/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

>>2930072
Also: concerning that list of reactionary books, I might add Plato’s Laws to the list.

>>2930072
it is not worth understanding how the reactionary mind thinks. they don't think. it is not worth reading their "theory" because being anti-materialist they have no theory. it all boils down to pseudo spiritual self help and excuses for divorced dad losers. I've tried reading it and there's nothing there at all.

polite sage.

>>2930072
>we aren’t supposed to debate fascists, we’re supposed to shoot them.
?????????

Is it worth it to understand those who control society? What do you think?

>>2930072
They are secretly the opposite of what they say they are. Conservatives love the government boot more than anyone else, as long as it is used to crush minorities. They hate free markets, people trying to start a small business are bums who need to get a job in their eyes. Conservatives watch more gay and trans porn per capita than any other demographic. Belief in the supernatural and acting as such is a sign of mental illness, conservatives are physicalist as hell. Must I go on? I can do this all day.

Yes, it is necessary. They are winning the minds of the masses through social-media exposure and algorithmic infestation. Nazism is as hip as it has ever been since the 1930s. This is a cultural phenomenon as well as a material one - understanding its theoretical bases (and the arguments that debunk them) is needed to push back against misconceptions, deception and lies pushed by a very class-conscious bourgeoisie.

>>2930072
cringe thread.

1. 99% of chuds you will ever encounter are running on vibes from social media, not whatever bullshit you posted
   
2. the remaining 1% doesn't care either, their objective is to give capital more power and they will say whatever they have to say to achieve that goal
   
   

this is all common sense. whenever I read anyone talking about discourse analysis I stop paying attention because none of this is complicated, you don't need a bunch of books or long words to describe these people. they are completely transparent and basic. that's also why people should stop wasting time with the critical theory shit and the verso-books authors: it's not that complicated, you can get the vibes yourself. maybe that chomsky book is worth reading, if you're really bored, but only because he presents lots of data, which sets him apart from all the other guys

tl;dr read capital volume 1, then read it again, then read it again

>>2930073
Millerman is a Zionist Jewish supremacist. Stop posting him.

>>2930095
They aren't winning the minds of the masses. It's always been like this. The masses are inherently reactionary.

All the answers ITT are retarded and wrong.
>>2930072
>Is it worth it to understand how the right-wing thinks?
Given that all human agency is mediated by material conditions, understanding the conditions and circumstances that fuels right-wing thought is highly pertinent. It allows us to identify and leverage those conditions into class consciousness by disarming the terrain of what ever made them right-wing to begin with. After all, right-wing beliefs are only a response to the same class contradictions. Demanding ideological purity from the working class is idealist nonsense.

>>2930095
Except this answer. This user is smart.

>>2930072
contrary to the fake quote "why should we reply to kautsky" Marx, Engels, and Lenin put a lot of effort into understanding and replying to the reactionaries, reformists, revisionists, and opportunists of their time:

Young Marx writes with passion and fury against Max Stirner and Pierre Proudhon. Older Marx writes with frustration and scientific acumen against Ferdinand Lassalle and Mikhail Bakunin. Engels writes an entire book dedicated to quoting and debunking the mostly forgotten Eugen Duhring. Lenin writes an entire book against Kautsky. All of them were interested to some extent in combating capitalist mythmaking and apologia.

I think where some people draw the line is the urgency. If you're going to be shot while writing about your enemies, best to shoot first.

