I had to leave SAlt behind because of these motherfuckers. They ruined Kshama's politics. They actively tricked people into believing voting for Democrats was ever fucking acceptable.
They're not mindless but they are rubes subject to false consciousness, or being actively misled by shitty leaders who should know better. The task of Marxists is to convince workers they've been getting conned their entire fucking life and it is such an uphill battle that I don't know if I'm going to make it past this decade.
The point of Marxist theory isn't just to understand the world but to change it. I am actually trying to change people's minds and want people to get organized so that we can actually fucking fight back for once in our miserable lives. I can't fucking take life under capitalism anymore and the revolutionary task is the main thing keeping me from killing myself.
I guess, but change peoples minds involves treating them and yourself as fallible people, not a prophet to correct them and lead them out of darkness. Their reasons for thinking what they think aren't necessarily any worse than yours are.
As far as not making past this decade; try to relax. It also might help to shift from a personal morality model of politics (the people who disagree with me are evil and or dumb) to a more contingent model (the interaction of personality and exterior stimulus will inform a persons political views)
I was a liberal until 2017. I fucking know what it's like to be a rube, to suffer all sorts of different delusions. I would have easily sold out the left before then the way I fear my liberal family is going to sell me out for being a communist, or make me playact being a normal liberal in public which is fucking torture over extended periods. Seeing my mom watch MSNBC on an almost daily basis is a constant stressor and she wonders why I have hypertension now. They don't see what I see and I can't even object to something Jake Tapper or whichever liberal ghoul is feeding my mom talking points without coming off as obnoxious.
When I realized that a lot of the things that I previously believed were wrong despite how certain I was of them, it also made me realize that the current things I believe might be wrong, despite how certain I am of them.
it also made me realize that the current things I believe might be wrong, despite how certain I am of them.
I would not have gotten this far if I didn't also believe this. As events give us more empirical historical data to work with my position can still change. My stance on the PRC, while still intensely critical, has softened a bit over the past year because of covid.
Even Marxists use a dialectical approach to study new historical events and draw conclusions. I used the term "empirical data" in order to reinforce the scientific nature of this process rather than to tether it to a strictly empiricist approach.
Am I correct to assume you're not a Marxist? You sure as hell don't sound like one.
Sure, but this is just a methodological choice; one you can make if you like, but not one you are compelled to make by some outside objective standard. To choose a dialectical approach or on essentially comes down to personal whim, and failing to choose so doesn't make one irrational or anti-socialist.
I have a math/econ background (i.e. basically no philosophy/metaphysics) and barely even understand dialectics other than that dialectical materialism has much stronger explanatory power than the mostly bullshit models used in neoclassical economics that I have to pretend are acceptable for a living if I don't want to be homeless.
My adoption of Marxism as the basis of my worldview came from a pragmatic "instrumentalist" initial position. If something comes along claiming to beat it when applied to the task of fighting back against my own immiseration without increasing other undeserving people's misery, I remain skeptical knowing what I now know about the complete failure of postmodernism and eclecticism to actually fucking deal with the problems facing the working-class. Ditching Marxism in the '80s has been an unmitigated disaster for the left. We shouldn't have to reinvent the fucking wheel when we have a solid foundation to work from, even if latter 20th-century revisionists built crap on top of it.
Oh neat, I'm a math professor. The thing is "explanatory power" isn't some nice and neat metric like an L2-norm that everyone can compute themselves and come to the same answer if they do it correctly. When it comes to things like Marxism, it's a much more subjective measure, and I say this not to be critical but to show you examples of how these things seem to work. The Mormon missionaries that have been having a go at me for the past year and half also report incredibly strong feelings of subjective explanatory power, which I have no reason to believe aren't genuine.
So, assuming neither framework has been objectively been shown to be true in some correspondence framework (which they haven't), if I'm looking for belonging, acceptance, and the feeling that I understand the laws that govern history, why would I choose Marxism as opposed to Mormonism?
Marxism in the US has also failed to bring about the revolution it purports to; you can blame that on competing leftist currents from sucking all the oxygen out of the room, but counterfactual hypotheticals aren't really evidence.
