee days, lived in packs.
Still, that doesn't mean ALL shit changes in how the pack organizes itself or what the pack can organize it with.

>>6075190
You need to revisit your understanding of "private property" in Marxism.

>>6075189

>It saves me if my construction of theology is, as indicated above, a populist revolutionary one based in the praxes of the labouring classes.

>>I want to save Buddhism from its reactionary episode


I'm gonna leave this thread because your head is too far up your pretentious clenched asshole.
Also "Platonist Darwinism", kek, you're really the new theory dude are ya?

>>6075199
do you have a point to make?

>>6075175

>neither does it exist by itself like Plato's Ideas.

look everyone, he understands nominalism.

>>6075179

>Catholicism never existed until after protestantism.

What is the Eastern Orthodox Church?

>>6075206
Private property is not personal possessions. As capital has concentrated private property –the means and tools of production – in the hands of the bourgeoisie, private property has intervened more and more into people's lives as that which they do not own.

The reduction of personal property held by all other social classes doesn't indicate that private property has been in the least destroyed.

>>6075213
>What is the Eastern Orthodox Church?
A result of nationalism in the 19th century.

The hierarchy never extended any deeper than the Bishops in Western Europe, and the peasantry controlled religion.

>>6075215
Nope. Private property is fundamentally land ownership.

>>6075202
>theory
This perfectly demonstrates that you are as divorced from the reality of the situation as Frankfurt is.

>>6075221
>I am a cretin.
Go start a single tax thread.

>>6075220

>the Schism wasn't real

>>6075224

What in god's name are you... You really need to chill.

I'm a graduate myself but I can still communicate.
You've got a lot to prove it seems.

>>6075227
>what is ecological crisis

>>6075228
The schism had almost no effect on the actuality of christianity in the villages. Keep substituting institutions for social reality, and keep substituting ideas for institutions. It will make my class's triumph easier.

>>6075234

>my class's triumph

I'm out.

>>6075239
You're posting in a Marx thread as if the actuality of the immanence of proletarian revolution is neither a belief nor praxis of Marxists you may encounter in that thread? Were you born dumb, or was this a great achievement in your life?

>>6075234

It did faggot.
The organization of the Eastern Church was in a myriad of ways different from the West, which did affect it.
Not to mention the ritus which diverged from the Catholic Church.

>>6075234

>It will make my class's triumph easier.

spoiler alert: "your class" (the genetically inferior) will keep losing forever and ever and ever

>>6075247

It's the way you phrased it shithead.
It's the way you phrased it.

>>6075251
>institutional declaration is necessarily and immediately a change in community practices

Please tell me more of your ideas about how great leaders create reality through the power of thought.

>>6075239
>Implying a Marxist-Leninist would describe themselves as a "defender of human rights"

If you're going to shitpost, you've got to do your research first.

>>6075258

Fucking hell, you have no idea what you're talking about. Just look at the liturgy, for example, it's already vastly different.
Or how the Eastern Church conducted services in in native languages.

>>6075257
And the world conforms to your pathetic need for cultural validation by matching its expressions to your desires.

Fuck me you're a cunt.

>>6075258
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuius_regio,_eius_religio

>>6075258

>this shitty understanding of the base and superstructure model

Back to your books, kid.

>>6075283
I'm sorry that you can't see the relationships between people for the institutions, and that you naïvely believe institution's accounts of the past. I'm sorry that you take the state of things in the 21st century as indicative of the state of things in the 9th century. That you believe that the institutions of the elite singularly impose their will, with absolute success, on collectives of people as if objects.

But you are a stupid fucking cunt and there's no helping your ignorance. I'd suggest you read Engel's German Peasants War but you're obviously fixated on the state as a father figure.

>>6075292
Which took 200 years of men on horses murdering people to reduce popular religiosity to state religion.

>>6075314

>I'd suggest you agree with me

kek

>>6075314

Dude again, you have a very shitty understanding of the base and superstructure model.
Ideas DO have an effect.
They aren't just the waves on greater currents.

>>6075314

>I'd suggest you read an idea and get affected by it

That can't happen you know.

>>6075332
I've repeatedly demonstrated the limits of your theory of history with reference to known empirical data. You have responded by restating your theory and its conclusions.

I'm sorry if you don't get what has happened, but expect to be ignored if you repeat this conduct.

>>6075343

You haven't referenced to any empirical data in this thread.

>>6075335
Go masturbate to Adorno more. The absence of the penetration of "ideas" into peasant religiosity was due to the material autonomy of the villages. The argument that ideology has any affect on the proletariat is solely due to the alienation of the working class and its inability to subsist independently of its relationship with capital.

>>6075347
There's an entire literature on popular religiosity in Europe. Your ignorance is not my concern.

