I find it hard to bring people to communism because telling them the truth of our system most often leads them to a doom spiral where fighting back against capitalism seems impossible and that the world is fucked. I feel bad because I feel like all it does is make people depressed. It's too much. People are tired and burnt out from daily life too much to handle it.
Now your dreams will never again be so peaceful. You will see capital in your nights, like a nightmare, that presses you and threatens to crush you. With terrified eyes you will see it get fatter, like a monster with one hundred proboscises that feverishly search the pores of your body to suck your blood. And finally you will learn to assume its boundless and gigantic proportions, its appearance dark and terrible, with eyes and mouth of fire, morphing its suckers into enormous hopeful trumpets, within which you’ll see thousands of human beings disappear: men, women, children. Down your face will trickle the sweat of death, because your time, and that of your wife and your children will soon arrive. And your final moan will be drowned out by the happy sneering of the monster, glad with your state, so much richer, so much more inhumane.
—Carlo Cafiero, Summary of Marx's Capital
Me starting fights pretty much anywhere with pretty much anyone when I accuse them of being a bootlicker for accepting or even defending the violence of capitalism.
Also I strongly dislike when people say "Oh this is a little thing it doesn't matter why do you care about this?" as though the small injustices don't mount or aren't built on the same legal justifications as the great injustices. In this case it was a "just a little thing", an abusive clause in an EULA that only became enforceable because Gorsuch and the rest of the clown show made a ruling to bust unions. "This doesn't matter it's not impotant it's just a little thing touch grass" Like no, this is important, it does matter, because the same court decision that lets this game company force you to accept a bad deal to play is also used as a ruinous union busting tool. There are no big or small issues, they're all tied in to the same system and recognizing that continuity is important to understanding how the system works.
Having a marxist lens to look at things can feel a little Kassandra-like, but, I've realised it's not worth staying sad over.
People that aren't communists, and don't understand how they are getting fucked over, are also sad about the situation. Even some capitalists who understand the game are sad, because they can't learn to be happy and content with what they have in a game of accumulation.
My solution is to stare at the whole crazy tangled up web of awful shit and just accept that it is your personal duty to find a cosy niche in it and be happy. You have to put your own oxygen mask on before helping others - if not, there's no one to forgive and help the people that need help.
You have to put your own oxygen mask on before helping others - if not, there's no one to forgive and help the people that need help.
Well said.
My solution is to stare at the whole crazy tangled up web of awful shit and just accept that it is your personal duty to find a cosy niche in it and be happy.
I will not be happy. I will seethe with barely controlled rage at the injustice of the system until the day I feel compelled to do an adventurism or my heart explodes from the stress.
Also I have a bunch of severe mental illnesses so happiness is almost literally not biomedically possible. Joy will betray you but hatred will keep you warm on the coldest night.
You should try to be happy, though. I 100% support you in that endeavor. I just choose the path of annihilation, that's all.
You don't need to suffer like that, earnestly.
I understand the sentiment but it's entirely possible to be, if not outright joyful, accepting of yourself. You aren't ordnance- you're a human, and as corny as it sounds, you deserve to love yourself and be loved. You don't have to be a primed grenade to reach some kind of fulfilling existence. Even outside of an ideal and perfect world, some of us on this earth would stand and protect you to give you the time you need to figure that out.
Even if bloody things are to be done in the course of liberation, it is out of love and understanding for what we are as creatures... not hatred.
undefined> Insert Disco Elysium quote here
I'm beggining to suspect Kraz Mazov fucked me over personally.
"That is what you came for, isn't it? A climactic bloodletting, where men are reduced to muscle and fury?
No, beautiful naked people fucking in the bushes is what you came for. Sweat, cocks and titties please!"
I don't think I did it right
That's surprising to hear
I feel like many understand that they're already fucked, and for me at least, knowing there's a system that has worked and is currently working has given me so much hope
Breaking capitalist realism was a lifesaver for me
I used to genuinely want to be a capitalist because I thought that was the only way to thrive
After getting into quite a few arguments with some otherwise brilliant people I know, it occurred to me that people just don't want to accept that history has yet to end and that our situation (which they concede is bad) isn't a reform or two away from getting "fixed". Especially when they have their own problems to deal with. We have to keep this in mind and take care while we agitate.
I think the majority of my life since 2020 has been spent trying to figure out how people can look at history (specifically the history for which we have overwhelmingly evidence) see various figures protesting the existing power structure through revolutions/direct action and still come to the conclusion that they were liberals operating within the confines of liberalism. Yeah manufactured consent and all that, but we live in an age where information has never been this accessible and people still stick to Cold War shit from 60 years ago. Makes it hard to believe things will change
People's ideology and beliefs severely, severely constrain what they are able to believe and understand. there's like, what, 4+ billion people who believe that magic invisible beings that control their fate? It runs counter to all observation and evidence but billions are people are trapped in a vast mass delusion and that delusion strongly shapes what they believe about the world, their concept of right and wrong, and what evidence they will accept or reject.
