Wanted to take a second to make some positive cases for why we believe in Scientific Socialism/Anarchism. We spend a lot of time belittling historically illiterate smug lords (which is awesome) but I think it’s important to take a second to appreciate why these ideas resonate with us so much and why we find these ideas so important that they are worth fighting for online and IRL. I’ll go first;
Demystification: that’s a big thing for me. The imperial core is a place that is full of institutions that, can technically be understood, and yet do not make a whole lot of sense in their function. Health insurance companies are a great example of this. The entire process of acquiring and using insurance in the U.S. is a Kafka-esque beauracratic nightmare. And at every step there are individuals who are happy to help you understand the process, and yet even once you gain the understanding they impart, it all still feels wildly inefficient and punitive. Even to a very young person, it doesn’t make sense. It is Only beneficial In comparison to the monstrous social violence of medically induced poverty. Meaning it only makes sense when you accept that violence as a necessary societal inevitably.
So growing up in the U.S. you are faced all the time with complex and baroque financial institutions and practices that society insists you understand even if doubt persists that what you are understanding doesn’t really make sense. Ultimately when this practice confers practical economic benefit the cognitive dissonance is assuaged and is even completely resolved in some individuals. Credit cards and credit scores are another great example of this.
Understanding Mystification as a Marxist term finally gave me the vocabulary to understand this phenomenon and hence be less bothered by trying to make sense of things that I understand and yet don’t make any sense.
Another big thing: The labor theory of value; perhaps my understanding is too cursory but when I tried reading Capital this part really stuck with me because it is profound even though it seemed rather obvious to me from my lived experience.
Without trying to get out of my depth In philosophical jargon, my understanding of the LTV is that the value of currency is derived from the surplus value generated by the application of labor to raw materials. I know the states ability to enforce the transaction is also key. I welcome any clarification/insight on LTV.
The point I’m trying to make about LTV and why I find it profound and worth Blooming about is that it means that as workers we generate the force that actually changes the world. That force is labor. It’s not money, It’s not Gold, it’s not big ideas from big job titles. It is the people who turn the earth, teach the young, or just sell their labor hours doing any number of things.
It’s easy to be pessimistic in the face of the incredible accumulated political power the west still holds. Yet we should have hope, because the power that money has is only ever borrowed from labor. Under that framework it becomes a struggle to organize enough unalienated labor hours to put towards building something better.
Our labor hours are the most important building block we have towards revolution. That is the real “capital” that reshapes the world. The struggle is to take as many back from your boss as you can, and if you can, invest those hours into something bigger than yourself.
That’s what gets me blooming. Constructive feedback always welcome (would love more insight on LTV)
What makes you feel hopeful about communism/anarchism?
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I originally read Marx to impress a tall socialist in my college dorm and it’s been a sound strategy since tbh
I have children, which let’s me get a super up close look at what genuine goodness looks like in a way I never experienced before.
And then when I’m out in my community or with strangers I can see it. Sometimes it’s subtle or hard to translate. But sometimes it’s blaring. People are generally good and want to take care of each other. Some through empathy and some through shame, but good nonetheless.
As long as I keep seeing that I will remain hopeful.
That’s beautiful comrade o7
This resonates with me. People, in my experience, want to help each other. Capitalism does its best to suppress that
The amount of positive vibes I get from everyone around me when I have my little kiddo strapped up in the chest harness is unreal. He’s like a joy magnet, and though I know the good vibes are being directed at him, I get it second hand; it really does change your perspective on people, I think.
The number of people who are so genuinely invested in ensuring my kiddos are at their best when they’re at daycare is also something the cynic in me didn’t anticipate. I know what it’s like to just “do the job” but these people are like second family. It’s a strong reminder of the kind of love and support a community is capable of. It reinforces the notion of it takes a village, but also is a reminder of what so many people are missing out on. Daycare costs are insane, at least 3x our mortgage per month for us, and we’re fortunate to be able to afford that.
You always hear dissenters say, “What would people do without proper incentives, why would anyone want to work if all their needs were being met?” They do not have the context or the imagination to picture a social order beyond what they know. It reminds me of the description of the Iroquois culture as told by Gary Nash:
No laws and ordinances, sheriffs and constables, judges and juries, or courts or jails—the apparatus of authority in European societies—were to be found in the northeast woodlands prior to European arrival. Yet boundaries of acceptable behavior were firmly set. Though priding themselves on the autonomous individual, the Iroquois maintained a strict sense of right and wrong. . . . He who stole another’s food or acted invalourously in war was “shamed” by his people and ostracized from their company until he had atoned for his actions and demonstrated to their satisfaction that he had morally purified himself.
