Pavlichenko_Fan_Club [comrade/them]

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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: July 26th, 2020

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  • I’ve wholeheartedly become one of those ‘boycott the elections!’ people recently. Obviously getting progressives elected isn’t the goal–I would hope this is a starting point most would agree with here–, but neither is it good strategy to say we’ll win reforms by creating powerful working-class organizations. I’ll go even further and say that the shame-faced agnosticism of saying that election are wholly irrelevant misses the point in that the farcical nature of Bourgeois democracy behooves us to put this fact forward as primary. We don’t ignore elections because everybody knows politics is a shame, a rich mans game, and so on, as although this may be true we understand our ‘democracy’ itself is a tool of class oppression by the Bourgeoisie. Therefore, we dont posit more working-class representation in government, we posit the dictatorship of the proletariate instead. We understand that all consessions, and reforms won through popular struggle are meant to bury the contradiction driving class-struggle, to quash popular discontent by channeling it through safe, legal avenues. The state legalized unions because the alternative was killing your boss. The state became ‘democratic’ because the alternative was overthrowing your government.








  • Gotcha. Yeah in my opinion philosophy should be taught with a focus on historicaly situating thinkers, and going through their works so as to understand not only why they came to the positions they do but also why, on a deeper level, did their concerns lead them down the path that it did.

    Kant as reacting to the French Revolution, or doggedly trying to place God amidst skepticism and reason itself. Nietzsche can be read as reacting against the angst of the precarious petty-Beourgeois intelligensia of the German State, etc.

    It’s unfortunate really as Kant is a remarkably systamtic thinker, and most of the claims / positions extracted into some lecture are in principal explainable with the text themselves. It’s just that a lot gets lost when hurrying from topic to topic as I’ve experienced.

    Uh… If you haven’t used https://plato.stanford.edu/ I highly recommend it. Good luck lmao











  • With all due respect this is pretty much a solved problem, and untill there is sufficient reason to revisit it it should be treated as such. I quote from here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1909/may/13.htm

    “The philosophical basis of Marxism, as Marx and Engels repeatedly declared, is dialectical materialism, which has fully taken over the historical traditions of eighteenth-century materialism in France and of Feuerbach (first half of the nineteenth century) in Germany—a materialism which is absolutely atheistic and positively hostile to all religion.

    [And yet…]

    “Accusing the would-be ultra-revolutionary Dühring of wanting to repeat Bismarck’s folly in another form, Engels insisted that the workers’ party should have the ability to work patiently at the task of organising and educating the proletariat, which would lead to the dying out of religion, and not throw itself into the gamble of a political war on religion” (ibid.)

    Let me put it this way: As dialectical materialists we must never settle into mere empericism as what appears before us must be understood in the historical relations that produce such a phenomenon. Therefore, when we talk of religion it isn’t so much a discussion of particular religious ideas and how we can tactically intervene in them to better our goals, but rather a wuestion of where religious thinking comes from, what are its conditions, what is it an expression of. Another quote: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm

    “The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man – state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form[…]. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.

    Indeed today we do see very little reflection of our ideas in the world, and it is understandable that in a desparate effort to remedy this one would try and popularize as much as possible. But at the cost of the very foundation of Marxism. That we see the fantastical mish-mash of half digested ideas upheld as a virtue of the diversity of thought speaks to the overwhelming lack of principle among so-called “leftists.” The answer to the disorder of our camp is not to abandon it, but instead to rise to the occasion.