>>6075371

'Literature' on a subject isn't empirical data you huge fuckwit.

>>6075371

Popular religiosity wasn't this detatched from upper class theology prole syncretism

What have you been reading then?

>>6075384
You've got a great understanding of historiography, and for that matter of English.

>>6075388

It's not my native language.
How many do you speak, you champion of the masses?

>>6075388

What has historiography have to do with any of that?
A book (interpretation of) on empirical data isn't empirical data.

>>6075387
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2124817 &tc.

>>6075392
The day when I fuck up in public on a moonrune board during an intense and language specific discussion, feel free to tear my anus into my vagina. Until then, fuck yourself with a broken bottle.

>>6075395
>What does historiography have to do with whether books supply empirical data on the past.

GJ!

>>6075402

So how many workers have you talked with today?
How was your toil on the factory floor?

>>6075399

> the link does not resolve to any existing content

Pretty much like your point of view.

The Shoah killed orthodox marxism, y'all need critical theory as well.
That being said, how can we turn more people into communists? Communism desperately needs more people behind it, more organic intellectuals, if you will. But how, more propaganda, more effective propaganda?

>capitalism destroys family/religion/nation more effectively than any other ideology. Destroys private property too as wealth goes up the way and social mobility down.

This is incorrect we had moral capitalism for 200+ years in the US, everything went to shit when Marxism was pumped into our culture

>>6075408
>http://www.jstor.org/stable/2124817
It resolves fine. Do you know what "&tc." means? Obviously not.

>>6075412
The thing that makes organic intellectuals organic is their reflection on their material experience as workers, not bourgeois propaganda with a red background.

IF ONLY PEOPLE WERE MARXIST WE'D BE SO HAPPY

At least you people have something to keep yourselves busy with before you die.

>>6075412
We need to turn purple into reactionaries not communist

>>6075418
And who's reflecting these days? Fucking nobody.

>>6075414
>everything went to shit when Marxism was pumped into our culture
>Americans actually believe this

Enjoy watching your shit culture, wage stagnation and loathsome political culture get even worse while you blame "cultural Marxism"

>>6075416

I don't know where you get this idea that popular religiosity wasn't affected by ideas and not just material conditions.

You're just a vulgar materialist shithead, that's what you are.
Any historian will look at your bullshit about ideas being irrelevant to the goings of history with a smirk on their face.

>>6075424
I don't expect to gain much from my political beliefs and activism and almost certainly will I never experience a socialist, let alone a communist society. I just can't stand by and do nothing, though.

>>6075414

Marxism in America is either a monstrous other or it is influence that leads to a socialism that is poisoned by a view of the individual as discrete and independent. The reason Marxism never penetrated is that the people who were interested in some of the things that underwrite Marxism, not socialism, were part of the old-school conservative (Burkean and Christian) party platform: nuclear family, virtue, and so on. These conservatives saw Marxism to a threat to the institutions they believed underwrote the freedom to participate in families, have virtue, and so on.

>>6075431
That's weird, because I've been participating in a self-education circle where we discuss our working lives. All it took was beer, smokes, and people who are willing to talk about work.

>>6075445

I'd rather survive within my own niche and make the best of it than being cannon fodder for some shitty cause I have no guarantee of success.

>>6075449
That's nice to hear. Next time also talk about Marx, plz

>>6075456
You don't necessarily have to be canon fodder. At least where I live it's not illegal to spread communist ideology

>>6075458
>That's nice to hear. Next time also talk about Marx, plz
Marx is largely irrelevant to workers cultivating praxis and the production of organic intellectuals. This is one of the greatest secrets of Marxism, unless you're a councillist or workerist in which case it is the first public information provided.

>>6075464
Care to elaborate?

>>6075461

Yeah but you know that that specific cause its succeeding is predicated upon revolution, i.e. violence.

>>6075470
And we're light years away from that.

>>6075480

And light years away from convincing any 'workers';
But good luck with that, I guess.
Time is precious and I've only got a few decades. I'd rather waste it on something else than a lost cause, which it most probably is.

>>6075468
A fair bit of this is in the Zizek thread, but:

Ideology is a form of knowledge constrained to the bourgeois individual and is radically deficient in its knowledge of the world because it forms a false mirror of actuality.

In contrast, the proletariat is capable of praxis, a form of collective doing knowledge derived from group test. This is possible, in a way impossible for the bourgeoisie, because divorced from the individuating property form, the proletariat's material basis is collective. Unlike the peasant's interest in a property form, the proletariat has no property form.

Therefore: the only real knowledge of the world, ie: the ones voiced ideologically by organic intellectuals, is praxic, not ideological.

Marxism is a form of knowledge transmitted from individual to individual through language. It is ideological.