Marxism in the US failed for most of its history not just because of subjective factors like competing leftist currents and shitty revisionist leadership but also because of objective obstacles like getting ruthlessly and violently suppressed by the ruling class here. The counterfactuals aren't just hypotheticals Marxists pull out of their ass, they're modeled based on other cases that were more successful or which failed for different reasons.
Marxism as a family of tendencies is by far the most successful group of tendencies when it comes to making revolution happen anywhere on Earth. The Bolshevik revolution in its early stages is still the universally-agreed-upon gold standard, deviation from which is considered a sign of weakness among Marxists. Maybe some Maoists might argue the Chinese revolution is an improvement, but I'm not a Maoist. Anarchists and utopians have never succeeded on any scale even comparable to the early Soviet Union. Social democrats are a joke even compared to the anarchists, and it was precisely the rejection of social democracy which allowed Lenin and co. to succeed at all.
objective obstacles like getting ruthlessly and violently suppressed
These obstacles are only 'objective' if you presuppose some model of their behavior; there are many documented examples in history where violent repression fuels further dissent as opposed to squashing it, so the sort of linear "sufficient repression = successful subversion" doesn't seem to work.
Marxism as a family of tendencies is by far the most successful group of tendencies when it comes to making revolution happen anywhere on Earth.
Has anyone actually tested this though? Like statistically? I'm not trying to Nate Bronze this, but you've got plenty of successful non-communist revolutions to point to, and plenty of unsuccessful Marxist ones, all of which have all sorts of confounding factors to muddle up the whole picture that I've never been convinced that "yep, it's definitely the Marxism that does it" .
I should probably make a note that terms like "subjective/objective" and "revolution" have specific meanings in Marxism.
The subjective factor is a catch-all for factors endogenous to the working class, e.g. the state of worker consciousness, and the state of their leadership. Objective conditions are exogenous and independent from the perspective working class, including truly exogenous features like geography but also elements that would be endogenous from a God's eye perspective like the economy and the behavior of the enemy ruling class, which are in fact modeled in detail in cornerstone Marxist texts like Capital and State and Revolution. We make assumptions about what to expect from our oppressors based on what their material class interests are (profit maximization, capital accumulation, the use of the state as a weapon to protect private property) and factor that into our analysis.
In a Marxist context, "revolution" is shorthand for a political and social revolution wherein the working class gains or attempts to gain total control of the state and begins the process of changing the main mode of production away from one based on class hierarchy and towards one which is less exploitative and unequal (except to the previous rulers, who can't be trusted) with the ultimate aim of dissolving the class hierarchy altogether and ending oppression. By this standard the only revolutions that count as actual revolutions are socialist or communist revolutions, and liberal people's revolutions like the French revolution (maybe the American one, if we're being charitable, though a better comparison might be something like the Civil War that ended slavery) are incomplete revolutions, and CIA color revolutions are counter-revolutions.
We make assumptions about what to expect from our oppressors based on what their material class interests are (profit maximization, capital accumulation, the use of the state as a weapon to protect private property) and factor that into our analysis.
Yeah, you're admirably attempting to model the behavior of a very complex system, but like I said at the beginning, there needs to be a level of humility in doing so. If the model gives you an outlook of the world that essentially saps your will to live, then the focus on that particular model needs to be tempered for your own sake. Otherwise it takes on the character of some Lovecraftian truth, at which point, what good is it? You aren't responsible for the dynamics of the system, and you as an individual cannot change the dynamics of the system. You can work as an individual toward strengthening the power of systems agents (classes in Marxism), but letting the class scale analysis percolate down into how you treat and act to individuals is a recipe for an entirely different kind of alienation altogether.
working class gains or attempts to gain total control of the state and begins the process of changing the main mode of production away from one based on class hierarchy and towards one which is less exploitative and unequal (except to the previous rulers, who can’t be trusted) with the ultimate aim of dissolving the class hierarchy altogether and ending oppression
These metrics aren't any more solid. You can substitute "purported aim" for "ultimate aim" to make it something more tangible, but those aren't the same thing, and it further renders a revolution unclassifiable until some unspecified date in the future when it fizzles out it open capitalism (like the USSR) or achieves abolition of the class hierarchy and the ending of oppression (no where yet). You can state that someplace like China was closer to this ideal, but then we're back to the original problem; we're not in some well metric space where distance is meaningfully defined. The USSR was you can say that the USSR was much closer to this ideal than say the US at a certain point in time, but what good is that now that they're further away? This is a bit like taking the limit as x -> 1E10 and substituting that for x -> infinity.
