#leftist thinkers

[blackswaneuroparedux]

His [Foucault's] vision of European culture as the institutionalised form of oppressive power is taught everywhere as gospel, to students who have neither the culture nor the religion to resist it. Only in France is he widely regarded as a fraud.

- Roger Scruton on Michel Foucault

During student protests in Paris in 1968, Roger Scruton, a francophile, watched students overturn cars to erect barricades and tear up cobblestones to throw at police. It was at that moment he realised he was a conservative.

For Scruton, he didn’t think much of Jean Paul Satre, the father of existentialism, who cobbled together the essence of his philosophy from Alexandre Kojève's reading of Hegel in his famous seminar at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in the 1930s. His listeners included Bataille, Aron, Merleau-Ponty, Lacan and Simone de Beauvoir. Each of them drew something different from him. For Sartre, the idea of the self-created individual with radical freedom. Expressed very early on in La nausée, this freedom is a source of anguish for a consciousness which not only considers that the surrounding world has no meaning other than that which it can possibly confer on it, but which experiences itself as a kind of nothingness.

How, starting from such a philosophy, does Sartre arrive at the idea of commitment to revolution and socialism? It is a mystery. Scruton wrote, "According to the metaphysics enunciated in Being and Nothingness, the correct answer to the question "To what shall I commit myself?" should be: What does it matter, as long as you can want it as a law for yourself." "But this is not the answer offered by Sartre, whose commitment is to an ideal that is at odds with his own philosophy.”

With his theory of episteme, Foucault gives us a new version of the Marxist concept of ideology.

Despite what some might think, Scruton wasn’t entirely dismissive of Foucault whose thought was more subtle and interesting than Sartre’s. Scruton confesses a certain tenderness for Michel Foucault's style, for his flamboyant imagination. But Scruton does not see his archaeology of knowledge as a great innovation. According to a habit shared by many French left-wing intellectuals, like Sartre himself, Foucault intended to tear away the veils behind which the relations of domination are hidden, to unmask the deceptions of others. With Sartre, it was in the name of a vague nostalgia for personal authenticity. Foucault, on the other hand, looked for the secret structures of power behind all institutions - and even at work in language.

But the historical horizon on which Foucault projected this quest, which postulated a rupture between the "classical age" of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the bourgeois world that would follow the French Revolution, showed that, despite his claims, Foucault had remained a prisoner of Marxism. Moreover, as Scruton would write, “his theory of episteme is a rehash of the Marxist theory of ideology. Moreover, he considers power only from the perspective of domination. “

But the main criticism that Scruton finds fault with Foucault is the one found in the post-enlightenment thinkers: relativism. If each era generates the discursive formations that correspond to its system of power, including the sciences, then truth does not exist. Everything is discourse...

Photo: Jean-Paul Satre and Michel Foucault take a stand during the Paris Student Riots, May 1968.

[menlove]

I love when people are like shocked and horrified about the latine vote always going red like. every latine in this country is gonna go "yeah?" like it's not surprising. those of us that are leftists agree that it's fucking stupid and I promise you we're more frustrated than you are, but like. never a shocking event.

[kotoneshiomiofficial]

yes asexual people can participate in kinks because sexual attraction ("i want to fuck them") and physical attraction ("that's hot and turns me on") are two different things. yes kinks are sexual by definition as in you participate in them for sexual pleasure (which asexual people do usually still want/need). no minors should not be in kink spaces irl or online. no that does not mean ace people are fucking predatory by default. thats the exact same shit u.s. senators are demonizing us with. like its not 2014 anymore and anonymous asexual was a troll account you need to grow the fuck up. no i dont care how much an ace person annoyed you it is still bigoted to make sweeping negative assumptions about an entire demographic of people, especially based on someone's sexual/romantic orientation

[mejomonster]

I may post a bunch about authoritarian thinking later, and how to combat it, but some short important points for anyone: if you think like an authoritarian it means you tend to think in terms of black/white, tend to obey and believe people you consider your leaders and tend to view the world as your own in-group and then outgroups (which you may want dead/not care what happens to them/hate them), you struggle to think critically and empathize, and ignoring the many ways this authoritarian thinking hurts society at large and yourself - importantly, authoritarian thinking leaves you EXTREMELY vulnerable to con artists and cruel leaders because once someone gets into a leadership position in your in-group you tend to trust and obey them. Even if they hurt you, abuse you, lie to you. So a big reason to work on changing your own authoritarian thinking, is to HELP YOU PROTECT YOURSELF and IMPROVE your own safety and situation. You will be able to spot con artists and abusers easier, and protect yourself from them hurting you, if you work on changing your authoritarian thinking a bit. In addition, if you care about your in-group (the group of people you identify with) and your in-group views you as part of it (for example: you're in-group is a church and the church members value your partocipation), then you learning to think in more flexible ways will allow you to both save yourself from abusers AND convince your in-group to stop following an abusive leader and switch to a better one for the group. Win win.

