As leftists, we tend to assign a lot of blame to systems, and that's good because that's where a lot of problems come from. But the coronavirus nonsense in the US has made me reconsider and wonder how much of our problems are really because our systems are fucked up, and how much is because people suck. Obviously, the government bungled the coronavirus response and made things considerably worse. But even if they hadn't, it's kind of hard to imagine that Americans would actually work together for the common good and not be entitled shitheads about it. As another example, while climate change certainly is a big systemic problem, it's also true that Americans tend to have larger carbon footprints than people in other developed countries.
I was watching Luna Oi on Youtube and she talked about Vietnam's coronavirus response. Some of what she said had to do with the government's swift and effective response, but she also talked about ordinary people taking it seriously and chiding people to wear masks. I've also thought about culture and Vietnam whenever chud libertarians use the Vietnam War as an example for how they could fight the state, and it's like, if you put an American chud next to a Vietnamese guerilla, they're about as different as two people can be, and if you consider those differences for two minutes it becomes clear that it's completely unrealistic for the former to fill the latter's shoes. To a certain extent (though certainly less so), I think the same critique can be applied to American leftists who make the comparison.
So with electoralism being such a dead-end, and with revolution looking pretty dicey, I wonder if it's worthwhile to work on things that may not solve problems directly, but might shift the way people think and act to be less, uh, you know, American. I don't know what that looks like exactly - maybe like community gardens or something. I know that climate change has us on a clock and that there are many other urgent problems right now, but it's hard to picture how anything gets solved with the way things are, so I figure it's worth looking at things from another angle. I don't really know what can be done about straight-up chuds though.
Idk, kinda just rambling/brainstorming here, thoughts?
Anthropologist here.
It's all culture, all the way down. It's not an accident that there are dozens and dozens of cultures that never followed the supposedly inevitable path of serfs-capitalism-socialism. Marx was a European writing in the 1850s, and most economics are not well versed in culture if they even understand such a thing exists.
Also, people don't "Suck". Global trade and communication and imperialism have allowed a handful of outstandingly pathological cultures to dominate the world due to a couple of historical and technological accidents. There were, and are, plenty of cultures where people are generally decent and not utterly alienated self serving assholes, they're just hard to see because of the European cultural hegemony.
Either way, the solution is propaganda and media domination. You can make people believe and behave almost any way you want if you have complete control of the information they're presented with. Mind control works and it's extremely effective.
Edit: I'm not a very good anthropologist, though, and there are a lot of Marxist Anthropologists out there, as well as a gradually growing body of non-European Anthropologists, who can provide good critiques of the "Economics is everything" analysis. Notably, Native-American anthropologists seem to be 100% not impressed with the idea that European-centric Marxism presents an inevitable blueprint for all human experiences, and reject the idea that a european economic philosophy can or should define all political action.
I could easily see small s socialisms that retain racism, slavery, violence against cultures and ethnicities. We saw that in the USSR and in China, to various extents. Economic conditions can't erase cultures or languages.
Honestly, in some ways the utopian, one world Communism has some really horrific implications. You'd almost certainly need to subsume all cultures and languages in to one extremely uniform world culture to make it work. Everyone would have to think the same way, hold the same values, and believe the same things. Cultural differences would lead to different approaches, which would create friction around the edges, which would create conflicts that could conceivably escalate.
I guess that feeds back in to the idea that nothing is inevitable and history never ends. You'd have to have a dynamic, changing Socialism and communism, or else you'd have to commit cultural omnicide and obliterate all cultures in to one monoculture. You'd either need to find some kind of meta-stability where many different kinds of people could cooperate despite significant cultural and linguistic differences, or you'd need to destroy culture and language as we know it.
I don't know enough to make a strong argument, but I think the Aztecs are a good example of how culture and economics are important. The Aztec empire's brutality definitely had strong economic underpinnings, but the form of that domination was strongly dictated by culture, to the extent that I don't know that there's anything else like it. Fighting entirely artificial wars served the economic interests of maintaining hegemony, but also a core cultural goal of attaining victims for sacrifice to keep the machinery of the universe running.
Inca are another culture that doesn't seem to fit the mold. Again, I'm not an expert at all, but they had this weird, like... agrarian state theological redistributive model, where agricultural surplus was owned by the theocratic state, but redistributed to the people. I wish I knew more about it, but it really doesn't seem to have fit the mold of any economic system in Europe.
And Islam has some unique elements, too. Zakat is a sort of quasi-official redistributive model that was intended to look after the needs of even the poorest muslims. It's been more or less formalized over the centuries, but at least in some times and places it was a very formalized and organized mode of economic welfare that, again, doesn't really have a clear parallels in European economics.
I didn't mean that people in general suck, I just meant people who don't take the virus seriously because muh haircuts.
Either way, the solution is propaganda and media domination. You can make people believe and behave almost any way you want if you have complete control of the information they’re presented with. Mind control works and it’s extremely effective.
So what you're saying is posting is praxis?
The more people you reach, and the more effective your messaging, and the more hegemonic your control over the media battlespace, the more praxis it is. We can literally re-write human minds. Just look at Fox, or the West Wing. Or, for that matter, look at the incredible amount of hard work the Vietnamese communists put in to educating everyone in Vietnam they could reach on their branch of Marxism. Vietnam's culture isn't an accident, people worked very hard to create it.
The Germans were the ones who introduced Culture to the anthropology in the first place, and Marx read Morgan and wrote a book heavily influenced by Morgan's Ideas (the German ideology) to the point where Engles asks readers to read him in the footnotes. Marx was almost certainly knowledgeable in the discourse around culture at the time, and even talked about an "asiatic mode of production" as distinct from capitalism and feudalism. He never flushed it out, but it definitely points to someone thinking about culture, even if he wasn't writing about it.
One of the key points of Marxist thought is that it is material conditions that, in a lot of ways, determine culture. Our system constructs and determines our culture, our values, etc. So the reason the United States is filled with chuds is because of the economic and social structure of the United States, and not the other way around. Likewise the case why Vietnamese people were so willing to "fight the good fight" in a way that Americans wouldn't. There's an upside to this in that if we can manage to change our system, our cultural values will change as well. Chuds are only chuds because they are living in late capitalism. In another world, they'd be something else entirely. It's up to us to steer us there. It's not people that suck, it's people under capitalism that suck.
So what can be done? It seems like we can't change the system because people are shitty but the reason people are shitty is that we can't change the system.
I guess what I'm trying to figure out is, what does that look like and how do we get to that point?
Part of it is that Americans don't have a war or general strike in common memory. We have no sense of collective responsibility because we've never had to rely on each other for our very survival.
The exceptions to this are the most oppressed in this country who are the folks we want to organize anyways.
Culture is a fancier term we use instead of "how". How we enjoy music is music culture, how we make food is food culture. Systems is also a substitute for how but refers to the process of inputs and outputs. It is slightly more analytical than when we use the word culture but it does the same thing as it points to the "how". However, many use the word culture as a substitute for "human nature" argueing that since culture (how we do things) is a reflection of identity (we do things differently from others) then this is their essential nature. That a change to culture is against that nature and shouldn't be forced by outsiders and that change should rather happen through cultural means and not via any other domain such as the political.
I find it useful to always ask people to substitute the word culture for something else because in practice, it is used to make simple things complicated by its ambiguity and elasticity between different fields.
Cultural conditions arise from material conditions, one can be traced back to the other
Matt had some good vlogs about base and superstructure I'll see if I can find it
EDIT: around 23 minutes into Whimsy on Demand, he also talks about it in Too Many Karens as well as the Nermal World one and the Tubalcain one
