marxism

PLEASE AND THANKS

An excellent Critical Theory Workshop lecture and Q&A on fascisms and liberalisms—contemporary but also historical—through a dialiectical materialist lens.

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/4028381

The only thing I can think of is Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord and Marshall McLuhan's work on media.

Oh, and this work by Christian Fuchs.

Problem being:

I think Fuchs is a Marxist-Humanist and I'm not sure what to think of Marxist humanism.

But I could be wrong.

Maybe I should ignore that aspect of their work.

Thoughts?

Got any book recommendations at all?

I'm looking for:

Media studies

Cultural theory

Communications

Internet

Social media

Management and organization

Community-building

Trends

Technology

etc.

^ These are the topics I'm looking into.

And, hopefully, from a Marxist-Leninist or Marxist standpoint (or at least leftist).

Got anything? Maybe advice?

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/4025828

I know the people that made it. One is for those new to the CPUSA and the other is for those new to the Marxism-Leninism.

Cheers!

Check it out:

Copy-pasta

CPUSA Reading List - 2022

https://cryptpad.fr/pad/#/2/pad/view/VJlD0b3eh4gMJovaypGkuW4m3Au-aksj+6oNDi50UFI/embed/

Communism Reading Guide

https://cryptpad.fr/pad/#/2/pad/view/eAFqVc1JC8v8T5AEEWSPQ9YD4FR8tK6E97XEy+v78KQ/embed/

pic one is the interesting part, the rest is whatevs.

Seriously, I think Marx describes only about a half-dozen of them?

• Primitive communism

• [something missing here for Classical Antiquity?]

• Feudalism

• Manufacture

• Factory system

I haven't read Saito's books, or looked too deeply into degrowth as a movement. I just read this article and thought it made some good arguments against what it claims are Saito's understandings of Marx. I'm not sure I agree with everything, but I thought it was interesting enough to share.

As a Turk, I approve.

But of course, the Turkish republic should be replaced with a socialist one. Strengthen democracy and continue the movement for it. Fight for reforms, but also revolution. And create dual power as well.

And of course, the Kurdish nationalist movement should be appeased and given their wants and needs and what they demand.

That is all I have to say on that matter.

I know the person that made this article on Twitter.

Good stuff.

Best Marxist YouTuber.

Some anti-China stuff, but it's to be expected. I'm used to it.

“If indeed the socialist commonwealth were an impossibility, then mankind would be cut off from all further economic development. In that event modern society would decay, as did the Roman empire nearly two thousand years ago, and finally relapse into barbarism.

“As things stand today capitalist civilization cannot continue; we must either move forward into socialism or fall back into barbarism.”:rosa:

Born in southeastern Poland on 5 March 1871, Rosa Luxemburg was a towering figure of the classical socialist movement— a brilliant thinker, sharp-tongued rhetorician, and trailblazing leader of the proletarian cause. The famed socialist historian and journalist Franz Mehring once called her the “best brain after Marx”. Her comrade and dear friend Clara Zetkin described her as the “sharp sword, the living flame of revolution”. Even Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin, with whom she often clashed, was compelled to acknowledge her status as an “eagle” of the Communist movement, at least in retrospect.

“Democracy is indispensable to the working class, because only through the exercise of its democratic rights, in the struggle for democracy, can the proletariat become aware of its class interests and its historic task.”:rosa:

She was, by all accounts, a truly unique figure. A Jew, a Polish woman, physically disabled and politically an irreconcilable Marxist—the obstacles to her pursuing her aims in life were legion, yet she rose to become one of the paramount leaders of the largest and strongest socialist movement in the Western world, German Social Democracy. In her short but brilliant career, she locked horns with the Prussian military elite several times and spoke as equals with Karl Kautsky, August Bebel, Victor Adler, and many other leading lights of socialism. As a political agitator she rallied masses of workers against capitalism and imperialist warfare, while also challenging Marxist orthodoxy as both a theorist and instructor at the Social Democratic party school in Berlin.

Yet since being cut down by proto-fascist thugs in January 1919, Luxemburg has been memorialized as a martyr for the revolution and a symbol of the tragic highs and lows of Germany’s twentieth century more than anything else. While her name and image remains iconic, her prodigious intellectual output and many contributions to socialist theory, have often been reduced to footnotes.

“Freedom only for the members of the government, only for the members of the Party – though they are quite numerous – is no freedom at all. Freedom is always the freedom of the one who thinks differently. Not because of any fanatical concept of justice, but because all that is instructive, wholesome and purifying in political freedom depends on this essential characteristic, and its effectiveness vanishes when ‘freedom’ becomes a special privilege.”

