This whole system is purely designed to keep a few people in power and it is fucking insane. We wouldn’t even have the internet if a governmental institution hadn’t created it, because the free market deemed it unprofitable. How can we as a society achieve progress like that?
I am constantly surrounded by people that defend free market capitalism without questioning it nor having independent thoughts about it, even though they are not stupid. I feel constantly alienated because I have to discuss the most ridiculous thing with me peers when I try to show them the massive amount contradictions of this system, and they just reply that it does not work. Without having a single grasp of how politics work. I don’t mean to say that the general population is stupid, but it feels like they are constantly influenced by pro-capitalist information sources. I don’t know, I regularly question my beliefs and apply constructive criticism to my thoughts, but I always come to the same conclusion. Am I getting insane, or am I just to alienated?
yeah, I used to find it weird how socialists would always blame capitalism for issues in society (crime, healthcare, mental issues, prisons, etc), but as I learned more about socialism, I realized that capitalism is unironically the cause of all that shit. I’m still learning more about socialism. I’ve never read theory like a nerd :)
Be a nerd and read theory! It helps give pattern and language to our shared struggles and is an invaluable tool for recognizing and correcting our own internalized liberalism.
I deffo see how it could be more valuable, especially when trying to explain certain concepts to others. I’m not totally deprived of theory. I’ve started listening to The Deprogram and have watched a couple of Hakim’s videos (I’ll slowly go through all of them). My main intro to socialism/communism was HasanAbi on Twitch and Bernie Sanders.
Nice! You can go at yout own pace, of course, and glad to see the lib-to-left pipeline is chugging along!
If you’re interested in recommendations, there are 3 that I recommend to folks, and in no particular order (really, whatever sounds best to you):
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Blackshirts and Reds by Michael Parenti. It does an efficient and readable deconstruction of the opposing forces of socialists and reactionaries, with a particular emphasis on a (more accurate) rundown of socialism in the 20th century. I end uo recommendinf this book to the largest number of people regardless of how left they are.
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State and Revolution by Lenin. While it is very much embedded in its time, it is still quite relevant and also surprisingly readable. Most folks are surprised to learn that Lenin talked about so many things still relevant (or at least with corrolaries) today. It’s also very useful for understanding where a lot of people around here are coming from, and can be particularly handy for understanding Trotskyists, which you will likely run into in any Western irl organizing context.
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Capital Volumes 1-3, Karl Marx (hey that’s me). This is… not incredibly approachable, but can be tackled by anyone given a little dedication. It is also a product of its time, an earlier stage of capitalism when it was still stamping out outright feudalism (Lenin was also in that context in Tsarist Russia), but it is a work that, if you really get on top of it, will give you something like superpowers when it comes to recogning features of capitalism and reaching reasonable conclusions about it - and what to do about it. It is also invaluable for understanding what Marxists are talking about. Also, a little secret: most self-proclaimed Marxists have never read these books and make mistakes about them in the regular. And even if they read Capital, they usually stop after Volume 1. Even big names, like David Harvey, tend to reveal substantial misunderstandinfs of the work. Unfortunately the best thing to do is still to slog through the original works. It does pay off, though, I promise. As a bonus, you can dunk on every lib that ever criticizes Marx, as they are wrong 99% of the time and you’ll have receipts.
Last I heard capital recommended the person said chapters 1-4.
Chapters or volumes? If chapters, that’s an odd place to stop imo. If volumes… well I guess they like Kautsky lol
Chapters, they said that’s where the essential stuff is if your not going to read the whole thing.
In that case I wouldn’t recommend Capital at all. You’d be suffering through a challenging work just to pick up 1/10th of it and are almost guaranteed to think Marx overlooked a lot of things. Instead, some kind of summary will be better. Maybe the Heinrich introduction followed by reading Michael Roberts to counter some of Heinrich’s anti-ML, anti-TRPF ideas.
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While the other comrades suggestions are on point, I think it’s also important to understand reading and learning theory as more than an individual burden. It has been historically and is in many places still the prime opportunity for organization. If you can at all join a reading group or organize one yourself, it’s by far the best thing you can do for your development as a communist and revolutionary. It’s more fun, better for learning anyway and will naturally bring up discussions around applying that theory into praxis.
