Welcome again to everybody! Happy Lunar New Year. Make yourself at home. Go ahead and stand on that inconspicuous floor tile over there. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is our weekly discussion thread!
We have our own Matrix homeserver at https://genzedong.org, and a Matrix space; see this thread for more information.
Short reading list for new MLs here. To find theory (and other books), you can use z-lib, libgen, or Sci-Hub (for scientific articles). If an article is unavailable, try the Wayback Machine.
You’re welcome.
I changed my attitude to social media after reading Richard Seymour’s Twittering Machine. (FYI it could be triggering as it goes into some of the darker effects of social media.) He used to write a blog called Lenin’s Tomb. He’s insightful. I think he’s mainly on Patreon nowadays.
In TM he writes about how internet pile-ons happen so innocuously. An upvote here, a few downvotes there. Lots of people adding witty quips and one-liners. Most people aren’t trying to be bullies or trolls, but it can seem like that to the recipient because their timeline can go from empty to flooded with negativity very quickly.
With contentious issues… say person X says something liberal here… they’ll be challenged. It may be warranted. Sometimes the challenge can get quite personal and mean. Here’s the problem. If person Y steps in to point this out, it looks like there are now two sides. Not just a single wrong individual, but a battle over the sanctity of Marxism itself.
This them exacerbates things for person X, who really just needs to log off, but now they’re drawn in. I’ve participated in this myself, by accident. And that’s the thing – it’s almost always an accident unless there is, as you say, a genuine fascist troll. Thankfully they tend to be few and far between on Lemmygrad. (So much so that they become part of the lore.)
I don’t have many solutions, I’m afraid. Neither does Seymour, really. He’s not arguing to abandon social media. He offers an analysis to reveal the problems, which socialists can then try to fix. FWIW, these issues are far less prevalent on Lemmygrad than elsewhere. And these comments (and maybe threads like those in the People’s Court) are testament to our willingness to do something about such problems when they do occur.
I have four ideas that may help.
First, and this is a trick for reviewing other people’s written work, too, is to engage with and talk about the ideas and the text rather than the writer. Some people will still take things personally. Like news anchors who feel called out when someone questions a principle that is tightly wound up with their sense of self.
If we could consistently achieve what you did in the post I mentioned earlier, we might facilitate an atmosphere where everyone assumes good faith even in threads where there is a large rift. Lemmygrad already does better with this than many other places.
Second, is not to assume things about other users. This applies to general things as well as politics and I know I need to improve on this. I’ve started trying to clarify a detail or two rather than responding on the basis of an assumption. I think this can come across as being sarcastic, but I’m trialling it for a while.
Third, assuming questions are asked in good faith and are not rhetorical questions. Assuming that a question is a witty way to make a factual claim can lead very quickly to hostility.
Fourth, a Marxist solution may lie in Mao’s works. I became much more humble after reading ‘No Investigation, No Right to Speak’, for example. And it’s not a bad thing in general for comrades to learn to participate in constructive struggle sessions. Mao wrote some scathing criticisms of party members who failed to listen to the masses.
Sometimes a struggle session might reveal deep ideological differences that cause a split. But if every session does that, unity will not last long. So it’s necessary to build the capacity to have fierce disagreements and still to arrive at a unified position. This could be a disagreement over something very basic, like Marx’s conception of the commodity.
There is a way of guiding people, who might disagree with or misunderstand that conception. I realise that a party may not have time to handhold people through the basics, and will delegate education for new comrades, etc. But online, simply telling someone that Marxism means XYZ and any deviation is revisionism is unlikely to persuade them.
There still needs to be a point at which bad faith actors are banned, etc, and we need to be cautious of e.g. concern trolls. But among the good faith participants, the above ideas might help us. What do you and others think?
Couldn’t agree more with the great and well explained statement that you have made , very well said Comrade ❤️👍🏼
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I think you’re right.
IRL I used to tell people they need to do more research when they mentioned outrageous ideas to me. It backfires almost every time. Either they assume the suggestion is a rhetorical device to insult their intelligence. Or they go on to do some research and end up deeper in the rabbit hole.
Part of it is related to what you said about anti-intellectualism and liberalism. This results in an education system and a broader social environment that does not inculcate the way of asking the right questions. So for example if someone denies climate change and you tell them to do more research. They google ‘Is climate change real?’ or ‘Are climate change believers rational?’ etc. These questions are unlikely to lead to useful answers. People need to be taught how to ask questions.
Additionally, Google & Co partly builds its reputation on the ability to answer questions. We see this in the screenshot-memes, where someone has started to ask a question and the search engine suggests some ridiculous subjects. What many (perhaps most) people don’t seem to realise is that search engines don’t work like that. They’re not answering questions, they’re returning results with that phrase in the title, body, or metadata. People need to be taught how search engines work and how to use key terms to find general sources that still require interpretation and critical analysis.
I’m not saying any of this from discouraging people here from asking questions. Asking questions of other humans is very different to asking a search engine. And having a discussion about materials can be part of one’s ‘investigation’. This should be encouraged. In fact, I’d say ask questions before making claims and assumptions. A lot of the pain in online struggle sessions could be avoided by asking each other for clarification before ‘responding’ substantively.
Whether someone says something problematic or something that might require a broader re-evaluation of one’s own knowledge, yours are good questions to ask, I think:
If you or others are interested, I wrote up a short(ish) guide on investigating / doing research a couple of weeks ago: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/481195.
Unfortunately, educational institutions and broader society fail to teach these skills. They perpetuate the idea that information simply needs to be absorbed. Bourgeois pedagogy reinforces this.
Have you heard of Bloom’s Taxonomy? For those who haven’t, it’s a pyramid of six skills, ranked from ‘understanding’ and ‘description’ through ‘analysis’, ‘criticism’, ‘evaluation’, to ‘synthesis’. The system (in some countries, at least) is deliberately structured on this basis. School-leavers who achieve the top grades are to reach ‘description’ by age 16 and possibly ‘analysis’ with some ‘criticism’. It’s similar for those who achieve the top grades at age 18, but slightly less description, slightly more analysis and criticism. Only the top university students are expected to be able to do the three higher-level skills.
(For any current pupils/students reading this: take a look at your assessment marking criteria and you’ll see these skills reflected within the relevant grade-boundaries. Working with this knowledge, you may find it easier to achieve the higher grades, which require a demonstration of the right mix of skills.)
There is some deviation, but these are the skills tested in examinations, and we know that many teachers (especially in the ‘better’ schools) teach to exams. At age 16, for example, 80% of the marks might be awarded for demonstrating understanding and describing the subject matter (depending on the criteria). This means the bulk of class time may effectively be set up to avoid the trickier higher-level skills; they distract the class from what they’ll be tested on.
Politically, it costs too much to test for criticism, it’s more difficult to rank the students and schools (which ranking feeds into an educational hierarchy), and the bourgeois tend to clash with critical workers.
I’m not trying to denigrate teachers, here. This is systemic. They have a lot to answer for, sure, but they need to be organised before they can do much about systemic problems. A lot depends on educational policy and the logic of that policy may not be explicit.
I see part of the task of modern Marxists as teaching these skills as well as Marxism. Fortunately, the task is made easier because if you can get someone to read almost any Marxist text, they will be tackling more advanced material than the majority of university students, who work mainly with extracts and summaries. Part of learning to be critical is seeing other people do it and working out how they did it. Bread and butter Marxism, really.
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