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Cake day: March 2nd, 2024

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  • Awesome comment. Thank you! This is where something starts to become visible: the weird indirect physical and psychological violence of liberal ideology.

    It’s base claim is: If everyone, as a single enlighted decent individual agent, would just play by the rules (fair markets), everything would be at it’s best. All of them shall thrive.

    Now all those good christians go through life working their ass of, actually trying to be “a good person”, but after decades they have to painfully find out: It doesn’t work out. Most of them get more stressed, poorer, there’s ecological destruction, war and so on. Almost no one get’s to thrive.

    As you pointed out, finding out about capitalism and (neccessarilly collectively) paving a way to more rational production and fairer distribution, is difficult. You could almost say it’s practically and ideologically out of reach. You know, because your freedoms depend on liberal individualism.

    They end up with two options: 1. Look for an outside menace to the otherwise funtional market game (immigrants, jews, or heck why not trans people) 2. Get more of the same: more privatizarion, less social welfare etc.

    They cling ever harder to a political decision, the more it harms them. This is brutal and sad af imo.

    Real agency is possible, just not the individualist kind liberalism is successfully promising them in their despair of heteronomy.




  • Was buzzwords sind weiß ich natürlich und ich kenne Wahlplakate und den rechtspopulistischen Sprech den zZ alle bis in die SPD rocken.

    Weniger wieviel wo genau, sondern überhaupt dass gesellschaftlich produzierter Reichtum anders verteilt werden kann als marktförmig, d.h. letzlich von unten nach oben, halte ich für “richtigen Inhalt”.

    Das wieviel etc. ist natürlich wichtig, aber da muss man in Rechnung stellen was Oppositionspolitik im Parlamentarischen ist, bzw. was sie nicht sein muss weil nicht kann. Stichwort Hegemonie & overton Fenster.

    Natürlich bleibt es ein spannender Moment für alle linken ever wenn sie dann regieren. Hier überschreitet Politik für alle, die an grundsätzliche Veränderbarkeit von Gesellschaft glauben, dann den Rahmen der parlamentarischen. Gibts es genug Bewegung und Zustimmung, entsprechende Kräfteverhältnisse in der Zivilgesellschaft um Eigentums- und Verteilungsfragen tiefgreifend neu zu beantworten? Wenn es um wesentliche Veränderung geht, sprich Bruch mit der neoliberalen Doktrin, wird das was du als Buzzwords abtust entscheidend. Darauf sollten wir m.E. hinarbeiten. Damit nicht für immer die Reichen reicher, alle anderen ärmer, der Planet kaputt und geopolitik kriegerischer wird.

    Wenn du konkrete Zahlen magst, vllt hier https://archive.ph/TV5vn



  • Bei Russland würde ich eher vom Staat, der die Einzelpersonen führt reden als andersherum. Aber natürlich ist es immer beides. …je nach Staatsbegriff, den man so anbringt.

    Deine Sorgen teile ich. Prinzipiell fängt bekämpft man Krieg nicht erst wenn Krieg anfängt. Eine wettbewetbsförmige Sozialordnung und die daraus resultierende “Weltordnung” spitzt sich zu geopolitischen, ökonomischen Frontlinien zu, die wiederum Kriege hervorbingen (wobei es insbesondere die Sprache der Rechten ist, gesellschaftliche Widersprüche nicht ursächlich zu behandeln sondern “Feinde” im inneren und äußeren auszumachen).

    Daher ja die traditionelle linke Position bloß keine Kriege zu führen, keine Aufrüstung etc. Im Falle Ukraine seh ich das zZ (und viele in der Linken) trotzdem anders. Putin muss akut aufgehalten werden mit Waffengewalt, Sanktionen etc.

    Für eine Orientierung auf solidarische Ausgestaltung der Gesellschaft(en) müssen wir aus “friedenspolitischer” Perspektive aber unbedingt kämpfen, weil mehr Markt, mehr Wettbewerb, immer ungerechtere Verteilung langfristig auch mehr Krieg bedeuten.






  • I think it was not only those material conditions but also a deterministic ideology or maybe just power hungry leaders. (Good cue for taking the democracy part very serious from the beginning, because non or semi-democratic structures attract and create dictator-subjects, and projecting yourself outside that dialectic is as naive as it is arrogant)

    Shooting thousands (or hundreds of thousands, as my hasty wikipedia research suggests) of the opposition, both left and right, is no matter of slow industrialization.

    Admittedly I’n not fit in soviet history, but the combo of “oh they had democratic infrastructure” and secret deportation, incarceration and murder of even leftist opposition doesn’t sit right. And honestly, calling that “not perfect” feels like violation of emancipatory writing of history and way of living.


  • Thanks. I read the tayangyu essay, and kinda liked it, but it didn’t really answer my questions…

    Isn’t the author leaving the framework of dialectical thinking when they dismiss the relevance of ideas almost entirely in favor of material economical factors?

    As in: Couldn’t have the development of productive forces happened with more participation?

    Wouldn’t than the emergence of a democratic or collective subject have been faaaar more likely, even though and because people would have been confronted with the limits of economic development, as agents, not just as objects of that one and only party’s decisions?


  • Okay sorry regarding stalin i mixed that up. It’s in the other reading list in the comments here.

    On “conduct yourself” dunno, maybe this boils down to writing style. But the ML sort of theoretical style plus the horrors of undemocratic socialist history do make it important to stress the emphatic (as in: since critical theory and french subjectivity theory we debunked “individual freedom”, but still need to keep it as a goal) part of personal freedom & choice. That wording above doesn’t show that kind of self reflection imo.

    Gramsci! The concepts of hegemony and “senso commune” (sry dont know english translation) are essential to analyse current events. Also this protects lefties from babbling about classes in a way that alienates them from everyone just observing whats going on.

    (Senso commune and gramscis notion of intellectuals also offers a neat way through the whole “get educated since otherwise you fundamentally don’t understand your own life”- rhethoric dilemma/arrogance issue)

    You need secondary literature for gramsci though. He left 3000 pages of unstructured notes from fascist prison. You don’t wanna go through that. Unfortunetly I have no idea of english publications. Barfuss & Jehle Einführung is nice, in case you speak german.


  • Just wrote this somewhere else. Maybe this is where it belongs: Good impulse to read theory, but 150y/o theory is not where I’d advice people to start. At least the german originals of what you recomend there are fairly hard to read. Plus they lack the development of marxist theory that happened since then. For example Gramscis thoughts or critical theory are so freakin important for marxism to be applicable to this society being far more diverse than good’ol working class in the factory vs. Monopoly man capitalists. I’m sure there is updated marxism and introductions available in english. (Dunno, Harvey maybe? Mayo?)

    Also “how to conduct yourself as a leftist” sound strict af and kinda deterministic.

    Plus there is no need to give stalin’s voice that kind of space.


  • Good impulse to read theory, but 150y/o theory is not where I’d advice people to start. At least the german originals of what you recomend there are fairly hard to read. Plus they lack the development of marxist theory that happened since then. For example Gramscis thoughts are so freakin important for marxism to be applicable to this society being far more diverse than good’ol working class in the factory vs. Monopoly man capitalists. I’m sure there is updated marxism and introductions available in english. (Dunno, Harvey maybe? Mayo?)

    Also “how to conduct yourself as a leftist” sound strict af and kinda deterministic.