Permanently Deleted
No.
Without hope you are lost. Communism is at its heart based on faith: faith that there is an alternative to capitalism, that a better world is possible, that we might someday live without poverty and war, starvation and illiteracy, slavery and artlessness and depression and all the other symptoms of the parasitic infection that is capital.
When Kim Il-Sung watched his country decimated, half its buildings flattened by American bombs, did he lose hope? When Mao was facing down the dual threat of the Kuomintang and the Japanese imperialists, watching his brothers be put to the sword and his sisters sold off as comfort women, did he lose hope? When Fidel Castro was hiding in the jungle with less than a dozen guerillas, did he lose hope? No. Defeatism in the Cuban Revolutionary Army was punishable by death--and they in turn achieved the impossible.
Make no mistake, hope is the most potent weapon against capital that there is. Without it we are nothing. With it, we are everything. We are the indestructible heart of human liberation, steadily beating until the inevitable day that that hope spreads far beyond yourself, to places you never thought possible, to the creation of something so much larger than you that it dwarfs your most wild of communist dreams.
And this day is inevitable comrade, as long as you don't let your hope dwindle. Feed it like the raging fire that it is; have faith, even when there is no evident reason to do so. Things may look hopeless in the US right now. That's exactly how the bourgeoisie wants things to look. You lose hope, they win. You don't, and they will lose. They will fold like paper tigers before the power of your hope. You let hope die and you let down not just yourself but the rest of your species, who are relying on you as one of the scant few to see past the propaganda of the imperialist core to lead them, hope in hand, to liberation.
Never give up hope.
Gramsci: I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.
I read this as it's very easy to be pessimistic looking at the state of the world as an egalitarian. But it doesn't take a lot of reading to realize that nobody can predict anything, that anything is possible. To be pessimistic is not more valid than being optimistic - in fact you could say they're equally unscientific.
I came to say that I find Mark Fisher's work pretty depressing. I find it interesting though that my impression of his ideas is probably coloured by his suicide, and the fact that a few other people here have already named other authors who also took their lives.
Philipp Mainlander was a socialist and ended up killing himself and viewing life as evil. Not sure if any of his writing's been translated though.