Subscribe to The Red Menace podcast and listen in chronological order. The podcast is 100% dedicated to the summarizing, analysis, critique, and practical application of major works of theory. They even started analyzing some right wing texts as a way of understanding the opponent and maintaining clarity on Marxist position.
Thanks for this suggestion. I’ve already started listening to the first episode while running some errands. This is perfect for me :)
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I felt the exact same way. The thing is, I sometimes question if scientific socialism really provides the correct (right) answers for the questions as to why things are how they are. I am a socialist because I think Marx, Engels and all the people after them were really good in analyzing the underlying conditions, contradictions in capitalism and solutions for those problems, but I also remain skeptical to the way they want to solve things. I don’t think there is an universal way how to make way for change, as any situation requires different methods. All roads lead to Rome one way or another, we just have to stay on the road and don’t turn back. But then again, isn’t this basically the essence of dialectical and historical materialism? Anti-Dogmatism and Self-Criticism? I saw many self proclaimed communists that think Mao’s way is the only right way and any change to it would be reactionary, but Mao himself basically wrote / said that this type of behaviour is not counter-productive, so I don’t understand where these people are coming from.
There is horror in understanding the way capitalism functions to create and reinforce so much deprivation and violence, no doubt.
Having comrades helps, though! And there is some value in revolutionary optimism and seeing where revolution worked, how the struggle evolved, and what we can build together. It took nearly a millenium for capitalism to dominate production, and yet look at how many victories have been won in such short time. Life expectancy in China alone is incredible and was wrought from, at minimum, a coherent anti-imperialist project that (partially) shields the people there from the cold sociopathy of global capital.
I also want to validate the frustrations you’ve shared about hegemonic capitalist psychology, of the power of propaganda so pervasive that it’s simply accepted as fact and common knowledge that is rarely investigated, but is still raised in contradiction to better-informed views. I don’t know if it makes you feel better, but this is something commies have recognized, highlighted, and battled against since at least Marx, and in the imperial core it’s certainly gotten worst as we have reached much more advanced stages of capitalism. On the other hand, revolutions still succeeded, revolutions that succeed occurred in countries where there was substantial liberal resistance and these same tired (and usually implicitly racist) capitalist arguments were everywhere, and we will accomplish the same through prolonged struggle, just as they did. Not that it will be easy or fast - just that the system itself breeds its own primary contradiction (a self-liberating working class) that can only be resolved resolved through revolution or fascism, and fascism will increasingly run out of frontiers to exploit.
Solidarity, comrade.
Thank you, that was very uplifting. But what exactly do you mean with the last sentence? Do you seriously think that fascism is a solution for ending this, just because it could accelerate the change to communism? Did I get that right? It sounds like a very dangerous (and to me, disgusting, no offense) theory. Sorry if I am being rude, please explain if I misunderstood you, but there is nothing more in this world I hate more than fascists.
Capitalism is full of contradictions that, among other things, lead to nascent class consciousness and powerful action by the proletariat. I say nascent because it really does take organising and explanations to get them organized - without socialists and so on teaching, it doesn’t necessarily go in the direction of revolution. Marx was aware of reaction and more subtle social relations getting in the way of revolutionary activity, but could not fully foresee the forces of fascism under more developed capitalist, and particularly imperialist, conditions. So we, as socialists, sometimes hear ideas of the inevitability of revolution, but this needs to be tempered by an understanding of the strengths of the enemy.
Namely, fascism can steer nascent class conciousness and action, which liberals simplistically refer to as populism, away from socialist understanding and revolution. Rather than beginning a process of resolving contradictions through proletarian control, fascism resolves the contradictions through destruction: of humanity and capital. Capitalist crises, fundamentally driven by crisis in profit, has that final escape hatch of just killing a ton of people and infrastructure so that there must then be repopulation and rebuilding, like a reset button.
This is a horrible realization that can get in the way of revolutionary optimism, but we can move past it through the recognition that fascism has survived primarily through colonial and neocolonial mechanisms, exploiting psychologies, economic mechanisms, and military tendencies that will wane over time due even just to simple demographic shifts, but most importantly, through a multipolar world order. This is why China and alliances like BRICS are so important: when revolution does come, the oppositional forces, i.e. fascists, will be inherently undermined.
Fascists are fundamental opponents of humanity, the left, and revolution, and nothing done to them is wrong.
