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Centrist Committee
Aug 6, 2019

dead gay comedy forums posted:

because for general purposes, the "subject" is something that has in very generous contextual lines a sort of "self", a consciousness and/or has and is capable of interacting with other things outside itself - those are "objects". The huge difficulty lies in how relative those things are to one and another and how to figure out their context. For example, the object of study of psychology is the human mind, whereas the subject of study of psychology is the patient. Does that help?

yes that helps, it feels like one of the most basic philosophical abstractions and so I am wondering if it a relatively recent invention, the culmination of a long history of thought, or if it’s been a feature of philosophy since forever ago. before I would hand guessed the former, but your response makes me think it’s likely the latter

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animist
Aug 28, 2018

e-dt posted:

as it always was, as it always shall be... similar things are already happening to "tankie".

yeah lol

i think you can read it as a reaction to the strides the left's made in public consciousness in the US recently (and other anglosphere countries? not sure) -- suddenly there's a new pejorative that all the libs steer clear of, despite the vast majority of people involved not knowing where the gently caress Hungary is.

it's not clear to me the extent to which it's intentional on the part of the broader system. like, are fbi agents logging onto twitter and posting how they don't like tankies? or is it just the "anti-authoritarianism" that's been laced throughout the activist left for decades taking its natural course? idk

uncop
Oct 23, 2010
I would add that the subject is an interconnected whole that is unable to interact with objects independently of what it already is, so there's a clearly observable subjectivity to things when multiple different kinds of subject are left to interact with the same event. Suppose we offered a plate of food to various people and animals on the street: we would get a variety of very different reactions. No one would have needed the concept of a subject if everything reacted to their objects the exact same way as with something like gravity functions. Real beings can be conceived as multiple kinds of abstract subjects depending on what they are interacting with, but the subject itself is a sort of minimum set of interconnected abstract qualities without which the subject's behavior within a specific system cannot be understood.

This whole subject-object question was developed in close dialogue with theology, and so it tends to place a big emphasis on conscious observation and action. When philosophers by default believed in gods whose consciousness the consciousness-independent reality seemingly sprang from, it was easy for them to start with the assumption that a subject both has consciousness and that some subject is behind all interactions that objects have (in effect, everything would be disconnected and inert without these special subjects having been there to will things).

Hegel kind of bridged the gap halfway by giving a partial (literally AFAIK) subject-nature to things without consciousness, but tying those incomplete subjects back to the theological conception by claiming that they produce some kind of conscious spirit as an emergent property and are part of that full subject in its conscious interactions with reality. Everything was part of what would become a grand consciousness with full understanding of itself, and so all the unconscious things in the world should be viewed a bit like the body parts of a baby that can't quite control them or understand what to do with them yet.

As far as I can tell, what Hegel was trying to do was keep the theological big-idea model coherent while appreciating scientific discoveries that contradicted creation. Most people nowadays talk about subjects and objects in a metaphorical manner that isn't supposed to reference any sort of coherent model. Like that "subject of study of psychology" example, "subject" there is not supposed to be coherent with other contexts where the word is used.

Marxists try to save the same general model from Hegel's theological assumptions and goals by reducing the requirement for subjectivity. Like, space rocks are still subjects simply by the virtue of hitting and otherwise affecting things, but they aren't part of a conscious subject unless they crash and form beings who become conscious of being space rock in another form and act with being space rock in mind. Same with a class, it only acquires full subjectivity when it becomes people who are conscious of being that class and act as its representatives. History for historical materialism is pretty much the self-written story of these sorts of usually non-conscious subjects struggling against each other after having taken self-aware human form. And the conscious thought of this sort of inanimate subject works a bit like divine inspiration, it's to be found in the thoughts that real people leave on the record when they've been acting as its consciousness.

Centrist Committee
Aug 6, 2019
I get a weirdly uncomfortable feeling reading that post, a mix of partial insight as I kind of follow what you're saying and a vague sense of anger at an educational system that hid all the good stuff away.

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


Alright, let's try something new

---

"But I don't understand. Why vote for them, after all of this? AND THAT? AND EVERYTHING ELSE?"