Key ways you can work on your own tendencies toward authoritarian thinking: learn how to empathize with various people, learn how to think critically, and expose yourself to a variety of enviornments/viewpoints/experiences.

For empathy, easy ways to start include: get a pet and practice caring about that pet, read books and practice caring about a character, volunteer in a place outside your in-group (so if you go to church, volunteer at a school or library or theater or fair or daycare or soup kitchen) and practice appreciating the process of helping people outside the in-group. Getting a pet and reading can be some of the easiest initial things you can do. Trying to make new friends and acquaintances with people outside your in-group may also help: talking to a child, coworker, classmate, stramger at grocery store or fair, with respect (such as asking what their favorite toy or show is, why, practicing caring about what makes them happy, practicing interacting with people even when you don't immediately get some tangible thing from them), practice talking with people without arguing or starting a conflict (and if they argue first, it's okay to leave the conversation entirely, at least for a while just try practicing Not Fighting sometimes). Practice listening to people to get to know them (including people in your in-group you may not know well), and be curious about their experiences and the differences/similarity to you as all interesting and not necessarily bad or good (so if you went to public school and they went to private school, hold off on making a judgement about it and just be curious about what their experience was like). On a more surface level, if people like a different musician or actor than you, be curious about what they like and try to imagine why someone might appreciate what they do (you don't have to like that band too, but practice trying to understand why someone else likes it). Its the idea of "imagine you were in someone else's shoes," and having pets, reading about characters unlike you, and getting to know people and their unique experiences helps you practice doing that. Along with practicing holding off on judgement, especially on simple basic things to start: for example trying not to jump to black/white good bad thinking over what people in your group and outside it do... in terms of say what they eat, or the music they like, or their clothes. So if you tend to decide everyone who doesnt go to your church is evil, practice maybe viewing a person with the same religion as you but who goes to a different church as neutral and someone who maybe just never knew your church existed or was raised in a different city and so their life experience may simply have been different - but that doesnt automatically make them evil, just for being born in a different city and not knowing about your specific church existing yet.

To expose yourself to more experiences and people: again consider volunteering at an event outside of your in-group, start a new hobby and join a new discord or fandom group or in-person meet up, go to a new bar or coffee place or grocery store and have small talk, take a class in the community, go to fairs and community events, go to an event in a nearby but different community (like a fair in the next county, a concert, a play you'd like to see). Any new hobby or interest that allows you to meet new people and ask them about their experience with the hobby/interest will help, and you'll help them as you share your own experiences. Even just the act of exploring new possible interests will help you, as you will not have a judgement yet on what you like/dislike and will get to practice deciding what parts of the interest you enjoy and don't based on your experiences. So experience new things, and listen to other people's experiences while being open to letting yourself enjoy things others may dislike, and letting yourseld dislike things others may like. Practice listening to others without automatically assuming their opinion/experience is good/bad (or that there is a good/bad at all, preference for cheeze pizza versus pepperoni can just be two neutral choices which are both fine) or going to be the same for you (you may feel much differently than others and thats fine), practice trying new things where you're allowed to try multiple different ways without any way being particularly good/bad (this is to practice thinking in more varied ways: you're allowed to make 3 different cookie recipes and find each of them yummy and yet not perfect, you're allowed to dislike all 3 recipes but appreciate that your friend loves recipe 1 so you may make it for their birthday, you're allowed to fail the 3 recipes and need to try a few times, you're allowed to make them and decide you don't like making cookies after all and would rather try making a cake next). Trying sports teams may help, hobby clubs, board game tournaments, book clubs (where people have various opinions and you - like them - may have your own unique opinion all of which is fine, no opinion is mandatory or restricted).

To develop critical thinking skills: the two parts above will help somewhat with that. Just letting yourself experience new things, meet new people and hear about experiences different than your own, practicing wondering why someone likes something you may not, practicing liking something because YOU like it after experiencing it and not because someone told you to like it, will all help you figure out what you SPECIFICALLY think. And it will help you recognize that other people all think uniquely, may sometimes disagree, and that thinking differently can be okay. Those are some helpful initial steps to learn to think critically.