Marxism is radically deficient compared to the knowledge the proletariat collectively and spontaneously produces in praxis.

Therefore: Marx is irrelevant to workers' praxis.

>>6075508
Praxis is theory laden.

I guess what couldn't hurt is if the radical left was more professional. Selling communism instead of asking if somebody would please, please listen for a minute. Hiring advertising agencies for propaganda pieces, having people educated in rhetorics and shit for talkshows, consulting on how to reach more people if need be, shit like that.

>>6073095
>Destroy the family
>Destroy private property
>Destroy religion
>Destroy the nation
Where can I sign up?

>>6075514
>Praxis is theory laden.
Theorisation only exists as the organisational responses to failed expressions of power. The Union is a completely different expression of theory to Ideology.

>>6075522
Not him but why would you want to destroy the family?

>>6075526
Didn't you read any of my dialogues, plebeian?

>>6075519
>Selling communism instead of asking if somebody would please, please listen for a minute. Hiring advertising agencies for propaganda pieces

Now this some pure ideology

>>6075508
Not really in the mood to wrap my head around it, but I just refuse to believe that it's irrelevant to read Marx.

>>6075531

>>6075170
What's "the incident with Katie"?

>>6075547

>>6075560
Bitch had it coming. We done Joey Bada$$'d her.

>>6075532
In short: Marxism is one of the least incorrect bourgeois ideologies. But it is radically deficient compared to the class for itself.

>>6073068
Let me guess, you all have a liberal arts degree and can't find jobs.
>"muh marx"
You are all lazy worthless pieces of shit, get a real degree and earn some money.

>>6075568
Found the guy who's never read Marx.

>>6075590
>"muh exploitation!"
>"muh evil business owners!"
Please kill yourself.

>>6075603
>"muh evil business owners!"
Read Marx you fucking idiot, he explicitly makes a point about capitalists not being greedy assholes.

>>6075603
>muh exploitation
What else would you call it when someone produces value, but has to give most of it to someone else?

>>6073068
I think I am a closed minded fascist, and I want to learn more about left wing political ideas so I don't hold onto retarded ideas so rigidly.

Should I just dive into books written by marx/hegel/lacan?

also how would a marxist society handle ethnicity, if say, there was a culture that did not tolerate another?

>>6075660
unless you're an edge lord naturally attracted to extremism (which, judging from self identifying as a fascist, might be the case), trying to understand the political left probably shouldn't start with the revolutionary far left.

just saiyan

>>6075674
so are you going to help me or point me in a direction or are you going to tell me what not to do

lmao

>>6075660
Try an introduction into Marx, all of Das Kapital at once is a bit much and not needed to give you an overview.

A society cannot be marxist, marxism is a tool with which you can analyse society and economy in particular. That being said, according to it there wouldn't be different cultures not tolerating each other because well, why wouldn't I tolerate my neighbors if I got like, luxury and a fine life?

>>6075681
I'm gonna tell you what not to do

if you insist though, this is of use

>>6075686
>>6075660
Let me elaborate, actually. The vast majority, if not all of the barbarism humans do to each other can be linked to lack or uneven distribution of goods. In some cases this connection is easy to see (People with no bread will try to steal yours and maybe kill you in the process), in others less so, but still relatively easy (The Holocaust for instance).

>>6075686
Thanks for clarifying that for me.

> why wouldn't I tolerate my neighbors if I got like, luxury and a fine life

Why wouldn't someone push for the supremacy of ideas that make them comfortable, from a psycho-social standpoint? Cultures would be in perpetual conflict

>>6075695
>chomsky
>no bakhtin

Shit image, make a new one fast.

Why do you need to make these threads? Why don't we have a Nietzsche general? He was more intelligent and influential than Marx.

>>6075716
>He was more intelligent
hahahahahaha
>and influential
hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
>Why don't we have a Nietzsche general?
hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

>>6075705
Yeah, you oughta read some Marx alright. I think you overestimate the importance of culture. Das Sein bestimmt das Bewußtsein, being (here as in economic conditions) creates the consciousness (of the individual). Different cultures are only different in regard to their values as they are different in regard to their development of production. If Earth was a communist utopia, there wouldn't be any incentive to spread your imagined or actual superior ideas, let alone with that sheer brutality we have nowadays.

What do Marxists hate family and are fine with having sex with 8 year olds?

>>6075733
Even from the perspective of a person who doesn't like Nietzsche, he was quite influential. Without him Zizek wouldn't exist because postmodernism wouldn't exist.

>>6075748
> he was quite influential
Yes but nowhere near as influential as Marx was

>>6075754
To the world stage, yes. To philosophy itself, no.

