https://files.catbox.moe/9bqwcr.mp4

I’m still hanging in there. New treatment soon so fingers crossed. It will be a few months until I’m on the other side of it. Will update when there’s something to update on.

Sorry if I’ve missed any messages or pings.

There are studies about people like you (said in the most positive of ways).

I’d ditch my car for the bike entirely if not for road trips.

The next step is to tally up the yearly costs of owning a car with all that this incurs, then weigh that against how many days per year you typically go on road trips and how much car rental would cost you in the amount of days you’d have to hire a car for.

If it looks like you’d more or less break even without factoring in those surprise costs that happen with car ownership (“Gee, that’s a nice alternator you’ve got there! It sure would be a shame if some day it decided to shit itself and then you’d have to pay for a tow to the mechanic’s to replace the thing while missing a day of work…”) and you think you’d be fine renting for road trips then you’re probably going to be better off selling the car, especially in the long run.

What I’d do from there, if I decided to pull the trigger, would be to set up a secondary bank account and automatically transfer money that would go to typical car-associated costs like insurance/registration/gas and set up an automatic transfer into that secondary account. Also set aside enough money to replace your ebike from the sale of your car so if anything happens you aren’t going to find yourself in a tricky situation. Then use the money that accrues in that secondary account to fund car hire when you’re ready for your next road trip. It’s going to be painful shelling out a thick wad of cash for a car rental on your first road trip but keep in mind that car ownership is a financial form of death by a thousand cuts that you rarely think about since it’s just the cost of doing business.

Honestly, over time I’d expect that the secondary account would start filling up faster than you can spend the money on car rentals which might free you up to buy other things you want.

The other option is to find a good friend or loved one who would be willing to split the costs for car sharing arrangement between the two of you. This would be a little bit tricky to navigate and you’d want to make sure that you’ve got the right person to do this with but if you went about it the right way you should be able to come up with a mutually-beneficial arrangment.

I’m broke lol, I’m not about to throw cash at S4A if I can just pique their interest instead and get them to think they came up with the idea to narrate the article by themselves

I used to be a terrible mischief-maker in my younger days but, with maturity, I’ve channeled this urge into achieving win-win outcomes for everyone. I have confidence in myself to get this one over the line by leveraging just the right amount of influence at the right moment.

Oh you were thinking of paying haha? I’m just gonna try drawing their attention to the article in such a way that it will just make sense for them to want to narrate it. I got a strategy all planned out already, just gotta wait until an opportunity presents itself to me - likely in the next few weeks. Will keep you posted.

Hell yeah! I didn’t even think about why having anthologies would be a problem until I encountered your post so it’s been a good learning opportunity. It’s not so bad having an anthology because you can timestamp within a playlist but it just makes more sense to have them as separate books because it’s more user-friendly that way.

I’ll see if I can entice Socialism For All to narrate the Jones Manoel article. S4A is on an Anti-Trotskyist reading arc right now and Manoel’s article fits neatly into that scope, plus the article is short - I’d guess it’s well under 30 minutes of runtime for a narration so I feel like that might be enough to get it over the line. I’ll see if I can work some magic in the next few weeks.

Elementary Principles of Philosophy
How To Be A Good Communist

Alright, the only thing I haven’t done is Lavender & Red because I S4A is still in the process of recording that one. I’ll have to remember to finish the job once they have completed it but that aside your playlist is complete.

Wage Labor and Capital
Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

Getting there!

Unlimited hot soup on the lap of Trotsky!

On Practice and Contradiction
Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Other ones are in the pipeline but I have to redownload them because I ran out of space on my harddrive and deleted some of the original files since I wasn’t expecting to need them again.

I’m tired of learning new things

What Is To Be Done?
Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism
State and Revolution

Okay I need to sleep

Btw I’m working on splitting the audiobooks at the moment. I’m gonna have to get to it tomorrow because Audacity wasn’t playing well with my computer.

I don’t know if you saw my edit, but I will try to squeeze it in!

Of course I didn’t see your edit. Do I strike you as one of those ?

Just kidding. About the hostile tone that is. I actually didn’t see it but that’s awesome thanks for letting me know. Also know that your comment inspired me to make this and submit it to the emoji comm lmao

For real, whenever I come across a baby leftist I have to restrain myself from acting like some sort of deranged person from a time travelling scifi movie who has come back to warn people about the dire reality of the future while I recite this article at them at a near-shouting volume.

