This blog has some very good analysis of the tariffs: article 1, article 2, and article 3.

This is where a book club or theory discussion group would be very helpful. Just getting a different perspective on the same text can facilitate understanding, and I find it also helps to connect the theory to examples of historical or current events.

I know it’s a bit clumsy in one comment, but I have a few suggestions:

Marx, 18th Brumaire - a classical work that I think is still under appreciated and apart from the theory, it contains some excellent prose as well.

Gramsci, The Modern Prince (starting on page 127 in this version) - Gramsci’s views on the (communist) political party which I just started reading myself.

I would also like to suggest Class Struggle by Losurdo, but I’m worried that it might be a bit too long for this format of discussion group. Still, I think it’s an extremely valuable book that everyone should read.

Some good reading and marxist analysis of AI and art on this blog: Article 1, Article 2.

It’s called ‘The Swerve’, and it’s not just limited to superhero stories. Here’s a short essay exploring it further: https://redsails.org/the-swerve/

Lemmygrad is a more serious site, I agree, and that’s why I use it instead of hexbear. However, I do still think we can improve. I’ve noticed a decline in the frequency of the type of theory discussion posts that I really liked when first coming to lemmygrad, and an increase in low effort posts, probably coinciding with the reddit exodus last year.

One thing I really like here is that certain matters are considered settled in the lemmygrad community. For example, each time a new “is Russia imperialist?” thread pops up, prople quickly link to past threads with excellent answers or post another version of those answers. I just think we could do that sort of thing - debate, come to a conclusion, adopt it as our stance backed by our arguments and proper sources, and present it when asked - with many more topics which still just “hang in the air” somewhat.

In today’s world, socializing online is not some distinct separate thing, it’s an integral part of daily life for basically everyone.

Yes, the western masses benefit from imperialism, but they are also exploited and it’s the communists job to successfully link the struggles against this exploitation with wider anti-imperialist struggles in the Third World.

It is easier to just sit idly in the status quo, but do you find that to be an acceptable level for communists to be at? We’re not talking about the masses in general here, we’re talking about self-identified communist spaces. I want and expect more from them, and a critique of their current errors is a first step to changing them.

Those communits weren’t somehow “at the forefront of organizing” before, and then decided to start publishing articles. They became the forefront of organizing by publishing these articles, having these debates, and putting the things they figured out into practice. This is a centeal thesis of Lenin’s What is to be Done?

Yes, the current western left is not going to form a vanguard tomorrow, conditions will still need to change. But at some point a vanguard will need to be formed by western communists, no one else can do it for us. These barriers aren’t permanent, and they can be overcome. A part of that includes ideological struggle and debate within communist spaces.

It’s not about individual comms, and there is, of course, a place for being silly. The problem is that the “silliness” “spreads” to the entire site. Look at how people are “arguing” against Roderic’s point on the hexbear thread about it, in what’s supposedly a comm for critiquing bad takes. Most of the comments are random jokes, and most of the actual written out ones are blatant lies, strawman arguments, or similar (some of the really bad ones did get removed as far as I can tell). The same exact tactics anti-communists regularly use to shit on AES states or our ideology in general.

The actual origin of it is western anti-intellectualism which we have to overcome in our organizing. Of course hexbear won’t be a vanguard, but we’re not doing our job as communists if don’t fight against these tendencies.

Doesn’t specifically have to be a lemmy instance, but any online communist space could be a serious place where anti-intellectualism is not tolerated, and where discussions with proper sourcing could lead to actual debate where certain issues are actually settled. Instead, now you have most people just yelling out their opinions with no sources, not bothering to actually engage with the counterpoints being made, and any criticism is taken as a personal attack and kts substance is ignored. No actual debate is being held, and any issues that come up stay unresolved and get brought up again and again with the same results.

What communists in the past did in newspapers and journals, we should be doing online.

I think this reply perfectly justifies Roderic’s position on seriousness. You just strawman his argument to mean “100% seriousness all the time, no fun allowed at all” and then proceed to write some nonsense against it.

Do you really think the western left is serious enough? What has it accomplished? Do you think others will take us seriously if we don’t take ourselves seriously, and how can we accomplish anything at all, let alone revolution, if we’re not serious about it?

What he expects is for the western left to take itself more seriously if it’s to have any success at all, and dodging critique by hiding behind “it’s a site for memes” isn’t doing any good to anyone that actually wants change.

Not “expecting too much” from a link aggregation site is like not expecting too much from any western communists. The masses are online and online spaces are not separated from “real” life like that. No one is saying we can’t have any fun, but at the end of the day If we don’t take ourselves seriously why should anyone else take us seriously.

While I do find lemmygrad a bit better than hexbear in regards to this, it also still has an abundance of low effort meme posts and a lack of serious discussion.

The Eurasian nuthatch is my favorite because it often walks down tree trunks, upside down while facing the ground.

And I have to give an honorable mention to Bulwer’s pheasants for obvious reasons.

