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it doesnt really matter. shit doesn't hit the fan cuz of ppl accumulating facts about their world, or whatever. revs are made by illiterate, sexist, and superstitious people imho
Formerly dada
[URL="https://gemeinwesen.wordpress.com/"species being[/URL] - A magazine of communist polemic
quite a few of my co workers have kids, had a long history of doing shit jobs, some with less-than-flattering histories with the state and so on.
we all clock in, do our stretches, then work for about 9-11 hours go home, eat, sleep, drink, entertainment, whatever.
its no surprise that people dont give a damn about uninteresting abstractions like imperialism and commodity production. i mean really, not everyone studies political economy.
what i have discovered though is that when dealing with co-workers, dont be aggressive and ultra-red. ive had to confront people over racism several times. one i tried to explain that a mexican worker (starting off by reinforcing that they, like me and him, are the same as us, workers) and i drive that point home quite often when these things come up.
the only thing is, some people start sounding like soft white nationalists without even knowing. 'our culture' 'our country' 'our jobs'
this can all drive one nuts because the amount of homophobia, sexism, and racism, at least in words, is through the roof. Revleft is a puritanical society compared to everything else.
i think in the day to day, re-defining 'we' and 'us' in the workplace is probably the most basic thing one can do. not to mention agitating around various things (you know, management fucking with someones schedule and what not.
by 'we' and 'us' i mean 'we the wage workers' versus 'we the company.' 'us' as in 'us employees, us workers'
if you have to go for global issues, point out positives, not negatives. 'chavez reduced poverty and raised social programs by using the country's oil for its people' rather than 'chavez is a bad ass and stopped people from profiting off of oil and totally fucking with the us'
'the communists in vietnam have been fighting for decades against the japanese, the french, and yes the us. mostly because they wanted to be a truly independent country and not a puppet' versus 'kill yankee imperialists!'
"taxes DO suck, its like double dipping, first they take money from what we actually make and give us a bit back in wages, THEN THEY TAKE EVEN MORE in the form of taxes!"
"no, i dont like obama because for a peace prize winner, he sure does like to bomb a lot of people'
that kind of shit. not "voroshilov defeated the whites near the crimea in 1920"
EDIT: and what BMH said. you cant make a revolution by just popularizing an idea. its totally baseless, and is the epitome of idealism(think robert owens). though, agitation when possible, and conscious raising when possible is NEVER bad.
FKA Vacant
"snook up behind him and took his koran, he said sumthin about burnin the koran. i was like DUDE YOU HAVE NO KORAN and ran off." - Jacob Isom, Amarillo Resident.
Guys that is not what I meant and I knew this was going to turn into a defense of the workers in some way as them being completely innocent in all this. There is nothing special about us. Not pointing out the faults in the working class is like how Christians say to hate the sin not sinner and make themselves feel special because of the revelation they've received. Some of the talk I've received in here feels like the comments I once received for feeling that no one was listening to Christianity back when I was a born again believer in my teens. That we cannot fault them for they know not what they do.
And this is all besides the point anyways because I am not talking about faulting them for not knowing. I am just in shock at how people lack even a basic foundation from which to even talk about anything we casually talk about in here. And it's not something that they cannot learn. I am always even more surprised at how nearly anything I ask concerning economics, history and even science there is always someone with a pretty good answer with a nice analysis in here.
Talking to a right winger and it's even more shocking at how someone could even fathom the stuff they learn without realizing they're being intentionally mislead.
What I am saying is that even the basics are not there. The basics. What I assumed was common sense for anyone to know even at the base level, is not there.
And I agree that one cannot come off as being a ultra red. That is why I am venting in here, not in front of my co-workers.
Well see this is why fascism in times of discount tends to mobilize the masses who really have no idea about politics at all. Unlike Socialism fascism does not have much of a philosophy behind it much less the rather complex philosophies of the different types of Marxism and Anarchism. Your average fox or CNN watching person would not know the difference between Anarcho-Communism and say Maoism if both ideologies cock slapped them in the face. This is the failing of the education system and if i ever believed in conspiracy theories i would say that intentionally keeping the masses uneducated is intentionally done to make sure that they do not get any smart ideas about learning about the evils of Capitalism and turning into evil Socialists.One word about the "they don't know anything/they don't think" thing: PROPAGANDA.
