#bordiga

[armchair-girlie]

[forevergulag]

yeah bukharin said this thing but you arent accounting for the fact stalin could say this thing i made up

[askenorweg]

kirby was historically progressive, despite his pinkness.

[septictankie]

[girldogmystic]

"It is obvious that I do not say anything con­cerning the particular process of development of, for example, a grain of bar­ley from germination to the death of the fruit-bearing plant, if I say it is a nega­tion of the negation" (Engels, Anti-Dühring).

This quote by Engels applies to a lot of self-described Marxists, even Lenin at times. Lenin we can forgive because most of his work on dialectics was in private notebooks where he was in the process of working things out.

Dialectical materialism doesn't really explain anything. It is a language of processes but you still need to understand the process to use the language correctly and say anything meaningful. The error of Lysenko and the Soviets of that era was expecting to apply ready-made conceptions and methods to a science. Marx actually critiques Ferdinand Lassale for trying to do this with economics:

"He will dis­cover to his cost that it is one thing for a critique to take a science to the point at which it admits of a dialectical presentation, and quite another to apply an abstract, ready-made system of logic to vague presentiments of just such a system" (MECW, 40:261).

Dialectical materialism, then, can be understood as a shared language that can emerge within the sciences to describe complex processes. There are actually other attempts to create shared language in this respect. My favorite is Cybernetics and Systems Theory. IMO, in complex systems theory, you start to get a lot of things that mirror dialectics.

At best, though, this shared language would allow easier communication between the sciences on many topics but would not explain processes on its own.

The sciences cannot be fundamentally transformed by the ideas of the scientists alone. They have to be unchained from the profit motive and the need for funding.

The Marxist and engineer Amadeo Bordiga says:

"Whether or not it be behind the capitalist as a person, industrial fixed capital, as opposed in its capitalist form to human labour, becomes the measure of the exchange value of products or commodities. This is the enemy Monster that hangs over the mass of producers, monopolising a product that concerns not only all present human beings but the entire course of the species down through the millennia. This product is the science and technology elaborated and deposited in the social brain. Today, with the degeneration of the capitalist form, this Monster is killing science itself, misgoverning it, criminally exploiting it fruits, squandering the heritage of future generations" (Bordiga, The Science and Passion of Communism).

In other words, it is the removal of the economic and political whips and chains placed on science that will radically change it, allowing it to stretch freely with the needs of humanity.

[ozymandiasdisorder]

Ideas of essays?

Hello fellow armchairs, ultras, and left deviationists

I was curious on what topics I should write about? I'm thinking for my next essay a critic on nationalism and pan-nationalism which may seem like a really obvious thing for Marxists to realize but as we all know billions must actually read.

cheers!

[dialectrician]

In the communist society we will make toilets out of crypto-currencies.

[toastertarts123]

[hiyathea]

Leftcoms on Tumblr rise up!

[dededeandsylveonenjoyer]

Tbh Looxray is my 2nd fovorite pokemon. just behind Sylveon :)

[skyno-lemons]

GRAMSCI, GIVE ME BACK MY LEGIONS!!!

[armchair-girlie]

[jocrude]

[askenorweg]

disregard previous post about pinkie pie. reactionary FASHoniSSta rarity needs to be shot

[cuominuobo]

"anti-fascism is the worst product of fascism" I say, making a troll face as my opponent (liberal) shrivels into a corn cob the moment the sound waves touch their ears

[oceanicmarxist]

The Nazis rejected Marxism and Communism but sections of the early Nazis were functionally 'reactionary socialists', they supported Socialism that replaced class struggle with national struggle, that's what's meant by 'National Socialism'. Early fascists (in Europe) in part came out of the workers movement (e.g. the Cercle Proudhon & Mussolini) but were a deeply reactionary and right-wing section of it, they eventually split from it when they make their pushes to seize power off the back of restoring class rule.

Most of the modern rightwing are not fundamentally the same as the Nazis, that's just reducing fascism to bad vibes. Plenty of rightwingers are willing to make concessions to Nazis (who, for the record, constitute a marginal section of the rightwing in most places with only a few exceptions - like Greece, Poland, Germany and France &c) because all they really care about is maintaining strict class rule, they don't really care who is the one wielding the stick as long as the stick is wielded.

Nazi occultism was fringe at the time (1920s-1940s), but sections of the early NSDAP came from the occultist Thule Society. Nazi occultism is mostly a product of neo-Nazi revival groups in the 60s and 70s which yes had overlap with neo-Pagans (Rodnovery for example was pioneered in the 50s by a Russian neo-Nazi, Alexey Dobrovolsky. It turns out when you frame your religion in terms of being a "native faith" or "ancestral traditional whatever" it really lends itself well to fascism!) and Satanist types.

