/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

I would definitely not take the "online left" as representative. It really sucks. If you can meet comrades on the ground, the odds of having an actually useful conversation is better.

>left
It's kind of a nothing word. Here, it basically means socialists, communists and anarchists. That means progressive liberals don't count, because they're still pro-capitalist.

>what are some leftist redpills?
having a job
Damn, the silly mods removed this site's reading list from the top. For easy introductory reading, I recommend:
The Principles of Communism (1847)
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/prin-com.htm
Basically a Q&A-style summary of Marxism. Even though it was written about a hundred and eighty years ago, most of it is still relevant today.
How Marxism Works (1979)
https://www.marxists.org/archive/harman/1979/marxism/index.html
A great introduction with some more depth, more modern and easier to read than something like the Communist Manifesto.

If you mean more general redpills, well, learning that the richer societies (like the US) overproduce so much that there really is no excuse for people to be starving, houseless, have unclean water, lacking cheap-to-produce medicine, these are all artificially scarce because our society is set up so that our work is done so that businesses can make profit, rather than doing work for the sake of improving our society. We now have the technology to fix so many of our problems, but our political economy instead ends up just making billionaires richer and the working class poorer.

The biggest redpill is that you are paying rent to your employer to be allowed to work for him.

>and do not feel obliged to dumb things down
Sorry, I missed that line from tiredness.

I'll focus on Marxism, the dominant strain of anticapitalist thought, although there are many others. Many ideologies around, like liberalism (that includes progressive liberals [Americans call this 'liberalism'], classical liberals [Americans call this 'libertarianism'] and conservative liberals [Americans call this 'conservatism']), fascist ideologies, and others are generally idealistic, they have ideals (e.g. liberty, freedom) and try to apply them to material reality. Marxism instead uses analysis like historical materialism to analyze how the world has worked historically and use that material reality as a basis for the ideology. So a lot of socialist theory is analyzing capitalism's political economy and its contradictions, and understanding how the new social classes it formed (primarily the proletariat and bourgeoisie; the working class and the owning class respectively) relate to each other and the political economy. Marxism proposes that the working class, unlike the owning class, has the most power to create a revolution (as opposed to reform, e.g. fascism) and abolish private property (not to be confused with personal property… we don't want to redistribute your personal home and your toothbrush) and create a society where the working people own the tools of their work and earn the full value produced by their work, as opposed to a parasitic owning class (e.g. bosses, investors) owning the tools and skimming off the profit.

The ultimate 'don't dumb it down' is probably Marx's famous work Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (aka. Das Kapital)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_Kapital

>>2371609
>we don't want to redistribute your personal home
Owning land / a home makes you petty booj
Houses will be expropriated in the revolution, especially in settler colonial states

In fact, it's the very first thing ghe bolsheviks did (following the instructions of Engels)

>>2371617
No.

wage labor and capital is like 18-20 pages and pretty straightforward. As you can see >>2371603 is right that the online left is fucking ass and for the most part out of touch egdelords like >>2371617 with no ability to speak with others about socialism in a constructive manner.

>>2370784
Do hate wageslaving or atleast think things could be better in the workplace but feel you have no power to change it?
Then communism is for you.

>>2371603
>Here, it basically means socialists, communists and anarchists.
Communists have nothing to do with the left wing of capital.

>>2370784
>what are some leftist redpills? how does one come to understand leftist thought?
The left is a catch-all for those seeking social change. What I think it really comes down to is thinking for yourself, and holding nothing sacred. That includes no existing historical situation. The right takes up an attitude of opportunism in respect to the world as it is, and tries to either affirm or idealize it, or desires to revert to a state which was once an accomplished fact.

>>2370784
>what are some leftist redpills
bourgeois democracy is simply not a democracy at all
human labor is the basis of all value
we all slave away for a cruel and ever hungy god of our own making, billionaires are simply the hands of this god but they're not even in control, the blind logic of a feedback system that accumulate capital is.
https://ianwrightsite.wordpress.com/2020/09/03/marx-on-capital-as-a-real-god-2/

Fuck "the left!" Long live communism! Lenin said: "Study, study, study!" and study, I shall.

>>2370784
Depends on where you're starting from but the following might shock people:

In America more money is lost to wage theft than robberies. The brutal struggles that organized labor had to endure to get what we consider basic rights and hours. All kinds of trivia about global inequality. Imperial Britain extracted 45 trillion dollars from India. The rarely talked about late Victorian holocausts. Planned obsolescence and overproduction, mass goods thrown away in landfills. Planned economic recessions to destroy worker power. How war isn't so bad from the capitalist POV because it helps restore profitability by destroying vast amounts of capital.

