Wanted to take a second to make some positive cases for why we believe in Scientific Socialism/Anarchism. We spend a lot of time belittling historically illiterate smug lords (which is awesome) but I think it’s important to take a second to appreciate why these ideas resonate with us so much and why we find these ideas so important that they are worth fighting for online and IRL. I’ll go first;
Demystification: that’s a big thing for me. The imperial core is a place that is full of institutions that, can technically be understood, and yet do not make a whole lot of sense in their function. Health insurance companies are a great example of this. The entire process of acquiring and using insurance in the U.S. is a Kafka-esque beauracratic nightmare. And at every step there are individuals who are happy to help you understand the process, and yet even once you gain the understanding they impart, it all still feels wildly inefficient and punitive. Even to a very young person, it doesn’t make sense. It is Only beneficial In comparison to the monstrous social violence of medically induced poverty. Meaning it only makes sense when you accept that violence as a necessary societal inevitably.
So growing up in the U.S. you are faced all the time with complex and baroque financial institutions and practices that society insists you understand even if doubt persists that what you are understanding doesn’t really make sense. Ultimately when this practice confers practical economic benefit the cognitive dissonance is assuaged and is even completely resolved in some individuals. Credit cards and credit scores are another great example of this.
Understanding Mystification as a Marxist term finally gave me the vocabulary to understand this phenomenon and hence be less bothered by trying to make sense of things that I understand and yet don’t make any sense.
Another big thing: The labor theory of value; perhaps my understanding is too cursory but when I tried reading Capital this part really stuck with me because it is profound even though it seemed rather obvious to me from my lived experience.
Without trying to get out of my depth In philosophical jargon, my understanding of the LTV is that the value of currency is derived from the surplus value generated by the application of labor to raw materials. I know the states ability to enforce the transaction is also key. I welcome any clarification/insight on LTV.
The point I’m trying to make about LTV and why I find it profound and worth Blooming about is that it means that as workers we generate the force that actually changes the world. That force is labor. It’s not money, It’s not Gold, it’s not big ideas from big job titles. It is the people who turn the earth, teach the young, or just sell their labor hours doing any number of things.
It’s easy to be pessimistic in the face of the incredible accumulated political power the west still holds. Yet we should have hope, because the power that money has is only ever borrowed from labor. Under that framework it becomes a struggle to organize enough unalienated labor hours to put towards building something better.
Our labor hours are the most important building block we have towards revolution. That is the real “capital” that reshapes the world. The struggle is to take as many back from your boss as you can, and if you can, invest those hours into something bigger than yourself.
That’s what gets me blooming. Constructive feedback always welcome (would love more insight on LTV)
What makes you feel hopeful about communism/anarchism?
I never played COD:WAW, but I did play COD Classic, and the flag over the Reichstag scene and the following cutscene, with historical footage and the following narration, honestly still make me tear up:
Fuck I’m crying again really bad, awh dammit why do I have to be so moved by… gawhh…
Anyways, I think it’s very specifically that cutscene that makes me consistently consider Call of Duty 1 to be the best Call of Duty game that I’ve ever played (although I haven’t played all of them, far from it). None of the other COD games managed to actually move me to a face full of tears and snot, nor make me feel like a soldier rather than a blockbuster action hero.
I’m pretty sure that COD 1 would’ve been the first piece of media I’d experienced, where Russians/Soviets were actually portrayed as “the good guys”, were actually portrayed as equals in the fight against fascism, and where the work’s literal closing words were an expression of true fraternity across the bounds of language and culture… Maybe I’m a particular sucker for that last point specifically because my own parents had different first languages, but in any case I’m eternally grateful to all of those who risked or sacrificed their lives in the war against fascism, not least among them my communist great-grandfather, who I only first learned about this year.
It naturally took many more years before I myself would become a commie, years after that still for me to unlearn most of the nonsense I’d picked up about the USSR over the years. But I still genuinely do believe that just once hearing a message of brotherly love from the USSR to the USA as a kid, and just once being placed in the shoes of a Soviet as a kid, helped put me on that path to eventually questioning more narratives about the USSR.
That was genuinely nice to read thank you. I was mostly shit posting about cod:WaW but it is a pretty decent game if you get the chance to play it. I’ve never played cod 1 but maybe I should. You are correct though not even World at War portrayed the Soviets in that good of a light. It tried to make them look like savages who only wanted revenge for being invaded. Obviously that’s kinda hard to do if you already think the Nazis are scum. No brotherly love at all and in later games it takes the named Soviet characters and makes them enemies of the Soviet Union because they become too big of heroes during the war lmfao
This is the first time I hear someone else express the same way I felt about the original CoDs. I was saying the same thing not too long ago to my girlfriend. I thought it was so cool you could play as a Soviet, because no other game I played did that before. It really put the game in an upper league because of it.
Shame the CIA/military funded it into a propaganda toy after that and killed any sympathetic Soviet perspective. It’s not the same.