this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2025
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This is just plain wrong, in my view. You don't learn Communism; you learn to hate life itself, instead of the terrible system in which your shitty life happens.
The impoverished Brazilian gig worker delivering food to rich people while riding a motorcycle with Bolsonaro stickers begs to differ. I see this guy all the time. He struggles to feed his family (because communists are making groceries more expensive), he wants more police brutality (against other people), he wants followers of certain religions (not his) arrested, he says he works 18 hour days and life is tough but he works hard (and you're a lazy crybaby if you don't want to do it too).
Sure, Marx explains why his life is miserable, but there's plenty of other people willing to offer misleading but more immediately compelling explanations and these are all very appealing to somebody who was born and raised immersed in anticommunist propaganda.
i think the part that i hate the most about this is that when they can finally afford something, its a big achievement ("conquista!") only working to the bone could have brought.
even being able to buy their basic motorcycles instead of renting is rationalized as them winning in life.
i know many many people like this. it confuses and upsets me to no end.
i think the part that i hate the most about this is that when they can finally afford something, its a big achievement ("conquista!") only working to the bone can bring.
The truly Brazilian vibes of "Foi Deus que me deu" (God gave this to me) sticker slapped onto the rear window of a shitty banged up car
This is just romanticizing suffering for purpose of anti-intellectualism. Nobody is capable of contextualizing all they go through let alone formulate that into a coherent worldview without prior cumulative analysis and knowledge. Even those who believe they do like this romanticization do so because they had some prior familiarity with the ideas, probably through second-hand knowledge, to relate it to theory or communism.
If any of that was remotely true, every poor person on earth would be a communist, obviously that's not the case
If the theory of anti-theory is not true in practice then of what use is the theory?
"Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement"
-Guy who actually led the first successful communist revolution
There are plenty of people who misread Marx, either willingfully or not, and become opportunists. Almost nobody truly understands the methods, requirements, and goals of Marxism without reading him though.
this sucks, pure anti intellectualism, if this were true the whole world would be red by now
I don't think the intention was to lessen the importance of theory, but it does read that way
I'd say it's both. It's not impossible to have a perfect grasp of theory without proletarianization and suffering, and it's not impossible to have a clear grasp of what needs to be done and why without theory. However, for the vast majority, you must have theory and practice. Theory is a tool that makes practice easier and more effective, it identifies the sources of problems and tells you how to think about solving them. To avoid theory is a mistake, that's fighting a terrible and great enemy while handcuffed or blindfolded. Not impossible, but unnecessarily difficult.
If you don't learn the lessons our predecessors gave us and spent their lives figuring out and testing, do you really care?
To quote Vijay Prashad paraphrasing Marx: Those who seek to change the world understand it better.
Every cadre should be a theorist, and every theorist should be a cadre; this separation between the proles who actually go and experience reality and the "theorists" who describe it while being alienated from it is bound to go nowhere. You need to have the workers educated in political theory, and you need to have the theorists close to the ground where they can experience history unfolding.
Exactly.
The screenshot isn't even talking about theory vs practice. The real life non-theory "practice" they recommend is simply being on the receiving end of booj state violence, starvation, being overworked, etc. This is not the same as organizing a strike, organizing a party, going to protests, and other stuff that actually is practice. That suffering may help one embed themself into a community or workplace they want to organize and motivate them to destroy capitalism, but it hasn't prevented many oppressed people becoming anticommunists regardless (see the other thread on this post about poor Brazilian gig workers still ending up as Bolsanaro supporting chuds).
I agree, I was just trying to address a more charitable reading of it that is less detached from reality IMO. It would probably have been better to acknowledge that in my comment though.