This flies in the face of all western notions of “human nature” and the idea that greed is a primary motivation. You don’t become the most dominate creature on the planet without also being one of the most communal creatures on the planet. I believe we have the capacity to be that way again, in some form or another.
I’m a leftist because my goal is the improvement of people’s lives.
Marxist materialism is the only ideology that seeks to properly explain a methodology for doing that, one that is without “it’s complicated” bullshit to explain away gaps or holes. Frankly if an ideology tries to explain something away or avoid addressing contradictions I toss it in the trash.
when i was a kid i was told god made us all equal and to love each other. i dont believe in god now but i have the same values. also the propaganda never stuck with me.
I’m a leftist because learning about the history of world war 2, it didn’t make sense why immediately afterwords the United States became enemies with the USSR and I wanted to understand why that was. It’s all pretty obvious now, but when I was younger it was a very confusing question. It led to sympathies with socialist ideology and then turned into me turning red.
Basically the gist of it is they shouldn’t have made the red army look so cool during call of duty world at war.
I never played COD:WAW, but I did play COD Classic, and the flag over the Reichstag scene and the following cutscene, with historical footage and the following narration, honestly still make me tear up:
Mother, a few days ago we waved the flag of the Motherland over the top of the Reichstag in Berlin. The war, at last, seems to be coming to an end. There is very little fighting left to the enemy. Soon, I will be returning to our home. There are German prisoners of war everywhere. Today, I cross the Elbe River in Germany and shook hands with an American soldier. Although I could not understand anything he said, I felt this man was my brother, and I think he felt the same.
Fuck I’m crying again really bad, awh dammit why do I have to be so moved by… gawhh…
Anyways, I think it’s very specifically that cutscene that makes me consistently consider Call of Duty 1 to be the best Call of Duty game that I’ve ever played (although I haven’t played all of them, far from it). None of the other COD games managed to actually move me to a face full of tears and snot, nor make me feel like a soldier rather than a blockbuster action hero.
I’m pretty sure that COD 1 would’ve been the first piece of media I’d experienced, where Russians/Soviets were actually portrayed as “the good guys”, were actually portrayed as equals in the fight against fascism, and where the work’s literal closing words were an expression of true fraternity across the bounds of language and culture… Maybe I’m a particular sucker for that last point specifically because my own parents had different first languages, but in any case I’m eternally grateful to all of those who risked or sacrificed their lives in the war against fascism, not least among them my communist great-grandfather, who I only first learned about this year.
It naturally took many more years before I myself would become a commie, years after that still for me to unlearn most of the nonsense I’d picked up about the USSR over the years. But I still genuinely do believe that just once hearing a message of brotherly love from the USSR to the USA as a kid, and just once being placed in the shoes of a Soviet as a kid, helped put me on that path to eventually questioning more narratives about the USSR.
That was genuinely nice to read thank you. I was mostly shit posting about cod:WaW but it is a pretty decent game if you get the chance to play it. I’ve never played cod 1 but maybe I should. You are correct though not even World at War portrayed the Soviets in that good of a light. It tried to make them look like savages who only wanted revenge for being invaded. Obviously that’s kinda hard to do if you already think the Nazis are scum. No brotherly love at all and in later games it takes the named Soviet characters and makes them enemies of the Soviet Union because they become too big of heroes during the war lmfao
This is the first time I hear someone else express the same way I felt about the original CoDs. I was saying the same thing not too long ago to my girlfriend. I thought it was so cool you could play as a Soviet, because no other game I played did that before. It really put the game in an upper league because of it.
Shame the CIA/military funded it into a propaganda toy after that and killed any sympathetic Soviet perspective. It’s not the same.
This really resonates with me. Not for the COD stuff but because my pipeline started as basically a Russiagate lib who decided to actually critically investigate why Russia would do something like that which led to a deeper understanding of WW2, Americas post WW2 posture towards Russia, the Cold War, etc…
It is really sad to think of what could have been, but I still hope for the best for the people of Russia. I feel great shame for my countries role in the degradation and failure of the Soviet system. This is not to say they didn’t make their own mistakes too but certainly the U.S. didn’t help. Best we can do now is learn from their mistakes and honor the sacrifices they did make to stop the Nazi war machine.
Thank for sharing comrade o7
Big heart, big cock.
Grew up in a pretty traditionally conservative family and environment. Had several terrible experiences with the American healthcare system. My family, despite being bad, at least mostly legitimately believed that we shouldn’t hate anyone else (excepting maybe gays and atheists lmao), so I wasn’t the worst off. Early teen years I nearly got dragged into true chud shit, gamergate, etc. Luckily I kinda snapped out of it.
