The genocide in Gaza.

That would sound amazing

So What’cha Want by the Beastie Boys

*more than

Right I was just joking. I’ve seen a lot of cases of this, not as pronounced as “husband loses his shit over wife’s vote” but def the situation where two young people fall in love, have kids, and then the guy becomes very conservative whereas the woman is like normal-conservative where maybe she doesn’t have all the right “takes” but she has a shred of common sense and maybe even decency to realize that women bleeding out in ERs due to complications from a miscarriage is not just cruel and pointless but unsustainable if certain theories of historical development are to be trusted.

you get into these things when you’re younger.

What, chauvanistic conservativism?

Anarchist socialist antifa liberal democrats have infiltrated MAGA, die mad about it

He’s a fucking Vanderbilt, he’ll be fine

Putin seems to make implicit threats every time he opens his mouth, and I’m sure Musk’s “I’m a very dangerous crazy loose cannon billionaire” that is such a huge part of his public image, even – maybe especially – with heads of state, went over extremely well with an actually very dangerous guy who tames loose cannon billionaires as a part of his actually very dangerous job.

This is garbage why should I care about what some nerd with a sub stack thinks about other academics? Intellectuals suck, Marxist intellectuals are no exception. So in the wake of MacCarthyism, at the dawn of Neoliberalism, intellectuals in universities were being pressured to gravitate away from Marx. No shit. Does this mean they were correct to do so? Well the death of the militant labor movement around the same time would give us some indication.

Why would you care so much to try and ensure that people don’t read very good books that you likely havent read? Seems like someone with an axe to grind. But let me assure anyone who is reading this, Marxist Intellectuals are as big a pain I’m the ass, and kind of necessary, as they are in any other org. The problem isn’t with the intellectuals though, it’s that there’s not enough regular working people who read and understand revolutionary theory to push back against them and their tendencies toward splits and polemics and laziness.

This is the problem with not reading Marxism though, the basis of the argument is “all these smart people stopped studying Marx” and takes it for granted that it is because the source material was somehow incorrect. And maybe some of it was, there’s no shortage of that. But that explanation completely ignores structural and social pressures that would have been a clearer and more direct explanation than, “all at once all these smart nerds left Marxism, so they must have been right to do so.” This is not what causes a mass exodus. What causes someone to leave a field of study for another one is the threat that their livelihood will be taken away.

Its so funny I wonder if this would have worked on someone who was new to Marxism. Homie I’m so far gone, if you think this post might be the reason someone would give up on reading Marx that person would have to be already unfamiliar. Actually engaging with other Marxists will do more to run you out of Marxism than this goofy ass nerd ass substack

I did neither of those things, literally

Wow 70 years of history is so flat, it just folds right up in your pocket like that, stunning. Its possible you’ve left a few details out

So no, no one understands it.

What was the last nail, exactly? I don’t see how swapping out neo-liberal drivel with “scientific Marxist drivel” would be any improvement

Does anybody understand what this meme is trying to say? I feel like its pretty obvious

Cuz that’s what this meme is trying to abandon - science

As long as you don’t mind me doing some lollygaggin

We all have our part to play in making the world an amusing place, dagnabbit

Normalize tactical use of “dingdong”

Excuse me? Can you give me more details about what you are trying to say?

I love this so much.

I didn’t really have the time or energy to go into the supporting logic, for as you’ve just demonstrated its a very involved argument that involves a lot of oft ignored history of the period after the crushing defeat of the German working class uprising (1923, '24) but before the Nazis took power in the wake of the Reichstag fire ('33, '34). Which honestly I’m not great on anyway, I appreciate your insight, slight factual correction that just makes the point even more urgently, and any book recommendations!

So while we are providing clarification and context to the uninitiated, I dug out Trotsky’s definition of fascism from 1932 since we are being so adamant about properly defining it:

At the moment that the “normal” police and military resources of the bourgeois dictatorship, together with their parliamentary screens, no longer suffice to hold society in a state of equilibrium – the turn of the fascist regime arrives. Through the fascist agency, capitalism sets in motion the masses of the crazed petty bourgeoisie [the small business owners basically MAGAs], and bands of the declassed and demoralized lumpenproletariat [working poor who are so exploited and disillusioned they defy their own class interests]; all the countless human beings whom finance capital itself has brought to desperation and frenzy. […] And the fascist agency, by utilizing the petty bourgeoisie as a battering ram, by overwhelming all obstacles in its path, does a thorough job. […] When a state turns fascist, it doesn’t only mean that the forms and methods of government are changed […] but it means, primarily and above all, that the workers’ organizations are annihilated; that the proletariat is reduced to an amorphous state; and that a system of administration is created which penetrates deeply into the masses and which serves to frustrate the independent crystallization of the proletariat.

In my opinion, wrt building coalition between liberals and communists, there tends to be a real failure by all parties, Marxist communists and liberals alike, to orient the alienated individual within the class or ideological milieu. Liberals can really only see the alienated individual; whereas commies, who claim to be materialists, can view the class/ideological superstructure, or sometimes reluctantly the individual, but almost never both at the same time. Mfs never read/don’t understand Theses on Feuerbach and it shows.

Which is to say liberalism and communism can’t really be allies, but individual liberals, who we might call progressives, more concerned with rights and human emancipation than preserving private property, can be won over to the demands of class struggle, especially as the conditions of struggle introduce sharp contradictions into their lives and the lives of the people around them. At this point the demands of their class outweigh the explanations furnished by their ideology and alliances can be forged between members of the fractured liberal or social democratic workers, and the communist/socialists who (hopefully) have prepared the field of struggle for the intensifying conflict.

Tldr: noone has a monopoly on being insufferable and maybe we could try not demonizing each other for like 15 seconds and see each other as rational people doing our best, reacting to rapidly changing conditions, that will result in pretty serious lose/lose final consequences for libs and commies alike if we can’t resist the actual fascists together.

But now I’ve been led away from the topic of the post article, proving that we are doomed to become what we most strongly condemn.