or lenin or mao or etc
i’m curious. I don’t think I’m a marxist but I have been trying to read marxist theory and I got caught by my family and had a huge argument with everyone. it was really interesting because it seemed like we weren’t talking about the same thing at all. Things like everyone is paid the same or everything is made by the government etc, I know very little but I have asked and read the basics and I was able to point out that wasn’t true
i’m used to people being smug about things they know nothing about, but it’s interesting how they look down on communists, like looking at a silly child that doesn’t know anything - while not knowing anything about what communists said in the first place. I actually tried to pull out quotes from the book but they didn’t want me to, they actually refused to know what they hate, it’s strange. I mean, I do the same, I’ve never read fascist theory or ayn rand or stuff like that, so I can’t really blame them, but I don’t try to seriously argue with fascists and libertarians anyways
some of them have a lived experience in eastern europe or cuba or something so I can’t really argue against that, but when it’s just an argument I’ve never met someone extremely vehemently against communist thoughts who actually read any of what communists wrote
have you ever had like, a productive, genuine conversation with an anti-communist?
“To understand Marx is to be a Marxist.” — Bertell Ollman
Marxism isn’t something you can un-see once you see it. I’ve had conversations with business owners before when they were explaining basic Marxist concepts without knowing it. A lot of people are kind of struggling to find an explanation for why everything is so fucked up, but because no one has actually explained Marxism to them or recommended that they read Marxist texts (teachers will lose their jobs and get blacklisted if they do this, parents are also disincentivized to mention it because Marxism can also help with class struggle at home), they basically find themselves having to reinvent the wheel, even though at this point we have almost two centuries of Marxist scholarship and plenty of praxis to confirm the theory. Bourgeois folks definitely understand Marxism, there’s just certain aspects they don’t want to understand (the overall tendency for profit to decline for example), and the proletariat also often gets the basics (my boss is my enemy and all bosses are enemies) without having even heard of Marx. It’s the labor aristocracy (IMO), trapped in the mid-deck of the sinking Titanic, which is confused.
Can you elaborate on this?
On which part?
Sorry, meant to quote this:
Ahh, this is Harriet Fraad’s thing, but Wilhelm Reich also used Marxism in The Mass Psychology of Fascism. Basically, in the modern nuclear family, there is a contradiction between the parents and children. Parents may want one thing, children may want another. A parent might not want his kids to learn about Marxism because they might team up against him or realize how society itself enforces the enslavement of marriage for instance. I also felt like this sometimes as a teacher. I was intensely aware of how being alone in a room with dozens of students put me at a great disadvantage. If they had only gotten over their own petty internal disputes, they could have been running the classroom, the school, and who knows what else.