People who claim to have gone from a “Marxist”(which I doubt they ever had a real understanding of) to anarchist don’t make any sense. Do these people think ignoring the national and global level of the problem will better address it? Do they think the oligarchy won’t equally quell your pitiful attempt at anarchism with tanks and artillery the same as any other attempt to break free of the system?
How could anyone think anarchism could address climate change more effectively when it’s incapable of removing the capitalist system from power as we see throughout history?
Embracing chauvinism because left wing geopolitics are too controversial
Yeah no shot someone understands Marxism and then “leaves” it. Especially not to anarchism.
I can sympathize with the hope getting dimmer, it really is dire. But the nihilistic “let’s do nothing and bask in sadness while the world burns” is just dumb. I’d rather go out trying.
Do these people think ignoring the national and global level of the problem will better address it? Do they think the oligarchy won’t equally quell your pitifully anarchist attempt with tanks and artillery the same as any other attempt to break free of the system?
Judging from their comments in the pic, it seems more like they’ve given up on addressing the problem at all. Both posters are resigned to climate change destroying the world.
And here we see the difference. A genuine Marxist-Leninist will always have revolutionary optimism in their heart because they understand the objective material and historical forces that compel the capitalist-imperialist system into ever worsening crises, with each one having greater and greater potential to lead to the collapse of the whole rotten system under the weight of its contradictions. It is the duty of the revolutionary cadre to ensure that when the inevitable revolutionary moment comes there exists a revolutionary vanguard with a mass base that is sufficiently organized, militant, educated and class conscious to seize power and build a workers’ state.
We will struggle, we will fight and we will win. But in order to win we have to first believe that we can. Anarchism, doomerism, defeatism, all of these are tools that the ruling class uses to try and suppress and neuter our revolutionary potential. But all of these psyops cannot change the objective realities.
The climate crisis will only accelerate the collapse of capitalism, while attempts to violently re-assert imperial control and double down on the exploitation of the global south in compensation for falling rates of profits in the core will only create more resistance and lead to the quicker loss of imperial hegemony.
Socialism will win. And when it does it will build a world that can coexist in harmony with the natural environment. China is showing us every day with its achievements that it can be done and it will be done.
At least for me, accepting that its impossible to address these issues is partially why I’m an ML. Way I see it, its definitely never gonna happen through reforms and legal means, so the .0001% chance we actually succeed is worth betting on as if I fail, I die, if I do nothing, I still die, but slower and more painfully. On the off chance I succeed I get to live so I might as well roll the dice. Nothing to lose and a world to gain at this point for me.
At least to me this more realistic outlook is far more appealing than being optimistic as optimism in my experience runs counter to the facts and generally causes poor decision making. If you just believe things will work out because capitalism will inevitably kill itself or something you’re just giving yourself an excuse to not actually try to do something.
Then again, maybe my thinking is a bit tainted as my experience with those who are optimistic is blind optimism combining with the toxic positivity culture here in the US to create the least empathetic, least self aware, least outwardly aware, least effective, and least honest forms of thinking imaginable.
I feel like the people who say “I used to be a Marxist, but…” are the ones whose foray into Marxism was posting lefty memes on discord or something.
It must be nice to have the kind of privilege to be like “You know what? I don’t really care what happens anymore. Not my problem.”
You know I really like the Catholics and blame the protestants for a lot of America’s arrogant behavior.
Hear me out: you don’t just get to be a Catholic. If you want the little piece of bread, you have to go through all sorts of steps and get made into a Catholic. You don’t hear Catholics going around saying they’ve been talking to God and God’s been talking back. They know better than to listen to their untrained mind and assume that to be the voice of God.
Americans, just like everything else, have their own special kind of Christianity, different from everyone else’s. If you want to be a Christian, all you have to do is go up to the front of the church and say you’re saved. You start babbling like an idiot and everyone’s got to respect that as the Holy Spirit. Some self absorbed Christian with no religious education goes around calling their inner monalog the voice God, and how are you ever going to convince this person that they don’t know everything there is to know, when they think their inner voice is the voice of the Highest God?
This is how Americans think, Christian or not. You want to be a Marxist then you’re a Marxist. Whatever thought pops in your head is the word from on High. No need to go beyond it.
From doomer to boomer (“just do your own thing, man”) by easy stages
- WikiHow dot com
double you double you double you dot
Socialism is one thing. Americans are dumb. In America communism and socialism are viewed differently. Socialism is FDR and Denmark.
The guy never progressed past liberalism. He started as a liberal who thought he was the first guy in history to think to vote for a better world, despite coming off the coat tails of “Mr. Hope and Change” Obama.
Bernie Sanders didn’t work out so he became a “its terrible but its the best we have” liberal. He was capable of seeing the corruption of the system but he still got behind it when it counted. We all can guess his opinions on Russia and China.
As much as I dislike Zizek, there are some observations he has made very well. It is easier for a liberal to envision the end of the world than it is for them to envision the end of capitalism.
Zizek really did wrong getting behind NATO in this Ukraine conflict, and I still believe it is the same reason why many scholars and voices who used to speak up, they all became scared seeing the Cold War-esque sentiment and gave up by protecting their university lecturer careers. He has a lot of great observations that explain most things easily.
I think Zizek’s playing the same game he’s always been playing. I’ve read a lot of his work and can appreciate his positions on the ideological subject; at the same time, he’s an anti materialist. He criticizes the old communist world without addressing the material details of the before and after. He speaks in strictly ideological framing and uses the ideological framing of movies and the like the back him up. He reduced riots to people being made into consumers and not being allowed to consume.
I honestly didn’t know Zizek’s take on the Ukraine war until someone else mentioned it, but it’s what I could have guessed considering his earlier perspectives.
This is what happens when you daydream on internet with open eyes in fantasy land. There is not much basis to their thinking, and is only subtly good enough to argue on Reddit and Quora because most people in these places have similar thinking limitations.
Apathy is a sickness. Get well soon.
Yes, we workers and the mass of small proprietors lead a life that is filled with unbearable oppression and suffering. Things are harder for our generation than they were for our fathers. But in one respect we are luckier than our fathers. We have begun to learn and are rapidly learning to fight—and to fight not as individuals, as the best of our fathers fought, not for the slogans of bourgeois speechifiers that are alien to us in spirit, but for our slogans, the slogans of our class. We are fighting better than our fathers did. Our children will fight better than we do, and they will be victorious.
- Vladimir Lenin, The Working Class and Neo-Malthusianism
This reminds me of the potato speech from the memoir of some American Socialist who went to the USSR pre-ww2 and did some time in Magnitogorsk.
The guy was explaining how things were difficult but better. Basically saying that right now he has one potato: it isn’t a lot but it’s his. He has an actual stake in the potato, and if he struggles and works his whole life for the revolutionary cause by the end he’ll have two potatoes. Even if it isn’t much, it’s something. Its his, and its something to have one’s own destiny in one’s hand, and through hard work be able to grow it, if only a little.
I really liked that potato speech.
