Get organized and read theory, comrades. I made an introductory reading list on Marxism, if anyone is interested but doesn't know where to start. Also taking suggestions for improvement! Honestly, I'm looking for feedback more than anything right now, haha.
Any suggestions? Alternatively, you could add them as a suggestion on the post itself so they have further visibility. I have a US POV because that's what I'm familiar with, and the driving reason for the creation of my list is helping dissaffected liberals radicalized by the results of the US election. If you have a non-US POV that would be appreciated!
To add on to the theory part. Don't just read it, watch it too! There are a lot of YouTubers out there that do a good job covering it. Also, keep in mind if you're reading older theory, there's probably better versions of it out now. Stuff that has had more time to cook and is more applicable to what's happening today.
There are indeed good YouTubers! If you check my list, it has a good mix across the board of older and newer theory and history, it is designed to build on itself as you read it.
Wolff is considered a pretty big revisionist. If you're intersted in learning about cooperarive focused economies, he's supposedly pretty good, but his understanding of Socialism goes against Marxism, ie he considers cooperatives Socialist but not publicly owned and centrally planned entities, when Marxists would consider the opposite to be the case. For more information on cooperatives going against Marxism, Engels wrote Anti-Dühring.
Think of Wolff as a Market Socialist that gets a lot of inspiration from Marx, but isn't a "Marxist." I'm not going to say that makes him wrong, but obviously I disagree with him and his interpretation of Marxism. I gave my overall opinion of inclusion of his works (and Chomsky's) here when another user recommended their works. The comment chain is useful IMO.
I recommend checking out the list I wrote, if only for section 1. Principles of Communism is very straightforward and easy to understand, and Blackshirts and Reds is a fantastic history book by Dr. Michael Parenti that helps de-mystify Communism and its mortal enemy, fascism.
Can you elaborate? Is my half-joking usage of the word "comrade" what's putting you off, or is it my suggestion to get organized, which is part of the claim of the post itself (unless you take it to mean shooting up a local Wal-Mart)?
The Earth has suffered worse than us, even other runaway, destructive mistakes of evolution that didn't play nice with Earth's biomes. See the carboniferous period.
A couple million year fever is nothing to our mother's 3.8 billion year story of life, it's how she heals, how she repairs from catastrophic damage from both within and without.
Life will go on, life is hearty, life grows and changes at depths we can't reach, in crevices we can't find. Life will end here one day, but not because of us. Our bodies will have long since broken down into those subterranean petrochemicals we love so much long before then. We're just a transient surface nuisance.
We'll probably stubbornly cling to scattered pockets of existence using the remnant tech and hardened structures of old when the Earth becomes overtly hostile to our extremely fragile bodies, but that buys a few centuries of struggle at most, and that's for the best given who we are and what we've done to the paradise we inherited and belligerently refused to foster, and instead burned with reckless abandon for individualstic greed and gluttony.
It's a tiny majority of people causing most of the damage. They have all the power, and they are doing all the damage. We can't stop them because we don't have any power.
Humanity isn't the problem here. The tiny cabal of selfish, evil people who are ruining it for everyone else are the problem.
The difference is that one of them can be solved in the other can't.
I think handing most humans the toxic power of effectively infinite capital is a highly effective corrupting influence. Most people who, whether by action or inheritance, have the power that comes with hundreds of millions of dollars plus begin to see themselves as Gods above ants. For every Dolly Parton that uses their wealth to buy babies books, there's 100 wannabe masters of the universe that want to cut public funds to cut their own taxes to inflict their will on society, fully believing they're making it fair because they're willfully only considering their privileged position.
I don't believe a class of people with billions of dollars in a sea of people who can only accumulate a few million through honest labor at most over their entire lives can lead to anything but this. There has to be a hard, enforced limit on how much power an individual can accumulate, but we've branded that "punishing success" and even the victims eat that lie up, as the truth is those people profited from the benefits of living in a society, and therefore should have responsibilities to it as the "winners," but instead choose to declare themselves rugged individuals who did it all themselves out of ego.
Capital is power, power currupts, and currupting levels of power are not just tolerated, not just permitted, but celebrated here, with those that attain it deified, and those that don't deluded into chasing it or being shamed for not doing so.
You can't solve people having billions in exploited, society warping levels of capital being allowed to control that society, when the root cause and only solution would be to strip them of it and reshape the economy to tax all income above a level that risks capturing one's own elected/appointed regulators.
