I have said this many times: internet memes only helped with radicalizing people, but offered none of the tools needed to help them see where they might overcome the problems.

Therefore you end up with a whole bunch of radicalized people who are increasingly depressed and pessimistic about the world because they literally don’t have the tools to analyze the current state of affairs, let alone come up with solutions.

Only reading theory can solve that. Read your Marx, Lenin, Gramsci and Mao. That’s the only way forward.

Or some of us might have multiple sociology degrees and/or are in academia. But I’m sure if they wrote comments about Marx (or Weber or Gramsci or Veblen etc) you’d just assume they got it from wikipedia anyway. Though I’m not sure why that’s a bad thing. It’s not like it makes a difference whether someone read primary texts online or overpaid at the college bookstore. It’s the same information. The fact that anyone has a desire to learn, better themselves, and then try to use that knowledge is admirable and a service to society at large. More people should try it.

Have you even read Gramsci? You really can’t disagree with anything I say until you’ve read Gramsci. Sorry, I don’t make the rules!

This is why my instance is defederated with them though. It’s just bad faith nonsense all the way down.

If you wanna insult me please call me a queer Marxist Stalinist devil worshiper or something, because that would be more accurate. Call me a North Korea apologist because that’s true. I’d also readily accept insults like baizuo or first world crakkker, because those are unfortunately also true.

i think fascist for you just means “scary person with bad ideas.” if it’s only a pejorative to you, rather than a specific identifiable movement, then you’re not gonna get it. I recommend reading Robert O. Paxton, or Marxist theorists like Antonio Gramsci or (my personal favorite) the historian Perry Anderson. They’ve all written on the particular contours of fascist ideology and how to identify it, rather than treating it as simply a set of violent tendencies.

People are fed up with zombie neoliberalism. The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters. — Antonio Gramsci

Neoliberalism has been “dead” for over a decade, and yet it lumbers on as a zombie ideology.

The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.
— Antonio Gramsci

Fascism isn’t on the rise in the US in particular and the West in general for no reason. The cause is neoliberalism, which is monopoly capitalism in decay. I wrote about this two months ago, but I’ll spare everyone the copypasta and just link to it.

All of 'em…All the prophecies !

I like Antonio Gramsci’s work, but many have written on the same theme : Liberlism will inevitably lead to Fascism either through collapse, or mutation to protect capital.

In this context, across the world we are observing Gramsci’s ‘Crises of Cultural Hegemony’. : The culture projected onto society (captialism, consumerism) by liberal elites, was never a culture of the working class - and in maturity, it becomes so far removed from working people’s lived experiences, and creates such disillusionment , it creates space for authoritatianism and fascism.

If you look at the recent US election, the Democratic Party historically retain power by drip feeding cultural ‘freedoms’ such as gender & racial equality (which by the way always belonged to all of us), which enables them to claim superior morality, but all the while the protect the interests of Capital and the elites.

A disenfranchised working class looking to improve their situation, are then vulnerable - and we’ve seen what happens with that.

sorry for spelling and grammar. words aren’t flowing this morning.

It’s true, I’ve only read Adorno and Gramsci but I said I read Marx once at a party and it just kinda snowballed from there and I couldn’t come clean after that, I was in too deep 😔

Edit: oh and harry potter too.

They don’t need to prove anything, they have common sense[1][2] on their side.

That’s different than what I said though, which is that you can’t disagree with me without reading Gramsci. And is also typically how these authors’ names are invoked in arguments which are not about the authors themselves.

Appreciate the clarification regarding Stalin.

First, offering advice on how to conduct yourself as a Leftist isn’t some spooky command. In the list I made, I literally say “to take with you as practical advice.” This practical advice includes joining a leftist organization (the bare minimum to be a leftist in practice and not just in theory), read more theory, fight white supremacy and queerphobia, be more industrious, learn self-defense, and be persistent. None of these get in the way of “personal freedom” in my opinion. My goal is to create Communists that want to change society and work to do so, not just intellectuals that want to endlessly critique society, and my list reflects that. If you have problems with individual bits of advice in that list, feel free to let me know.

Secondly, regarding your claims of Marxist-Leninist theory and “horrifyingly undemocratic” AES states, I do recommend you read the essay Why do Marxists Fail to Bring the “Worker’s Paradise?” It’s important to contextualize AES states, their successes and failures, properly. For further reading, Soviet Democracy by Pat Sloan is a good historical account of the Soviet Democratic System, warts and all.

As for Gramsci, I am not at all opposed to including his writings, but my list is focuses on getting the most out of the least. I would need to remove a work and find a concise secondary work, in English. I can include his writings in my “DLC Pack” further reading list I am making. The target audience for my list is English-speaking, I made it in the context of the aftermath of the US election and am targeting disenfranchised liberals who may benefit from theory.

I appreciate your feedback however, and will add Gramsci as a suggestion for my DLC list.

