I always look back at the stuff socialists wrote between the start of WWI and the October Revolution.
:lenin-confused: "I'll be long dead before I get to see a revolution..."
tempting fate by saying shit like "the revolution may not happen in my lifetime, my work lies in making sure we're as ready as can be"
Yeah best response. I do not like this meme bc it is very much supposing action doesnt matter or we have already lost and can just die. If it just expresses frustration, i dont feel it. Like come on, some of us are pretty fuckin priviledged and with a lot of priviledge some action absolutely matters. If you wanna see how waiting foe the conditions to become worse and being a passive doomer feed on one another, look at history or even like Lebanon right now. There is no reliable electricity, safe food, no gas, water is toxic, formerly well off people live on 100$ (with prices for food being lower but not by much) or less and some time in living memory this country was like a poster child for development and still people didnt do much more (as a whole) than throwing stones at best and having silly protest parties at worst. So bad conditions dont change shit if there is no one to channel that anger in a direction. AND OBVIOUSLY JUST GIVING UP MEANS THE OTHER SIDE FUCKING WINS FFS ARGH If you are absolutely convinced that you are actually unable to do anything and that it is not just learned helplessness talking, I get it. That rant is not adressed at you.
I also don't like the og quote bc it was pretty chauvinist in its historical context. Like not worth denouncing Rosa over but very poorly worded and analyticaly weak so maybe I am too fast to sort the meme as a bad take
It's always been barbarism but at every moment in history there have been chances and victories. A better world is always possible and every change we can make improves the odds of it being created.
yeah a lot of people don't realize how close some of our failures were to being victories, if certain things had just happened slightly differently.
not to mention things are constantly in flux, it's not an either/or succeed/fail dynamic.
inside this marxist, there are two wolves (I am at the furry convention)
eh, could be either way really. That said, unfortunately I'm not too picky and lotsa furries are kinda a mess politically
Not much more than your average hobby group. It is a consumption habit, not that much of a marker for politics tbh.
eh, honestly it's a bit better than that because loads of us are queer and/or some type of neurodivergent, esp. the people who're actually invested enough to go to events. More of an actual subculture than just a consumption habit imo, because we're largely Like This from socialising on the computer to avoid existing in a world that didn't want us to for one reason or another. Unfortunately that means there's a pretty big shard of Tech Guys, within which is a shard of fuckin Five Eyes Guys lmao
I have known quite a lot of cishet nt furries, hard to do counts. I know some cons banned nazis which is not so much an indicator of leftism as just functional liberalism imo in the us. I mean, being isolated on the internet falls always in many diff directions, politically. could have changed lately as more are open outrageously gay and have pushed back against the weirder people. E.g. look at anime which attracts basically anybody from all directions. Wouldnt say that anime watchers have messed up politics just bc they watch anime. And there are different tiers to that as well like who can afford cons, why people go into seeing themselves as an anime viewer (opposed to somebody who occasionally watches anime)
I am just sceptical of the idea that hobbies/subcultures as a rule are a reliable indicator of identity or politics (where I presumed this was coming from) bc I see people trodding it out against a more class based analysis, except maybe one that squarely places all of these into a globally priviledged consumer class (ew, dirty ""third worldism"" ew ew).
Would still kinda group subcultures as consumption (in the wider sense of the word) habits, doesnt mean they are "bad". It feels weird to tack "this person enjoys this or that hobby therefore they are most likely y" on things. I would guess the queers furs are more coherently organized and therefore more visible/ able to ban people that would kill them since they stick together as a community more? I should prolly finish the book on that which is lying on my device...
oh, yeah, all subcultures are also consumption groups under capital, wasn't disagreeing with you there but worded it poorly. this one's definitely a pretty reliable indicator of identity in my pretty extensive experience though. as an example that's fairly easy to tell at a glance, cis women are waaay below half (honestly there's probably about as many trans women as cis women at a given furmeet) due to massive issues with misogyny within the fandom, reflections of misogyny in geek culture & male gay culture. While, yes, the economic relations are largely the same as they are outside of the subculture, I think it's kinda absurd to go full vulgar marxist and abandon any analysis of social relations - specific groups face specific issues, and in order to flip other folks into being communists you gotta apply marxism to their actual lives
Was not saying class is the only thing that matters but if something is putting subjective stuff first and claims it is more important, it raises an eyebrow ngl.
