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Socialism |OT| The Dawn of a Red Era

What tendency/ideology do you best align with?

  • Anarchism

    Votes: 125 12.0%

  • Marxism

    Votes: 86 8.2%

  • Marxism-Leninism

    Votes: 79 7.6%

  • Left Communism

    Votes: 19 1.8%

  • Democratic Socialism

    Votes: 423 40.6%

  • Social Democracy

    Votes: 238 22.8%

  • Other

    Votes: 73 7.0%
  • Total voters
    1,043
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sphagnum

sphagnum

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Oct 25, 2017
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curly said:
What are some good introductory texts on Maoism/third worldism? I was reading this pretty devastating takedown of Bhakshar Sunkara's new "manifesto" and I realized all of my knowledge of it comes secondhand. Obviously Mao I guess but which writings are best?
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I don't think I've ever actually read an honest Maoist-Third Worldist text, just like I've never read a genuine Posadist text, because it ends up as one of those offshoots that exists primarily in memeland.

Funny enough, people on Rhizzone would probably know.

After googling around a bit, this seems like it might be a good starting point. https://kersplebedeb.com/posts/the-weapon-of-theory-a-maoist-third-worldist-reader/
 
House_Of_Lightning

House_Of_Lightning

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Tankies are peak reactionary garbage. I'll never understand how a statist, worker liquidating ideology rooted in homophobia and ethnic purges became fashionable with the modern left, but considering the state of the modern left I shouldn't be too surprised.

This forum used to take a hard stance on shit like Holodomor denial/support but that's waned a bit lately.
 
House_Of_Lightning

House_Of_Lightning

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MTW is a white, bourgeois, western ideology. Non Westerners who believe in third world theory are very few and far between.
 
Funky Dude Sparks

Funky Dude Sparks

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Oct 27, 2017
12,317
House_Of_Lightning said:
Tankies are peak reactionary garbage. I'll never understand how a statist, worker liquidating ideology rooted in homophobia and ethnic purges became fashionable with the modern left, but considering the state of the modern left I shouldn't be too surprised.

This forum used to take a hard stance on shit like Holodomor denial/support but that's waned a bit lately.
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I'm more worried that any anti imperialist tinge will horseshoe into support for third world dictators and not independence for the people like Russia's support for Assad
 
House_Of_Lightning

House_Of_Lightning

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Comrade Doggo Sparky said:
I'm more worried that any anti imperialist tinge will horseshoe into support for third world dictators and not independence for the people like Russia's support for Assad
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Be worried because this has largely happened and has been the case for the past 40 years.

Straight up apologia and support for things like China's installation of military bases in Africa and their colonialism, brushing off of their gulags and extermination of Muslim Chinese, etc... All because it's China and Not America, as if that matters in the slightest.

Bad Socialists who never read Marx and don't understand Lenin or Mao.
 
samoyed

samoyed

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Oct 26, 2017
15,191
Thanks for posting that Eylos I enjoyed it very much. Navigating ethics in a capitalist society while rejecting capitalism can be complicated and this has given me a bit to think about.
 
Bonen no Max'd

Bonen no Max'd

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Oct 25, 2017
523
what's up with twitter communists/tankies using the corn and gear emojis? Like I get that it's supposed to be agriculture and industry but why not just use the hammer and sickle
 

Deleted member 25600

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5,701
This was just posted in a Leftist Facebook group I'm in. The narrator uses Cities: Skylines to illustrate the effects of poor urban planning.
it's extremely interesting.

 
OP
OP
sphagnum

sphagnum

Banned
Oct 25, 2017
16,058
OP
OP
sphagnum

sphagnum

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Really interesting essay I found about the failure of Soviet cybernetics. It would have been really interesting to see how they would have fared had they gotten OGAS up and running, but I suspect that under their centralized conditons it wouldn't have led to the liberation of the proletariat so much as an even more regimented system of production.

http://audentia-gestion.fr/MIT/Gerovitch-InterNyet.pdf
 
Old_King_Coal

Old_King_Coal

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Shy

Shy

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Everyone please watch this. It's a tv adaption of the play, Accidental death of an Anarchist.
 
