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cucumovirus

@ cucumovirus @lemmygrad.ml

Posts
6
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87
Joined
3 yr. ago

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  • Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

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  • she needs to find better material if she wants to do something greater than pander to her audience

    She doesn't. She's petty bourgeois and her income relies on her audience's subscriptions.

    This also isn't the first time she doubled down on bad takes just because the majority of her audience already think/feel what she's reinforcing, and she has never responded well to criticism from Marxists. You might remember from a few years ago when she was pushing the brainwashing narrative, which as you pointed out here with AI, also lets her audience feel like a superior elite and dehumanizes the masses.

  • Day two of Hegel updates: AHHHHHHHHHHHH

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  • I think you should try "Hegel and the Freedom of Moderns" by Domenico Losurdo. It's the book that really helped me understand Hegel and see how Marxism built on his method by focusing in on the rational kernel in his system.

  • Careful

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  • In the West, the capitalist is actually most often taking the cookies from the Global South and giving multiple to the white worker.

  • ML view on elite theory?

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  • Plekhanov deals with this topic and many closely related issues is his On the Role of the Individual in History (1898) essay. I would recommend you read this in its entirety first.

    I am struggling to see how so many revolutions would have succeeded merely by waiting for the masses to rise up by themselves?

    This is not the ML dialectical materialist view. If you're interested in exploring the relationship of masses and elites, which you've probably observed only in the reactionary West, I would recommend this essay from Roderic Day: Masses, Elites, and Rebels. When you read past revolutionaries like Lenin praising the proletariat for being revolutionary and holding the correct ideas, that's not them sucking up to them, it's a real description of a revolutionary proletariat in a revolutionary time lead by a communist party. Also, this short text by Stalin covers a very brief overview of the dialectical nature of these relationships.

    Maybe you would also be interested in Gramsci's writings about intellectuals and political parties from his Prison Notebooks, or dialectical materialist philosophy in general.

    Some recommendations: there are more good essays on the topic on Red Sails, In Defense of Materialism - Plekhanov, The Dialectics of Nature - Engels, The Dialectical Biologist - Lewins and Levontin, Materialism and Empirio-criticism - Lenin

  • General Discussion Thread - Juche 114, Week 18

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  • This is where a book club or theory discussion group would be very helpful. Just getting a different perspective on the same text can facilitate understanding, and I find it also helps to connect the theory to examples of historical or current events.

  • My thoughts on AI

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  • Is Russia imperialist?

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  • To add onto this, I really like Losurdo's analysis:

    Immediately after World War I — after the defeat of Tsarist Russia — Russia was in danger of being balkanized, of becoming a colony. Here I quote Stalin, who said that the West saw Russia like they saw Central Africa, that they were trying to drag it into war for the sake of Western capitalism and imperialism.

    The end of the Cold War, with the West and the United States triumphant, once again put Russia at risk of becoming a colony. Massive privatization was not only a betrayal of the working classes of the Soviet Union and Russia, it was also a betrayal of the Russian nation itself. The West was trying to take over Russia’s massive energy deposits, and the US came very close to acquiring them. Here Yeltsin played the role of “great champion” for the Western colonization effort. Putin is not a communist, that much is clear, but he wants to stop this colonization, and seeks to reassert Russian power over its energy resources.

    Therefore, in this context, we can speak of a struggle against a new colonial counter-revolution. We can speak of a struggle between the imperialist and colonialist powers — principally the United States — on the one side, and on the other we have China and the third world. Russia is an integral part of this greater third world, because it was in danger of becoming a colony of the West.

  • Antonio Gramsci - I Hate New Year’s Day

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  • Antonio Gramsci - I Hate New Year’s Day

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  • Yes, I also quite like NYE, I don't know why he chose to write about it in particular, maybe it was worse in his time. However, his point about about bourgeois holidays and commemorations of historical events that have no meaning to the vast majority of today's people I find to be correct. There are several such "holidays" in my country which the bourgeoisie basically forces, and which the majority of people don't care about. I guess getting the day off is still nice though.

  • Antonio Gramsci - I Hate New Year’s Day

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  • I agree, it has that vibe a bit, and I have no particular problem with New Year's, but his general point is definitely correct when it comes to some bourgeois holidays and commemorations of specific historical events that really don't have any meaning to the vast majority today. I can think of several examples that are "celebrated" in my country.

  • GenZedong @lemmygrad.ml
    cucumovirus @lemmygrad.ml

    Antonio Gramsci - I Hate New Year’s Day

    viewpointmag.com /2015/01/01/i-hate-new-years-day/

  • Sources showing why Wikipedia is not reliable on political issues

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  • Are Zionists pure evil or just brainwashed?

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  • Now I understand US a bit more

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  • Your comment here is way too favorable to the tzar. There was plenty of racism against the non-Russian peoples in the empire. Plenty of pogroms and other horrors committed. The "Great Russians" were very chauvinistic in their attitude towards the other nationalities, and were very privileged in what positions they could occupy, for example. An important part of Bolshevik propaganda was fighting against racism and "Great Russian" chauvinism.

    From Walter Rodney's 'The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World':

    There was a group of people known as Russians, who ruled over Finns, Poles, Latvians, Lithuanians, Georgians, Ukrainians, Armenians, Mongolians, and Turks, to name just a few. The Russians monopolized political power and sent their governors and settlers into the countries of these other peoples. As in all colonial states, there was a legal distinction between the citizen (Russian) and the colonial subject. The constitution of Tsarist Russia explicitly based discriminatory measures on the racial or national origin or religion of those affected. It was in some ways like the distinctions made under Portuguese and Belgian colonialism, and under South African and Rhodesian apartheid. In other words, Russian colonial rule hardly differed from that of the Western European powers. The British sent warships; the Russians sent the Cossacks. When its colonial subjects revolted, as Georgian workers and peasants had during the 1905 Revolution, the tsar, as we’ve seen, agreed to a few minor reforms but ultimately crushed the uprising and reverted to the old system of colonialism.

