/lit/ - Literature

>>6495280
>implying he's not right

>>6495280
>true radicals are peaceful and vote
Also war is peace

The one who closes to door on a Peaceful Revolution, open at the same time the door to a Violent Revolution.

Also, voting is another way for marxists to influence some issues and possibly change them, also leading the way for more people to hear about them, etc... A Revolutionary knows when to be peaceful and knows when peace no longer serves the interest of the people.

>>6495280
wasn't he completely against voting?

>>6495319
Misconception, He said there was no point in voting given the options.

>>6495317
>Also, voting is another way for marxists to influence some issues and possibly change them

You don't vote capitalism away m8

>>6495329
yes, and therefore he was not voting.

>>6495319
Yes but apparently it was a big ruse and publicity stunt for Labour

>>6495354
for shame, i was actually agreeing with him for once.

>But, in general, the protective system of our day is conservative, while the free trade system is destructive. It breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade.
- Karl Marx

Real marxists vote as libertarian as possible.

>>6495280

I don't know why anyone pays attention to early Marx anyway when Ghandi proved that revolution can be achieved peacefully (which is a direction Marx was actually heading in himself in his later years).

>>6495371
fuck
the
mods

>>6495352
Yes, but there's a difference between not voting and being 'completely against voting'

>>6495373
Yes, India is truly a beacon of worker glory.

>>6495341
No one said we would, but being represented in parliament allows to take as much power as you can from them, and also contesting them whenever they put forth a set of laws that are absolute shit, at the same time preventing that they have majorities that will enable them to make irreversible constitutional change. It is a weapon, as is a demonstration or a strike, and should be regarded as very important while the possibility of a revolution isn't on the horizon

>>6495369

Nice try libertard. Marx didn't have access to the analysis of the flexibility of capitalism to adapt to the antagonisms it produces, especially with regards to the placating and ideological work of mass media.

Your double speak doesn't work here.

>>6495373
>>6495380
this

>>6495317
>The one who closes to door on a Peaceful Revolution, open at the same time the door to a Violent Revolution.

>implying that not what Communists want
fuck off liberal

>>6495379
yeah i ment against voting now, not as a concept.

>>6495341
Socialdemocracy is bad but it's where disillusioned lefties go. At least they still try instead of making excuses.

>>6495396
He changed his mind after he met Miliband. He says vote Green if you have one in your constituency otherwise vote Labour; the most important thing is to keep the Tories out

>true radicals are peaceful

Then I don't want to be a radical. There is nothing peaceful about effecting change.

>>6495395
>Registered member of a Marxist-Leninist Communist Party
>Chávez quote
>Liberal

:(

>>6495373
He proved nothing, capitalism is not the british retreating because imperialism is dumb.

>>6495402
What would you suggest instead of socdem? Students talking about the revolution in basements?

>>6495411
>Chávez
Now there's your problem.

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/gallery/2015/may/04/who-should-be-the-next-prime-minister-a-guide-to-the-election-by-chris-simpsons-artist-in-pictures

I'm just gonna leave this here.

>>6495427
>What would you suggest instead of socdem?
Nothing, I said I recognize the need for it in pretty clear words.

>>6495442
So social democracy is bad but there is nothing better?

>>6495427
How about workers talking about the revolution in basements?

>>6495451
not until we're stuck with states

>>6495455
Shouldn't workers study too?

>>6495461
anarchist pls

>>6495455
Workers don't tend to do that, they tend to go home to eat and have a beer and maybe spend five minutes talking to their kids if they can summon the energy to do so before falling asleep in front of the TV.

>>6495477
I'm sure statism will work one day anon.
You'll probably be dead though.

>>6495479
>tfw Marx talked about this in Wage-Labour and Capital, but in Marx's time, they would return home and read

>>6495479
That's why we need less work hours.
Also even with this rhythm plenty of manual labor workers still engage in political discourse.
It depends on where they live... It also used to be a more popular activity decades ago.

>>6495488
They would probably mostly read trash like the masses have always done. TV is just easier because the trash gets sends into your mind automatically.

>>6495485
>statism
>tfw every anarchist revolution produced a state in everything but name

http://a.pomf.se/metoij.webm

>implying I care

>>6495474
In a perfect world of course, but the ones who get to go to university do not usually come from the working class. I'm from the middle class, and time and time again I saw the poor guys (who were also the ones with the lowest grades, go figure) drop out, one after the other. When i got to Uni, about 10 dropped out of a class of 40 because they couldn't afford continuing to study, while others couldn't attend most classes because they had to work to pay their tuition.

