No type of revolution? Do not underestimate the transformation of quantity into quality. Every week seems to be a decade recently. Just because some people are comfortable-ish now doesn’t mean that any one of the massive crises we are constantly on the brink of will spill over enough to cause more radical shifts.

Good point. Do we need to organize to build a massive party over decades with underground newspapers and walking thousands of miles? Or will things just go viral enough one day after the capitalist governments have failed hard enough? Technology levels the playing field, but of course we need to do all we can to come out on top.

Hey, I’ve seen a ton of comedies that all center “middle class people [who have moderately sized businesses and never struggled a day in their lives.]” http://smbc-comics.com/comic/frigid

Most people are not even aware of their need to conform. They live under the illusion that they follow their own ideas and inclinations, that they are individualists, that they have arrived at their opinions as the result of their own thinking—and that it just happens that their ideas are the same as those of the majority

Erich Fromm

lol this is exactly what the below banger is pointing out. Most people are not idiots. They definitely have false ideas, but that is because those ideas bring them some sort of security, and/or they have not had sufficient access to alternative perspectives (in the ways people actually learn). While we are no logic machines (closest to that is philosophers and the amount of times we’ve realized reason doesn’t really work), we are all just looking for the most satisfying explanation of how things work.

Definitely gotta accept most people won’t dedicate years of free time to political theory. Just gotta nudge their thinking enough so they fall for less bullshit and are more likely to unionize, organize, voot, etc closer to your vision.

Important to remember that “logic” is often a retrospective process for justifying existing emotions about things. People get the information you’re transmitting when you connect on an emotional level and make sure your logos is well tied to the sorts of pathos and ethos they are receptive to. Of course this is all grounded in individuals’ material circumstances and personal practice.

I am the nerd who talked about Marxist theory explicitly and constantly for years. It worked on a few (neurodivergent leftlib) people. If they don’t listen to that (most won’t), whenever people complain (and not much otherwise, people like it when others agree with their complaints, not “bring everyone down” or “complain about nothing”), chip in comments (in a similar tone, showing your sympathy/shared struggle) pointing out how the people causing their problems are wealthy or tied to wealth. Slip in the notion that the authorities handing down bourgeois ideology are subject to the same moral condemnation they place on other things and tied to wealth. Note contradictions in reactionary narratives (comparing headlines or just counter-examples to major ideas like the need for growth, human nature, etc) at good times. If opportune, add light explanations on your understanding of the structures lying to and hurting them, and what could be better (only a full vision of society if they are interested). If they are receptive enough you can drop socdem, investigative journalist, etc sources, just not too explicit to poison the well.

Do not be too evangelistic about it. “Preach the gospel” as in taking intellectual comfort in the “good news” you have, not giving the impression that you despise all who do not accept your worldview in its totality in a short time frame. Be open minded. Marxism is a most solid and rational worldview. Do not take others opinions as a threat to your identity. Do not be defensive. Everyone you talk to will probably have a less coherent way of seeing the world. If you hear them out non-judgmentally they will be less averse to hearing you out. Good faith reciprocates. At best you actually understood their perspective, which helps you poke holes it. At worst your own perspective evolved and you got something out of it.

If someone is too (materially) comfortable, escapist, and/or immoral (to the point of accepting the logical ends of fascism consciously), focus your energy elsewhere.

This isn’t totally easy in practice (especially autistic myself), but it’s the best advice I’ve seen.

Solidarity comrade

Kant’s totally in there. Of course, he came after Spinoza and probably developed and disputed his ideas a decent bit. Of course everyone intellectualizing any of these places and times could have had a direct impact on the development of this philosophy. I felt like I had written enough names and didn’t need to add Fichte, Lao Tzu…

Fair enough. Makes sense why there’s so much emphasis on practice (besides that being where the revolution comes from) because you kind of have to live dialectical materialism to understand it fully.

Glad your confidence is boosted. Congrats on the hormones! Good luck :3.

Dialectics isn’t some static thing that popped into the world one day and will suddenly pop out with something else in its place. That’s a metaphysical way of understanding dialectics. Marx or Hegel didn’t invent dialectics. Everyone everywhere has discovered it in some sense. We just have the most coherent philosophical form yet seen for a world that has made computer chips and capitalism. Other lenses we can call dialectical have greater understandings of different axes of the development of knowledge.

The old survives within the new while being in other ways more dead than we realize. Nobility and metaphysics are still around in full and in part as remainders in their successors. Buddhism has an advanced “dialectical” philosophy with many schools and turns and obsolete ideas that were forgotten. In the west we learned from Heraclitus, and people are still influenced by him but his worldview is understood to be incomplete. Spinoza made many philosophical leaps and has been largely left behind for those who were influenced by him, though people still read his work. All these philosophies are dead and alive. They have had their negation do the negation. Marx negated Hegel. Marx has been superseded by Lenin without really dying. One day there may be a successor so advanced that only nerds remember Marx like today they remember Heraclitus.