If you went through Marx/Engels/Lenin picking out truth bombs we could be here all day even ignoring the technical stuff.

- Products of human labor seem to control us and have a will of their own; socialism is in part a project to reverse this so we're in control. Think of when people talk about "the economy" or "the market" like it's a God that must be sated or else it will punish us.

- It doesn't matter if you replaced all the "greedy rich people" with saints. They're just representations of capital, an amoral social relation. It must seek the greatest return on investment or perish.

- Capitalism trends towards centralization and monopoly.

- The demand for equality is incoherent beyond the abolition of classes.

- People, morality, laws, culture, and other things are products of the economic forces of their time.

- As socialists there's no point in demanding people to be more selfless, or selfish, both are necessary expressions of the human will.

- If you can't get rid of wage labor you won't get rid of capitalism.

- Liberals always yammer on about democracy, but you should always ask: for which class?

This passage from the fictional work Red Plenty is a poetic summary:

"Marx had drawn a nightmare picture of what happened to human life under capitalism, when everything was produced only in order to be exchanged; when true qualities and uses dropped away, and the human power of making and doing itself became only an object to be traded. Then the makers and the things made turned alike into commodities, and the motion of society turned into a kind of zombie dance, a grim cavorting whirl in which objects and people blurred together till the objects were half alive and the people were half dead. Stock-market prices acted back upon the world as if they were independent powers, requiring factories to be opened or closed, real human beings to work or rest, hurry or dawdle; and they, having given the transfusion that made the stock prices come alive, felt their flesh go cold and impersonal on them, mere mechanisms for chunking out the man-hours. Living money and dying humans, metal as tender as skin and skin as hard as metal, taking hands, and dancing round, and round, and round, with no way ever of stopping; the quickened and the deadened, whirling on."

…

"And what would be the alternative? The consciously arranged alternative? A dance of another nature, Emil presumed. A dance to the music of use, where every step fulfilled some real need, did some tangible good, and no matter how fast the dancers spun, they moved easily, because they moved to a human measure, intelligible to all, chosen by all."

LMAO I knew as soon as I read the OP that the comments would be filled with people gleefully telling them to read books written in the 19th and early 20th century.

There is nothing, absolutely nothing that a Western leftist loves more than making reading lists. It's no wonder leftism is seen as a middle class, elitist subculture by the working class

>>2374255
they literally asked for reading material also what kind of dipshit sheltered ah surburboid thinks none of us workers read LMAO

>>2374437
>>2374255
I will recommend some stuff written after 1990 that is more readable and relevant.


>The Divide- Jason Hickel. Gives a history of how the global North has exploited the South. Readable

Imperialism in the Twenty First Century- John Smith. Excellent and much needed update of marxist theory on imperialism. many people will tell you to read Lenin, but frankly, he is outdated. This is a modern classic.

Hardt and Negri- Multitude. A praxis for a global uprising, not just the proletariat, but all who labour under capitalism.

>>2374255
>LMAO I knew as soon as I read the OP that the comments would be filled with people gleefully telling them to read books written in the 19th and early 20th century.
Literally the first suggestion post has a book recc that contradicts you lmao. learn to read.

on bourgeois neoliberal Jeffrey Epstein economics:
>Introducing Sociology: A Review of Eyes Wide Shut by Tim Kreider
http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0096.html
< There is a moment in Eyes Wide Shut, as Bill Harford is lying to his wife over a cellphone from a prostitute's apartment, when we see a textbook in the foreground titled Introducing Sociology. The book's title is a dry caption to the action onscreen (like the slogan PEACE IS OUR PROFESSION looming over the battle at Burpelson Air Force Base in Dr. Strangelove), telling us that prostitution is the basic, defining transaction of our society. It is also, more importantly, a key to understanding the film, suggesting that we ought to interpret it sociologically–not as most reviewers insisted on doing, psychologically.

>>2374255
>leftism is seen as a middle class, elitist subculture by the working class
<"workers are incapable of reading"
sounds like you're the middle class elitist

>>2374255
Try Socialism 4 All's audio books

>>2375900
>telling us that prostitution is the basic, defining transaction of our society
thats not true

>>2370784
I would say a big thing is that the concessions made by the ruling class to organized labor (right to unionize, 8 hour day, weekends, social security, decent wages, in some places universal healthcare etc.) were only arrived at to prevent revolution. These "guarantees" are of course subject to deterioration when the ruling class believe organized labor to be sufficiently placated and/or repressed, along with the ruling class being concerned about their rate of profit being too low.
Even if you're not from the United States, I would highly recommend Mike Davis' Prisoners of the American Dream where he details the making and breaking of these "guarantees" from the 19th century to the 1980s.