Critical thinking skills are important because it helps you figure out what is a fact and real, what is a person's opinion which may be right or wrong or only partly right or wrong or may be something you can't detetmine, how to check if a fact is something you can make decisions with or not explained well enough to rely on. Critical thinking is how you help yourself: if you are abused and your lover hits and punches you, and says "I love you and care about you," critical thinking will help you recognize the fact: you are being injured, help you recognize the actions your lover does of hurting you doesn't match their words that they love you, and helps you make a decision to help yourself - to leave the location where your lover is harming you over and over and go somewhere you are safer and not in danger. Critical thinking, even if you love being in an in-group and love following leadership, will allow you to notice when leaders and in-group members genuinely are helping the group, and when leaders or members are hurting the group. This can allow you to help the group and yourself by recognizing when the group has someone harming others and help you determine how to stop that harm. Even if you think very authoritarian and like that kind of structure in your life, critical thinking skills will help you and those you love.

You can start by figuring out how to make a decision on some basic thing. For example: prepare for the weather today in your city. Look up weather your-city in google, click some weather sites (to check collected data), go outside of your front door and physically feel the weather (data you collect yourself), text a friend who lives somewhere else and ask them what the weather is in your city - and ask them not to check the weather report (get an opinion), perhaps also ask your roommate what the weather is (an opinion from someone with the same ability to literally look outside the window and get their own data in person). From this experience you'll learn that data from a collected organization is probably fairly accurate but not perfect (maybe the weather site said 90% chance rain and when you went outside it was sprinkling but not pouring, and the clouds were dark), maybe your friend's opinion in another town was right or wrong (maybe they guessed and rain was a good guess for a cloudy November in your state) but they couldn't tell you how long until the weather would change, you went outside yourself and that was fairly reliable as you could literally feel the weather (but it cant help you decide if it will still be raining in 8 hours), maybe your roommate's weather judgement was better than the friend in another town but worse than your own judgement of going outside and feeling it. This is an experience to show you how useful facts are versus opinions. If you go outside and it rains on you, it is a fact that it is raining. If your friend in another city says they think the rain stopped, it's their opinion and they may be right Or wrong... you'll have to go outside to find out. The weather report site is somewhat right and can give you estimates of the next several hours of weather so that's helpful, but isn't giving you updates as specific as actually standing outside in the weather on your particular block. You can now see how facts and opinipns are useful, and when they are more or less reliable for making a decision to help yourself. (In this case to prepare to deal with the weathet outside).

Next you can practice critical thinking with less simple questions. You can try to decide "what is the best tires to get for my SUV" or "what coverup will be least likely to give me acne"? You'll look up on google these questions, and see company sites marketing their product and claiming theirs is best. You'll notice a company always says THEIR product is the best, and learn that a company may not give you facts as often as NON company sites that compare many products, or that a company will word facts in a way to imply something that isn't necessarily true. (For example: if a makeup clogs pores, it may not say it does that, it may just not use the word "non comedogenic"... but since you aren't seeing the word "non comdegenic" which means not-pore-clogging, that's a sign the makeup May actually clog pores). You will notice review sites, and reviewers with NO sponsors will tend to be more honest and share personal experience, while sponsored reviews may only mention positives. You will notice more fact based comparison sites, which will list ingredients and what each ingredient does, which will be facts to help you make a decision on which makeup is least likely to give you acne.

You may read articles on certain makeup ingredients and if they're a common allergen, which might explain why some makeup with some ingredients caused you acne before even though none of the ingredients were pore clogging. You are practicing comparing facts, and practicing deciding which sources are reliable or biased (biased sources try to convince you to buy something/believe something), what the bias is about (many articles want you to buy something even though you don't Truly need to buy everything), which reviewers gave biased opinions (if theyre sponsored they get money to convince you to buy something), which reviewers gave personal experiences (and are those experiences useful to you - did the reviewer have similar skin type and issues and allergies?). These are important skills! Learning to do this will help you spend money on things that are more likely to HELP you, to be what you want, and this skill will help you avoid scams and avoid being tricked.

Critical thinking gets much deeper than this, and applies to everything you run into in life - all news articles have biases (they want to convince you of something, there's facts AND opinions and attempts to convince you to do something), all ads are like this (every sponsored post on instagram is trying to convince you to believe and/or buy something), all influencers posts (their job is to convince you to buy products from companies paying the influencer, to get you to invest money in the influencer too - every podcaster/twitch streamer/youtuber/etc), books. All stuff you can find in the world is fact, opinion, some mixture, someone trying to convince you of something, and you using your own experiences to get your own facts (example: its raining on your face when you go outside so fact: its raining) and to decide your own opinions (opinion might be: you like feeling the rain, so you choose not to bring an umbrella, but your lover hates rain so they choose to bring an umbrella for themselves). You use all that information to decide what is fact, what is others opinion and are they trying to convince you of something, what your opinion is, and what to do that will help you.