The liberal worldview, if anything, is one of Reason and for Reason. Of course, big-r Reason is nothing but reasonable; therein lies the problem in which reality can turn dissonant from what was supposed to be at a snap of the fingers. For example: meticulously crafted suppositions, abundantly seasoned with jargon and pseudotechnicality, transforms what is at best an informed guess into a Reasonable factoid which, like the bewitchment of the faerie of myth, carries a certain glamour (and not just any: a scientific one) to make it more truthful.

However, just because it looks like truth, does not mean that it is real. It is a little poetic that one of the easiest ways to perceive what is the ideology of liberalism - how that worldview works - is through realizing its many ironies, and among the most important to notice is that big-r Reason is itself ideological. It has nothing to do with the faculties of human reason, but rather, to the belief that there is One Correct Way based on a mangled concept of how science works to do things for oneself, for society and for the world. The ideal of Reason is not about reason at all: is about control.

Which, of course, is where capitalism and liberalism entwine. Capitalism has an absolute necessity of control in order to prosper and propagate, and thus people must be first bent into shape to then have their labor exploited. Capitalism, after all, is the most Rational system there is and as such, is the correct one by default, the truest to human nature.

However, as testified by History, ideology cannot hold when the gyre widens. As material conditions worsen for the masses, they start to look elsewhere for solutions. If enough time goes by, as the glamour falters but not entirely fails, the people start to dissent from what is Reasonable in order to explain what is going on in their personal experiences. Here be dragons.

The often forgotten side-effect of such a worldview is the need for control it imparts. To live under capitalism is to also reproduce within oneself what it considers most important, and as we've said above, control is pretty loving important to it. In the space between people starting to repudiate the social circumstances and the radical alteration of ideology, the necessity of control affirms itself through shock: the danger lies that they no longer want Reasonable control (because whatever justifications there are it has failed them) and are willing to embrace reaction to deny it. The liberal ideologue, confronted by reaction, adapts to accommodate it to maintain its grasp on the situation; however because they are too enchanted by the glamour, they cannot see.

And so comes that reaction defeats them. Predictably, since reaction is only about the reassertion of an imaginary order that has never existed in the first place, it fails in myriad ways at the helm of society. As incompetence mounts, conservatives repudiate and turn back from being reactionaries; Liberals, horrified by the continuous mismanagement (but still under the spell) and denigration of the Reasonable, reorganize along more conservative lines. For Progress is, after all, a common ideal of both. However, reaction endures with popular support. How? How come?

Reaction is odious because its own charm, its spell, perverts the very idea of dignity, making hateful cowardice look like a caricature of such. Yet this lie still gives something back, recognizing a very human need. The tragedy of liberal ideology is that only serves purpose for the glamour of Reason. It cannot truthfully address the matter to its circumstances, to assert that it has been failing society and not attending its demands in order to provide the artificial misery so that the Correct Way can work as it should. It cannot understand, it does not want to understand why people would reject that; if it did, there would be no glamour anymore, Reason being shown for what it is: a way to bend people into shapes that best serve the will of capital.

Shaocaholica
Oct 29, 2002

Fig. 5E
Is the label 'bourgeois specialist' supposed to be derogatory?

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


Shaocaholica posted:

Is the label 'bourgeois specialist' supposed to be derogatory?

depends on the context of use

afaik, the term refers to a special category of workers whose labor by its very nature under capitalism is essentially irreducible. The derogatory part comes depending on what job you are talking about. Medical doctors are the exemplar bourgeois specialist because ultimately capitalists need them to be alive and healthy.

ooooon the other hand, lawyers. Because "the Law" is ultimately codified by the most powerful either directly or indirectly (and there is the Real law, but that's for another time), lawyers are very much there to extend the reach of social action for capitalists in ways that seem subversive to society at large, but actually only serve to reinforce the legitimacy of what it defends. For example, any case where a rich rear end in a top hat is accused of raping somebody and gets away free, even if there is a lot of evidence saying that he raped, the role of all specialists involved is to be symbolic legitimizers; the man was subjected to the law and he was spared not because he was innocent, but because he is rich, and this is as should be under capitalism because who owns capital determines law

uncop
Oct 23, 2010
In the mouths of early 20th century Russian workers, it absolutely was derogatory. Russia was a semi-feudal, not a liberal country, the pretense that all men are equal was not there yet. So in the workplace there were these little aristocrats that could be likened to low-ranking army officers: they lived and ate separately, had to be treated very formally, watched them, called punishments on them, could often act with impunity toward them and so on.

