Ideology

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Posted in menby because, honestly, that's where it's most needed. Question race. Question gender. Question your oppressors. Don't take the non-ideological 'default' the world hands you at face value. It is ideology. :zizek:

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It's finally happening, you hogs. Time to get your slop. :Hoggers:

A thousand thanks, my dearly beloved Karl, for your long, dear letter of yesterday. How I longed for news of you all during those days of anxiety and sorrow when my heart scarcely dared to hope any more, and how long, how very long, did my yearning breast remain unsatisfied. Every hour contained in itself an eternity of fear and worry. Your letters are the only gleams of light in my life just now. Dear Karl, pray let them shine for me more often and cheer me...

...I am happy beyond words, my dear Karl, that you are still keeping your spirits up and continuing to master your impatience and your longings. How I love you for this courage of yours. You are my husband, and I am still thankful for this! To remain calm and clear-headed in the midst of the hurly-burly and to be in harmony with the times!

• Letter from Jenny Marx to Karl Marx - March 24, 1846

Karl Marx was an imperfect man, not in the sense of a humble-brag, but in the manner of which our society still has critiques of him through a lens of traditional masculinity. He wasn't the best provider in an era where that was expected of him. He was impatient, very forward, frequently ill, always working on personal projects, and he was in constant feuds with his comrades. I am not here to sing his praises as the bastion of all good things, but I think it would be good to take stock of the character of the man who set the foundations of this movement in order that we might learn from him.

Marx was first and foremost a humanist. He loved humanity, and despite what unsourced conservative media will tell you, he cared very deeply about the human beings around him:

Marx was a humanist through and through. Nothing was more wonderful to him than man, and he expressed that feeling in a frequently repeated quotation from Hegel: "even the criminal thought of a malefactor has more grandeur and nobility than the wonders of heaven." His answers to the questionnaire made up for him by his daughter Laura reveal a great deal of the man: his idea of misery was submission; the vice he detested most was servility, and his favorite maxims were "nothing human is alien to me" and "one must doubt of everything."

• Erich Fromm: Marx's Concept of Man (1961)

This wasn't just an ideology for Marx, however. In my other posts I have brought up Marx's concept of community (Gemeinwesen), and there is evidence that he lived by his concept of community in his own life, from his political involvement to the way he kept his own household:

Of his political creed, and the tremendous issues that have resulted from it, I have nothing to say. Much indeed has already been said, and the last word is not spoken. It is of his home that I would speak--the man as I saw him in the midst of his family and friends, to whom I talked in the intimacies of every-day life during his last years, and to whom I owe many memories of kindly words and generous hospitality.

This was in the early 'eighties, when as a political refugee, he had found a home in England, and lived in Maitland Park Road; N.W. My introduction to him took place in his own drawing-room at a meeting of a Shakespeare Reading Club, called the 'Dogberry,' of which his youngest daughter Eleanor (Tussy to her friends) was the leading spirit. Amongst the members of this Club were Edward Rose, the dramatist, Mrs. Theodore Wright, whose acting in Ibsen's Ghosts will still be remembered, pretty Dollie Radford, the poet, Sir Henry Juta, Frederic Engels, and others to whom some measure of fame has come. I had been asked to read the juvenile part of Prince Arthur in King John, but the part was an exceedingly small one, and my attention was riveted less on my princely words than on the figure of our host, who sat at the end of the long double room--an extraordinarily forceful and dominating personality...

...These Shakespearean readings were supposed to take place once a fortnight at different members' houses, but as a matter of fact they were held more frequently at the Marx's than anywhere else. Karl Marx, in common with the rest of his family, was a devoted admirer of the poet and loved to listen to his plays. As he very rarely went out at night, the only place he could hear them was in his own house. He never read a part which, for the sake of the play, was perhaps quite as well, for he had a guttural voice and a decided German accent. He was interested in talking of Shakespeare's popularity in Germany and of how it had come about; Eleanor always maintained that the German dramatic ideal approximated much more closely to the English than the French, and waxed eloquent over Lessing and Wieland, who had both done so much to make Shakespeare known in their own country. And, indeed, the 'Swan of Avon' can hardly have had a more passionate devotee than Wieland, who wrote to one of his correspondents: 'I tremble with the deepest, holiest veneration when I only speak his name: I bow down to the earth and pray when I feel the presence of Shakespeare's spirit.'

