i don’t appreciate enough how much easy and understandable Lenin Stalin and Mao made their work trying to read INTELLECTUAL AND MANUAL LABOUR A CRITIQUE OF EPISTEMOLOGY by Alfred Sohn-Rethel and all i can think is damn i really need to hurry up and go through Capital so i can understand this better

nah this man mentioning Kant now too f*** this and f*** that nerd

I tried to read him but ended up saying I Kant bring myself to give a f***!

Usage of "baizuo" by western leftists is very weird to me since it looks like the Chinese conservative's equivalent of SJW/libtard

1917

2022

New vanguard same struggle

Pre invasion and approval of zelensky doesn't indicate approval of the war effort in either direction

ur not wrong

war is bad either way

Is the Yemeni famine going to be treated as badly as the holodomor by our westoid lib posters or is it not as bad because it’s Saudi Arabia and not the US who’s directly responsible this despite one being the lapdog of the other

22 million people

yeah in a couple of decades liberals are gonna apologize and say we should have done something while ignoring the current atrocities theyre committing then

reddit.com/r/HistoryPorn/comments/wd0ih0/a_crowd_of_about_4000_nazi_sympathizers_some_with/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf

Reddit got it right for once wow

There's no political gain from drawing attention to it so nobody talks about it. Even Biden who's the most vocally anti-Saudi Arabia US president in years only talks about Kashoggi.

But I thought liberalism was about being moral !

Liberals will support any state as long as it allies itself with the West. See the democratic strongholds called Thailand, Eritrea, Liberia...

same what happens when i don't read ig!!!

All that talk about professional managerial class is so dumb

Stupidpol types who try to make class about culture

seriously yall should check this out its f***ing hilarious and kinda interesting at the same time

A “left” defined by petty-bourgeois and bourgeois proletarians cannot help but flatter themselves in this self-flagellating way again and again. Lacking in imagination but absolutely starved for respectability and approval, they freely denounce Stalin and Mao while attempting to build up Nietzsche and Orwell (literati in whom they see themselves) as authentic socialist revolutionaries in embryo. With the “betrayal by an evil clique” and “brainwashing” narratives in hand, these “leftists” press a Faustian bargain: masses everywhere are granted innocence, but robbed of their intelligence. Salvation is not forthcoming in this life, but it is at least well-deserved. Ostensibly pro-worker theory, now suffused in elitism, nihilism, and condescension, becomes the doctrine of the petty-bourgeois lumpen-intelligentsia, repulsive to proletarians.

Even staunch anti-imperialists are partly to blame for this state of affairs. It’s foolhardy to insist that “brainwashing” rules the West and then act aghast that accusations of “brainwashing” are widely deployed by the West against its enemies in service of imperialism and war propaganda. If we allow that this technique succeeded even once, then who is to say that it won’t succeed again, or that it isn’t already succeeding elsewhere, or everywhere? This is the problem with embracing the tripartite narrative, and identifying oneself as one of the enlightened rebels.

Now, what would it look like if we were to reject this theory of “brainwashing” altogether, and approach instead all of the aforementioned in an actually revolutionary way?

next paragraph titled

"Karl Marx, Tupac Shakur, and “The Jewish Question” "

wtf

What are the strategic consequences of decisively rejecting the tripartite social theory advanced by Orwell, and adopting Marx’s all-encompassing one instead? The basic call to action looks something like this:

Stop accusing the masses of being “brainwashed.” Stop treating them as cattle, stop attempting to rouse them into action by scolding them with exposure to “unpleasant truths.”
Accept instead that they have been avoiding those truths for a reason. You were able to break through the propaganda barrier, and so could they if they really wanted to. Many of these people see you as the fool, and in many cases not without reason.
Understanding people as morally flawed but essentially intelligent beings, craft a political strategy that convincingly makes the case for why they and their lot are very likely to benefit from joining your political project. Not in some utopian infinite timescale, but soon.
If you cannot make this case, then forget about convincing the person in question. Focus instead on finding other people to whom such a case can be made. This will lead you directly to class a***ysis.

I began this essay by relating the tough lesson that people often weren’t receptive to my research into anticommunist atrocity propaganda narratives. However, this wasn’t the only lesson I learned in all this time. I also learned about an actually effective strategy against anticommunist propaganda, centered around the steady share of positive communist accomplishments, both contemporary and historical. I learned it from other folks, because it did not come naturally to me. The dynamics at play are palpable: when people are on-board with positive accomplishments, they shred false negatives (and reason through the real negatives) all on their own.