Here's more information on developing critical thinking skills:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2022/08/05/13-easy-steps-to-improve-your-critical-thinking-skills/ (this has good basic tips for things you can do daily)

https://www.criticalthinking.org/pages/critical-thinking-where-to-begin/796 (a big website on critical thinking)

https://www.monash.edu/student-academic-success/enhance-your-thinking/critical-thinking/what-is-critical-thinking (this has good step by step instructions on how to start to think critically and practice in depth)

[bonni]

another interesting thing is that fascism warping perceptions of artistic beauty in the regions where it flourished was and still is a very real phenomenon, but if you think that fascist art was just soooo good intrinsically and that that made it useful for indoctrinating people you've very much got it backwards (as op of that post pointed out). read Rhinoceros by Eugene Ionesco for free online

[rotzaprachim]

it is soooo funny to see fanon be reposted under uh particular contexts when this is quite literally what's going on these days with antisemitism being fine actually if it's from other oppressed people especially those in post colonial states after former imperial powers literally used antisemitism as an organizing tactic and self-legitimizing conspiracy

[glassrunner]

.

[queeraliensposts]

Y'all still thinking about that chick that had one whole blog dedicated to how much she is against "identity politics" and her being super "anti-leftist" and then having another blog all about how much she loves the cyberpunk aesthetic

um, ma'am cyberpunk as an art form and literary genre was created to criticize capitalism and class division.

[nottobeadickoranything]

Sooo, if all of the worlds most evil people despise leftism and spend billions saying its bad, and yall then go "I'm a badass, a real free thinker" and then proceed to say and think exactly what the billionaires tell you to think, how does that make sense? How are you "thinking freely" there, unless that phrase just means "white supremacy" and no one told me...

If you're such a "badass free thinker" doesn't that mean figuring out who all the worst, most damaging-to-society, outwardly-evil people are, and then doing the opposite of what they want? In this case I cant see any other path other than going left, not right. If all of the rich people are right wingers, pissing them off by being equally annoying leftists sure seems like the most logical path here. Yet your "free thinking" in reality just means "parroting the anti-leftist propaganda the billionaires spoonfed me". Please feel free to educate me on the logic here. Unless its just white/british supremacy all along, in that case, you are a coward going along with the herd, and certainly not a "free thinker" (this concept of "free thinking" is entirely bunk and anti-academia too btw, it means "thinking without facts, using white supremacist vibes over reality").

Keep in mind rich people have never benefitted anyone other than themselves and their immediate families. They do not benefit society, or humanity in general, they only hoard and steal. So why would you want to be aligned with them on any level? We also have seen behind the curtain too many times, we all know rich people are not better or smarter than anyone, they don't ever work hard in real life (but love to say that phrase, or they think making 1 phone call = "hard work") and usually are rich from birth. Therefore, they are easily the most obvious group to taunt, ridicule and make their lives worse in any legal way, and being that the online space is the best battleground for this, being an annoying online leftist is the only logical result here that I can see when talking about "free thinking" or "rebelling against the norm".

[historicity-was-already-taken]

I hate what the Israeli government is doing but I'm scared of contributing to the rise in anti-semitism in the US. I'm not Jewish and not super keyed in to anti-semitism. Obviously, anyone talking shit about the Jewish people is someone I should fight, but there are things I should watch out for even when they say "Israel," right? What kind of rhetoric should I be on the lookout for?

What makes this hard, is that there is no collective Jewish take on this. There are some Jews who would tell you that any criticism of Israel is inherently anti-Semitic. There are other Jews who would tell you that Jewish support for the modern state is antithetical to the values at the core of our ethics and faith.

Both of those types of Jewish thinkers follow this blog, as do Jews holding views everywhere in between.

So what I'm going to tell you isn't The Jewish Stance on this, but the stance I've developed as a Modern Jewish historian who also happens to be a Jewish person with leftist politics.

Here is a list of narratives and rhetorical patterns to watch out for:

-individuals or spaces which view jews as inherently unworthy of trust, and require them to consistently prove that they are a "Good Jew"

-rhetoric which continuously singles out Israeli human and civil rights abuses, while failing to hold other states committing equal or much larger scale abuses to the same standards

-speech which implies that the Jews can fit neatly into the role of "white colonizer"

-visual languages which super-impose Nazi imagery over Jewish symbols

-Blood Libel rhetoric, which accuses Israel of using the blood or murdered Palestinian babies for its bread, or harvesting Palestinian organs for the black market. This type of rhetoric has been circulating the western world for literal centuries, and it always ends with Jews being expelled and/or burnt at the stake.

And this is kind of where the classic "I can't define it but I know it when I see it" porn definition comes in. Sometimes someone screaming about "The Zionists" is someone deeply disturbed by, say, the frankly fascistic behavior of Israelis in West Bank Settlements. Sometimes, that person is furious that Jews are asking them to critically examine the role of any or some of the above elements in their speech regarding Israel and Israelis.