• Marian Comyn: My Recollections of Karl Marx (1922)

He loved human art, and culture, and loved sharing his interests with like-minded people. He shared his love with others freely, and frequently had people in his own home. And it's obvious in the writings of Engels, Jenny, and Marx's children that he cared deeply for his family and friends. Most of all, his love for his wife seemed boundless, even until the end of his life:

His whole life long Marx not only loved his wife, he was in love with her. Before me is a love letter the passionate, youthful ardour of which would suggest it was written by an eighteen-year-old. Marx wrote it in 1856, after Jenny had borne him six children. Called to Trier by the death of his mother in 1863, he wrote from there saying he had made "daily pilgrimages to the old house of the Westphalens (in Roemerstrasse) that interests me more than the whole of Roman antiquity because it reminds me of my happy youth and once held my dearest treasure. Besides, I am asked daily on all sides about the former 'most beautiful girl in Trier' and 'Queen of the ball'. It is damned pleasing for a man to find his wife lives on in the imagination of a whole city as a delightful princess..."

• Eleanor Marx: Biographical Comments on Karl Marx (1897)

From everything I've read on Marx, I see him as an embodiment of the communal man through love of humanity. I can't think of any other reason a relatively privileged middle class person would throw away all of their wealth and political power in favor of principles, working on theory until the end of his life. We can see this, again, in Fromm's description of Marx's idea of man:

For Marx man is characterized by the "principle of movement," and it is significant that he quotes the great mystic Jacob Boehme in connection with this point. [36] The principle of movement must not be understood mechanically but as a drive, creative vitality, energy; human passion for Marx "is the essential power of man striving energetically for its object."

As for how to achieve this, it's hard to say. I don't think we can just git gud and push people into living better lives. There are so many of us managing neurodivergence, poverty, racism, and various other social ills that it's not reasonable to expect everyone to be the image of greatness. Not even Marx was great. What I do think, however, is that not all of us or even most of us are here for selfish aims. Revolutionary thought necessitates a kind of love, I believe. And in most of us it's a very vestigial uncultivated kind of love yearning to grow. But in the end I think we can turn it into community and through community into power.

I'm not sure if Marx would agree with me, but I'd like to end this with another Comyn quote straight from Marx's mouth:

"'It's waste of breath to tell people of their faults, in the hope that the telling will cure them," he muttered, in his guttural tones. "If they would only think--but that is just what they won't do. What is man's greatest asset, the most precious thing that is given him? Time. And see how it is wasted. Your own time --well, that does not matter. But other people's--mine-Himmel! what a responsibility." I looked as I felt--abject. His ferocity disappeared in a charming smile.

"Come, come, you shall be forgiven. Sit down, and I will tell you stories of the days when I was in Paris, and did not know French as well as I know it now..."

Invidious Link

Pretty much all the things that are said to be plaguing men, especially white men, can be explained through understanding the exploitative nature of capitalism and how men play a specific and important role in the maintenance of capitalism; a role that, for the vast majority of them, requires a traumatizing debasement of their sense of self and humanity. Men have to be the arbiters and vectors of patriarchal power. Patriarchy does not work without our support: we are the glue that keeps that machine together...but consider how glue is made.

Topically relevant with the recent violence we've been seeing this year in the news, Signifier does his usual schtick of speaking on topics of masculinity and toxic patriarchal norms, including a commentary on the intersectionality of whiteness and maleness (with white guests) and its relevance to the radicalization of spree shooters. Additionally, as usual, Signifier speaks to the ways that men can disconnect from cultural expectations in order to have happier and healthier lives.

