Wanted to take a second to make some positive cases for why we believe in Scientific Socialism/Anarchism. We spend a lot of time belittling historically illiterate smug lords (which is awesome) but I think it’s important to take a second to appreciate why these ideas resonate with us so much and why we find these ideas so important that they are worth fighting for online and IRL. I’ll go first;
Demystification: that’s a big thing for me. The imperial core is a place that is full of institutions that, can technically be understood, and yet do not make a whole lot of sense in their function. Health insurance companies are a great example of this. The entire process of acquiring and using insurance in the U.S. is a Kafka-esque beauracratic nightmare. And at every step there are individuals who are happy to help you understand the process, and yet even once you gain the understanding they impart, it all still feels wildly inefficient and punitive. Even to a very young person, it doesn’t make sense. It is Only beneficial In comparison to the monstrous social violence of medically induced poverty. Meaning it only makes sense when you accept that violence as a necessary societal inevitably.
So growing up in the U.S. you are faced all the time with complex and baroque financial institutions and practices that society insists you understand even if doubt persists that what you are understanding doesn’t really make sense. Ultimately when this practice confers practical economic benefit the cognitive dissonance is assuaged and is even completely resolved in some individuals. Credit cards and credit scores are another great example of this.
Understanding Mystification as a Marxist term finally gave me the vocabulary to understand this phenomenon and hence be less bothered by trying to make sense of things that I understand and yet don’t make any sense.
Another big thing: The labor theory of value; perhaps my understanding is too cursory but when I tried reading Capital this part really stuck with me because it is profound even though it seemed rather obvious to me from my lived experience.
Without trying to get out of my depth In philosophical jargon, my understanding of the LTV is that the value of currency is derived from the surplus value generated by the application of labor to raw materials. I know the states ability to enforce the transaction is also key. I welcome any clarification/insight on LTV.
The point I’m trying to make about LTV and why I find it profound and worth Blooming about is that it means that as workers we generate the force that actually changes the world. That force is labor. It’s not money, It’s not Gold, it’s not big ideas from big job titles. It is the people who turn the earth, teach the young, or just sell their labor hours doing any number of things.
It’s easy to be pessimistic in the face of the incredible accumulated political power the west still holds. Yet we should have hope, because the power that money has is only ever borrowed from labor. Under that framework it becomes a struggle to organize enough unalienated labor hours to put towards building something better.
Our labor hours are the most important building block we have towards revolution. That is the real “capital” that reshapes the world. The struggle is to take as many back from your boss as you can, and if you can, invest those hours into something bigger than yourself.
That’s what gets me blooming. Constructive feedback always welcome (would love more insight on LTV)
What makes you feel hopeful about communism/anarchism?
I think there's a dialectical contradiction between "was I born a communist?" and "did I become a communist at a specific point in time?" I've spent a lot of time thinking about this because I'm obsessed with changing people's minds. In one sense, it started when I was a lib and couldn't understand how Trump won in 2016 after the entire liberal corporate media reassured me a million fucking times that he could never possibly win. How could this happen? How could anyone vote for this guy? I started reading and getting involved in politics. I also moved back to the USA with my young family after living abroad and couldn't get a job or healthcare no matter how smart or hard I worked (I had gotten a little too used to some of the perks of living abroad, which included universal health care). I also started running into a lot of extremely hostile white liberals who always seemed to have their hands on the levers of power. I had initially thought that Trump people were the enemy, and although I still think this, the libs were the ones standing in the way of me having a decent normal happy life 99% of the time. Then someone on reddit recommended the r/chapotraphouse subreddit, and I found that you could criticize these horrible dickheads from the left. I started seriously reading theory for the first time, listening to a lot of leftist podcasts, and here I am.
But the thing is, I can also remember moments from deep in my past when I was displaying communist characteristics without actually being a communist. I noticed a homeless guy asking for money when I was like five years old. I can still see him jingling a styrofoam cup full of coins. I know it's unusual to actually notice homeless people, that homeless people themselves complain about feeling invisible. There are other examples. Loving Star Trek. Never going through a fascist phase. Never fitting in somehow. Being against the Iraq War from day fucking one. In high school, I started radicalizing because I was tired of constantly being ordered to perform pointless arbitrary tasks. At that time I was reading books about alternative education, and I once asked myself: "we have political democracy, but why can't we have economic democracy?" I had discovered Marxism on my own (like many people) because nobody, and I mean nobody, had ever taught it to me, even though I had been surrounded by liberals for my entire life (and had also taken all of the advanced social studies classes in high school). I ended up asking my lib dad about it, and he said it was impossible because of human nature. I had no answer to that, and ended up going to a college I loved and having a great time there. It actually reaffirmed my liberalism, to the extent that I even sometimes ran into communists there and ended up making the same bullshit arguments we make fun of here on hexbear all the time.
My radicalization also went through stages, from me supporting Bernie to becoming a Trotskyist to moving straight into Marxism-Leninism after reading non-lib sources about Stalin. I volunteered very hard for the Bernie campaign in 2020 but was fully and completely radicalized after I witnessed local liberals stealing his state delegates right in front of me. This was as the pandemic was beginning and only weeks away from George Floyd's lynching. I never stopped masking, either, and so lately as I've been listening to the Tankie Group Therapy series on The East Is A Podcast I've been a little shocked, I guess, as the people on that podcast keep saying that they had no idea that liberals were so indifferent to human life. Meanwhile, I am surrounded at all times by anti-maskers whenever I venture into public, so I am fully aware that liberals don't give a fuck about anything except keeping the gravy train of suffering on the rails.
I also learned, thanks to Marxists like Wilhelm Reich, the people's minds don't usually change unless their circumstances change. Marxists in general have much deeper and more thoroughly researched explanations for whatever you can imagine, in contrast to liberals, who will just say something about authoritarianism, church, and Fox News when you ask them why so many Americans love Trump. Only very superficial answers come from them.
Marxists I think are also more optimistic, actually, in spite of our reputations. The liberals in my life have virtually no hope of any kind for the future.