Some Jews will weaponize a lot of our traumatic past to silence other Jews, and say that by writing this I am no better than the Jewish Police who rounded up their people for the Treblinka transports. Other Jews will say that by writing any of this, I'm silencing necessary speech regarding the war crimes in Gaza and that I'm complicit in the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinian civilians as a result.

But this is my basic, 101 level response, and it's not going to change.

I really, truly, appreciate your how deeply you care about grasping these issues. If you have any follow-up questions I'd be happy to answer them under similar understandings of username exclusion.

[ptsilencedhill]

Every person I thought was a leftist Thinker on this website has managed to come full circle into “black people aren’t oppressed and make up their problems” “women’s rights haven’t mattered since they got the right to vote, so shut up you feminazi” “these revolutionary movements are totally a bunch of whining liberal college kids who think it’s a fad”

[jewish-mccoy]

Can we talk about how fucked up it is that Jews and Israelis have no safe spaces online? And if we dare complain, we’re told we’re whining and other groups have it worse.

And no one seems to either notice or care. The pro Palestine movement is infested with antisemitism. Leftist spaces are infested with antisemitism. It’s impossible to engage with the pro Palestinian movement because to do so, they demand you denounce Israel’s existence and make you be their token Jew. Like no? The fuck gives you the audacity?

I’m tired of walking on eggshells around leftists for fear of being called a colonizer or a genocide apologist because guess what??? It doesn’t fucking matter what I say, you’re gonna do it anyway, because I’m an evil Jew!

I could talk till I’m blue in the face about cease fires or how Hamas is purposefully putting civilians in harms way, but the second I do, people are like “oh you mean Israel. Israel is the problem.” Actually, you fucking black and white thinker, ISRAEL IS NOT ALWAYS THE PROBLEM. Israel has done fucked up things. So has every fucking country on earth. But the news is dominated by “Israel is awful” and “wipe Israel off the map.” Why do you think that is.

IT’S ANTISEMITISM. It’s just that simple. Really fucking is.

And because the movement keeps flooding Jewish tags on tumblr with antisemitism, I am gonna tag this so the “river to the sea” people ACTUALLY ADVOCATING GENOCIDE can have their safe spaces (Jew free spaces) interrupted. I’m tired of taking the high road.

You all would rather side with terrorists than Jews. That’s how bad the leftist problem with antisemitism is. Terrorists who admit to using rape and murder and torture ON CIVILIANS as tactics. That’s how much you fucking hate us. Well, tough fucking luck. We’re here and we’re not going anywhere. Am yisrael chai, fuckers.

[psychotrenny]

While "Leftism" is a useful enough shorthand to describe a general tendency within a specific political context, it means absolutely nothing on it's own. Like you can use it when you want to quickly and broadly place something as "progressive", advocating more rapid and radical social changes in order to progress society away from its current set of contradictions. This has meaning when you can contrast it with "rightists", who could (depending on the specific context) seek more incremental change, preservation of the status quo or a retreat to a more entrenched version of it.

There are a number of ways in which one could employ these terms too. Like you could use it to describe those who exhibit these tendencies within a broader group or organisation, such as calling Bernie Sanders part of the "left wing" of the contemporary US DP while Leon Trotsky was a "leftist" within the CPSU of the mid 1920s. It could also describe individuals or organisations within a broader milieu (such as a nation's political scene); Noam Chomsky and Michael Parenti are both broadly "leftist" thinkers of the 21st century USA while the GPUS and PSL are both "leftist" parties within the same context.

As you can see from these wildly varying examples, terms like "leftists" are inherently vague and not always useful. A lot of examples of what people call "leftist infighting" are groups with inherently irreconcilable ideologies that just happen to fall, under current conditions, within the same broad political tendency; it makes no sense to talk as though that sort of "left unity" is inherently desirable or even possible. And "Leftism" certainly isn't an ideology in of itself, but merely a way of classifying them. Your ideology can make you a "Leftist", but "Leftism" cannot be your ideology.

[qqueenofhades]

What do you think of the movement to vote "uncommitted" in the primary? Personally I think it's a good idea as a protest vote, while not "allowing Trump to win" since it's, ya know, the primary. You're voting for "the Democrat you want to be the candidate for president" not who you actually want to be president. Most of the arguments I've seen against it seem to forget primaries exist...

Well, since you came to me and presumably do want my honest opinion on this topic, I'll share it with you. However, this will also be very blunt and candid, including some things which I haven't yet said in the 4+ months since the whole Israel/Hamas situation kicked off, and therefore also frustrated. This frustration should not be read as/taken as being directed at you personally, but since you're the conduit for this question, that's just something I want to highlight.

So. Why should you vote for Biden in the primary, and not "uncommitted" or whatever else?