Also, would you mind elaborating on why cis women are put off by misogyny and trans women in the fandom are not?
Marxist wolves would be pretty dope, especially if they showed up unexpectedly to question the hero about their motives in ways that clarified their goals and galvanized their resolve.
it’s been a hard day comrades……..whatever happens n the long term, I love y’all now.
I haven't read Capital but I have read all of the US Army's manuals on Counter-Insurgency and irregular warfare and I don't think I'm wrong.
All I know is that I will stand for what is right, no matter what
If shit goes bad, then I will stand with my friends and comrades just as I would if times were good
A better world is something worth fighting for
To put it basically; Capitalism is based on a lot of sets of ideas that can't all be true at the same time; Capitalists think that markets breed competition and competition leads to innovation, efficiency, and better products. But it's pretty obvious that if you observe markets they lead to coruption, stagnation, constantly falling product quality, and monopolies. For Capitalists (as an ideology) to justify their support for capitalism they need the first premise to be true. But as time goes on and Capitalism becomes more powerful and advances through it's life span it becomes harder and harder to ignore that it doesn't actually do any of the things Capitalists claim it does. That's the contradiction - The difference between the theoretical capitalism of economists and the observed capitalism of reality. Those contradictions become more and more obvious over time as the system increasingly devours the very systems - labor, resources - that sustain it until eventually it's obvious to everyone that it's an unsustainable destructive mess. For decades the only thing that's kept it functioning are events like the 2007 Financial Crisis where governments step in, and in absolute refutation of all capitalist theory they stabilize the rapidly exploding system by more or less taking control and shoving cash at the problem or breaking the law in massive ways. That buys them about another decade of pretending the system works until they have to do it again. That's where we are right now - the system is so overburdened by it's own contradictions that to save it the capitalists who allegedly believe in free market competition and other fairy tales are deliberately raising interest rates to crash the world economy to fend off any possibility of labor gaining power. They know that at this point, with everything a barely functional shambles, any serious labor power has the potential to spread exponentially and fatally wound the system in ways it probably couldn't come back from.
Theorists - Please check me if I'm full of shit, this is how I understand the concept based on my limited reading.
I hate to be that person, but this line of thinking is what leads people to believe that capitalism can be fixed, i.e. capitalism in theory vs capitalismin in practice. The contradictions that Marx spoke of are the irreconcilable differences between competing interests that are inherent in a capitalist system. For example, full employment vs inflation or infinite growth vs finite resources or the interests of finance capital vs industrial capital.
Edit: wanted to add this for clarity. The corruption and all the other things you mention are a result of contradictions. Think of it like symptoms of a disease. You have a cold (capitalism) that's causing sneezing, lethargy, congestion, fever (corruption, monopolies, corporate takeover of politics). You could continually try to fight back the symptoms with OTC drugs (regulation or deregulation depending on which flavor of liberal you are) which do nothing to combat the actual virus or you could try to eradicate the virus causing the symptoms. It's an important distinction because if we think of the contradictions as symptoms then we can fall into the trap of trying to relieve the symptoms as opposed to eradicating the disease. The contradictions are the RNA of the virus, itself, it cannot exist without them.
It isnt contradictions in what it actually is and what liberal economics claim it is.
The contradictions come from a lot of things that need to be true for capitalism to function but destroy the conditions for each other. Capitalism is profit seeking, and automation necessary to be competitive within the capitalist system reduces long term profits, is a good example
Capitalist contradictions start out blunt and sharpen themselves over time because capitalism is a kitty cat and contradictions are its claws.
Pretty sure we, as a species, chose barbarism back in the early 1800s
Kind of a hot take when you think about how the majority of the human species has been on the involuntary receiving end of barbarism.
Well, not that most humans weren't engaged in some sort of barbaric bullshit since long before, but most of the world has been systematically denied the ability to choose in any way.
They gerrymandered this bullshit for sure, but the people who choose barbarism make sure there's nobody else left to disagree.
I was more thinking of the billions of people crushed under the boot heel of Western imperialism for centuries.
Almost as if barbarism was a mystifying term that means :us-foreign-policy: mostly
