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China is a barometer for someone having ever read a book. Any socialist who reads about Chinese history would end up sympathetic to the CPC or at least greatly prefer them over any of the alternatives. Genuine socialists who oppose China are simply ignorant. I can’t accept that the human brain can sustain the cognitive dissonance required to be an anti-China socialist.

Reflection gang rise up

Great explanation. Lenin’s theorizing on Russian conscripts cannot be grafted onto the US military in 2026. Two very different scenarios.

dylan_g’s point about the possibility for troops to radicalize — that is almost trivially true, just as anyone could theoretically radicalize under certain conditions. But on the question of which class do you rely on for radicalization, I think US troops are far down on the list due to sheer amount of propaganda they are exposed to. Military training is basically self-MKUltra.

Among the “radicalized” ex-military, there is tendency to concede evil wrongdoings, but in an individualist, national-chauvinistic way that preserves the moral goodness of empire. “They lied to us to go to Iraq” instead of “Iraq is one event in a long history of imperialism predicated on bourgeois class interest and corruption”

Photons, is it gay to refract light?

Breakthrough News was making the same apologetics for Platner in the past month. I’m sure that had an effect.

This made me think about the repeated notion that old European capitals are “Disneyland for adults”, how while there is a kernel of insightful criticism, it betrays a lack of imagination on the part of the speaker; because, having lived in a very adult, very serious, very sober world of capitalist America, where the urban districts are built for the exclusive satisfaction of capital and the rejection of human residents — this person already cannot imagine a city that is designed for the pleasure of its residents, designed for use-value instead of exchange-value, except to the extent that pleasure is transactional as in an amusement park.

Like you said, there is a spectrum of psychology depending on the person. Though, in general I wouldn’t think of it as pathology or fixation, and the temptation to do so reflects the depth of the stigmas which say, tautologically, that: men cannot be feminine, adults cannot be children, cis cannot toy with gender expression, and so on. That a cishetero man who paints his nails might be perceived as fixated on femininity — in my opinion, this says something about the observer and not about the man per se, as the observer would be projecting a boundary that the man might not perceive. Likewise, we shouldn’t construct a framework of pathology to contemplate adults behaving “like children” unless there is a clear, well, pathology i.e. there is genuine dysfunction. (Not saying you are doing this, I’m sure you understand)

On the reverse of the medal from “childlike” adults, many adults — particularly parents — exaggerate the difference of children from adults. It’s normal in society to think of children almost as a different species entirely, until they pupate and finally metamorphosize into an adult in discrete transitions. Hence for example, the concern about kids degrading their attention spans on social media does not apply also to adults, despite more or less having the same brain structures and reward pathways, albeit more developed. I think this is a similar reasoning to the notion that kids need emotional validation and should receive it from media, but adults do not.

I’m getting sleepy so kind of lost my train of thought, but close enough.

Edit: oh I was going to say something about the strong separation between child and adult having to do with the requirements of capital, having a clear separation between human beings according to their working status (which of course also includes gender). This has historical roots/baggage in the old feudal understanding of age which was different because labor was different, but inheritance was a lot more important so people had to “come of age” for political-economic reasons. Also there is the instutution of marriage which, in feudal times especially, needed clear (and gross) definitions of when girls as property could be legally sold off to another “commodity owner” which also has Inheritance implications.

Revisiting this after reading through a few hours ago. Really good points made here.

As a tangent it feels like this debate over YA versus “mature” art echoes the Socialist Realism era in which art was intentionally pushed to be relatable and intelligible to the average working person. This was in response to centuries of high-brow and inaccessible art being the only admissible art, an emblem of class barriers and the intentional obfuscation and gatekeeping. The thought was, no, art doesn’t have to be inscrutable and “nuanced”, it can and maybe should be direct. I would love for an actual art historian to add more to this since it’s just my basic understanding.

Quite beside these points about realism, I think there are other reasons that adults today might reach for (apparently) children’s media that has less to do with an adult’s individual arrested development, and more to do with their daily alienation and social invalidation of their emotions and struggle within capitalism. Kids shows usually do a lot of emotional validation which makes them alluring for alienated adults also.

Don’t want to dox my age, but I am very much an adult and I’ve recently got into One Piece and Pokémon, so these ideas have been on my mind anyway. I feel happier since starting these shows, so I don’t care if they’re not adult shows

I have a bad habit of starting books, reading a few pages or chapters, and never finishing.

Goal: stop doing that

Method: read several books at once, and in smaller chunks (as little as 5 mins, up to 30 mins). My tendency is to complete books as fast as possible, which burns me out during a session and makes me loathe to pick up the book again.

Progress: going well so far. I’ve read more in the past few weeks than I have in a while.

