There is power in Marxism that you cannot find in other systems of ideas. Marxism is a totality; if you’re a committed Marxist, you can’t pick and choose where to apply it. You cannot have a bit of Marxism for breakfast and a bit of liberalism for lunch. Choosing to be a Marxist means examining every facet of the social world through a rigid system that rejects esotericism, magic, or religious thinking.
But when you step outside your Marxist bubble, you realize: people are fucking idiots. Not "idiots" meaning "stupid," but ἰδιώτης (idiotes), an Ancient Greek term for a private person indifferent to politics or public life. Most people refuse to see the connection between politics and their daily existence. They prioritize a "good" private life: a stable job, a wife who cooks and cleans, 1.8 children, maybe a dog, a home, and holidays twice a year (sorry, Americans, this is Europe). Young Marx (or Engels, I can't remember) once called this an "animal’s life": unreflective, driven by instincts the bourgeoisie instilled in workers. Tragically, this remains true 150 years later. The separation of private and public life poisons any cohesive society.
As capitalism’s crises deepen, bourgeois propaganda (mass media, PR) aggressively pushes unscientific, esoteric, and religious ideas. I told my family I’m a materialis - not chasing money, just rejecting spirits - and they got sad for me. Like I’m some empty husk because I don’t "feel" ghosts. It’s even more exhausting to explain that most "personal" thoughts aren’t original. Humans rarely have new ideas; we recycle old ones. Yet people resent being asked to examine their beliefs. They deny that their desires are manufactured by mass media, or that history predates them. Many cling to a nonexistent sentimental past or an idealized future. I’ve developed profound hatred for the state, family, private property, and religion. My mother understands my critiques of the state, religion, and property, but family is sacred to her. Explaining its evolution as a social structure is pointless. This mental block leads to a common schema: individual → family → nation. You see this everywhere. ("States are cities; cities are families.") Most people can’t grasp their own historicity.
This is why meaningful mass political action is nearly impossible today. As a Marxist, you must constantly fight: first, to stay sharp and avoid sinking into the swamp of bourgeois society; second, to drive change against bourgeois society’s current. The river of bourgeois history flows against the general arrow of history. Paradoxically, Marxism is liberating: it reveals history’s direction. But bourgeois history is the only history that exists now. As a Marxist, you're forced to swim upstream. Swimming upstream is the exhaustion.
>>2421696I'm not sure what answer you expect, because the answer is well known and stayed the same for the last century and a half. Before the bourgeois had nuclear bombs they had guns and armies, yet we still struggled. You can't keep a slave population forever. Yesterday's slaves, too, have nuclear weapons, in case you've forgotten.
You have to politically organize. You have to find like-minded communists in this atomized hellscape and you have to push yourself and every other comrade to burnout in your praxis while building a party capable of holding dual power during a time of crisis, and be ready to smash the bourgeois state, to enter civil war, and for the proletarian dictatorship to win. This all sounds like phrases - but it is the only truth we have, that no other political faction has. We realize this way of living cannot go on forever - in this we are different form liberals. We realize armed struggle has to happen somewhere along the way - in this we are different from social-democrats and other reformists. And we realize there is no going back - this makes us different from fascists.
You have to struggle to do the impossible. Let there be uncessant struggle, let there be what cannot be.
>>2421684I basically think like a Marxist but live like an ἰδιώτης because I'm a lucky coward. I know it won't last. Only I'm the one who cooks and cleans and I've got 1 instead of 1.8.
>I told my family I’m a materialis - not chasing money, just rejecting spirits - and they got sad for me. Like I’m some empty husk because I don’t "feel" ghostsI'm so glad I wasn't raised religious. My family is full of libs but at least they're all agnostic.
>>2421756It's a bluff. Why would they do that when it would lower
their quality of life, the very thing they're seeking to preserve through their class rule?
>>2421769Because for them the alternative is worse.
>>2421777>These are spiteful, awful people who are already willing to support genocide, what’s omnicide to them?There's that, also. We're witnessing the culmination of American egoism or individualism or whatever you want to call it. The requirements for reaching the apex of business or politics in the US is that you have no qualms about however many thousands or millions of people you have to hurt or even kill to get what you want. Not only that, but getting what you want is not only a reward in itself for this behavior, but also treated as evidence that you were right and right to do it, but most importantly that your material success is because of your extra super specialness.
