/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.15820286]

Hey /lit/, I'm a zoomer who knows nothing about critical theory and I'm wondering if anyone has any recs to understand leftist movements today
>inb4 cringe

[Sage No.15820300]

>>15820286

[Anonymous No.15820310]

>>15820286
Assuming this isn't just an excuse to post le epic White fragility cover again, you'll be hard-pressed to find leftist literature that isn't cognitohazardous garbage.
I recommend For My Legionaries by Codreanu. The Iron Guard was fighting basically the same dudes as you are.

[Anonymous No.15820311]

>>15820286
blm lol!

[Anonymous No.15820350]

>>15820286

There are no books that will help you understand leftist movements today any better than just continuing to do what you're already doing and watching them gurgle and hiss at each other on social media. There's nothing any deeper going on under the surface.

[Anonymous No.15820354]

>>15820286
Everything is postmodern
Every mass political movement, right or left, has no point

[Anonymous No.15820363]

>>15820350
Yes. It's not an ideological movement based on rational thought. Look at the people that are championing wokeness. Literal drooling retards. There are no thought leaders. Only the mob.

[Anonymous No.15820392]

>>15820310
Thanks anon seems like a good read

>>15820350
I honestly don't understand how these people can fight so hard for something without any clear goal or vision in mind

[Anonymous No.15820404]

>>15820392
Most people will do whatever they can to fit in to the system. They're all slaves in Plato's Cave.

[Anonymous No.15820410]

>>15820392
A very small group of chosen folk have a fairly clear goal in mind, and they have a lot of power. This has been true throughout most of history, but for most of history the agendas at play weren't this malicious.

[Anonymous No.15820430]

>>15820392

It is indeed quite strange.
If you're really a zoomer, you're probably too young to understand the depths of depravity people can sink to. The atrophy of which the intellect and spirit is capable.

I've been watching the cognitive decline of this nation since I was a young man myself.
What we are witnessing now is nothing more than a product of decades of that steady erosion of the American mind.
One day you too will live to see people become even worse than they are today, when we're already basically at zombie apocalypse levels.

Your life will be like I am Legend, except instead of zombies, you have to take pictures of normies screeching at their phones for science, for the hope of saving the future...

[Anonymous No.15820454]

>>15820286
He's right you know

[Anonymous No.15820485]

>>15820454
Kantbot just likes nitpicking ideologies for the sake of being a contrarian

[Anonymous No.15820495]

>>15820454
Western culture was slowly dissolved out of existence with the popularization of jazz.

[Anonymous No.15820523]

>>15820286
op can't inb4
cringe!
anyway, in principle it's a bunch of horse shit, good theory is NOT something that you smoothly convert to this or that concrete practice, to some ethical imperative, even though that's what the woke twitter crowd is doing - they read two and a half articles on the desired topic (lgbt, feminism, race), memorise the cool keywords ("black/trans bodies", "indigenous voices", "subverting the hierarchy", "folx"), turn the thesis to something maximally black-and-white (for example, E.Said = west bad, east good) and off you go, ready to get "likes" with your hot takes on twitter fueling very very basic hatred between people (that's what these niggers pillaging across the US really are a pawn of, they don't directly know shit about "white guilt" or whatever the fuck some white collar bitch made up to sell to other virtue-signalling white collar goyim, they're just pissed off for various better and worse reasons)

[Anonymous No.15821542]

The best critical theory and one which doesn't invite you to feel hopeless

[Anonymous No.15821548]

>>15821542

[Anonymous No.15821553]

>>15821542
>>15821548

[Anonymous No.15821555]

>>15820310
What about Brave New World?

[Anonymous No.15821565]

>>15820350
I’m the president of a social justice organization, this is complete nonsense, everyone but me has to learn more about history and political science to understand

[Anonymous No.15821583]

>>15820286
Anything by Orwell is a pretty good place to start. 1984 is the obvious one but he writes about his political opinions in most of his books. I'd recommend "Homage to Catalonia", about his time spent fighting with the anarchists during the Spanish Civil war. Sure it's not contemporary, but it's a pretty good insight into the differences between anarchism and communism, especially in a real-world situation which is quite interesting.

[Anonymous No.15821658]

>>15820286
>(((critical theory)))

[Anonymous No.15821796]

>>15820350
They can be seen to have taken the elite's divide and conquer tactics hook line and sinker and fallen for the race bait. The elites are obsessed with making everything seem about race as they extract billions

[Anonymous No.15822093]

>>15820286
Unironically its 'Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism' by Fredric Jameson. So long as you understand that much of the left today is deeply ideologically committed to the kind of culture he is describing, but that there is a genuine possibility for a non-postmodernist left. The problems of postmodern cultural logic are also to be found on the right, but it is significantly less predominant

[Anonymous No.15822135]

Honestly any anti-commie or anti-faith-based mentality books will suffice.

