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   mira (frog) (mira@froggie.town)'s status on Wednesday, 04-Oct-2023 04:52:40 JST mira (frog)

   marxists on their way to not engage critically with the history of their movement

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     novatorine 🏴🏳️‍⚧️ (anarchopunk_girl@kolektiva.social)'s status on Wednesday, 04-Oct-2023 04:53:56 JST novatorine 🏴🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     @mira no but see if you engage critically with the history of Marxism as a movement that means you'd be criticizing all examples of actually existing communism (as if it ever turns into anything but state capitalism lol) which means you must not truly want communism at all because every time it comes around you criticize it! /s (A real argument I've heard)

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     novatorine 🏴🏳️‍⚧️ (anarchopunk_girl@kolektiva.social)'s status on Wednesday, 04-Oct-2023 04:59:24 JST novatorine 🏴🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     @mira if you think the Soviet Union was a horrible State capitalist authoritarian atrocity then you must not actually be a leftist because that's the most successful example of leftist governance we've ever seen!

     What's my definition of successful? When there's a high literacy rate and a high rate of factory production and a large amount of area conquered!

     Huh? That's "hitler made the trains run on time" level logic?

     But the USSR was communist!

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     novatorine 🏴🏳️‍⚧️ (anarchopunk_girl@kolektiva.social)'s status on Wednesday, 04-Oct-2023 05:00:17 JST novatorine 🏴🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     @mira it's just another cult. Marxism is honestly among the most Christian atheist ideologies ever invented up there with humanism.

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     mira (frog) (mira@froggie.town)'s status on Wednesday, 04-Oct-2023 05:00:20 JST mira (frog)

     in reply to

     • novatorine 🏴🏳️‍⚧️

     @anarchopunk_girl@kolektiva.social they are truly the most peculiar type of people

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     novatorine 🏴🏳️‍⚧️ (anarchopunk_girl@kolektiva.social)'s status on Wednesday, 04-Oct-2023 05:03:02 JST novatorine 🏴🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     @mira it's got the self-sacrificing resentment driven morality, it's got the Manicheanism, it's got the inevitable march of history toward a particular glorious end (eschatology), it's got It's religious books and scholars, it's got the same hyper altruistic resentment driven morality, it's got the hierarchical authoritarianism

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     Rozalia Sofia (redrozalia@kolektiva.social)'s status on Wednesday, 04-Oct-2023 06:01:17 JST Rozalia Sofia

     in reply to

     • novatorine 🏴🏳️‍⚧️

     @anarchopunk_girl @mira
     as a marxist, in my opinion you cant be a self-consistent marxist unless you understand that the "socialist" states since 1917 have never advanced further than capitalism. unfortunately myself and others who agree with me are far outnumbered among those who call themselves marxists (sigh)

     marx himself advocated ruthless criticism; the paris commune was what he saw as the closest workers had ever got to overthrowing capital and yet his thought developed because of his criticism of the paris commune, not because of his love or it. and he mocked at the party of guesde who called themselves marxists, saying "i am no marxist". that is what i see as valuable in marxism, not the "adherence" to marxs specific opinions, but the critical attitude.

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     novatorine 🏴🏳️‍⚧️ (anarchopunk_girl@kolektiva.social)'s status on Wednesday, 04-Oct-2023 06:01:59 JST novatorine 🏴🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     • mazel

     @mazel @mira I think most of the basic approaches and ideas of Marxism are very wrong — dialectical "materialism", reducing everything to class and economic forces, their ideas of how things must be centrally planned from the top down in order to be "rational," the specific account of value and profit Marx gives, and even why he cares about worker liberation in the first place (not centering autonomy and self determination, but some abstract economic sense of fairness based on teetering towers of abstractions). The entire edifice is also the exact sort of 1800s faux-scientific rationalism without a hint of actual empiricism (every concrete prediction Marx made has failed) or philosophy of science that people decry in the likes of Locke and so on, too, which is what is directly *responsible* for MLs treating it as the "immortal science." In fact I think *most* of the issues MLs can be laid squarely at the feet of Marxism itself in one way or another

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     mazel (mazel@social.xenofem.me)'s status on Wednesday, 04-Oct-2023 06:02:00 JST mazel

     in reply to

     • novatorine 🏴🏳️‍⚧️

     @anarchopunk_girl @mira ok ngl I’m not about to toss out Marxism entirely. But MLs as a social phenomenon, in my experience, refuse to do any serious self-critique about their own implicit values as a “subculture.” MLs rarely view themselves as having a “culture” to begin with because they presume that their framework is “scientific” and thus is too objective to have assumptions of its own (much like STEMlords who diss philosophy of science, tbh). So they don’t pay attention, for instance, to the intellectualism wielded for social capital. Frankly, reading Capital is hard, and for MLs, those who are able to understand it (or who think they understand it) have authority over those who aren’t as “well-read.” It doesn’t actually matter if “AES” is anything but - someone more learned than you in scripture has interpreted it that way, so you shouldn’t question it.

     Critique of ML culture doesn’t mean Marxism’s content is definitely and entirely wrong. But MLs see self-critique as a threat, because they are so stuck in their intellectualism. It’s baked into how they came up with Marxism in the first place: through academic literature. Occasionally they will acknowledge, with a shallow “humility,” that the “less educated” classes also have decent insights now and then, but their hierarchical thinking is still central to how their uncritical acceptance of “AES” is formed.

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     novatorine 🏴🏳️‍⚧️ (anarchopunk_girl@kolektiva.social)'s status on Wednesday, 04-Oct-2023 06:03:45 JST novatorine 🏴🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     • GreenSkyOverMe (Monika)

     @GreenSkyOverMe the USSR, obviously. Cuba, I believe, although I'm less certain of that.

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     GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) (greenskyoverme@ohai.social)'s status on Wednesday, 04-Oct-2023 06:03:46 JST GreenSkyOverMe (Monika)

     in reply to

     • novatorine 🏴🏳️‍⚧️

     @anarchopunk_girl Which communist countries besides China turned into state capitalism?