#what do you think your anti-communist histories are?

[damnesdelamer]

‘Socialism has never worked’?

What do you call Russia, China, and Cuba functionally eradicating homelessness and illiteracy in their respective spheres within a few years of the massive upheaval of revolution, and radically improving the living conditions of millions after generations of poverty? What do you call the Soviet Union bearing the brunt of the greatest military conflict the world has ever seen and emerging victorious? What do you call the Soviet Union holding out for four decades of sustained military and economic warfare against the greatest military and economic superpower the world has ever known? What do you call Vietnam defeating the greatest military empire the world has ever known in its anti-imperialist resistance campaign? What do you call China emerging from the 20th Century as the most populous country on earth with the highest GDP? What do you call China reducing daily covid numbers to double digits in a population of 1.4 billion? What do you call Cuba thriving after six decades of brutal embargoes? What do you call Cuba passing the most progressive and practically protective legislation for family and LGBT rights in a world historical moment marked by increased LGBTphobia among the Western powers? What do you call the people of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe shrugging off the muck of ages to usher in an era of progress, all while Western powers conspire to sabotage them at every turn while growing fat off the earth they’ve scorched?

I’d ask what history books you’re reading, but I know that you’re not reading any, and the only information you have on the subject is spoon-fed into your colonised mind by the people’s enemies, whose vested interest in fabricating events is readily apparent to any who bother to look into these things.

‘Socialism has never worked’? It has been one of the dominant political-economic models of the past century, and has made drastic strides on every front despite its relative infancy and constant opposition from Western superpowers. If you fear socialism, what do you really fear? Socialism is the people. Socialism is me; socialism is you; socialism is all of us, together.

‘Socialism has never worked’? Socialism has always worked. Socialism is working right now. We will see socialism work again, always.

[listen-to-the-inner-walrus]

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[specialagentartemis]

I get variations on this comment on my post about history misinformation all the time: "why does it matter?" Why does it matter that people believe falsehoods about history? Why does it matter if people spread history misinformation? Why does it matter if people on tumblr believe that those bronze dodecahedra were used for knitting, or that Persephone had a daughter named Mespyrian? It's not the kind of misinformation that actually hurts people, like anti-vaxx propaganda or climate change denial. It doesn't hurt anyone to believe something false about the past.

Which, one, thanks for letting me know on my post that you think my job doesn't matter and what I do is pointless, if it doesn't really matter if we know the truth or make up lies about history because lies don't hurt anyone. But two, there are lots of reasons that it matters.

It encourages us to distrust historians when they talk about other aspects of history. You might think it's harmless to believe that Pharaoh Hatshepsut was trans. It's less harmless when you're espousing that the Holocaust wasn't really about Jews because the Nazis "came for trans people first." You might think it's harmless to believe that the French royalty of Versailles pooped and urinated on the floor of the palace all the time, because they were asshole rich people anyway, who cares, we hate the rich here; it's rather less harmless when you decide that the USSR was the communist ideal and Good, Actually, and that reports of its genocidal oppression are actually lies.

It encourages anti-intellectualism in other areas of scholarship. Deciding based on your own gut that the experts don't know what they're talking about and are either too stupid to realize the truth, or maliciously hiding the truth, is how you get to anti-vaxxers and climate change denial. It is also how you come to discount housing-first solutions for homelessness or the idea that long-term sustained weight loss is both biologically unlikely and health-wise unnecessary for the majority of fat people - because they conflict with what you feel should be true. Believing what you want to be true about history, because you want to believe it, and discounting fact-based corrections because you don't want them to be true, can then bleed over into how you approach other sociological and scientific topics.

How we think about history informs how we think about the present. A lot of people want certain things to be true - this famous person from history was gay or trans, this sexist story was actually feminist in its origin - because we want proof that gay people, trans people, and women deserve to be respected, and this gives evidence to prove we once were and deserve to be. But let me tell you a different story: on Thanksgiving of 2016, I was at a family friend's house and listening to their drunk conservative relative rant, and he told me, confidently, that the Roman Empire fell because they instituted universal healthcare, which was proof that Obama was destroying America. Of course that's nonsense. But projecting what we think is true about the world back onto history, and then using that as recursive proof that that is how the world is... is shoddy scholarship, and gets used for topics you don't agree with just as much as the ones you do. We should not be encouraging this, because our politics should be informed by the truth and material reality, not how we wish the past proved us right.

It frequently reinforces "Good vs. Bad" dichotomies that are at best unhelpful and at worst victim-blaming. A very common thread of historical misinformation on tumblr is about the innocence or benevolence of oppressed groups, slandered by oppressors who were far worse. This very frequently has truth to it - but makes the lies hard to separate out. It often simplifies the narrative, and implies that the reason that colonialism and oppression were bad was because the victims were Good and didn't deserve it... not because colonialism and oppression are bad. You see this sometimes with radical feminist mother goddess Neolithic feminist utopia stuff, but you also see it a lot regarding Native American and African history. I have seen people earnestly argue that Aztecs did not practice human sacrifice, that that was a lie made up by the Spanish to slander them. That is not true. Human sacrifice was part of Aztec, Maya, and many Central American war/religious practices. They are significantly more complex than often presented, and came from a captive-based system of warfare that significantly reduced the number of people who got killed in war compared to European styles of war that primarily killed people on the battlefield rather than taking them captive for sacrifice... but the human sacrifice was real and did happen. This can often come off with the implications of a 'noble savage' or an 'innocent victim' that implies that the bad things the Spanish conquistadors did were bad because the victims were innocent or good. This is a very easy trap to fall into; if the victims were good, they didn't deserve it. Right? This logic is dangerous when you are presented with a person or group who did something bad... you're caught in a bind. Did they deserve their injustice or oppression because they did something bad? This kind of logic drives a lot of transphobia, homophobia, racism, and defenses of Kyle Rittenhouse today. The answer to a colonialist logic of "The Aztecs deserved to be conquered because they did human sacrifice and that's bad" is not "The Aztecs didn't do human sacrifice actually, that's just Spanish propaganda" (which is a lie) it should be "We Americans do human sacrifice all the god damn time with our forever wars in the Middle East, we just don't call it that. We use bullets and bombs rather than obsidian knives but we kill way, way more people in the name of our country. What does that make us? Maybe genocide is not okay regardless of if you think the people are weird and scary." It becomes hard to square your ethics of the Innocent Victim and Lying Perpetrator when you see real, complicated, individual-level and group-level interactions, where no group is made up of members who are all completely pure and good, and they don't deserve to be oppressed anyway.