>>6075560
>Katie
jesus fucking christ, /lit/

>>6075607
>>6075620
>WAAAH WAAAAH. I WANT MORE MONEY!
Why can't you lazy assholes get a STEM education and a decent job? Fucking mouthbreathers.

>>6075922
0/10, if you didn't say 'STEM' I might have believed you were for real.

>>6075758
also not true. none of 20th cent. euro thought would exist without Marx, essentially anything remotely political or connected to the material world. pure metaphysics doesn't really benefit from Nietzsche's "all metaphysics is bullshit" either

>>6075927
Not quite sure what you mean.
Norwegian petroleum engineer student here, we have your kind all over the place here. I just don't get it, do you people expect to get a 100k a year job with a degree in English literature or Gender studies? Is picking a math oriented education that hard?

>>6075949
Or the trades ofc. You avoid debt + it's well payed. But social sciences and arts? REALLY?

>>6075922
STEM student here. If you think about political philosophy in scientific terms, you'll most likely come down to some form of Post-Marxist thought empirically adapted to the changes that have happened since his death. it's still the most effective for explaining how a capitalist society functions and has evolved over time.

>>6075949
>Norway
>STEM
>DAE think librul arts degrees are stupid?
>muh bootstraps
Your Reddit impression is almost complete, just make a statement about poor blacks and/or Muslims that skirts being racist and you're done.

>>6075949
Marxists aren't really bitching about not making 100k though are they?
More like the system that produces a "you either do whatever arbitrary shit will get you a job in a technocracy or you shut up and deal with a service job" mindset in the first place.

>>6075960
Is this some sort of meme on /lit/?
I mostly sit on /fit/ and /sci/ so I'm not familiar with the board culture.
>>6075961
Sorry, I'm generalising. It's the average phrase I hear here at UNI from the Social science/art students whenever the topic comes up.

Does anyone on /lit/ know what's going on within the Lugansk and Donetsk republics, politically? This article http://slavyangrad.org/2014/12/07/we-have-a-once-in-a-lifetime-opportunity-to-build-a-socialist-state-in-europe/ shows communists (from as far away as Basque country) are fighting in the front lines and (according to wiki) the supreme soviet of Donetsk has a majority coalition between the Communist Party and the Donetsk Republic party, in opposition to the Free Donbass/New Russia coalition of rightist-nationalists, who want to make a Russian-nationalist confederation with the Lugansk Republic with the Russian Orthodox Church in charge of education? What is going on?

>>6075983
Okay bruh

While jobs for humanities people have always been scanty and not well paying, it is also true that they have dried up substantially in recent times (one could say LATE CAPITALISM yuk yuk yuk), especially since the 2007 recession.

Like, it used to be that you could be an artist or freelance essayist or some shit and still be able to at least pay the rent of your dumpy apartment and skirt the poverty line. Now you can't even do that.

People don't go into humanities fields to make bigbux, but it used to be at least survivable for those invested enough in what they were doing. It isn't anymore. Which is a little worrying and worth talking about for those people.

For example, now in 2015, the budget for one of the most reputable and high profile Leftist politics and culture journals in the US, Dissent, has the budget of a single tenured professor.

https://nplusonemag.com/issue-21/labor-letters/the-mission-and-the-movement/

If you read the essay you'll see times were always tough obviously, but shit has hit the fan in recent years.

also lol Norway gtfo

>>6075983
If you are butthurt about people you know in real life go discuss with them in real life, your posts have nothing to do with marxism and nobody gives a fuck about who you are or what you study.

I get that it's the 21st century and advanced capitalism has made it fashionable to have a political opinion, and so now hipsters base their political opinions only on aesthetics and end up fascists, but calm down. Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Marx Horkheimer and the rest of the Frankfurst School knew this was going to happen. Now stop throwing a tantrum, sit down, and be a lefitst like the rest of the grown ups at the table.

>>6076061
>hipsters
>facists
Good one man!

>>6076181
how is it that you people feel that you're surrounded by liberals who also happen to be the minority.

>>6076061
le/fit/ist
Get out reddit and deal with your gains.

There isn't much nearly as much hostility given to a broad empiricism as there is when its specifically related to a social science. Marx is, to be very general, a radical empiricist taking his foundation for knowledge to include what people do, materially. The next step is obviously how people interact with their surroundings. This is exactly what 'household management' or economics is. I don't see why there should be so much more anger or polemics regarding Marx than with Locke. In the same way the established empiricist tradition claimed thoughts were sediments of what one sees, a social empiricist (of the Marxist flair) would claim ones material social context will in some way determine one's social or political thinking. It simply includes more than one solitary experience. Yes, both traditions are reductionist; but, Marx, more than Hume, really thought that whole tradition closer to its frontier, pushing it to its more extreme end. The kind of name-bashing peculiar to Marx is confounding, especially in 2015.

