I like to think of it less as “heres a bunch of stuff, everything is stuff God literally did” and a bit more like “here is a bunch of stories, some more allegorical, some based on real events, where we try to explain what human life, the world, and divinity is”
There are plenty of political battles which can and should be fought, but opposing new means of production in principle outside of the specific impacts is fundamentally reactionary
Hi comerades. Finished Capital Vol II this weekend. Gonna take a short break before the next one.
Remember, we are on the side of the working peoples true interests, and the development of the productive foces. Therefore, we as a movement have a historic advantage, even when times get tough or when nothing seems to get anywhere, because through hardship lies victory, and even still waters can be stirred. Keep up the good work comerades!
I can’t give you adviae related to mental health conditions or anything, but here are aome thoughts on anger in general.
Anger is an energetic feeling. What you need is an outlet for that anger, you need to do something. Because the source of your anger is political, it can be a great source of energy to do political work (done in a measured manner) like organizing, agitating, or reading tough-to-read theory. A healthy amount of exercise is also a great outlet and will objectively make you a more capable revolutionary because it imprives your health, energy, and mood.
Anger, like many emotions, can be a component of ruminating thoughts. You also need an outlet for those thoughts. That can be something like political writing related to an issue or other agitprop, journaling for yourself, art, or venting and dark humor with a comerade. However, if you are still stuck no matter what and feel like the thought isn’t progressing, don’t feed it by giving it undue attention.
I’ve really been getting into painting this year. I feel like it’s a great way to work through emotions. Hopefully I can find a way to use it for politics and just so share, maybe by making agitprop. I was thinking of making a zine about a “socialist version” of the city I live in with some tongue in cheek visuals and at least somewhat more serious city planning/slice of life stuff
Three reasons:
Childcare costs is very expensive now and also largely individualized
The actual way we raise children is very individualized and intensive putting a massive burden on parents
The future is very uncertain. Before, people had to worry about war and exploitation, now we have that and WMDs, climate change, fascism, and whatever other technological horrors we manage to create
Sure, I agree! It is a very human centric approach to viewing the world.
I would say that I believe that we are special because we can have a different type of relation to ourselves, to each other, to the world, and to the divine than other animals (atheisticly, this might be just imaginary, but still special that we are able to, no?). I mean isn’t it a little intriguing that humans is the only species line which has these traits? I guess I just feel like it is an awful lot of random chance if it is all random
EDIT: Or to put it in another way, isn’t it peculiar that the dialectical development of the universe has included humans, us, beings capable of understanding it? I can’t get a grasp of why it has worked out that way without approaching it from a faith perspective.
Fair point!
I might say that more strictly, it observably reduces the scope of which we know that a hypothetical outside power chooses to act upon the world in our time. Of course, if you spend all your life looking for unicorns, but never find one, it is perfectly reasonable to think they don’t exist, so I understand your point.
By equating science with metaphysics, you are elevating Occam’s Razor to an universal metaphysical qualifier to select the least presumptive explanation as the truest explanation - that is of course very useful in science, and also a very fair metaphysical standpoint to take. It’s just not “provable” in a strict sense that this “best theory” is necessarily metaphysically “true”, as the scientific method does not really attempt to define “metaphysical truth”, but rather that “this is our most useful model of the truth”. Still, it is fair to assume it is as true as it can be in our time.
I guess I’m trying to say that I think it is perfectly reasonable to not be religious. For me it is more about a personal faith relationship and faith as a “extrarational” mode of thought (ala Kieerkegard). I also find some of the conclusions one might draw from a purely atheist viewpoint a little absurd: A universe exists, possibly the only one, for no known reason and possibly for no reason at all, which we to a large part do not understand the nature of, and which happened to have the exact conditions possible to not just make life on at least one, and possibly only one, planet; and not just life, but human life, and not just human life, human life which can have a subjective experience of connection with the divine, and not just that kind of human life, but us specifically, and everyone we know and everything we do, and that then all this will pass, we will, human life will, all life will, possibly even the possibility of life and advanced structures in the universe - all for no reason at all, lost into nothingness through time. Maybe it’s just my ego, but I don’t find this a satisfactory explanation to why we exist - it seems to me absurd to think that it all just happened to randomly work out that way (sure, if it didn’t, no one would know, but the fact is that we don’t know about an infinite or large amount of other universes with different configurations where we don’t exist, so we are still faced with the problem of existing in the one provably existing universe in which we do exist). I’d rather think that love is the reason and that love even defeats death in the end, but I totally get that not everyone needs to agree.