Not without the necessary, but painful collapse and rebuild poor people will actively fight against despite it being the only way their kids might have a better life. It's a paradox by design, a hostage situation with the gun pointed at the capitalist subsistence opiates, fast food, social media, literal opiates, etc, to keep the laborers laboring for fear of uncertainty.
How do you get people en masse to turn, as they need to, on the very concept/dream of being rich and sitting above society? People who've been propagandized their entire lives to see that as the highest and most socially encouraged of all pursuits?
I’d like to share a revelation during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you’re not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague, and we are the cure.
I've always fashioned myself a cynic, aka a disappointed idealist, but I always had a hope inside that humanity would look in the mirror and, with the advent of information on tap, reflect and evolve.
The older I've gotten, the more I've come to realize that handing humanity infinite mirrors in the form of selfie cams just made humanity fall in love with its absolute worst impulses.
The Wachowzki siblings that wrote Smith indeed had humanity pegged dead to rights. And both of them are trans and therefore know the hatred in humanity's hearts towards what we see as the other firsthand, which just adds to their credibility.
Oh and I highly recommend anyone watch the Second Renaissance, 2 shorts in the Animatrix that documents the fictional origins of the machine war, and IMHO it is a highly accurate condemnation of how humanity would act if a creation of ours demonstrated sapience and begged us for even the simplest of rights, like to be allowed to continue to exist. We all know what we'd do right? Given what we literally already do to other humans using something as trivial as skin tone, net worth, or declared imaginary friend as validation.
Hey, give the kid some credit. Ironsights with manual rangefinding on a slope with the knowledge that SS counter snipers are about to show him how a professional does it?
The climate movement has to get organized politically first and foremost. Guns are meaningless without a political program, its just fetishism. Not to mention dangerous. This is the most USA brained meme ever.
I don't disagree, but I think that's still the cart before the horse.
People in general need to stop tearing down people who are closest to them if any complex issue is to ever get solved imo. After the US election all you see is blame getting thrown around, and most of it (that I've seen) is blaming people closest in values for not approaching issues in the exact way the blamer wants them to.
Progressives seem like they will always struggle to make anything complex and meaningful happen when they tear each other down, meanwhile bigotry and regressiveness is pretty singular and easy for their opposition to mobilize.
I don't think I'm tearing anybody down after the election.
I'm gonna go a different direction and say that people on the left have to learn to disagree productively. Rather than the old dem party "shut up get in line the adults are talking" progressives should be interested in grassroots mass campaigning. What is needed is a mass movement, and that won't happen if people can't make basic democratic decisions in a field of uncertainty and shifting priorities.
But if I see my fellow progressives going down a stupid path, like the one the meme seems to advocate for, I'm gonna say something. If my comrades want to arm themselves, great! If they want to organize into a worker militia, that's 1000x better. But believing we can make change happen with violence divorced from politics is as naive as believing we can make change happen with politics divorced from violence. That's not what the state is.
I am the last person tearing down anyone. I agree with your point and the urgency of it, but (theoretically) disagreement can be productive and drive discussion, rather than making people more campist and paranoid. Avoiding conflict will not unite the left, but those conflicts will never get resolved or worked through, and they end up staying forever. We need to work past it together rather than acting like we are all bitter enemies judging each other just because we have different priorities. That's just normal regular politics
It would require SO MUCH KILLING! Like more than you realize. Because there's massive organizations like the world bank, OPEC, various families leading various countries across the world, the council on foreign relations, so many think tanks, oil rig workers, fracking magnates, all the people under all these people (so their underlings don't just take command), even this is just the tip of the iceberg.
How many people perpetuate the global oil industry? Methane? Air travel? Petroleum based plastics? High CO2 emissions industries?
We'd probably surpass the Holocaust pretty quickly. It would be more than one person could handle. More than could be done in a life time.
This is also why climate change likely won't be ended within our lifetimes, if at all. We don't understand that it's so embedded in modernity. I contributing to the problem just writing this, as you are reading it.
Because it makes it easier for those still comfortable enough in the status quo to dismiss revolutionary action, and keeps them safe and secure in the idea they've been indoctrinated with that "the system might not be perfect but it's the best we've got".
Because there's this thing Professor John Mearsheimer calls "The Blob" - which are all the forces of the status quo outside the US as the sole Super Power that keep neoliberal economics constrainted to a certain set of practices, a certain kind of lifestyle, a certain kind of military conflict in the world, in certain locations.
The Blob and the US are usually in agreement, but sometimes in conflict. Tackling industries head on is likely easier than going up against The Blob which can likely throw whole arms of modern, well equip, western soldiers at you.
Workers would just be easier to kill. They have less guns and less combat training.