Hating all forms of lefitsm was a big part of their ideology, and especially a big part of how they sold themselves.

Referring to things as "leftism" is a pretty recent thing. Socialists 100 years ago didn't really view themselves as being "a form of leftism", or referred to "leftism" as a thing at all. They viewed themselves as "The Left" in the classical French Revolution way. The Nazis didn't sell themselves as being "anti-leftist" they sold themselves as being anti-communist, anti-Jewish, pro-German, pro-Christian, etc.

But yes, pop culture depictions of anything aren't indicative of reality. The point of it is to standardise culture, mass produce it as a product, and to hammer people into believing certain things in a certain way.

In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation. The images detached from every aspect of life fuse in a common stream in which the unity of this life can no longer be reestablished. Reality considered partially unfolds, in its own general unity, as a pseudo-world apart, an object of mere contemplation. The specialization of images of the world is completed in the world of the autonomous image, where the liar has lied to himself. The spectacle in general, as the concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the non-living.

-Society of the Spectacle

There is nothing left for the consumer to classify. Producers have done it for him. Art for the masses has destroyed the dream but still conforms to the tenets of that dreaming idealism which critical idealism baulked at. Everything derives from consciousness: for Malebranche and Berkeley, from the consciousness of God; in mass art, from the consciousness of the production team. Not only are the hit songs, stars, and soap operas cyclically recurrent and rigidly invariable types, but the specific content of the entertainment itself is derived from them and only appears to change. The details are interchangeable. The short interval sequence which was effective in a hit song, the hero’s momentary fall from grace (which he accepts as good sport), the rough treatment which the beloved gets from the male star, the latter’s rugged defiance of the spoilt heiress, are, like all the other details, ready-made clichés to be slotted in anywhere; they never do anything more than fulfil the purpose allotted them in the overall plan. Their whole raison d’être is to confirm it by being its constituent parts. As soon as the film begins, it is quite clear how it will end, and who will be rewarded, punished, or forgotten. In light music, once the trained ear has heard the first notes of the hit song, it can guess what is coming and feel flattered when it does come. The average length of the short story has to be rigidly adhered to. Even gags, effects, and jokes are calculated like the setting in which they are placed. They are the responsibility of special experts and their narrow range makes it easy for them to be apportioned in the office.

-Enlightenment as Mass Deception

also:

What is National Socialism?

Fascism: What it is and How to fight it

Report on Fascism

Thalheimer: On Fascism

The nazis that you see in movies are as much a historical fantasy as vikings with horned helmets and samurai cutting people in half.

The nazis were not some vague evil that wanted to hurt people for the sake of hurting them. They had specific goals which furthered a far right agenda, and they wanted to do harm to very specific groups, (largely slavs, jews, Romani, queer people, communists/leftists, and disabled people.)

The nazis didn't use soldiers in creepy gas masks as their main imagery that they sold to the german people, they used blond haired blue eyed families. Nor did they stand up on podiums saying that would wage an endless and brutal war, they gave speeches about protecting white Christian society from degenerates just like how conservatives do today.

Nazis weren't atheists or pagans. They were deeply Christian and Christianity was part of their ideology just like it is for modern conservatives. They spoke at lengths about defending their Christian nation from godless leftism. The ones who hated the catholic church hated it for protestant reasons. Nazi occultism was fringe within the party and never expected to become mainstream, and those occultists were still Christian, none of them ever claimed to be Satanists or Asatru.

Nazis were also not queer or disabled. They killed those groups, before they had a chance to kill almost anyone else actually. Despite the amount of disabled nazis or queer/queer coded nazis you'll see in movies and on TV, in reality they were very cishet and very able bodied. There was one high ranking nazi early on who was gay and the other nazis killed him for that. Saying the nazis were gay or disabled makes about as much sense as saying they were Jewish.

The nazis weren't mentally ill. As previously mentioned they hated disabled people, and this unquestionably included anyone neurodivergent. When the surviving nazi war criminals were given psychological tests after the war, they were shown to be some of the most neurotypical people out there.

The nazis weren't socialists. Full stop. They hated socialists. They got elected on hating socialists. They killed socialists. Hating all forms of lefitsm was a big part of their ideology, and especially a big part of how they sold themselves.

The nazis were not the supervillians you see on screen, not because they didn't do horrible things in real life, they most certainly did, but because they weren't that vague apolitical evil that exists for white American action heros to fight. They did horrible things because they had a right wing authoritarian political ideology, an ideology that is fundamentally the same as what most of the modern right wing believes.