Comradeship // Freechat

If you didn't go over there and argue with them you did a Liberalism. Ooh, if it's a library you could literally go get some theory from the very shelves of the library you're in and then dump them on their table along with a note saying 'read theory, loser' and leave.

I can smell the insides of their colons from across the room because of the amount of stuff they're collectively pulling from their asses.

I'm going to have to appropriate this one for the masses. It's too good not to keep in my back pocket. Also, I know it wouldn't help, but I enjoy imagining you saying all of this to them.

The "control your subjects" quote is not even that far fetched, because in order to perpetuate itself, the capitalist class must adopt its own version of dialectical materialism so that it can learn how to avoid or defeat revolutions and minimise the damage of economic crises on its end.

The problem with learning this capitalist kind of theory is that it limits its user to the portion of history before a successful revolution occurs. It tells them nothing about the culture and the society of the economy that will follow, nor about their own role in it. They will lie awake pondering the simplest question that any proletarian who has read even just a Marxist leaflet could answer, as if it were an indeterminable enigma such as the shape of the universe. Such a theory may be able to teach calm indifference when Marxism teaches horror and revulsion, but it must be silent in the face of existential dread when Marxism begins teaching hope.

It's so much easier - and feels smarter - to just come up with your own opinion on a subject. If you're a reasonably intelligent person otherwise you might even produce a consistent idea. But this consistent idea is not original. Everyone is informed by the ideology they grew up in and our specific neoliberal ideology grooms critical thought in a specific way.

It's not their fault, though. The only way they could possibly be cognizant of this is if they read political theory - oh wait.

I'm talking based on my interpretation of my own journey. Even when I started absorbing marxist talking points from youtube videos and shit I still told myself I didn't need to ready the theory. I assumed any sufficiently good idea can be summarized. So when I ran against barriers in my thinking, I just assumed Marxism was too outdated to be applied, or that they were just bad ideas.

It was years until I actually picked up Marx's works, dusted off the notes section, and spent the time actually reading it. It was only then that I realized I had no actual understanding of Marxism before. I just had buzzwords and talking points. It would have been so easy for me to manipulate those buzzwords and talking points to serve whatever worldview I pleased. Like, for example, that Marxism is about controlling subjects and not class analysis.

I probably would have even seemed really smart doing it.