SaveWeyard

SaveWeyard

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Read the latter two articles posted above quickly and this line in the response stood out to me:
But nevertheless, the collective human dynamic by which social groups and professions (cops, priests, or activists) emerge out of the division of labor cannot be denied or thrown over by acts of individual will, which is the level at which Andrew X addresses the problem.
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I agree that there seems to remnants of reliance on individual responsibility in Andrew X's critique that stink of liberalism. Of course, its a hard thing to shake since its the dominant ideology that permeates all of our thoughts.
 
SaveWeyard

SaveWeyard

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House_Of_Lightning said:
Well, at the end of the day, activism is shit praxis but it's the human condition.
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But there's a difference between activism as praxis and activism as identity. You could argue that praxis involves some sort of embodiment of the activity itself and in that case the distinction is blurred, but the point is that identity is not purely self-made, but socially-imposed. If that is the case then one's condition is not bound by humanity but is contingent on the current societal structure, which may be subject to change.
 

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Comrade Doggo Sparky said:
Ummmmmmmmmmmmmm

Not sure if the stanning of the Soviet Union on the chapo subreddit front page is ironic or unironic but I think that in a world where the kulaks thing happen, not sure I can abide by that
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Chapo is full of refugees from /LateStageCapitalism, which means that it's a brigading sub for vapid anarchist adjacent something leftists who want to edge post and circlejerk each other. Probably best to just not go there, it's always like that.
 
House_Of_Lightning

House_Of_Lightning

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There is very little reason for anyone who calls themselves a socialist to be on any of the "socialist" subreddits. CTH and /r/socialism especially. They're full of people who have never read a book, have no relation to the working class, and I wouldn't be surprised if either are crawling with feds.
 
Shy

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House_Of_Lightning said:
There is very little reason for anyone who calls themselves a socialist to be on any of the "socialist" subreddits. CTH and /r/socialism especially. They're full of people who have never read a book, have no relation to the working class, and I wouldn't be surprised if either are crawling with feds.
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absolutely_right_zoolander.gif
 
Frozenprince

Frozenprince

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House_Of_Lightning said:
There is very little reason for anyone who calls themselves a socialist to be on any of the "socialist" subreddits. CTH and /r/socialism especially. They're full of people who have never read a book, have no relation to the working class, and I wouldn't be surprised if either are crawling with feds.
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Posters on the Chapo reddit are proud of never reading theory.
 
Juan29.Zapata

Juan29.Zapata

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Oct 25, 2017
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Colombia
House_Of_Lightning said:
There is very little reason for anyone who calls themselves a socialist to be on any of the "socialist" subreddits. CTH and /r/socialism especially. They're full of people who have never read a book, have no relation to the working class, and I wouldn't be surprised if either are crawling with feds.
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Hah, this reminds me of that video of the 60's explaining the American political spectrum, and makes the joke that the American Communist Party is 70% composed of FBI agents haha.
 

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Old_King_Coal said:
I fInally got around to reading the 'militancy is the highest form of alienation' and 'give up activism' articles that House linked me to much earlier in the thread, as well as a reply to the latter. They were excellent, and are quite helpful for situating how left com (I think) ideas work in practice.

The articles, for anyone curious:

https://libcom.org/library/militancy-ojtr

https://libcom.org/library/give-up-activism

http://libcom.org/library/anti-activism
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These articles are always interesting, but it always feel like I never get answers - just better questions I should be asking. It feels like reading essays on Buddhist practice, only you swap out karma for historical materialism and enlightenment for society-wide self-actualization. But I think I'll keep claiming my seeding pirated manga torrents as good praxis, thankyouverymuch.