I dont like the word theory. I feel like it turns people off to it. I think a better word is strategy. We might all agree on the whole capitalism must go thing, but ask most people wtf are we gonna do about it and theyll shrug. Lenin literally wrote a book called What is to be done. Theory is more about being able to recognize the cracks in capitalism and learn how to exploit those cracks. When its put into practice anyway. A lot of people are honestly just politics nerds who study it without ever putting it into practice. Which is... Fine i guess. But dont think you have to be like that to read it. Its not a college class. Just think of it as Lenin, the guy who founded the USSR, talking to you directly and being like "so this is what im thinking". Its very valuable insight. Not all of it still applies in 2025 obviously, but most does.
Like your meme says Marx explains why it happens. Lenin tells you what to do about it.
I think what would be more accurate is to say that studying Marx (or any theorists) alone doesn't give one the willpower to truly commit to being a communist. This helps explain the issue in the western left as a labor aristocracy with an understanding of class dynamics. There are many well read people who can emulate the aesthetics, language, and cultural relics of communism history but when push comes to shove, they aren't truly committed to destroying the system they benefit from.
Poverty and oppression alone obviously doesn't produce Communist thought, if it did we would already be living under Communism.
Yup. Simply overcoming the fear of state retaliation for trying to pull shit is a major hurdle. Most people will not pass this hurdle unless circumstances become extreme, or at least, enough people won't for a mass rebellion. Only when western states begin to actually break down will we see mass movements of communists flare up.
"I've never read Marx's Capital, but I've got the marks of capital all over my body."
-Bill Haywood
why that happens is kind of important tho
Revolutionary consciousness isn't spontaneous! Empiricist, subjectivist, and cannot see the world beyond their own nose. Scientific socialism was brought to, and fused with, the workers' movement--a cursory reading of Lenin would tell you that. Y'all are backwards as fuck.
Yeah. Some people respond to oppression by becoming bigots for example.
Usually cause they’re directed to by their oppressors, one way or another
Yeah, but the lesson here is: if they don't read your theory they'll read theirs.
In Software this is called Cargo Cult Programming. Where programmers do things without knowing why they do them, simply because they've seen them in the code before.
Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play
My boy Engels can get no love 
communism is really obvious if you think about reality for like 10 seconds
If that were the case, I'd expect there to be a lot more communists.
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I mean most of these things arent yet experienced by the workers in the Global North. perhaps I'm an ally of the JDPON after all.
perhaps I'm an ally of the JDPON after all.
There's often no difference in form of newly minted communists punching left against third worldism, and liberals punching left against communists. Newly minted communists are mad that third worldism is both correct in its observations and morals. Third worldism is taking away the new toy they found tells them why their lives should be better than they are. Same thing happens with liberals and liberalism in respect to communism.
Liberals see their place in society as cosmopolitan educated socialites. Communism reminds them they are in reality subjects of a capital order, whose only worth is based on the money they accumulate not on any acculturation, morality, or valor.
Communists see their place in society as "proletarians" (I'm using this loosely and not technically), a solidaristic class of the oppressed, not as a class of oppressors. Third Worldism reminds them that in reality they sit on the backs of a global proletariat living in even greater precarity than they do, and their emancipation as a proletariat cannot be moral or ideologically consistent if the global proletariat is not emancipated.
You just explained why V*ush is so popular.
Me in 2020: Lol looks like we're done and Hamas is our only hope 
Me in 2023: Hamas is our only hope 
No offense, but I think fetishizing movements in the imperial periphery is a way to absolve responsibility from people in the imperial core. Communism tells liberals they need to do more, Third Worldism tells Communists they need to do more. It's not a hierarchy based on who has to deal with the most suffering, it's a hierarchy of who gains more benefit from the current state of the world and therefore who has more responsibility and power to fix it. You are simply shoveling the responsibility to those who comparatively the hardest battles.
Hamas can't save us. That idea is the idea of Red Dawn -- the same silly fantasy that libs have about the poorest taking their things -- but for potential allies of the invading communist movement, rather than its enemies. It's Communist Big Mommy
I mean, yeah of course, I don't literally mean Hamas or any other anti-colonialist resistance group is coming to do our work for us. I live in the Global South myself. What I mean is that those who live where the contradictions are the sharpest are the ones who have the power to move the historical process forwards because socialism isn't going to spring out of the ether in the imperialist countries, it will have to be imposed on them from the outside.
it will have to be imposed on them from the outside.
