IceWallowCum [he/him]
I had one episode during a period of intense stress and anxiety. It was so goddam intense and scary, which only fed it and made it worse. I’d see the same person simultaniously far away and right up on my face, space wouldn’t make any sense and time was all choppy. It was made worse by the fact that I had to go attend to a thing as it was happening.
It all got bad to a point that I started getting what I think must have been psychotic symptoms (even though I was mostly aware that it was all coming from my head). I thought the signs were all talking directly to me (a “🤫 silence” sign got me all jittery) and people’s eyes were all in HD and violent.
I started treating anxiety in that same week and I’m all good now, years later.
Guevara has a bunch of speeches about this. IIRC, he differentiated between “political freedom”, the power of a people to make their own decisions and act on them, and “economical freedom”, the power of a people to decide over their production and trade. He argued that a revolution aims for the former; after that, the post-revolution state builds the latter.
Hello!
essentially the authoritarian version of the left; instead of being the more moderate-ish(?) leftists/communists.
This distinction comes from a false problem posed by capitalists - liberals and conservatives alike. It is completely ideological and not real.
Every relation of property requires force/violence to be maintained. When you have to determine who gets what in a society, the distinction between getting /not getting or having/not having is supported by violence or the threat of it, in whatever form it may take in a specific society.
Thus, every single form of society that is based on relations of property is maintained by force and violence. That includes modern western states, drug cartels, and even early socialism. The difference between capitalism (dictatorship of the bourgeoisie) and early socialism (dictatorship of the proletariat) is which class uses violence against which other class in order to control property.
This considered, it is impossible to have any sort of society (one without absolute abundance, that is) that is not based on force or violence. Pointing this out to capitalists gets you called a tankie because they would be on the side of “not having”, not because they abhor violence, as we already established their society is also based on violence.
Think of it this way and you’ll see most political discussions, specially ones about violence, boil down to property.
It’s ok! I’ll try to add a bit to what other already said, in simple terms. I’ll respond to punctual questions in another comment.
I’ll talk about two important ideas here: historicity and collectivity. This whole mode of thought is very complex and there is no shame in feeling overwhelmed at first and not getting it with just some short online comments. Marx took thousands of pages to develop all these ideas, and others still had to develop them further.
One important thing to keep in mind during an analysis is that, although things simply pop up on our mind when we experience them, that is not the case in reality outside our head - your land didn’t just pop up into existence the way you experience it right now. Sure, you simply bought it from another person, but that’s not where the land started existing. Assuming you are from the US, how did a piece of land in America become a market product in the first place? To understand that, you have to look into history. Way back then, someone had to take the land away from others (natives) using force and then keep it from getting taken away by others also using force. The state was created by these situations: as a mediator of ownership of the newly explored property. How is that mediation put into practice? To see it, let’s bring it a little closer to yourself: what would happen to you if, instead of buying the land, you simply got into it and said it’s yours? Best case scenario, you’d be dragged away by cops - that is, the state would use force to mediate property rights. Unless you have an army to fight the state, you are not keeping that land.
So, since things in reality develop through historical processes, it is wrong to not consider those in your analysis, you won’t get close to thinking something that is objective (ie. that exists outside your head).
Also, just reflecting about oneself and your own personal experiences will hardly deliver a correct analysis. The world is collective - everything around you and inside you were made by a long chain of producers scattered in space and time. Failing to add this consideration into your analysis won’t get you close to reproducing reality correctly inside your head either.
Hope this helps! Try the “primitive accumulation” chapter of Capital, it’s towards the end and will give you a great picture of all this, as it describes the political events that gave birth to English capitalism. It’s not a hard read, as it is not abstract as the initial chapters are. Then come back and tell us what you think 😄
If you’re feeling adventurous, read the introduction to Grundrisse, although that one is more complicated. The book lays down a lot of Marxist ideas, and also describes the method of analysis Marx used to reach them. My two comments were based on these two, respectively.
Would the “society based on force” in play here be that I am being forced to work to afford and enjoy these necessities?
Kinda. You’re buying it in the first place because you don’t have a property to produce it yourself, which is also the reason we work, as there is no other way of getting what we need to survive. That’s also why you pay rent.
Think of this: who owns the food before you buy it, or who are you buying it from? How is it produced? Why can’t you just take it, and what happens if you do?
My point is: violence is inherent to property. Property can’t exist without violence or the threat of it.
And that the ideal society would be that I shouldn’t have to work to have those?
In Marxist communism, the question of what is a perfect society doesn’t matter, is counterproductive and should be repelled. The point is not to design a perfect society, but to develop the progressive forces of capitalism (the tools which develop scientific advancements, education, production capacity…) and get over the regressive forces (current relations of property, mostly). Communism will develop from capitalism, not made of thin air by a fairy. According to Marx himself, the initial stages of communism will be hardly distinguishable from capitalism, save for the property relations. Which brings us to:
I get that this is probably moving towards the more well known stance of “the workers should own the means of production”. Is that the case?
You should know what that means beyond the slogan:
You see, european and american capitalism started as progressive force, in the sense that it brought about a material development never before experienced in history. Now, we have the potential to do much much more than we currently are, but the way the system works gets in the way and keeps us from doing better. Just look at cars and climate change - why aren’t we ditching fossil fuels faster, if it’s for the surviving of the human race?
In Marx’s analysis, in the beginning stages of a form of society, their relations of property, specially the property of the means of production (land, tools, education), act as a progressive force, developing the productive forces (workers and their abilities, mostly). With time, these productive forces become too developed, and what once was a rocket launching society forward now becomes a cage that won’t let it go any further. These overdeveloped productive forces then dissolve the previous relations of property and a new relation of property arises, one that is based on that overdevelopment. Then rinse and repeat.
Science and productivity are now too developed for capitalism, which now ceases to be a factor of progress and becomes an impediment for further development. The natural next step of a society to progress is to abandon the current relations (who owns the land, tools, machines etc) and organize new ones based on the fact that workers are much more educated and we can now produce absurd quantities of useful products if we ditch the production of useless ones for financial market reasons (do you know the amount of energy humanity wastes mining bitcoin? 😬).
There’s also the fact that the planet is dying and big companies won’t let us do anything about it or else they’ll lose profits, so that is another situation in which capitalism has become a cage and not the rocket it once was.
I recommend reading Critique of the Gotha Programme, which consists of Marx dunking on a communist party of his time. He exposes all these ideas much more eloquently than I can.
XXth century fascism was the west’s capitalists reaction to communists taking power all around them. Rich assholes started financing rabid anti-communists to kill leftists.
An early version of fascism is described in Marx’s 18th Brumaire, in which he describes a failed revolution being followed by a period of terror, when anyone the cops thought was involved with workers movement could be killed in the street.
From the end of WWII to now, imperialists have been financing far-right groups to counter communists/leftist/progressive groups wherever they seem to be getting some power. See operations Gladio and Condor, and also the Jakarta Method