[Anonymous No.15822299]

>>15820286
Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth by Franz Fanon.

Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation by Silvia Federici.

Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat by J. Sakai.

If you're a white man serious about reading them and not just memeing, you probably read something more positive at the same time because they'll depress you.

[Anonymous No.15822355]

>>15820286
Orwell's 1984 is the best place to start

[Anonymous No.15822388]

>>15822135
The Enlightenment ideals are what have caused this, Descartes castrated the human sciences into irrelevancy and now science (as many predicted) proves to be no stable tradition.

[Anonymous No.15822405]

>>15821542
what is this from?

[Anonymous No.15822410]

>>15822135
The people who pretend to be that always end up marching in antifa rallies to stop libertarian boomers from complaining about gun rights.

[Anonymous No.15822411]

>>15820354
Best post

[Anonymous No.15822487]

>>15820286
the collected works of one steve sailer

[Anonymous No.15822736]

>>15822388
This, but a better schematic is hermeneutics as envisioned by Gadamer. Truth and method is a fairly large tome but just look him up on youtube to get started - he is compelling, if very germanic, in his speech.

[Anonymous No.15822776]

read mein kampf

[Anonymous No.15822799]

>>15820286
Nobody in this thread understands nor has recommended any Critical Theory. Just read Adorno or some shit or use google.

>>15820354
Only good post itt.

[Anonymous No.15822803]

Are you already leftist and want to know more, or do you just want to understand where they're coming from?
Throw away critical theory books that have come out in the last 10 years. Start at the basics, Marx, Foucault, etc

[Anonymous No.15822817]

>>15821542
>>15821548
>>15821553
is this that bap fag?
sounds very, very gay.

[Anonymous No.15822829]

>>15822817
bap?

[Anonymous No.15822833]

>>15822829
bronze
age
phaggot

[Anonymous No.15822836]

cringe

[Anonymous No.15822856]

>>15822388
>The Enlightenment ideals are what have caused this

We can argue about the route that got us here (a matter of history) but woke ideology and intersectionalism is at its core anti-enlightenment humanism, and often faith based. Enlightenment criticisms are applicable and relevant.

[Anonymous No.15822888]

>>15821553
>Incels being the Black People of White People
Kek
but serious I do find some of this interesting, only thing is that translating intentionality of collectives is a very old game and leaves a lot in the way of doubt. Not that I am calling for scientific proof for this theory but that its always going to fall on the theory extrapolated examples, which will always age badly.

[Anonymous No.15822928]

>>15822856
The very fact you parenthesis history as some useless semantic reflects how untethered we are. I'd argue wokeness is largely the logical result of Enlightenment-era Humanism (and partly the Reformation), its smugness and vapid arrogance in imagining a human being as limitless. This nightmare began with Pico della Mirandola, where it ends who knows? What we know is that the profane is impossible to define without reference to the sacred, and the sacred is a concept that cannot be grasped by this prevailing overreliance on the truth criteria stipulated by natural sciences (e.g methodology).

[Anonymous No.15822988]

>>15822928
>its smugness and vapid arrogance in imagining a human being as limitless.

this is not a logical result of the enlightenment. the enlightenment holds that human beings have a nature that reliably leads them to error and so promotes institutions and epistemologies like democracy and science which most reliably corrects for those errors.

it is the faith based mentality that holds fantasies of purity and perfection and anti-enlightenment ideologies at the far right and left that believe they can remake man into their own image

[Anonymous No.15823380]

>>15822988
I have to disagree with that but I am glad that at least we both agree that there is an a priori dimension to man beyond our manipulation.

[Anonymous No.15823397]

>>15823380
i dont agree its beyond manipulation, we just arent very good at manipulating it yet

[Anonymous No.15823461]

>>15822299
These are good recs

[Anonymous No.15823500]

No one on here reads literature that challenges them, only one that reaffirms their views, so you won't find any actual left wing theory on here. Better go to twitter/resetera.

[Anonymous No.15823512]

>critical theory

it's just psychobabble asspull to no end, it completely ruined humanism.

basically it's a marxist doctrine attacking culture instead of capitalism, and capitalism allowed it to flourish because more department = more diplomas printed by diploma mills = profit.

