Read theory, it's literally online for free. Join a reading group. You spend hours doom scrolling on Twitter to no end. All that's gotten you is deep knowledge of every twitter beef between 400 follower nazbols.
Edit: It’s not an issue with the site but online discourse about the left in general. Why are y'all upset about shoeonhead or black hammer or whatever new group of dumbasses is saying some new dumb shit. I'm talking about how every few days lots of leftists are surprised and upset that their fav twitter personality said something really stupid.
Another day, another passive-aggressive vaguepost
god these are awful. @ABigguhPizzahPieh if you want to be more specific as to what you're referring to go ahead, but at the moment this post just does nothing to solve whatever issue you have with the site
It's not an issue with the site but online discourse about the left. Im talking about how every few days lots of people are surprised and upset that their fav twitter personality said something really stupid. Like yea no shit
Ah, I get it. Sorry it seemed like you were vaguely referring to something that happened here without actually mentioning it. Thanks for the clarification.
I finally sunk my teeth into some theory today, started "what is to be done?" So far it's just beef between revolutionaries and opportunists, but I feel like I'm learning something.
That was the struggle of his time. Basically imagine DSA was a viable party during a second American civil war and had a large portion of the military actively involved in it, but within DSA you have the actual workers, and the petite bourgeois business owners. The workers want proletarian revolution and the petite bourgeois say "just vote" or something.
Also, Value Price and Profit and The Civil War in France are fantastic for getting a Marxist base. I'd also recommend the People's Marx which is a re-edit of all 3 volumes of Capital into like 300 pages.
it's interesting stuff so far, and I am learning about how he overcame the opportunists of his day. My plan right now is to chug through more Lenin, then try to tackle Marx directly once I understand that.
I would just go directly to Marx tbh. Lenin's adaptations and developments from his readings of Marx are his own, they are not Marx's context or content and there's nothing wrong with reading them directly to understand Marx (and imo there are severe divisions between Marx and Lenin on their conception of socialism and transition).
I understand what you are saying, but I usually get a better grasp of things if I can see them in practice, or at least in a practical application, before just seeing their treatise. I tried to get into Das Capital without anything else before, and was immediately lost. This seems to be working better for me, so I am just going to continue as I am, but thanks for your input.
You are taking the right path, imo it is better to read Lenin first before the more complex stuff by Marx, although maybe you should read the communist manifesto or value price and profit or some other of the "popularised" stuff by Marx first.
However with Lenin I think State and Revolution or the infantile book are better starting points. Especially the infantile book is very, very relevant to terminally online twitter weirdos.
I tried State and Revolution once before, and it immediately went way over my head. I understood just enough to win a few arguments though. After I clear WITBD, I'll take another crack at state and revolution and then move on to the infantile book. Thanks for the recommendation!
Most of Lenin's texts are basically angry effortposts which are usually addressing something very specific but from which you can draw much more general conclusions and see how he applied marxism in practice. However there is also Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism which is a little bit harder but it's more general. However of course it's worth reading the shorter texts by Marx and Engels before all that. Just don't try to read Capital because you'll burn out.
Imperialism: the highest stage of cringe will be my endpoint for reading Lenin, then I'll move on to short Marx and Engels. Thanks for your advice, but I'm going to use the reading tactics that usually work for me. I might revisit this if I find my strategy not working.
Thanks for your advice, but I’m going to use the reading tactics that usually work for me.
Yeah alright but I'm saying that partly because there's a logical progression in that Lenin builds on Marx and Engels and occasionally even departs from them so it's worth knowing what they said first.
Good deal, definitely start Marx with those ones I mentioned. That's like 400 pages total for all 3 and you'll have a really solid grasp on all the economic stuff as well as the frameworks of communism and how it arises from capitalist contradictions.
I read Lenin first too and going back and reading Marx made me realize that there isn't really a "Marxism" without "Leninism". Like Lenin's whole deal was just doing exactly what Marx said.
That's really not true, there are significant changes from Marx's thought to Lenin's, and substantial (the large majority in fact) amounts of Marx's writing Lenin didn't have access to either. There's also important ideas that just are not Marx's. For example the withering of the state is not from Marx, it's a statement Engels made. Lenin also draws significantly from other Marxists for a lot of his base, especially Hilferding and Kautsky (the point of the renegade Kautsky is after all that Kautsky's earlier writings were very important for Lenin and that he went renegade post war) who are all part of imo a departure (and not a good one, it makes fundamental mistakes) from Marx's political thought and critique that becomes dominant in the SPD and then the Bolsheviks.
I'm just gonna counter the "withering away" point by saying that while Marx may have never said that phrase specifically, it is heavily implied in his definition of state. He frequently mentions that the state is a tool of class oppression and that the workers "seizing the machinery of the state" is more of a destruction of the state machinery and replacement by democratic worker counterparts.