It makes you an unwitting tool of the oppressor. The favorite, favorite allegation transphobes level at trans people, and conservatives at queer people, is that we're lying to push the Gay Agenda. We're liars or deluded fools. If you say something about queer or trans history that's easy to debunk as false, you have permanently hurt your credibility - and the cause of queer history. It makes you easy to write off as a liar or a deluded fool who needs misinformation to make your case. If you say Louisa May Alcott was trans, that's easy to counter with "there is literally no evidence of that, and lots of evidence that she was fine being a woman," and instantly tanks your credibility going forward, so when you then say James Barry was trans and push back against a novel or biopic that treats James Barry as a woman, you get "you don't know what you're talking about, didn't you say Louisa May Alcott was trans too?" TERFs love to call trans people liars - do not hand them ammunition, not even a single bullet. Make sure you can back up what you say with facts and evidence. This is true of homophobes, of racists, of sexists. Be confident of your facts, and have facts to give to the hopeful and questioning learners who you are relating this story to, or the bigots who you are telling off, because misinformation can only hurt you and your cause.

It makes the queer, female, POC, or other marginalized listeners hurt, sad, and betrayed when something they thought was a reflection of their own experiences turns out not to be real. This is a good response to a performance art piece purporting to tell a real story of gay WWI soldiers, until the author revealed it as fiction. Why would you want to set yourself up for disappointment like that? Why would you want to risk inflicting that disappointment and betrayal on anyone else?

It makes it harder to learn the actual truth.

Historical misinformation has consequences, and those consequences are best avoided - by checking your facts, citing your sources, and taking the time and effort to make sure you are actually telling the truth.

[autolenaphilia]

If your main argument against any proposal is “it’s bad because it will destroy existing culture, tradition and religion”, you are not a leftist, you are a conservative. The very definition of a conservative, in fact. And yet I see people who self-identiy as left-wing radicals who get angry whenever an actual communist criticizes religion or proposes family abolition. Even something as minor as suggesting abolishing circumcision, you know the radical idea that we shouldn’t literally cut off parts of the genitals on babies, is enough to bring them out.

Frankly if I were asked to define conservatism, “Preserving tradition, culture and religion is more important than the welfare of the people who are oppressed by such instittuions (such as women, queer people and children)” is as succinct and accurate a definition of its main value I can make. And like if you hear a proposal of family abolition for example, and react with what’s essentially a screed about how evil soulless leftist communist queer feminist globohomo are trying to destroy sacred culture, religion, family and traditions, I’ll view you as a reactionary.

Reactionary anti-imperialism

And I don’t care if you are trying to put such reactionary opinions in “anti-imperialist” terms, and calling actual communists “cultural imperialists” and “cultural christians.” All such accusations reveal is just a deeply idealistic understanding of what imperialism is on the side of accuser, a lack of understanding of the material basis of actual imperialism. Imperialism for these people is not caused by capitalism, but by ideology, and apparently the imperialist ideology is people thinking some things are good (like socialism) and other things are bad (like misogyny).

This “anti-imperialism of fools” is not based on the theory of imperialism made by Rosa Luxemburg, or even Lenin, Mao or Hobson for all their faults, but Henning Eichberg’s neo-fascist concept of ethnopluralism. The central value of such anti-imperialism is the ethnonationalist creed that “Every ethnic group has the right to preserve its traditional culture in its own territory.” I’ve complained about this before. This kind of anti-imperialism is what happens when you just don’t defend “the nationalism of the oppressed” in the name of anti-imperialism but “the conservative ethno-nationalism of the oppressed”.

Why conservatism is wrong

The problem is that any kind of conservative values about preserving traditional culture is that it’s impossible. And it’s even more impossible to want to do that while being a communist or a socialist. You can’t want to preserve traditional culture and also call for socialist revolution. Not without abandoning communism.

This is obvious to anyone who, in the vein of Marx, has a materialist understanding of how history and society works. As Marx put it, “The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.” This means culture and religion are based on a certain mode of production, the economic structure of the society in which it is based, such as capitalism or feudalism. And what communist revolution is, is a revolutionary change in this economic structure. “The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure. “ This means a socialist revolution will inevitably destroy existing culture, transforming into something new, more fitting to a socialist society.

You can’t call for a radical change in economic foundation of a society, and also want to preserve existing culture, because the latter is very much dependent on the former. This is why conservatives are violently opposed to any idea of socialism, or any kind of radical economic or political change. The traditional culture they want to preserve is dependent on the economic system it is based on.

And the problem with this is that the status quo, capitalism, is itself constantly in flux, and destroys and transforms culture as itself transforms. As Marx put it in a famous passage from the first chapter of the Communist Manifesto. “Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. “

The reactionary political forces are of course to some degree aware of this, it’s obvious. And from this comes criticism and opposition of capitalism from the right. This is what Marx calls “feudal socialism” in the third chapter of the Communist manifesto. This right-wing anti-capitalism arose from the feudal and religious elites whose power were usurped by capitalist forces. This is a criticism of capitalism that is devoid of any liberatory qualities and is a reactionary call for a “retvrn” to the class society and hierarchies of pre-capitalist societies. It’s frequently openly anti-feminist and anti-queer, seeing feminism and queerness as creations of capitalism.

Fascism’s anti-capitalism is of this nature. This is also why the pope sometimes criticizes capitalism, because he like any catholic reactionary longs for a return of the feudal medieval pre-reformation europe where the Catholic Church was at the peak of its power and influence. And the central folly of the anti-imperialism of fools is to defend this kind of reactionary anti-capitalism when it comes from outside the western world.

Why communists criticize religion

Now let’s talk about what communists believe instead, what we think will happen to religion, family and nations.

Let’s talk about religion first. Engels’ the principles of communismexplains it succintly “All religions so far have been the expression of historical stages of development of individual peoples or groups of peoples. But communism is the stage of historical development which makes all existing religions superfluous and brings about their disappearance“

This is maybe explained best in Marx’s famous lines in A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. “The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man.” Religion is not some expression of some mystical supernatural truth, instead “This state and this society produce religion.” Religion does not just explain the world, but is the “moral sanction” of class society, “its universal basis of consolation and justification.” And why do regular people believe in religion? It’s because religion is a coping mechanism for the sufferings of class society. This is what Marx meant when he wrote that religion “is the opium of the people.”

This is why religion will disappear in a communist society, there is no need for religion in a class-less society. We won’t need to ban it using state violence, it will disappear on its own. This is also why communists criticize religion: “The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion…. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo. “

The abolition of the family.

As Marx put it, “Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists.”

But it’s actually fairly simple, as Engels explained in The Principles of Communism: “It will transform the relations between the sexes into a purely private matter which concerns only the persons involved and into which society has no occasion to intervene. It can do this since it does away with private property and educates children on a communal basis, and in this way removes the two bases of traditional marriage – the dependence rooted in private property, of the women on the man, and of the children on the parents. "

The final line perfectly explains why communists oppose the family, it’s hierarchical. It’s an institution based the patriarchal rule of men over women, and of the adultist rule of parents over children, and it’s based on private property.