I love talking to Mormons. It’s the worst when they try to just stick to the script and fast track you into baptist. Ain’t gonna be that easy boys!
I've had some sets try that actually, and they told me if I committed to a date then I'd receive a special witness and believe. I said sure, lets give it a go. Date comes up, they ask the baptismal interview questions, I vomit out a load of epistemology, and they say, "on second thought, lets keep working". We've been at it for over year now.
Sometimes they swap out, some have gone home (I always send them off with a book like The Structure of Scientific Revolutions or The Brothers Karamazov based on their personalities) and others get transferred around the region. Longest I've had a single one is about 5 months. The official transfer schedule is every 6 weeks, but some get assigned to the same region for more than 1 transfer.
Even if you convince everyone of the truth of Marxism, a small reminder is that all militaries in the world are controlled by ruling classes, this includes all nuclear weapons. Also, people lived under feudalism for a thousand years, while capitalism is still just 200 years old and far more dynamic than feudalism. Not trying to doompill you, but trying to make you realize that the solution isnt simply "convincing people". Although that is a major step, there are many more steps that are even harder.
Also, people lived under feudalism for a thousand years, while capitalism is still just 200 years old and far more dynamic than feudalism.
Thoughts like this fuel my despair. When I was a liberal the thought of traveling back in time and getting stuck in medieval Europe sounded like my idea of hell on Earth. Now that I'm a Marxist I actually get to experience that feeling every waking moment of my life.
I did not know that. I still despise the current liberal/social-democratic DSA leadership for the reasons I laid out but will note that they aren't technically Harringtonites.
Well I'm glad you've got someone to blame, but thats small solace by the look of it.
I had to leave SAlt behind because of these motherfuckers. They ruined Kshama's politics. They actively tricked people into believing voting for Democrats was ever fucking acceptable.
You know some people genuinely do believe it's acceptable, and you treating them as mindless rubes isn't going to get you anything but a coronary.
They're not mindless but they are rubes subject to false consciousness, or being actively misled by shitty leaders who should know better. The task of Marxists is to convince workers they've been getting conned their entire fucking life and it is such an uphill battle that I don't know if I'm going to make it past this decade.
Yeah maybe maybe not. It's certainly a theoretical model that purports to explain it.
The point of Marxist theory isn't just to understand the world but to change it. I am actually trying to change people's minds and want people to get organized so that we can actually fucking fight back for once in our miserable lives. I can't fucking take life under capitalism anymore and the revolutionary task is the main thing keeping me from killing myself.
I guess, but change peoples minds involves treating them and yourself as fallible people, not a prophet to correct them and lead them out of darkness. Their reasons for thinking what they think aren't necessarily any worse than yours are.
As far as not making past this decade; try to relax. It also might help to shift from a personal morality model of politics (the people who disagree with me are evil and or dumb) to a more contingent model (the interaction of personality and exterior stimulus will inform a persons political views)
I was a liberal until 2017. I fucking know what it's like to be a rube, to suffer all sorts of different delusions. I would have easily sold out the left before then the way I fear my liberal family is going to sell me out for being a communist, or make me playact being a normal liberal in public which is fucking torture over extended periods. Seeing my mom watch MSNBC on an almost daily basis is a constant stressor and she wonders why I have hypertension now. They don't see what I see and I can't even object to something Jake Tapper or whichever liberal ghoul is feeding my mom talking points without coming off as obnoxious.
