StalinForTime [comrade/them]
Lmao westerners having a totally normal one over the lack of loyalty of a slop-house to the divinely-ordained imperial cause.
Oh no. Now the settler-colonialists will have to take ecstasy in their pizza-discotecs again. THE HORROR…THE HORROR…
Much as I hate chuds, there’s something about the smug, pretentious, condescending, obnoxious tone and content that these bourgeois liberals all seem to have that makes me understand why a bunch of white working class people just get driven into the arms of cultural nationalists like the Republicans who refuse to abide by the same absurd language and standards. Like my instinctive repulsion and contempt is stronger in a way when I see a pretentious lib talk than a ridiculous Republican. The latter I still fear and would like to see merked in minecraft, but there’s something more especially intuitively infuriating about liberals.
It’s fascinating to see these people come to something of an understanding, albeit superficial, of some of the most obvious realist motives and calculations behind the US’s essential involvement in Ukraine as if they were stumbling onto a revelation, which should have been not only obvious before it even began (the US’s foreign policy in this regard hasn’t changed in 30 years) but should have made obvious how incomparably dangerous the US is, only for them to then say: “actually this is smart and good, I love paying top $$$ to impoverish Slavs and Chinese people”.
The more Marx (or good Marxist theory more generally) that you read, the more you realise how detached from reality liberal discourse about anything even remotely connected to Marxist thought is. This is blindingly obvious in mainstream economics departments, where the average professor or TA normally manages to combine both shocking ignorance of any economic theory beyond their barrenly narrow purview, and depressing naivety when it comes to the apparent self-evidence of their arguments.
That being said, economics is only the most obvious example. Set foot inside the average history, sociology or anthropology department and the epistemic consequences of a lack of Marxist approaches becomes immediately obvious when you see the low quality of alot of the work being produced and ask why that’s the case.
History probably has the best showing, although it’s nothing like it was in the 1960’s or 70’s, and I suspect that that’s because history is an area where the necessity of a materialist analysis makes itself the most immediately obvious, and because the results in this area achieved by Marxist are obviously superior and so more easily form the basis for further productive historical analysis. For example the debates around the origins of capitalism out of late feudalism cannot avoid the Brenner Debate. You see the influence of materialist thought here even in thinkers who are not explicitly Marxist. Historians who are otherwise not rigorously materialist and politically liberal will still sometimes readily recognise the validity, or make use of, class-analysis.
Sociology is interesting because it’s mainstream’s basic methods seem deeply idealistic to me despite the fact that Marx is also one of the key figures in the development of modern sociology, and given that Marx’s political economy, as opposed to modern neoclassical economics, recognises that you cannot really engage in productive economic analysis beyond a very superficial level if you do not recognise that it’s essential to talk about the economic sociology, the economic institutions and social structures that serve differnent socio-economic functions and fit together in certain contexts to distribute the socio-economics functions amongst themselves, including the fundamentally important point of noting how different societies and different modes of production will see different social structures serve as the social relations of production. Otherwise you end up with an idealist theory of economic production.
Honestly though you also see this among self-described leftists or even ‘Marxists’ who do not understand the meaning of the term ‘value’ in Marx, i.e. that it is a technical economic concept, not a moral one (though through its social and political implications we are obviously naturally going to attach normative value to how it functions or affects us).
Another think that both liberals and soc dems do when discussing Marxism is taking quotes completely out of context and radically misunderstanding or misinterpreting what it being claimed or discussed. Which just makes all the more obvious the need for reeducation in the fundamentals of Marxism.
9/11 was proof that America is one of the most self-absorbed, narcissistic societies to ever exist. They suffer what they inflict upon others in an afternoon of ignorance or infantile righteous judgement, and they start foaming at the mouth to cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war, gloating over how they will ‘send them back to the stone age’. It’s sometimes difficult to put into words how repulsive Americans can be.
Does that mean that everyone who died on 9/11 had it comin? No. But the event was beyond illuminating of how America is an imperialist beast with a Narcissus complex.