>>6495495
Wouldn't less work hours make them more satisfied with their lives and therefore less prone to revolution?

People in happy countries are generally not very revolutionary inclined.

>>6495479
>>6495495
The Major Left-Wing party in Portugal has about 60.000 active members and 60% of them are Working-Class. They also rule the traditionally poor, factory worker areas as well as the zones where the latifundium's operated.
The Students mainly go with pussy social-democratics and worry about Weed and Feminism

>>6495508
>>implying I care
Well said.

>>6495515
>Wouldn't less work hours make them more satisfied with their lives and therefore less prone to revolution?
If they're satisfied with their life there's no point in making a revolution.

>>6495496
>mostly read trash
this was the time before YA fiction

>tfw Lenin extolls the virtues of the intellectual discipline of the working-class intelligentsia
>tfw it's not like that anymore

>>6495515
It gives them more time to be radicalized and to better understand the system they are working. That's why it is also important to keep them entertained.

>>6495538
How can they be satisfied if they are only fed trash

>tfw you finally realise liberalism can't be beaten
>tfw you accept the end state of history

>>6495566
>the end state of history

>>6495566
>tfw you post dank memes

>>6495539
>this was the time before YA fiction
YA is just the latest flavour of trash, people have always read trash. It's just that the trash doesn't last so we aren't reminded of it. We just keep being reminded of the masterpieces, so we think their times had better literature while all that really happened is time weeding out the filth.

>>6495590

>>6495381
You're not "represented" in parliament, only the owning classes are. What we see in the difference between major parties not a divergence of values, but simply a divergence of methods. It's a conversation you're not invited to, but like football you pick a team and cheerlead for it even if it refuses to acknowledge your being.

The minute you side with either of them, you've already accepted the framework they work with and you'll be drawn to fight its battles for them. You will focus on the difference between candidates without ever challenging the consensus among them. You will pick the issues they raise from inside instead of working towards a political organ that will impose issues from the outside. What should be autonomous bodies for the working classes will become intimately tied with partisan politics, limited by its machinery, and cheered for at least standing against the "bigger evil" at the expense of its integrity, independence and credibility.

I think we've lost enough playing this game in the past century.

>>6495573
Those kind of attacks are just the death throes of primitivism. It's only a tiny minority that want to be that edgy.

Most just like shopping malls and indoor skiing in the desert and nice cars.

>>6495427
>Students talking about the revolution in basements?

What a surprise, a social democrat who doesn't know how much his precious welfare reforms were only possible due to a large numbers of people "talking about revolution" and forcing the state towards a model of concession. The minute these people went away, so did your social democracy. Go figure.

>>6495614
>implying I am American and belong to a Bourgeois Party in which people are allowed to organize in tendencies

>>6495402
>At least they still try instead of making excuses.

Pic always pretty relevant

>>6495617
>implying history has ended

>>6495631
Not yet, since the whole world isn't liberal yet.

>>6495627
I'm not american either and I vote for small Left-Wing parties as well but let's be realistic. We barely even have any independent media today.

>>6495643
My party is expected to have 11% of the vote, has a weekly newspaper since the 1930's that was printed all through the dictatorship never missing a number and 36 cities and 2 districts. If your party is small it is also your fault, even if you are the only one, you should find a way to grow it.

>>6495639
>ignoring the massive political phenomena (the War on Terror and the ensuing Arab Spring) as a result of the response to a single attack as a primary reason
>ignoring the 2008 recession, showing that crises, an intrinsic element of capitalist society still exists
>ignoring the rise of neo-fascism in europe as a response to Arab immigration
>ignoring the rise of corporatist China as an authoritarian alternative to western liberal democracy
let's face it, history hasn't ended, and it isn't "ending" anytime soon

>>6495660
Pretty difficult, media monopoly is a thing here and the majority of the popular isn't internet-savvy and doesn't care about alternative media. But good luck to you.

>>6495672
I really think it's difficult for anyone honest nowadays to not see the post-war Liberal model as dependant upon certain historical conditions that we can't really reproduce. We're now seeing basically where capitalism would be at in 1950 if Bolshevism and Fascism had never happened, and it will only get worse.