Love y'all. :cat-trans:

Normally I don't interact with reddit but I saw this and found it interesting. This post is dripping with the alienation women feel from patriarchal norms and it feels like women in general have a bit of radical frustration brewing.

Easier that way. When men are together and no women are around you probably wouldn't believe the things that come out of the mouthes of your brother, father, lover, son, etc. I work with all women and am one of 5 guys, which 0 are on my shift with me. Anytime politics or religion or anything comes up like it does all day every day I just shut my mouth and agree with whatever they say or pretend to be aloof and like they are teaching me something. Much easier that way because being factually correct and being "right" are two totally different things and sorry ladies but we all know which one of those you strive to be.

For the pussy

To get laid

I DID IT ALL FOR THE NOOKIE

Sometimes it's just about getting laid

I keep reading "I will hide my support of parties that support various forms of misogyny until I get the thing I want from the people affected by that misogyny" and Jesus fuck you could consider maybe, just fucking maybe, if you have to be dishonest to get what you want maybe you're on the wrong damn side. Somehow being a lying selfish asshole has become virtue signaling to other men which is exactly how societies fall apart or go to civil war. It's not because you have a dick. It's because you're an asshole that you have to lie to get pussy.

Men don't, Republicans do.

You know why.

Because their opinions if expressed would make a vagina dry up faster than the Sahara Desert.

To get laid.

We're willing to listen to your delusional bs, inflated sense of self-importance and narcissism for the brief access to your clam.

There’s only one reason and it’s pretty obvious.

This sounds exclusive to people with conservative political views. In which case they are aware women won't like their actual opinions, so they decieve someone into sleeping with them.

Because they're trying to have sex, not debate how ridiculous the Democratic party has become.

To get laid. I won't tell women around I think immigrants can GTFO because women are sensitive and that's irrilevant for my goal.

Because our views on politics aren't that important, but some people think they are. Just because I think something today doesn't mean I'm willing to die for it or even that I'll have the same idea tomorrow.

We do it to get laid.

Because the competition is lying as well. Gotta keep up.

Cause they trying to get that punani

Is this a real question?? Like really??

Because he knows no woman would be willing to.sleep with him if they know how he really feels

I don't lie about anything. I am also not very successful with pursuing women. Anecdotal evidence but take it for what you will

Tiangong (Chinese: 天宮; pinyin: Tiāngōng; lit. 'Palace in the Sky'),[5][6] officially the Tiangong space station (Chinese: 天宫空间站), is a space station being constructed by China in low Earth orbit between 340 and 450 km (210 and 280 mi) above the surface. Being China's first long-term space station, it is the goal of the "Third Step" of the China Manned Space Program. Once completed, Tiangong will have a mass between 80 and 100 t (180,000 and 220,000 lb), roughly one-fifth the mass of the International Space Station and about the size of the decommissioned Russian Mir space station.

The construction of the station is based on the experience gained from its precursors, Tiangong-1 and Tiangong-2.[7][8][9] The first module, the Tianhe ("Harmony of the Heavens") core module, was launched on 29 April 2021,[5][6] followed by multiple crewed and uncrewed missions and two more modules to be launched in 2022.[7] Chinese leaders have expressed the hope that the research conducted on the station will improve researchers' ability to conduct science experiments in space, beyond the duration and capacity offered by China's existing space laboratories.[10]

China's incentive to build its own space station was amplified after NASA refused Chinese participation in the International Space Station in 2011,[63] although China, Russia and Europe mutually vowed intentions to maintain a cooperative and multilateral approach in space.[64] Cooperation in the field of crewed space flight between the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) and the Italian Space Agency (ASI) was examined in 2011 and participation in the development of China crewed space stations and cooperation with China in the fields such as visiting astronauts, and scientific research was discussed.[65]

An initial cooperative agreement with China National Space Administration and Italian Space Agency was subsequently signed in November 2011, covering areas of collaboration within space transportation, telecommunications, Earth observation, etc.[66] In 2019, an Italian experiment High Energy cosmic-Radiation Detection (HERD) was scheduled on board the Chinese station.[67] Tiangong also involved cooperation from France, Sweden, and Russia.[68]

