/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

>>473597
My question as well. but OP make sure you are already familiar with marxist theory, because it might give some good insights about how to apply it.

> organizing
Collective bargaining, unions, any community has a way of getting shit done for itself

How do I organize?
You can join a local socialist org
You can also join any community and
talk about stuff, just be the expert on economic
matters and people will listen eventually.

Marx's political economy work is no longer useful, except for historical purposes. It didn't even describe what free trade really was, and really just described the logic of the British Empire. You wouldn't understand how the American slave and industrial system worked in sufficient detail, which is the source of so many Marxist failures to read what the American Civil War and its aftermath was. You wouldn't read Capital and understand why the German Empire did the things that it did. It's particular to understanding the British system and particular conceits of men within it - among them Marx himself.

Understanding Marx is necessary to understand why the 20th century turned out the way it did. After the 1930s, it drops off because the Marxists themselves gave it up.

That said you don't ever apply a theory like a formula to say you have the master key. That's not how it works. Marx suggested a method of critique, and not even a particularly effective one. The "original Marxism" led to Bernstein and Kautsky - Kautsky was the intellectual dean of Marxism in his day, until 1914 discredited him big time.

As far as understanding politics - if you get into political history and theory today, most will acknowledge Marx's contribution to political thought readily, regardless of their alignment. That would be the chief application of Marx today - how to engage in political fuckery. What you come away with though isn't revolution, but how to fuck people up with NGOs and institutions. The socialists all chose the institutions and did not need the people, which is why socialism wound up losing. There isn't a form of socialism that suggested the people had any say whatsoever, and now materially the people are fucked. That was decided a long time ago. We can struggle out of dire necessity, but there will never be any victory. The only way it changes for us is to somehow attain class mobility, which is by design impossible in a caste society like what is forming, or if humans become very different creatures spiritually which is centuries away if it ever happens.

If you want things to change, in any way, you'd see Marx as a historical artifact to study rather than a guide to follow. It's an important artifact and usually it's a door to the true blackpill, but if you don't get what Marxism really was, it will fuck you up. I'm glad I eventually figured it out and didn't get too deep in the echo chamber.
It's not to say Marxism is "evil" or even stupid, but that online Marxists by and large do not know the shit coming out of their mouths. Every once in a while an actually competent person will speak up, but they are always those who chose the institutions. They know they must keep kicking down the losers and keep them as retarded as possible. They never want anyone outside of the know to gain legitimacy. That's the last thing they want, and that's true of everyone in the institutions. They would fall apart if there were the degree of class mobility that existed before 1980.

And the first sign of true Marxist failure is a total inability to read the genuine social classes of the late 20th century. There isn't a "bourgeois" or "proletariat" any more. The latter was successfully cleaved into grades of civic worth and turned against each other. The former was sorted to fit functions in the new society of technocrats, eugenists, and aristocrats, leaving behind a bunch of people whose shit is being stripped away from them, who have nowhere to go.

There was some exchange between the two groups, but in the main, if you have to ask who the proletariat is, you don't have a proletariat in your country. It referred to a social grouping that was particular to 19th century Britain and not even really true then. It was clear there were already three broad groups within the working class - skilled labor that could bargain and form trade unions, common labor that doubled as crime, and the residuum who were preyed upon and killed on sight.

>>473758
>You wouldn't understand how the American slave and industrial system worked in sufficient detail, which is the source of so many Marxist failures to read what the American Civil War and its aftermath was.

Marx literally wrote about the American civil war while it was going on.

>>473760
>And the first sign of true Marxist failure is a total inability to read the genuine social classes of the late 20th century. There isn't a "bourgeois" or "proletariat" any more.

This is bullshit, actually.
Even in Marx's time, he observed strata within the bourgeoisie and proletariat - this isn't a new phenomenon. What has changed, the most significant change, is the overall decline of the previous monarchical class. The Kings have mostly gone, or have ceded much of their power to capital - the bourgeoisie and proletariat actually are more relevant to a basic understanding of class than they were in Marx's time.

Marx's understanding of class is many times more coherent and broadly true than any attempt to divide it along income lines - I say this as someone who isn't even a Marxist. If anything, Marx was too prone to obsessing over minor distinctions - it's not that he generalized too broadly, but he occasionally failed to generalize broadly enough. His hatred of lumpenproles is one of his numerous lapses in judgment - the best analysis from Marx and Engels is great materialism, it demystifies economics and history, but Marx sets that aside when he decides to lament the stupidity of whores without adequate consideration for what causes whores to be whores. The little differences between groups of people who sell their labor for money are less significant than the commonality of relying upon the selling labor for money.

Growing up, I was told that class was income levels - but no one could pin it down. Almost everyone just thought they were middle class, even a lot of people who were poor just thought of themselves as "lower middle class" unless they were actually homeless. Everyone thought they were middle class and that everyone poorer than them was some other class, but only the absolute richest Bill Gates-type people were another, higher class. It was stupid. Workers have a common interest, and should organize around it to the fullest extent.

>>473758
>>473760
>>473761
Why haven't you taken your meds yet?

>>473766
Yes and he didn't get it and wrote some stupid shit to get some extra money and fame. At most he took notice of some of the tactics, which is more than a lot of Euros at the time were learning. As far as the causes and how to tell the state of the war, he was clueless. There was after the war revelation of a lot of grody shit happening to suggest none of it was about the purported purposes, and it was about setting up corporate government. That's why there was no way to reconcile the slavery issue, rather than "material conditions supplanting slavery with industry", which is dumb because the Southerners were testing out industrial slavery and slavery produced huge profits for the plantation owners.