>>6495685
argfag?

>>6495672
>>ignoring the 2008 recession, showing that crises, an intrinsic element of capitalist society still exists
And you're ignoring the 1910, 1930, 1970 and 1990 crisis. 2008 was very small time since it didn't result in new ways of structuring the state.

>>6495672
>implying china isn't becoming more liberal as the middle class grows

>>6495685
It is a thing here too, do you think we get more than a couple minutes of airtime a week? While the other left-bourgeois parties have the first page in the most important newspapers? We get demonstrations going with thousands of people and if we are lucky we are mentioned in the end of the 8-o'clock news. Of course the system won't give us any airtime, it's against their interests.
That doesn't stop you from forcing change in your school, to get together with people with similar mindsets and get elected to representative bodies, to do small protests, to organize a collective, to organize distributions, to organize a small newspaper. There are dozens of things you can do, you only have to push for it. There were two people in my collective when i started High-School, only the two of us went to the demonstrations, 3 years later there were 50, and nowadays, 3 years after i left the school they are organizing demonstrations themselves where more than 500 people from the school are present. It's a matter of pushing and being the example, just because no one pays attention to you if you stand 3 hours talking to people about what you want to do, doesn't mean you should just give up because it is impossible. That's a defeatist mindset, which is anti-revolutionary.
Voting is useful, but without direct action it means nothing.

>>6495743
Liberal in what manner?

>>6495790
neoliberal

:^)

>>6495743
Eastern Politics differs from West, their left supports the death penalty, so don't mix the two.

>>6495790
as in progressive liberal, more westernised, more whining about small things once they fix the big things.

>>6495628
Fair enough, but as i said, they're working in a bad environment. They faced that revolution isn't happening anytime soon. You can't even make most people vote for a non centrist position, let alone have them make revolution without them being completely hopeless, which is, ironically, the worst possible condition for the post-revolution to be successful. Socialdemocracy gets a lot of shit but what else can they do when they're working in the state framework?

>>6495512
It is a desirable outcome that everyone, or at least everyone interested in doing it, has the chance to educate themselves. Of course this is currently not the case for a variety of reasons, some of which have already been pointed out. What I mean by this is that they need to have access to culture for free or at a very modest price. This way a person who is interested in a certain field can study it by themselves. We have to do away with the assumption that education must be institutionalized: it comes from the desire to monetarize knowledge. The education system doesn't even work that well.

biz is where we discuss Marxism, guys
>>>/biz/741890

>>6495623
It's the same shit as people who go "DUR DUR PHILOSOPHY DUN DONE NUFFIN!".
Trying to monetarize everything does so much damage we don't even realize it.

>>6495280

How are you people even remotely swayed by the sophistry of this lunatic?

The /lit/ formula: Aggressive Rhetoric + sub-par jokes + aphorisms = thought-provoking.

>>6496331
>How are you people even remotely swayed by the sophistry of this lunatic?
>implying anyone is

work on your meta posting

>>6496331
every board demonizes certain people to unite the members of that board in their hatred of the outsider

In /r9k/ this is most apparent in "chad"
in /sci/ it's Neil degrasse tyson or Brian green
in /lit/ it's john green and russell brand

>>6496392
Sam Harris

>>6496410
Sam Harris is just the new Ayn Rand

The threads about him don't always devolve into 5-minute-hates

>>6496100
It's funny that you complain about the complacency of the general population when social democracy literally embodies the set of laws, reforms and policies that are mostly to blame for that.

Back in the 19th century forces of the Right already realised that by offering some relief "from above" to their condition, workers could be alienated from any radical emancipatory movement. The first Welfare State for example wasn't developed by any brave Social Democrat, but by the Bismarck administration, around the same time he passed the anti-Socialist laws. It's one of the oldest tricks in politics: offer a temporary solution to the problem and then move to destroy any organization that could provide a permanent one. This is why I believe that if we decide to play by the rules of welfare politics, of gradual reform and social democracy, we're already playing in the framework laid down for us by people concerned with nothing but the preservation and expansion of capital.

The way I see it, the struggle against the current order is (unless there's a revolution) one that we cannot win, but at least we can choose what battles will be fought. For that we need autonomy and political organs that fight for self-determination. Social democrats destroy this by linking all these organs to the state apparatus, offering to fight its fights from the above, and then turning against them when the masses have more faith in the state than in isolated groups. This is why reforms always run of steam and eventually die.