On 22 February 2017, the CMSA and the Italian Space Agency (ASI) signed an agreement to cooperate on long-term human spaceflight activities.[69] The agreement holds importance due to Italy's leading position in the field of human spaceflight with regards to the creation and exploitation of the International Space Station (Node 2, Node 3, Columbus, Cupola, Leonardo, Raffaello, Donatello, PMM, etc.) and it signified Italy's increased anticipation in China's developing space station programme.[70] The European Space Agency (ESA) started human spaceflight training with CMSEO in 2017, with the ultimate goal of sending ESA astronauts to Tiangong.[71]

International experiments were selected by the CMSA and the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA) in a UN session in 2019. 42 applications were submitted and nine experiments were accepted.[72] Some of the experiments are a continuation to the ones on Tiangong-2 such as POLAR-2, an experiment of researching Gamma-ray burst polarimetry, proposed by Switzerland, Poland, Germany and China.[73] Tricia Larose from the University of Oslo of Norway develops a cancer research experiment for the station. The 31-days experiment will test to see if weightlessness has a positive effect in stopping cancer growth.[74] Tiangong is also expected to host experiments from Belgium, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Mexico, the Netherlands, Peru, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Spain.[73]

Regarding the participation of foreign astronauts, CMSA has repeatedly communicated their support for such proposals. During the press conference of the Shenzhou 12 mission, Zhou Jianping, the chief designer of China Manned Space Program explained that multiple countries had expressed their wish to participate. He told journalists that the future participation of foreign astronauts "will be guaranteed".[75] Ji Qiming, an assistant director at CMSEO told reporters that he believes "in the near future, after the completion of the Chinese space station, we will see Chinese and foreign astronauts fly and work together."[76]

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The post with the hexbear logo has a corrupted image so...do with this what you will.

I've been lurking and making accounts on Hexbear for a few years now. It's had its up and downs, struggle sessions and troll raids. But the most persistent issue I've seen in this place (and even across other parts of the fediverse at times) is the prevalence of social alienation that drives users into depression and doomerism.

I'm not saying I have the complete answer, but I think I found a good start in the works of other people . And strangely, it takes the form of the often mythicized concept of "Love". Western culture worships love, humanist liberalism is steeped in talk of love, religion professes to know the divine origin of love. But I think bell hooks and Erich Fromm give us a good starting point for talking about love in materialist terms. In All About Love, hooks writes:

I spent years searching for a meaningful definition of the word “love,” and was deeply relieved when I found one in psychiatrist M. Scott Peck’s classic self-help book The Road Less Traveled, first published in 1978. Echoing the work of Erich Fromm, he defines love as “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” Explaining further, he continues: “Love is as love does. Love is an act of will—namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.” Since the choice must be made to nurture growth, this definition counters the more widely accepted assumption that we love instinctually.

Through this definition, we can see the will to love as the vehicle through which human communities share resources and knowledge, and nurtured the growth of indigenous societies over the cource of the past 2 million years. Our success as a species is often attributed to the ruthlessness behind destructive invention, but I would counter that it's our tendency away from ruthlessness which allowed us to thrive.

Thus, we arrive at The Communism of Love by Richard Gilman-Opalsky, which takes a view of Communism that doesn't just look at the mechanics of economy, but of Communism as a way of life. The book takes a look at multiple socialist theory's of love, including hooks, and attempts to synthesize them.

To understand why a revolutionary love is necessary to defang social alienation in our societies, we can look to the classic Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire:

Whereas the violence of the oppressors prevents the oppressed from being fully human, the response of the latter to this violence is grounded in the desire to pursue the right to be human. As the oppressors dehumanize others and violate their rights, they themselves also become dehumanized. As the oppressed, fighting to be human, take away the oppressors’ power to dominate and suppress, they restore to the oppressors the humanity they had lost in the exercise of oppression.