Debunks of atrocity propaganda are still very useful, just not in the way I originally imagined. Initially I hoped that sheer anger at becoming aware of imperialist machinations would elicit a response, but now I instead think of them as an auxiliary tool. Sharing positives is primary, and debunks are secondary. Secondary, however, does not mean optional. There is a persistent myth that social accomplishments like sane pandemic management or quality public transit come at the cost of one’s soul. Confronted with such a notion, appeals to hypocrisy — e.g. insisting one’s soul is already foregone due to complicity in Western genocides — are worse than useless. Insofar as they read like a confession, they are extremely harmful. A confident, evidence-based rejection of such claims is both a more principled and a more effective strategy. All it takes is work.

Perhaps this may seem like too much dwelling in the realm of rhetoric, but here it is important to affirm that a rejection of liberal idealism shouldn’t send one packing straight into mechanical materialism. Marxism is alternatively referred to as dialectical materialism for a reason. There’s no shame whatsoever in thinking about how to approach engagement in the realm of ideas calmly and strategically.

Moving into more polemic territory now, the usefulness of Orwell (and Nietzsche) to the ruling class suggests that communists in North America, in their effort to distance themselves from the all-talk-no-walk intelligentsia, have too reflexively shrunk from some important ideological tasks. One of them is the articulation of a compelling, realistic collective vision for the future, a task which cannot be eternally deferred as an implementation detail for “after the revolution” or “after the seizure of power.” Mere statements of virtue and principle simply won’t cut it.

this part is particularly useful as a practical bit
the next part is ... an interesting argument

"There is an even more pressing issue, however. If we accept that the so-called “victims” of propaganda in the imperial core don’t really believe fabricated facts and figures but instead more casually go along with them, a controversial but essential conviction of mine follows: we should not treat the content of news media and entertainment media all that differently, and we should treat entertainment media much more seriously than we currently do. In the realm of atrocity propaganda I’d say communists already far outclass imperial propagandists. The writing is more rigorous and the evidence is much more clearly laid out and readily verifiable. The problem is that we’re failing to get people to the point where they even care about facts in the first place!

It’s absurd to see people rabidly complaining about, say, BBC’s China reporting being rife with orientalist falsehood, then turn around to make excuses for why the same exact stereotypes must be tolerated or even praised as they worm their way through high-budget entertainment productions. It’s absurd to see communists defend sinking dozens upon dozens of hours into reactionary, soul-crushing media like Breaking Bad or Mad Men or Game of Thrones, then turn around to ridicule and condemn the entire realm of ideological struggle as mere superstructure. A common refrain goes: “The news must be reported correctly, but let people enjoy things — artistic freedom is sacrosanct.” I deem this nonsense liberalism. When we do this, what we throw out the window comes right around through the backdoor.

In reality, entertainment media and news media serve the same propaganda purpose: they target not our reasoned beliefs about right and wrong, but our perception of social risks and rewards. People’s actual rationality, their ability to discern cause and effect, is far too resilient to be tampered with when their own immediate interests are at stake. People’s pride, however, is much more malleable. For communists to refuse to challenge media that makes them invisible — or, worse, aggressively humiliates them — is to surrender before the fight is even scheduled. And I genuinely believe that we do this every single time we refuse to challenge an Orwellism, or a Nietzscheanism. We have largely failed to create nourishing communist alternatives — not only in reality, as with the Black Panther breakfast program, but also as far as the imagination goes. And in the realm of imagination, as in others, nature abhors a vacuum. In absence of social-realist agitprop, Orwellism thrives.

Lenin titled his world-changing revolutionary pamphlet directly after Chernyshevsky’s beloved and influential revolutionary fiction novel What Is To Be Done? 44 Stalin took his pseudonym “Koba” from The Patricide, a heroism-romance novel that was popular in Georgia when he was a youth. 45 We could speak similarly of Mao’s esteem for Lu Xun 46 and Water Margin. 47 Assata has spoken about the insidiously grim messaging in our media. 48 Where is our revolutionary fiction today? Anarchist authors like Ursula K. Le Guin often appear the closest thing we’ve got to mainstream communist literature. I genuinely think that if one can truly imagine in fiction a viable transition from our current state of affairs into a better one, that plays a huge role in mustering the conviction to assert that it can be achieved in reality. Conversely, if we cannot even imagine what a transition might look like in our wildest dreams, any “real” organization is doomed.

