Have more taglines like "Hey [username], read Lenin's Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism." That got me to read it, then I checked out a book of his selected writings. The command worked!
This, but unironically. We need a Summoning Salt for Marxist theorists.
Post "The State and Revolution" line by line in the trans megathread, but in the form of a conversation.
I'm not sure if this thread is a parody of the other thread about Chapelle Roan, but taking it at face value -
Honestly it was interacting with y'all that got me to take reading theory more seriously. I had read a few basic things like the Manifesto and some other short things, but hanging around this community and seeing all the discussions from people more learned than I really got me to tuck into Lenin and Stalin's works.
It is parodying those threads but also hexbears should read theory more.
Look, there's a very simple answer here - standardized testing. The hordes of people yearning to post on hexbear will not be discouraged by a volume of text or two which they must read and then pass a test on in order to create an account (entrance exams).
In order to maintain an account in good standing, all accounts must regularly undergo testing on some randomly chosen Marxist text from a list determined The People's School Board (it will be all Marxists texts of course, all of them).
Failure to pass bimonthly testing will put your account in bad standing and you will become unable to post to or see "fun" coms (badposting, the_dunk_tank, shrekland) until your standing improves. Only theory comms will be viewable and only questions or commentary on theory will not be removed. Failure to pass even one test within a year will result in a ban.
It's really that easy!
SmallBeanPoster: "Why was I banned? I got 9/10 correct answers."
PowerMod: "You did. But you also spelled bourgeoisie wrong."
We should do this unironically, but without the bans and stuff.
This is such a good idea. Are you a teacher? Lol
Just wanted to add to this. Instead of points. We have users score on the last test and overall grade since they were a user on the site. Report Cards will submitted at the end of the year. You will have a cumulative GPA. You are only sent to theory purgatory once you are failing for the whole school year. We will have long written responses where a group of hexbears will grade you and give you feedback. High scoring students will get extra badges.
Let's get people to actually read the full text of the articles posted first. Baby steps lol.
But seriously, yeah I just quote leftist theory on this website whenever I feel it's relevant. Just giving some exposure to the ideas.
Don't worry, I'll keep quoting the important bits in the comments, along with quoting leftist theory. Hexbears will absorb it eventually, through osmosis I guess.
Nico has just been looking for the last few pages of State and Rev
[REDACTED LIST] got me to finally read Lenin, highly recommend it. It's convenient to read on my phone during lulls in the day, finally got through beginner-advanced and now I just have Org theory left (I had read other various pieces from Marx, Engels, Politzer, etc. before but this list got me into Lenin specifically).
Edit: see the comment thread, I'm spooked about the list I linked originally. Just use the Prolewiki beginner guide linked below IMO.
I don't understand why diamat is put at the very beginning? I'm putting a book together to radicalize my wife and it's wagelabour and capital, socialism from utopian to scientific and then state and revolution.
Also why is it using google analytics?? What the fuck
I don't understand why diamat is put at the very beginning?
In my opinion, understanding Diamat from the get-go is important, it makes the rest of Marxism-Leninism easier to learn and analyze. It puts you in the right frame of mind.
Also why is it using google analytics?? What the fuck
I did not know this, can you elaborate? I'm not great with that kind of stuff
so I can remove it from my comment if it's unsafe, don't want to put anyone in privacy risk. I found it on Lemmygrad and it seemed to be alright, so that's why I've been using it.Failing the one I linked, Prolewiki's is great too but not nearly as comprehensive or in-depth, not that it's trying to be. It's just the basics, but I highly recommend Politzer's Elementary Principles of Philosophy regardless, it's the best intro to Diamat IMO.
About diamat: Hmm I guess I never really understood the big deal about it, it just seems like the standard toolkit when trying to understand something.
about google: Basically it allows google to put a cookie in your browser. Google gets to build a better profile of your browsing habits and in exchange the site owner gets to see some data about the users browsing habits pertinent to their site. Like where do most of their users come from, a search engine or some other site using google analytics, how many unique visitors etc. You get jack shit.
Google can and does sell your profile which might contain personally identifying information to others like government agencies or employers so it's the last thing I would expect on a website trying to radicalize people.
Here's the disclaimer you get to see once:
Show
About diamat: Hmm I guess I never really understood the big deal about it, it just seems like the standard toolkit when trying to understand something.
Diamat is the backbone of Marxism, period. Without a clear understanding of it, along with Historical Materialism, it's incredibly difficult to understand and analyze Imperialist conflicts correctly, and helps put geopolitical struggles in clearer light. Just my 2 cents.
about google: Basically it allows google to put a cookie in your browser. Google gets to build a better profile of your browsing habits and in exchange the site owner gets to see some data about the users browsing habits pertinent to their site. Like where do most of their users come from, a search engine or some other site using google analytics, how many unique visitors etc. You get jack shit.
