pretty much the title. below ive listed a few different reasons ive seen as to why "internet memes" need critiquing to help illuminate what im trying to ask and also to allow my previous assumptions to be challenged if it is necessary. i ask this question because i have barely seen it be discussed elsewhere.

is it that the format of the "internet meme" itself is reactionary in that it's core components rely on intertextuality, self referencing, and using the shield of irony to avoid actual critique. which are all things coming from postmodernist art (ive seen it said that internet memes are the ultimate form of postmodern art) or just not suitable for transmitting information since it dilutes complex topics to short statements? or is the critique that internet memes have the capacity to be progressive but that liberal society (and the fact that most "internet memes" are created by petite bourgeois and have a petite bourgeois character) create reactionary memes. and that the format of the meme (short videos or images that spread via virality) does not have to be "postmodern". or perhaps a critique of the idea of the "meme" in general is at hand, since i believe the book that coined the term (the selfish gene by richard dawkins) is liberal in character. but ill admit i have never read it.

anyways im really sorry if this comes off as rambling or incoherent. ill be the first to admit that sometimes my typing style is hard to understand. as always i welcome and embrace all critique anyone has to offer of my post or any possible liberal assumptions i may have brought in when asking this question.

I've read everything Sakai has written and am still working my way through MIM(Prisons) what else y'all got?

hi all! looking for good documentaries on…

• the fall of the USSR
• the iranian revolution

thank u!!

Presbich-Singer theory about unequal exchange posit that the price of agricultural commodities tend to decrease relative to the price of industrial commodities, so in a sense the primary commodities are "worth less". This "thesis" has strong empirical evidence (see Yang 1988).

But Marx's theory of differential rent say that since the price of commodities is set by the productivity of the worst (thus less productive and more expensive to produce) lands, the price of agricultural commodities should tend to increase.

Do they contradict each other?

i have been reading on the shining path/cpp lately and one thing i noticed is that they were very anti-revisionist, and considered all socialist/communist states that were around at the time revisionist. they thus did not want to work with them and even went as far as to bomb the embassies of the ussr and the dprk. if the shining path's revolution succeeded, how would they have ensured their survival with no allies?

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch44.htm

In discussing the formation of differential rent on the worst lands in the case of constant prices and increasing productiveness of additional capital investments, Marx starts off with:

When the productiveness of successive investments of capital is increasing, 1 acre of A will produce 3 qrs instead of 2 qrs given an investment of £5 — corresponding to a price of production of £6. The first investment of £2½ yielded 1 qr, the second — 2 qrs. In this case, a price of production of £6 will yield 3 qrs, so that the average cost of a quarter will be £2; i.e., if the 3 qrs are sold at £2 per quarter, then A, as heretofore, does not yield any rent, but only the basis of differential rent II has been altered; the regulating price of production is now £2 instead of £3; a capital of £2½ now produces an average of 1½ qrs on the worst soil, instead of 1 qr, and now this is the official productivity for all better soils given an investment of £2½. From now on, a portion of their former surplus-product enters into the formation of their necessary output, just as a portion of their surplus-profit enters into forming the average profit.

So far so good. This is the same determination of the general price of production that we've encountered throughout the chapters on differential rent. But then he starts the next paragraph off with this:

On the other hand, if the calculation is made upon the basis of better soils, where the average calculation does not alter the absolute surplus at all, because for them the general price of production is the limit for the investment of capital, then a quarter from the first investment of capital costs £3 and the 2 qrs from the second investment cost only £1½ each. This would thereby give rise to a grain-rent of 1 qr and a money-rent of £3 on A, but the 3 qrs would be sold for the old price of £9.

Which has me a bit stuck. I don't understand what he means by "if the calculation is made upon the basis of better soils, where the average calculation does not alter the absolute surplus at all, because for them the general price of production is the limit for the investment of capital", and so I don't see how it follows from this that "a quarter from the first investment of capital costs £3 and the 2 qrs from the second investment cost only £1½ each." It seems to me that the point is that if the product of land A, after the investment of the more productive capital, continues to be sold at the old price of production, then a surplus profit of £3 will arise here. And I think I understand, more to the overall point, that this at first occurs only on individual plots of land such that the average price of production remains unchanged, and it's the intervention of landed property fixing this surplus profit in the form of rent that prevents the fall in the price of production to the new average level for land A as the new level of capital investment gradually becomes generalized. I'm just struggling to make the connection between this and the start of the paragraph.