I feel strongly about the idea that politics in art matters because art has affected how I view the world. Therefore, since I reject the idea there’s some kind of unbridgeable gap between me and “the masses,” I imagine it has to matter to everyone else too. More generally, I imagine that what I feel are my needs — food, peace, society, ego, dignity — are also the needs of others. This categorical rejection of “news vs. entertainment” segues into the rejection of the “heart vs. mind” divide, the “facts vs. feelings” divide, and the “morality vs. intelligence” divide. These are all liberal delusions arising from the powerful justifying their abuse, and the powerless coping with the consolation prize of self-righteousness.

As long as we Marxists continue to operate in environments where everyone’s ideas about what the past was like and what the future can be like remain vague and noticeably beholden to the reactionary elitism of the likes of Orwell and Nietzsche and other cultural gatekeepers, any kind of revolutionary communist movement will rely solely on material desperation to rally adherents. If we want to take the initiative here, we must cease to celebrate the “telling of hard truths” for their own sake. We must begin to demonstrate to people how social organization can solve our problems, with schematics as well as with stories, so that rather than pity or scorn the collective as self-styled outsiders, we take pride in seeing and recognizing ourselves as individuals within it."

this essay is fire
redsails.org/women-and-the-myth-of-consumerism

The confusion between cause and effect is particularly apparent in the consumerist a***ysis of women’s oppression. Women are not manipulated by the media into being domestic servants and mindless sexual decorations, the better to sell soap and hair spray. Rather, the image reflects women as they are forced by men in a sexist society to behave. Male supremacy is the oldest and most basic form of class exploitation; it was not invented by a smart ad man. The real evil of the media image of women is that it supports the sexist status quo. In a sense, the fashion, cosmetics, and “feminine hygiene” ads are aimed more at men than at women. They encourage men to expect women to sport all the latest trappings of sexual slavery — expectations women must then fulfill if they are to survive. That advertisers exploit women’s subordination rather than cause it can be clearly seen now that male fashions and toiletries have become big business. In contrast to ads for women’s products, whose appeal is “use this and he will want you” (or “if you don’t use this, he won’t want you”), ads for the male counterparts urge, “You too can enjoy perfume and bright-colored clothes; don’t worry, it doesn’t make you feminine.” Although advertisers are careful to emphasize how virile these products are (giving them names like “Brut,” showing the man who uses them hunting or flirting with admiring women — who, incidentally, remain decorative objects when the sell is aimed directly at men), it is never claimed that the product is essential to masculinity (as make-up is essential to femininity), only compatible with it. To convince a man to buy, an ad must appeal to his desire for autonomy and freedom from conventional restrictions; to convince a woman, an ad must appeal to her need to please the male oppressor.

For women, buying and wearing clothes and beauty aids is not so much consumption as work. One of a woman’s jobs in this society is to be an attractive sexual object, and clothes and make up are tools of the trade. Similarly, buying food and household furnishings is a domestic task; it is the wife’s chore to pick out the commodities that will be consumed by the whole family. Appliances and cleaning materials are tools that faciliate her domestic function. When a woman spends a lot of money and time decorating her home or herself, or hunting down the latest in vacuum cleaners, it is not idle self-indulgence (let alone the result of psychic manipulation) but a healthy attempt to find outlets for her creative energies within her circumscribed role.

lithub.com/men-explain-lolita-to-me
this one is also really interesting and explains what this dude is trying to get at here far better

the origin of the term PMC isn't related to stupidpol though, it emerged during the 60s at the same time as critique of new left yuppies became popular in order to accurately categorize people who act in the interest of the bourgeois and further assist in alienation of workers w/o actually owning capital or being bourgeois themselves. modern PMC discussion is largely rw-led though because the discourse is basically "PMC workers are the reason kids are gay!!!"

if youre interested in this topic i recommend reading mid-late 20th century feminist (esp. radfem) literature, esp what emerged during the feminist s***wars from the non-liberal side. Marxist/leftist feminist stuff is always interesting but I think only focusing on the material side of it leaves out a lot - especially since gender dynamics (even things like makeup, jewelry, & other cosmetics) far precede capitalism.
To get the full end of the spectrum, I recommend Dworkin, MacKinnon, and also Paglia (despite her meme status - her work is genuinely interesting). For a more modern topical set of work I rec Sadie Plant esp. Zeroes & Ones