this post was submitted on 17 May 2026
81 points (97.6% liked)
Memes
4858 readers
155 users here now
Good memes, bad memes, unite towards a united front.
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I remember watching Richard Wolff's "Let's Talk About Socialism" as a pivotal moment of "oh maybe it isn't terrible." Nowadays I'd probably say that lecture is mediocre, cause IIRC he was kinda downplaying the USSR's accomplishments and advocating for worker co-ops or something. But at the time it was a solid pipeline moment to get me to reconsider. For a time after that, I was into "libertarian socialism," which basically meant that I thought AES states were too top down and that we were going to do it differently by being more bottom up or something.
I think reading State and Revolution was the real turning point away from that, where Lenin kinda lays out the blueprint for AES states and it became a lot more clear what all the terms mean and why people practicing it did the stuff that they did. I still had a lot more growing to do after that though and do to this day. But this place helped me transform from "I'm probably ML" to "I don't see any proven alternative to ML." And helped me transform from "I don't quite understand what states like Russia are doing, it's confusing" to "imperialism is the primary contradiction and critical support for anti-imperialist states."
This place also helped me understand dialectical and historical materialism better. It's still something that slides off my brain a bit, but I think that's just from not enough actual application of it.
The State and Revolution was the big turning point for me as well because it dismantles all the arguments regarding reformism. And what really struck me about it was how relevant it felt because you see these exact same debates playing out today. And tha made me realize that Lenin hit on an invariant in the system. After a whole century of capitalism, we're still at the exact same place.
What I find interesting about Marxism is that it inoculates you from capitalist propaganda. Once you understand a certain amount of theory, then the whole system is laid bare, and you can see exactly what's happening and why it's happening. You start realizing how elections work, why 'progressive' candidates never win. Why supposedly left parties always betray their promises. All of a sudden, it's not just random bad luck, or people not voting hard enough, you start seeing it through a structural lens, and these become necessary outcomes which are the only ones possible within the system. And I think that's the real power of dialectical materialism, it creates a level of understanding that makes you immune to the sophistry that the propagandists use.
Yes, well said. The science of it is a huge deal in political literacy. It's much easier to be deceived without it because without it we're depending on bougie science like idealism and metaphysics, and as those are insufficient to explain things, trying to wrack one's brains to work things out through them tends to end up with a lot of going in circles and a lot of "I guess people are stupid or something". When you're armed with the science of it, normally incomprehensible behavior has an explanatory process behind it that can be investigated and analyzed, one of clashing contradictions and development through phases. Things that seemed like impenetrable mysteries before become a lot more doable to understand.
Exactly, being able to see the root causes and then trace how they connect to the symptoms we observe is at the crux of actually understanding what's going on.