Google can and does sell your profile which might contain personally identifying information to others like government agencies or employers so it's the last thing I would expect on a website trying to radicalize people.
That's fucking terrifying, thanks for pointing it out, I'll remove the link and purge it. Do you think it's related to them selling printed copies on the site? Didn't see the warning because I use Mull and Librewolf I think, but inspected element and sure enough, found gtag scripts.
Edit: purged it from my comment history too.
Diamat is the backbone of Marxism, period. Without a clear understanding of it, along with Historical Materialism,
seconded a hundred times; and it's not just incredibly difficult to understand and analyze imperialist conflicts, Dialectical materialism and Historical Materialism is literally the "scientific method" of political-economic analysis and socio-historical analysis in Marxism. It is the methodology with which all of the prescient analyses of Lenin et all were built on and from which they sprung forth. In fact it's almost dangerous in my mind to only read Lenin and other revolutionaries without understanding or working to understand and apply Diamat and Histmat; because then all (many) people end up doing is vulgarizing Lenin's analyses from ~1916 and copy/pasting them to now as if we live in the same era, which is exactly how you get people calling China imperialist as a binary thing without coming to grips with the structures undergirding their exported capital or what opposing forces it is antithesis to.
They copy/paste as static facts these past analyses of Lenin, rather than trying to break down his methodology, with which he came to those realizations, criticisms, and analyses,, and build from his analyses forward to now using that methodology; deepening your understanding and ability to apply this methodology from which the predictive power of Marxism comes to new conditions. Lacking the undergirding methodology leads inherently and inevitably to opportunism; because you will just fill in the gaps with your own preconceptions because you don't have the tools for the necessary criticality and rigor to understand the underlying forces and contradictions in things, let alone how to orient in or between them; just as people did in the off-the-wall nonsense that permeated basic science before the scientific method was developed -- just as before the theoretical and experimental methodologies underlying modern science were put to solving problems and accomplishing tasks by removing the factor of human bias and instead discovering the underlying forces and conditions and patterns in things.
It's like that Sankara saying "Without patriotic political education, a soldier is only a potential criminal." the same applies to a revolutionary without a cohesive political education, which needs to at its base include the methodology for analysis and an understanding of the hows and whys and whats of it. Not having so is how you get opportunists and how you get adventurists who vulgarize theory to justify their own ends.
Exactly! You put it a hundred times better than I did. DiaMat is Marxism, analysis of Capitalism and advocacy for Socialism stems from Dialectical and Historical Materialism. Great comment!
Diamat is the backbone of Marxism, period. Without a clead understanding of it, along with Historical Materialism, it's incredibly difficult to understand and analyze Imperialist conflicts correctly, and helps put geopolitical struggles in clearer light. Just my 2 cents.
I really don't know what it is I'm missing there and keep feel like I didn't understand it properly but don't know what it might be since it all seems straightforward and boring philosophizing like logic calculus and set theory I had to do when starting studying math.
Do you think it's related to them selling printed copies on the site?
Idk, but every link to an outside site like their lulu.com store has a google.com URL prepended so google knows what you (your to google pseudonymous you) clicked when you left the site.
I really don't know what it is I'm missing there and keep feel like I didn't understand it properly but don't know what it might be since it all seems straightforward and boring philosophizing like logic calculus and set theory I had to do when starting studying math.
That's difficult to explain, but an example is that it helps us analyze Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, and the necessity of it in the context of the struggles faced by the PRC under the Gang of Four and the Cultural Revolution. That's something that trips up a lot of left-anticommunists, they see the markets in China and believe it to be Capitalist, because they analyze static units rather than a moving system in the context of a transitional Socialist State.
It's certainly possible to correctly come to the right conclusions without it, but it's extremely useful if you want to do your own analysis, rather than rely on comrades.
Idk, but every link to an outside site like their lulu.com store has a google.com URL prepended so google knows what you (your to google pseudonymous you) clicked when you left the site.
Thanks comrade, purged it from my comment history. I liked it a lot more than Prolewiki's good but minimal beginner guide, and felt it flowed better than Dessalines's Marxism intro, so I actually linked it quite a bit (which, again, I have purged). It's a shame, Communists shouldn't be sending data to google like that, thanks for pointing that out
Just for some color commentary: Google Analytics is used to track site traffic and the flow of users into, out of, and through a site. You can also use it to track which pages cause people to buy things and click on ads.
Sometimes you will see it in random places like this because some webmaster is curious about page hits and doesn't want to pay their domain provider for some premium stats package, or maybe traffic data is not provided. So you sign up for Google Analytics and add a tracking script to your website which is free, but it's free because you're bartering your users' data for your site analytics.
It's not always done with a malicious or surveiling intent and honestly probably would amount to nothing, but God only knows what Google will do with that user data, so I think your instinct is correct that it's inappropriate for a commie site from an opsec perspective.