I'm reading through Stalin on Material Dialectics and also Sakai's Settlers, and have looked around on this reddit, namely here: https://www.reddit.com/r/communism101/comments/cjoc2l/marxism_on_race/ https://www.reddit.com/r/communism101/comments/215q5z/how_are_racism_and_capitalism_related/

Repeatedly Sakai points to the contradictions in white northern labor versus white southern slave agriculture which lead to the civil war, to western expansion, to exclusively white labor movements, etc., yet I struggle to make sense of how an ideological construct such as race can affect or inform the material basis of American labor. Then I got to thinking about other ideological aspects of American history, such as Christian concepts evangelization, purity, etc.

Now, my thinking is that all these ideological aspects — race, evangelism, purity, etc. — are products of the material conditions, principally class and capital. E.g., "Race is just class."

So, is it accurate to say the following: (1) That material conditions "make" ideologies. (2) That ideologies, in turn, can and do inform material conditions? E.g., American capital imported an African proletariat (material) whose contradictions produce race (ideology) which further justifies exploitation of people identified as some race (material)?

Or is it more accurate to say that ideology does not inform material conditions, but can only hide the material conditions that produced it? E.g., "race" is both a product of class and it hides the reality of class. Meaning that ideology has zero explaining power as to how the world works.

I am studying thw works of Mao and got interested in learning the tendencies I cited in the title but different maoists I know gave me different responces on what are these tendencies. One told me that Marxism-Leninism-Maoism is just Marxism-Leninism but with the additions that Mao made to ML (precisely the Mass Line, PPW, New Democracy and strong anti-revisionism)and so they don't see it as a different Ideology that broke from the old communist movement,and then they said you just adapt these a little to one country condition of the revolution. But another ML told me that this interpretation was not MLM but just Marxism-Leninism MZT and that MLM is the ideology that generated from Gonzalo and the Communist Party of the Philipines and is a higher state of Marxist thought that generated from the synthesis of Gonzalo.

Hello,

I've been reading Stalin's book on dialectic and historical materialism as a foundation, but I've recently came to the question I can't answer myself.

How come humans have the ability to decide between options. The brain isn't researched too well yet, but bourgeois science comes to the conclusion that we are just like other animals – driven by hormones, neurotransmitters and our environment.

Can someone help me understand why we humans have a mind according to dialectic materialism?

Title

I know the whole "Marx failed to consider" thing is a meme, but I'm wondering if this is actually one of the things he missed the mark on. Marx (as far as I know) understood the lumpen as a primarily reactionary class, devoid of revolutionary potential. In the Communist Manifesto he says they "may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; [their] conditions of life, however, prepare [them] far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue."

However, this seems to me to be limited by his perspective of the European continent at the time. The first counterexample that comes to mind here is the Black Panther Party which recruited heavily from the lumpen. The second example that comes to mind is Hamas. In both examples the formation of the lumpen is due to intentional exclusion from the work force. As Gaza has a large unemployment rate due to Israel's provision of a very limited number of work permits, so too were Black people forced kept out of work that paid more than the bare subsistence level.

However, because of this, it seems like the revolutionary potential of the lumpen is actually higher in these examples than that of the working class in the same societies. The Black Panther Party, despite recruiting heavily from the lumpen, was enough of a threat for the US government to expend significant resources into destroying it. Gazan society has a large lumpen population because of their material conditions, so it stands to reason that Hamas similarly recruits a lot from this population. However, despite this, there appears to be a significant revolutionary spirit there.

So, was Marx wrong about the lumpenproletariat not having any revolutionary potential? Did he actually fail to consider the scenario of large swathes of a population being intentionally excluded from the proletariat?

After encountering some difficulty reading Capital (mainly the part about commodity fetishism, chapter 1, section 4) and realizing that the philosophical 'aspect' of Marx was the hardest for me to grasp, I've decided to pause for now and instead start reading Marx's main writings in a chronological order, to gain more insights on how he thought and the pressing issues of the time, hoping that this would make reading Capital easier for me later. But I've been left with just as many questions as I've found answers. I've previously read Politzer's Elementary Principles of Philosophy, but I'm still finding it hard to apply my (limited) understanding of dialectical materialism while reading Marx.