>>6073880

>>6076341
How is it so hard to believe people hate Marx after everything that has come from communism in the 20th century

>>6075153
Who said I wanted to be.
I just want to be right.

>>6076061
Hipsters are all liberal, and most leftists are college kids. If you try and espouse any kind of socialism in any serious economic circles you'd get laughed auto of the room

>>6076970
Marxism is not right

>>6076979
Marxism is left

>>6076061
>frankfurt school
Please take your Cultural Marxism and go back to tumblr.

>>6077005
>I can handle criticism
>get out of my hug box

>>6076974
What serious economic circles, neoclassical economics?
>mfw marginal utility
Doesn't even allow to calculate an absolute marginal value, only differences. And how stupid do you have to be to assume rational market actors? Homo oeconomicus is dead, kiddo.

>>6077016
isn't bringing in immigrants creating a new identity though? Is one identity objectively better than another?

So is /lit/ pretty much a big Marxist hugbox for the most part?

I notice these threads going on a very long time and I don't think I have the stamina to debate you guys, but I'll just pose a few quesitons.

1. A lot of you seem to be against ideology (which I completely agree with), but orthodox Marxist nevertheless. When you aren't Orthodox Marxist you are critical theorists. As an anti-idealogue myself, I'm just curious, what makes Marxism not an ideology? You are aware that Marx simply saying his philosophy is "materialist", does not mean there's not an underlying ideology subconsciously motivating him, right? Or if you do admit that Marxism is an ideology (which it OBVIOUSLY IS), why do you make an exception for this particular ideology over the others?

2. What form of Marxism do you advocate? Do you actually think, a-la Marxism-Leninism, that the Free Market needs to be replaced by a command economy? Do you subscribe to Frankfurt School anti-Westernism?

3. Are you opposed to democracy and liberalism, or do you see these values as somehow reconcilable with Marxism? This is perhaps the most important question here because this determines whether you guys actually know anything about politics or not. I consistently heard my Marxist profs in college talking about how democracy is a sham, liberalism is a tool of the moneyed classes, free speech is a tool of the moneyed classes, and other creepy things. I even once had a prof say that Feudalism is underrated and that the socialist utopia will mix the best part of liberalism with the best parts of socialism in a classic hegelian synthesis. If you guys are on board with this general attitude, what in Marxism is supposed to prevent political repression and dictatorship? What tools does it have to prevent the Stalins, Kims, etc, from seizing power and becoming de-facto monarchs with unlimited power, which is the main thing that creeps people out about your ideology and which is somewhat antithetical to helping the working classes?

>>6077703
1. I'd agree that it's an ideology, just a bretty gud one
2. Command economy run by an algorithm that has the needs of the people as its input and an as-precise-as-possible production command as its output. The machines necessary for this belong to the people and are as such controlled via council democracy.
Communism is Soviet power plus the computerization of the entire country.

3. >free speech is a tool of the moneyed classes
I guess technically they might be right, given the ruling class allows free speech...But seriously, what the hell.

>What tools does it have to prevent the Stalins, Kims, etc, from seizing power and becoming de-facto monarchs
I think Gramsci is helpful here. I haven't yet read him, but apparently he saw cultural hegemony (a proletarian one in this case) as a necessary condition for successful revolution, not just a small vanguard party taking over the state.
Also, critical theory.
I think a hefty dose of (queer) feminism is also very useful. Not only allows it to potentially draw 50% of the world population to your cause, women also tend to be less violent and way more communicative, qualities diametrically opposed to those of the Stalins and Kims, I would think.

>>6077703
1. I am not sure what you mean. I am not against ideology.
2. I favour the cooperative movement that Wolff advocates.
3. I am currently reading "Socialism after Hayek" which intends to use Hayek's ideas to derive arguments for a cooperative movement. It makes sense to me so far. Which means that I think Marxism can be reconciled with democracy and liberalism.

>>6077703
Marxism is an ideology that emerged during a time of rapid social change, and was targeted at empowering the human objects of that change in a way that would allow them a subjective position. The question is not whether some body of thought is or is not an ideology, its about whose ideology it is. Dialectical materialism is appropriate for those, usually the subaltern, who seek change for themselves within society, .

Ideological conflict is a reflection of deeper economic and political trends in society. Look at how and when 'Confucianism' has fallen out of and back into fashion in China.

Non-Leninist Marxism, following Luxemburg, the Council Communists, and various other free-thinking Marxists like Paul Mattick and Raya Dunayevskaya, modern writers like Simon Pirani, aspects of Sorel and anarcho-syndicalism, allow an insight into how real 'free association' might be built.

