u/iforgotmypassword56

Now unfortunately I opened instagram today and I saw an instagram reel from some black academic guy captioned Marx was a colonizer basically saying what everyone already knows: marx held racist beliefs that where common in his time.

I think my problem with this sort of thinkng is not oh this guy should read theory he’s a dumbass it’s why does this guy think that everything he wrote is bad? Like first thought i had was that marxism empowered so many black and brown people to resist imperialism all over the world. Does he think they lost the revolution because marx was racist?

I think deifying our historical figures as completely pure entities is wrong—but to completely throw out the baby with the bathwater is just insane to me.

I think this sort of take is also wrong because it essentializes all of the history of a philosophy to the various aged blindspots of its originator.

There’s a reason why no serious marxist in today’s day and age talks about the “Asiatic Mode of Production” because,

we have more information then marx did and we have expanded and adapted our theories accordingly.

what are gonna do when the capitalists reach space and begin endlessly profiting off its endless contents. An almost infinite amount of resources to capitalize off means an almost infinite amount of exploitation.

Wondering if any of you guys have read any Noam Chomsky/respect his writings at all. I doubt i would ever read anything he’s wrote in the near future so i’m curious.

A terrible habit i’ve noticed people who call themselves communist do is that they’ve invoke theoretical terms as if they’re magical spells in conversation in writing. I remember once I read some ML on reddit saying some shit like “we use material conditions to improve the lives of the working class”. What? No one uses material conditions they are a term to describe something. I think they were talking about mutual aid or something but nonetheless. Contradiction is another bad one—at this point a shibboleth so people can distinguish themselves from lumpen masses.

Another i’ve noticed is people thinking they can theory their ways into activating the working class (looking at you RCA). I used to tag along with a buddy to his RCA meetings and at one point a guy said something to the effect of “the problem of being marxists is that we can never give simple answers to things”. Okay sure, but that doesn’t mean we can only radicalize people by explaining the intricacies of theory to people. You can still agitate the working class by meeting them where they’re at. That’s what being an affective communicator is.

I once saw a video by a lefty astrophysicist and she was talking about how she had an hour long conversation with someone who was a full flat earther. She was going through all the facts with him and he just wasn’t buying it. Not until she asked him “if the US faked the moon landing do you really think the USSR would let them get away with it?”. Then he finally reconsidered his beliefs. A lot of communists could learn alot from her.

Just some thoughts.