    Every colonial relationship in history has involved cultural domination, namely the imposition of language, religion and way of life on the subjugated peoples. In the Russian Empire, there were numerous other religions apart from the Russian Orthodox church. None of these were respected. The Catholics in Polish Russia were persecuted. The Jews were hounded wherever they were found, especially in the Ukraine. The Muslims were treated as enemies of Christian civilization. And those elements of the population who believed in their own family gods and traditional religion were the most despised of all, in the same way that European missionaries came to Africa and denounced African religion as devil worship and black magic. […] When faced with a more technologically advanced culture, such groups were victims of genocidal policies.

  • Now I understand US a bit more

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  • I'm not sure what point you're making here. Russian colonialism doesn't change the importance of settler-colonialism in general and specifically in the US. The USSR was built on a basis of national liberation, and not on the "Great Russian" identity which would be analogous to the US identity here.

    Another difference is that the US is entirely settler colonial, a whole country founded solely by settlers, while the Russian empire's colonies were all still tied to the metropolitan core in western Russia. The US was created through a revolt of the most reactionary settlers that wanted autonomy from Britain. The path forward for North America is strictly decolonial.

  • Now I understand US a bit more

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  • the basis is capitalist

    And also settler-colonial, which is a very important factor when it comes to culture in this sense.

  • Should communists be minimalists as a way to not partake in pointless consumerism and as a way to help save the planet?

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  • I agree, and when talking about consumerism, I'm always reminded of these two great essays on it:

    https://redsails.org/women-and-the-myth-of-consumerism/

    https://redsails.org/the-logic-of-stupid-poor-people/

    Also, Marx's own view of consumption is that it's a real social need which capitalism itself restricts only to the bourgeoisie (we could also add the labour aristocracy) while the vast majority cannot engage in consumption like they need to. Of course, the goal here isn't a form of bourgeois luxury, but the ability of everyone to live a fulfilling life.

    IMO communism will not prevail through celebrating austerity

    Exactly, and there was quite a big debate around this in the early years after the October revolution and the founding of the USSR (as there seems to be every time a revolution manages to survive the initial time of great crisis and then needs to build up the forces of production and increase quality of life). After the horrors of WW1 and the civil war, both caused by capitalism, there was a long period of crisis which meant that no one really had a lot, and the little that people had, they had to all share equally. It was a sort of rationing program that was necessary during the wars. This, however, cannot be continued forever, and both Lenin and Stalin (and others) understood this. It's why the NEP was necessary, but these decisions caused outcry from some Soviet and even Wester European socialists who didn't understand the actual situation, but clung on to an abstract principle.

    From Losurdo's 'Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend':

    In the climate of horror at the carnage caused by capitalism and the auri sacra fames [accursed hunger for gold], a religious distrust of gold and of wealth as such is reproduced, alongside the idealization of poverty or at least of scarcity, understood and experienced as an expression of spiritual fullness or revolutionary rigor. And Stalin felt compelled to emphasize a central point: “It would be absurd to think that socialism can be built on the basis of poverty and privation, on the basis of reducing personal requirements and lowering the standard of living to the level of the poor”; instead, “socialism can be built only on the basis of a vigorous growth of the productive forces of society” and “on the basis of the prosperity of the working people,” for that matter, “a prosperous and cultured life for all members of society.”

  • Can you recommend me reading on the french revolution and the paris commune?

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  • Don't know about the 1789 revolution, but Marx wrote 'The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte' (about the 1848-1852 situation in France), and 'The Civil War in France' (about the commune).

  • How did settlers get to California through all those mountains? A thread from comrade Sungmanitu

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  • I appreciate you reposting these threads to lemmygrad now as the twitter algorithm usually seems to not want to show them to me.

  • Reading on Zionism ?

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  • Never Stop Being Shocked By The Depravity Of The Empire

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  • I agree with you. The shock can be useful during radicalization at first, but the point is to stop being shocked and understand how these things work rationally in order to change them. Similarly, I don't like how many are still shocked by some soc-dem politicians "betraying" us when it has always been clear that they've never been with us in the first place. Not being shocked anymore (unless it's out of a defeatist resignation) is a good thing because it means you understand how things actually work. We want people to move past shock to an understanding and action.

  • Comradeship // Freechat @lemmygrad.ml
    cucumovirus @lemmygrad.ml

    "Research" by US university says lemmygrad is the 4th most popular "tankie" website

    twitter.com /RodericDay/status/1681686962661470210
  • Communism @lemmygrad.ml
    cucumovirus @lemmygrad.ml

    Marxism and the Dialectical Method: A Critique of G. A. Cohen

    redsails.org /sayers-on-cohen/
  • GenZedong @lemmygrad.ml
    cucumovirus @lemmygrad.ml

    Preemptive War, Americanism, and Anti-Americanism (2004) - Domenico Losurdo

    redsails.org /preemptive-war-and-americanism/
  • GenZedong @lemmygrad.ml
    cucumovirus @lemmygrad.ml

    Reformists, Revolutionaries, and Social Liberals by Jones Manoel

    redsails.org /esquerda-reformista/
  • Memes @lemmygrad.ml
    cucumovirus @lemmygrad.ml

    Kids these days...