Book reader community.
I've forced myself to read Mein Kampf, Atlas Shrugged, Imperialism by Lenin and various other political works from various philosophies. Do these count?
I've found many of them to be dry at best and abhorrent at worst (thanks Hitler).
None of them have changed my mind in drastic ways but have helped me understand the viewpoints of people I talk to.
Mein Kampf is notoriously just not a good text in any way, even when ignoring the abhorrent views. It's an unhinged shapeless rant. It's pretty funny to see the wikipedia page quoting translators comments about how poorly-written the original is. Of course, neo-Nazis insist that any faithful translation is a [communist/Jewish/pick one] trick to make them look bad.
Yeah, it just read like the angry rantings of a man left alone with hateful thoughts for too long. I can't speak to the quality of German in it and I'm certain some translations make his writings seem academic but they all just fall flat if you take a few hours to read up on economics and policy in Europe around the time he wrote the book.
Just the angry rants of some dude who feels like he isn't getting what he deserves. Some things never change. We just have podcasts for that now.
Kudos for reading Imperialism, I consider it one of the most important works for understanding the state of the world today. It can be a bit dry, but Lenin's writing really makes up for it.
I figured I had to give it a fair shake and use it as a companion to Kapital. While I found Marx's writing to be strongly focused on the philosophy I couldn't help but shake the feeling throughout Imperialism that Lenin was trying to sell the reader something.
Which makes sense to me as it was published in pamphlets and the likes leading into the revolution.
Though that unshakeable feeling never went away it did confirm a lot of my feelings and thoughts on globalisation, wealth consolidation and so on.
Lenin didn't get a faithful customer out of me but his writing certainly helped me understand some of my more authoritarian comrades. I don't have to agree with people completely to stand beside them.
In Imperialism, Lenin is specifically trying to outline the primary contradiction in the world as he saw it as it evolved from Marx's era, as an explanation for why Revolution hadn't yet occured in developed Capitalist countries as Marx had initially thought. Rather than the most developed countries, Imperialism causes revolution to happen in the Global South. This came with a whole host of new questions, but those aren't going to be answered in Imperialism. Instead, you'll find discussion of revolutionary strategy in The State and Revolution, as well as What is to be Done?
As for "authoritarianism," the standard Marxist stance can largely be found in Engels' On Authority, which is a very quick read. I would also recommend Blackshirts and Reds by Michael Parenti if you want to really understand Marxist movements and why the vast majority of Marxists support them, even if they aren't utopian wonderlands. You don't have to agree, but you'll have a much better understanding of your Marxist comrades that way.
Thank you, this is exactly the stuff I'm looking for.
Thanks!
How did you find Rand's take on relativism?
I'm quite young so I can only compare it to a few things. It felt to me to just be overwhelmingly "Fuck you, I got mine." Which is... Interesting to say the least when you build your empire on the back of the workers.
I’m curious about that book ever since reading “The Book Thief” (about 65% in). But it also feels odd and betrayal to read it for some reason.
To be completely honest I don't think Mein Kampf is worth the read and any other derivative that follow it are just worse takes like "The Turner Diaries".
Turns out ethno-fascists don't have anything to back them up except fear and hatred so their fiction tends to fall flat.
I skimmed Seej to see why neo-Nazis believed it was a game changer (skimmed, because it becomes very obvious very quickly that it's not worth the paper it was printed on. A food wrapper is more informative)
It doesn't explain much one already doesn't pick up from its followers, there's no real theoretical depth or rationale. It's really just a syncretic mess that quotes revolutionaries from various movements , including anarchist and communist revolutionaries, as inspiration rather than actually understanding them. If anything, it just conclusively confirns how hollow that subculture is. It's a characteristic of syncretic Franken-ideologies, they can have (for lack of the right word) populist appeal but won't accomplish their goals no matter how hard they push. It's like a kid trying to complete an exam by peeking at the other student's essays on each desk around them, copying a few random sentences from each, not understanding that these sentences don't mean much when taken away from their foundation. The few correct points (e.g. some remarks about police) are poorly reasoned and its 'lessons' can't be generalized to synthesize correct ideas in other contexts. It's ultimately glorifying a tactic history proved doesn't work back in the 1900s, and the rallying cry in the conclusion is basically "just do things".
By the way, the author has been charged with taking nude photos of a minor, which they vowed to get back from police, and for threatening an ex-girlfriend (underaged) and her boyfriend with a handgun, along with other charges of minor exploitation.