Instead I’m like “Oh um, you know, uhhh… just be careful of the political organisations who sell you on this idea of them being the valiant underdog and how great everything could have been if only they weren’t robbed of their opportunity. You want to find an organisation that has a positive future perspective rather than just lamenting the past.”

I know that the character limit is tight but I just remembered that the short piece by Jones Manoel titled Western Marxism Loves Purity and Martyrdom, But Not Real Revolution could have saved me years wasted as an eclectic radical. I think it dovetails nicely after Left Communism but it’s updated and takes aim at people who idolise Che yet despise Castro and Stalin, that sort of thing.

I’d like to suggest it, if there’s room and you think it’s suitable. Also if you haven’t read it yet, goddamn you should because it’s really incisive.

And your friend has never denied pissing in the kitchen sink so… y’know…

Yeah, I see it as a great foreclosure on the imagination and on the horizon of possibility. Once you look for it in liberalism, you’ll start noticing it everywhere.

I live in a country where it’s common for very progressive progressives and radicals to lament that the masses are extremely politically apathetic. Like, the polar opposite of the French who start flipping cars and starting fires in the street because parliament is trying to reduce pensions kinda thing.

I don’t disagree with that take that people are apathetic but I think there’s something deeper going on than just some widespread individualistic moral failing. I think that liberalism has been very effective here in creating a cultural belief that it’s impossible to make things better and that there’s no point fighting for things.

There’s a reason why people identify so strongly with that Churchill quote “Democracy is the worst form of Government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time” and it’s because they genuinely believe that liberalism is shit but it’s the best that things are gonna get. It’s like some sort of mass Stockholm syndrome or a political learned helplessness experiment inflicted on the masses.

You encounter it when organising. People are deeply pessimistic and genuinely hopeless, if you dig under the surface a little bit. Contemporary liberalism requires the erosion of hope so that masses remain passive and they don’t organise and fight, so they don’t vote en masse outside of the two party system, so they don’t start a revolution etc.

If you want to go deep on this there’s a weird sort of dualism in liberals because this hopelessness makes people react by resorting to investing hope in the status quo as a secondary response. This is why people put so much hope in electing Harris but they try to convince people that a third party vote is a waste:

“We all have to band together and vote for Kamala to stop things from getting worse!!”

“Cool but what if we all band together and vote for the PSL or the green party and make things better?”

“Um, no. That will never work.”

I’m sorry, what??

I think that’s why the DNC were so desperate to clip Bernie’s wings (outside of the economic reasons to do so); he represented a massive political threat to the DNC because a movement that has mass support where people start making demands means that they can no longer force their agenda on the compliant masses who believe that the only thing they can do is accept the hidden bipartisan consensus on government policy.

In order to radicalise, I think people in the west generally have to go through a process of losing hope, even that secondary response to hopelessness by investing hope in the status quo, so when they get spat out of liberalism they mostly end up bereft of hope entirely. I’d say for most people that’s necessary to negate the indoctrination from liberal hegemony. The problem is when people fail to genuinely create hope for the struggle and for a better world. It’s not all anarchists who have this sort of lack of hope, this “don’t seize power because you’ll only make things worse if you try” kinda attitude because it’s pretty endemic in lots of the left more broadly; there are leftcoms and doomer tendencies like with Mark Fisher or Chris Hedges and the people who buy into the anti-USSR paradigm and so on.

You can ask this type of person what all the failures and inadequacies of something like the Soviet Union were and if you genuinely listen they’ll have a laundry list of complaints, which is fine - that’s their prerogative. But when you ask them what movement they do find inspiring, which one was better than the USSR they tend to come up with nothing or they’ll give you a half-hearted answer like “Burkina Faso led by Thomas Sankara I guess” and if you get them to talk about why they find Burkina Faso’s revolution inspiring they tend to give very shallow answers or they’ll regress into talking about what could have been. I think this is representative of a deep kind of hopelessness that is really commonplace.

I’m gonna do some detestable armchair psychologist cultural critic routine here (like I haven’t already been doing that lol), so excuse me while I get self-indulgent, but I genuinely think for a lot of people that psychological trauma of losing all hope in politics when they radicalise goes unresolved and so when they are confronted with the invitation to engage in political optimism, they tend react very negatively and viscerally to it because they aren’t ready to hope again as the experience of suffering disappointment and losing all hope has been too much for them to deal with and they haven’t really completed the cycle of grief that they needed to go through, so it draws out all sorts of hostility and rejection and apathy. I’m not saying that everyone in the radical left must get hyped for the Soviet Union or otherwise they are psychologically broken but to see very brokenhearted people whose politics lacks any genuine hope, I think there’s a psychological response going on beneath the surface that drives this.

So I think that other responses in this thread are right about liberal anti-communist indoctrination but in my opinion there’s also deeper psychological reasons for why people adopt this indoctrination and really cling to it, otherwise it would be a simple process of providing counterfactuals that debunk this indoctrination and people would change their minds almost instantly because their position was purely based on false information. But I think we are all aware that it’s a much more involved process than simply correcting some falsehoods and this is because there’s psychological factors that motivate this belief at play, which is what I’ve been outlining here.

I’m exhausted but I’ll try and take a swing at this, speaking as a long-term ex-anarchist. Note that I can only speak for myself but these are the trends I observed and a lot of this is exactly what I experienced.

So in transitioning from progressive liberal to the radical left, it’s basically a rite of passage to identify all the ills and the egregious excesses of the government and corporations. I think this is not only valid but it’s also extremely important.

The problem that emerges is that anarchists and LibSocs can fall into a trap of universalising this very valid skepticism to expand to all forms of hierarchy that have existed and will ever exist.

This is going to sound uncharitable but it’s really not intended to be this way but I see a deep form of liberal hegemony as being not a positive form of hegemonic ideology but a negative form of it. Let me explain: the USSR established its own cultural hegemony. It was very much a positive cultural hegemony: this is who we are, this is how we act, this is the future we are striving to achieve etc. etc. You absolutely see this in Soviet art and film and propaganda.

The negative form of cultural hegemony that I understand liberalism to mostly rely upon, especially in a post-Gilded Age era or a neoliberal era or wherever you want to draw that line, is epitomised by Francis Fukuyama’s pronouncement about arriving at the end of history; this wasn’t a positive proclamation but rather it was a negation of the future, of the need to strive for a better world, of the demand to be better. Instead it was essentially an attack on and an erasure of aspirations.

This is also seen on a small scale with people demonstrating antipathy towards unionism; “they’re all corrupt”, “they used to be important in the past but there’s no use for unions anymore”, “there’s no point joining a union because I’ll just get fired or management will close this branch down if we all unionise”. That sort of thing. It’s also seen in the shadow cast by this plethora of pseudo-choice we are offered and, forgive me for invoking Horkheimer & Adorno but, the pseudo-individuality inherent to this developed form of capitalism we exist under. There’s no point boycotting because how do you avoid consooming products from one of the two or three oligopolistic companies that have cornered a market? Why bother attempting to divest from BlackRock when they already own everything? Why bother protesting against war when we know the government is going to ignore us and prosecute it anyway? etc.

So this negative form of ideology or liberal cultural hegemony tends to inculcate the belief in LibSocs and anarchists that the best we can really achieve is abolition of the current state of affairs and not the construction of a positive project to bring about the revolution.

This is where I take issue with Audre Lorde, or at least the way that people quote her and what this is used in service of. She is absolutely right that you cannot dismantle patriarchy with patriarchy or that white supremacy will not be dismantled by a different form of racial supremacy. I think the distortion of Lorde comes with people thinking that this quote is in service of abstaining from using some of the most valuable tools available to us; you cannot hug the violence out of the bourgeois state no matter how hard you try (just ask the hippies). But at the same time I think we need to be cautious about how far we take this message; people can arrive at pacifism simply because the bourgeois state uses war and violence, if you took this to the the point of absurdity you could imagine people rejecting construction itself or maybe even hammers because infrastructure has been used to enact genocide and land theft and vast exploitation through colonialism and imperialism in so, so many countries. Heck, hammers have been used for DV and assault so you wouldn’t want to taint yourself by benefitting directly from that instrument of violence, would you?

But it’s very easy to slip into a reductive or reflexive rejection of things like the state simply because most states have historically been dogshit. If you look exclusively at the west from the advent of feudalism to today, it’s basically all of them.

This is where anarchists tend to develop the basis of a quite bitter ideological distinction from communists, although obviously this varies in degree depending on what sort of anarchist we’re talking about here. (I’ll try to remember to circle back on this negative urge and how it provides a degree of… I guess ideological comfort or safety for anarchists once I’ve finished the other parts of this comment.)

The other factors are a disagreement on the pace of the post-revolution construction period (which likewise comes from the difference between materialists orienting themselves to addressing material conditions and working to resolve contradictions and anarchists who mostly prefer abolition as the means to address these issues) and the other one is that anarchists tend to be exposed to convenient historical narratives that are overly reductive if not downright anaemic.