To any objections, I can just quote Marx’s wordsd in the Communist Manifesto, “the real point aimed at is to do away with the status of women as mere instruments of production“ and more caustically: “Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty. “

Communism and national/ethnic differences

Again Marx put it perfectly in chapter 2 of the Communist Manifesto. I have really nothing to add here, it explains pretty much everything:

“The Communists are further reproached with desiring to abolish countries and nationality.

The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got. Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word.

National differences and antagonism between peoples are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto.

The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still faster. United action, of the leading civilised countries at least, is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat.

In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another will also be put an end to, the exploitation of one nation by another will also be put an end to. In proportion as the antagonism between classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end.”

Final notes

I’ve been relying a lot here on rather basic texts, like the Manifesto, The Principles of Communism, and the introductions to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.But that’s because this is rather basic communist theory.

For some heavier reading to actually understand imperialism, i suggest The Accumulation of Capital by Rosa Luxemburg and her “anti-critique”

And in conclusion, yes I am a transfeminist queer radical communist who wants to abolish capitalism, patriarchy, the family and religion and all traditional culture. “Everything you say we are, we are. And we are very proud of ourselves.”

[tom-hossain-minis]

Holy shit politics tumblr what the fuck. Are there no communists on this site? Or people with memory greater than that of dory from finding nemo ? Does nobody recall every promise Biden not only broke but actively did the opposite of what he said he was gonna do? And I also have to ask, and I’m sorry to do so, but I think it’s important, are you all white? Cause I seen yall saying “your pic friends will suffer” and the way it’s phrased makes me think perhaps yall are not yourselves poc, for the most part. Furthermore, all *my* poc friends are well fucking aware that Joe “I’m against desegregation” Biden is a fucking racist POS, as is his entire administration. Let’s not even get into increased climate destruction, his support for trans people being barred from sports, his general apathy towards lgbt people, his really fucking vile southern border behaviour and policy, his explicit fucking islamaphobia, anti black racism, and anti-Asian racism, his supreme belief in police barbarism, his total economic shitshow these last four years, and finally, something I suspect non Americans literally are unable to fathom, his vitriolic hatred of the rest of the world, and the danger he poses to humanity’s continued survival as a result. It’s true, your political system sucks fucking balls, I pity you for having only one party and not being able to remove your head of state, but don’t you dare tell me that you think Joe Biden is a “good president in most regards except Palestine”. And guess what, “trump is worse” is something I wholeheartedly agree with. But for some reason you Americans have no concept of “saying no”. You don’t have a permanent minimum standard. I can’t understand it, is there some weird part of American culture that says you can’t have a sense of personal dignity, or, dare I say it, a spine? It’s inconciliables to me that every person in the most well off, powerful, heavily defended nation on earth would not only allow themselves to be, in the most shakespearien sense, raped by their political system every four years, but that *some* would revel in it. I genuinely mean it when I say I cannot understand this behaviour. Aren’t you outraged at this treatment? Where is your fury against such degradation? Wouldn’t you fight and work and claw at everything against you until your bones were raw and white and broken rather than settle for this most violating and humiliating of lifestyles, in the hope of something better? Don’t get me wrong, I come from the cesspool that is Britain, and that’s its own thing, but I know why and how the British spirit was so thoroughly crushed so I know why people have given up there, and even then, we not only still have some resemblance of fight, but also a system that at least in theory can allow for some better representation than the American one. Britain has a proud history of rioting when things get too bad, we stole the idea from the French, just like everything in our history and culture, but America never seemed to have the same; is it just too vast a country? I just, really need someone to explain it. When and how were the American people politically lobotomised? And I’m sorry if this is rude or confusing but I really am at a loss. As a scientist I really am dedicated to and obsessed with making the world a better place for everyone, but America, the biggest problem by a landslide so massive it could be its own planet, completely and totally baffles me.

Tl;dr: fuck Joe Biden, I have a sneaking suspicion tumblr is mostly racist white people, America’s very existence can drive a man insane like the visage of Cthulhu

[eldritchdyke]

The recent Signalis anticommunism discussion on here made me stumble onto your take about it from last month, and while I do believe that Signalis is very... normie anticommunist (you seem to disagree), your post made me really curious, but at the same time it was very vague, and a lot of people interpreted it as "Signalis isn't anti-communist, it's anti-authoritarian". Would you be willing to elaborate?

Oof didn't realize there was more discussion to it than I thought so I won't wade into the whole of that cuz that wasn't what I was responding to at the time. Also just to preface two things; for one I am a communist myself and that did effect my reading of the text a great deal and for two I didn't say anything about the "Signalis isn't anti-communist, it's anti-authoritarian" thing myself that was a later addition from other people (personally I don't like the term "authoritarian" as a way to analyze the faults of certain socialist states but that's neither here nor there).

What I was driving at is the idea that the DDR imagery (and beyond that, as others have pointed out it isn't solely pulling from that) is doing a lot more than simple condemnation or any sort of post-war triumphalism over "dystopian" socialism. We can read a lot based on what was given attention in the text, and I think the ways that DDR imagery show up in the game are shown with a rather loving, even reverent light at times (you don't create a bunch of intricately designed DDR robot girl ocs and name some of them after historical DDR special forces units because you totally despise everything the DDR stood for). This is intentionally contrasted with the rotting and decayed state we actively find a great deal of these things in, which provides a great deal of contrast between the lowercase i ideal and the reality of an execution which was tainted by the literal bleeding psychology of collective trauma and the attempts at domination of individuals.

What results is less a coherent world as such that can be dissected as one might dissect typical worldbuilding lore and more an emotional portrait which depicts a sense of portrayal at the way the history of the DDR played out, and you may disagree with parts of that (I do with certain parts as well) but it isn't intended to reflect a dissertation on the flaws of the DDR. It's an emotion first conceptualization of tainted Ostalgie and the hauntological traces of a future which was not allowed to be for reasons internal and external, through that lens it is, to me, quite ambiguous over whether or not the source object was a negative or a positive. Instead its a truly conflicted portrayal of the emotional state one is left in after both the (again lowercase i) ideals of that revolutionary state and its practical execution, warts and all, have passed into the realm of cultural memory.

(I'm sorry that's probably a whole lot of words to not fully answer your question but tldr I don't think Signalis is as anticommunist as a lot of people think it is, I think people are generally reading the diegesis too literally and not really delving into the full emotional depth going on with how communist imagery is used in the game)

[mesetacadre]

do you think religion and communism are compatible?