[Anonymous No.15823541]

>>15822093
The left today is decidedly *not* committed to the culture Jameson describes. The postmodern condition is a product of alienation under capitalism. The left's project is ending capitalism in an attempt to abolish class conflict and create a more egalitarian society. Unfortunately, there's a very good chance this will just bring about new a new version of hierarchy as we saw in the USSR. One can see Marx's attempt to resolve contradiction once and for all as a right-wing deviation from Hegel's dialectics.

[Anonymous No.15823550]

>>15820392
Careful of what copy you buy, some aren't translated well

[Anonymous No.15823552]

>>15823500
you wont find any actual left wing theory on lit? you must be joking

[Anonymous No.15823557]

>>15823512
Capitalism eroded culture by proping up the ideals of what "culture" ought to be in order to placate the masses.

[Anonymous No.15823595]

>>15820286
Can online encyclopedias be classified as literature? Here you go.
- https://newdiscourses.com/translations-from-the-wokish/
- https://newdiscourses.com/2020/07/nobody-systemically-racist/

[Anonymous No.15823606]

>>15823557
university education worked just fine before postmodernism hit.

[Anonymous No.15823617]

>>15823606
when did postmodernism "hit" and what is "postmodernism"?

[Anonymous No.15823618]

>>15823557
capitalism is an economic theory that asserts that goods, services, and labor have inherent value based on costs and scarcity and can be traded based on that valuation
what you're referring to has nothing to do with capitalism and everything to do with government-enabled cartel market capitalization and cronyism

[Anonymous No.15823625]

>>15823617
Why don't you finish grade school before posting online?

[Anonymous No.15823631]

>>15823618
>asserts that goods, services, and labor have inherent value based on costs and scarcity and can be traded based on that valuation

You're describing markets. Capitalism is a set of social relations ordering the production of commodities, and their distribution based on exchange-value rather than use-value.

[Anonymous No.15823635]

>>15820495
source

[Anonymous No.15823644]

>>15823625
Nice evasion. You seem like you've read books and know what postmodernism is.

[Anonymous No.15823667]

>>15820286
>understand leftist movements today
what exactly is there to understand?
Watch Yuri Bezmenov's lectures. This is the result of the US ignoring its social policy in the 60's and 70's and allowing a concerted marxist effort to overthrow the west to take root. Ideological subversion takes between 20 and 40 years. We've exited the demoralization phase and entered the destabilization phase of it.
Now the concerted efforts of the marxists and socialists are focused on dismantling any connecting ideologies which unify pro-market, pro-freedom, pro-darwinian/meritocrats and legally skewing the system to actively discriminate those that participate in the actions of resisting against the dismantling of the system. Disarmament of those right of center and the simultaneous armament of those left of center is a major goal of this structure as well.

[Anonymous No.15823676]

oh look this shitty thread again for 30th time

[Anonymous No.15823679]

>>15820430
Underground man type vibes

[Anonymous No.15823693]

>>15820286
You won't really find much critical on leftist nonsense, unfortunately. The easiest way to understand them is that leftism is about power. They don't give a shit about anything, it's about using them. They overwhelmingly don't give a shit about anyone, but will use them for their goals.

This guy, though usually a Christian apologist, has some good social commentary that will explain their mindsets:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnD5lS-rHJY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbb0czjt7go
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKBnvrg0QMM
Enjoy.

[Anonymous No.15824270]

>>15823595
Lindsay recently wrote a book with Helen Pluckrose

>Have you heard that language is violence and that science is sexist? Have you read that certain people shouldn’t practice yoga or cook Chinese food? Or been told that being obese is healthy, that there is no such thing as biological sex, or that only white people can be racist? Are you confused by these ideas, and do you wonder how they have managed so quickly to challenge the very logic of Western society? In this probing and intrepid volume, Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay document the evolution of the dogma that informs these ideas, from its coarse origins in French postmodernism to its refinement within activist academic fields. Today this dogma is recognizable as much by its effects, such as cancel culture and social-media dogpiles, as by its tenets, which are all too often embraced as axiomatic in mainstream media: knowledge is a social construct; science and reason are tools of oppression; all human interactions are sites of oppressive power play; and language is dangerous. As Pluckrose and Lindsay warn, the unchecked proliferation of these anti-Enlightenment beliefs present a threat not only to liberal democracy but also to modernity itself. While acknowledging the need to challenge the complacency of those who think a just society has been fully achieved, Pluckrose and Lindsay break down how this often-radical activist scholarship does far more harm than good, not least to those marginalized communities it claims to champion. They also detail its alarmingly inconsistent and illiberal ethics. Only through a proper understanding of the evolution of these ideas, they conclude, can those who value science, reason, and consistently liberal ethics successfully challenge this harmful and authoritarian orthodoxy—in the academy, in culture, and beyond.