I've been feeling like I fucking brainwashed my self and honest to god sometimes I feel like I'm just a red version of Nazi. Before you hit me I don't think we're as bad as Nazis but like.....I don't know. Sometimes I wonder if we're wrong and we actually are just like jealous of the wealthy and the world is indeed a fair, equitable place where you can become prosperous if you work hard enough.
I think I struggle with these doubts a lot because I went from being sucked into the whole 4chan reactionary thing just from a "contact high" from when I still used that shitty website but it never felt right to me and when I read Estranged Labor I'm like "wait this dude spittin straight facts, more than (((da jooz))) nonsense" and pretty much instantly abandoned my old worldview and felt really lost until I discovered all these fucked up websites and well...now I got a bunch of communist songs in my likes. Sometimes I just feel like I went in the opposite direction, and have to wonder if it's even possible to arrive at an objective "truth" or model of the world, and if a lot of the reasons why Marxism seems intuitively correct to me are largely born out of my own particular experiences, which always feel to me like they can't be all that common. It all just seems so obvious now but I still think: "what if I'm we stretch the truth and make shit up in the same way reactionaries do?"
I don't know. I sometimes feel like I'm not right in the head when I think shit like "damn landlords should be thrown into a pit" or "billionaires aren't human" or "dead cops, dead cops, army of the rich, we'll piss on your grave, won't be your slave!" because of how extreme it is.
I mean I can't really function at work anymore, I just think all this shit is absurd. It always feels like, "are people just dumb or blind? Do they not get it? I got it even before I read theory!" and then I just feel like I'm off in my own unreality where billionaire pedophiles blast off into space during a pandemic and everything really sucks.
I think I'm just going to pick up reefer.
Sometimes I wonder if we’re wrong and we actually are just like jealous of the wealthy and the world is indeed a fair, equitable place where you can become prosperous if you work hard enough.
give me a fucking break
The way the masses of rural people were forced at gunpoint into the incipient Capitalism of England was so fair and equitable.
The way they were intentionally deprived of any alternative means of living except in perpetual exploitation was so fair and equitable.
Because this was the very foundational transaction of Capitalism, we can see that, thus, the entire system is very fair and equitable.
If you picked up communism for the same reason you picked up fascism, of course you just feel like red fash (Or whatever word you wanna use/identify with on the right-hand side). Ideology hopping is inherently reactionary, which is why we encourage people to read theory. Theory plants roots and can help you decide whether or not you actually believe this and why.
Ideology as an identity is just a form of liberalism anyway. It’s one that a bunch of us struggle with, but it’s liberalism nonetheless. Communism is not supposed to be a Good Belief worn like a sports jersey or a way for you to self-actualize. You can use a lot of theory similar to self-help, but it’s certainly not intended for that use.
I’ll say if you’re lacking community, organizing can be a valid and healthy way to gain that, but the point is and will always be to make people’s lives better.
Edit:
I think I’m just going to pick up reefer
You can do both, btw. Taking breaks from politics is fine and having hobbies is fine. Treating politics as a hobby isn’t very productive either. And I say that as someone who loves to sit around and talk politics with people
Edit 2: Just saw at the end that you said you’ve already a bit of theory. Definitely sounds like you need a break from the doomscroll. A lot of that shit is super dehumanizing and kinda promotes simple solutions to complicated conditions. Makes it that much harder thinking about climate change and/or packing infrastructure to organize. But we keep pushing forward to be a very small part of something very big.
our revolution will be a revolution of love for all of humanity and the rights of every human to live in peace and dignity and comfort and community. focus on that part.
To expand on this a bit. Our revolution is a revolution of self defense for ourselves, the people we care about, and everyone else who suffers under capitalism. They enslave us, exploit us, and kill us. Wishing death upon the people who are responsible for the suffering of your friends and family, who see us as expendable, I don't think that's something you really need to apologize for. The past year of covid deaths, most of which were avoidable if the system hadn't demanded line go up, should really drive that home.
I never really got super into the /pol/ shit, I was taken in by the faux anti capitalism but since I'm not white it always felt half baked and I became really disillusioned with the racism over time because again I'm not white. I think I was always very left leaning, even as a kid I would think about why people like my dad worked so much but never had any money, even though I was told that if you work hard you will have money. I've always had the inkling that the way society was set up was insane but liberalism was never all that appealing to me so I just wound up getting sucked into the lazy criticism of capitalism on /pol/ (da j0000z!!!!1111!!) but like I said the racism and general assholery was grating.
