Word around the office is you’ve got a little guy

Last time I tried this with chatgpt it was able to give well-worded summaries that were basically what reddit thought the book was about. So like, if you’re only ever gonna get a superficial understanding of something I suppose an ai simplification is as good as anything.

Kinda fun to have it write a debate between Marx and deleuze lol

That’s how libs feel about capitalism

First as a tragedy, then as a tragedy, then as a tragedy, then as a…

This reeks of volcel psyop

The tweet is saying the same thing you are with a different framing.

From most people’s perspectives, things are not working as intended. A working class person might be inclined to say things are upside down or they live in a backwards world (I’ve heard this a lot).

A hundred people lose their jobs while their CEO gets a bonus, ten thousand people lose their homes while the banks get bailed out, ten million people starve while the world produces an overabundance of food. No normal empathetic person would call this rational.

The tweet effectively explains that while the world is irrational from any reasonable perspective, it’s not chaotic or unorganized, it’s this way for a reason, and that reason is to protect the institution of private property. This logic, this subjective valuation of property above all else, makes sense only from the perspective of the bourgeoisie, a minute fraction of people.

The state suppressing class war is one of many ways bourgeois subjectivity gets reproduced and enforced at the expense of working class subjectivity (a subjectivity so broad compared to the statistically miniscule bourgeoisie that it arguably verges on objective truth).

Yeah tbh. After all he did and at his age, let him rest.

Plus he could still be an advisor to oversee a smoother transition period.

Yeah that’s fair, my knowledge post WWII gets really fuzzy so I can’t confidently critique what followed.

It’s easy to claim things should have been done differently, in retrospect after the fall of the USSR. But it’s not very useful without careful examination.

Also given his age it seems like there should have been a better succession plan

Damn I never realized he lived to be 74.

Still died too soon but that’s a long life for his time/place/experiences.

Okilly Dokilly and Babymetal maybe?

Is that the instance filtering that out? Thats removed lol

What are you trying to say?

Lmao

I’ve heard it with varying degrees of the R sound. There’s a common shorthand “bougie” (BOO-zhee) that people often hear before learning the original term, so they’ll maintain the pronunciation into BOO-zhwa.

Sometimes the R is slightly swallowed so it sounds more like BOH-zhwa, maybe very light throat vocalization. Or people skip over it and it’s buh-ZHWA. Some commit fully for BOR-zhwa.

Universally seems to maintain (my non-native understanding of) the French “oi” and silent S.

I have yet to hear anyone pronounce it correctly: bor-gee-oice.

It’s late and I’m about to head to bed, but to quickly reply: this is ultimately just a categorical discussion, so if you feel ltv is a necessary quality to the essence of Marxism that’s fine, I just think the label can be used in plenty of ltv-agnostic ways. To me the useful essence of a label like that is to describe an intensity of associations that can be directed or used to direct energy effectively, rather than a strict categorical structure. There’s simply no context where I’ll dismiss or disassociate from a person or idea that doesn’t claim one facet of Marxism, in theory or in practise, due to a categorical claim.

You bring up some good points which I’ll engage with later if I remember.

Eh ltv isn’t really Marx’s and if it were it would be one of his many significant contributions to various fields. It’d still be reasonable to call yourself a Marxist if you ascribe to other parts of his framework, especially in specific academic contexts. And in revolutionary contexts I doubt most non-academic revolutionaries fully understand the mechanisms laid out in Capital, so it seems inconsequential really. Class analysis doesn’t inherently require ltv either.

I do think ltv makes more sense than modern models, but Marx was basically using bourgeois theory to critique itself, and arguably the same can be done using the more abstract modern models.

Lmao

Tankie is an empty signifier

That is to say, it’s a label that can be used to describe an array of different and conflicting ideas, values, and identities. Because of this it serves as an obfuscatory device rather than a communicative one. The sub-logic becomes tankie = bad, so if someone I don’t like = tankie, then person I don’t like = bad.

Almost none of us were alive when Khrushchev rolled tanks into Hungary. Most MLs aren’t particularly fond of Khrushchev.

It’s made a resurgence in this new, weird context because most of the terms used during the previous red scares lost their power through similar misuse. It’s become unfashionable to hate on leftism in progressive spaces, doing so using old terminology makes you sound like a fox news conservative. But you can do the same thing by calling it this instead.

The other replies in this thread are more specific to ultras, but more generally a lot of the problems with the western/online left stem from reading theory without reading history (and/or direct experience fighting against the mechanisms of capitalism). We might identify as materialists, but it’s an idealist materialism, because it’s purely identity, existing only in our heads or online.

It’s hard to overcome without access to effective orgs, though. Individual action is largely ineffectual and thus usually idealist. Systemic problems have to be engaged with collectively, so without organization the “correct” strategies are entirely hypothetical.

But more and more people are realizing this, I think. Labor organizing is becoming popular again and political orgs are growing. The red-state smallish city I just moved from started a DSA chapter this year and now has 20-30 members (a bunch of whom are MLs). Bevins’ recent book seems to be catching on among the western left.

Things are still pretty bleak, but it’s a “bad times breed opportunity” kind of bleak rather than a consuming hopelessness.

Worth keeping in mind that these ideologies each have multiple self-definitions (the ideal with which they describe themselves) as well as a set of definitions from the perspective of each other ideology. Tack on semantic drift (words changing meaning over time, or growing different meanings in different contexts) and it can start to feel hopelessly complicated. And they each offer different ways of understanding the world and history, so on top of all the aforementioned complexity, they also interpret historical events and real-world applications of each ideology differently. So learning about them is a process where your understanding slowly moves from abstract to concrete by getting rough definitions then tempering them with seemingly contradictory definitions, over time building a network of understanding that includes the contexts of each perspective.

My perspective is largely coming from a communist ideology fyi. But here’s a quick rundown.

Capitalism is a system in which a class of owners leverage their ownership of productive assets to engage in non-equal exchange with the un-owning classes, most notably the exchange of labor value for a fraction of the products of said labor value. It necessitates a large government to enforce these hierarchies of ownership and exclusion. (Classical) liberalism is the ideology of capitalism. Conservatism is generally a subset of liberalism. It’s the culturally dominant ideology now, so most of what you see and read will come from this perspective, explicitly or not.

Communism is a theoretical system in which class tensions have resolved themselves. No one knows what it’ll look like, it’s explicitly a theoretical ideal. Communism as an ideology is advocating for the interests of the working class against the owning class. A country that calls itself communist would probably be doing so in reference to the ideology, rather than claiming it has achieved communism.

Socialism as an ideology can be synonymous with communism, although there are subsets of liberalism that have taken on the word to mean capitalism with welfare and regulations. Socialism as a system is the interim stage between capitalism and communism, the point where workers have seized control of the state and means of production and now have a strong influence over how class tensions develop.