Leninist (and Trotskyist parties, often more so) parties reproduce within themselves the apparatus of a society they are trying to change. Experiments in new forms of order, new social relations, new forms of praxis, are indications of healthy behaviour. There are many formations that inherently reject the 'vanguardism' that leads to reproduction of class society.

Although proselytic, it's not a universal faith, no matter how many leaflets the SWP or another Trot group pass out. Marxism is an ideology that expresses a particular struggle within the workplace, and its from that struggle - not from the ideology - that social change proceeds. To the extent that the ideological glove fits, it can be worn.

>>6077976
Do I smell some post-operaism in here or is that something else?

>>6078045
My formative years were spent among anarchists and I am thankful that that early (unreflective, but /fun/) practice was guided by them rather than by the Party Marxists I later encountered. There is a fundamental honesty of that practice compared to things like the "secret meetings" that the Leninist/Trot parties held before and after every trade union meeting, sending members to infiltrate factories, entryism in general, and worse that existed/exists too.

>>6078122
Maybe you met different anarchists than I did, but the vast majority of those I know use their anarchist ideology as an excuse not to actually analyse the status quo and how to overcome it. "The state sucks bro, let's get rid of it!" and that's it. Worst example was literally "I'm unpolitical, because I'm an archist".

>>6078153
*anarchist

>>6074234
Cant upload it here but here you go.
http://i.imgur.com/muQy8O4.jpg

>>6073880
Chinks lel

>>6078153
My experience with anarchism was through social centres, drop-in centres, squats and social housing issues, and protecting - on the front line - people being evicted or forced from their homes. I'm from a particularly divided and racist society, and the anarchists were really the only ones who were consistently ready to put themselves in front of danger on these issues.

To maintain a social centre or a squat entails forms of discussion and (at its best, anyway) consensus-based decision-making that has the potential to rebuild the social relations that have been broken.

Anarchism, like Marxism, has many flavours. In the first volume of Capital, IMO the pivotal chapter is Machinery and Large Scale Industry. Marx makes a number of comments on the future. He describes "the totally developed individual, for whom the different social functions are different modes of activity he takes up in turn." I'd extend this into one's choices regarding group alignment, factional alignment. One shouldn't allow themselves to be subsumed within a party - that's the opposite of what social change/dialectical materialism/Marxism is about.

>>6078158
>AnarChrist

>>6078221
I do agree on the point that many anarchists share the problem that they do not read enough Marx.

>>6078221
>First paragraph
Oi, that's nice.

>Second paragraph
Makes sense, but I'm afraid it's not enough. Kinda going off on a tangent here, but I made that point earlier in this thread, I believe communists, or anarchists in your case, should level up, become more professional in their activism, e.g. hiring advertising agencies for propaganda stuff, develop a brand strategy for the emancipated society, so to speak.

>One shouldn't allow themselves to be subsumed within a party
Strongly agree on a merely personal level, individuals are preferable over party hacks, however, I don't think you can disregard party politics on that ground, as the enemy also employs parties.

>>6078288
I don't know if you are arguing for the kind of praxis used by 'Adbusters' which to an extent is effective, but is outside the real locus of change. Professional activism is strategies employed on street level - by anarchists, communists, social workers, even sometimes on rare occasions by (god forbid) the police.

Change will not be created as an advertising strategy. When the apparatus of the old society is taken up by those seeking change, it's time to seek a new party.

My ultimate point is not against party politics whatsoever, but simply against democratic centralism (which is always, in the final account, only centralism).

Mattick is good on this: https://www.marxists.org/archive/mattick-paul/1949/spontaneity.htm

>>6078158
*analchest

>>6078358
>Professional activism is strategies employed on street level
I'm talking about how this activism is usually employed, at least where I live.

This
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomes_Zentrum#mediaviewer/File:Koepi_entrance.jpg
is a social center in Berlin, while this
http://www.cdu-bw.de/uploads/pics/neb_bundesparteitag_3.jpg
is a federal party convent of the conservative party ruling Germany with a steady hand. I know I'm being unfair because the former obviously lack the money the latter have, but I hope you can see what I'm getting at? The radical left looks like shit, no wonder most people think they are just that.

>>6078358
So now I read the Wiki article on AdBusters, Jesus Christ they're horrible. Ineffective, feel-good and anti-semitic bullshit.

>>6078443
To put it in combative terms, the radical left look like shit because that is where we come from. It's James Connolly's Starry Plough - that from the dirt we look to the stars. But there should not be any pretense that we come from anywhere else.

Voters can be gained through slick presentation and branding, and groups and parties can be run effectively using modern management strategies that are 'modern' and 'effective' precisely because they reproduce a society that revolution seeks to change. Leninism brought to the semi-feudal societies of Russia and China an ideology that promised change and an apparatus that delivered the same old continuity. Mao equipped with Leninism became the final Chinese warlord. Are you not using modern techniques to achieve the same kind of "revolution"?

