Thinking about how capitalism’s contradictions are exponentially increasing

Also thinking about how someone critiqued Marx as overly idealists

Like one of my favorite contradictions is the idea that communism is unnecessarily idealistic yet it’s subscribers are cold hearted pragmatists

Are you referring to Althusser and his conception of an epistemological break in Marx’s thought between the “young” Marx and “anti humanist” Marx?

Slogans are something you use for agitation but when people use them as a substitute to theory they just end up saying the dumbest simplistic s*** half the time no relation to socialism anyways

Nah the liberal one where nice things aren’t possible

oh word

I’ve been reading For Marx by Althusser recently and highly recommend it. Don’t agree with all of it as he’s a pretty rigid structuralist but still think there’s a lot of great insights there

I see him championed by Anarchists so it turned me off reading him but does he have any interesting ideas? He's pretty prominent

what you think of the break?

What anarchists you talking to lol? Not disbelieving you I have just never heard of a anarchist liking (or even knowing) Althusser lol

@bopman i could write a very long essay about Althusser and what his contributions are, but I’m out with friends so can’t at this moment. I can provide a more detailed response later.

But the long and short of it is I think Althusser details extremely well how capitalist ideology is reproduced through what he calls Ideological State Apparatuses. With that, we should think about how we can try to wage political struggles within and in counter to ISAs by attempting - through cultural struggles and creating independent organs of political power - to challenge the capitalist State’s hegemony. I think it ties into Gramsci’s thoughts really nicely in that regard as well

Might be confusing him with another guy idk

I’m somewhat torn on that as someone who has an appreciation for Hegel but also sympathizes with Althusser’s “anti humanism” and his critique of Hegels idealist influence on Marx.

I do think Althusser is absolutely right that social democrats and revisionists lean on Marx’s early works to justify their phony “Marxism”. That being said, I think those early works are really valuable in a lot of ways despite their problems, and I don’t think we should cast them aside entirely the way Althusser proposes

beautiful in depth explanation of the economics behind the tendency for the rate of profit to fall

ive watched this video like 30 times

i think in this way his contributions to socialist thought and "anarchism" are important.

developing dual power not just to "combat capitalism" through some economic warfare or some s*** but on a psychological level to develop dual power against capitalist realism

i cant believe emu said marx never thought about having finite natural resources

i dont mean to be mean but what the f***

carbonbrief.org/chinas-2060-climate-pledge-is-largely-consistent-with-1-5c-goal-study-finds
the only country actually hitting the paris climate agreement accords

Precisely

Something to be said about how often attempts to "purge" end up killing everybody with principles and sparing all the people it was in theory supposed to get rid of. One of the worst specters of the French Revolution.

Systems of education, re-education, and material reinforcement are far more effective

@Scratchin_Bandit

Lmao my bad forgot to respond

But it is for sure, easily the best historical account of US interventions post-WW2, definitely an engaging read in William Blum's writing style and you can of course choose about which intervention you wanna read so you can get to what interests you the most right away

just hit libgen up

also happy easter orthodox brother

And happy easter to u my orthodox brother