This is just plain wrong, in my view. You don’t learn Communism; you learn to hate life itself, instead of the terrible system in which your shitty life happens.
The impoverished Brazilian gig worker delivering food to rich people while riding a motorcycle with Bolsonaro stickers begs to differ. I see this guy all the time. He struggles to feed his family (because communists are making groceries more expensive), he wants more police brutality (against other people), he wants followers of certain religions (not his) arrested, he says he works 18 hour days and life is tough but he works hard (and you’re a lazy crybaby if you don’t want to do it too).
Sure, Marx explains why his life is miserable, but there’s plenty of other people willing to offer misleading but more immediately compelling explanations and these are all very appealing to somebody who was born and raised immersed in anticommunist propaganda.
i think the part that i hate the most about this is that when they can finally afford something, its a big achievement (“conquista!”) only working to the bone could have brought.
even being able to buy their basic motorcycles instead of renting is rationalized as them winning in life.
i know many many people like this. it confuses and upsets me to no end.
i think the part that i hate the most about this is that when they can finally afford something, its a big achievement (“conquista!”) only working to the bone can bring.
The truly Brazilian vibes of “Foi Deus que me deu” (God gave this to me) sticker slapped onto the rear window of a shitty banged up car
This is just romanticizing suffering for purpose of anti-intellectualism. Nobody is capable of contextualizing all they go through let alone formulate that into a coherent worldview without prior cumulative analysis and knowledge. Even those who believe they do like this romanticization do so because they had some prior familiarity with the ideas, probably through second-hand knowledge, to relate it to theory or communism.
If any of that was remotely true, every poor person on earth would be a communist, obviously that’s not the case
If the theory of anti-theory is not true in practice then of what use is the theory?
“Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement”
-Guy who actually led the first successful communist revolution
There are plenty of people who misread Marx, either willingfully or not, and become opportunists. Almost nobody truly understands the methods, requirements, and goals of Marxism without reading him though.
this sucks, pure anti intellectualism, if this were true the whole world would be red by now
I don’t think the intention was to lessen the importance of theory, but it does read that way
I’d say it’s both. It’s not impossible to have a perfect grasp of theory without proletarianization and suffering, and it’s not impossible to have a clear grasp of what needs to be done and why without theory. However, for the vast majority, you must have theory and practice. Theory is a tool that makes practice easier and more effective, it identifies the sources of problems and tells you how to think about solving them. To avoid theory is a mistake, that’s fighting a terrible and great enemy while handcuffed or blindfolded. Not impossible, but unnecessarily difficult.
If you don’t learn the lessons our predecessors gave us and spent their lives figuring out and testing, do you really care?
To quote Vijay Prashad paraphrasing Marx: Those who seek to change the world understand it better.
Every cadre should be a theorist, and every theorist should be a cadre; this separation between the proles who actually go and experience reality and the “theorists” who describe it while being alienated from it is bound to go nowhere. You need to have the workers educated in political theory, and you need to have the theorists close to the ground where they can experience history unfolding.
Exactly.
The screenshot isn’t even talking about theory vs practice. The real life non-theory “practice” they recommend is simply being on the receiving end of booj state violence, starvation, being overworked, etc. This is not the same as organizing a strike, organizing a party, going to protests, and other stuff that actually is practice. That suffering may help one embed themself into a community or workplace they want to organize and motivate them to destroy capitalism, but it hasn’t prevented many oppressed people becoming anticommunists regardless (see the other thread on this post about poor Brazilian gig workers still ending up as Bolsanaro supporting chuds).
I agree, I was just trying to address a more charitable reading of it that is less detached from reality IMO. It would probably have been better to acknowledge that in my comment though.
I dont like the word theory. I feel like it turns people off to it. I think a better word is strategy. We might all agree on the whole capitalism must go thing, but ask most people wtf are we gonna do about it and theyll shrug. Lenin literally wrote a book called What is to be done. Theory is more about being able to recognize the cracks in capitalism and learn how to exploit those cracks. When its put into practice anyway. A lot of people are honestly just politics nerds who study it without ever putting it into practice. Which is… Fine i guess. But dont think you have to be like that to read it. Its not a college class. Just think of it as Lenin, the guy who founded the USSR, talking to you directly and being like “so this is what im thinking”. Its very valuable insight. Not all of it still applies in 2025 obviously, but most does.