He also asserts many times that the goal of a proletarian revolution is to abolish class, and therefore the worker's state serves as the tool with which to resolve those contradictions.
From these points, you can concluelde that the state must either away, or at least as I believe Engels puts it, transition from an administration of people to an administration of things. Which I would say constitutes a withering away (as without class conflicts, the state has no reason to exist).
Kautsky's big sin was the assertion that the revolution could occur within the framework of the bourgeois state, an idea which Marx heavily criticizes in The French Civil War.
Right, but Marx is still in other places, like the notes on Bakunin, quite ambivalent on how much "state" there is in a worker's state. Like being a workers "state" for Marx still requires things like the destruction the bureaucracy and the army. Furthermore Marx was never completely convinced by the common instrumental view of the state that is attributed him. This period is also still pretty short, and imo from the critique of the Gotha program and some sections of Capital, it's pretty clear that the state does not exist by the time the first phase of communism rolls around (which is really the big change with the worker's state for Lenin since it still exists in the first phase of socialism).
Once again, The Civil War in France is the big turning point for Marx. He described the governing structure that emerged in the Paris commune as the form of the proletarian state. He also makes it clear that the state like that exists until the class conflict doesn't. At no point did he say that the Paris revolutionaries should have disbanded their councils and disbanded their national guardsmen.
He also made it clear that "ideology" plays no part in the formation of the proletarian state as it assumes the form it needs to survive. His evidence being that the main ideologies of the Parisians said nothing about formation of councils and revocable representatives. The workers organized in a way that they needed to to survive the encirclement.
Also I'm calling bullshit on Marx ever saying that the state stops existing before the first stage of communism. He clearly says that the length of the different stages cannot be known and will likely take generations. He also states the role of central banks in the first stage which are absolutely a state appendage.
I'd highly recommend Lars Lih's Lenin Rediscovered: What Is To Be Done In Context, it's a new translation of WITBD, and goes into a lot of detail on the unique context and meaning of the work that cuts through both the liberal and Marxist-Leninist twistings of the work.
Theory is the distilled experience of millions of comrades who have lived and died in pursuit of human freedom and emancipation. You literally cannot understand what went wrong and how we came to live in hell world without understanding what has been tried and why it was tried. You cant understand where your task begins if you don't know where the tasks of comrades who came before us ended. I promise you its worth it.
its always gonna be more valuable to go straight to the source if possible bc you never know how it was filtered through someone else but the two can work well together and if right now podcasts only is helping you that's fine too I'd just consider looking into it some day if it strikes you. :)
It's always good to read the source material either before or after listening to a podcast. That way you not only get more from the podcast (as you know what they're talking about and can focus on it better), but also more from the book through a differing perspective.
nah for sure i just used it as a jumping off point. I do agree with op mostly that theory is important and helps people get up to speed and be informed on things but i recognize its daunting and just want to be encouraging and not berate people. Desalines has tons of theory on his channel as well as audible socialism you can check out or if you're more into anarchism theres an audible anarchism too. You can almost always find a free audiobook version of a book just searching its name on youtube and audiobook, I listen to a lot of theory while wallking my dog
Yes but what about if you listen to every podcast? Doesn't matter about anything being filtered through someone else then, and you still never have to read any theory. 🧠
i mean getting various perspectives on something definitely can help you get closer to the truth and is a decent facsimile of dialectics if it's all that is available though it's still not going to be as informing as going direct to the source there's still filtering happening your just trying to sus out a cohesion through various 2nd hand sources. Also I think the amount of effort and time invested listening to a multitude of podcasts is way higher than just reading the book tho lol. But again if that's more enjoyable at least you're getting something which is better than nothing
Yeah, agree with that. One of the overlooked benefits of pods is the insight into conversations around the reading. Conversations that would have been had in reading groups or union halls or meetings back in the day, that we're not having because of the atomised lives we lead now. People hearing these conversations, even parasocially, from the outside, has value imo.
In the sense that any map is just an abstraction. The fact that it isn't a 1:1 representation of the Ocean doesn't make a Maritime chart less essential
The relationship between a map and the physiographic area it represents is a lot more straight-forward than a theoretical model of history, economics, and social class conflict.
Uhhhh what?
This seems like a really specific thing to be upset about.
Fine I'll go read all of Trotsky's works. You talked me into it.
Reading Trotskys half finished biography of stalin to own the effort poster
The more people tell me to read theory, the less theory I read. Soon I'll be reading negative theory.
what the fuck is a means of production. that doesn't sound very nice
Hey now, I've hated Shoe0nhead for years now. And the outrage machine is fun. It's fun to be angry at these dipshits. Cathartic and it feeds into my superiority complex. That's literally what most of these social media platforms are designed around.
It's not useful. It's not satisfying. But it is, in the moment, fun.