First of all, what I desperately want to ask all these self-righteous VOTE UNCOMMITTED IN THE PRIMARY TO SEND BIDEN A MESSAGE types is: what exactly the fuck do you want this message to be, and what action do you expect Biden will take as a result? Is this actually based on an expectation of what he can/and or will actually do, or is it just a froth of misguided Online Leftist "rah rah this Bad Thing Happening Is All Biden's Fault," as we also notably went through when Roe was overturned by the Trump-stacked SCOTUS selected precisely for the purpose of overturning Roe? My god, the amount of bad "THIS IS BIDEN/THE DEMOCRATS' FAULT" posts that appeared, and are still circulating on the particularly idiotic corners of this site. Nothing could ever be Trump/the Republicans' fault in that case; it was the same old same old "DEMOCRATS DON'T CARE ENOUGH TO STOP THIS!!!" puerile fantasy. That's what we are getting now with Israel/Hamas. This isn't Hamas's fault for attacking Israel on October 7 (god forbid; the online left loves Hamas) and it isn't even the state of Israel and Netanyahu's fault for responding with full-scale genocide on Gaza. Or it is, somehow, but not so much that Biden personally couldn't magically reach in and stop it "if he really wanted to." I'm sick and fucking tired of this bullshit sixth-grade bad-faith disingenuous approach to playing Super Moral Social Justice Yahtzee and refusing to acknowledge the thousands of complex factors at play, especially when it involves blaming literally anyone other than Biden, personally (just like the Trump cultists, for whom "IT'S BIDEN'Z FAULT" is the beginning and end of their political theory, just like the Online Leftists). I'm sure this will get me called a genocide apologist by the Very Smart Moral Twitter Thinker types, but I don't think "Biden has failed to magically single-handedly solve this crisis, which stems from one of the most major and long-running issues in post-WWII and indeed pre-WWII world history, in four months" is actually a good reason to vote against him.

Likewise: withholding your vote might make more sense as a strategy if Biden was still only blindly supporting Israel and refusing to do anything to pressure them, which is demonstrably untrue. I know it's hard for some of these people to actually read the news and/or anything outside their ultra-curated Twitter feed, but it's been well-reported and well-documented that he is. If the US was directly involved in the bombing campaign on Gaza, sure, tell Biden that you will vote uncommitted to increase pressure on him to pull out. None of that is actually true, and the "information" about Biden's action in re: Gaza on both Twitter and Tumblr is basically just entirely malicious lies. So again: what message are you sending when you decide to be all precious and announce you're not voting for him? You don't want him to pressure Israel? You're willing to blow this up entirely and increase the media nonsense about BIDEN WEAK DEMOCRATS DIVIDED and give Trump an opening to exploit? You really want to announce to the Trump/Putin/Netanyahu axis of evil that their anti-Biden propaganda is working (since all three of them are working as hard as they fucking can to get Biden out of office, and as someone who opposes all three of them, I think this is a good idea to vote for Biden!) and they need to hammer harder on this wedge issue? Because that's all your oh-so-moral Uncommitted vote is doing. It's not a protest. It's not leverage. It is the withdrawing of leverage. If you want Biden in office so he can be pressured to listen to you and take action that you agree with, you will vote for him. Yes, in the primary. Yes, when it's not directly against Trump.

You want a ceasefire, you say? GREAT! WE ALL WANT A CEASEFIRE AND/OR ACTUAL PEACE AND RECOGNITION OF A PALESTINIAN STATE! That's in fact why you should be busting your fucking ass to make sure Biden gets re-elected, and to give him a strong show of support in the primary. Biden is the only candidate with a credible long-term (and like, baseline functional sane adult) plan for Gaza. Biden is the one who has been pressuring Netanyahu in every single contact to tone it down and stop acting like an insane murderous maniac and therefore torching any remains of sympathy for the attack Israel suffered in October. Biden is the one who has his entire diplomatic team working on high-level contacts with the Israeli government and the Hamas representatives via Qatar, while sufficiently threatening Iran to back down from frothing at the mouth to destroy Israel (once again, just like the rest of the antisemitic western left). Biden is the one who is pushing for this not to be World War III, and yet we get Baby's First Social Justice Activist screaming at him for being GENOCIDE JOE and blaming him personally for not, as I keep putting it, shapeshifting into Netanyahu's body and making this stop. "He should publicly call for a ceasefire!" Or, and this is just a suggestion, he should DO HIS FUCKING JOB and continue to work on serious problems that don't have instant socially media marketable catchphrases and won't come with instant gratification. Also, please tell me how you plan to get both Hamas and Israel to accept the same terms for a ceasefire, abide by it, and do exactly what Big Daddy Biden told them, because you, the dedicated anti-western anti-imperialist, think that's the best course of action?