I think it's just because I really, really struggled as a kid. I've always been pretty upset and tended to lash out a lot by just not fucking doing anything and every authority figure in my life made me feel like I was fucking insane for being dissatisfied with life in "The Greatest Country of All of Human Creation" despite the fact that even as a teenager I could see that there's very little to look forward to except for drudgery. There's a lot of element of racism in there, if you're a minority people become really hostile to you for being "ungrateful" with what "this country has given you" as compared to the 3rd world
it's mostly because(in my opinion), liberals, here referring to the average Joe democrat and not people running the party, are only evil when you think about the implications, but chuds are directly and vocally evil, or at least have such a different definition of good it falls outside what the general populace believes in. Liberals approved of the occupation of Afghanistan because they thought that human rights would be protected that way. It unravels into racism as you ask why Muslims are apparently incapable of doing that themselves to the liberal, and once you realise the main reason is to get opium and coltan. Chuds just want more territory for white countries and to kill some brown people. So, once you realise how racist liberalism is, it's not the hardest mental trick to transition to a less racist system, as one example. Going from pathological desire to kill non-european races to wanting to build solidarity with them is a whole lot harder, so you might just become dogmatic as you try to retrain yourself.
One of the things I hate most about liberalism is how it weaponises civility and recontextualises it as interpersonal interactions that happen in a vacuum. There's no greater system or set of conditions at play, people are just nice to each other in daily life or they aren't. They spontaneously do violence because of some moral flaw or they don't because they're individually virtuous. But when the issue is a deprivation of needs, that is profound violence. If you punch me in the mouth or say I don't deserve dental care I lose the same teeth either way, one just allows people with weak arms to punch more victims. We don't live on some island of stability surrounded by chaos, but in an artificially constructed trolley problem. The liberals who tell me I'm an unhinged radical own the trolley company, laid the tracks, set the route, and tied everyone to the tracks. They'll stand behind me at the lever and say I'm the problem if I don't choose the track with fewer people. But that isn't the basic question of the trolley problem or its obvious solution. I'm not going to apologise for asking why the fuck there's a trolley that has to kill people to provide transportation. If anyone has to die and the system tells me that I'm a bad person unless I want the harm reduction track, I'm just going to kill the one person driving the trolley and the CEO benefiting from its operation. I did not choose to be put in front of that lever and I'm not going to pretend that it should be there just because some ghoul can profit off of it.
While they chide me for being violent, they vote for wars I protest and against public health I advocate for. They simultaneously insist that a landlord should be able to destroy their tenants' lives if they don't get 30% or more of those peoples' paycheques for doing nothing. They're committing ecocide and feeding bullshit solutions to the public so that they can profit off the death of the biosphere. That is so morally insane, so divorced from any kind of ecological thinking, that supporting it would be the worst thing imaginable if that person had to stand on the mountain of their victims to call me uncivil. The system they're protecting milks normal people for their bloody sweaty tears, hunts minorities like deer, and is burning down the world around me for profits my community will never see.
At some point I stopped bothering with that question and just accepted that the tanks were great because the alternative was this. Then I asked your second question. If Marxism was so intuitive for me and I had naive conceptions of his ideas just from really liking dogs and anthropology, why isn't that the norm? It's the same kind of dynamic with civility swapped for ontology by a system that denies people a philosophy education so they don't know why ontology is important. Thinking ecologically, in terms of systems and relationships, is a threat to an unecological system those liberals benefit from. Thinking intersectionally undermines the ways that system divides the people it controls. Thinking materialistically is such a basic threat to all of the magical thinking behind power structures that half the people in power can't admit evolution and germs exist because it would destroy them. All of these things are violently suppressed when we do it, and I only do it because I'm a neurotic person that questions everything. The public doesn't question its alienation because that's mediated by the system and channeled into things I just don't have an interest in- sports, hobby clubs, religions, political parties, fandoms, myopic wealth hoarding. Their spectacle relationship is different in the absence of understanding the mechanics of spectacle, but that doesn't mean that spectacle is wrong. Apologising for the way I think would be like a climate scientist saying "I'm sorry" after people call them an alarmist. They have a polymathic understanding of issues that other people have distractions from and incentives to deny. For half a century they've been radicalising and will only be proven correct in doing so. The people who called them alarmists or hippies or pinkos built their glass house without a foundation. When it collapses because the materialist pointed at material things they ignored, they won't any less wrong. They'll just starve to death as a result of not understanding the issue enough to intervene in it, spending that time insulting the alarmists because they made those people feel bad.
Wouldn't go back, will never make excuses. If someone looks at the world and says "this is fine", they're either oblivious to the point that they're a child or they're morally feral and entertaining them is just allowing them to tie more people to the trolley tracks. I'm not going to be a silent or stupid victim.
Can try media blackout for vibe check for couple of weeks :shrug-outta-hecks:
Yeah anyone who feels like they’ve been brainwashed, intentionally or otherwise, should try taking time away. It’ll clear out some brainworms one way or the other. We don’t need to rely on thought control or personality manipulation to accomplish our goals and we shouldn’t be endorsing communities that promote these thought techniques, even accidentally
Sometimes I wonder if we’re wrong and we actually are just like jealous of the wealthy and the world is indeed a fair, equitable place where you can become prosperous if you work hard enough.