• Who Was Rosa Luxemburg? :rosa:

• Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung Marxist organization connected to Die Linke in germany :rose-fist:

• Reform or Revolution by Rosa Luxemburg :rosa-shining:

• The Russian Revolution by Rosa Luxemburg :rosa: :lenin-cat:

• Red Rosa: A Graphic Biography of Rosa Luxemburg :rosa-shining:

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Check it out. Also:

“George Bush doesn’t care about Black people.” These were the words of famed rapper Kanye West during the 2005 nationally televised telethon benefit for victims of Hurricane Katrina. In this notorious quote, Kanye expressed a popular conception of the Bush administration for a whole generation of people. How is it then, that less than 15 years later the same Kanye West — son of a Black Panther who had previously made commentary on racism in the U.S. — would go on a national tour professing his love for Hitler? Even more recently, beloved star in the Black community, Nicki Minaj, cozied up to Ben Shapiro after rapper Megan Thee Stallion blasted her for misogynoir. Both of these instances illustrate the right’s newfound investment in popular culture in response to young people, people of color and the LGBTQ community’s increasing acceptance of socialism.

Kanye was the son of a Black Panther?! Holy shit...

Anyway:

It's only a few paragraphs long and is for a pre-convention discussion (since CPUSA is in discussion period for our democratic process).

(This is one of my various-thoughts-no-particular conclusion posts)

• Firstly, don't think that by 'paganism' I mean some Tumblr thing: I mean the dominant religion of classical antiquity. And Marx does quote thinkers from Greece & Rome a lot, and talks about its productive system a bit.

• Different productive systems differ in the way surplus value is extracted

• Marxist theory thinks of religion as something that justifies and protects the productive system. e.g. Catholicism was the religious superstructure on the feudal base. Feudalism extracts surplus value by duty to your lord.

• Quote from Capital Ch.3 Section 3 'Money': "The class struggle in the ancient world, for instance, took the form mainly of a contest between debtors and creditors" (The Marxist economist Michael Hudson writes about this.)

• Religions tell us what is sacred.

Now, it makes sense that some things would be held sacred in the economy of the classical world:

• Depend on conquest: glorify Mars

• Depend on the harvest: glorify the harvest-goddess, have harvest festivals

• Depend on fertility of livestock: glorify fertility goddess

• Depend on the tribe: glorify your ancestors (Latin: maiores). We mock social rebellion as being a "fuck you dad" attitude; the flipside of that is that ancestor-worship implies social conservatism.

Tribe

To emphasise the last point a bit more: in capitalism we have the nuclear family at best. Lots of people have no family at all. In ancienter economic systems, the family/tribe was everything, was your economic support. It makes sense to revere fertility and having lots of kids, as that's the strength of your family.

Polytheism

Chapter 1 of 'Capital' talks about how use-values are myriad, exchange-value is singular....

...and about how people used to produce for use-value (catch fish to eat), but the commodity-form made them produce for exchange-value (which, I repeat, is singular).

Do you see how in the first case it would make sense to have many gods, and in the second case one god?

But none of that quite gets to the heart of surplus-value-extraction. (Well, Mars being an important god does: that's extraction-through-conquest.) But how does paganism justify extraction of surplus value by creditors? This is where my theory is incomplete.

I've been enjoying reading Krupskaya's works on education and how to study (e.g. How Lenin Studied Marx). I'm wondering if there's anything similar in the Marxist canon (or just worth reading for Marxists in general) on the subject of study and self-education. I'll try to compile the Krupskaya I've been reading in an edit.

edit:

The Organization of Self Education

General Rules for Independent Study

How Lenin Studied Marx

Unfortunately that's all I could find online

How to Be a Good Communist

Written/Published: July 1939

Source: Selected Works of Liu Shaoqi, Volume I

First Published: Foreign Languages Press

I'm reading this for the first time, btw, based on something I heard online. Someone also recommended it to me and said Liu Shaoqi was underrated.

Definitely giving this a go.

Good stuff.

Love Henry Winston.

You can read the book for yourself here.

Check it out. I highly recommend this book.

Oh yeah, and there's a sequel to it as well. Maybe I'll do a book club on both later on.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/1795146

Video is about 50 minutes long.

You can listen to it while you're doing other things.

Glad they touched on the AFL-CIO and the recent developments in the labor movement, especially vis a vis the South.