I'd say it depends on the maturity of the social relations and the starting point of socialism. Religion was identified by Marx as the opium of the masses not because he was a radical anti-theist bent on the immediate destruction of any semblance of religiosity, rather because religion, as it accompanies the evolution of the economy, serves to alleviate the alienation caused the the exploitative nature of work ever since labor was organized. It acts like an anesthetic, or rather, an opiate.

Therefore if religion began to take form in this way, and considering its pervasiveness across most aspects of almost all societies, its removal will have to be slow, much like the family. Take Spain, where a little over half of the population considers themselves to be catholic, along with the comfortable place the church has within society and most people's minds. If the communist revolution were to happen tomorrow, and assuming its continuance, it would take a multi-generational effort for the dismantling of all causes of alienation along with the appropiate education to make religion wither out, or perhaps mutate into something completely new. For me this is at the same level of speculation as the conclusion of family abolition.

Keeping all of this in mind, and getting at your question, communism is, nowadays, compatible with religion insofar as the objective conditions demand it to be. If religion is important to the working class in your region of intervention, it would be an immediatist error to viciously attack that religion and demand people stop believing in it. It is one thing to remove the financial and political privileges some religious institutions might have, which should be done albeit avoiding excessive antagonization, and another to go after people's faith.

To give a couple of examples, the USSR's policy on religion was to remove the power that the religious institutions and leaders had achieved by allowing workers to stop being reliant on them, emphasizing science and technology. The first chapter of Anna Louise Strong's The Soviets Expected gives a good example of what this looked like at the beginning of industrialization. In Cuba, on the other hand, christianity was, to an extent, included in the narrative created around their national liberation struggle and revolution, it had a part in the creation of that revolutionary patriotism that's characteristic of communist national liberation. The difference in the preconditions for Cuba and the USSR is that the USSR was a mosaic of tens of religions, if not hundreds, with contrasting levels of reactionary tendencies and influence, whereas in Cuba the population was pretty monolithically christian. There is no single recipe for the policies to take regarding religion in socialism.

When it comes to currents like christian socialism or liberation theology, I personally think that mixing theology with marxism should be avoided at all costs. Philosophically speaking there are very little similarities when you go beyond the surface, the scientific approach to analizing history and society that marxism takes has nothing to do with the irrational or spiritual explanations theology gives. I don't really care if people choose to go that way, I just think it's a waste of time because if you ever wish to go deeper so to speak, there will be a time, sooner rather than later, when you'll have to choose one over the other. I consider the approach I explained earlier to be a sufficiently close relationship to religion and that, strategically speaking, it is also unnecessary to intertwine the two.

In East Asia, especially China, the label of religion and its difference with spirituality and philosophy is less clear than in the west as far as I'm aware, but I don't know anything beyond that so maybe someone can expand on it, though I assume the approach is similar.

[hereforthelizardsex]

You mentioned about different analyses of 1984 in a post that you reblogged from me, and now I’m interested. I haven’t read 1984 for a while (I’m thinking of rereading it soon), but I’d be interested in any of your opinions / other people’s analyses if you want to share! :)

Omg yay 1984 is my favorite book and I always want to talk about it.

Of course the well known thing about the book is the issue of censorship, but the censorship in the novel does not exist in isolation, rather it is influenced by other political and economic forces.

1984 is a story of a society where, as a result of an end to scarcity (which would otherwise require a transition away from capitalism), those in power have created an economic system where war is used to manufacture scarcity, thereby ensuring the continued existence of hierarchy and power. It is important to note that hierarchy is also the problematized issue in Animal Farm, another book my George Orwell that is often misinterpreted as anti-communist while in actuality being anti-capitalist. The censorship in 1984 is done not only in the service of preserving the state but specifically for the purpose of preserving hierarchy as a concept. This is stated outright in the theory section in the middle of the book, when Winston is reading The Book. When I logged on to tumblr after finishing 1984 to look for meta posts and analyses, I was shocked to find people saying that they had skipped that entire section of the novel. I exclaimed out loud about this and my mother who was in the room at the time said she’d done the same thing. While people are entitled to consume media in whatever fashion they like and 1984 itself promotes this idea, I find it deeply concerning that many people skip what was to me the most interesting and important section of the book due to finding it to be a difficult read. The book states outright that the preservation of the power of the capitalist class and the subjugation of the working class is the entire reason that the government does everything it does, and people just don’t read that part of the book.

The censorship in the book is also not only censorship by elimination but censorship by the rewriting of history. This is important because it happens all the time in real life. For example, Florida’s governor Ron DeSantis wishes for it to be taught in schools that slavery helped Black people. This is the same kind of censorship that happens in 1984. In the field of political science this is called the “usable past” - versions of rewritten history used to uphold a nation’s identity.

Another political science concept that 1984 takes to an extreme is that if war abroad being used to put an end to social movements at home. This has happened throughout history as wars are used to make patriotism the norm, thereby marginalizing “unpatriotic” political movements such as labor or racial or gender equality that are seen as not in line with the aforementioned national identity that has been constructed. In 1984 the wars do this quite literally by manufacturing scarcity and thereby preventing the rise of communism.

I could go on forever, but instead I’ll conclude with an anecdote from when I was in high school. In my English class senior year of high school we were split into groups and assigned various novels to read instead of reading one as a class. The group that was assigned 1984 (not my group, I read The Color Purple which is another favorite that I could go on about forever) decided they wouldn’t read it because “the main character wants to rape someone.” I found this disturbing immediately because the novel is about censorship being a bad thing and here my classmates were not wanting to read it because it depicts sensitive subject matter. Their behavior was disturbingly indicative of the self censoring mindset of so many young people on the internet today. When I myself read the novel a few years later I discovered that it deals with rape in a few different ways. The first is that the main character was himself raped by his wife before the story takes place, not for sexual gratification but for reproductive purposes. The second is that he does indeed fantasize about raping someone who he is under the impression wants to get him killed. He later has sex with this person after finding out that she does not in fact want to get him killed, and it is the sex scene in a novel with the best negotiation of consent I have ever read. After the characters have sex Winston muses on the political power of sex in ways that I recognize more from queer activists who post on tumblr than from any other novel. All of the novel’s dealings with sensitive topics around sex are well done. The ones that are disturbing are intended to be disturbing - the book ends darkly; nothing in it is intended to make the reader feel good.

I could go on and I have - I wrote one of my papers in undergrad on 1984 and would be willing to share that too, if I could find a way to link it without my full name attached - but I’ll leave this as is for now.

[grandhotelabyss]

Any thoughts on nick land / mark fisher?

I've encountered both of them essentially as bloggers—I don't think I've ever read a word of either on paper—so I can't say I've studied them formally or mastered their thinking.