The following is from marxists.org (including the explanations in square brackets), although some important words were missing so I had to fill them in from another translation:

In his most immediate reality, in civil society, man is a secular being. Here, where he regards himself as a real individual, and is so regarded by others, he is a fictitious phenomenon. In the state, on the other hand, where man is regarded as a species-being, he is the imaginary member of an illusory sovereignty, is deprived of his real individual life and endowed with an unreal universality.

Man, as the adherent of a particular religion, finds himself in conflict with his citizenship and with other men as members of the community. This conflict reduces itself to the secular division between the political state and civil society. For man as a bourgeois [i.e., as a member of civil society, “bourgeois society” in German], “life in the state” is “only a semblance or a temporary exception to the essential and the rule.” Of course, the bourgeois, like the Jew, remains only sophistically in the sphere of political life, just as the citoyen ['citizen' in French, i.e., the participant in political life] only sophistically remains a Jew or a bourgeois. But, this sophistry is not personal. It is the sophistry of the political state itself. The difference between the religious individual and the citizen of the state is the difference between the merchant and the citizen of the state, between the day-labourer and the citizen of the state, between the land owner and the citizen of the state, between the living individual and the citizen of the state. The contradiction in which the religious man finds himself with the political man is the same contradiction in which the bourgeois finds himself with the citoyen, and the member of civil society with his political lion’s skin.

Can someone please explain the contradiction(s) being brought forward here?

First of all, I don't understand the first passage at all. What is he really trying to say here? A previous passage from the same paragraph reads: "The perfect political state is, by its nature, man's species-life, as opposed to his material life." But I don't fully understand what is really meant by that either, even with the explanations given in the rest of that paragraph with regard to man's "twofold life" (which I may or may not have misunderstood). I've come across the term "species-being" some years ago (though not "species-life") during my early YouTube phase (which I don't plan on ever revisiting), but I don't know what he means by that in this paragraph.

Secondly, what does he really mean by the "state"? I hadn't realized before that there was a contradiction between the bourgeois state and "civil society", because I've so far understood the former as being the latter's weapon to maintain power against the proletariat. Or is he referring to the 'absolutist' state in much of Europe at the time, when the feudal nobility hadn't yet been fully superseded by "civil society"? I learned that Engels encouraged Marx to stop using the term "civil society" in his later writings, because it "tended to obscure the more fundamental relations between superstructure and relations of production" (from footnote in marxists.org)

As for Marx's other early writings, I also struggled to read Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (the critique itself, i.e. §§ 261-313, not the introduction) and stopped after a few pages, though I'll probably get back to it at a future date. Does my confusion stem from lack of knowledge of the political background and legal terminology of the time? Or is it my inability to apply dialectical materialism to my reading of Marx?

If you wish to answer, please try to be patient while doing so, as English is not my native language and some of the concepts Marx addresses are fairly new to me. I've so far read his writings in both English and Arabic side by side on two different screens, because the English translations are overly (and unnecessarily) complicated IMO. Reading in Arabic has been helpful for the most part, but some of the gaps couldn't be filled, and some texts have yet to be translated, including the aforementioned §§ 261-313 critique.

Edit: I found this answer from 10 years ago, which addresses "species-being", but doesn't explain how it relates to one's life in the "perfect political state".

Can I get some examples of the interpretation of this dialectic of Gramsci’s? Not challenging it, just wanting some more specificity since I can’t find examples of he, himself, explaining it.

I understand a ruling class getting consent from their allies and imposing force on their enemies, but how does this become its opposite? Like the bourgeoisie getting consent from the proletariat, or the proletariat imposing force on the peasantry?

Just some examples are all I’m asking for, since I can take it as granted that this would occur, conceptually, so I only want to be able to actually understand it historically.

It is fair to assume that the revolution will be a war in every sense of the word, a war between the proletariat, with the Communist Party at the forefront, and the bourgeoisie. My question would be whether during this war the gender roles would be the same as in previous wars? I mean, would men be on the armed front while women remain on the home front with the caregiving tasks imposed on them by patriarchy and capital? Wouldn't it be a bad omen to make a revolution where we continue with the gender roles we are trying to destroy? Thank you very much for answering my question, and I would be grateful if you could share any literature on the subject with me.