Dialectics started when people started trying to understand the world. Maybe it will end when we are no longer here to care about truth and reality.

Lines aren’t real. Everything doesn’t turn to ice the moment the thermostat hits 0.0000* C. We still understand that that delineation is very useful. Class is far less exact. Liberals think we propose that there is a very fine and exact line where everything to one side of it is saintly prole and the other side is evil bourgeois pig. Dialectics acknowledges that there is fluidity. There are many classes and subclasses with various moving parts and their own contradictions. Class relations are always changing and we know class traitors and those who do not understand their interests exist. But we understand that generally under certain circumstances we can define certain general categories the have certain interests according to conditions generally shared.

For another comparison, let’s say you said the exact same thing but about gender. “We know that men and women exist and will give you distinctions about how they work and act.” We know that this statement ignores huge complexity and conditionality. Are revisionist might hold that there is absolute bourgeois and proletariat and there are absolutely two genders. This understanding can be functional enough in many situations, but we both know that such ideas can be further analyzed with the dialectical method to reveal a much truer and more complex picture.

To organize a revolution we don’t say “hey workers, it’s in your interest to go kill your boss, so do it.” If it were so clear cut everyone would just be conscious of their interests and we’d have a stagnant communism already. But dialectics is how the world works, not simple slogans. We analyze all the relevant conditions through observation and existing concepts derived from practice to determine the best course of action within our material circumstance.

Edit: put another way, everything is too interconnected and changing to have a separate stable definition that corresponds to it, yet defining things relatively is very helpful

It’s probably “normal.” Sounds familiar anyway.

Short answer: “man” “woman” and “nonbinary” aren’t real and there is no evidence to analyze to see which category you belong to. Over time you will figure out your vast and multifaceted preferences.

Longer, better answer: you should read this recent hexbear post (well, mostly the comments).

Based asf. It’s funny how when it comes to discussing philosophy some of us resort liberal metaphysics without even remembering to define our terms (no hate, it’s a product of social context). If someone came up to us and asked for the exact monetary line between bourgeois and proletariat we’d laugh at them, but we forget that the same frameworks apply elsewhere.

Our human context is inescapable. Language doesn’t exist in order to correspond to objective reality, it exists to allow us to socialize and think in order to survive: a practical purpose. Reality can only be understood from a context. Scientific instruments only enhance our senses, they do not reveal something about an ethereal true reality beyond anyone’s perception of pure energy and matter.

Ideas are real because we are real and perceive them. Ideas are concepts. Concepts are human linguistic/imaginitive/etc understandings of what we perceive. They suit a practical purpose. We develop high level concepts that allow us to interact with reality on high levels. The map is not the territory and the territory does not depend upon the existence of the map. Still, the map can be highly detailed and be used to skillfully navigate the territory.

In a causal chain an entity feels the feeling we call hunger, gets the impulse to eat, eats, and the feeling and impulse cease. This language is not real on some transcendent material plane, but as you experience reading it, it functions to make you imagine a scenario you know to occur practically. All such things happen without the need for the word carbohydrate, though that word enhances our ability to interact with a group of substances in process that we have categorized together.

This is what Mao meant, put in the terms of an autistic philosophy nerd.

It’s not a unified system that follows a set of logical postulates dogmatically according to certain rules. That sort of thinking always results in intractable paradoxes, while dialectics is the study of paradoxes. We see that we can describe reality through paradoxes and learn from experience to predict what will happen better and better, but it’s not concrete and ultimately we will see and study what happens in reality beyond our assumptions. We acknowledge that we ourselves are a constantly moving part of a system with factors no less than the sum totality of all that has happened in the universe.

As a philosophy it has developed overtime and will continue to develop. My understanding is that it springs from the structure of language that contains a subject and an object, and that all words are defined by being not something else. When we separate inseparable things conceptually we eventually realize that it does not accurately reflect reality. When trying to describe things we end up words from both sides of dualities and see that maybe that is how things actually are. This is a functional view of the world and developing it improves its functionality. So we make many dualistic conceptual elaborations on nondual reality. Eventually we end up with Darwin and Marx and then understanding physical objects with both particles and waves, infinitely touching and in a way never contacting. We still have a lot to learn about the universe, and being such a great perspective that is inherent to the study of reality, it will continue to advance.

I just started concerta and it’s pretty nice. All it changed is that there’s less miserable time in between tasks where I’m trying to transition or stuck on my phone. Haters and losers say ADHD meds turn you into a mindless drone but that is not true. Most of my extra focus has gone towards “unproductive” hyperfixations (although I’ll try to get more work done, it just didn’t seem as important for a bit). There’s the expectation in this capitalist society that if you’re using drugs to focus better all that extra ability to do things belongs to the exploiters, but you can certainly use it only occasionally when you need it for work and otherwise to empower yourself to do what you like more in free time.

I could crank out a better book in two weeks lol.