/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

I'm starting this after asking in reading general because there was some interest shown. A thread for the encouragement, maintenance, and organisation of different reading groups- a regular thread will be maintained in order for reading groups to rhizomatically organise. No specific topic of reading is mandated. I would like to start by organising a group, I have a few texts I would be interested in reading but would like to get any kind of feedback because I don't want to propose we read a book and then have a buncha people be like 'nooo i dont like that book' so here are some initial suggestions for what we could read to begin with:

CURRENT BOOK: engels' origin of the family (prehistoric society)

- Baruch Spinoza's 'Ethics'
- Vladimir Lenin's 'Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism'
- Murray Bookchin's 'Post-Scarcity Anarchism'
- Felix Guattari's 'Three Ecologies'
- Alfred North Whitehead's 'Process and Reality'
- Guy Debord's 'Society of the Spectacle'
- Theodor Adorno's 'Negative Dialectics'
- Fredy Perlman's 'Against His-Story, Against Leviathan'
- Friedrich Engel's 'The Origin of the Family'

We humbly invite you all! Feel free to organise and maintain your own group here!

What was this book about again? It was my least favorite Lenin book. I know it's like the Organon to Engels' Dialectics of Nature, but every single one of Lenin's arguments was so unremarkable that they're forgettable. He's very terse and verbose. Does Lenin argue badly or is materialism a very dull philosophy and we like making shit up (see the post-1968. French Left).

Like, help a comrade out here. I fell in a post-Marxist reading hellscape due to bourgeois propaganda and need a hefty dose of sanity to get back on track.

in my country, there is a laborist political movement akin to spanish national syndicalism that appropiated the pro-workers discourse
around the 2000s, they invented the term "popular class" in contrast to the "oligarch class". im not exactly sure of its implications, maybe its a rebranding of the universal "middle class" term, or they (more likely) synthetized an alliance between workers and lumpenproles. what are the implications and consequences of this manufactured discourse?

Why give a fuck about those that burn grain while starving? Why not care about those who starve but do not burn grain?

>The economy of the Republic of Ireland is a highly developed knowledge economy, focused on services in high-tech, life sciences, financial services and agribusiness, including agrifood. Ireland is an open economy… and ranks first for high-value foreign direct investment (FDI) flows. In the global GDP per capita tables, Ireland ranks 2nd of 192 in the IMF table and 4th of 187 in the World Bank ranking.

how the fuck is IRELAND so RICH? Doesn't this prove neoliberalism works and former colonies of european powers can just neoliberal their way out of poverty?

If you told me a fucking ancap would become president I'd laugh in your face, but it seems Milei is leading the polls and might become the next Argentinian president. What does this say about the absolute state of the world?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx-Engels_Forum
>Immediately after the statue was erected, the artist expressed his discontent with the little attention it was receiving.
>Engelhardt complained in a letter written to East German leader Erich Honecker
>Honecker in response ordered East Berliners, and later East German citizens, to visit the statue and surrounding area under threat of imprisonment.
>Soon after, however, the monument to the two leaders became well-liked by the Berlin public. Its main audience consisted of locals, travelers, artists, and academics, who liked and somewhat pitied the two modest looking figures, at one point even nicknaming them ‘The Pensioners.’
> After Engelhardt again complained to Honecker about this moniker, Stasi chief Erich Mielke was instructed to investigate and punish those responsible for creating the nickname.

ayy lmao is this true?

What are Leftypol's thoughts on watermelon vendors? Recently, there has been a lot of discussion about the role of watermelon vendors in the socialist revolution. Some leftists argue that watermelon vendors play an important role in the struggle for economic justice, while others see them as a distraction from more significant issues.

On one hand, some leftists argue that watermelon vendors are an essential part of the struggle for socialism. They argue that small business owners like watermelon vendors are often exploited by larger corporations and that supporting these small businesses can be an effective way to fight back against the capitalist system. Additionally, some see watermelon vendors as an opportunity to build solidarity within working-class communities and to challenge the dominant economic order.

On the other hand, some leftists are critical of the emphasis on watermelon vendors. They argue that small business owners are not necessarily allies in the fight for socialism, as they often rely on exploiting their own workers to make a profit. Additionally, they argue that the focus on individual actions like buying from watermelon vendors detracts from the need for systemic change and revolutionary action. Instead, they argue for a more collective approach to building solidarity and fighting against capitalism.

Overall, the debate about watermelon vendors highlights the tension between individual action and collective struggle in the fight for socialism. While some leftists see supporting small businesses as a way to challenge the capitalist system, others see it as a distraction from the need for revolutionary change. Understanding the nuances of this debate can help us think more critically about how we can build a more just and equitable society.(irrelevant topic, /siberia/ thread)

You will eat ze mucus
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFyd-kC6IUw

We will genetically modify all our plantz to have mucus producing penises auto-fertilizing ze soil and you will eat ze mucus plants. You want eat ze pizza? Ze pizza came from flour from jizz producing wheat. You want eat ze pickle? The pickle is mucus cucumber. All ze plants will be mucus plantz and you will eat ze plantz and you will like it.

A lot of you seem to be under the belief that you can have marxist theory without ontological grounding. But to me it seems the positive sciences that say things about the 'world' rely on a totally certain idea of what 'world' means. So why don't we all have a calm discussion about ontology and attempt to come to an understanding of why there are so many of you (usually tankies) for whomst philosophy and ontology appears 'meaningless'? For me it seems to be the most important thing that we properly understand the dependency and aims of sciences (which simply explicate categories about our "external" reality) on a proper approach towards the world. In a sense, I think Marxists also unconsciously on some level agree with this, because you recognise that the bourgeois sciences mainly operate in service of capital, and this is unwanted. But on the other hand you seem to shoot yourselves on the foot by explicitly denying the validity of ontology in favour of vapid essentialism. From where does this 'materialism' come? Even in naive realist ontologies we see that the brain mediates reality, but there is no account for this in the materialist ontology.

I don't see much substance from Marx by way of arguing for materialism either. Deleuze follows kind of a more enlightened transcendental empiricism which I find far more respectable but that required torturous meditation beginning from a throwing away of beings in favour of the search for a proper ontology. But *you* personally, the person who is reading this, how do you understand ontology, if all you've spent all your life on is the pursuit of small-B beings, never evaluating the existential nature of 'world', which rather than being something we are merely placed in, is constitutive of our being?