On a related note: If you’re a lib looking to educate yourself on what exactly communism is read Principles of Communism, also by Engels. It’s literally an FAQ describing the very basics, and a much better starting point than the manifesto which is what most people tend to start off with.
Principles of Communism is great, the best introductory text. Incredibly clear and short.
My boy Freddy really knows how to distill these concepts into an incredibly easy to digest form.
I might make some posts going through different bits of introductory theory, since I plan to go back and read through the fundamental stuff again and take notes. With federation being a thing now it’s a great opportunity to expose other Lemmy users to theory
Thats a great idea comrade
“It’s very short”, you say, oh please, how short could it possibly-- oh.
That actually is pretty short.
Huh.
Alright is nobody gonna remark on how much this sounds like an innuendo
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Throwback to when Va*sh said of this work “I hate that book”
Frankly, at no stage in my ideological development have I ever been able to comprehend how anyone can like Vaush.
I think it’s pretty simple why people like Vaush and that sort of cohort.
Y’know how there’s those boomers who have news blaring on the TV or, less frequently, talkback radio blaring in the background 24/7?
I think that’s what streamerbros are to the younger generation.
It’s something that you can put on in the background while you’re playing an FPS game which doesn’t really require any particular mental engagement because there isn’t really anything particularly difficult to grapple with and very little that challenges the dominant worldview or which considers hegemony in a different light.
It’s mostly just a regurgitation of the prevailing narrative and prevailing tropes and the occasional gotcha-style “dunking” on someone.
I don’t play FPS games because it’s not to my taste. There’s a small handful of RTS and turn-based RPGs that I’ll play which I know like the back of my hand and at times I’ll listen to podcasts or lectures or audiobooks on theory/history/current affairs from a radical perspective and while I’m playing those games even then, with games where I know exactly how I’m going to play, what’s coming next, dialogue that I can skip over because I don’t need the in-game direction to advance the plot etc. I still find that I can’t focus sufficiently if the content gets too heavy.
His content is vapid but I think that’s a feature and not a bug, at least to his audience.
He also reaffirms people’s biases so you aren’t encouraged to do any introspection or self-reflection or hard personal work.
He assuages the latent guilty conscience of a non-reader by reassuring them that they always have the correct position and their assumptions about the world and theory are correct. He is contemptuous towards reading theory so, for the non-theory gang, this makes them feel better about themselves and it even makes them feel elevated above the people who read.
Vaush skim-reads Wikipedia on stream and delivers hot takes on matters that he is obvious to. The person this attracts is the type of person who also skim reads Wikipedia for a small fact that “vindicates” their position in an online debate.
He has a degree in sociology and I remember on a stream clip he discussed Durkheim’s concept of anomie as being, like, nihilism and whatever. This is sociology 101 stuff and anomie has nothing to do with nihilism but he couldn’t even provide a basic definition of this simple sociological concept. Tbh, Durkheim’s not my jam and I can only ever remember 3 of the 4 categories in his quadrant discussion anomie on the spot because I’m cursed but there’s no shame in not knowing this stuff if you’re schooled in sociology but all it takes is to pull up an image of the quadrant and to discuss anomie in relation to its opposite in order to elucidate the concept. (Legit came across a suspected Vaushite on social media use the term anomie in a way that implied the same meaning as Vaush did and which in no way applied the correct meaning one time and I called them out for getting their definitions from Vaush rather than bothering to spend 5 minutes reading up on it in Wikipedia before using the term and they never replied lol.)
Same can be said for how he had to look up Cypress to discover that it’s a country before discussing “Sigh-pree-yachts” as if he knew anything about the subject. This is the go-to guy for a cohort of people who want to form their opinions on geopolitics smh.
It’s just trash. It’s junk food for the mind and that’s its whole appeal.
And he’s sort of intentionally playing into this type of audience, right?
I guess the bigger question then is why do people not want to just f#!kin’ read, or listen to an audiobook, or join a study group, or whatever… I’m sure it comes from the cognitive dissonance between despising exploitation and doing nothing to address one’s own — but simply denying that inconsistency is such a half-measure, right? So why do people like to choose half measures, when they should be going all the way?
It’s definitely playing into this type of audience.
I’m not sure if Vaush fell into the grift or if he’s just the product of an organic process where the largest audience accumulated via accretion because he was the most palatable (or I guess there’s always astroturfing too but that seems a bit more farfetched) and the less palatable streamers just don’t find traction because it’s too challenging and thus less palatable.
From my engagement with his fans, it’s not about wanting to do anything it’s just about wanting to feel correct and to have claim over a sense of moral high ground.
I can’t remember any times where I’ve had a discussion with a Vaush fan where they’ve used disclaimer terms like “I think” or “my suspicion is” or “my opinion is”. They seem convinced that their opinion is always correct and they never seem to say that they don’t know about a topic or that they only have a superficial understanding of something. I think that the Dunning-Kruger effect comes into play in a big way here.