Land's concept of capital as autonomous alien intelligence assembling itself through retroaction on human agents—do I have this right?—is fun science fiction. I accept that as a theory of cultural temporality in general but not necessarily as a theory of technology or capitalism in particular. As for his more (shall we say) "ethnic" idea about "exit" and the Anglo character—maybe there's something to that. Modern history as the struggle between decentralized commercial sea empires (UK, US) and despotic communist land empires (Germany, Russia, China). And his new thing about Anglo-Zionism—I believe he's read Milton deeply—is right on time. All his Compact pieces on the English canon are paywalled, so I haven't read them, but it seems like he's approaching the idea that the God of the Bible is the force he previously identified as capital. (I think this is similar to what Mitchell Heisman outlined in his Suicide Note, but I only read some of that, and only once, on one sleepless night over 10 years ago, and doubt I'll revisit it. Does Heisman cite Land? I don't recall.) Hyperstition is real, as any manifestation girl on here or on TikTok or on YouTube will tell you.

Now Fisher was a sad case. I think all that anti-humanist theory did him no favors, personally. I'm not sure he could stand in that desolate place, the way Land could. I don't believe I ever directly interacted with him online when we both were bloggers in the same milieu circa 2005 or so. Maybe once or twice. He had a positive Marxist take on Batman Begins, and I had a negative one, and I think somebody sent him mine when he had comments open. (He had a whole thing, which anticipated the "vampire's castle" image, about "gray vampires" who stalk the comments section and suck the life out of your imaginative assertions with their point-missing nitpickery. He wasn't wrong!) I'm sure he thought I was hideously naive if he ever thought about me at all, and I was naive, I was essentially a Stalinist, an obvious example of humanist theory gone wrong, but there are limits, too, to that gothic style he picked up from Land and the CCRU.

I think he said Kafka was his first major author. There's a case to be made that you should read Kafka only after Dickens. (I don't mean literally but metonymically. Nor do I mean the 19th century vs. the 20th or even realism vs. modernism. Replace Kafka with Baudelaire and Dickens with Joyce and it'll mean the same.) And I'm not talking about politics here or even ethics. No panacea for politics and ethics can be found in books. Kafka, for that matter, was probably a nicer guy qua guy than Dickens was. But, just as someone who has to live in the world in your skin, it can't hurt to read a non-anti-humanist book from time to time if you're a bookish person. To not always try to conceptually outflank as a ruse of power every obvious humane sentiment. And to try not to need your humane sentiments to be conveyed only by the most alienating stimulus, to need them to come in the form of their opposite. I never got over his review of The Passion of the Christ:

What, from one perspective, is the utter humiliation and degradation of Jesus's body is on the other a coldly ruthless vision of the body liberated from the 'wisdom and limits of the organism'.

Masochristianity.

Christ's Example is simply this: it is better to die than to pass on abuse virus or to in any way vindicate the idiot vacuity and stupidity of the World of authority.

Power depends upon the weakness of the organism. When authority is seriously challenged, when its tolerance is tested to the limit, it has the ultimate recourse of torture. The slow, graphic scenes of mindless physical degradation in The Passion of the Christ are necessary for revealing the horrors to which Jesus' organism was subject. It is made clear that he could have escaped the excruciating agony simply by renouncing his Truth and by assenting to the Authority of the World. Christ's Example insists: better to let the organism be tortured to death ('If thine own eye offend thee, pluck it out') than to bow, bent-headed, to Authority.

This is what is perhaps most astonishing about Gibson's film. Far from being a statement of Catholic bigotry, it can only be read as an anti-authoritarian AND THEREFORE anti-Catholic film. For the Pharisees of two millennia ago, puffed up in their absurd finery, substitute the child-abuser apologists of today's gilt-laden, guilt-ridden Vatican. Against all the odds, against two thousand years of cover-ups and dissimulation, The Passion of the Christ recovers the original Christ, the anti-Wordly but not otherwordly Christ of Liberation Theology: the Gnostic herald of Apocalypse Now.

This is why I found him frustrating when I read him as a daily blogger almost 20 years ago. Plus the over-solemnity about pop-culture ephemera. I found him a bit naive, too, in the end, though he was almost 15 years my senior. I also sometimes just didn't and don't know what he was talking about, because I sort of hated and hate theory.

In his purely political commentary, he was right, however, to focus on bureaucratization as an effect of neoliberalism—the way capitalism and communism converge in the present for the worst of both worlds, everything is at once a competition and frozen in a statist hierarchy. I'm not sure I'm persuaded by the "hauntology" thesis. I've thought through that issue in a different way and am not convinced the end of the myth of the revolution or the myth of the avant-garde has to mean that we have no future. In fact it might mean the opposite. But good for him for putting into public consciousness an interesting and melancholically beautiful idea that would otherwise have remained confined to smug Derrida-readers.

He is fun to read. That's the highest compliment I can pay. I'm sure the big K-Punk book is a wonderful thing to own and to browse through: to watch a movie or read a book or listen to an album and then see what he had to say about it. He was one model of the blogger as true essayist.

[the-frosty-mac]

idk if this is a hot take but one of the most important things the communist movement needs right now is political commentators with shows. people who are well-versed in theory, both the fundamentals and more modern, who can tell you breaking news WITH a proper material analysis of that news to the best of their abilities. we have a few kinda-sorta-almost-not-really socialist pundits out there but even they will often fall for, and subsequently spout, anti-communist propaganda

it’s the modern equivalent of a communist newspaper in terms of reach, and we so desperately need something like that because even progressive commentators and news outlets often fail to apply proper analysis, which can give false impressions that lead people down the path of liberalism. im talking your TYTs and your David Pakmans of the world. Just look how much dumb shit they’ve done and said

we do have podcasts, and those are pretty great and useful, but i’ve noticed they TEND to be focused on history and/or theory, not usually current events, with the odd exception here or there. maybe i’m missing a whole trove of awesome podcasts that do exactly what i want, but i’ve been unable to find them. i think some shows ON YOUTUBE that cover current events and breaking news would be immensely helpful for our cause

[libertineangel]

even tho theres basically zero marxist-leninist punk bands, i think having that framework in the back of your mind when youre learning the history and deep diving into the different politics of the genre really helps put some pieces together. punk is a bit all over the place politically, often very 'incoherent leftist' (aka that nebulous type of leftist who hasnt actually read any theory and just has Concepts they like and agree with- vibes based leftists basically), socially progressive yet often very reactionary (youre anti-capitalism and anti-tory thats cool but what do you want instead of all that?). theres a reason why a lot of the old school punk stars either became conservative in their old age or just seemed to have tapped out of politics entirely. you need that theory framework to avoid falling prey to nigel farages of the world. a valuable lesson for all of us!

