I find it hard to bring people to communism because telling them the truth of our system most often leads them to a doom spiral where fighting back against capitalism seems impossible and that the world is fucked. I feel bad because I feel like all it does is make people depressed. It’s too much. People are tired and burnt out from daily life too much to handle it.
Now your dreams will never again be so peaceful. You will see capital in your nights, like a nightmare, that presses you and threatens to crush you. With terrified eyes you will see it get fatter, like a monster with one hundred proboscises that feverishly search the pores of your body to suck your blood. And finally you will learn to assume its boundless and gigantic proportions, its appearance dark and terrible, with eyes and mouth of fire, morphing its suckers into enormous hopeful trumpets, within which you’ll see thousands of human beings disappear: men, women, children. Down your face will trickle the sweat of death, because your time, and that of your wife and your children will soon arrive. And your final moan will be drowned out by the happy sneering of the monster, glad with your state, so much richer, so much more inhumane.
—Carlo Cafiero, Summary of Marx’s Capital
Me starting fights pretty much anywhere with pretty much anyone when I accuse them of being a bootlicker for accepting or even defending the violence of capitalism.
Also I strongly dislike when people say “Oh this is a little thing it doesn’t matter why do you care about this?” as though the small injustices don’t mount or aren’t built on the same legal justifications as the great injustices. In this case it was a “just a little thing”, an abusive clause in an EULA that only became enforceable because Gorsuch and the rest of the clown show made a ruling to bust unions. “This doesn’t matter it’s not impotant it’s just a little thing touch grass” Like no, this is important, it does matter, because the same court decision that lets this game company force you to accept a bad deal to play is also used as a ruinous union busting tool. There are no big or small issues, they’re all tied in to the same system and recognizing that continuity is important to understanding how the system works.
I think the most cursed part about anti-capitalist theory in general (whether communist, anarchist, or even just stale economic data with no particular tendency associated with it, but which nevertheless demonstrates that capitalism a shit) is that, due to asymmetrical access to education, the bourgeoisie almost always end up reading that stuff more than the working class, and they use it as an instruction manual on how to better fuck people over, rather than a real diagnosis of what’s wrong with the world.
Take this excerpt from Michael Hudson’s “super imperialism” for example. In the second edition he points out that US agencies were huge customers of his book on US imperialism, and that statisticians worked to cover up the statistics he used to demonstrate US imperialism in the 1st edition.
Lol, Japan was on its way to learn the secrets of the US and they just said
Also, he mentioned in another interview that the CIA specifically was the largest customer for his books in the US, and that he was scheduled to explain the concepts to the president at the time but the president never showed up lol
This was part of the thesis many of the continental philosophers came up with. Their solution was essentially philisophical Blanquism, under the thought that you makenit not worth the effort for anyone else. Which is why it’s fucking impossible to understand what Althussier is going on about.
You’re framing this wrong. Communism is not an eldritch abomination. Capitalism is the monster. Marxism is the tool we use to understand capitalism and fight it.
People know they’re in a shitty world and one false step away from poverty. What understanding capitalism shows is that this isn’t simply the individual’s fault; it’s a collective structural challenge. This can be scary if you were under the illusion that you were the sole author of your destiny, but most people aren’t that deluded.
Looking capitalism through Marxism brings understanding and organization to what is otherwise disordered harmful phenomenon that all to often is either ignored (and the individual blamed) or only understood through reactionary conspiracy goggles.