Just like now, most publicly known marxists were sort of academically inclined and sympathetic to the middle classes, and there was a struggle over whether to try to link middle class specialists with the workers' movement. Calling specialists "bourgeois" basically said that as a group, they could only oppose the workers' movement, and individual specialists should prove themselves somehow (e.g. by actually living, eating and struggling with the workers) if they want to join. But the workers didn't have a disdain for the professions as such, they despised the people who had inhabited those positions before the revolution. They specifically wanted to pull them off of their high horses and educate workers to fill the emptied seats.

In modern western society where half the people seem to be some kind of specialist, the term sounds weird, but you should immediately understand the outright hatred workers had for the old specialist middle class if you read up on how labor relations actually were like in those parts of Europe at that time. If the term were used in a contemporary context, I guess it would neutrally refer to professions that tend to concretely oppose the workers' movement, but the union movement, women's movement and in the Americas the civil rights movement mostly fought off the arbitrariness, wage theft, physical violence, sexual violence etc. that used to make them well known villains.

Centrist Committee
Aug 6, 2019
how about a crash course in ideology. I know there’s marx’s German ideology, and Gramsci wrote thousands of pages in code to escape Italian sensors looking for German radical influence, and zizek prints a new book every six months, but surely there’s a gentler overview?

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


Centrist Committee posted:

how about a crash course in ideology

the most intuitive way I know to give the broad outline is: are you a fan of a sports team? How do you feel about it?

uncop
Oct 23, 2010
Ideology in the old, original sense is inverted consciousness. It inverts the real order of events: instead of man creating god, god created man, instead of new social arrangements producing new ideas, ideas produced new social arrangements etc. IIRC one of The German Ideology's big arguments was that since the Germans lived in a backward social arrangement while taking in modern ideas from England and France, they had developed the world's most advanced philosophical systems simply because their aristocracies were very hostile to actual social change, so the progressives had contented themselves with the idea that advanced enough thought would be what'd open the floodgates to social change. Within this old conception, ideological thought and scientific thought are sort of mutually exclusive and opposed processes.

Ideology in the later, post-Marx (likely also late Marx, but it's up to interpretation) sense is the collective thought of a class. You know how there's this mysterious common sense that's based half on what people have heard somewhere, half on what they've succeeded trying in practice? And different kinds of people seem to have totally different commonsense answers to the same questions? From this base common sense level, ideology gets organized into complex and coherent-seeming systems of religion, philosophy and so on that ultimately feed back into the sphere of common sense, and so there's this endless feedback loop between the unorganized intuitive thoughts and organized formal thought of a class.

Within the later conception, the concept of a "scientific ideology" is no longer an oxymoron. The nature of the ideology of a class depends on whether the class is on its way in or out. A new rising class's ideology mostly develops by engaging with reality in novel ways, learning things that others before them couldn't grasp and utilizing those new capabilities. The rising class's ideology tries to honestly make sense of new realities and experiences, so its consciousness is "right side up" even if necessarily sort of blurry and romanticised. On the opposite side, a falling class's ideology mostly develops through feedback from its established systems of thought and naturally resists recognizing new insights about the real world. Imagine scholasticism, being burdened by a heavy load of commonsense axioms accumulated over centuries, and trying to find new insights by deducing things from them. Just as the process of how the falling class produces new thought has become inverted (it takes the beliefs of the previous generations instead of the experiences of the current one as its axiomatic starting point), its consciousness becomes similarly inverted as a consequence.

Centrist Committee
Aug 6, 2019
that’s cool, it makes me think of those vision experiments that demonstrate just how much the brain “fills in” what we think of as vision... I guess ideology is the mental version of that? extrapolated beliefs that may or may not be materially based and guide unconscious decision making?