There are scientific ways to measure "social mobility" and it always leads to the finding that the world is emphatically not that type of place.
if a lot of the reasons why Marxism seems intuitively correct to me are largely born out of my own particular experiences
If you are a prole, it's not at all strange for your experiences to resonate with communism.
I sometimes feel like I’m not right in the head when I think shit like “damn landlords should be thrown into a pit”
It's good to do a double take on stuff like this. We don't want violence towards humans, we simply see it as necessary with some egregious ones to overcome the daily background violence of capitalism. The capitalist states and mercenaries do much worse to us every day. When this becomes all you think about, it's that mythical police in our heads screaming to "stop resisting!" Remember what Pinochet did to Allende's peaceful bourgeois parliamentary democratic nice attempt at reform.
Remember that landlords are slowly killing people by holding shelter hostage. Their mercenaries are the cops that evict people and endlessly harass homeless camps, when there are empty houses all over town. This violence is out of view for most people and less obvious, so we need to remind ourselves. Leaving someone to the elements is way more brutal than the quick death of a firing squad.
I mean I think it's a crucial problem that most revolutionaries, especially if genuinely materialist, should always be returning to: how much of this is really a personal jihad I've embarked on to deal with the traumas of my particular historical and material experiences, how much of this is truly pointing towards universal emancipation and the necessity of a Communist future?
The point is not to trivialize the mundane pathology of struggling with our personal issues but to assert the dialectic between these anxieties and the antagonisms of social existence which facilitate them - the radical step is grappling with the fact that any individual subject can only be derived from some presupposed grounds of collective existence, that your anxieties reflect very real yet contradictory truths about the very constitution of the social world in which you exist.
You're probably right to doubt the purity of your moral principles right now, but you're missing that the problem is likely precisely the fact that you evidently think that your belief in Communism ought to be pure.
idk i feel like i am being gaslit by everyone and everything around me 24/7 and my mental state has been steadily deteriorating for probably the past 3 years at least because of it... i think it's completely normal to feel this way as a comm because capitalism society is built around makign you feel like you're insane for wanting things to not be garbage. i also think it is normal to have that anger and rage build and turn into feelings of violence and hatred towards the people and systems that are responsible for our suffering.
The core of a fascist's belief is the focus on himself. But the core of a communist's belief is your focus on fellow humans/sentient beings. It's the power of avarice versus the power of love.
Any monetary system that involves interest, debt, and exchange of these abstractions will necessarily result in a giant underclass of miserable debtors and a tiny upperclass of paranoid creditors. There's no way around this. You can't have a billionaire without thousands of destitute or precarious workers. Most people will respond to this prospect either by suppressing the thought, and putting their blinders up to the world, or by carving out something that lets them feel like part of the owning class - but it's always an illusion. You may find it useful to talk to coworkers on their level, without hitting them all at once with the harsh truth that they function as wage/debt slaves.
If you have a project of popular liberation that you can work on, you can keep your eyes on that prize. It's way more worthwhile in the long run than defeatism or escapism.
It’s the power of avarice versus the power of love.
Well shit I just read a bunch of dry economic texts and largely agreed with their conclusions
That's quite good. But the economic theory doesn't make value judgments; you still had the empathy to make those yourself.
The physical strength as an opposing form of power to economic strength is a concept that is baffling to me. Hasn't economic strength always been enforced by physical strength you literally can't have economic strength if your ownership is not enforced
When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace - Jimi Hendrix
Just study history and Marxism will very clearly prove itself as a method of explaining the world.
I'm absolutely terrible at reading theory (as in I'll sometimes get the urge and read 3-5 pages, nod, then put it down for months), but there's an early paragraph in Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed that may be relevant here?
Sectarianism, fed by fanaticism, is always castrating. Radicalization, nourished by a critical spirit, is always creative. Sectarianism mythicizes and thereby alienates; radicalization criticizes and thereby liberates. Radicalization involves increased commitment to the position one has chosen, and thus ever greater engagement in the effort to transform concrete, objective reality. Conversely, sectarianism, because it is mythicizing and irrational, turns reality into a false (and therefore unchangeable) "reality."
Not sure if this is elaborated on later. I get you though, I often feel the same way after a lifetime of thinking "extreme = bad, moderate = good", especially when I remember how thoroughly convinced I was that my worldview was right. It's hard to reconcile how "obvious" everything seems now with how blindly confident I was before. One of the things that helped was realizing just how many of the people from history* I genuinely admired/respected were actually socialists or communists and just completely misrepresented by popular media. Knowing how much propaganda we've been wading through our entire lives without even being conscious of it, I think these feelings are probably natural.
* or even contemporary figures like Hayao Miyazaki, whom I vividly remember being consistently framed as some sort of super lib when he was first introduced to mainstream Western pop culture