Yep, I don't doubt that it could have been innocent, but the fact that it's there regardless is unacceptable for commie sites. Thanks for your input!
I had a bit of a think about it and perhaps the problem was my expectations of it. People kept posting about how it revolutionized their entire life and how they interact with people which hadn't happened for me.
But what that might have been is people thinking about their day-to-day life in a more abstract manner, or rather bridging the gap between abstract theory and how it presents in reality, because I remember having such a revelation from my introduction to mathematical thinking.
Because taken by itself set and logic theory, the backbone of math, really aren't that awe-inspiring, but being able to reduce complex problems to a set of easily formulated axioms certainly made me approach real life issues in a different manner. It's how I fell in love with the field itself.
And so just like set theory seems rather mundane on its surface even though it forms the backbone of the entire field of mathematics so it's with dia-mat.
A couple of carefully chosen minimal axioms that form the backbone of the whole field, making them vital to study for anyone who wants to learn about it, that are supposed to be obviously true since they are taken for granted, i.e. without proof or even much justification.
Also I'm thinking about changing engels for stalins intro to diamat so it's 1. wagelabor and value to kind of get a feel of what it's all about, 2. diamat to make sense of state and revolution and then 3. state and revolution as the "magnum opus" or whatever.
also tagging @anarcho_blinkenist@hexbear.net and @GarbageShoot@hexbear.net because they had very helpful insights to see if it makes sense to them as well. Thank you!!
I've thought about this for a while and I'm not sure what to say. I don't think I'd go so far as to say that reading any single book "revolutionized my entire life", I just got useful information and perspectives from them. I think that your guess is at least partially right, that some of the people who have the strongest enthusiasm are probably ones who haven't read much philosophy before and therefore are getting more groundwork covered in reading State and Rev [or whatever] than you and I did, because a fair amount of that stuff was already familiar to us.
Reading theory generally shouldn't be revelatory in some grand sense, this isn't a religious text and you aren't supposed to fall into some kind of transcendental rhapsody, you're just developing your understanding point by point.
About diamat: Hmm I guess I never really understood the big deal about it, it just seems like the standard toolkit when trying to understand something.
If both are told to render them in plain language, a lot of the stated beliefs of a Marxist and a highly-secular liberal are going to be similar. From a certain perspective however, the Marxist seeks to take those truisms and push them to their logical extremes rather than just let them sit there as a meaningless token admission. Put a more palatable way, diamat and historical materialism are ways of taking the axioms that both parties (the Marxist and secular liberal) admit as being foundational to reality and systematize them. Vibes are not enough.
If you're interested in writing on the necessity of this approach, see Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, which isn't bandied about like a meme in the manner that his three most popular works are, but is very philosophically interesting.
If you want meme texts, this is also covered in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific and in Marx's The German Ideology. As others have noted, these things are fundamental to the nature of Marxism as "scientific socialism", so a shorter option is the very good essay This Ruthless Criticism of All That Exists: Marxism as Science, which I think also exists in an audio form if you want me to dig that up.
In my opinion, understanding Diamat from the get-go is important
I think it's best to start with the history of socialist and political-theoretical ideas like Engels does so one can develop a gradual understanding and see how it fits within the landscape of political ideologies.
Similar to Prolewiki, I would probably do Principles of Communism into Elementary Principles of Philosophy into Socialism: Utopian and Scientific because I think Politzer does a good job of making Diamat extremely easy to grasp.
I’ve been trying to get people to do this irl but it’s harder than it seems chat. Especially when you get the reputation as the only outspoken socialist in the group
This is just life in America I’m afraid
Nah, I'm in Europe and it's similar, being the only openly Marxist even in a quite progressive group of friends means you're seen kinda as a good-hearted crazy radical.
Nah, I'm in Europe and it's similar, being the only openly Marxist even in a quite progressive group of friends means you're seen kinda as a good-hearted crazy radical.
Nah, I'm in Europe and it's similar, being the only openly Marxist even in a quite progressive group of friends means you're seen kinda as a good-hearted crazy radical.
Nah, I'm in Europe and it's similar, being the only openly Marxist even in a quite progressive group of friends means you're seen kinda as a good-hearted crazy radical.
Conlang translation challenge (said as if joking, but with a faint voice in the back of my mind telling me that it might actually work)
I tried throwing a copy or Imperialism: the Highest Stage or Capitalism at HexBear but it just broke my computer screen.
Great my laptop is split in two now. Guess I'm just stuck with my phone.
This is communism's fault!
Try with a copy of foundations of Leninism thrown at the foundations of the building nearest to you
The book just fell apart and then the manager of the WaWa came out and started yelling at me.
Is being a communist this hard usually?
Convince them to buy paperbacks as an act of consumerism, then, a couple weeks later, cause a widespread internet outage.
