A publication by The Atlantic going over his works:

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/04/the-illusion-of-reality/479559/

My immediate intuition is that this is just bad philosophy disguised as pseudoscience, and from a philosophical perspective none of this makes sense. Am I wrong here? I would like insights.

He believes in so-called "conscious realism", which believes that matter does not exist, and in fact, only consciousness exists.

Here's a critical analysis of some of his stuff: https://philarchive.org/archive/ALLHCR

Edit: Please don't downvote if you think this guy is a nerd, I am skeptical of him myself, but please, upvote so a particularly strong of constitution comrade can detail their opinions and dunk on him

I have been playing a PvP MMO which allows players to spend real-life money to get in-game money and buy items from the in-game economy. Of course, it is a terrible idea to do this and anyone who does it is getting ripped off because the game has full loot mechanics and they die instantly because they usually know nothing about the game, but

By playing it, I am directly contributing to their player numbers and the economy which allows it to function. Indeed, one could argue this is the same for capital itself and that my decision to live is similarly morally questionable, and therefore the entire question is silly, but it still doesn’t sit right with me.

Am I not directly contributing to a system that uses the vulnerable to make large amount of money? Am I not doing so in a way that isn’t actually essential to my happiness or quality of life?

I think, in the mean time, I will move to a different game.

I stg it was an accident please don't kill me

In case you're confused, check my username on my profile, not my display name

There are a lot of things in life that I love, but those things will always inevitably come into conflict with organizing somehow. So far, the only ways I’ve been able to resolve this have basically come down to bullying myself for caring about anything except socialism, or ignoring the problem. Both seem toxic. How do you deal with it?

Let’s collect theory on left unity, organizing with other tendencies, the challenges it faces and issues with the concept!

Please post any theory you have on the subject. I’ll list it on this main post.

Marxism

Hey everyone!

Thought it would be helpful to have a thread in the community that isn't just about constant armchair political analysis. Feel free to chat about anything here, as long as it fits with the community's rules!

Please discuss! No uncritical sectarianism, bad faith arguments, etc.

Important questions:

• Is the strategy most socialist organizations in the US are using, in your opinion, a good one? What else should they do?
• As individual socialist, what do you think we should be doing? What groups are worth joining?
• What should be done about the sudden rise of socially reactionary beliefs and laws across the country?

Reading posted by users:
Where’s the Winter Palace?, posted by @CannotSleep420@lemmygrad.ml, written by unknown author, I checked and could not find one on the article.

Conclusion from this text, that I think summarizes it’s premise quite well:

We believe that, in the U.S. in 2018, the truly important theoretical tasks have not been solved. We are in a period of a nascent socialist movement since the 2008 financial crisis. We should not be afraid of new ideas, and should look forward instead of harping on the 20th century. Without bending to reformism or adventurism, we must feel free to put everything back on the table and come to build strategy and theory through struggle.

(Emphasis mine)

In the West, we are constantly bombarded with lies and blatantly incorrect statements about the living conditions of socialist countries. During the original Cold War, depictions of the USSR as a cold, purely utilitarian world with extreme restrictions on any sort of luxury were quite frequent, and though they were blatantly false, it still rubbed off on the West’s impression of socialism in numerous ways that affect even those ideologically committed to socialism subconsciously.

How else to explain the existence of “Nazbol” ideology? People, due to some degree of ignorance about the true nature of the USSR and of socialism in general, but drawn to ascetic, “anti-excessive” (excessive, a term butchered and vulgarized so much I could write an essay about that alone) aesthetics. These people could be drawn to this completely illusory ideology due to bigotry, mere aesthetic appeal, or any number of reasons, but the important thing to remember is that the majority of people are not like this.

The USSR greatly supported “excessive” things that the Nazbol would see as absurd. State-funded movie directors existed. And the USSR pioneered much of modern animation. And what a legacy that is! Not only is animation for the sake of art and self-expression the furthest from cold asceticism I can think of, this deeply important art form has direct ties with numerous current-day queer communities.

Socialism and “excessive” art does not end with the USSR. Anyone who has been in the furry community long enough knows this to be the case. I will not elaborate as to respect the instance’s rules against sexual content (though, arguably, the original content is not sexual, the internet’s general reaction to it definitely was, and the original was by no means drab). The fact I even have to specify that hopefully demonstrates my point.

In this present day, despite all of these obvious examples of rich, romantic and “excessive” art from socialist countries, the Western left still had a somewhat ascetic view of socialism, this could be based on a misguided belief that Lenin’s view of a responsible and likeable revolutionary was proposing excessive self-restraint, but if anyone truly believed that Lenin advocated that, it’s quite sad. Beating yourself up moralistically for enjoying anything is a fairly reliable way to get people to think you’re weird, in a way more unsettling to people than any kind of “excessive” activity the Nazbol would despise.