>>2930109
>inherently
elaborate

>>2930118
>replying to the reactionaries
and yet you only commented on the intra-left polemics

they rarely did comment on reactionaries because they knew it was nonsense and a waste of time. and even then, it was far from "a lot of effort into understanding": they didn't take them at face value. you capitalize duhring and post his entire name trying to act smart but I assume you haven't read the fucking book, because engels wastes 0 lines trying to play debate lord or taking the guy seriously. most of it boil down to
>this guy is a crank
>he says a lot of bullshit
>it's not worth reading
>it doesn't make sense
>and ultimately it's just an angle to push the party to the right

>>2930072
This list is completely philosophically incoherent and the quality of the inclusions varies considerably - Buchanan and Goldwater are not worth reading. If you’re talking about ‘Reaction’ specifically then this list is even worse because a bunch of these people are explicit liberals like Nozick and Hayek. Also left-wing influences on radical right-wing thought like Sorel and Marx are probably more important than Oakeshott to the contemporary right. What fucking right-winger is influenced by Heidegger’s metaphysics

You don't typically see the average reactionary type of person try to make the case that they base their stance on some kind of academic or educated foundation, save for the ones that call up their preferred foundational civilization myth as some sort of mystical guiding spirit, or the ones that base their beliefs entirely off their preferred religious tradition.

I've always been of the mind that the western trope of the "left wing academic" existed precisely because they have read everything and came to the conclusion that "left wing" ideas are simply the vanguard of intelligentsia of the western world, which is why "right wing academic" was a phrase unheard of until very recently, because in the past, monarchists and the like based their authority on the basis of religion, which was at odds with academia.

In that sense the kind of reactionary political parties made up of "straight rich white men looking to preserve their institutional power" is not the same kind of reactionary which lives below the poverty line and is currently being crushed by the capital power of the former, while simultaneously advocating for that power. These are the people who, if asked where they base their political beliefs on, will more commonly point to "tradition", "culture", "religion", "race", "tribe", etc., but will almost never say that they adhere to their politics based on some kind of systematic study of an academic subject. Such a thing is anathema to them, and more often than not will say that those are the types of people they are stalwartly against.

So this leaves reactionary academics in a very strange position. They are hated by the majority of the working class man that supports their politics, and are irrelevant to the ruling class which derives its authority from a combination of capital and institutional power, not the conclusions of academics. In my personal opinion, right wing academics are simply just half-baked academics, often ones who study independently, who came sprinting to tell the world a teleological destiny immediately after reading the first piece of literature that managed to shake the foundations of their worldview, quite often a work that is a hundreds, if not thousands of years old, completely unaware of the following works that have gone on to critique, expand, and sublate into a better understanding of those old books. Many reading lists for reactionaries, like the one in OPs post are simply lists for propagandizing oneself, as such lists will hardly ever give the reader a separate list of works critiquing or countering its positions.

>Yet there’s always that curiosity concerning how and why right-wingers believe what they believe.
The explanation is that they are retarded. Not all people are equal. Imagine you're trying to move and a bunch of weights are tied to you via rope. The weights are the reactionaries trying to resist the tide of progress, they must be cut loose.
>I know the standard answer is that they’re all a bunch of straight rich white men looking to preserve their institutional power
I don't think this is accurate for 99% of right wingers. The simple truth is that some people are predisposed to "magical thinking" and the right rewards this, I went more in depth in another thread https://leftypol.org/leftypol/res/2927644.html

Mix magical thinking and sadism and you end up with the modern far right

>>2930120
Nta but he’s confusing “inherently” with “by default”, the latter is way closer to the truth

>>2930107
He's literally a Plato scholar. Jews and Greeks are opps, idiot.

>>2930203
plato can be read as a spiritual elitist, with the republic et al not describing a real polity but rather a spiritual truth

Dissect it, figure out how it forms and how to stop it from forming in yourself, but don't adopt it willingly.

A lot of it boils down to catharsis seeking, which is dangerously common on the left–worsened by twitter and tumblr–so the more you can understand about it and cut it out early, the better.

>>2930204
And what does that have to do with Jews?

>>2930211
not sure, what i said is only tangentially relevant, i dont think plato belongs in a list of right wing books

>>2930219
The Zio in the video >>2930073
is talking about Plato's Laws, not The Republic. A totally different dialogue.

studying reactionary thought can be interesting, because it gives you a deeper understanding of how incoherent it is

>>2930209
>catharsis seeking
Looks like babby learned a new word.
Catharsis against the bourgeoisie is a good thing, retard.

Low empathy and critical thinking, that's it