Currently hopping between:

• Marx’s Ecology
• Moby Dick
• A People’s History of the United States
• 18 Theses on Marxism and Animal Liberation
• Philippine Society and Revolution
• Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Also started watching One Piece in the midst of this

Maybe that gives a sense of how scattered my reading has been in the past…

Focusing on ownership is too easily misunderstood. It’s difficult to speak of a transfer of property rights when the concept of property itself is transformed. Otherwise this message is easily misconstrued by anticommunist rhetoric that communism is merely redistribution rather than a restructuring of production relations. The 2nd chapter of the manifesto also makes this point, that abolition of private property is a derived, not fundamental, principle.

Moving from private property, it might be tempting to reduce communism to abolition of wage labor. Yet in the modern super-imperial, financial era, much of the global value flow occurs through means other than direct exploitation of wage labor.

If not wage labor, maybe it’s simply commodities that have to be done away with? But commodities have existed for millennia, so has money. Capitalism clearly cannot be reduced to those either.

If communist revolution is reduced to a single phrase, in my opinion it has to be focused against capital, because capital is the social relation that allows the use of wealth to expand personal wealth and thereby entrench class society. Naturally some might ask, well what is this capital? And it will require some explaining. But it’s accurate at every level of analysis, from intro to advanced theory.

If we follow Marx’s example, then there are two kinds of right-wing theory. First is vulgar theory, then there is scientific theory. He didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about the vulgarians except to make fun of them.

On the other hand, Marx understood the material advantage held by bourgeois intellectuals over proletarians, namely that proletarians don’t get paid to produce theory. Therefore not only was it necessary to generate theory from below, from the proletarian standpoint; it was also necessary to critically examine the most advanced bourgeois theory, to dust off the class bias, and then to hand it to the working class for their revolutionary purposes. That is essentially what Marx dedicated his life to, as himself an intellectual of bourgeois background and education. He took bourgeois political economy and created a revolutionary theory out of it, a practical theory that could be used to change things for the working class.

Lenin makes this point in What Is To Be Done, stating: ” We have said that there could not have been Social-Democratic consciousness among the workers. It would have to be brought to them from without. The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness …” Gramsci also wrote about the need for the working class to have its own intellectuals and the nature of these different intellectual strata.

In brief: if you are going to read theory, left or right wing, clarify your own purpose before wading in. If your purpose is entertainment, go ahead and read whatever drivel is written by The Economist or Tucker Carlson. If your purpose is to advance your ability to help the working class, then at most I would read relevant academics pursuing science honestly, even if those academics adopt imperial or class-biased attitudes.

Guess what, nothing mattered in the end. Americans still elected presidents which use the middle east as punching bag, for votes. Insane.

comment

It’s called imperialism

Link https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoricalCapsule/comments/1rnwcvs/two_us_army_soldiers_hold_each_other_for_support/

I don’t think I’ll ever get over how poetic those words were

Kinda pointless to debate a vague post, but

Marx himself and people got something wrong about luddites, the machines that came in weren’t fully automatic looms, they were to be operated by the workers

Whether the cotton looms were fully automatic misses the essential purpose of the loom for the bourgeoisie, which is that it appropriated the technique of production, taking skill previously bound up in the workers’ hands and converting it into intellectual property in the form of patents. The production technique was almost entirely converted from variable capital into constant capital, with labor afterward figuring in the process only as simple labor that sets the machine in motion.

Marx had a firm understanding of this:

Idk which communists you talked to who think we can just seize the means of capitalist production, without modification, and jump directly to communism. Marx was adamantly against this reading since at least the failure of the Paris Commune

I’m not particularly convinced by studies like “violent video games don’t increase violence” because underpinning such analyses is a mechanical, undialectical understanding of ideology, as though you can turn one dial and expect a deterministic change in an observable somewhere else. Let alone the difficulty of isolating variables, that’s just not how ideology works.

In the first place, what counts as violence is political. Does playing Call of Duty correlate with support for imperialist aggression? Studies that measure only personal, individual aggression will not detect violence done on the subject’s behalf, and on their consent, by a third party such as the state.

Secondly it conceives of violence abstractly, separated from the ideology that produces it and the reason it is carried out. Not all violence is equal in moral or political content, but this is how non-state violence has to be portrayed by bourgeois states which monopolize violence for class interests.

By the same token, I’m skeptical of vegan replicas of animal products, such as leather, which can actually serve to reinforce the ideological normalization of animals as commodities.

Instead of seeking a direct mechanical, causal link between one thing and another, instead you should ask what effect does one thing have on the totality of a superstructure (culture, ideology, etc) which maintains the patterns of society in a dialectical fashion.

Poor lady

In 22 hours, you can catch Gerald Horne live talking about this topic of the American Counter-Revolution: https://www.youtube.com/live/95sYVnt5bx8

cc @deforestgump@hexbear.net @JoeByeThen@hexbear.net

Yep, conservatives prefer to speak in terms of abstractions. The first step in dealing with them is to ground it in concrete terms. Instead of “immigrants” talk about specific people/situations. Instead of “lazy workers” talk about your own difficulty avoiding burnout when doing overtime for months on end. Etc.