So you've got a society ruled by people whose chief cultural conceit is the centrality and exceptional nature of themselves and the worthlessness of everyone else that isn't special like them. Seeing that overturned isn't just a repudiation of their privileged place in society. It's a refutation of every value they've based themselves and their lives and legacies on. The idea that the world doesn't need them is so anathetical to their world view, they'd rather burn the whole thing down than contemplate the idea that it could get on just fine without them, or worse yet that it could be better off. Billions would die, but there's no doubt that
they would survive, because they're special, and the universe has already made clear that it can't do without them.
Anything,
anything is preferable to the idea that the world doesn't need them or that the millions of dull mundanes they now rule can rule themselves. Even Armageddon.
>>2421684>This is why meaningful mass political action is nearly impossible todaythe problems you describe have always existed, and they didnt prevent mass political action. Yes its hard, yes most people would rather not concern themselves with it, but mass political work have to recognize this and yet still persist
>As a Marxist, you must constantly fight: first, to stay sharp and avoid sinking into the swamp of bourgeois societyI mean, not everyone who adhere to the ideas have to be a revolutionary warrior monk dedicated to making it happen and doing ruthless criticizing all the time. I have great respect for those who do, but having a lot of sympathizer simply getting the ideas around and raising the political aspect when its relevant is already being part of it.
>Swimming upstream is the exhaustionalso why good to join orgs. You dont have to do it alone, and you dont have to do it all the time. Everything doesnt rest on your sole shoulders
>>2421738What are you imagining? That they're just going to nuke themselves? Like if there's a mass uprising in the US, the US government is going to turn the nukes on itself and not only are they going to consider this a win scenario by turning any one or more of their major cities into nuclear slag, but vaporizing however many thousands or millions of people, and killing millions more with radiation. Not only all of that, but this is somehow going to make the underlying problems that produced this uprising to just go away?
Nukes are a serious practical problem but I swear people just use it as an excuse to deny the need or possibility of revolution. It was the same with the US military for years. "How can a revolution succeed against the strongest military in history???" As though an aircraft carrier is going to help against insurgents in an urban sprawl that stretches from bangor to miami. Like the only tactic that seems to occur to some people is that if there's an abrams tank the only thing to do is go out in front and let it shoot you. "How are we supposed to beat that?"
Ignorance, conformism and magical thinking aside, one thing that pisses me off is how everywhere in mass media, social interactions and the normie Internet you can see the death of nuance in real time. Every online argument is like watching two toddlers going "nuh huh" defending their dumbfuck either-or takes and you can sense how unwilling people are to engage with complex ideas or criticism, or even to show a minimum of empathy for others, particularly strangers. It's the consequence of a decades-old, multi-front attack on the fundamental cognitive mechanisms that allow people to independently form thoughts, led by instant gratification algorithms that favor short-form content. There's also a constant push by propagandists and politicians to normalize this sort of either-or logic and non-sequiturs in everyday talk: "oh you don't support sending one gorillion dollars to israel so they can decimate the remaining children? you must be a hamas terrorist who hates america"
This is gonna sound pretentious as fuck but I'm glad my irl friend group has meaningful discussions on the most random ass topics like life and relationships, entertainment, national politics, markets, tech and science. Guess studying mathematics and going to grad school led me to meet a ton of interesting people, who maybe aren't Marxists nor have a grasp on dialectical materialism (some do) but definitely are halfway there by rejecting bullshit and embracing critical reasoning and dialogue as an approach to life. Most of said friends are autistic as fuck in a good way and have some kind of science background, others are artists or in med school and so on. There's a reason why Marxist thinkers have always insisted it's a scientific approach to history, and why a bunch of people in the "hard" sciences leaned left in the 20th century, according to some accounts (I think Paul Cockshott made a point about this once, also think e.g. Einstein's writings about lib-ish socialism or whatever)
It's easy to doomerpost about porky going "gaza but with nuclear weapons and clankers with guns" on the entirety of humanity if global revolution were to happen, or about not ever getting there because people don't care and if they do they have no hope, but I have hope that resistance networks can be built. It starts with cultivating the connections you have right now, checking on your friends and family, loving and caring for them, talking about current topics they care about bringing your materialist point of view. Tell them the "loneliness epidemic" is a consequence of the youth being sold unattainable ideals and living in impossibly expensive cities without third spaces, tell them why dating apps or AI and other dumb tech trends are built for profit rather than some altruistic purpose, tell them about the housing market or really whatever comes to mind. Do commentary – hell social media is full of viral content like this nowadays. But fundamentally remember that caring for your homies is praxis
Unique IPs: 14