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


Centrist Committee posted:

that’s cool, it makes me think of those vision experiments that demonstrate just how much the brain “fills in” what we think of as vision... I guess ideology is the mental version of that? extrapolated beliefs that may or may not be materially based and guide unconscious decision making?

in a way of speaking

that's why I use the example of football (aka soccer) clubs to talk about the experience of ideology and one can then extrapolate from there. There is extremely little rationality involved in it: in Europe, Africa, Latin America and some parts of Asia, it is loving inconceivable to support another team once you have been grown into it: some Latin American writers like Eduardo Galeano and Nelson Rodrigues often wrote things like it is easier to betray family, country and faith than his team. One rather drops from following football altogether than supporting another club than the one they grew to love.

What's ideological about it? Everything. There is no rationality at all: almost all fans are fans of their teams because of things like their place of birth in the city, where their family lived or used to live, if they were working class or posh, if they were of color or not... And so on. For example, the fact of somebody being a supporter of the Glasgow Celtic Football Club has nothing to do with their track record or actual performance statistics; it is a byproduct of location and cultural legacy being manifest through one's family and early social life, such as being from Irish descent, having republican/separatist sympathies in the family, being against the English crown and/or being Catholic: these factors were and are far more decisive to indicate if somebody is going to be a fan of Celtic because Celtic is an ideological manifestation of these combined circumstances in an appropriate cultural vehicle that allows its expression.

And through being a fan of Celtic, even if you are not any of those things, if you are a fan just because your family has been generations and generations of Celtic supporters since its founding, you are more inclined to care about republicanism or catholicism and if the Irish State should be the whole of Ireland or if Scotland should gtfo of the UK because solely of that. Through your interactions with the club's culture, the likelihood of having certain opinions on those matters that are in agreement with what the club represents is very high even (and especially so) you haven't even considered anything about those subjects.

Another example: if you are a football fan in Spain, rationality suggests that you should support Barcelona or Real Madrid, perhaps Atlético de Madrid or Valencia. Yet, even if there is literally almost zero chances for any other clubs participating in the Spanish league to actually win anything at all at the national stage, those clubs have their very significant followings that still, even to this day, carry on representing their cities and homes. They are not in the stands for the victory: they are there for the culture of the team, what it represents.

To try an American reference (sorry I do not know much about sports traditions there), I remember reading/listening somewhere from a comedian or some such that "nobody chooses to be a Chicago Cubs fan"; yet even so, its stadium got filled regularly considering a World Series drought that predated it; how in the gently caress somebody is going to rationally choose to be a Chicago Cubs fan?! Yet before that World Series win, how many Chicagoans were raised and died supporting this baseball club and did not see that conquest? How many moms and dads put the clubs baby clothing in their kids? Why they would make their kid support a team that could not for their own lives win a World Series?

If you can intuitively figure out the *why* of that, congratulations, that's ideology as experience, and is literally the same (or more, depending on who's asked) when it comes to politics. The major advantage, the ace, the triumph of the socialist revolutionary comes down to the fact they are concretely aware of their own ideology in relation to the others, that they are ideological and fully embracing of that instead of being "ideological unawares" such as your average conservative or worse, "non-ideological" like your standard liberal. This is also why these two often use the i-word in the context of criticism, especially against leftists (of course): because recognizing that ideology is a real thing means that poo poo like "common sense" are, in fact, not common at all and flexible and malleable as playdough and thus also our social reality.

dead gay comedy forums has issued a correction as of 08:34 on Nov 13, 2020

uncop
Oct 23, 2010

Centrist Committee posted:

that’s cool, it makes me think of those vision experiments that demonstrate just how much the brain “fills in” what we think of as vision... I guess ideology is the mental version of that? extrapolated beliefs that may or may not be materially based and guide unconscious decision making?

Yeah, I could call the example with the eye ”biological” filling in of mental images and the example of thought ”cultural” filling in of them. There’s a shared system that determines what people feel like they see where they dont strictly speaking see anything. Like when a person sees a beggar on the street for the first time, they tend to immediately have an endless stream of assumptions about just who that beggar is as a person, how they got there and what they need and deserve. And those assumptions are rather different based on the cultural context the person is immersed in.