I think historically this has been proven out to be the opposite after all the USSR fell.
The only real hope that this is a way is that the CCP:
- CCP economically (and at one point militarily) is able to defend itself against global imperial capital
- CCP brings about real communism, moving more towards MLM roots in terms of social and economic arrangements
- CCP brings in the tanks.
I have doubts about the practicality and reality of each of these steps. Even if you believe that steps 1 and 2 are going to happen. Step 3 is the most tenuous of all. China is very much a mind your own business country. They CCP does not and will not care that the people of the imperial core are suffering. It's not their problem.
I think the real problem for Marxists is they get too stuck on the "scientific" parts, and assume that means "determinism". This leads them to advocate ripping off previous playbooks (What Is To Be Done posting) wholesale rather than understand what from each previous playbook would work for their specific situation. You cannot build even a nascent state capitalist state that is attempting to build socialism let alone communism through a set of replicable steps. When in reality Marx describes the interaction purely through base and superstructure. There is no "if this then that" of building communism, you have to move these structures into alignment and continually reinforce base and superstructure in the direction of communist development. What works in one society may not work in a different one, (See Sino Soviet Split) what works in one society in the past may never work again in the same society in the future.
It's a similar reason why typically our capitalist societies cannot make good software. Not only is there simply not a "single way", but most people have their own experiences from the negative problems they have suffered building software for previous companies. These experiences may reinforce practices that seem to be helpful, but were only helpful in the context of the previous company.
Meanwhile China has done great things for its people, but it has put itself into the same position as those in the imperial core. There are contradictions in the Chinese economy. In order for China to make good on socialism by 2050, it essentially needs to kill its guided capitalist prosperity engine. This is going to make a lot of people uneasy and upset and many of them are also people who are in the CCP. Chinese development has also made it become a treatler country in many respects, I think American Communists don't recognize that. I think in practice we're all just doing a prisoners dilemma with each other and ultimately ourselves.
A huge example of the difference between China and the USSR right now is food. The USSR had always been a seasonal agriculture country, because having Western style supermarkets that are both price stable and more-or-less unaffected by seasonal availability is based on a network of global trade that requires extraction by its very nature. If you cannot produce food half the year, and the people that can produce food the other half of the year are equals, you can maintain price stability of food through trade. But the reality is that the Global South where this stability is based in, are not equals. So the way price stability is maintained is through deprivation, extraction and manipulation of global markets. In a socialist global system we're back at third worldism, you have to convince people who have it good to sacrifice for those that don't in a place they've never been, for reasons that are extremely difficult to articulate. China is a rich country now and in this way has created this problem for itself and historically benevolent internationalism hasn't really been a cultural tendency. Culturally and politically to China trade is trade, no more no less.
Absolutely. I think there's a lot of bad rep for third worldists because they've had to deal with more than their fair share of people hijacking their theory and language, but in general the principles are on point.
But also I think we may sometimes discard its tenets as a meme/joke rather than taking it seriously (as I have done so here, regrettably). I'm thankful that even if the language is different now, colonialism and its consequences are finally being thoroughly critiqued within the economics of class and race by socialists the world over.
I apologise for the snarky/joke comment!
I wasn't trying to dress you down, and I'm sorry if it came off that way.
I was merely using the memery to explain how the OP tweet is completely wrong, because even within the context of Marxism there are Marxists who read the scantest of theory and are like 'WHAT DO YOU MEAN GLOBALLY I'M THE BAD GUY?'. This usually comes out when Conservatives point to the fact that the American poor are economically way richer than global poor. Which is correct and is merely a rephrasing of imperial capitalism. So upon seeing these arguments they usually dismiss them in an illogical way because the only thing they learned from Socialism in one country vs International Socialism is 'Trotsky bad'.
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