Most of what matters is having the values of wanting people to live without being turned into tools or commodities by other people. After that, recognizing that most of “civilized” history consists of the ways in which people engaged in that very subordination, and then assembled narratives to justify it, will inform you very far.

With countless variables influencing human affairs, no one can predict exactly how things will turn out; it’s enough to put yourself on the side of the classes that wish to shake off and put an end to exploitation, and recognize the wide range of experimentation that has gone on and also the range that has yet to be done.

You’re learning and you’re growing. You should feel good about that.

Never changing your world view is dogmatism and dogmatism is counter to leftism and it’s principals. As a Marxist I except that my world view will be challenged and changed, since life is an ever unfolding process of change. Conditions change, and your analysis of those conditions will change your view of the world. The material world shapes your consciousness. The more you learn the more your consciousness becomes aligned with the material world. It is inescapable.

What you recognize as cringe was your false consciousness. That false consciousness was developed by the material world as well. Through the narrow window built for you by the ruling ideas of the ruling class.

This is the class struggle.

You don’t always have to have a ‘take’ on everything.

I just wanna pick one goddamn worldview, never change it, and still be right about everything all the time. Is that so much to ask?

yes, completely

No. Even the most celebrated revolutionaries in history had cringe takes.

I just wanna pick one goddamn worldview, never change it, and still be right about everything all the time. Is that so much to ask?

Well you could create a society where everyone observes, but nobody participates and then be right about things going wrong all the time. An Autopoietic society that inevitably destroys itself, even in the best case scenario it just floats in space repeating the same life over and over again until the end of history.

Marxism is based on Dialectics or specifically Dialectical Materialism. You don’t need to follow it I’m not your mom and have no interest in telling you what to do or how to live your life, but if you’re interested in learning more about it, revolutionaryth0t made a great little video explaining it, in simple terms. And my toxic trait is not linking it here because I’m too lazy.

I also know that I’m prone to emotional outbursts and I’m really mean spirited, but that allows for me to disengaging from discussions when things get too heated lol

Does this go away eventually? Or are y’all constantly refining your understanding, so you always dislike your views from a year ago?

education is a constant process. but as you progress, the scale of the “cringe” decreases. so for instance my takes a year ago are not super different from my takes now. as opposed to my takes a year before joining a marxist org and a year after.

If folks leave, where do they go from here? Are they just picking their preferred flavor of communism/anarchism? Are there other categories of leftism that they’re heading to? I’m sure some backslide, but I mean heading somewhere new - like I didn’t know people actually liked DPRK until I heard about “tankies.” I saw a group that doesn’t believe in objective reality?

1. what do you mean by leave?
2. ideology is not a supermarket, you dont pick a flavor.
3. im not sure wha “heading to other categories of leftism” means

I’m not really expecting to look at anything new and not be a Marxist, but I’d like to know what’s out there to be sure.

i would really recommend to look at marxist orgs in your area

I just wanna pick one goddamn worldview, never change it, and still be right about everything all the time. Is that so much to ask?

thats not how self improvement and science work. it is important to always keep refining your understanding of yourself and the world

The moment you believe you have cast aside all cringe is the moment you have become truly cringe. Your best defense against posting cringe is to view your battle against it as an ongoing process that will exist until FALGSC does.

depends how old you are, but nobody is ever 100% correct, and anyone who thinks they can’t be wrong is a delusion and egotistical shitbag.

Once youre a marxist though, the % of correctness is pretty solid, as long as you have concrete values.

I was against the iraq/afghan wars in middle school when they started, but was still mostly lib until 2012 when i discovered bernie and realized Obama and Dems didnt accomplish anything. Bernie getting fucked out of the presidency turned me into a marxist. I also didnt really use reddit until like 2016 and that also helped alot. I hadn’t really spent time on political message boards, mostly gaming and nerd forums. So luckily ive always been anti war, but i wasnt always anti capitalist. So maybe 3 times in my life would i have thought “damn i cant believe i thought that a year ago.” I was at least a lib/Dem from the start, i know someone who was the republican kid in high school and he’s a marxist now.

But do i really think about how i was wrong at some point? It should be acknowledged but you can’t overthink it.

Boomer take: fuck i hate the word cringe.

grains of cringe are necessary are on the road to a heap of based

On the one hand, yes I’m always reading more, trying to educate myself more, talking more about issues with other people, etc., and therfore I am always updating my beliefs and discarding old ones, some of which are cringe.

But on the other hand, my overall worldview has not changed for some time. I’ve been a Marxist Leninist for about a decade now. The beliefs I’m updating are smaller things (some important still, but nothing at all like what things were like when in a couple of years I went from libertarian (I was a child, in my defense) to ancom to ML.)

I have this same feeling almost constantly and I’m over 40. I’ve been a “leftist” of some variety most of my life, especially if we’re counting anything that’s anti-capitalist as left. I look at it as a good thing. My present self might cringe at my past self, but that’s the cost of learning new shit.

I only really accepted this in the last 5 years or so doing software development. I have worked on the same project for 6+ years and constantly run into my old code and think how terrible it is and how could I ever be this dumb, etc. Now I just view that experience as the cost of improving.

If I looked at my old code (or my old ideology) and it was exactly the same as it is now, I would probably cringe even harder.

I don’t really feel cringe about my previous positions. They were based on the education I had at that time which was liberal indoctrination, and I don’t fault myself for it and am happy I learned more.

There are so many things still unclear to me, I don’t know my political ideology and there are some parts about the organizing I do that I’m unsure of. But I keep doing it to the best of my ability because committed organizers are rare and doing something while making mistakes and learning from them is better than doing nothing.

In my opinion the best way to learn is by putting theory to practice because then you start to notice the gaps in the theory you read and know what to look for for future learning. You can join an org even if you aren’t sure if you fully agree with its methods and ideology. You can always leave if it turns out that it doesn’t suit you. No org is perfect but you should have some feeling that you are able to actually build something through it.

I think it’s much healthier to take pride in having grown from old errors and to seek to keep growing such that you’ll look back at now the same way. I’ve had periods of my life where I consistently felt that way about how I viewed things like three months ago, and now I miss being able to say that, because I think I’ve stalled out lately.

It’s not generally about hopping around to different labels imo but having a better understanding, which might mostly fit under the same label, though what you call Marxism now you might have a less charitable name for in the future. If you think that having an overwhelmingly thorough view of Marxism and an ability to analyze new situations with preeminent accuracy is a low ceiling such that you have any business being concerned with your intellectual development after you reach that point, then I can only say that I hope you’re right and you’re really that brilliant.