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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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I think being the communist businessman on the commune would be pretty cool. "Our budget is the state and our quarterly target is whatever makes the proletariat happy, what about you, Sony rep?"
An even funnier job would be the notar, that would stand next to it and sign it as well just so it's apostilled for some reason
I hope you all have a nice week :D
In my city a woman has recently been murdered and put in a suitcase and then thrown in the river. We have no information on the perpetrator and he's still walking free. As a woman I'm feeling more unsafe in my city, especially with people like him around.
Oh no my protests turned violent! Violence is never the answer!
Except when it is the organized violence by the state in the form of police repression, poverty, denied healthcare, etc.
Or when it happens in countries whose governments we are trying to topple.
Have a good week, comrades! Even when times get stressful, you can still bear through it as all problems can be.
As always, communism will win.
Thank you so much for the study guide.
No problem, I hope it helps!
Thanks Cowbee. Hope your week goes well! We will stand strong against apathy.
got flu :(( hope im better tomorrow or day after and ready to get work done again or atleast do something creative. im not too beat up about it though, im thinking of it as a forced break 😁
get better comrade. drink a lot of water.
you WILL get better soon i’m magic school bussing my way in there /j
hope you do get better and feel that sort of sweet spot of sick enough you still gotta rest but not miserable enough everything’s horrible, and you can enjoy things as you said and be creative hopefully
i think i was good at sloganeering and vulgar explanations that somewhat reach into the ‘correct direction’ for my friends.
at best, i definitely still was going counter to the worst anti-communist narratives and promoting somewhat correct narratives about AES or the real world (in things like historical description of AES like DPRK or USSR or PRC, at least helping them think of and follow regular logic regarding their operations rather than idealist or nonsensical capitalist propaganda).
my prayer is right direction, even if wrong, is okay, and course correction obviously will always be possible(?) i really just hope the foundation isn’t too rotten by my own oversights and holes in knowledge, but maybe i’m fretting for no reason if i could always just go back and totally amend those things.
i’m trying my very best not to feel super discouraged and anxious about poisoning others by my wrongness, and just assuring myself that a little in the right, and rare to find direction, is still meaningful especially for us for whom everything is so insular. it is just frustrating, so many of these days i hate having to feel as if i’ve restarted or know nothing and must begin again, even though it’s unequivocally true. but i have to hope that whatever minimal and odd progress i made was still progress with that friend, you know?
i rushed into getting my friend to understand and empathize with AES because that is what helped me best (combatting myths about AES so i could even entertain evil Stalinism). i won’t be mean to myself about that. i will focus on learning more myself. all is not lost, and that was still progress, however minimal, however childish i was then (forgivably so. and i have time and time ahead of me)
reading things out of order of very regimented reading guides sometimes throws me for a loop. i went back to reading from a guide and picking only those sources after reading external works, and i have difficulty identifying is this something i'm getting right? is it just rephrased? is this a simplification that is confusing me because it's reducing something i already otherwise know?
i find that i skipped the basic of diamat and contradiction itself, (save for cowbee's post that they themselves called oversimplified) so i still am due to read something more whole. i didn't think thiswould be as large of a problem as it seems to be for me, since i figured if i knew the basics (avoid idealism and the conception that there are solid immutable "ideas" separate from the material world, imagine all matter and existence as dynamic(? also wrong i'm pretty sure)) it would minimize error to a passable degree. this is because i thought a vulgar understanding of philosophy was preferable to a vulgar understanding of economy, which i should prioritize, and also because, rather sorrily, i felt weary of rereading a lot of the summaries to what felt like little to no benefit. (i'll pick up mao's on contradiction soon when i regain motivation)
since i'm now so out of order, i'm attempting once MORE to read "Wage Labour and Capital". i've tried multiple times since it comes recommended i feel almost everywhere, and yet i've never been able to progress well or ever feel like i'm fostering an understanding.
to add, over the last few days i had a renewed energy and was propelled mostly through organic interest in one off posts to read Marx on Capital as a Real God and then lenin's "Marx's Economic Doctrine", and yet now that i'm back at wage labour and capital i find myself lost, unsure if it's repeating concepts that were sufficiently explained in other works i already read. i feel frustrated by this text almost always, which is odd because i really don't know why that is. maybe marx's style of writing in specific? i'm disappointed in myself and wish i could just go into my brain and rotate gears until i feel i'm fine
Read Carlo Cafiero's summarized capital, george politzer's "elementary principles of philosophy" and "introducing marx:a graphic guide" by Rius before you read Marx, Engels, Lenin and all that. Otherwise you wont really understand what theyre saying at all. Those 3 books are a good little pre-Marx reading list.
i will note those recommendations down :3 thank you
Comrade, I'll state that understanding dialectical materialism is critical for understanding Marxist economics. There's good reason I put diamat so early on, and it's because philosophy is the way we think about and view the world. Without a proper understanding of how to view the world, learning economics allows is to let our bourgeois preconceptions cloud our judgement. If you're frustrated, I suggest going through the guide I wrote in the order it was intended. You can also wait for Edie to do the weekly reading list for it over on Hexbear.
went back to very start of reading plan, including the dearly cherished krupskaya principles for self-study
- It is necessary to make up one’s mind what one wants to study. Sometimes a person wants to study, but does not know what. Things go well at a collective farm or a factory because there is a plan. So does self-education if there is a plan, if the man does not skip from book to book — if he does not jump from history to literature and from literature to physics
got to this part i forgot and gulped… i was making a fool of myself for no damn reason
Nah, you're learning through experience! Seeing theory affirm your own suspicions and provide new clarity and insight helps the points actually stick!
thank you :) the encouragement is much dearer than you can imagine :)
No problem!
sigh, i figured TT /nay
i really hoped my rudimentary and probably vulgar mental simplification (admittedly probably fed almost exclusively on sloganeering or posts like your crash course that self-profess to NOT being comprehensive and encourage further reading) would suffice as a basis, really praying that i knew somewhat enough not to completely poison my understanding, but… you would never know if it was poisoning your knowledge unless you knew the extent of your ignorance, which you only know by knowing…
i’ll revisit those segments of the reading guide once more TT i really have been getting in my own way
edit
Conceit, self-assumption, and self-complacency are the number-one enemies of study.
must remember always
It's an easy mistake! Don't beat yourself up!
People tend to recommend comrades to read Lenin first because he is easier to read. Don't worry, you aren't the first to struggle with Marx's writing style.
One of the main things you'll notice -- especially on technical works like The Capital -- is that Marx writes with "lenses", then he takes a "lens" and expands it even more with other "lenses".
He takes an object and it can be a natural-form or a value-form. Then he expands value-forms into use-values and exchange-values. Then he combines the two into the commodity-form. Then he takes the exchange-value, finds the common thing shared by all commodities -- namely labour-time -- then he discovers the Value. So on, and so forth.
Marx doesn't let any concept stay "static" so to speak. They play with each other, contradict, expand etc.
It's how he applies dialectics. It's accurate, but it's a pain in the ass to read.
It's gets easier though. Especially when you get used to dialectics.