Edit: The sports example is also great at illustrating the ”inverted consciousness” aspect: sports fans tend to not get deep at all into how sports is actually done and won, and assume it’s decided by aspects like grit, putting in all you have, being a local because there’s something special about your hometown, them morally deserving to win, the cheering of the fans, even the amount of money bet on them and so on. They tend to prefer to reject material judgments of their favorite teams when they contradict those ideological assumptions. While in actuality the symbols of victory they see are appearances produced by materially being able to field a winning team.

uncop has issued a correction as of 09:04 on Nov 13, 2020

Centrist Committee
Aug 6, 2019
hmm, what’s the difference between ideology and belief then?

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


Centrist Committee posted:

hmm, what’s the difference between ideology and belief then?

hehe, that's the trick

you could say that ideology is a coherent set of beliefs that when woven together form a worldview. That "coherence" there is not meant in the usual way, but rather in the psychological-subjective way of things; in this case, it means the personal mode of fitting ideas and beliefs together through the self, which is how you can get poo poo like QAnon and fascism: they are completely incoherent in terms of actuality, but that literally does not matter in the face of their ability to provide ways for a bunch of separate pieces floating along in the subconscious to click together on the conscious mind

indigi
Jul 20, 2004

how can we not talk about family
when family's all that we got?
what's the deal with non-Marxist (non-utopian) socialism, or does such a thing even exist

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


indigi posted:

what's the deal with non-Marxist (non-utopian) socialism, or does such a thing even exist

non-Marxist socialism is generally understood as "utopian socialism", thus called because it is in opposition to scientific socialism (ever heard about immortal science? that's why) espoused by Our German Boys. This distinction was their idea to begin with, in fact.

So, the reason why they got to be called as such is that while they had the right idea and came to imagine different structures of society based on a socialist arrangement, they did not offer the how or why these transformations would happen in a grounded, material framework of reality, mostly ascribing to stuff like "ever-increasing rationality" (This is a bit unfair to Proudhon, who was perhaps the most perspicacious of the utopians and did come to conclusions that were important for Marx himself, but always remember Marx was a proto-cspam troll irl and couldn't help but have savage takes against guys like him) or without conflict: hence utopian.

Utopian socialism as it was does not exist anymore in an organized sense, but did influence the principle of "ethical socialism" that became a political cornerstone of the major social-democratic movements in Western Europe (in opposition to revolutionary socialism/communism), for example: the idea of voluntary principle, that all classes would agree in a socialist arrangement by volition should a good enough structure and social project emerge to carry this transformation, was quite a hit in some circles such as the German SDP

however, don't let Marx's trolling carry the entire argument: it is relevant to remember that some who were described to be "utopians" were quite important revolutionaries and radical leaders, such as Francis Bellamy, Gerrard Winstanley and almost all Irish early revolutionaries could be called as such too. Generally, this is done by anti-revolutionary sentiment from liberal intention: by describing the toothier rebels as utopians or non-Marxist, they are sequestered from use by the revolutionary socialists. The best contemporary example I can think of is MLK or perhaps Mandela in that sense

indigi
Jul 20, 2004

how can we not talk about family
when family's all that we got?
are there any right wing anti-capitalist ideologies (not counting stuff like nazbols)

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


indigi posted:

are there any right wing anti-capitalist ideologies (not counting stuff like nazbols)

The only one afaik that is “coherent” as such are the reactionaries in extremis: primitivists and annihilationists, the people who sincerely believe society has developed into a general mistake and there is no previous state acceptable other than a fundamental basic one. Monarchists are too modernized to be anticapitalists; their harder counterparts, feudalists, are actually fascists by the way of medieval larping.