Genuinely novel means of social critique that have been thrown up in the West - punk music and culture, graffiti and hip hop culture, as examples - are themselves easily co-opted, branded and integrated into the process of capital. But the inherent democracy of these cultures continues to empower, and of course new forms will be thrown up too.

I think, under the present conditions of the Western left, a 'broad church' is desirable. But the locus of action is, as its always been, in enabling the self-expression of the working class.

>>6077579
> And how stupid do you have to be to assume rational market actors? Homo oeconomicus is dead, kiddo

Mises debunked this in Human Action, kiddo

>>6078045
Seems like straight workerism to me, mate.

>>6078688
Labels are one thing, discussion is another.

>>6078484
>adbuster's names their campaign "occupy wall street"
>every paranoid kike thinks it's about israel

damn you dudes must be feeling mighty guilty about the palestinian situation if this is what it's come to

that said, fuck adbusters, long live capitalism

>>6077703
>I don't think I have the stamina to debate you guys
Nor, probably, the depth of historical reading, experience of collective social conflict, or the funny technical jargon of Marxism. Instead of debating, you could contribute like you've done.

1) Marxist Orthodoxy was the current that the 2nd International reacted against. A fair bit of /lit/'s marxists are post-Tankie, or autonomists. The idea of "orthodoxy" died with Engels. Marxism is the greatest of bourgeois ideologies in that it thrusts itself towards praxis like a frotting teenager. While Marxism is grinding its mound on the working class struggle, we might actually be able to use elements of that ideology to partly and tenuously inform struggle. Marxism is a common ideological language amongst people who've been in struggle a long time (it has a useful ideological toolset for describing struggle), so it is a little bit like "hey, all your pseudo-code looks like C."
>ideology subconsciously motivating him
I'm not sure I'd describe the action of ideology as functioning through the sub-conscious, Zizek can fuck himself on that front.

2) the workerist current when it turns towards the class at the point of production and reproduction. "Autonomism" might be a simple summary. A command economy is just capitalism with a computer. Democratic workers councils, aided by rapid simulation, are capable of producing a democratic plan with enough fudge in it for free local decision making on many topics. The Frankfurt School are bourgeois ideologues pure and simple who turned to culture because organising trade unions into revolutionary industrial unions was too hard. No faith in the class, not from the class, fuck off frankfurt.

3) Democracy and liberalism are, as you mean them, bourgeois tyranny over the proletariat. Proletarian meetings are more democratic, in the sense that they engage, require, and empower their members far more than shitting toilet paper marked brown or yellow into the toilet of the ballot box so a few "red" deputies can go to their deathbed on leather couches.

Feudalism is underrated. Peasant resistance in feudalism gave us the first cooperatives of labouring people organised democratically, in the anabaptist communes.

>How is Marxism supposed to prevent political repression
Marxism is a tool of analysis, not a positive programme. The positive programmes of council communist type movements build proletarian self-empowerment in as the basis of building: we make new men and women in new communities of struggle. This can be contrasted to vanguardism who reproduce the state within the party under the belief that an enlightened dictatorial party will save those poor down trodden.

Class struggle saves those who struggle themselves.

>>6078710
>In October 2010, Shopper's Drug Mart pulled Adbusters off of its shelves after a photo montage[45] comparing the Gaza Strip to the Warsaw ghetto was featured in an article critiquing Israel's embargo of Gaza.
Yeah, totally not anti-semitic. DA JOOS ARE RUNNING A SECOND HOLOCAUST IN PALESTINE!!!111234

>>6078724
Would amend this by saying that Kautsky quite well took on the Orthodox mantle after Engels. And turning away from unions is a bourgeois move but ignorance and/or reliance on unions alone is equally reactionary to new means of working/underclass culture and expression.

>>6078726
hey, buddy, what happened to "Je Suis Charlie" and all that? or free speech is only cool when it bashes muslims and christians? fuck off

>>6078800
>but ignorance and/or reliance on unions alone is equally reactionary to new means of working/underclass culture and expression.

Here we differ comrade. If these expressions are not at the point of production or reproduction they are useless in the sense that they do not reflect on material reality.

Next consider what spaces aren't part of the point of production or reproduction for proles?

Marxism is christianism without Christ. Is God without Devil. It's purely the utopia of making this sinful Earth a Heaven.

Why is it so hard to marxists to understand how insane they are? Their whole ideology is based on destruction, descrution and destruction for this is the central nerve of dialectical materialism. They've never construct anything and nothing good comes from their mouth.

>>6078890

I agree, Marxism is just as shitty as Christianity

>>6078890
Nice contribution, great citations. Claiming Marxism has a positive programme. Great work.