Although I do think I figured out what House_Of_Lightning has been rambling on about when he tells people you can't educate the working class on socialism. People already know intuitively the alienation thrust upon them by society. People know when they're getting a bum deal. Even if I can't diagnose an illness, I still know I'm sick, and where it hurts.
 
Old_King_Coal

Old_King_Coal

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BuddyDharma said:
These articles are always interesting, but it always feel like I never get answers - just better questions I should be asking. It feels like reading essays on Buddhist practice, only you swap out karma for historical materialism and enlightenment for society-wide self-actualization. But I think I'll keep claiming my seeding pirated manga torrents as good praxis, thankyouverymuch.

Although I do think I figured out what House_Of_Lightning has been rambling on about when he tells people you can't educate the working class on socialism. People already know intuitively the alienation thrust upon them by society. People know when they're getting a bum deal. Even if I can't diagnose an illness, I still know I'm sick, and where it hurts.
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Indeed. For me, what it really helped clarify was all this 'follow your desire' stuff. I couldn't understand what was so revolutionary about that. I think now I get that it essentially means attempting to act as if you were already in a society of free association, so only do the things that you want to do. Of course in a capitalist society where you need money to survive, that's really hard, but that's why they call it 'struggle'!

And when thought about in this way, something like slacking off at work to read your phone about something you find genuinely interesting rather than the job you hate is a more revolutionary act than any activist or militant meeting. And it has the added benefit of meaning you aren't generating more surplus value to exploit (I had this revelation whilst reading the articles on my phone at work which was particularly delicious).

This is also why you don't need formal parties to organise the proletariat. What unites them is a common desire they share, whether to overthrow the factory managers they work for because they hate the working conditions, or they need to produce something that meets their needs, so they (we) naturally band together to do so. In the moment you will look around you and see a common desire, so you all follow it, and the organised revolution follows from there.

I think. Still new to all this.
 
House_Of_Lightning

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Old_King_Coal said:
the job you hate is a more revolutionary act than any activist or militant meeting.
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Tune In Turn On Drop Out Free Tibet


Old_King_Coal said:
This is also why you don't need formal parties to organise the proletariat. What unites them is a common desire they share, whether to overthrow the factory managers they work for because they hate the working conditions, or they need to produce something that meets their needs, so they (we) naturally band together to do so. In the moment you will look around you and see a common desire, so you all follow it, and the organised revolution follows from there.
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Organic centralism, the Class is the Party.




Good job.
 
House_Of_Lightning

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SaveWeyard said:
But there's a difference between activism as praxis and activism as identity. You could argue that praxis involves some sort of embodiment of the activity itself and in that case the distinction is blurred, but the point is that identity is not purely self-made, but socially-imposed. If that is the case then one's condition is not bound by humanity but is contingent on the current societal structure, which may be subject to change.
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Agreed, largely.

"Praxis" vs "Activism". One is the politics of the Party in motion, the other is the expression of an identity by the individual. One is historical, one is immaterial. One's condition is influenced by the base/superstructure cyclical nature of culture and hegemony and the methods this dominate way of life seeks to reproduce itself.

This is why class supersedes everything. As you said, societal structure is a primary influence and is always subject to change. Your identity ("Marxist", "Stalinist", "Maoist", "Fascist", "etc") is defined by you, your class is imposed on you by the very nature of the system itself. Rarely is one given the option to choose their class, and one's relation to capital often never changes, regardless of how you see or project yourself. The ascent of class consciousness and the resultant unity of the class as the common denominator is what unites the masses. The result of this unity isn't the creation of the "proletarian identity" or the splintering of various expressions of working class culture but instead the abolition of class itself.
 
samoyed

samoyed

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How does Mao Third World interpret the post-Cold War, post-Trump/Brexit order?

Anyone want to take a stab at this? I'm new to MTW stuff and it's not really my thing but I'm curious what it looks like without the Soviets.
 
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