Neofeudalists are the interesting ones, but they are not reactionary by default; definitely a type of accelerationist though. Corporate dominion is emulating greater degrees of feudal behavior year by year as consequence of they oversized influence and weakening public infrastructure and government, which they argue that will eventually force companies to take responsibilities that are non-profitable in order to continue existing, going against capitalist interest. By doing so, in effect they begin to transition into something else, akin to a feudal mode of production.

indigi
Jul 20, 2004

how can we not talk about family
when family's all that we got?
the Eurasia thread might be a better place to ask this, but what are some similarities/differences between Yugoslavia's market socialism and China's socialism with Chinese characteristics? I know jack poo poo about Titoism

thotsky
Jun 7, 2005

hot to trot

Centrist Committee posted:

how about a crash course in ideology. I know there’s marx’s German ideology, and Gramsci wrote thousands of pages in code to escape Italian sensors looking for German radical influence, and zizek prints a new book every six months, but surely there’s a gentler overview?

I like Zizeks movie The Perverts Guide to Ideology.

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


indigi posted:

the Eurasia thread might be a better place to ask this, but what are some similarities/differences between Yugoslavia's market socialism and China's socialism with Chinese characteristics? I know jack poo poo about Titoism

would love to hear about that as well for the same reasons, haha

Centrist Committee
Aug 6, 2019

thotsky posted:

I like Zizeks movie The Perverts Guide to Ideology.

thanks this was definitely more my speed and good to watch while high

AxGrap
Jan 11, 2005

☝☯ Ŧ𝓤𝒸Ҝ 𝓨𝕠𝔲! 🐼👽
Maybe this has been covered, I skipped to the end after a few pages, but what would be advice for getting someone to see things through a socialist or communist lens without a giant reading list, or really any studying theory at all? Seems like a huge stumbling block for most people, myself included. I learn by engagement with people and orgs, I don't really have the mind for studying.

F_Shit_Fitzgerald
Feb 2, 2017



I've touched on this before: an argument I've heard more than once when I've argued for universal health care was that this was "placing doctors and nurses in slavery". The 'logic' is that by forcing doctors and nurses to work without pay, you're liberating yourself at their expense, I suppose? It's a baffling argument and I've never figured out what to say in response to that idiocy, so I'm wondering if people more familiar with Theory would have an insight.

In the past, I didn't have the presence of mind to say, "No one said that doctors and nurses wouldn't be paid, only that everyone would receive medical care based on need instead of health insurance company profits". Wish I had.

F_Shit_Fitzgerald has issued a correction as of 21:43 on Jul 29, 2023

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


holy poo poo my child is returned

AxGrap
Jan 11, 2005

☝☯ Ŧ𝓤𝒸Ҝ 𝓨𝕠𝔲! 🐼👽
The sad (?) fact is that more people are probably exposed to socialism/communism via Instagram infographics than theory or even talking to people who read theory, and while bite sized stuff like that doesn't really do a lot for education or whatever it's probably a net good. I guess this is neither here nor there.

But yeah I don't really read books anymore and most people I know read for pleasure, so my above question is something I've been thinking about. Seems like there is some anti podcast vitriol on this site sometimes, I assume bc podcasters are just mini celebrities and not exactly known for their consistency.

Mandoric
Mar 15, 2003
At some point, seeing things through a Marxist or even Marxian lens, a lens of scientific socialism, not only requires but is in itself studying; the prescriptions, such that they are, developed from first a coherent, significantly predictive general history of human society and scientific sociology of specifically capitalist society, and gain much of their value from being as the result of study where the line can be developed upon many fronts through (remember, still sociology) somewhat falsifiable hypotheses backed by data rather than utopianism where a thousand dreams can rise and fall based on mixes of personal gut feels. Not that those gut feels are necessarily wrong on the whole; wasn't even a page ago that dgcf brought up MLK and Mandela as modern examples of utopian socialists who get neatly parceled into the 'oh no sweetie those people fundamentally disagree with Marx don't worry your pretty little head about trying to square the two" bin.