I am a Christian and a Marxist-Leninist. I don’t think this is a big problem. My practical politics is based on diamat analysis and the study of theory, not idealism. My personal drive is a wish to help create a better world through altering the material conditions here and now, with more space for love to flourish - why does it matter if I am personally motivated by faith in God in addition to just secular love for my fellow humans?
The critique of religion, while it can wary between ML-theorists, usually either rest on a practical opposition to the clergy class (and personally I am just as eager to oppose and stop MAGA megachurch supply-side Jesus christians as I’m sure the bolsheviks were to stop the tsarist orthodox clergy) or a philosophical position (I am sure there is a lot of nuance and things one could get into here, just writing from what I’ve seen when reading. I do not intend to argue against a strawman, just to be brief). Philosophically, it either rests on pure materialism and non-dualism; which is a fair position to take, but which is inherently also an unprovable metaphysical position, and one which I personally disagree with - or on an idea that religion is used to resolve alienation from our limitations in the psyche. I rather think that faith is an innate part of what we are as humans, and even if Marxs critique of religion as a way to counteract alienation of the self, societal progress is still not going to solve the core human issues which faith deals with: interpersonal relations and issues, the meaning of life and existence, growing as human beings, and our meeting with death.
The primary thing to avoid is to let politics be influenced by idealism. Comrade, atheists and agnostics do not automatically avoid this! Racism and other xenophobia, bro science, unexamined belief, imperialism and social chauvinism, liberalism - in many countries today strands of non-religious ideology and thought are problematic just the same as the most problematic expressions of faith. The tendency to idealism is innate in humanity, the matter is to discipline the mind, to be aware of ones biases, to spend the time and effort needed for clear and examined thought, and to think collectively to transcend our individual limits. Comrade, you can do this just as well as anyone else!
Whenever I am uncertain about something regarding my political work, I try to think about Combat Liberalism by Mao, Mao’s principle of no right to speech without investigation, and the principles of unity, crit/self-crit, and democratic centralism. I find it often clears it up for me whether I should forge on ahead or change course and backtrack.
Best of luck, comerade!
I nearly always skim the numbers if they aren’t just interesting statistics to be honest, assuming that the point is clear enough without me needing to fact-check the math
Highlight with a 4 color pen in outer margins on each page. Red important, blue interesting, green for your own thoughts, black for notes which don’t fit into any of the categories. Write as short as you can notes in top and bottom margins. If I use an e-reader I just highlight instead of red and write down notes after reading chapters or finishing the book. When you’re done reading, it’s great if you try to find a way to use that knowledge - blogpost or article, video, podcast, conversations in real life, real life politics, anything to make you actually use it and remember.
In a communist society, with equal access to treatment, and with societal management of equal “improvements” and “sidegrades”, sure, why not use medical technology to improve lives with, IDK, better muscular health into old age or changing your natural hair color or whatever.
The cyberpunk artistic tradition focuses on the effects of augmentation in capitalism as a lens to explore the contradiction between human labour and fixed constant capital in capitalism (and other contradictions in capitalism) by heightening it through moving it into our bodies.
Making headway into Capital Vol 2, some 350 pages in or so now. I’ve gotten really interested in the monetary system so I’m really motivated to read economic theory :D
I also read Socialism in Power by Roland Boer. Heavy recommend for an intro to socialist governance!
Lenin walks around the world. Frontiers cannot bar him. Neither barracks nor barricades impede. Nor does barbed wire scar him.
Lenin walks around the world. Black, brown, and white receive him. Language is no barrier. The strangest tongues believe him.
Lenin walks around the world. The sun sets like a scar. Between the darkness and the dawn There rises a red star.
Tell me more about your joke reference to the Eliza chatbot.
You are welcome! If you think that people in your area will just dismiss it because of the section, you could rephrase it to be softer. Just cutting the use of “gods” in the paragraph and leaving it implicit could maybe make some people more receptive? Otherwise highlighting that you can use diamat as a method of analysis without accepting diamat fully as a worldview could maybe help?
Agree! My biggest weakness as a writer is that I write too complex sentences and paragraphs. It is a difficult balance though with pamphlets, because it needs to be readable, short, and precise and correct. This one is additionally about philosophy, which often has dense concepts and writing. But readability is definetly still an area of improvement!
Thats a tough one! I’d suggest focusing on opposites, which are very intuitive, and how things keep changing, with plenty of examples. Maybe an example about what a thing is internally determines what it can do, with a common toy or something as an example. And then explaining that this can be used to find out all sorts of stuff about the world!
I’m reading Lasurdos book on Stalin, probably a better alternative. Haven’t finished it but his aim is to give a more objective view of Stalin and the party during his time, good and bad, instead of regurgitating propaganda like western pop-history authors