Like. I mean. As vice president and now as president, Biden is actually one of the least foreign-intervention-happy leaders the US has ever had. He was originally against the Abbottabad raid to take out Osama bin Laden in 2011; he wound down the overseas drone assassination program (at which the Online Leftists screamed bloody murder at Obama, ignored in Trump, and then refused to give Biden any credit for ending) to almost nothing, he pulled the US out of Afghanistan, and even though he's been supporting Ukraine in its fight against Russia, he's also been extremely slow and cautious (in my opinion, too slow and cautious) at giving them all the military hardware they need, even before this latest blockade of aid in the House by Putin's favorite little bitch Mike Johnson. He has already presided over a historic shift in US policy toward Israel, in terms of conditioning the use of lethal aid, imposing reporting requirements, starting to criticize them publicly, and calling for the recognition of a Palestinian state and more humanitarian aid to get into Gaza. Yet in the Online Leftists' mind, because he is not personally out there Captain America-ing away the Israeli bombs and/or calling for Israel to be totally destroyed "from the river to the sea" as the Tumblr activists are fond of using no matter how often Jews ask them to stop, there is nothing he's actually doing! GENOCIDE JOE!!!!! Like, I thought the anti-western anti-American crowd thought all overseas American influence was evil (but all overseas Russian and/or Chinese influence is fine). When Biden actually doesn't recklessly intervene in foreign conflicts like Kennedy/Johnson/Nixon/Reagan/Bush 1/Bush 2/pretty much every American president in the latter half of the twentieth century, you'd think that would get him plaudits? NAH.

"Biden should stop selling Israel weapons without Congressional approval!" Okay, sure, he should. Which he did one time, and he also repeatedly promised to veto and/or not pass any only-Israel aid package that didn't also help Ukraine and Taiwan. He's also not beholden to the frothing antisemitic Online Leftists position that Israel should just lie down and let all of its citizens be killed and its state wiped from existence. Like. We also remember that Jewish voters exist in America, right? And that Jewish lives are something which are repeatedly and demonstrably under threat in the rest of the world, including from Hamas and the Houthis (who are genuinely terrible people and the western left's warm embrace of them as principled anti-Israel actors is all we need to know about their inherent brainrot and moral vacancy). We know that maybe going full masks-off antisemite (which Biden isn't going to do anyway, for any number of reasons) isn't the greatest plan and nothing to which you should be conditioning your vote? Likewise, please tell me how you plan to make Congress (especially the GOP-led clown car House) "do what Biden wants," since you're still beholden to that being the be-all-and-end-all of moral action? Or how you account for Congress at all, and not just think The President is An Almighty King?

Aside from all this, I am sick to my fucking back teeth of the Precious Moral Princesses (gender neutral) who have spent four years lying about everything Biden has done. We had the personally blaming him for Roe ending (he could unilaterally overturn SCOTUS if he really wanted!) We had the endless bashing about student debt, only to ignore him actually making the most major effort to forgive student debt in all the post-Reagan years. We have had a complete ignoring and/or distortion of his domestic policy accomplishments, which are some of the most momentous since FDR and LBJ. We have had an utter ignoring, revision, and downplaying of the damage Trump did in one term and how very much worse his second would be. We have had to endure "WELL YOU CAN'T ASK ME TO VOTE FOR BIDEN" at every single second for every single thing, because this is such a terrible onerous thing to ask them to lift one single fucking finger to give us some more time to come up with a better solution. And yet, as astutely pointed out by one of my anons yesterday, they utterly don't care whether the obvious outcome of this action is to help Trump get back into power. Apparently that's not a moral reach too far, but straining their delicate tender moral sensibilities to fucking do the goddamn bare minimum to help us out -- both in America and around the world -- no, no. We can't have that.

Like. These people allegedly want a ceasefire, and they want it to come about by asking literally nothing more of them then posting snide anti-Biden diatribes on social media. That's the extent of the effort they're willing to put in. They can't even trouble themselves to take the first step of voting for people who want to address this crisis in a constructive way. So yeah, I have a hard time believing this is anything deeply felt in regard to opposing genocide, and just wants what makes them look morally superior. Also: I don't care if your feelings are genuinely pure and strong and you obviously oppose what's happening in Gaza (we all do!) and want it to end. In that case, why the fuck aren't you throwing your support (yes! Even in the primary!) behind the one guy who's actually working to fix it and not just posting empty platitudes on Twitter? It likewise does not excuse you from the harmful consequences of your rhetoric and actions, if you decide that the best way to act on your deep-seated and genuine desire to stop the genocide is just to blindly bash Biden all day every day. Not voting for Biden in the primary does not excuse the fact that this election is against Trump and everything horrible that he represents, and that we are in this situation largely because the online left has learned literally fucking nothing from 2016 and is eager to do it all over again. Not voting for Biden in the primary does not give you a special Gold Star Moral Activist sticker announcing that you were too virtuous to engage in the process now, but if you're sufficiently placated, you maybe will do it in November. Miss me with that bullshit. I've spent eight years pleading with people to help us fix this mess, by -- yes! engaging with the flawed process that makes partial changes!!! -- and all I hear is that same fucking nonsense. That is a large part of why this response is so steamed.