Yeah like while the kids online these days drastically overstate the political nature of the subculture and its significance it would still be reductive to say that it had no significance, especially the British scene - Marxism-Leninism has always been impotent here but it's well worth noting that things like Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League, which were genuinely important in both the development of British punk and the fight against the National Front, were organised & run by the explicitly Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (loath as I am to give them credit for anything), at a time where the other Trots in Militant were achieving actual national influence in Labour; these may have ultimately amounted to nothing but that's because Trotskyist programs are useless, not because the punk movement was inherently useless, and I do believe if our MLs weren't a waste of air they might have identified an actual opportunity to act as a vanguard in a movement so readily susceptible to it.

Punk has always been full of bollocks but there was a segment of it that did inspire a significant level of youth political engagement, and multiple leading bands of that segment were explicitly inspired by left-communist movements & theory (Gang Of Four weren't called that for nothing); the fact that much of the sentiment and subsequent bands the initial wave inspired rapidly devolved into aimless or reactionary workerism is not a reason to entirely dismiss and disparage the subculture as a whole but I think instead yet another demonstration of the failures of left-communism's uncoordinated undirected nature, and another place in which British Marxism-Leninism utterly failed to engage with a potential opportunity. There are things to be learned here, and I think genuinely engaging with that has genuine merit.

[honeyriot]

You're a woman hater! You're pro rape if you think women aren't allowed to have boundaries from men, especially lesbians who are not sexually attracted to male bodies, whether they're in a skirt or not. You have the audacity to suggest the only people standing up for women are Nazis???? So you love rush Limbaugh and male supremacy and hate women. Got it. Loud and clear, bigot

Yeah, pretty much. Who comes to the #letwomenspeak rallies? Who fawns at Tucker Carlson and Fox News? You have no idea you are even indulging it because you have turned feminism into a single issue: trans. As if that were the crux and final coffin in feminism and then sneak around and condone or tolerate LITERAL FASCISTS like Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Mr. "What is a Woman" Matt Walsh, organizations like Libs of Tik Tok, Reduxx, Gays Against Groomers, who are racist, nationalist organizations funded by right wing investors. We never question that nature of the prison system or how sports have historically been a means of demonstrating male superiority and a means of perpetuating capitalist competition and we need an entire revamping of bathroom privacy but no let's burn the gays and the trans (because these fascists want you dead as much as they want trans people. to them a feminist is a witch the same as a trans person. they only accept you because you glorify them. you don't want to look at nationalism and capitalism as the machinations of men. You have never come in contact with any trans person you are just a paranoid person who fell for the propaganda from fascists. It was considered crossdressing for a woman to wear pants. Gender essentialism ties in nicely with eugenics and ethnonationalism. Why are so many prominent terfs complete nazis?

Anna Slatz cofounder of Reduxx, a vastly huge and respected GC TERF company, is a absolute fascist collaborating with white nationalist Lauren Southern, who preaches Great Replacement theory is under investigation for receiving Russian funds to spread white supremacist propaganda. Who's that on the left?

That's what reactionaries do in Terf communities. You will all write it off and call me the evil one for pointing it out. To you, feminism is a big joke. You don't study feminist theory and history, you spend more time on trans issues because they seem like a bigger deal and leave the rest of the issues on the back burner because they are tougher and would require real change.

You will never talk about it. It will never be addressed although you will be promoting neonazis and by you tacit refusal to investigate this very real reality, you become an accomplice to it. Many "feminists" spend more time attacking trans people than talking about any real feminist issue, of which there are many that need much more attention than these people are giving at the same time as them NEVER being around trans people.

In fact you probably do not see fascism as a very real thing. Your political science may not be very scientific or historical. If you are so mad, prove me wrong rather than saying I hate women and condone rape when that is obviously not true. I get called the same when I call out racist anti immigration speech. Nationalism and racism are diseases to community.

Do we have to answer the "trans question"? We all know there is a final solution to all the undesirables of society: communists, feminists, gay/lesbian and gender nonconforming/trans. But the questionan is that the systems need to be imagined from the ground up. We cannot build the future on yesterday's institutions.

So yes, it is possibly flattening reality to just randomly call a "trans excluding radical feminist" a nazi. But you have got to know you are flattening reality as well with a skewed understanding of history and political movements (including feminism). I will be posting a link to a bunch of feminist pdfs in a few days so check back!

If that's an ad hominem I hope it forces you to study harder and be a better feminist and, ya know, maybe pick up on doing actual feminist activism instead mischaracterizing the fight for women's liberation.

if you shrug this off as crazy ramblings and cease to understand the political aligning with fascism that trans (and gay and lesbian and gender nonconforming) hate groups have, you will unkowingly perpetuate the very structures and conditions that we are fighting against.

[paradoxcase]

@maiden-roar:

I think the anti-voting people do seem to want a communist revolution, nothing else is good enough for them, there's just the small problem that conditions in 21st century USA are extremely different from conditions in early 20th century Russia

I feel like maybe I should be more open-minded towards their POV, like I appreciate it when conservatives turn away from trump, it's perfectly rational to be able to criticize your own side, and maybe that's largely what people are doing, so I should care more about their criticisms. By voting based on my fear of the other side, am I just as bad as conservatives who think gay rights and public health care will send us to the gulags? Far-right is so crazy scary tho.

I think a lot of these people are very young. And every single young person in the entire history of the world has always hated to be told by their elders that they should sit down, and be patient, and work hard, and maybe some day in the distant future they'll get what they want. They are young and full of righteous anger and are just so sure that there is a secret way that no one else has figured out to get everything they want right now

As for how you know you're not like the people who think gay people are going install Sharia Law, it comes down to where you get your information about the world from. Their problem is they rely exclusively on an echo-chamber of far-right news outlets. And like, if you start to feel like the places you get your news from are starting to become echo-chamber-like, it's good to branch out. There are plenty of reliable sources that rate news sites for bias, and you generally want to avoid sources that always validate the things you think you know already, or which are making emotional appeals or direct calls to action, even if they are sources on the left. Like, advocacy groups are fine and all, but you should get your actual news from somewhere else. And then, after reading news from multiple sources with limited bias, if you still think a Donald Trump presidency is scary as fuck, it probably is.

also MLs believe that revolution is the only way, and democratic socialism is evil, and marx apparently based his analysis on the french revolution, but like france and england and the USA all had their own paths to liberal democracy. French were extremist, USA compromised with slave owners, UK gradually expanded democracy. History says there's not only one way to do things. We don't know what the future holds. Also modern anarchists seem to be allergic to doing things.

French revolutionaries killed their political enemies, bolshevik-style, but their resulting goverment was unstable and france spent like the next 100 years flip-flopping between modes of goverment. The USA made compromises resulting in a more stable government but then people had to battle slavery for most of the following century. The UK as far as I know didn't have an equivalent event but they still made to basically the same liberal democratic endpoint.

