I highly reccomend reading both together as this book contains Lenin’s notes on that particular book :)

Science of Logic by Hegel alongside Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks

Stop romanticizing your despair. You are not a martyr, and you are not ‘evil’, that framing is a convenient escape hatch. Calling yourself scum lets you off the hook because it declares you irredeemable before you’ve even tried. That isn’t humility, it’s narcissistic fatalism. The global oppressed don’t care about your American guilt complex, they care about whether you’re useful.

‘No organizing potential?’ That’s lazy defeatism dressed up as realism. The US has millions of exploited workers, tenants facing eviction, and queer kids losing rights. The potential is there, buried under the same rubble you’re too tired to lift. Did you expect the masses to deliver themselves to your doorstep? The vanguard isn’t handed out, it’s forged in the exact exhaustion you’re feeling right now. If you can’t do grand strategy, do logistics. If you can’t do logistics, do mutual aid. If you can’t do that, then your only job today is to survive and show up tomorrow. That is a tactical order, not a request.

I am not going to coddle you. But I will tell you a hard truth: checking out is the ruling class’s favorite outcome for radical Americans. They want you dead or paralyzed. Staying alive and doing one tedious, miserable task today is an act of war against them. So stop spiraling about your inherent evil, that is a bourgeois luxury problem, and start thinking about your next tactical move. Eat a meal. Make a help-line call. Send an email to them. Just don’t confuse self-pity with political analysis. Get up. Not for the party not the cause, but because lying down is exactly what the Empire wants you to do.

This is not the message of my comment.

Then you take care of the particular (the problem stopping you from action) before the universal (the action). Get medicated, find support networks, call helplines as much as you can, journal, and remember that material conditions predecede any form of conciousness - so you will not get better if you don’t get up. Set up the smallest goals. Do not think about achieveing them. Instead of “getting better” think of what personal material conditions you can change, so you are better. Remember Marx from the 18th Brumaire: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” Your position is still materially different than that of an Indonesian sweatshop slave. You can and should make the best of it.

This kind of thinking is still privileged. You do not recognize your responsibility to the people of the world and selfishly want to anihillate yourself to save yourself from the trouble of doing the hard work. This is ingrained american exceptionalism and you should reflect on that. I do not write this to “dunk” on you, but I live in an equally if not MORE anti-communist country, and what? Do I complain? Do I resign? No. Our organization is small, but it’s the little Davids that stand up against Goliath every day, get beaten down and rise back again. Because if not us, then who? You will not be saved from the outside, and resignation is admitting defeat, and giving away the win to the ruling class without a fight. Do better.

The biggest problem they fall in is constant universalism. Anything that is not pure in content, anything that includes any particular solutions to concrete problems, especially if it deviates from the Idea of Full Communism is deemed as a betrayal of the revolution. (Check out the conceptions of universalism and particularism in Hegel). Just to give an idea, he criticized Stalin for introducting wage-differentiation for different occupations (as in a doctor is paid more than a line worker). This was made to combat flight from factory to factory, in search of better wages and general reluctance to engage in more demanding jobs (as there were little to no incentives in the early collectivization phase). Since SU was trying to industralize heavily and was in need of experts, there had to be incentives for such experts to come to be. Trotsky criticized this as uncommunist, and insisted on keeping the wages the same for EVERYONE, as to build communism here and now, ignoring the reality that existed at that particular historical moment (and aleo because he hated Stalin).

Where can I read about this?

I’ve read Kristen R. Ghodsee’s Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism. DISCOURAGE people from reading this book! I would rate it as 2/5, it provides some limited data, most of which shows that USSR and the Eastern Bloc was one of the best places in the world to be a woman, yet the author does not refrain from saying “we definetely can have the same thing without ToTaLiTarIaN government”. She also vulgarizes Rosa Luxemburg in the last chapter, by saying that she believed that reform and revolution were different ways of achieving the same goal. I would take any recommendations on the “woman question” though, maybe except from Ultras like Kollontai who wanted to focus on universals and disregard the particulars (which Trotsky, curse his name, pointed out - focusing on universalization in the area of family, transforming the idea of “mine” and “yours” in regards to children leads to justifications of neglect of children, a shame he couldn’t see the same universalization he was committing in the national question, by focusing on an ideal of an “international” revolution and interpreting INTER-NATIONAL as cosmopolitan)

Why do you consider Colonialism to be such importnat subject so as to make 1/4 of the course about it? Do you reckon it is of any use to a comrade in a country like Slovakia, which has no history of colonialism whether imposed or enforced (or am I mistaken?) And what about modern problems and possible solutions to them? What about the nuclear question, or the rise of surveillance technology?