Anyway. In short, I don't think voting "uncommitted" is a good idea, I think it only helps Trump in the short and long term, I think it protests nothing, I think it represents the same old tired anti-voting schlock that I have had more than fucking enough of, and I don't endorse it by any means. However, you will see that while I can strongly and unequivocally give you my opinion that it is a bad idea, I cannot actually reach through the screen, take control of your body, and force you to obey me one way or the other. So maybe, just maybe, Biden can't do the same with Netanyahu. Weird.

[communistkenobi]

hi, i'd like to read marx's capital, but I've heard it's quite challenging. do you think there is a best way to go about reading it, maybe skipping or reading chapters in a particular order or taking notes in a particular way?..

I read some parts of it a very long time ago so I can’t give specific advice on what to skip. I’m preparing to read it in August for an exam, and I’ll be using David Harvey’s companion to Marx’s Capital as a study + learning guide. David Harvey also has video lectures about it that you can watch, which are probably the most accessible.

however, and I mean this in a completely non-judgemental way, I think an important question to ask is why you want to read Capital - is it for Marxist theory cred? Are people telling you that you have to read it? Do you feel you ‘need’ to read it to understand Marxist theory or call yourself a socialist/communist? Is it casual intellectual curiosity? Is it part of a larger reading set that you’re doing? I’m not going to discourage you from reading it, but i wouldn’t recommend starting with it if you want to read Marx, particularly if you haven’t read a lot of economic/political theory.

and i want to be clear I’m not trying to talk down to you, I ask these question to myself constantly because it helps inform my learning priorities - what is it that I want to get out of this text, what are my goals and expectations, what personal/intellectual/moral worth am I tying to the completion of this text, and so on. Capital is a difficult and boring read! something I’ve seen both on and offline is people try to read it, it’s dense/confusing/boring, they give up and feel discouraged or think they’re ‘too stupid’ for Marxist theory, when like in reality it’s a specific text intervening on a particular set of political debates in Marx’s time, and is also an origin point for a wide range of political and economic belief systems that have undergone fundamental and global developments in the nearly two centuries since its publication. Which is all to say that I think picking up Capital for the sake of simply reading Capital sets yourself up for failure, disappointment, and potentially feeling stupid/incapable of meeting the demands of your own political convictions. Which is not a good mindset for communists to be in! CLR James says that every cook can govern; Marxist theory should not be a site of personal misery and intellectual punishment. A challenging text is not the same thing as a confusing or boring one, and I think there is a lot of moralistic expectations floating around in “leftist spaces” (big quotation marks) about the development of “critical thinking skills” as this miserable slog of whipping yourself into being radical.

I call myself a communist and have not read Capital; not only are there many other works by Marx to read, not to mention the nearly infinite amounts of secondary sources that engage with Marx, it’s also not something I feel is going to answer the questions I need when I want to read theory. I am specifically reading this text because I have to be qualified to teach it and regurgitate it on an exam, which is how I’m approaching this text. I think asking yourself what your approach is (are you doing it to advance your own learning, to answer specific questions you have about Marxist theory [and what are those specific questions?], to inform your historical understanding of the development of continental economic theory, etc) will help answer some of these “philosophy of learning” questions. Maybe Capital is the place to start based on your own motivations and prior reading, but maybe it’s not. And if it’s not that’s totally fine! Marx is perhaps one of the most responded-to European political thinkers of modernity - we are engulfed in theory engaging with his ideas. You have your pick of the lot

[drdemonprince]

I very much appreciate the practical financial advice you’ve shared. It’s definitely something I’ve struggled with, because the moral standpoint seems to be put on a burlap sack and live in a cave to avoid contributing to suffering. But realistically, if I’m not earning and saving, I’m pushing the burden of the financial shortfall onto my loved ones who will not be willing to watch me suffer without at least providing shelter and food. I feel an obligation to give back to them as well, which has led me to pursue jobs that give me as much income as possible with the most manageable workload for my disability. It’s an uncomfortable place to be, but I have to agree that I think it’s far more in the interest of empire for the most radical thinkers of society to be stuck in poverty than to be safe and able to provide to each other. I’m trying to be grateful and give back instead of beating myself for being lucky, essentially. A tricky topic - Thank you for grappling with it!

My pleasure! As one person said in the notes, dying of starvation is not praxis! We leftists gotta get over our fucking inherited puritanical compulsion toward suffering.