This does not mean that people can't be eased into it, but it's a lot easier if the line is set at particular problems one might have with sitting down and reading.
If the problem is just the time to sit down and read, there are audiobooks and, as iffy as they are, podcasts; historically, a lot of education was done just by readings at meetings or by the lectors who operated as a sort of proto-muzak in factories. Ironically, the problem with podcasts is one of those Marx predictions come true; as the capital-intensiveness of reading back Marx has increased and less and less labor has become required to read back Marx to an arbitrarily larger crowd, there are fewer and fewer sources who can viably provide an unadulterated product .
If you have no patience for long, drawn-out rambling and want single examples with calls to action, there's a strong pamphleteering tradition, including things like the Manifesto or Engels's Socialism: Scientific and Utopian (pretty relevant to this discussion in fact! And only a few print pages); if conversely you worry you're not getting it without a detailed walkthrough, dear god does Capital lean extremely hard into the German philosophical tradition of devoting most of a chapter to what a "2" is before closing with "2+2 = 4".
If the problem is being able to focus on thinking critically at all, that's a tougher one and probably is a generational matter of a vanguard who somehow didn't have it beaten out of them, maybe even leaned into it as a defiance strategy, establishing a world where it doesn't get beaten out of the average person.

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


Not at home right now so I can’t fully harness my posting energies to give A Take but Mandoric elaborates pretty well imho

Mandoric
Mar 15, 2003
And I will note as a flipside to the wall of recs that's come up in the Marxism thread: because it's essentially a scientific tradition, you will see things like that, it's like trying to put together a summary of what books people should read to have a postgrad understanding of "physics".

No one except the most brokebrained, essentially ineffective prisoner-of-their-own-study "we don't take religion seriously anymore so I missed out on my calling of becoming a monk" types--I'm so down on them because honestly that is my personal leaning--will read and put to use all of that list in one go, or even a lifetime. It's like deciding that you need to be a postgrad-level expert on tectonics, nuclear engineering, particle physics, acoustics, relativity, thermodynamics, structural engineering, astrophysics, and able to predict the result of any given chemistry reaction all at the same time. It's study, but the important part of the study is the method of dialectical and historical materialism, learned via works devoted to it like Marx and Engels's Feuerbach and the German Ideology or Stalin's, well, Dialectical and Historical Materialism or Mao's On Contradiction (all but the German Ideology of the pamphlet length and format) or via examining how an uncontroversially Marxist writer came to their conclusions about a field you know, applied to matters which are relevant to you.

AxGrap
Jan 11, 2005

☝☯ Ŧ𝓤𝒸Ҝ 𝓨𝕠𝔲! 🐼👽
I like this and I'm going to look up those pamphlets. Idk if my underlying question has been answered but it's also not a super clear one so maybe my fault. Also Mandoric I do appreciate the information and your style of delivery but pretend (I am) a dumb guy.
For me socialism is a moral imperative, it's a reaction to something that is being done to us by forces beyond our control and a method/strategy(?) to right that wrong. That was definitely the hook for me. I really see more people coming into the fold in one way or another bc of tragedy and I'm wondering about more proactive solutions. I guess door knocking could be a thing? Idk if I want to do that tho. Sorry if this is a derail from a more theory based vibe but I necroed it so lol

Mandoric
Mar 15, 2003
Oh, yeah, sorry for being so stilted, end of the day I grew up a dumbass farmboy and tweaking things while I rephrase my train of thought into that is how I try to force myself to think things through.

Moral calling is good and important. Moral calling gets you out into the world of normal people, and helping them honestly is your foot in the door to get around them being told all their life that you're the worst thing to possibly exist. The problem with moral calling is that it falls apart real easy when circumstances change or big groups of people need to all square their personal feelings on the details together. Siddhartha Gautama and Joshua ben Joseph were both roughly as close to utopian socialist as could be in their time, didn't make it happen as their churches outgrew them, and doesn't stop television preachers on either side of the Pacific from pushing the exact overall opposite in their names now because they endorsed someone else who said some dumb, or dumb out of context, poo poo once.

Because of that, you have scientific socialism, which is based off a few rules for understanding why things are how they are. This helps people with a moral calling keep it pure through temptation or just brainfarts, it helps keep everyone on the same page working on their own paragraph and being able to go 'see guys it fits the rules', it helps get through to the depressing number who think the system is fine because their boss is a good boss and their president is a good president and we just need to avoid the bad guys, it makes useful predictions about how to change the system itself. So it's real useful if you can find a path to this way of thinking.