>>>/lit/I don't read

>>6078821
http://xkcd.com/1357/ You fuck off.

>>6078608
That's all well and nice, but in a sense it's admitting defeat. If the most the left can do is saber-rattle on a pet issue that almost immediately gets co-opted, how are we supposed to actually implement the change the world needs.

It's all well and good that the sexual liberation, gay rights movement etc allow me to be a genderqueer transkin three-spirit that spits sick raps, feels compassion for rainforest deforestation, regret at our rape of the earth, but if all of this is co-opted into the broader monstrosity of consumer culture and in the end the person still votes Democrat, what the hell is the point?

>>6078913
>wants citations for a personal opinion
I'm not that alienated, the only book that defines my fate is the Holy Bible.

>>6078872

All 'things' reflect upon material reality. But your meaning is that certain expressions do not reflect directly on the struggle.

There is practice as pure criticism - ie desperation - and there is practice as praxis. But one can easily become the other.

Kids who are bored of concrete overpasses and underpasses and viaducts naturally seek to paint things on them. I remember standing in an underpass in my hometown whilst a fella came and stood behind me and instructed me on how to use a spraycan. My relationship with my natural surroundings was co-opted (positively in terms of technique, negatively in terms of instruction) but by dint of that particular means of self-expression remained safely outside the law. Police and council continued to offer us legal walls, and there'd continue to be kids hiding under trains and walking down train lines to wreck things.

Production exists within communal spaces - monks producing Buckfast wine, communes and crofters doing woodworking, social centres that are at once an inroad for hoodlum kids into vocational skills as well as a center for graffiti (reclamation of urban space) and gluesniffing and good music. All of which are in conflict with the present mode of production, but also are shaped by it.

My point here really is that the revolutionary apprenticeship begins earlier and is larger than a person's entry to the workplace.

>>6078971
Left action is a three-hour colleague meeting on "wage restructuring", meeting in failure, and the readiness to regroup. If you aren't willing to bang your head against a brick wall, you can leave. Like I said, it's not a universalist ideology.

>>6079050
Although, I don't want to be unclear, the need for that apprenticeship is of course born from the point of production itself.

>>6079050
>All 'things' reflect
My dog doesn't reflect on material reality, it lacks consciousness or "historicity."

I'm happy with your noting the workplace is a particular kind of work, because you express that the pre-workplace are sites of production and reproduction. There is a school, the Birmingham School, which believed the cultural content of resistant working class subcultures was decisive. They were spectacularly (ha ha) wrong.

>>6075526
it's a bourgeois construct inherently connected to the patriarchy and thus to the opression of women and women-like people.

>marxism general
>neo-classical fags spamming the thread
why

>>6079149
Your dog's existence is itself a reflection of material reality, that is our relationship with nature and our bending of that nature - domestication of animals. A dog's every action is a reflection of the material reality we have created. Dogs would not exist without our (then incipient) production of our own environment. Every breed of dog, from Tibetan Mastiff to Chihuahua, is a reflection not only of our material reality but of our own human interaction with that reality. Its every action is historically conditioned.

Cultural content is not precisely what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the means by which that self-expression is produced.And I haven't said it's decisive. Or that the workplace is not decisive. But I do believe its dogmatic to think that /only/ in the workplace can change be enacted.

>>6078608
Alright, I gotta chew on that. I don't trust the working class though, not after the Holocaust. Only Trotzkyists from yesterday believe in that "The capitalists financed Hitler" stuff anymore and maybe I'm being incredibly arrogant here, but somehow I doubt the working class will discover critical theory on their own.

>>6079230
Then there is no discussion here. The working class does not need your 'trust' or your 'doubt'.

>>6079284
But what if they do? Not mine personally, of course, but...being oppressed doesn't automatically mean you're right.

>>6079230
clearly not a member of the working class

>>6079419
Indeed, I'm not

>>6079399
Social struggle within class society has no provision for universal 'rights' and 'wrongs'. Changing society for the 'better' means changing society for the benefit of those who /are/ oppressed. It must therefore be led by those. Its not your problem to figure out.

>>6073095

MARX WAS A KIKE FAGGOT

>>6080636
Whether or not he was Jewish or homosexual means nothing to the importance Karl's works.

http://www.strawpoll.me/3537053

How is it that Marxists can structure their entire ideology upon the premise of equality, a premise which is empirically false and non-existent in nature?

>>6081984
Nature can be changed

>>6081984
>How is it that humans try to control their bowels and maintain special places to shit, even cleaning themselves afterwards, a practice which is empirically false and non-existent in nature?

>>6081984
>"We [as communists] reject the metaphysical concept of equality of something outside the material world. Equality means to us the disappearance of social classes. Nothing more shall be concluded from our analysis of capitalism."
- Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring