Here's the thing, why would you ever assume that the Democratic party has ever had an interest in 'doing anything'? They are the ones who, when granted the political writ, doubled down on neoliberal economics and funding the war machine back in 2010. And you can go back even further to see that they are always, always doing similar things, no matter what the political mood of the country is. All they do, and literally what they tell you they do is 'Be the Republicans but smarter.'
What if I'm not interested in that? Then it isn't in my interest to vote for the Democrats and this supposed propaganda isn't my personal undoing.
The Democrats don't do things for people because the party is literally defined by ripping out the levers and mechanisms of power that make the party even mildly accountable to the people, as people became even mildly radicalized. The Republicans, on the other hand, appear very accountable to their base because what their base wants is good for capital. If their base suddenly didn't want those things, they would be cut out just as fast as the Democrats did to theirs (Which btw we are starting to see in real time wrt Zionism within the party.)
It's not bourgeois propaganda, it's literally just having a memory longer than the last year. Truth is the most effective propaganda.
Or you could just be self-conscious, work a normal ass job, advocate for wealth equality, and try to be a decent person to others?
I know several rich kids who do that and are fine. Nobody ever holds it against them for being normal or even just a bit annoying. The issue is that there are a lot of them who try to compensate for their parent's success by exploiting everyone around them or use their position to create academic justifications about how everything is great for everyone and nothing needs to change actually.
Honestly the same thing can be said about a Christmas Story. It was released with little fanfare in the 80's but basically became a cult Christmas classic in the Midwest. Really still holds up, with only a little bit of racist humor against the Chinese at the end (but honestly they portray them as doing their best to give great customer service and everyone actually enjoying their experience).
Of course. Revolutions are moments of social inflection, where rationality can be enforced upon the irrational chaotic social system. This is basic Marxist-Leninist thought. That is why a vanguard party must be formed, they create the coherence necessary to the enforce that rationality, without it the revolution either fizzles, is crushed by the state, or descends into score settling with no larger social program.
If a revolutionary moment broke out tomorrow, historians wouldn't write about it other than as a footnote because it would get crushed because there is nothing enforcing coherence on the moment.
Dissatisfaction has never been higher. Translation of that into a coherent movement and not just stochastic violence? Unclear. There is a lot of propaganda that one has to sift through to even consider the idea of modern revolution as a viable path.
No, this is part of the irrationality of the system that Marx talks about. Unless we actually are able to organize, it will get to a point where there is an expectation to take on debt simply to be alive. Not even medical, just simply exist. We will bring back slavery.
What is crazy is that the Pareto principle is literally an arbitrary ratio that was made up to justify why 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the people. There isn't actually much more to it than that other than that some lean engineering guy from the U.S. got it in his head that it must be a magic ratio for efficiency because some fascist Italian matematician came up with it.
That's a pretty good point. Idk, I guess if I was going to read stuff from a pedophile I would rather it be from ancient Greece, guess that is where my bias lies lol.
I don't know if you want to learn about love from people who notoriously groomed their female students for Sartre's pleasure. Like, maybe it is a French v.s. American cultural difference, but the fact that they would usually completely abandon their protege professionally when the sexual relationship was done speaks volumes to what they actually cared about.
Not that either of them don't have interesting things that they have written about, but taking their writings on love seriously without considering their actions is like taking Chomsky's political philosophy seriously after the revelation of his close association with Epstein. These things must exist in context to the material world around them. The author may be dead, but I can still smell their corpse rotting.
Idk, I never even know what questions I actually have until I actually read something.
Do you mean to say that an idea is portrayed as a non-physical, non-material thing that is independent from reality? If both are codependent on reality, idk if there really is a contradiction there, unless there are actually saying that the mind is a material, physical thing.
That said, I don't think the nature of 'the mind' outside of it's still kinda undetermined relationship to the body has been determined well enough to speak on it outside of the purely philosophical.
The plots that have surfaced have basically been funding weird basically irrelevant fractious groups of 'leftwing' cultists like Black Hammer, and random rw influencers.
I would assume that their media presence is much higher for countries that have Russian speakers.
Chinese buyers will just have to purchase through Chevron. I don't want to keep banging the drum here, but Chevron is still unsanctioned. The goal of the operation atm isn't necessarily to actually fight with Venezuela, it is to funnel any and all oil revenue that Venezuela does make through a U.S. company. You just have to wonder ATM if the operational costs are anywhere close to the money they are making from it. I have to assume they are not.
And you are stubbornly saying that for some reason philosophy only starts when modernity begins. You are literally placing your trust in liberal self-selected interpretations of Vol. 2 (or hell, other Marxist interpretations, including my own, of Vol. 2) rather than reading it yourself and forming your own opinion to compare to these modern authors. You want to be a giant but all of these giants before you did every bit of reading, writing and research they could get their grubby little mitts on. That is imo, what creates a giant.
I 100% recommend that you read Adam Smith and Ricardo as well, so you can even argue with Marx on his interpretation of it. Hell, I 100% recommend that you read Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kant, Hume, Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon, etc. We live in an age with access to archives of knowledge Marx would have literally killed for. Excersize it.
Marx was pretty clear. It was socialism OR barbarism. If the system is rational, it will proceed towards communism and the freedom and betterment of mankind, if the system remains mired in irrationality, it will inevitably collapse under the weight of it's own contradictions and revert back towards the feudal economy, or some other formation that values protection of accumulated wealth over the common interests of those that create it. He was also clear that without active and organized party and labor movement with the means to defend itself and the revolution, the system will never naturally bring itself towards rationality. You clearly get this if you are arguing that Marx didn't have teleology.
Men make history, but they do not make it under circumstances of their own choosing. And he was correct. If anything it was Lenin who really fucked up his analysis, thinking that if Russia fell then there would be nothing stopping Germany and the entirety of industrial Europe from becoming communist. Without a communist revolution occuring in the most industrialized nation in the world after WWII, the capitalists were able to essentially dictate the course of modern history, and we now live in an incredible state of being where two countries at war with each other can still be their greatest energy partner and provider for most of it. A fully irrational system for the betterment of humanity. And it may take another couple 100 years, but eventually, the oil will run dry, the mines will be empty, and for what? So that .001% of humanity never has to work another day in their life? To go forth and strip the light from the stars for the sake of number go up?
I'm not saying he had everything figured out, but I am saying that the principles of capital reproduction that are laid out in Capital Vol. 2 are the foundations for a real understanding of modern political-economy and you are insisting that you don't have to read it because you are just so good at this analysis, but others should. It's maddeningly absurd logic.
Argueably Vol. 2 is even more important than Vol. 1 because it is where he gets into the most important parts, how capital is formed, accumulates and is in-of-itself vested with power in a way that never actually existed prior to modernity (which, argueably it did, just not in the kind of concentrations that divorced it from the polity as an independent entity. Even Crassus was still a creature of Rome. But one could also argue that Marx is pretty clear about a development period being about the overall tendency in the period, not if something was 100% one thing or the other, but I digress).
Look, you can do whatever you want, read whatever you want, tell people to read whatever you want. It's not your job to live up to my standards. You can respond however you wish, but know that I am considering this conversation finished for my own sake.
Lenin constantly references Marx and Engles throughout his works, with most of his critiques of his opponents stemming directly from what he believed to be misinterpretations (revisions) of Marxist thought. Lenin was always, always, sure to tie his particular analysis of the material conditions within Russia back to Marx's original observations, littering his works with direct quotations from Marx that would refute his opponents. He literally wrote one of the most comprehensive known biographies of Marx.
You don't understand the metaphor. You can be giant while standing on the shoulders of giants. If there was ever a giant that stood on the shoulders of a giant, it was Lenin. If you want to be Lenin, then you have to read Marx.
Here's the thing, why would you ever assume that the Democratic party has ever had an interest in 'doing anything'? They are the ones who, when granted the political writ, doubled down on neoliberal economics and funding the war machine back in 2010. And you can go back even further to see that they are always, always doing similar things, no matter what the political mood of the country is. All they do, and literally what they tell you they do is 'Be the Republicans but smarter.'
What if I'm not interested in that? Then it isn't in my interest to vote for the Democrats and this supposed propaganda isn't my personal undoing.
The Democrats don't do things for people because the party is literally defined by ripping out the levers and mechanisms of power that make the party even mildly accountable to the people, as people became even mildly radicalized. The Republicans, on the other hand, appear very accountable to their base because what their base wants is good for capital. If their base suddenly didn't want those things, they would be cut out just as fast as the Democrats did to theirs (Which btw we are starting to see in real time wrt Zionism within the party.)
It's not bourgeois propaganda, it's literally just having a memory longer than the last year. Truth is the most effective propaganda.