Why is leftism so elitist? You people argue about philosophers and shit all day, surely the the only people who have the time or interest to read all of this stuff are the well educated middle class… I'm from a very working class area in the UK, we've always voted labour but nobody here understands all of this stuff, and without a strong, relatable socialist prescence people are turning more and more to nationalism. Why do I want to spend my life campaigning for leftist causes and then be told by some politics and philosophy masters student that I don't follow the correct anarcho-communist schools of thought and that I need to read such and such philosophers. Sure, maybe somebody needs to understand all of this stuff to give us direction but it isn't for the common man and you're alienating a lot of people who want to get into politics. Shunned is how I felt when I first wanted to get into leftism and couldn't navigate all the academic gibberish. Pic unrelated.
Why is leftism so elitist? You people argue about philosophers and shit all day...
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The intellectualist bullshit is definitely one of the biggest problems facing the left. We need to engage with the proletariat with things that they understand and are important to them.
Don't listen to the special snowflakes. Revolutionary self theory is the way to go. Take the stuff you hear that makes the most sense to you and work with it.
IRL the best you can do with working class people usually is point out the lack of control over their own national politics and the stupid things that capitalism does.
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don't worry I'm sure the leftcoms are already on their way
Stop being such an lazy, anti-intellectual cretin and actually read up on some leftist theory. No action without theory, remember
and there we go
You don't even need to read anymore
just let the audiobook on youtube or download them yourself and listen to while working
here some free books my comrade
>>>/freedu/
I am sorry. Ours is a stupidity inherent to leftism and revolutionary romantics in general. We get the (occasionally) hyper-intelligent subject who just doesn't "get it," who understands a situation logically, what a conundrum is overtly glossing, but simply misses its hidden contextual rules. In literature, one cannot avoid recalling Jaroslav Hašek's good soldier Švejk, who, when he saw soldiers shooting from their trenches at the enemy soldiers, ran into no-man's land and started to shout: "Stop shooting, there are people on the other side!" The arch-model of this idiocy is, however the naïve child from Anderson's tale who publicly exclaims that the emperor is naked—thereby missing the point that, as Alphonse Allais put it, we are all naked beneath our clothes.
If you work 9 hours a day plus overtime on minimum wage, have bills to pay and a household to maintain, how are you going to have time to give a single fuck about reading philosophy?
Here some of the things i used to listen to
The Revolutionary Catechism by my nigga sergey nechayev
youtube.com
If you want to live the mood of this short work for longer read demons by Dostoevsky
Don't be shy to ask us to spoonfeed you nigga
Nigga, how hard is it to understand the basic concept of workers ownership?
Like the state?
Join the Communist.
Don't like the state?
become an anarchist.
Those are the basics.
Simple shit, my man.
It doesn't help that most of the working class proles are stupid, ignorant, and uneducated. That's why we need an intellectual vanguard to guide them in the right direction.
fuck off, MLism is dead
Nah, if you like the state but don't like soviet-style economies come join the Market Socialist masterrace
This is what I'm saying. Cut the bullshit, the sectarianism, the academic arguing. Fight for socialism.
10/10 b8
What do you propose instead of a vanguard?
What's wrong with planning?
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The workers death squads
the demons
You can have a little bit of planning, but for the most part it means that if something goes wrong it all gets blamed on the government endangering the stability of the state. And stastically speaking, somethings probably going to go wrong at some point.
It also gives bureaucrats too much power and cannot lead to socialism with democratic centralism.
I think that a lot of it has to do with the fact that so much socialist thought is only available through books, and that leftists don't really have access to the channels through which most information is disseminated. Like when you get down to it, the Labour Theory of Value is no more counterintuitive than The Secret, but the key difference is that while most of your modern proletarians are able to dredge up the tenets of The Secret, you're probably going to get a bunch of blank stares regarding LTV. Plus, you're not going to see Oprah talk about Das Kapital on her show.
The problem is that socialism is basically ALL theory. If we have something concrete, like a single instance where workers communally own and run a business that isn't an artisanal cruelty-free vegan soap workshop staffed entirely by dreadlocked skeletons with earlobe gauges, you can just point to that and say "that. that is socialism". I think it is the moral duty of middle class people to try and use the resources at their disposal to give everyone a taste of what socialism looks like.
It also doesn't help that most people are indoctrinated with the "socialism = dictatorship with empty shelves" meme from a fairly early age and it gets repeated everywhere, in America at least.
Those signs are in my town to I don't get them
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This.
When I try to organize and instigate at the workplace, I talk about what matters to people – their wages, their hours, fairness, etc.
I haven't even really read too much of the actual philosophy myself, I mainly just listen to Wolff to keep up on recent events and what a leftist alternative would be to those things so I grow better ideas on how to approach controversies in my own workplace and community. From personal experience, it's much more effective than just being like "just read Marx."
let's throw out bureaucrats altogether and use supercomputers.
Like when Allende tried it back in the 70's.
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We need stronger memes lads
The alt-right got so far because they dumbed things down so much
One day it's bound to be possible.
After all, techonological development IS what made capitalism supersede feudalism.
Perhaps that's why 20th c. socialism failed as well.
computers can't innovate or create new commodities spontaneously which is necessary for any modern economy
Science is supposed to innovate.
What the fuck is spontaneous commodity production?
Innovation is more than grand things by science, it may be something as simple as a better mousetrap or air conditioning filter. Spontaneous commodity production is what happens when a firm recognizes a need and demand for a market which is not or is barely being met, one which has clearly been overlooked. For while a computer may easily figure out the appropriate level of production for any given market, it cannot easily identify new market as they appear, unlike the collective insight of innumerable autonomous firms.
Arthur C. Clarke was not wrong, user.
OP is lumpen, and probably class traitor too.
This guy is right, people still need theory, we need to dumb down theory and stop using so many complex words for simple conceptd
I was somehow able to do it.
But as others have stated we don't need to abandon theory, just simplify it for mass consumption which is essentially the purpose of propaganda
The revolution isn't coming until the masses are on our side, so until then we need to Agitate and Educate™ (preferably using shitty ms paint comics)
are you even socialist?
Market socialist maybe?
Yes they can, or they WILL at least.
Anyways, innovation is overrated if you're maximizing it to the fullest through markets.
Also, markets solving everything is a porky meme. Hayek and Mises