I don't think the US and France are actually super comparable here - the US started out with a philosophy of embracing democracy. A very racist, sexist, classist kind of democracy, yes, but it was some democracy, which opens the door to gradually getting more democracy in a peaceful manner, and what do you know, that's what happened. Whereas, France was going from zero democracy to any democracy, which is much harder, and who knows if the French kings actually would have allowed that without some kind of violence? And also, the creation of the US and its nascent democracy did begin with a revolution. It was just kind of lucky that it happened in a colony where Britain couldn't oppose it as effectively and the revolutionaries didn't feel like they had to murder the king and all of his relatives in order to succeed (and also, they weren't really able to).

Whatever the UK did is probably a much better option than either of those. Although, I don't know a lot of the history of this time period, but I kind of suspect that the transition to democracy in the UK and other countries that kept their royals might have been influenced by observation of what was happening in France. It's kind of hard to imagine a situation where absolute monarchy transitions to democracy on a world-wide scale with no violence at all. But at the same time... the Romans had a partial democracy 2000 years before all of this happened. It wasn't actually ever necessary to go through an absolute monarchy stage, which means it's not necessary to have a revolution. Maybe if Caesar had never declared himself Imperator none of this violence would ever have had to happen.

Also I think if there's any kind of revolution-type activity happening in modernized industrial capitalist countries, it's going to be fascists overthrowing the government. There is almost zero desire for a left-wing revolution. You'd have to do a lot of convincing to get people to give up their comfortable lives and go to war and make sacrifices just to live in a communist country where their boss works them just as hard but maybe things will get better in 100 years.

Yeah, like I said in the last post, once you're in a position where you can change things peacefully through democracy, even slowly, violence becomes a lot less attractive. It's really only attractive to people who feel like they don't have the numbers necessary to get their way through democracy, and right now it's the left wing that feels secure that they have the numbers, and the right wing that doesn't, which you can tell based on which people are the ones attempting voter suppression tactics.

Communist revolutions seem to have happened mostly in poor farming economies, which then industrialize after the revolution. Meanwhile, in countries like the USA, people seem to find fascism to be a much more palatable form of violence. No waiting for the country to slowly transition from state capitalism, people get the immediate reward of killing inferior people.

I really don't think this is based on economic issues, I think it's just very hard to go from no political freedom to some political freedom, and then people look back on those early revolutions and don't understand (or forget) the actual reason they happened, which is no longer an issue in the modern day in most countries.

Also random side note, people like to say "if voting did anything, they wouldn't let us do it" when actually uh yeah the GOP actually does try to restrict voting, yes

The big problem is that no one thinks strategically or tactically about HOW to get from crappy point A to utopian point B. Just people being overly emotional on the website that rewards you with internet points for being overly emotional. Rage gets clicks, reason does not.

I mean, yeah, that's teenagers for you

Anarchists and MLs etc only want change to happen outside of voting. But realistically, the way that workers would realize they have the power to do direct action is through participating in unions. And we have parties that are more and less hostile to unions.

Yeah, definitely

[eye-in-hand]

My bf is Georgian (like the country not the state), grew up in Russia so despite moving here because of how his ethnic minority was/is treated in Russia (and Georgia) - Americans think he's Russian (as he puts it - hes Russian in the States, Georgian in Russia and x minority in Georgia)

Hes constantly harrassed about Ukraine - even tho he moved here forever ago - constantly called a tankie even tho hes not, called slurs, and called a Russian supremacist even tho hes not Russian, by fucking dumb americans who probably dont even know where Georgia IS let alone any of its history or its history w Russia

The Russian language and History teacher I see gets harrassed despite living in the States for a decade

Ukrainian businesses are harrassed because people think they're Russian

Im bringing this up because with Jews that happens too. We can't exist w out everyone bringing up Israel, calling us slurs, or nazis or genocide lovers

Regardless what your feelings are on the i/p conflict, or Russia/Ukraine, harrassing individuals who have nothing to do w the conflict other than ethnic relation (or perceived relation) doesnt fucking help anyone - it just makes you an asshole

Yet liberals get so mad and distance themselves from Trump, or American imperialism - w your logic you love bombing people too, right? You're the colonizing, imperial capitalist too, right? Oh but wait I'm sorry I didn't see the communist/anti-west labels in your bio lmfao my bad you're not like the other americans

I'm so sick of the needless hate, the unnecessary violence and harrassment of people who are just trying to live their lives like anyone else, who aren't harming anyone by just existing.

You want to help people? Go fucking volunteer instead of harrassing people all day. I work at the food pantry every week in my rural area - wtf do you do ?

[selkiesstories]

Nice post on the Anti-Semitism in HOTD and while I don't think it was their intention to do that, I can't deny that their progressive politics (both GRRM and Condal/Hess) makes them susceptible to adding those anti-sematic tropes because most sects of socialism (both Communisms and Fascism) are imbedded deeply with anti-Semitic and Anti-Christian doctrine. The Soviets, the Chi-Coms, and the Nazi - even the British as well - have both anti-Jewish and anti-Catholic ideologies baked into their cultural make up, some till this very day.

I could say that the portrayal of the Greens are just as filled with Anti-Catholic tropes as Anti-Sematic, but anyone who studies history knows that both go hand in hand in a lot places in Protestant dominated areas of both the past and present West.

To add to your post, I would say that Daemon exemplifies the Nazi trop of the Uber-Mensch - Super-man - who believes in the supremacy of himself due to his race and holds no religion but the idea that he is his own god and cannot be judged by the moral constraints of the "Normal People". GRRM and his rewriting deification of Daemon in later editions of Westrosi history has veered dangerously close to these Nazi tropes.

And while his aim was to write a character "in equal parts heroic and villainous" - his nihilistic writing and philosophies along with his progressive politics have set him on the path to the Fascistic fetishizations that we're starting to see from the left-wing in the West in the revival of Nazi authoritarianism and attitudes under a different more 'compassionate' guise. As wells as the moral good being relative and self-principled rather than the divine ideals of Jerusalem wed to the philosophy of Athens, and the civilized social orders of Rome.

With all the current day bullshit of "Anti-Zionism" - which we all know what they really mean, even if they can't admit it to themselves - it's hard not to see the anti-Semitism in a lot of things. But I do think that GRRM, Condal, and Hess's bullshit politics make them incredibly vulnerable to falling into Anti-Jewish storytelling based on progressivism being built entirely on anti-Semitism and Ant-Christian values.

They wouldn't even question it.