Social Democracy is popular on the Left for the same reason that the masses support the centrist positions you describe (and love the word "bipartisan" more than anything) - it seems feasible if you don't think too much about it. It's innofensive enough to work. It won't be *that* upsetting to anybody and we can just outsource the task to clever politicians. But the truth is that if something is inoffensive and harmless, that is just one more reason for it to be ignored. Liberal democracy is not based on rational choice of the most effective system, it's based on concessions. And they only offer concessions when people are organizing outside the boundaries of their control.

>In other words, history has not transformed the nation into a debating society solemnly voting the transition to the social revolution by a majority of votes. On the contrary, the violent revolution has become a necessity precisely because the imminent requirements of history are helpless to find a road through the apparatus of parliamentary democracy. The capitalist bourgeois calculates: “while, I have in my hands lands, factories, workshops, banks; while I possess newspapers, universities, schools; while – and this most important of all – I retain control of the army: the apparatus of democracy, however, you reconstruct it, will remain obedient to my will. I subordinate to my interests spiritually the stupid, conservative, characterless lower middle class, just as it is subjected to me materially. I oppress, and will oppress, its imagination by the gigantic scale of my buildings, my transactions, my plans, and my crimes. For moments when it is dissatisfied and murmurs, I have created scores of safety-valves and lightning-conductors. At the right moment I will bring into existence opposition parties, which will disappear to-morrow, but which to-day accomplish their mission by affording the possibility of the lower middle class expressing their indignation without hurt therefrom for capitalism. I shall hold the masses of the people, under cover of compulsory general education, on the verge of complete ignorance, giving them no opportunity of rising above the level which my experts in spiritual slavery consider safe. I will corrupt, deceive, and terrorize the more privileged or the more backward of the proletariat itself. By means of these measures I shall not allow the vanguard of the working class to gain the ear of the majority of the working class, while the necessary weapons of mastery and terrorism remain in my hands.

There. Anyone who knows Trotsky is aware that he likes to depict his opponents in the format of a villainous soliloquy, but there's no denying he can be on point when he wants to.

>>6496528
>It's funny that you complain about the complacency of the general population when social democracy literally embodies the set of laws, reforms and policies that are mostly to blame for that.
I don't know who you think you're talking to, I said social democracy is bad because it conforms to a framework that is itself bad, I just wasn't willing to demonize it.
The rest of your post seems sound and I agree with most of it.

>>6496566

I also think that if we take the paradigm of class struggle based on antagonistic relations of production to be the one that properly reflects our condition (which I do) then I believe we should demonize social democracy even more than we demonize the liberal-conservative tradition because this is would be, virtually, like having the enemy feed, clothe and entertain our own troops if this struggle left the sphere of politics and entered the sphere of military conflict. If you allowed this, you should expect in return alienation and defections.

>>6495280
>parliamentary elections
>radical
>revolutionary
>doing anything to help anyone but the capitalist class

>>6496633
My problem with this is that, if not the politicians, the socdem voters are usually people who genuinely think thats the best course available. They hold similar views and goals as us, they just never explored some implications we did. There is, frankly, enough fragmentation in the left as it is and its mostly the lefts fault: an example is identity politics, which ultimately only alienates everyone involved.

>>6496644
>violent revolutions
>practical
>successful
>doing anything to help anyone with the new ruling class

>>6496705
>strawmanning this hard

>>6496705
Right, look at all of Kings and Queens and their Knights and Aristocrats all over the world holding power over feudal societies, right.
>posts picture of people in famine caused partially by imperialist wars, not violent revolution
Dumb-ass.

>>6496737
>starvation genocide of the Ukrainians
>a famine caused by war
>not caused by the ruling class put in power by a violent revolution
Dumbass

>>6496735
>history is a strawman

>>6496737
We brought down monarchies and now we're stuck with capitalism. Way to prove him right.

>>6496780
The Ukranina genocide was perpetuated by the democratic government of Putin.

>>6496780
It was certainly caused by the ruling class in power, but that doesn't have anything to do with violent revolution. The Nazis were voted into power and they killed people just fine.

I'm not knocking democracy however, or it's institutions (such as elections). Democracy does an incredible job avoiding famine.

holy shit fuck off you asshole

>>6495280
"Remember, you dumb egoists, true spooks are spooky and ghastly"