This is a Dengist community in favor of Bashar al-Assad with no information that can lead to the arrest of Hillary Clinton, our fellow liberal and queen. This community is not ironic. We are Marxists-Leninists.
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Welcome again to everybody. Make yourselves at home. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is the weekly discussion thread.
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Sometimes I feel like this is hell. Not in a "I actually sincerely believe it is" kind of way (I don't even really believe in hell in the religious sense), but more like I'm looking at how bad things are sometimes, how prolonged, and it's hard not to go to a dark place sometimes.
I guess it's one reason I'm inclined toward romanticizing early commune style of society. I know it had hardship, but god damn, at least you had community; like actually existing in the immediate real world community, not online posting or people who are a long drive away. Individualism segments everybody out like they're an island of their own and then says "cope".
I wish I could summon a black void, hold it up to liberals, and be like, "See this? This is what your liberal individualism is. This is the best case scenario of it. Emptiness." Like what is fulfilling about "be yourself" if there's no "us"? This is one of the things reformists either don't understand, or do understand and ignore. Even if you somehow temporarily make "capitalism with better living conditions", you haven't addressed the pain of individualism, which works hand in hand with capitalism. We should be aspiring for people to be able to lead a good life, not a slightly less terrible than before life.
I would slightly correct you there that individualism is the cope people use to explain the atomisation that occurred under our stage of Capitalism- the era of the car (and therefore suburbia), mass media, entertainment direct in your living room, the welfare system and more ending the "old world" that connected capitalism to the past- the effective destruction of the family and "the community".
Obviously this is a developing era so what is rising to replace the old system is new, frightening, going through growing pains and is struggling to assert itself.
Edit: Interestingly, I'm reading Hobsbawm's Age of Extremes right now and he has the rather poignant observation that Really Existing Socialism was, in its maintenance of cultural norms and traditions, actually far more conservative than anything posited by liberals and conservatives in the capitalist world. No matter how much the liberal democracies wanted to conserve tradition, the capitalist economic system is the most destructive and dispassionate by far.