>>473768
You must not have read my words or dismissed them out of hand. Everything that happened in the 20th century was conscious of making sure the bourgeois and proletariat were no longer classes that could unite, and they never united as a hive mind that all thought the same thing. Social classes exist around institutions that allow them some holding of property that must be recognized. There are classes today which were never classes unto themselves in the past, and a whole fucking inquisition of psychologists that effectively overrides the law. Nothing of the situation resembles the imagined model of capitalism - which wasn't even Marx's understanding, but that's what gets called Marxism these days because the system favors this sort of idealization from the model.

The difficulty with social class today is that it became an unmentionable. To mention what really rules now is to go against the institutions who are all in agreement of which classes were selected and favored, and which were to be disfavored. We down here know the bastards who lord over us and tell us what to think. The scientists and technocrats hate us more than any capitalist ever did, and the capitalists long ago made an alliance with those people, because the leading capitalists always saw themselves as intellectuals rather than mere proprietors. They weren't stupid men to be cajoled by the experts, and much of this expert opinion was established by that alliance, with the oligarchs invested heavily in education and the smart making their natural alliance. You can't mention basic shit and to tell us that history never moved, convoluted lies and more lies are told to deny the existence of anything new. It's why you get this bizarre notion that capitalists still wear top hats and 1913 didn't happen.

>>473597
> How do you apply Marxist theory?
It’s called being a materialist retard. As long as you stick to materialism whether it be scientific, historical, or in the philosophical sense; you are developing Marxism even if you aren’t politically or economically a Marxist

Lots of leftist today think that you can some how magically detatch the material reality of what capitalism is (private ownership of production in a market economy based on wage labor) from the society we have today, or, that some how we have "progressed" beyond capitalism, but, that's all a bunch of bullshit because things are exactly as they were at the turn of the industrial revolution, fundamentally. Of course marx's theory still applies because we still have private control of the productive forces of our society based on profits.

>>473771
1. This is a hack-ass reading of the civil war. I'm not even saying Marx's reading was necessarily perfect, but the Marxist takes on it I've seen are usually better than your "um actually, corporate government" kneejerk contrarian take. Also, the north didn't even initiate it - the south opted to secede following John Brown and some contentious tariffs, and then fired at and laid siege upon northern troops for not leaving a place they had already been stationed before the secession.

2. If anything, there were more classes circa Marx - agriculture has largely been converted to a system of capitalists, laborers, and middle-managers, so the old-fashioned agrarian peasant is less common now. Kings and queens, who once outranked merchants and capitalists, are largely gone. Marx lived in a time when these old, feudal classes coexisted much more with the then-emerging capitalist classes. These things have changed.

Production, overall, has changed - but not to the effect that it's created new classes. Rather, more of production has shifted to factories, technology has increased crop yields and the rural population has decreased. More of the population has been integrated into the proletariat, and this process has been exported globally, and now it progresses almost entirely unopposed.

>>473789
John Brown was executed and seen as an anarchist railing hopelessly against the system. You have a really poor understanding of what led to the war.
The status quo was slavery - that was understood by all sides going in. The North had everything it needed to end the arrangement legally, so the South turned to war pre-emptively.
When you replace history with pure narratives, you are always rewriting it to conform to the Grand Theory, and this is the source of historical misreadings going back to the French Revolution. If you believed in the narrative of a inchoate blob of "revolution", you did not understand the French Revolution. It's because of that, that the purpose of the American Rebellion is eliminated in history, and instead it's replaced with a bland moral tale of Bad Guys who can only clamor for crass position on all sides.
All part of this Germanic retelling of history where nothing changes until thought leaders declare that the world moved. It's insane.

And this is why it became impossible to speak of history. Marxism leads to fascism and Ingsoc - it's the inexorable trend if it's assumptions about human nature and political thought are taken as absolutes. That would be a bad interpretation of Marxism, except that Marxism never has any solution. It's locked into its method of critique which destroys anything inimical to it, and doesn't allow philosophy to escape this Hegeloid mysticism. You're supposed to get that you would use this method for its purpose, and reality abides historical understandings that preceded Marx, but when it became the total system, it became a death cult like so much else, and this was intended.
There basically wasn't a version of history for us, for anyone not given over to the aristocratic view of humanity. Doubt there can be, now.

Marxism in my view was self-refuting - the point was for the reader to see the absurdity of the German philosophy that was flipped on its head, to describe what this actually does and see past the narratives it creates.

>>473819
>Marxism leads to fascism
The sheer absurdity of this, is mind boggling. The Soviet Union was run by Marxists and it were instrumental in defeating fascism in the 20th century.

>>473786
>As long as you stick to materialism whether it be scientific, historical, or in the philosophical sense; you are developing Marxism even if you aren’t politically or economically a Marxist

Interesting thought. This idea occurred to me as well, but i never really managed to think it through all the way.

>>473829
Inner fascist rivalry
>>473830
Gobbly.gook

>>473834
conflating communism with fascism is neo-liberal ideological extremism.

>>474069
Nah, they're both flavors of capitalism

>>474069
Maybe conflating communism is, dare I say, perhaps a tad bit based

>>474069
Painting fascism in red is still fascism.

>>474069
No, it's common in leftcom theory
https://www.marxists.org/archive/ruhle/1939/ruhle01.htm

>>474074
>>474081
>>474082
cringe poster

>>474083
hm i didn't know there was overlap with leftcom-theory and neoliberal ideology.

>>473830
This is why “leftism” is such a stupid deviation. Even Marxist “critical” of leftist tendencies fall into this pit of ideology,aesthetics and general politics. ironically if Marx and Engels were alive today they would think leftists are annoying and lame while they would exchange emails about some random fucking conservative economist or something who happens to have a material grasp on economic

>>474099
Marx even thought the leftists of his time were lame and annoying.