I propose that we must fight this tendency however we can. But how?

Does anyone else remember when a socialist subreddit banned catgirls for objectifying women?

I’m not going to get into if that was right or wrong here, but it sounds like a pretty good example of something “excessive”, something which, even when having it’s truly problematic character removed from it (possibly especially at that point given how misogynistic Nazbols probably are) scares the aesthetically committed revolutionary.

These days, the catgirl is not exclusively associated with misogyny. Plenty of queer and women-dominated spaces have adopted it as an icon of sorts. We can, then, fight two reactionary tendencies, social conservatism and Nazbol ideology, with one stone.

Let’s post more catgirls. And make them queer feminist ones.

This is the second part to this post. You'll likely need to read that for this to make sense.

Also, this post has anarchist apologia-adjacent rhetoric in it. You have been warned.

We are not comfortable. Many of us are more comfortable than the rest of the world, yes, but many more are not. The millions of people in US prisons exploited for slave labor are not comfortable. The desperately struggling black and brown communities in this country are not comfortable. We should at least be able to reach these people, but we have failed to. Why? I suggest a lack of empathy, and self introspection.

The United States socialist has become something of a disciple, a religious acolyte. Instead of seeing Marxism as a discipline to explain and understand this society of class conflict, they see it as a magic power they can channel with the pureness and devotion of their faith. And so, they begin to believe that the emotions of themselves and those around them ceases to matter, that they are surrounded by nonbelievers and heretics, and so any concerns or opposition to what they suggest is merely the baseless protests of the unclean.

This is a deeply maladjusted and flawed view of Marxism. And, more importantly, it completely stops the prospective revolutionary from truly organizing. When we assume that those who disagree with us are baselessly evil, or reactionary, or assume they are merely immature or idiotic, we completely cut ourselves off from an important line of questioning that is ultimately essential to socialism in the United States.

The average conversation between any two socialists in the United States has been reduced to a religious argument. When disagreement reaches a heated point, instead of acknowledging each other as simply needing a break or being overwhelmed, both treat the other as an enemy. To display this, I shall dissect the supposed greatest enemy of the United States socialist: the anarchist.

The anarchist is a person of great disdain to many socialists. Someone moralistically driven to dismiss tools necessary for the liberation of the proletariat. And this can certainly be true. But what many socialists and Marxists fail to even inspect is why the United States proletariat is so often drawn to anarchism. Instead of taking these people as coming from a legitimate perspective, these socialists simply assume that anarchism is the ideology of the privileged, or the labor aristocracy. But this doesn’t make any sense.

Merely being class conscious or aware of one’s oppression doesn’t automatically grant someone the ability to understand the true nature of class or class conflict, and especially does not grant an understanding of the best way to fight that conflict. The inverse is true, as well. In a vacuum, someone more isolated from the reality of class conflict would not necessarily automatically choose an ideology that is sub-optimal for fighting that class conflict. The decision becomes a purely abstract one.

In both situations, a dedicated anarchist is capable of being a dedicated anarchist without the influence of western propaganda.

So, we are left with only one recourse- Attempting to find out what the reason for that is. When we finally let ourselves ask this question, instead of constantly closing ourselves off to others because of a moralistic, vulgar perspective to Marxism, we can begin to inspect the material conditions of the United States proletariat from a different perspective, and start finding explanations for our lack of traction.

The United States itself, as part of it’s material conditions, has been a horrifyingly repressive and disgusting country, which has been unabashedly on the side of the bourgeoisie for most of history. We know this much, it is true of many capitalist countries. But the United States went much, much further, strictly controlling the lives of the proletariat with laws that enforced homophobia, prohibition, the moralistic Christianity of the region. Social control by the state is not merely a background, ambient crime of capitalism for the United States proletariat: It is an ancestral trauma that hangs over us to the present day. It is easy to see that this explains the popularity of anarchism among the United States socialists (I am aware of how ironic this is, given the United States supposed dedication to “freedom”).

We must keep in this in mind when engaging with the proletariat here. We cannot simply dismiss concerns of social control with accusations of propaganda and conspiracy, because the hyper-reactionary, socially controlling forces of the United States have used the exact same argument every time a new social movement has appeared (and, yes, this is true of some other western countries, but those countries have their own conditions that must be individually examined ).