The epitome of this was when Vaush made the argument about voting Biden in and then pushing him left (once your bargaining chips as “the vooter”
have already been surrendered to the DNC.) I pressed Vaushites on what the strategy was for pushing Biden left around the time of the vote and in the months after, saying stuff like “He spends hours streaming most days right? Has he devoted a single hour to detailing what strategy you’re all going to take to push Biden left yet? What’s the plan?” and I’d inevitably get downvoted and ignored for being so impertinent.Nobody ever got back to me with any activism or organising strategies from Vaush, naturally.
Vaushism is where any aspirations for becoming more educated or more active go to die.
I think they actively want half-measures and they want to be reassured that their half-measures are adequate, and that they’re doing a radicalism simply by sitting back and watching his streams.
I kinda had an epiphany today. Liberals use the word “authoritarian” to mean “lack of representation from a plurality of interests, instead all representation is done by a single interest”
That would mean every single socialist country by default, since communist parties represent working class interests and disenfranchise capitalist interests. Since liberals dismiss a Marxist understanding of economic class, they can only see administration by a communist party as needlessly strict and dictatorial, since they literally do not see a difference between capitalist and worker. They can only surmise a communist party takes power for no reason at all except to be evil. Authoritarian might as well just mean “bad.” It’s when bad things happen.
Yeah, they can’t even actually describe what they mean by authoritarian. They name countries, but not describe what it means. It is just bad to them, that’s how they’re encouraged to use it and understand it by propaganda
I’m coming to understand what they mean by authoritarian is “unfair.” There are unfair circumstances that don’t allow liberals to take power through their preferred democratic theater mechanisms. There are restrictions on things like large business interests involving themselves within the political sphere. There’s only a single party, meaning a liberal/capitalist party can’t gain representation. There are restrictions on media that prevent a liberal viewpoint from dominating. And since they’re liberals they can’t just say they want to overthrow socialism because it’s contrary to their interests. Instead they have to invent this complex mythology about authoritarian abuses of power that would justify the advocacy of overthrowing a foreign country.
I think you’re really onto something with this. “Unfair” really does seem to sum up their objections to single party states, and not allowing reactionaries voices.
In the US for example free soeech brainworms are drummed into young peoples heads with the idea of fairness. KKK member has to have free speech too or maybe you wouldn’t. It has to be fair. The content if the speech doesn’t matter.
That example isnt hyperbole for anyone who doesn’t know, thats the literal court case they use to talk about free speech. A KKK member had a show on local access cable and sued when he was kicked off air. Got to be fair. It would be authoritarian to not let reactionaries speak
Yeah, the ACLU sued on the behalf of the KKK to march through a majority black neighborhood where kids could see them. Just all around lack of empathy from free speech warriors.
Yeah, another foundational case was allowing Nazis to march through a Jewish neighborhood in Skokie Illinois, where some of the people living there were Holocaust survivors.
Interestingly, finding that out helped me shake out some of my
back in collegeYeah the ACLU loves to defend the KKK.
meanwhile, near-total media dominance by bourgeois interests is “fair” because you too could buy a cable network for 10 billion dollars
I’m coming to understand what they mean by authoritarian is “unfair.”
it’s more nuanced than that for example the fact America only has two parties with any chance of success is unfair, the fact the UK has a heritary monarch who is above the law and a place for heritary aristocrats within the legislature is unfair
neither of these countries are called authoritarian
what I mean is unfair for liberals. If liberals see that a country has mechanisms in place to curtail or dismiss ideological liberals, then it’s authoritarian. You’re right that it’s nuanced too, because it’s a term almost exclusively used for countries that aren’t white.
They don’t undersrand comradery.
But why can’t you defeat the ruling class with niceness?
You expect libs to read?
If they can read our dunks, they can read Engles
if federation has taught me anything, it’s that they can’t read anything longer than a sentence or two.
if they could read engles they would not need to read our dunks
- fantastic reccomemdation comrade corgi. It may keep some of us from having to repeat “all governments are authoritarian”
I do agree with the argument of the text, but I don’t think it is a good introductory read for someone who doesn’t already have an understanding of how historical materialism works.
I would recommend this video first since it explains a lot of the same material, along with the general basics of historical materialism, and does so in terms that should be much more familiar to someone with a more mainstream understanding of politics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nPVkpWMH9k
no more half measures walter
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We’re all reactionaries in these notes lol
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Please stop speaking on my behalf, thank you
All socialists in their hearts are anarchists. It’s just that you can’t defend a society with no organised body of men representing the interest of the ruling class against a society with one
basically the only thing that can stop a bourgeoise with a state is a proletariat with a state
Great piece, worth the reread. Thanks comrade.
on authority is only a counter to anyone who wants to abolish all forms of authority. If an anarchist believed in elected foremans for factories for example then on authority would not apply to what they believe
it’s not really a counterargument against anarchism but against the stupidest subsection of anarchism imaginable
Ah, again the text that willingly conflates authority with self-defence.
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I’m locking this damn thread.
Narration by Socialism For All (9:40)
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