It might not be their fault... but it is their fault too.
Anyway, I have been saying for a long time that if the left wants to actually start a revolution they need people. LOTS OF PEOPLE. So I wonder how the hell they are going to turn so many unaware people of capitalism, communism etc to revolutionaries?
When I was younger I couldn't tell from communists that they were right, because I had absolutely no idea of what the hell they were talking about. They didn't use simple words.
My father (nationalist to the maximum god knows why) was telling me: "The nation must be first. You should give your life for the greek nation" and blah blah blah.
So when I was younger I was a nationalist and a racist. Why? Because my father was using simple words that made even the unlogical things seem logical, while on the other hand communists were using words like "revisionist", "proletarians" and some other words with 3000 syllables.
In conclusion the left must start realising that it needs some people that talk about difficult things in a very nice and understandable way because our future allies might be among the nationionalist and capitalist people that we despise. So let's all start talking slowly and without using difficult words and get some people to understand our ideas
Fascism basically consists of nothing more then reactionary force that blames all the problems of society on the evil Jews, Arabs, Communists, etc and ultranationalism based upon some abstract concept of a new pure society free of these "traitors" to the nation. Hence why fascism is populist while Socialism is not as Socialists tend to think more about what is actually causing the problems in society instead of scapegoating people.
Granted Socialists could do alot more to actually interact with the working class and to speak their language instead of essentially talking down to them.
Chomsky's writings on culture are a complete load of shit. "Workers are told to watch sports to distract them from their oppression"! Or maybe people just enjoy watching sports and private businesses respond to this.
If you want to learn about culture, read Gramsci, not that moron.
Yup that is a total load of shit. Even if by some miracle i woke up tomorrow in a Communist society i certainly would not give up watching hockey. Why? Simply because i like hockey.
It would be a very dull world indeed if we did not have things like sports and art to take joy in.
"The American public doesn't know what's happening and it doesn't know that it doesn't know." - Noam Chomsky
Yeah, someone has already mentioned it, but it's our public education system. Here in the states, it just seems we're immediately driven into submission and subjected to authority being the source of all truth more than anywhere else on the planet.
This is why when I have conversations with co-workers, they tend to appeal to authority figures with people like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington as being some kind of God-like figures with divine truth for how a nation and economic system is supposed to be run. I try telling them that those were wealthy white men who owned slaves, but they always reply with "well they still had good ideas". When you debunk that claim, they still won't accept what you're saying. Why? Well because for over a decade it was drummed into them that the constitution is basically the Holy Book, and therefore is to never be questioned.
So why are large segments of the American public nationalists? It's indoctrination. And as you say, they can't understand basic principles, because the principles they've been taught are completely skewed to support bourgeois and class society....and they don't question any of it.
It's certainly not just America that indoctrinates and pacifies the population from the very first day you set foot in school. Basically what we where taught was that Capitalism=good while Socialism=bad while Communism=pure evil. And well Anarchism was passed off as nothing but abunch of bomb throwing terrorists. I thank fuck that i atleast had a left wing teacher even if he was a social democrat as he supported the NDP which are the lesser of 3 evils among the 3 main federal political parties in Canada. Basically what every other teacher taught us was sanitized politics about how great Canadian style Capitalism is. As if British democracy is any better then American democracy.
Of course we where taught from a very young age that we where better then those evil Americans. This was of course all done to whip up mindless nationalism. To this day i really hate Canadians (i don't consider myself Canadian and we tend not to hate Americans here unlike mainlanders) who act smug and superior to Americans. Even the most PC wishy washy Liberal will still ***** about Americans which is rather stupid to say the least and shows a inferiority complex if nothing else.
It's funny how governments on both sides of the border play the working class off against each other by stiring up mindless nationalism that only serves to distract people from the real enemy which is capitalism.
