I'm not sure if this is supposed to be posted here but I'm not sure this would be welcome in c/wallstreetbets (lmao) either. It's just sad and dispiriting. Not really gonna say more about this because it's been pretty draining tbh.
Also, before someone says "well I don't think it's WRONG to talk about this, and I don't think it's praxis, and y'know I had to pay rent and spent some money on this and I just like laughing at Melvin eating shit and...." cool, I'm not talking about you, you know which people I am talking about.
Virtually nothing done online is praxis
Yeah, I don't understand why people are suddenly upset about a lack of praxis in people's posts. They're posts.
The problem isn't that the posts aren't praxis. I said as much in another comment in this thread.
The issue is that people THINK they are praxis.
Why are we on this website? Because if it's about doing praxis, we sucked ass at it long before yesterday. If your message is that everybody should stop posting on the internet and go do real shit in the real world, I'm 100% behind you. But singling out this one event as "not praxis" makes no sense to me because it also applies to 90% of all the leftist content online.
I think you are misinterpreting my post.
My problem isn't that this isn't praxis. I'm not expecting praxis to come out of obscure Internet fora. It is that people have convinced themselves it is, especially when it's literally about trying to do a capitalism at the stock market, and ESPECIALLY when it's something with a potential to get a lot of people addicted to stock gambling.
I said it elsewhere here, but my experience has been the opposite. The majority of posts I see are people acknowledging that they're participating in a system that wasn't built for them. I don't think people are deluding themselves into thinking that they can out-capitalist the capitalists. If anything more people have come out of this realizing that the stock market is less fair than they thought it was.
Yeah I've seen some of that but also I've seen a whole lot of unironic and explicit "stonks are praxis", or that WSB is "collective action", and other similar takes. I'm also pretty sure that out of the people playing right now, as a whole the main attitudes will either be "wow the stock market rules" or "fuck I lost everything, if only I wasn't dumb >:(" in the long term. It's a terrible thing to promote in general, let alone as a revolutionary action.
I mean at some point we're just focusing on different things. Yesterday almost every major subreddit had posts about how billionaires don't play fair, the little man can't get ahead, etc. I've seen next to nothing, on this site or on reddit, about the stock market actually being a good place to spend your time and money. If you say you've seen it, I believe you, but it doesn't seem like the prevailing sentiment right now.
I’m so sorry for what the internet is doing to your brain OP
I don't see how the online space is fundamentally different to the writing+distribution of newspapers or books of the old world. Anyone that considers those activities to be praxis back then should consider quite a lot of activity in the online space to be praxis today, in particular because social media has more power today than the newspapers today, or in the past for that matter.
That's not to say that the online space should ever be all the praxis anyone does. But this outright dismissal of it is detrimental to the left. It actually astounds me that people continue to so heavily dismiss it after watching the fascists put it to work for their entire movement over the last decade and after qanon literally built a successful cult out of it.
The thing we should be saying is that it cannot be all the praxis that you do. You MUST go outside and organise with organisations in the streets as well.
If you actually understood what Marxists mean by the word "praxis" you'd understand none of this is new or a material "change" to Amerikkkan society
Yes. That's part of my point.