At one point, I read the Turner Diaries in a similar spirit and, while I normally encourage people to read challenging literature, this is the one book that makes me hesitate. It’s absolutely vile and it requires a very skeptical mindset to get any actual value out of it. But, having read it anyway, it did teach me a lot about the worldview of the modern white supremacist.
Firstly, let me just say that the book is god awful. Like, not in terms of its ideas but in terms of what makes a novel well written. The characters are all emotionless as planks of wood, the romance between the main character and his lover is so sterile it could only be written by a virgin who views women as property, the main character constantly fucks things up and the story bends to save him from the stakes that it had just established, etc. Not a lot of people dwell on that part because of everything else wrong with it, but I thought I’d point that out.
I also learned that the modern day cryptofascist has to be profoundly ignorant about just about everything. This book exists to explain a white supremacist’s worldview and it lays out a lot of takes about things like feminism, biology, law, etc. that are all as confident as they are flat out wrong. What I took from this is that the modern day white supremacist has no interest in actually learning anything about the things they hate or even understanding the world that they actually exist in. For whatever reason they choose it, they live for the hate and the hate becomes the single thing that defines everything in their world, no matter what actual facts say.
It’s also a very specific guide on how to conduct a guérilla war against the US government. Like, there are a lot of passages where the main character will describe things like his cell building a bomb by taking whole pages outlining step by step how the bomb was built, what components were used, how they obtained them without the government noticing, and how the bomb is intended to be utilized. The idea that this book is a work of fiction and not a very specific plan for terrorists is pretty flimsy. Mind you, the information is all half a century old and didn’t really work out when actual white supremacist terrorists tried to use it, so don’t go getting ideas that the info is useful. But, when you hear rumors about white supremacists doing things like plotting to attack the power grid or kidnap politicians or infiltrate city councils, understand that that is 100% something they talk about doing and absolutely would do given the right opportunity.
Lastly, and I think this was the biggest insight, cryptofascists believe that they are the antifascists. That sounds ridiculous, but I swear: this book talks at length about how the enemies of the white supremacists are literal fascists, calling them by that name, and declares the white supremacist terrorists freedom fighters against fascist tyranny, even as the book ends by talking about how Hitler was great and we should follow his example and describing the terrorists’ new society as being even more brutally fascistic than the society they just overthrew. It sounds crazy because it is, but if you remember conservatives calling mask mandates during covid fascism and state control, it doesn’t seem so hard to believe. You can’t get through to a cryptofascist by pointing out their hypocrisy because they already wear that hypocrisy like armor.
Won't be too much of a hate read like fountainhead, but most of Richard Dawkins work will have a large effect on your informity.
Broadly commenting on government grants and funding to 'moochers', and being anti public aid of any sort. I lost him back in the 90s , so I can't remember his exact arguments.
What did this friend say, I cant read a salacious lemmy post without precious details
There's bound to be numerous Rand critiques written throughout the 20th c. just do a web search. Otherwise The School of Life on YT does good philosophy primers. Don't forget Diogenes the cynic either
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And perhaps additionally:
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And perhaps additionally:
Hopefully you can then school everyone, including me, on Trotsky vs Stalin when talking about Orwell's famous books.
Hell yeah, thanks!
To the library!
And if you didn't know, the debate has been by commies and commie-symphathizers like me that
And to be honest. For the last point I do as well, just for the fact that I like seeing alternative cultures taking routes that might work better or have qualities that the other one doesn't, especially when the "we-all-living-in-the-one-culture" turns predictably fascist dictatorial.
And I've seen comments saying that Orwell was a racist and some other things, but I'll have to look that up again.
I think the more important pressing question is why Trotsky and Trotskyists have been so much vilified by Stalinists and why Orwell thought Trotsky was the man of freedom and liberation and not Stalin despite both being socialists.
Is there more than just Orwell hating Stalin on a personal level?
Is there more to it than just Trotsky wanting to fasttrack the road to communism that is argued by other communists that "socialism goes first and then communism will naturally happen somewhere in the far future as Marx intended and is not a goal to persue whereas socialism is" to paraphrase the leader of MAGA communism, to which I don't know if this shared by other communists. MAGA communists are a bit of a weird bunch, considered similar to Trotskyists by lemmygrad.
Also, not sure if MAGA communists still call themselves that considering what's been happening the past six months.