When I realized that a lot of the things that I previously believed were wrong despite how certain I was of them, it also made me realize that the current things I believe might be wrong, despite how certain I am of them.
So uh, try to keep that in mind and don't let a framework poison your views of humanity!
I would not have gotten this far if I didn't also believe this. As events give us more empirical historical data to work with my position can still change. My stance on the PRC, while still intensely critical, has softened a bit over the past year because of covid.
Yeah see I don't know about that, even notions of 'empiricism' seem to be on shakier foundations than I thought they were.
This is of course why I converted to Troskyism on the basis of bird flight patterns.
Even Marxists use a dialectical approach to study new historical events and draw conclusions. I used the term "empirical data" in order to reinforce the scientific nature of this process rather than to tether it to a strictly empiricist approach.
Am I correct to assume you're not a Marxist? You sure as hell don't sound like one.
Sure, but this is just a methodological choice; one you can make if you like, but not one you are compelled to make by some outside objective standard. To choose a dialectical approach or on essentially comes down to personal whim, and failing to choose so doesn't make one irrational or anti-socialist.
No, I hew closer toward instrumentalism.
I have a math/econ background (i.e. basically no philosophy/metaphysics) and barely even understand dialectics other than that dialectical materialism has much stronger explanatory power than the mostly bullshit models used in neoclassical economics that I have to pretend are acceptable for a living if I don't want to be homeless.
My adoption of Marxism as the basis of my worldview came from a pragmatic "instrumentalist" initial position. If something comes along claiming to beat it when applied to the task of fighting back against my own immiseration without increasing other undeserving people's misery, I remain skeptical knowing what I now know about the complete failure of postmodernism and eclecticism to actually fucking deal with the problems facing the working-class. Ditching Marxism in the '80s has been an unmitigated disaster for the left. We shouldn't have to reinvent the fucking wheel when we have a solid foundation to work from, even if latter 20th-century revisionists built crap on top of it.
Oh neat, I'm a math professor. The thing is "explanatory power" isn't some nice and neat metric like an L2-norm that everyone can compute themselves and come to the same answer if they do it correctly. When it comes to things like Marxism, it's a much more subjective measure, and I say this not to be critical but to show you examples of how these things seem to work. The Mormon missionaries that have been having a go at me for the past year and half also report incredibly strong feelings of subjective explanatory power, which I have no reason to believe aren't genuine.
So, assuming neither framework has been objectively been shown to be true in some correspondence framework (which they haven't), if I'm looking for belonging, acceptance, and the feeling that I understand the laws that govern history, why would I choose Marxism as opposed to Mormonism?
Marxism in the US has also failed to bring about the revolution it purports to; you can blame that on competing leftist currents from sucking all the oxygen out of the room, but counterfactual hypotheticals aren't really evidence.
Marxism in the US failed for most of its history not just because of subjective factors like competing leftist currents and shitty revisionist leadership but also because of objective obstacles like getting ruthlessly and violently suppressed by the ruling class here. The counterfactuals aren't just hypotheticals Marxists pull out of their ass, they're modeled based on other cases that were more successful or which failed for different reasons.
Marxism as a family of tendencies is by far the most successful group of tendencies when it comes to making revolution happen anywhere on Earth. The Bolshevik revolution in its early stages is still the universally-agreed-upon gold standard, deviation from which is considered a sign of weakness among Marxists. Maybe some Maoists might argue the Chinese revolution is an improvement, but I'm not a Maoist. Anarchists and utopians have never succeeded on any scale even comparable to the early Soviet Union. Social democrats are a joke even compared to the anarchists, and it was precisely the rejection of social democracy which allowed Lenin and co. to succeed at all.
These obstacles are only 'objective' if you presuppose some model of their behavior; there are many documented examples in history where violent repression fuels further dissent as opposed to squashing it, so the sort of linear "sufficient repression = successful subversion" doesn't seem to work.
Has anyone actually tested this though? Like statistically? I'm not trying to Nate Bronze this, but you've got plenty of successful non-communist revolutions to point to, and plenty of unsuccessful Marxist ones, all of which have all sorts of confounding factors to muddle up the whole picture that I've never been convinced that "yep, it's definitely the Marxism that does it" .