Like your meme says Marx explains why it happens. Lenin tells you what to do about it.
I think what would be more accurate is to say that studying Marx (or any theorists) alone doesn’t give one the willpower to truly commit to being a communist. This helps explain the issue in the western left as a labor aristocracy with an understanding of class dynamics. There are many well read people who can emulate the aesthetics, language, and cultural relics of communism history but when push comes to shove, they aren’t truly committed to destroying the system they benefit from.
Poverty and oppression alone obviously doesn’t produce Communist thought, if it did we would already be living under Communism.
Yup. Simply overcoming the fear of state retaliation for trying to pull shit is a major hurdle. Most people will not pass this hurdle unless circumstances become extreme, or at least, enough people won’t for a mass rebellion. Only when western states begin to actually break down will we see mass movements of communists flare up.
“I’ve never read Marx’s Capital, but I’ve got the marks of capital all over my body.”
-Bill Haywood
Revolutionary consciousness isn’t spontaneous! Empiricist, subjectivist, and cannot see the world beyond their own nose. Scientific socialism was brought to, and fused with, the workers’ movement–a cursory reading of Lenin would tell you that. Y’all are backwards as fuck.
Yeah. Some people respond to oppression by becoming bigots for example.
Usually cause they’re directed to by their oppressors, one way or another
Yeah, but the lesson here is: if they don’t read your theory they’ll read theirs.
In Software this is called Cargo Cult Programming. Where programmers do things without knowing why they do them, simply because they’ve seen them in the code before.
why that happens is kind of important tho
Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play
My boy Engels can get no love
communism is really obvious if you think about reality for like 10 seconds
If that were the case, I’d expect there to be a lot more communists.
people are just way stupider and uninteresting than you think
Nah, not about people being stupid. The propaganda apparatus is omnipresent and STRONG, it’s been perfected over centuries, and it accompanies us from birth to death.
idk what to tell you. I was a dumb teenager, then when I hit my early 20s I started seeing everything from a zoomed out perspective (instead of working within a framework)
I thought about the job market and saw that either A) everyone gets equal B) the lowest tier gets pushed into homelessness and then prison forever and ever as long as it’s gradual enough that everyone isn’t unemployed all at once
thinking that people are stupid and uninteresting is a very dumb teenager take, so consider how much perspective you have actually gained
Communism isn’t when everyone gets equal, it’s just a system in which there aren’t two classes, with one owning the capital and the other having to sell their labor power as a commodity while being exploited.
Misanthropy and socialism don’t go well together IMO. My desires of social justice and betterment of living standards for everyone aren’t that compatible with misanthropy, at least in my opinion. What makes you a socialist then?
that’s just “everyone gets equal” in 10x more words
Again, no. I don’t see why someone studying 20 years to be a doctor and performing 10-hour surgeries has to earn the same as someone who, say, earns a living in a less qualified position or who just wants to work less, communism isn’t when everyone gets the same. Equal opportunities hopefully, as much as possible, but definitely not everyone getting the same necessarily.
To be a pedant, but not to dog-pile, if you want to boil communism down to a statement, that statement is (as Marx points out in the Manifesto) to paraphrase ‘Human development would be best if all lived by the maxim, from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.’ Which is, of course, why reading theory is important.
There is a difference. It’s not ‘just’ ‘everyone is equal’, as liberals claim their society provides with legal equality, and that from legal equality stems liberty. It is a statement that strips liberals of their claim towards the ‘maximization of human liberty’, and posits that the giving of real materials to the people who are in need of them, not just ideals in a vacuum, are what maximizes overall human development and liberty.
Yeah I guess there’s still time to grow up after you get out of your early twenties. Certainly hope so.
Of course there is, if someone develops class consciousness at 75 we should still take them into the fold.
I was a lib till at least 23 or 24, but I really don’t like the superiority thing I’ve seen of “well I was a communist when I was 16”. Its not a competition.
I was telling you to grow up.