It applies to everyone, including us. We're all servants to our biases and beliefs and we'll always interpret the phenomena we encounter through the lens of those biases and beliefs. All you can really do is hope that you're closer to "reality" than the other guys and that your efforts will bear fruit. That's a huge part of why science is such a powerful weapon, and why the "Scientific" in Scientific Socialism is vital; We're hopefully operating within a system of belief where we can be wrong, and when we find ourselves to be wrong we can evaluate our beliefs and change them to better suit the available evidence. This has advantages and disadvantages - We are able to understand our enemies in a way the libs largely aren't, we can adapt to changing circumstances and apply leftist principles in wildly different circumstances, we can explore our failures and come up with genuinely useful new information.
not even communism really, but just reframing your worldview from the superstructurally prescribed idealism to dialectical materialism. you become aware of so many people putting so much effort into pulling on what they perceive are the levers of power, but they're just not attached to anything.
Looking back, I'd rather go through the grief of our current reality than live in the false consciousness of liberalism.
It does hurt to see others in pain as they're processing the the truth about how these systems work. It also hurts when they go in a random direction and do something like become a chud because they don't want to be alienated from their family.
I try to remind myself that telling the truth isn't the problem. It's a lot and we can only do so much in this system.
Honestly, I think a lot more people are experiencing another kind of grief than they let on under capitalist realism. Liberalism accepts that some things are just the way of the world, and it's best to simply get ahead as individuals/cliques, numb ourselves to the suffering of others and tend to our own gardens. Given how most people can't even follow the first step adequately, it's hard to get to the second and be able to fool themselves into thinking everything is fine. The problem is that the lack of consciousness (entirely by design) leads people to take... alternative paths.
That's a good point. Leftist ideologies are one of the few that does not believe there are any acceptable sacrifices or injustices. The end goal, however tortured the route, is for everyone, everywhere to have a good life without exception. The anti-communist Christians love to accuse us of trying to "immanetize the eschaton" like their god didn't go out for cigarettes 2,000 years ago.
You're framing this wrong. Communism is not an eldritch abomination. Capitalism is the monster. Marxism is the tool we use to understand capitalism and fight it.
People know they're in a shitty world and one false step away from poverty. What understanding capitalism shows is that this isn't simply the individual's fault; it's a collective structural challenge. This can be scary if you were under the illusion that you were the sole author of your destiny, but most people aren't that deluded.
Looking capitalism through Marxism brings understanding and organization to what is otherwise disordered harmful phenomenon that all to often is either ignored (and the individual blamed) or only understood through reactionary conspiracy goggles.
I think the most cursed part about anti-capitalist theory in general (whether communist, anarchist, or even just stale economic data with no particular tendency associated with it, but which nevertheless demonstrates that capitalism a shit) is that, due to asymmetrical access to education, the bourgeoisie almost always end up reading that stuff more than the working class, and they use it as an instruction manual on how to better fuck people over, rather than a real diagnosis of what's wrong with the world.
Take this excerpt from Michael Hudson's "super imperialism" for example. In the second edition he points out that US agencies were huge customers of his book on US imperialism, and that statisticians worked to cover up the statistics he used to demonstrate US imperialism in the 1st edition.
Show
Lol, Japan was on its way to learn the secrets of the US and they just said
Also, he mentioned in another interview that the CIA specifically was the largest customer for his books in the US, and that he was scheduled to explain the concepts to the president at the time but the president never showed up lol
This was part of the thesis many of the continental philosophers came up with. Their solution was essentially philisophical Blanquism, under the thought that you makenit not worth the effort for anyone else. Which is why it's fucking impossible to understand what Althussier is going on about.
Look, a very big religion has been telling people "life is supposed to be shit and not even death will save you cuz you'll go to hell for all eternity, fuck you" for centuries and they still have a huge following, so idk why "doomerism" would prevent people from becoming communists
Look, a very big religion has been telling people "life is supposed to be shit and not even death will save you cuz you'll go to hell for all eternity"
3 big religions tell people this, and ironically they all come from a guy named abraham, and they all do the spiderman pointing meme at each other and tell each other that they're going to hell lol
islam read micheal hudson and forbade usury ,
big high five to Islam !
The most doomer take I have is it's better to knowing what you're dying from as opposed to the terror of not knowing. There's some peace in that.
However the most bloomer take is if the world starts to twist, you know what is to be done.
True pain is better than false comfort, possibly because I am a little pain piggy.
But ignorance really is bliss.
Makes me think of Hitchcock's old adage that "nothing is scarier" and often not showing the monster or the killer is more effective than revealing it on screen. The odds suck, but at least we know there are odds, that it's been done before and people are fighting for it now.
It's like that one Lovecraft story where learning the eldritch lore makes the protagonist upset about horrible things that happen all the time that everyone else is fine with.
It isn't any of the ones he wrote, but it's the Lovecraft story that we're living right now.
It's good though, because it pushes people away from things that don't work and towards forming and joining militant workers parties.
i always thought capitalism was the eldritch abomination and communism was the ability to actually see it for what it is (thus the ensuing insanity)
people are tired and burnt out but a lot of them are looking for answers, and class consciousness can feel like a grand awakening where everything finally starts to make sense.
there's an innate sense of meaning in seeing a button, pushing it, and experiencing an outcome. people are so used to pushing buttons with no result that they've stopped trying. but class consciousness is the first step in understanding the mechanisms at play and being able to influence the systems that surround us. we push a button and see a response and all of the sudden the void of alienation between the self and the social perceptibly shrinks. we're no longer just isolated grains of sand blowing in the wind, we're agents acting in coordination with other agents.
these are bleak times, but with crisis comes opportunity. the labor shortage has diminished the toolset the bourgeois can utilize to crush us, so it's a great time to gain experience, test our power, and plant seeds for a future movement.