So, this exercise in analyzing the United States anarchist, not from a moralistic, religiously ”Marxist” perspective, but from the perspective of actual history, has given us important insight about building socialism in the United States. We can’t just tell the proletariat that we aren’t going to oppress them, or that we are on their side while naively dismissing their concerns every time it is brought up. This is what the United States does to it’s own civilians. No, we need to prove that we are on their side by actually siding with the United States proletariat in this still ongoing element of the class war, and actively fight against the currently present forms of social control in the United States.

And, even more potently, it gives us a weapon to use against the hyper-reactionary, socially controlling elements. We can now understand that this is exactly what hyper-conservative elements have been exploiting, twisting the proletariat’s desire for freedom from social control against itself, trying to convince the proletariat that returning once again to control is social freedom. Once we begin to truly and consciously side with the United States proletariat on this, beyond simply doing so because “we’re leftists”, we will be able to turn this around on the reactionary elements. The proletariat will always side with us once they realize we are actually acting in their interests, a much more convincing and relatable reason to side with us than the reactionary’s false promises. For this reason, the queer struggle, the struggle of all racial minorities, and the struggle of all the people who have been oppressed by this nation’s extreme social control, should be prioritized and heavily focused upon by any socialists here. Not only are these people the ones to see the horror of capitalism in this country most directly, they are also the people most harmed by the United States’ social control, and therefore directly represent the United States proletariat’s efforts against social control.

But, this was merely an experiment. Hopefully, it should display the utility of examining the possible motivations and reasoning of those we disagree with. That is the purpose of this community, and I hope that we can do much more, together.

TL;DR: sectarianism bad, fatalism bad, black panthers good

I apologize in advance. This is one of the most badly edited things I have ever posted on the internet. I'm not even sure if I agree with it anymore.

Part 2 (I already have the entire thing written, but it's too big for one post) will be on my community. (yes i am shilling for my community here). Warning about that second part: It may veer into some vaguely "left unity" territory, so if you disagree with that but like this first part... you have been warned. Don't worry, I'm not necessarily going to say anarchists are right or anything like that ~~i don't think they are~~

The approach that the United States, radical left has adapted is fundamentally flawed, as demonstrated by it’s almost complete lack of political power. Numerous explanations have been made for this, many of them rooting in the relative comfort of most United States citizens.

I do think this argument makes some sense, but that it doesn’t hold that much weight when inspected closer. If this were the main roadblock that socialism has encountered in the United States, I speculate that we would have a much higher portion of the less well-off (non-labor-aristocratic) proletariat participating in radically socialist politics. Instead, we see a resurgence of reactionary views, political apathy, and nihilism. While there could be other possible explanations for this, I think the most likely one is that socialist theory has not truly yet been adapted to existence in the imperial core. Indeed, the majority of successful figures and scientific Marxists figures have been in imperialized, and, sometimes, feudal countries.

These are quite noticeably, not in even remotely the same situation as the proletariat in the United States. Exact differences are numerous, but what should be first and foremost acknowledged is that it is fundamentally different. But, of course, this has been acknowledged by quite a few people, many of which are reactionaries pretending to be “socialist”. The laughable “pat-Soc”, or “patriotic socialist”, claims to be adapting a scientific Marxism for the United States, but if they are, they must not have been examining scientific Marxism too closely!

Indeed, the main flaw many of these aspiring revolutionaries share is a complete and total disregard for the findings of previous revolutionaries, a belief that they are irrelevant. But this is non-sensical. Of course they are relevant. If their analysis of the material environment in their imperialized countries was correct (and it most certainly was- A socialist revolution was successfully done to overthrow Tsarist Russia for a reason), then the insights gleamed there are still going to be valuable - Just with the caveat that they were observed from the perspective of an imperialized country, not the one doing the imperializing.

So what can we gleam from this? Well, the mistakes that the Western and especially the United States, socialists have made, is twofold. Not only have some socialists made the grave error of failing to acknowledge the importance of previous revolutionaries, but other socialists have interpreted their writings and experiences as being able to be directly translated to their current situation. An equally massive mistake.

We can take Lenin’s critiques, the internationalist approach to proletarian struggle, Mao’s examples of successful revolutions and conflicts, but we cannot use these people as one to one maps on what to do now. There is still theorizing to be done, desperate work to understand the United States proletariat, and it cannot be simplified to something as trivial and fatalistic (a tendency Lenin himself criticized!) as organization in the imperial core being impossible.

But how to reach the United States proletariat? If they can be reached, then what are we missing? They are not being organized now, and that is not due to lack of trying.

I suggest that most (modern, 2020) United States socialists have completely failed to understand the situation of both themselves and their peers on a fundamental level, in understanding the material conditions of the United States proletariat.

see title

(not radlib, actual left.)