Yeah, I actually think Chomsky is a bit too hard on spectator sports. People genuinely enjoy them.
Yeah, RadioRaheem, I don't think people here are attempting to just apologize or excuse why this is, but provide an explaination.
Propaganda telling us that "human behevaior" is like X or that capitalism is "natural" or "unavoidable" is definately part of it. The poor education system and the way the US specifically educates workers is part of it. But these are not insurrmontable, the fundamental issue is lack of struggle. That means that the capitalists can describe their views, and to a certain extent (if people are not confronting the limits and contradictions of the system) it does describe the daily practical reality of people within capitalism: you have to compete for a wage, you have to "work your way up" to hope to get a better owe, etc.
As for lack of basic general knowledge, well if it's not directly related to some interest by our rulers (like promoting self-serving sociological or economic views) then it probably is mostly that public education is shitty, irrelevant for many workers, and alienating. We are taught very superficially and narrowly - unless we went to a more elite school - and for most workers you are just learning how to be someone who can sit and do assigned tasks - the actual knowledge is secondary.
I was just trying to point out that I am baffled that even the basics to continue learning has been so horribly distorted by propaganda that I do not know how the left could even begin to fix it.
Well, mostly not a whole lot is happening here. Most basic labour and movement struggles are not particularly exciting or all that inspiring.
Have you ever been in a trade union?
Baby Boomers all grew up in an education system that told them that Jim Crow was right, that John Brown was a mass murderer, that pot will make you a strung-out maniac, that women don't have opinions, all the while watching Saturday morning TV telling them that Indians are only good for killing by white white-hatted protagonists. It can feel really overwhelming when we are stuck among a lot of common ideas that can't hold up to the lightest tug on their threads... I feel that way about "bro/lad-culture" and how I will hear guys on the internet seriously saying that "it's harder being a guy in this society" and "women have all the power". But I think ideas can change very quickly if there is a counter-force out there pushing those ideas. Occupy is a great example of that - Popular ideas in the US went from "we're all middle class" to "the elietes are fucking everyone over" for a chunk of the population (seemingly) overnight. Or how in the social movements of the 1970s you had popular arguments about women, blacks, and gays which were in some ways worse than popular consiousness today change to the point that in a decade or so consiousness on questions of women, ethnic minorities, and LGBT people that are arguably much more advanced than they are today. Many of the ideas and arguments of late 60s and 70s radicals and militant social activists were originated in books or debates on the Left earlier, and so small groups of people would read anti-Stalinist communist arguments, read about National Liberation Struggles, read and hear Malcolm X, read about enviromentalism, etc. but then those ideas became much more widespread as those small groups led to activism and struggle: like all the people inspired by Malcolm X's later more radical speaches and writing went on to form the more militan parts of the Black Power movement.
This was not the case per say with the bourgeois revolution (sexist yes). Try reading "The invention of capitalism: Clasical political economy and the secret of primitive accumulation". If you're talking about Roman slave revolts perhaps you're right but traditionally it was an elite merchant class using coercion/violence and the state to set the condition's for the capitalist mode of production just as it will be socialists agitating and capitalism itself which will set the condition's for socialist revolution. Things don't just accidentally happen. If you were to believe that then you would subscribe to Adam Smiths theory of primitive accumulation.
they dont happen accidentally, but they dont happen totally consciously either. i dont think the early merchant elite thought 'man we need to do t his and this and kick out the kings to form a capitalist system.' they thought 'we can fuck this plebs and make more bank, lets do it'
'heavens above, how awful it is to live outside the law - one is always expecting what one rightly deserves.'
petronius, the satyricon
It's just that it seems as though we're talking a completely different language altogether. Definitions have been firmly planted, literally in dictionaries and encylopedias as to what socialism means. We will literally be arguing with established definitions that have now been translated into common sense arguments. Siting there arguing against Meriam Webster is like telling people everything they knew about the world is totally false. We will sound like Morpheus talking to Neo from the Matrix.