I just try to channel Gramsci:

“You must realize that I am far from feeling beaten…it seems to me that… a man out to be deeply convinced that the source of his own moral force is in himself — his very energy and will, the iron coherence of ends and means — that he never falls into those vulgar, banal moods, pessimism and optimism. My own state of mind synthesises these two feelings and transcends them: my mind is pessimistic, but my will is optimistic. Whatever the situation, I imagine the worst that could happen in order to summon up all my reserves and will power to overcome every obstacle.”

and this dude was dying in a fascist prison and able to hold this outlook. i find it inspiring

I would recommend a mix of Marxist and anarchist founfational texts, media literacy snd historical texts, and modern summaries and topic-focused books. You can start wherever you’d like, but I usually recommend media literacy and history as they are immediately and widely useful and help open the door to the rest. So maybe an order like this to start:

• Blackshirts and Reds by Michael Parenti

• FAIR.org, the Citations Needed podcast, and Manufacturing Consent / Inventing Reality.

• The Jakarta Method

• A summary text of Marx’s Capital or two. Like Heinrich and then Michael Roberts’ counterpoints. Eventually, read Capital itself.

• Socialism, Utopian and Scientific and The Conditions of the Working Class by Engels.

• Texts around the October Revolution and contemporaries. Lenin vs. Kautsky, the formation of the Bolsheviks, histories around the timeline, Kropotkin, State and Revolution, Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism, What is to Be Done

• The basic Soviet canon, like Foundations of Leninism. Histories around the topic, like those of Losurdo.

• Major works by Emma Goldman, David Graeber, Crimethinc, Bookchin.

• Wretched of the Earth by Fanon.

• Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Friere.

• Fanshen and core Mao writings.

• Prison writings of Gramsci.

• Essential works by the French weirdos like Foucault and Debord.

That should set you up for the basics. Not joking - these are the basics that will allow you to communicate with the left and have a grasp of the analyses. There is much, much more to understand, and namely, none of what I’ve listed teaches how to organize or will make you sufficiently educated on the specific contexts in which we need organization. That is best done by joining an active socialist organization (not Trot and not a cult like Avakian stuff). This list is also low on topics of marginalization and combined struggle, which are important to read (e.g. Leslie Feinberg on trans liberation or du Bois on Pan Africanism), as it really is just the basics.

Antonio Gramsci - Selections From The Prison Notebooks. Phenomenal work on cultural hegemony, intellectual leadership and strategy for revolution.

Good impulse to read theory, but 150y/o theory is not where I’d advice people to start. At least the german originals of what you recomend there are fairly hard to read. Plus they lack the development of marxist theory that happened since then. For example Gramscis thoughts are so freakin important for marxism to be applicable to this society being far more diverse than good’ol working class in the factory vs. Monopoly man capitalists. I’m sure there is updated marxism and introductions available in english. (Dunno, Harvey maybe? Mayo?)

Also “how to conduct yourself as a leftist” sound strict af and kinda deterministic.

You all need to read gramsci.

If you think racism is an issue of “whites vs blacks” you either have never seen racism (good for you) or never really heard the people affected.

Hegemonial culture is a thing, and it plays a major role in keeping modern systems afloat.

Can’t fight capitalism without addressing inequalities and fighting for a just society for everyone.

This is the literal concept of solidarity: also fighting for causes you are not personally affected by.

I think that’s a fair take and perhaps indicates you’d lean anarchist-left.

I perceive myself as a social democrat, maybe with elements of anarchism, such as decentralization and down-to-up elements of organization.

I have mixed feelings myself, that kind of natural transformation won’t just be left alone to evolve, it’ll be actively resisted by powerful political and global forces, the United States and its allies would not allow it, for example.

This problem is actually a hard one – otherwise no one wouldn’t need to argue about it, and there is no simple choice. If someone thinks that there is an obvious simple solution, then he/her may be just very ignorant. Maybe I will sound controversial here, but in contrast to Marxist-Leninist, I do not blame United States for damping revolution. Revolution will not come simply because we are not in 19th century capitalism anymore. Capitalists adapted, provided more humane conditions to workers to not be swept by workers’ revolution, and Antonio Gramsci saw it something like 100 years ago, but Marxist-Leninists still live in 19th century and do not see that low-income class would rather choose far-right options like Trump or AfD. The United States indeed massively interfered with damping of “socialists” republics in South America, but I think we do not need another “red” imperialism country like USSR or Russia’s vassal. Humanity needs real communism, not “red” authoritarianism.

I think this pretty clearly demonstrated that the USSR wasn’t interested in anything but Empire.

I think so, and with time this was becoming more and more obvious. Western leftists were surprisingly long (like 1956) under the charm of USSR, maybe with an exception of people like Emma Goldman.

Basically Gramsci. The old hegemonic world order is dying and a new multipolar world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters: plague, climate catastrophe, war, and genocide. Our own four horsemen.

You should educate yourself by reading The Problem of Political Leadership in the Formation and Development of the Nation and the Modern State in Italy from Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks and studying trasformismo in Italian history instead of infantilizing an entire marginalized group over their justified stance against the system currently genociding their friends and family 👍 trust me, you’ll learn a lot about our current political situation.

We often do. There are 17 pages of hits in the search results: https://lemmy.ml/search?q=gramsci
It pops on on lemmy.ml alone dozens of times: https://lemmy.ml/search?listingType=Local&q=gramsci