/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

>>2344859
I'm pretty sure one must struggle regardless. I mean Albert Camus leaned syndicalist IIRC but I don't think absurdism really contradicts communism. Same thing with existentialism and nihilism. Personally, I think of myself as an active nihilist. For me, it is not enough that the world is meaningless but that I must actively participate in the unmaking of the world. I think that the only way to abolish myself is to abolish the material conditions which gave rise to me. For that reason, I reject suicide because I do not think suicide is an active enough form of self-annihilation.

I need to read Huey Newton. He has some ideas on revolutionary suicide IIRC which sounded interesting to me.

>How would you respond to the Absurdist critique that life was absurd and will be absurd before and after capitalism?

God gives his funniest battles to his silliest clowns.

All philosophy beginning with Nietzsche and after is just pointless faffing about to forestall the ultimate conclusion of western philosophy: "enough knowin, start rowin"
Towards communism, that is

Also camus was an imperialist who was against algerian liberation

>>2344859
Existence is weird, and we live in and as part of a literal cosmic explosion.

Absurdist here; we must imagine the communist to be happy.

>>2344859
absurdism is a retared ideology that provides no feasible justification for not just killing oneself other than childish
>OOooOO YOu JuST GonNNA LeT lIFE wNiNnN?!!?
yes, if you clearly lay out that its shit and nothing means anything. note how every absurdist ive ever met comes from yankee land and usually knows little about other philosophies.
camus is a poor mans nietzsche

>>2357104
Agreed. Even if life has no objective meaning, it wouldn’t matter if the proletariat had the freedom to fully develop and sustain themselves. Absurdists simply assume that freedom isn’t enough to fulfill a person, which implies a projection of their own pessimism and failures.

It doesn’t matter because Absurdism and Socialism are concerned with completely different things.

>>2357104
>justification for not just killing oneself other than childish
i think you got it backwards, you need to provide justification for killing yourself.

There is no contradiction between striving for a better life, while thinking life is somewhat absurd and has no inherent meaning.
I mean, this thread is absurd because it creates a false opposition between two things, yet I still reply to it. Do you understand?

>life was absurd and will be absurd before and after capitalism?
Life was always contingent on precarious material conditions…but the satanic nuclear bomb has rendered all human culture pointless:

https://timezeropod.substack.com/p/01-put-on-the-whole-armor-of-god
<It is not simply the threat of radiation exposure from the nuclear industry that hangs over every living thing on the planet today. We also each navigate—or avoid, subconsciously or intentionally—a deeply personal psychological relationship with the ever-present reality that, at any moment, we are but minutes from potential nuclear annihilation.
<Example: an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) fired from Russia or North Korea would hit the city of Los Angeles in about 30 minutes. A submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) could strike in seven to 12 minutes. There are likely at least five Russian nuclear submarines currently active in the oceans
<We, the United States, continuously operate about a dozen Ohio-class submarines across the globe, each armed with up to 20 Trident II missiles. These missiles carry four nuclear warheads apiece. Each warhead delivers 475 kilotons—a figure 3,000% more powerful than the bomb we exploded over Hiroshima. So, right now, US submarines are sitting under the ocean with, potentially, nearly 1,000 nuclear warheads, primed for immediate deployment.

<Anthropologist Joseph Masco has written extensively about the psychological paradoxes of living in a nuclearized world. Building off of Freud’s concept of the uncanny—which identified not a feeling of unfamiliarity, per se, but rather, quite specifically, a disconcerting feeling of unhomeliness—Masco introduced the concept of the “nuclear uncanny” in his 2006 book The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War New Mexico.
>"One aspect of nuclearity has to do with the idea of a potential nuclear war that could always have already started, because the US, since the early 1960s, has lived within a 15-minute launch window for full out nuclear war. If you think about that just for a second, it would mean, at any given moment of the day, it might have already started and you just don't know it yet.”
>"The other one has to do with radiation itself, and the fact that so many of the materials involved in producing nuclear weapons—also questions around nuclear power plants and nuclear waste—have to do with things that are invisible, but that are a source of harm. It became very clear to me that one of the things that was most disturbing about living around a nuclear site is the fact that one can’t know what the level of danger is at any given moment. And so, the nuclear uncanny, as a concept, is trying to explain that by saying that one of the effects of nuclear processes—nuclear technologies, nuclear waste, nuclear fallout—is that one can’t trust one’s own senses anymore."

<Through the arc of Time Zero Podcast, we’ll hear from artists who use speculative fiction and other strategies to propose exciting and radical, post-nuclear futures. And we’ll talk with the people on the ground—regular people—who are working to slay this completely unnecessary monster.
<The first step is confronting the reality that the Atomic Era never ended, and that it’s everywhere, all the time. As of today, we’ve already taken that step.
<The people in charge of America’s nuclear weapons and atomic energy are betting that you and I will indeed be overwhelmed by the hyperobject of the nuclear. They want us to be so afraid of Russia, North Korea, and China that we don’t question the rebuilding of the entire US nuclear arsenal, which is going to cost $1.7 trillion over the next 30 years21, right out of our paychecks.

