I’ve recently been reading anti-dühring and a bunch of writing from Marx and Engel and I continue to run into this problem where I realize how insane it is for someone to call themself a socialist after listening to a couple lectures and articles and reading the communist manifesto and maybe wage labor and profit and some excerpts. It’s maddening in the sense of, imagine someone being a fan of space or a general thing of physics and only knowing the very basic premises but not the details in of themselves, and if you yourself were a physicist and knew the details and listened to an explanation of physics by someone who knows only the most basic generalizations of the topic. Theory and especially materialist theory and dialectics is basically a socio-economic science, you can’t grasp materialism in just a short video that simplifies things like so many science and physics type videos out there.
On top of that there’s an entire history of socialism from the utopians like Saint-Simon, Fourier, Robert Owen, Weitlung. That history is Socialist history, Communist history, how does one not try and understand their history in order to understand their own beliefs? Libertarian Socialist? What’s that even? It sounds like an Idealist philosophy if anything. All I know is that there are two camps of Socialism, the Idealists and the Materialists, the Idealists being: all the flavors of the anarchos such and such. The Materialists being: Marxist Leninists, MLMs. The idealist socialism and this seems to always be the case is they’re usually people who’ve not read much theory or has read some but not enough to get a good grasp of historical materialism or dialectics and attempt to ascribe their vague abstractions of what is their personal ideas of justice and not a materialist justice based on socio-economic conditions and the solutions to reconcile antagonisms in a society, specifically class antagonism.
What sucks of this knowing too much is that like any person who has a good grasp of a subject one can’t help but want to constantly try and correct someone who is totally wrong. An example of mine is where I met an “anarcho-communist” recently and asked out of curiosity what they read and they told me they didn’t much read because they don’t like reading and instead mostly watch YouTube videos, I didn’t say anything because I wasn’t gonna get into an argument with someone who sees themselves as a comrade but I can tell you it was frustrating. It’s like someone saying “I know everything there is to know about feudal society, they had like knights and stuff, I know cuz I took one course on it”.
The problem here isn’t you knowing too much. Funnily enough, it’s the usual problem of knowing too little! Let me explain.
Your knowledge on a certain subject may well be adequate. The frustration that you feel does not stem from this knowledge but rather from not knowing how to reach your audience. If you had the ability (knowledge) to alter your audience’s behaviour away from willful ignorance, I doubt you’d actually face any frustration whatsoever. I believe that impotence, due to the lack of knowledge, is the true root of whatever problem you have here.
True, because telling someone: please just read theory, is usually not enough at least to comrades who call themselves socialists, I don’t have that problem with someone who doesn’t know anything about socialism because most people I know are at least radically liberal and teaching them is easier than say a socialist who’s barely read theory. Does that make sense?
I’m surprised that the radlibs you know haven’t at least internalized some anti-communist narratives about socialism. They don’t resist being taught about socialism by regurgitating the usual talking points?
Most of the radlibs I’ve known have been poor or at least from poor families and mostly PoCs, their rad liberalism was very simple and justice minded. I mean I wouldn’t imagine they’d call themselves pro capitalist or anti capitalist, just aware of the injustice of wealth and the system so the potential was always there.
They don’t hit you with 100 million, didn’t work, everyone starved, no freedom?
No because their knowledge of Communism is just the Soviet Union that they learned about in High School, I think the only people who’ve read the black book have been anti-comms or pro capitalists with a clear intent to prevent organization. Most poor liberals are social democrats something like what MLK was early on without actually knowing it, most of the anti communism usually comes from Anarchist circles or politically active libertarians.
learned about in High School
Your high schools don’t teach about the supposed evils of communism?
Never to the extent you see in videos. I never knew anything about holodomor or Great Leap Forward but I do remember in public school them teaching about the 5 year plan, not too deep just the usual propaganda such as the Soviets “intentionally” starved their own citizens etc, and that USSR was “authoritarian” and harsh but public school would brush over that history so quickly that it never took.
The most I do remember though is American exceptionalism propaganda which is horrible, it literally makes the country look perfect through all its history and white washes the fuck out of “manifest destiny”. If anything the anti communism stuff isn’t the largest of the propaganda but making America look like the greatest democracy history has ever known is something that is definitely perpetuated in history classes.
I’m in the complete opposite camp. I don’t think there’s much one needs to understand in order to become a revolutionary. Shall we all own the means of production or shall we let some idiot king or a handful of asshole capitalists own them? Any illiterate barefoot peasant can think about this and then agree to join the struggle to make it happen and can make great contributions to the cause. You don’t need to know everything, you need to think correctly and be able to solve the practical problems of the day through correct thinking. Mao’s “On Contradiction” and “On Practice” are very simple and can get any reasonable person to think correctly within a few days. I studied philosophy and was given the western canon to chew for several years. It’s trash. Reading Marx and Engels I constantly feel like they’re trying to correct the fucked up way of thinking prevalent in the “western mindset”… but if you’re non-western or an ignorant westerner you’re in luck because you could just… ignore all that trash.
Its not so much of getting someone to think revolutionary on my end, But more so when I hear someone say a specific thing regarding socialism and knowing that it’s wrong but it would be unreasonable for me to tell someone every time they say something incorrect to go read this or that because I can’t be an encyclopedia all the time by like you said. I have read On Practice and at the end of the day putting your theory to the test is what creates learning. Unfortunately since I’m in the west the only way to engage in practice as far as on the ground work is cadres who do direct action through demonstrations and such.
I tend to adhere to the mindset of “Theory isn’t revolutionary if it isn’t accessible.” If you consider yourself to be a revolutionary, then it is part of your responsibility to make this information as accessible as possible.
As revolutionaries, we don’t have the right to say we are tired of explaining. We must never stop explaining. We know that when the people understand, they cannot help but follow us.
– Thomas Sankara
Theory and especially materialist theory and dialectics is basically a socio-economic science
That’s just it, narchos don’t think it’s a science. They’re petit-bourgeois. They’re used to ordering things off a menu, and they think government works the same way. “Today I’ll have a classless stateless society, with none of that icky violence stuff. And a bottle of red wine.”
Yep basically if someone were to ask me what type of socialist I am I would answer simply: I’m a Communist. If they were to ask further questions I would simply say, my method of application is Marxist extended to Leninism extended to Maoism, theories built on each other based on the developing world, a world which doesn’t exist in a vacuum. An interesting question to ask the Anarchos is, okay what’s your theoretical method of application? Show me your theory in practice, show me how those societies adapted their methods or revised their methods according to their changing material conditions.
