This is a Dengist community in favor of Bashar al-Assad with no information that can lead to the arrest of Hillary Clinton, our fellow liberal and queen. This community is not ironic. We are Marxists-Leninists.
This community is for posts about Marxism and geopolitics (including shitposts to some extent). Serious posts can be posted here or in /c/GenZhou. Reactionary or ultra-leftist cringe posts belong in /c/shitreactionariessay or /c/shitultrassay respectively.
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Welcome again to everybody. Make yourself at home. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is the weekly discussion thread.
☭ Matrix homeserver and space
☭ Theory reading group on hiatus, will move to Lemmygrad later this year
☭ Find theory on ProleWiki, marxists.org, Anna's Archive, libgen
Absolutely. For example, I have played baseball when I was very little and have watched professional baseball games a few times. But I am not qualified to give advice to professional ball players based on this very limited experience. Likewise, an individual who has not educated themselves on history and read extensively on philosophy, economics, politics etc etc is not qualified to be speaking on this matter. I find many liberals wish to speak about everything under the sun even when their own knowledge of the matter is very limited. I see this tendency often in leftist circles as well unfortunately when it comes to even portraying one’s own views of something as what was intended by an author. I think this tendency is foolish and must be avoided and corrected. Equally as this tendency can come about as a result of not reading at all, it can also come from just placing theory on a pedestal and ignoring actual material conditions.
Mao said “A Communist Party's correct and unswerving tactics of struggle can in no circumstance be created by a few people sitting in an office; they emerge in the course of mass struggle, that is, through actual experience. Therefore, we must at all times study social conditions and make practical investigations. Those comrades who are inflexible, conservative, formalistic and groundlessly optimistic think that the present tactics of struggle are perfect, that the ‘book of documents’ of the Party's Sixth National Congress guarantees lasting victory, and that one can always be victorious merely by adhering to the established methods.“ I think that this issues come about both from ignorance of the world around individuals but also on neglecting the duty to study history and culture. I like what you are saying about trying to avoid this in personal life and I think everyone (myself included) would do well by keeping this in mind as well.
I think perhaps the best summery of what I saying also came from Mao, who said, “Only a blockhead cudgels his brains on his own, or together with a group, to ‘find solution’ or ‘evolve an idea’ without making any investigation.” (https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-6/mswv6_11.htm)
Well said. It is unfortunately something that seems to plague the western english-speaking internet in particular (I can't speak to whether similar happens elsewhere). Countless "takes" that are nothing more than an off-the-cuff bunch of thoughts thrown together on a whim. I don't think this is inherently a bad thing, to exchange casual thoughts, but when it is mixed with arrogance, stubbornness, projection, dogmatic thinking, and just a general bad attitude, as is often the case in arguments online, it creates more needless hostility than it does clarify anything. And as you helpfully call attention to, you cannot "evolve an idea" without any investigation into the matter; that's the stuff of philosophers who pretend reality doesn't exist, so they can cosplay understanding it from outside.
And none of this is meant to be criticism that can't find its way back around to me at times. There are definitely times I would do better to spend the time I do on responding to an internet post reading more theory or doing more direct investigation of things instead.
Another point that occurs to me relates to a piece I read today on Hasan the streamer: https://loloverruled.substack.com/p/waiting-for-hasan
The part I'm thinking of was about marketing and presentation, and how some on "the left" undervalue that. And I know I'm one of them who struggles with marketing as a whole, whether it's explicitly about politics or not. And I see it plenty beyond myself too. As an example, people who adopt something like a wannabe version of the US empire "mafia intimidation" mindset when trying to persuade others about ideology, rather than finding other means. Of course the working class and/or colonized peoples will not liberate through hugs, but neither will they gain popular support through condescending bad faith takes that disrespect the very people they're trying to win over.
So there is agreeing with communism, or anti-imperialism, and then there is practicing it, and we are always in a process on that. Agreeing doesn't immediately unlearn the bad habits of liberalism or the arrogance of western chauvinism, for example.