Why so serious? 🤡

Absurdism taught me that you should be ok with being a murdering white settler in a colonized country because it's 'absurd'.

leave it to online commies to debate about ambiguous pseudo-philosophical questions that answer literally nothing instead of discussing actual tangible praxis and/or theory

>>2360711
That's a terrible misreading of The Stranger, his worse book in my opinion. Camus never implied it was okay to kill a random Arab because of the Sun. It's about people going through motions without thinking much (the narrator of The Stranger is objectively a stupid person with barely any inner thoughts) then doing an act that redefine their life on a whim which in this case results in a death sentence.
Read The Fall, it's Camus' masterpiece.
>>2360722
Online Marxists have no praxis, it's all wank and talk, if you want praxis read Crimethinc. and join your local anarchist/Food Not Bombs community

>how would you respond to x philosophical critique of communism
lol its fucking philosophy, not science

>>2360873
its yet another phil undergrad pretending literally everything is philosophy

>>2360874
I never studied philosophy in university, but where do you think the scientific method comes from, dumbass? From fucking aliens?

>>2344859
Absurdism is devoid of any material analysis or critique and makes it point with a blanket statement followed by tugging at your inner torment. I don't usually call shit reddit but it embodies reddit with its obsession with pointless ideologies.

Truthfully, I haven't engaged with it much but when people who enjoy absurdist philosophy explain it to me it's usually something like finding comfort in the conscious, irrational choice to keep living. This, besides being empty self-help garbage, doesn't really impede anything in Marxism or the (good) tendencies in Anarchism.

>>2344859
The absurdist claim is more so a defense of existentialist meaning of life. Existentialism arose from modernity, and the reason it rose from modernity is because before modernity there was a machine set in place by the ruling class of society called "God" and "The Church."

any questions about existence, or about purpose in life could be answered by turning to god or the holy bible for answers
>why do I exist?
<you exist because God gave you life etc…

once the burgers started the revolution against the old fuedalist lords, one of the first things that the burgers did was take a page from many of the enlighentment thinkers and start to move away from the idea that God is the ultimate decider of things; and instead move towards a more humanist perspective.
after all god decided who was a king or a lord or serf, under this new democracy; every (theoretically) is meant to start from 0.
<fast forward to the end of the 19th century
it turns out that structurally, capitalist liberal democracy did indeed not have lords and serfs, but instead we find that the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, sort of feel similar to that of Lords and peasants etc… except now we also did away with one more thing; The system that was held in place to distract us from existential meaning had been abolished, and in it's place is only the social relations left by capitalism - which isn't good; the social relations under capitalism are inherently alienating, not just from an economic standpoint, but from a social standpoint
>I need to work a 9 to 5 job to survive
>I need to make sure my children are able to survive in this capitalist society
>I cannot truly live my life how I want to, because my life is mediated by capital

<WW1 and 2 happens
THIS is where absurdism is more so put into place, it's really the acceptance that no matter what happens, we are always going to suffer an undue and cruel fate, not because we've managed to set up a system that thrives on such a thing, but because that's how "life" is

>How would you respond to the Absurdist critique that life was absurd and will be absurd before and after capitalism?
the response is that life under capitalism is only absurd because it's a system that seems to have grown naturally under history(and it has) but is unnaturally kept allive by the bourgeoisie, that's what's so absurd about it. Other systems of governance HAVE existed, and absurdism seems to handwave this aspect, there were societies that WERE utopian, or times in which past societies actually seemed better in regards to today's capitalism. Once capitalism is over, life will still remain absurd, but you can at least rest easy knowing that the absurdity of life did or didn't come from a system that has been put in place intentionally.

What exactly about the communist mode of production will alleviate the absurd?
again the biggest alleviation is knowing that capitalism was or wasn't the cause of absurdism. think of this symptomatically - if you went to the doctor and you told him that you felt miserable (when you really just had a cold that was making you miserable) and the doctor told you "well sometimes life will feel miserable." - you didn't really try to allievate the symptoms of said miserableness, you just accepted the fact that some days are just miserable - in this regard, the communist mode of production can at least tell us if life is truly absurd left to it's own devices or that capitalism is the one that's actually making everything seem a bit more absurd than it really is - the thing is we cannot truly say because we've never truly BEEN free.

>>2344859
they may be right right, but i would rather life be absurd and comfortable and with healthcare rather than with unnecessary cruelty and suffering. we can figure out 'the meaning of life' after we defeat capitalism and fascism and imperialism.

what's there to critique? people will experience existential dread even in gommunism