So for the pace of the post-revolution construction, most anarchists expect a very swift transitional phase - the abolition of capitalism, often the abolition of markets themselves, prison abolition, and all sorts of other things to establish a more-or-less horizontal or low/zero hierarchy society. Again this depends on the different types of anarchist in question but to put it simply they tend to believe that post-revolution you knock all or most of it down, then establish a government or council of sorts (which again varies) and you call it good.

So from that perspective, communists get into power and instead of following what anarchists believe to be the correct path, instead communists go completely the wrong way and even start building up more state than existed under the Tsardom, for example. With this in mind I think it’s easy enough to understand why they perceive this to be a betrayal of principles and of the revolution.

The last thing I want to touch on is the historical narratives. Anarchists have a tendency to share a distorted perspective on historical moments; the communists betrayed the anarchists in the Spanish Civil, the Bolsheviks stabbed the Black Army of Makhnovia in the back, occasionally you’ll hear discussion of the KPAM likewise being crushed by the Soviets (although not very often tbh).

All three are actually very complicated topics and there’s a lot to cover with them but in broad brushstrokes the narrative is that the communists were the aggressor and that they opted not to leave the anarchists alone to do their thing because they wanted to crush the true revolution. I disagree with this narrative these days, although I didn’t always disagree with it.

There’s a really good article by Jones Manoel on this sort of preference for martyrdom-over-statecraft mentality here. While he only discusses western Marxists, it definitely applies to a lot of anarchists and LibSocs. I think that Manoel simply doesn’t regard the latter two as worth addressing though.

So we’ve got the martyrdom and purity fetish for the immaculate revolution covered there. Last of all to circle back around to the ideological comfort of the negative, I’ve seen plenty of anarchists do this and I have definitely been guilty of doing this myself - by not supporting or critically supporting any but the briefest attempts at revolution (and then only maybe 3 or so of those), you can create a rhetorical and ideological detachment from the real world attempts. You don’t have to engage or defend anything, you can just reflexively dismiss things as being statist or hierarchical or authoritarian and thus you don’t have to grapple with the reality of their circumstances or to consider what would be a better way of resolving the contradictions or moving forwards with the project. “You committed the sin of statism? Then I can wash my hands of you and that’s that.”

This is alluring because it’s a simple rubric and you don’t need to wrestle with the reality of things. To put this into an analogy that’s probably more relatable, imagine a Marxist who refuses to engage in the ol’ agitate/educate/organise because “liberals are social fascists and counterrevolutionary - I’m not gonna waste my time befriending my enemies!”

On the face of it, there’s nothing false in that statement. But the application of this line of thinking absolves this Marxist from needing to do any of the hard work because they have created a rhetorical and ideological detachment from the most important task that a revolutionary faces and so by abdicating from this duty they never have to put in any effort and they never have to deal with fuckups and failures and addressing their own inadequacies.

That’s a pretty close match to this urge that exists in a lot of anarchists and it’s also why they can invest a lot into their grudge against communists, because ultimately the other option is to engage in the hard work of listening and learning and working with/working on the “authoritarians”.

Obviously all of this is my vain attempt at brevity so I didn’t cover the broad terrain of different ideology tendencies within anarchism and I’m talking specifically about the anarchists who really bear a grudge against communists. Plenty of anarchists do not begrduge communists and are very willing to work with them and to engage with them (or to roll up their sleeves and engage in the difficult work of educating, agitating, organising as well as grappling with the historical realities fafed by revolutions) so I haven’t given consideration to this cohort of anarchists because it’s beyond the scope of the question, although if I gave the impression that what I’ve said is true for all anarchists then that’s on me.

If you want to be combative about it, you can always learn up on the history of food and point out all the things that he eats that are “fake”.

That cola? You know that’s fake, right? HFCS isn’t real sugar.

That ketchup you just used? That’s fake, you know? Unless it’s walnut ketchup (at the very least) or fermented fish kê-chiap, that’s fake ketchup.

Bread? Lol. I hope you are aware that bread made with commercial yeast is an imitation of real bread that has been leavened with naturally occurring wild yeast from the atmosphere; it’s completely fake.

Oh you want to eat sushi? Yeah, that stuff is fake. Putting vinegar into fresh rice to mimic the sourness from lacto-fermented fish that has been stored in rice is bogus af.

Just try it out for a day and see how tiresome that schtick suddenly becomes when he’s on the receiving end of it.