I should probably make a note that terms like "subjective/objective" and "revolution" have specific meanings in Marxism.
The subjective factor is a catch-all for factors endogenous to the working class, e.g. the state of worker consciousness, and the state of their leadership. Objective conditions are exogenous and independent from the perspective working class, including truly exogenous features like geography but also elements that would be endogenous from a God's eye perspective like the economy and the behavior of the enemy ruling class, which are in fact modeled in detail in cornerstone Marxist texts like Capital and State and Revolution. We make assumptions about what to expect from our oppressors based on what their material class interests are (profit maximization, capital accumulation, the use of the state as a weapon to protect private property) and factor that into our analysis.
In a Marxist context, "revolution" is shorthand for a political and social revolution wherein the working class gains or attempts to gain total control of the state and begins the process of changing the main mode of production away from one based on class hierarchy and towards one which is less exploitative and unequal (except to the previous rulers, who can't be trusted) with the ultimate aim of dissolving the class hierarchy altogether and ending oppression. By this standard the only revolutions that count as actual revolutions are socialist or communist revolutions, and liberal people's revolutions like the French revolution (maybe the American one, if we're being charitable, though a better comparison might be something like the Civil War that ended slavery) are incomplete revolutions, and CIA color revolutions are counter-revolutions.
Yeah, you're admirably attempting to model the behavior of a very complex system, but like I said at the beginning, there needs to be a level of humility in doing so. If the model gives you an outlook of the world that essentially saps your will to live, then the focus on that particular model needs to be tempered for your own sake. Otherwise it takes on the character of some Lovecraftian truth, at which point, what good is it? You aren't responsible for the dynamics of the system, and you as an individual cannot change the dynamics of the system. You can work as an individual toward strengthening the power of systems agents (classes in Marxism), but letting the class scale analysis percolate down into how you treat and act to individuals is a recipe for an entirely different kind of alienation altogether.
These metrics aren't any more solid. You can substitute "purported aim" for "ultimate aim" to make it something more tangible, but those aren't the same thing, and it further renders a revolution unclassifiable until some unspecified date in the future when it fizzles out it open capitalism (like the USSR) or achieves abolition of the class hierarchy and the ending of oppression (no where yet). You can state that someplace like China was closer to this ideal, but then we're back to the original problem; we're not in some well metric space where distance is meaningfully defined. The USSR was you can say that the USSR was much closer to this ideal than say the US at a certain point in time, but what good is that now that they're further away? This is a bit like taking the limit as x -> 1E10 and substituting that for x -> infinity.
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I've had some sets try that actually, and they told me if I committed to a date then I'd receive a special witness and believe. I said sure, lets give it a go. Date comes up, they ask the baptismal interview questions, I vomit out a load of epistemology, and they say, "on second thought, lets keep working". We've been at it for over year now.
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Sometimes they swap out, some have gone home (I always send them off with a book like The Structure of Scientific Revolutions or The Brothers Karamazov based on their personalities) and others get transferred around the region. Longest I've had a single one is about 5 months. The official transfer schedule is every 6 weeks, but some get assigned to the same region for more than 1 transfer.
Even if you convince everyone of the truth of Marxism, a small reminder is that all militaries in the world are controlled by ruling classes, this includes all nuclear weapons. Also, people lived under feudalism for a thousand years, while capitalism is still just 200 years old and far more dynamic than feudalism. Not trying to doompill you, but trying to make you realize that the solution isnt simply "convincing people". Although that is a major step, there are many more steps that are even harder.
Thoughts like this fuel my despair. When I was a liberal the thought of traveling back in time and getting stuck in medieval Europe sounded like my idea of hell on Earth. Now that I'm a Marxist I actually get to experience that feeling every waking moment of my life.
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There's no Harrington people left in leadership and there hasn't been for years. The anger they're feeling is ridiculously unplaced.
I did not know that. I still despise the current liberal/social-democratic DSA leadership for the reasons I laid out but will note that they aren't technically Harringtonites.