E: as for proactive solutions you can do right now in the west, man, who knows. If someone had the one weird trick to make everything good in all situations we wouldn't be here. Just gotta get to know people around you, get to be heard if not trusted, and work on that philosophical underpinning so that you can figure out what the right thing is.

Mandoric has issued a correction as of 03:00 on Jul 30, 2023

AxGrap
Jan 11, 2005

☝☯ Ŧ𝓤𝒸Ҝ 𝓨𝕠𝔲! 🐼👽
Thanks for this I'm slow at digesting but really appreciate it

indigi
Jul 20, 2004

how can we not talk about family
when family's all that we got?

AxGrap posted:

Maybe this has been covered, I skipped to the end after a few pages, but what would be advice for getting someone to see things through a socialist or communist lens without a giant reading list, or really any studying theory at all? l

Socialism Utopian and Scientific is like 80 pages and articulates it in the most convincing way I've yet read. you should be able to knock it out in a few poo poo breaks at work.

AxGrap posted:

The sad (?) fact is that more people are probably exposed to socialism/communism via Instagram infographics than theory or even talking to people who read theory, and while bite sized stuff like that doesn't really do a lot for education or whatever it's probably a net good. I guess this is neither here nor there.

But yeah I don't really read books anymore and most people I know read for pleasure, so my above question is something I've been thinking about. Seems like there is some anti podcast vitriol on this site sometimes, I assume bc podcasters are just mini celebrities and not exactly known for their consistency.

podcasts and youtube are bad for this because podcasters/streamers loving suck at 1) having a deep understanding of theory, history, and application and 2) communicating theory, history, and application to a curious audience, as well as 3) evolving their ideas and taking on criticism. all of which is critical for people whose main or sole method of ingesting this stuff is youtube or podcasts

honestly in the end there's so much written on this stuff - and so much is available freely in ebook form - that if you're not hooked by a pamphlet essay or book within the first 15-20 pages just chuck it and grab something else. for eg I don't really care for Marx's writing at all (whether it's the treanslator's fault idk) but Lenin or Engels are easy reads. if someone isn't keeping your interest on a topic odds are someone else will

indigi has issued a correction as of 09:55 on Jul 30, 2023

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


AxGrap posted:

Sorry if this is a derail from a more theory based vibe but I necroed it so lol

Nah, it's fine, my intention back then was something to bridge the gap between talking shop and that elusive thing called "praxis". Let's see how it goes this time, let it evolve into something new altogether idk

(It's also cool to check back because I am a very different person than I was at the start of the thread. Turns out that I had a lot of formative issues because I studied first with a problematic crowd and I had a lot of blind spots; during the pandemic woes I had the luck to get in touch with some seriously learned people that managed to help me tons, and got me back to re-learn from a new perspective)

Socialism as a moral imperative is well and good, but the practice towards it is not a moral matter, it's what can work or not. In places where action tends to pop off frequently, experienced militants remind each other to not be stupid; you are far more useful alive and well than getting into some trouble for little or no gain.

Ok but what I can do right now, you are already doing it by talking, by listening, by learning. Like, the development of dialectical thinking happens by the dialectic itself. You don't need to read Hegel or Marx for that. By the very activity of being engaged to socialism through this dialectical practice, theory tends to make way as if by itself, at least in my own experience and perspective. People start asking about this or that and the lines of inquiry naturally lead to interest towards the books. Some people read lots, others little, but they find a way to engage with theory on terms that work for them.

And some of them become very militant, others find different ways. The thing that most people underestimate by far is the power of being someone who has that process going on and has a decent handle on how to be, you know, a social animal. Because that thinking will naturally emerge when talking with others and, if you have the presence of mind to do so, you will be able to cut some spaces through false class consciousness by simply engaging with them without being an annoying dumbass. That, by itself, counts a lot to start

AxGrap
Jan 11, 2005

☝☯ Ŧ𝓤𝒸Ҝ 𝓨𝕠𝔲! 🐼👽
Thanks and well put. Esp appreciate this

quote:

Socialism as a moral imperative is well and good, but the practice towards it is not a moral matter, it's what can work or not.
I may hit up this thread again at some point while I think things through, and encourage others to do the same.

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Centrist Committee
Aug 6, 2019
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