Oh I definitely don’t think it was intentional if only because I think the show runners have only the most shallow knowledge of history if that. Doubtless what little they know is of the-why should we learn about Henry VIII just because he’s a white man?- variety. I agree that they lean towards the ideological purity of the Communist rather than the racial purity of Nazis, and because most of academia never fell out of love with Stalin the way they did with Hitler this is seen as a good thing. (Obviously ideological vs racial purity is an oversimplification since the two got hopelessly muddled but it’s a good starting point) The rest of s2 certainly made it plain that Condal & Hess have never heard about Ravensbrück or really anything about women and Nazism besides the tired “the Nazis were misogynistic”.

I didn’t really get into Daemon but you’re right, maybe at some point I’ll do a post on the Aryan tropes I’ve noticed with them.

Personally I find it fascinating that Nazism is so often conflated with Christian nationalism since historically it was very much not the case. There were places that is was such as the Ustaše in Croatia, but Nazism very much downplayed Christianity to the point where Wilm Hosenfeld wrote in his diary in 1944 that the youngest German soldiers had no real concept of Christmas. There’s probably a great paper on Nazi anti Christianity as an expression of Nazi antisemitism especially if you can work in the overlap with antisemitism and anti Catholicism vis-à-vis Protestantism as Christianity to Catholicism’s Judaism.

Thanks for the ask!

[pazodetrasalba]

Vae Victis

Dear Caroline:

Just finished reading yesterday this recommendation of yours. It wasn't bad, but if I am to be sincere, it is up to now the least interesting of your 5 star choices. I imagine this comes as a result of my absence from the world it depicts: what might have been personally relevant for an (ex)finance bro like you is mostly irrelevant for me.

Yes, the book is a bit slow and rambling, and yes, it does accelerate and get more thriller-like once the bids are out (title gives away the resolution, though, if for some reason you had never heard of the RJR Nabisco leveraged buyout in the first place). The cast is too big - I actually benefited from watching the movie adaptation before finishing the book so that I could at least make a clear mental picture of the, say, 10 or so main characters.

One way of reading this book (and the popular narrative at the time of the events) is as a story of greed, with stereotyped and villainous figures (the film is much less nuanced than the book, and really goes full-hog in this direction: Ross Johnson is a a snake charmer wallowing in luxury who'd sell his mother for the right price, and Henry Kravis is literally Count Dracula - nobody does 'slightly creepy old dude' better than Jonathan Pryce), the worst of which are Wall Street bankers and lawyers who are out to make a catch with complete disregard for the well-being of businesses, shareholders, workers and public. This is how I would have read it many years ago, in my Marxist years. Now that I have become attuned to the fact that capitalism and markets are (mostly) good and the financial sector is necessary for keeping our social machine well oiled and running, I'd be inclined to make other readings as well.

On a side note -actually, it's not that much in the sidelines-, schools do a very poor job at pushing forward what is an extremely anti-intuitive but truthful view, first espoused by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, and expressed in your own review as "You think about market participants each trying to maximize their profits, and everyone acting in their own interest ends up maximizing total welfare, and that makes sense in a zoomed-out way, and as far as I can tell is not a crazy model of the behavior of companies". But this really beggars belief until you actually see it: it feels no less stupid and false to a smart teenager than religious dogma. On the contrary, the same teenager who reads The Communist Manifesto will find a very believable narrative of the moral and economic progress of History through class conflict, and if he further pursues some basic readings (and remains, as we mostly do, economically illiterate), will also find the theory of surplus value scientific-sounding and a good basis for accusing all capitalists of being exploiters and thieves.

It is, indeed, nothing short of miraculous that individual egoisms actually end up creating a quasi-optimal arrangement for the most part, but I feel Barbarians at the Gate is mostly showing you the scenario when this doesn't actually happen. That is to say, for RJR Nabisco under Johnson's leadership, and through the LBO, it does indeed appear that (quoting you again):

- there is a CEO, who is a guy - there is a board, consisting of a bunch of guys who are friends with the CEO - they all have fiduciary duties and if they fail to meet them they will get yelled at by a judge in Delaware - ??? - shareholder value gets maximized

Love the ???. Actually, if one goes back to those dull, first chapters at the beginning of the book, we do get a glimpse of how companies manage to turn individual egoisms into positive enterprises. The book dwells a lot on the first years of Nabisco and Reynolds tobacco, on how founders made all the right choices of wise investment and expansion, use of local knowledge, ethics, hard work and know-how, treating workers and shareholders well, taking advantage of rising opportunities... It really reads like a guide on what to do, as contrasted with the relative vacuity of what Ross Johnson actually ends up doing. Does he actually create any positive value? Perhaps his best contribution is his rejection of stability and routine, a chaotic undermining of conformity which might help against the inevitable stagnation of consolidated companies, but that appears to be all he does. Yes, he charms board members and presidents, parties hard and lavishes wealth on executives and board members (including himself). on the face of it, all this doesn't seem at all better than its opposite.

I am not economically savvy enough, but moving to LBOs, I imagine one could make the case for them in that they judge company value more efficiently than markets (as seemed to be the case with the stagnantly low value of RJR Nabisco shares), and in that the debt and diet they impose on their companies trim out the fat, the redundant, the inefficient and (once the debt is paid), end with a more economically efficient company that can survive and thrive in the market better. Like all tools, though, they can be misused, making some people very rich (CEOs, their cronies and the lenders) and a lot of people quite miserable (workers and shareholders) through financial trickery and assaults orchestrated through 'phoney money'. It is all a matter of trade-offs, I guess. Still, I like some of the anti-LBO voices: even though the book has no heroes (Johnson might be an anti-hero of sorts), Ted Forstmann comes pretty close (and btw, he become a signatory of the Giving Pledge in 2011). It's a pity the way he's massacred in the movie. And crypto doesn't feel that far away from junk bonds...

The book did have some lovely snippets of humor (loved the private jet piloting Mr. G. Shepherd to safety). As for your belief that "it is reassuring that the whole system seems to kinda work anyway", I fear it seems to be the wrong lesson to learn from all of this; in fact, the book seems peppered with quotes that are the absolutely worst possible lessons one could take, most of them from the lips of Ross Johnson, about disregarding protocols, logic, reason and checks and balances. Your final quote about rows of figures with millions of dollars that no one knows the proper meaning of is actually quite an ominous note to end the review with, a precursor to the apparently very lax and chaotic management of vastly superior sums of money in FTX and Alameda.

Quote:

"It all started with a small lemonade stand in Manitoba,” read one Johnson parody. “The next thing I knew I had sold my mother. The rest was easy.”

P.S.: Among the things you mention that motivate you, "making guys think I am attractive" seems particularly ill-phrased. You are incredibly attractive, Caroline (both as a person and as a woman), so there should be little need of persuasion, except we usually find that these truths and feelings are seldom commutative.