Marx: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/value-price-profit/
For modern Marxism, Paul Cockshott is good.

>>2374495
This has to be a shitpost. Hickel and Smith are running mostly on vibes. Hickel tries to measure trade inequality in physical tons. Smith had a meltdown a couple months ago and became a pro-capitalist zionist.

>>2371617
Let's start by taking a quote from what the abolition of private property means from the communist manifesto:

<The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property. But modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products, that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few.

<In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.

<We Communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man’s own labour, which property is alleged to be the groundwork of all personal freedom, activity and independence.

<Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean the property of petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form of property that preceded the bourgeois form? There is no need to abolish that; the development of industry has to a great extent already destroyed it, and is still destroying it daily.

<Or do you mean the modern bourgeois private property?

<But does wage-labour create any property for the labourer? Not a bit. It creates capital, i.e., that kind of property which exploits wage-labour, and which cannot increase except upon condition of begetting a new supply of wage-labour for fresh exploitation. Property, in its present form, is based on the antagonism of capital and wage labour. Let us examine both sides of this antagonism.

<To be a capitalist, is to have not only a purely personal, but a social status in production. Capital is a collective product, and only by the united action of many members, nay, in the last resort, only by the united action of all members of society, can it be set in motion.

<Capital is therefore not only personal; it is a social power.

<When, therefore, capital is converted into common property, into the property of all members of society, personal property is not thereby transformed into social property. It is only the social character of the property that is changed. It loses its class character.

<Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, 1848, Manifesto of the Communist Party

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch02.htm

Although land will be nationalized and socialized, this will only affect the relationship of housing as a commodity to be bought and sold in the market. Its use as personal property will not be affected, since there is no shortage of housing, contrary to the alarmist apologists of the capitalist system, and this can be reorganized with the national collective economic plan to meet the housing needs of the general population.

Now let's take an example of petty bourgeoisie from Marx in "The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850" and because even in these cases the petty bourgeoisie must act only with what it has in common with the proletariat so that the proletariat becomes the new ruling class in the dictatorship of the proletariat, this class of workers will never be able to have independence because otherwise there will only be co-optation to serve the capitalist class:

<No one had fought more fanatically in the June days for the salvation of property and the restoration of credit than the Parisian petty bourgeois – keepers of cafes and restaurants, marchands de vins [wine merchants], small traders, shopkeepers, handicraftsman, etc. The shopkeeper had pulled himself together and marched against the barricades in order to restore the traffic which leads from the streets into the shop. But behind the barricade stood the customers and the debtors; before it the creditors of the shop. And when the barricades were thrown down and the workers were crushed and the shopkeepers, drunk with victory, rushed back to their shops, they found the entrance barred by a savior of property, an official agent of credit, who presented them with threatening notices: Overdue promissory note! Overdue house rent! Overdue bond! Doomed shop! Doomed shopkeeper!

<Salvation of property! But the house they lived in was not their property; the shop they kept was not their property; the commodities they dealt in were not their property. Neither their business, nor the plate they ate from, nor the bed they slept on belonged to them any longer. It was precisely from them that this property had to be saved – for the house-owner who let the house, for the banker who discounted the promissory note, for the capitalist who made the advances in cash, for the manufacturer who entrusted the sale of his commodities to these retailers, for the wholesale dealer who had credited the raw materials to these handicraftsman. Restoration of credit! But credit, having regained strength, proved itself a vigorous and jealous god; it turned the debtor who could not pay out of his four walls, together with wife and child, surrendered his sham property to capital, and threw the man himself into the debtors’ prison, which had once more reared its head threateningly over the corpses of the June insurgents.

<The petty bourgeois saw with horror that by striking down the workers they had delivered themselves without resistance into the hands of their creditors. Their bankruptcy, which since February had been dragging on in chronic fashion and had apparently been ignored, was openly declared after June.

<Karl Marx, 1850, "The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850"

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1850/class-struggles-france/ch02.htm

Remembering that communism is not a moral attitude and even a capitalist can be a communist as is the case with Engels if the capitalist acts as a class traitor to the extinction of the capitalist class and the petty bourgeoisie, semi-proletarians, peasants, intelligentsia and other working classes must recognize the proletariat as the revolutionary agent and act only with what they have in common for the political supremacy of the proletariat to make the revolutionary transformation of society abolishing private property and the exploiting classes.

for me it's gotta be the gotha programme and the feuerbach theses