unable to imagine futures beyond capitalism
doesn't seem accurate to me
To Kim Stanley Robinson's point from some recent podcast or another, it's not that people can't imagine a utopian socialist society. It's that they can't imagine a realistic pathway to getting there
Good thing that capitalism slowly eats through its own foundations.
"Capitalism sews the seeds of it's own destruction!" - Sad Horse show
yeah all we have to do is sit and wait for capitalism to spontaneously collapse on itself. any day now!
This definitely feels like it is four iterations deep in the worst meme argument ever.
If I simulate the revolution enough times maybe I'll actually know what I'm doing when the real thing happens. Or at least sound like I know what I'm doing which is really half of leadership anyway
I know this is a shitpost but I love when chuds or liberals ask me “what about Stalin then?” After I say I’m a communist. Idk, what about him? He’s dead, he has been dead for a long time, the world is not the same as it was then and won’t be. I don’t give a fuck about Stalin.
Now with communists there is good discussion to be had about Stalin, because I do actually give a fuck about him! However, as communists we know that past movements, revolutions, and the people involved in them are not blueprints but lessons on how to adapt to the material conditions of our time to create our own revolutionary movement.
tldr this meme is a joke but bad bc we only use the lessons of the past as shoulders on which we stand in an attempt to better understand how to act in the non-socialist present to craft a socialist future
SHUT THE FUCK UP OK I DID MY TIME IDOLIZING ANARCHISTS NOW IM IDOLIZING THE BOLSHEVIKS LET ME BREATHE PLEASE I DON'T HAVE A LOT GOING ON FOR ME RN LET ME JUST IMAGINE THE WORLD IS RED PLEASE PLEASE PLASE
if you want to be deluded, liberalism and fascism are just down the hallway after you take a right
And just when they seem engaged in revolutionising themselves and things, in creating something entirely new, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle slogans and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honored disguise and this borrowed language. Thus Luther donned the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789 to 1814 draped itself alternately as the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, in turn, 1789 and the revolutionary tradition of 1793 to 1795. In like manner the beginner who has learnt a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he has assimilated the spirit of the new language and can produce freely in it only when he moves in it without remembering the old and forgets in it his ancestral tongue.
:marx-joker:
From the recently posted Zizek essay:
His conclusion – “to begin from the beginning over and over again” – makes it clear that he is not talking merely of slowing down the progress and fortifying what was already achieved, but precisely of descending back to the starting point: one should “begin from the beginning,” not from where one succeeded in ascending in the previous effort. In Kierkegaard’s terms, a revolutionary process is not a gradual progress, but a repetitive movement, a movement of repeating the beginning again and again… and this, exactly, is where we are today, after the “obscure disaster” of 1989, the definitive end of the epoch which began with the October Revolution. One should therefore reject the continuity with what Left meant in the last two centuries. Although sublime moments like the Jacobin climax of the French Revolution and the October Revolution will forever remain a key part of our memory, that story is over, everything should be re-thought, one should begin from the zero-point.