It’s not hypocrisy at all, it’s a consistent position made to advance their imperial interests and white supremacy.

To add onto this, I really like Losurdo’s analysis:

Immediately after World War I — after the defeat of Tsarist Russia — Russia was in danger of being balkanized, of becoming a colony. Here I quote Stalin, who said that the West saw Russia like they saw Central Africa, that they were trying to drag it into war for the sake of Western capitalism and imperialism.

The end of the Cold War, with the West and the United States triumphant, once again put Russia at risk of becoming a colony. Massive privatization was not only a betrayal of the working classes of the Soviet Union and Russia, it was also a betrayal of the Russian nation itself. The West was trying to take over Russia’s massive energy deposits, and the US came very close to acquiring them. Here Yeltsin played the role of “great champion” for the Western colonization effort. Putin is not a communist, that much is clear, but he wants to stop this colonization, and seeks to reassert Russian power over its energy resources.

Therefore, in this context, we can speak of a struggle against a new colonial counter-revolution. We can speak of a struggle between the imperialist and colonialist powers — principally the United States — on the one side, and on the other we have China and the third world. Russia is an integral part of this greater third world, because it was in danger of becoming a colony of the West.

The GPCR is, of course, exaggerated in the netflix show. Here’s a twitter thread about it, and check out this screenshot for a more direct critique and comparison to the Chinese version.

You can also read the CPC’s own critique of the GPCR in this thread. (original source)

Marx, 18th Brumaire:

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

And:

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.

I’ve got basically the same story, except I disovered lemmygrad later on.

Nerd or geek culture was quite reactionary for a long time now. It’s a product of the (predominantly white male) western bourgeoisie and labour aristocrats, and its links to racism and sexism go quite deep.

This 3-page article (page 1, page 2, page 3) does a good job at analyzing these cultural aspects. It’s a very interesting read.

Here’s an excerpt from the introduction:

As geekdom moves from the cultural fringes into the mainstream, it becomes increasingly difficult for the figure of the geek to maintain the outsider victim status that made him such a sympathetic figure in the first place. Confronted with his cultural centrality and white, masculine privilege—geeks are most frequently represented as white males—the geek seeks a simulated victimhood and even simulated ethnicity in order to justify his existence as a protagonist in a world where an unmarked straight white male protagonist is increasingly passé.

Our investigation proceeds through three core concepts / tropes prevalent in geek-centered visual narratives:

1. “geek melodrama” as a means of rendering geek protagonists sympathetically,
2. white male “geek rage” against women and ethnic minorities for receiving preferential treatment from society, which relates to the geek’s often raced, usually misogynistic implications for contemporary constructions of masculinity, and
3. “simulated ethnicity,” our term for how geeks read their sub-cultural identity as a sign of markedness or as a put-upon status equivalent to the markedness of a marginalized identity such as that of a person of color.

We analyze these tropes via an historical survey of some key moments in the rise of geek media dominance: the early-20th century origins of geekdom and its rise as an identifiable subculture in the 1960s, the mainstreaming of geek masculinity in the 1970s and 80s via blockbuster cinema and superhero comics, and the postmodern permutations of geekdom popularized by Generation X cultural producers, including geek/slacker duos in “indie” cinema and alternative comics.

thought as we experience is not a property of the processes of the brain, but rather a consequence or a side product of neurobiological processes

So, in effect, you are saying that it is a property, only that it’s one you assume is irrelevant. Thinking is what our brains do. There isn’t some other “real” underlying function of our brains for thoughts to be some irrelevant side effect. I’ve already written about the contradictions in our perception of these processes in my previous comments.

Consciousness is neither explained by mechanical interactions nor dialectics, we can only guess at it.

You’ve gone into idealism here, painting consciousness as a Kantian unknowable thing-in-itself. Dialectical materialism is a consistently materialist worldview, and it can explain consciousness through proper study of it. I’ve given you a rough outline of a dialectical materialist explanation of consciousness in my previous replies.

it has to map onto some state of the brain (…) So there is a discreet neurological state that corresponds to a thought within our conscious experience. But conscious experience has to be a consequence of that state.

This is a false assumption and one that’s a result of your mechanist thinking. There is no need for there to be discreet states. Our thinking is a process, neuronal circuits are constantly firing, no steady state can encompass it. A similar example are protein conformations which are constantly moving around and changing. This is where dialectics would help you with accepting the fact that change is the “default” state and what we perceive as stable states are in fact also changing, just on different timescales.

It comes back to atoms just chugging along.

But it doesn’t. Yes, at the bottom, it’s atoms “chugging along”, but we’re not at a fundamental level, we’re talking about consciousness, behavior, and society. You cannot accurately study any phenomena of higher organization of matter only by studying fundamental particles. You keep clinging onto this model of abstract reductionism, but it will not give you an accurate understanding of most phenomena. You seemingly admit that we are active parts of the universe, and then you swerve into calling us “just atoms”, which on an atomic level, we are, but there are other levels to us, all still material. We have properties which arise from the specific organization and motion of those atoms as I’ve demonstrated in my previous reply. A similar error would be calling any molecules “just bunches of atoms” as a way to paint their specific properties or interactions as irrelevant.