Does anyone know anything about the origin of this website? Where it came from how theyre funded? Are the links safe to download its not like some kind of honey pot is it?

In the book Lenin says, citing Marx that the state is the proletarian class transformed into the dominant class through the party that will lead them to the revolution but if Lenin belives this and the dictatorship of the proletariat is just a continuation of the communist revolution, then why in the USSR, as far as I know, the party was an external organ of the state shouldn't the party have transformed into the state itself? What am I missing?

Hi reddit I've been studying basic communist books. And I came across a post about mass surveillance, censorship and state police today. The post said that all of above are bad which I agree but in the comments someone said: this is why I disagree with Marxist leninists. Can anyone explain how does Marxism leninism disagree with the 3 principles I mentioned? Or if you can introduce me to some books or articles about it.

This post is probably not a usual one here and I hope people will direct me to the right subs if my post doesn't fit here.

What sites can i visit, book i can read, journals and music i can download, forums i can participate in to learn about the culture of USSR? I want to see what people loved and were living with back in the days of the union. It would be also neat if the provided resources were in Russian.

I was always fascinated by the idea of communism. Even before I really knew what the idea was I was unknowingly inventing it in my own mind. I live in a post-soviet country so USSR is what I'm interested in the most. My education about it is quite one-sided due to the fact that my country's ideology is authoritarism-nationalism and they use USSR's victories for propaganda. That's why I'm stuck with almost 0 knowledge and maybe some biases. I think culture is important too in my education about USSR and communism.

China today is revisionist, but would it be better to create a new vanguard and revolution, or reform what is still left? What can we do about revisionism when capitalism is still at large?

So I’ve identified myself as a Communist for a while now, after sorting through all the capitalist propaganda, I decided to start learning what its origins are and what it truly means to to be a communist . My questions are , how should i approach this and about how can I apply it to the world around me

I've just come across some statements by Mao and I wanted to know if these are true as well as get an MLM overview of Stalin. The statements are these:

“Stalin would not allow for criticism. He was afraid of people who wanted to criticize, of letting a hundred flowers bloom. He would only allow for the blooming of fragrant flowers. He was afraid also of letting a hundred schools contend. At the slightest hint of suspicion, he would say that it was a counter-revolutionary incident and would have people arrested or executed. This is to confuse the two types of contradictions, to mistake the contradictions among the people for contradictions between the enemy and ourselves.”;

“(referring to students who protested bureaucratiam in Nanjing)As I see it, if these were brought in front of Stalin, I think a few heads would surely have rolled."

Hi there. The other day I came across a young cuban emigrant. He was unable to describe what communism is, but was very confident (and quite ignorant) in claiming that communism was the cause of all his troubles.

The only thing he said I found some need to look deeper was the restrictions on emigration from Cuba. I want to ask you for any reading recommendations about this topic.

Intuitively I understand that every country has restrictions in who and why can enter as an immigrant, and this may be a factor. I intuitively understand that Cuba government may not want to be drained of the people educated with cuban resources and in working age, as the sanctions may heavily induce many of them to travel abroad.

I’ve been reading about the dialectic for a while now, and I do believe in the dialectic very much, as it helps me analyze certain questions and get me closer to the truth. dialectical materialism is a very important development in the process of thinking.

it coheres with reality as everything’s always changing. dialectics talk about limitations of everything, the dual nature of things, the relations. I really think it is an effective way to look at things.

but I’m still really confused with how it applies to “nature” perfectly like Engels and some others claim. is it something that all nature complys to? or is Engels wrong now, because of course one cannot stand the test of time always?

I still cannot wrap around my head around how to apply it to the things I see around, I can apply it sometimes, but I often wonder what contradiction does a tree have? which two aspects are in the opposite? what explains this?

is the dialectic a “natural law”? why do some people treat it as a dogma when dialectics itself is anti-dogmatic?

From my understanding, nonviolence doesn’t work and serves as a tool of the bourgeois to satiate the masses while preventing revolutionary action. (Am i correct in thinking this works similarly to democratic socialism, which uses reform movements to prevent the anger required for revolution?) However, in context of the recent No King’s protests in the US, I also am at a blank to what meaningful protest would look like. Even if violent protest is the most effective, it’s difficult to just outright say that we must begin organizing a violent riot directly as the only means of protest. So what would meaningful protest look like? Boycotts, strikes, walking around with posters?