I got my mind on the right path when I learned about what Liberalism was from Victoria 2 of all things. Really opened me up to looking at politics in reality. Then I started to realize the socialists of that game were the good guys. Seeing them support healthcare was a brain changer. Slowly picked up more and more socialist ideas, and began identifying as a “fellow traveler”, and from there became more and more fed up with liberals and conservatives.
I’ve voted for fucking Jeb (2016? primary, in a closed state), Hilldog, and Bernie like 3 times. Now I’d only vote for Parenti, the ghost of Lenin, and all of the politicians to slip on a banana peel.
One thing that hasn’t changed is I feel like I always liked John Brown. Even as a chud I saw him as a true believer in personal freedom, someone actually getting shit done. From little seeds
.I want better for everyone and this is the only way to do it
I was cursed with a conscience.
I would have been so good as a sales/marketing ghoul, instead I am depressed because people suffer
city planning is way cooler though!
Well, I don’t like racism and I don’t believe people should live in hell for not having money
It’s amazing how few ideologies and philosophies hold to these principles
I was raised Catholic and the concept of stewardship got lodged in my brain. Any religiosity faded over the years, but that concept stuck around and gradually morphed from “care for the earth because it’s god’s” to “care for the earth because all of humanity needs it.”
I read The Jungle in middle school and the “trivia” that everyone missed Sinclair’s whole fucking point got lodged in my brain.
I was a basic lib for a number of years, and then Trump happened and everyone pointing out that 80% of his horrible shit was just carried over from Obama so why didn’t you oppose him too, and I decided huh, maybe I do. Maybe the meatgrinder was the friends I made along the way and I need new friends with a better idea of the future.
I honestly feel like my fall into the alt-right pipeline was a necessary wake-up call. I grew up in a borderline cult and managed to deprogram myself from it when I was 13-17, when I started to see the conflict between the teachings of loving everyone equally and the attitudes towards women and sexual minorities. After that I basically coasted for a few years identifying as “progressive” or “left-leaning” because I disagreed with the most blatant discrimination without doing any self-reflection on any of the more internalized bigotries I harbored at that point.
The rabbit hole obviously started with the youtube atheist sceptics a few years before the anti-sjw brainworms first really manifested, at that point I was just looking for validation for breaking away from the religion I grew up with. It ended up with watching way too many “owning feminists” compilations and I started being pedantic about which waves of feminism I support.
At some point I realized I was in the middle of even more sexist and homophobic people than I thought I left behind in my enlightenment as a teen, and that brought along pretty uncomfortable questions.
A big part of that realization was all the more leftist friends and family, I’m forever thankful that they kept me out of the bubble enough that I realized where I was heading.
I started to look more critically on what my actual values and feelings were compared to what I wanted to project to the world, and that combined with looking for more information directly from the marginalized groups instead of the easily consumed and regurgitated liberal talking points my radicalization snowballed.
One of the funnier parts of my radicalization was my relationship with edgy humour and how it helped me to actually read theory. I didn’t really want to give up shocking and annoying people, because it can objectively be funny. Then I realized, that edgy humour from leftist perspective shocks and annoys the right-wing edgelords and the floodgates opened. I started with the obvious ones like Mussolini doing yoga, but I needed better material so I started memorizing funny quotes and studying history for bits and ended up reading theory.
So why am I leftist? Because of the people around me. They taught me empathy, patience and love, they showed me that even an asshole who belittles you is worth at least an attempt to change their mind.
And because nothing is funnier than a crypto fascist trying to hide his genuine anger and offense with a pitiful laugh at my joke about murdering nazis because the room is full of liberals that cannot be allowed to see their power level, but we both know that the other one knows.
love for humanity & a hatred of human suffering. obviously there are some more tedious details in terms of how i unlearned a lot of pro-capitalist propaganda and learned more about theory/socialist history, but those two drives are really at the base of it if i boil it down to its bare essentials.
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got into radical punk music in my early teens which helped to articulate what I had been feeling about how fucked our society is
seeing the bombs drop in Baghdad on live TV at age 10 had definitely primed me to hate the US military. also I remember being like 12 and thinking “ohhh the cops are just another gang, but with a lot more power”
edit: oh and even younger than that, I remember the first time I saw homeless people living in tents and thinking that was fundamentally not okay. probably my first inkling that something was inherently wrong with how the world works
Yeah it’s amazing what a universally radicalizing experience it is to just be a child and witness homelessness. Morality is subjective but kids are often empathetic in a way that gives them what I feel are good moral instincts. Then capitalism and patriarchy and do their best to beat that out of us!