However the counterpart thought we experience within consciousness is simply a consequent phenomenon, some kind of representation of this activation pattern. The conscious (experience of) thought has no power and is predetermined, simply representing a state of brain activation. And thus no actual control is to be found. Theres is simply a set of circumstances, a neurobiological calculation and a set output.

You call our thoughts “some kind of representation of this activation pattern” which is wrong. The movement of the matter of our neurons and supporting cells that contribute to our cognitive processes are our thoughts. Our thoughts are properties of that matter that arise from those specific interactions. In your model, again, there is a dualism present, where “we” aren’t material and are just somehow observing this from the outside.

You are also making assumptions you shouldn’t make and you’re abstracting these things in a mechanist way again. These phenomena don’t function as simple calculations with a set output, a computer analogy of biological organisms is woefully inaccurate in general and especially in this particular example. There are higher order interactions happening at every step and the only way to make sense of them is through dialectics. Again, you’re painting only our consciousness as “powerless” while you’re retaining the “power” of other things. Here, you’ve come to the position that our subconscious thoughts do have “power”, but our conscious ones don’t. Our consciousness and subconsciousness are not some separate, non-interacting entities, they are both parts of our material mind. They’re both “us”, it’s entirely irrelevant here whether we’re talking about conscious or subconscious thought, they function together, and they function rationally. Not to mention that you’re contradicting yourself again when you said before (correctly) that “consciousness isn’t explained by mechanical interactions”, and now you’re using exactly mechanical interactions to “explain” consciousness.

We only have control in the sense that we create change in the universe, but then we are simply microscopic a part of an ever-changing universe, it is simply that the universe is changing. This is predicted simply by thermodynamics, there is no need to involve more complex theories to explain this at a fundamental level.

The universe is changing, and so are we and our consciousness. We and everything else around us are parts of the universe. You seem to think that by pointing out the whole, you can simply ignore all the constitutive parts. Saying “it’s simply a person that’s sick” isn’t a substitute for a description of pathophysiological processes happening in the body. The scale of our activity in relation to the universe doesn’t matter, we’re discussing the quality here, not the quantity. You’ve gone from the abstraction of parts (“it’s all just atoms”) to an abstraction of the whole (“it’s simply the whole universe that’s changing”). This, again, doesn’t explain anything. We are looking for explanations of how particular parts of the universe function which we can only gain from studying those parts of the universe, not by abstracting to either extreme.

Just because thermodynamics describes change in general in the universe, doesn’t mean that it alone explains all the particularities of all the different phenomena occurring at all levels of organization of matter. Yes, it’s always present, but more things are added on as complexity increases. You cannot accurately explain human behavior just by studying abstract fundamental particles. There is a reason we have many scientific disciplines and not just particle physics. Yes, they’re all inseparably connected, but particle physics or thermodynamics alone aren’t enough.

I’m not even sure how dialectical materialsm ties in here all that well, the articles mostly just make slight off-handed remarks about consciousness and overall the theory seems to mostly deal with social organisation. I have to say it reads to me like a bunch of truisms thrown together. Maybe my reading is too brief, but I fail to see where it offers much of meaning.

I’ve been explaining how dialectical materialism “ties in” all throughout this thread. Furthermore, dialectical materialism isn’t just a patch that you can “tie in” to bolster some other theory or understanding, it’s a consistent and all-encompassing worldview which recognizes the reality of dialectics in our material reality. The articles I linked aren’t supposed to give you an answer specifically about consciousness, they are supposed to explain dialectics and dialectical materialism in general and on some common examples. Once you have a good understanding, you can apply it yourself. The articles do mostly deal with social organization because that’s what Marxism is primarily about, however, the Marxist method is dialectical materialism which is universally applicable. Take a look at the chapter of ‘The Dialectical Biologist’ I mentioned if you want a greater focus on natural science.

If all you see are a “bunch of truisms” then I don’t really know what you read, because that’s certainly not the case in any of the articles or books I mentioned. You admit that you’re unfamiliar with dialectical materialism and yet, instead of trying to educate yourself, you just keep going along with your mechanist worldview (that’s rife with contradictions, as I’ve been pointing out) while complaining that you don’t understand dialectics without even really trying. You don’t respond to any points I make, and you just move on to “new” points which are mostly just your old points recycled, but slightly changed in an attempt to get around my critique which you never specifically address. You keep retreating into “it’s just some atoms chugging along” as if it’s some profound wisdom, but it’s just a cover for your model’s inability to accurately explain human thought, behavior, or society (and plenty of other natural phenomena). It seems like I’m just repeating myself at this point, so I won’t be continuing this discussion any further.