In my view, this is why PatSoc, liberal anarchism, and conspiracy theory socialism fall flat. They are far too focused on the individual and the separation of individuals. Revolutionary love, in this case is a love of the poor, a love of the global south, a non-objectifying love of women, queer people, and racial minorities. Without the drive to listen to these people, respect their autonomy and their concerns, and aid in their liberation, we kneecap our own movement before it can even get out of the starting gate.

To adequately confront and combat racism and national chauvinism it is essential for socialists to understand that this is a phenomenon with deep material roots in the privileged life style of workers in the northern countries. It is not merely an ideological mistake they are making.

• Steve Bloom: Labor Aristocracy: Myth—or Reality?

But the Communism of Love goes even further. It suggests we can actually transform our surroundings and De-Alienate ourselves through revolutionary love. Quoting Alexandra Kollontai's Selected Writings:

“We are people living in the world of property relationships, a world of sharp class contradictions and of an individualistic morality. We still live and think under the heavy hand of an unavoidable loneliness of spirit. . . . People have perhaps never in any age felt spiritual loneliness as deeply and persistently as at the present time. People have probably never become so depressed and fallen so fully under the numbing influence of this loneliness.”

We could think about these lines for the next hundred pages, so I shall use some restraint and make only three related points here. Firstly, our capitalist societies have created the loneliest ways of being together. A century later, with our social-mediated relations, we are literally together alone. Our problem today is that we falsely believe that any form of togetherness counteracts loneliness, which is not even true in many marriages and families. Secondly, Kollontai writes of the problem of loneliness as a spiritual one. In those passages where Marx wrote about spirituality in The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, spirituality was for him a matter of alienation, being cut off from others, from one’s self. A theory of love helps us extend and deepen the analysis of alienation. Finally, and perhaps most sadly, from more contemporary perspectives of social psychology, critical theory, and cognitive science (all of which we shall consult in the next two chapters), Kollontai appears to be right about the basic condition, which has not improved and in some ways has gotten worse.

Kollontai connects the problem of loneliness not only to capitalism but to love. “We are unable to follow the simplest rule of love—that another person should be treated with great consideration.” This isolation of love’s simplest rule is not, of course, to specify it as the only rule of love.

Great consideration of another person is simply impossible when and where one considers only one’s self. Love demands not some passing consideration, not a small or fleeting consideration, but rather consideration with depth and duration, which recalls our discussions of Luxemburg, Weil, and Levinas. Loving consideration means that we have to work to know who the other is, what they would like, what they desire, and how to help them avoid or bear suffering if at all possible. But that great consideration is the simplest rule of love also means that there is no love without it. For Kollontai, this consideration belongs to communist morality and promotes communist forms of life.

We should appreciate here a bit more of the feminist content of Kollontai’s communism. She argues in “Sexual Relations and the Class Struggle” that women are placed into a kind of captivity in the marital/family/couple units of capitalist society, and that the implementation of property rights appears to go only to the husband over the wife, and not in the other direction. Kollontai advances an analysis of women and capitalism similar to that of Luxemburg. Kollontai observes: “Capitalism has placed a crushing burden on women’s shoulders: it has made her a wage-worker without having reduced her cares as housekeeper or mother.” Importantly, Kollontai’s feminist-communism makes the confrontation with sexist bourgeois morality into a necessity of women’s liberation. It is not lost on Kollontai that if men were to accept the notion of a more expansive (rather than shrinking) love, it is unlikely they would advocate an equal expansion for the love of their wives because doing so would loosen their grip over women as property. Unlike the theories of many communists, Kollontai’s communist theory of love is also always feminist. For Kollontai, any theory of communism as a form of life (which is always superior to the bankrupt notion of communism as a form of government) must be feminist if it is to be communist in any meaningful sense. Following Kollontai, we must ruthlessly criticize and ultimately reject any antifeminist communism as well as any anticommunist feminism, since both are contradictions in terms.

Part of what capitalists fear most in communism is its feminism.

Kollontai adds the following:

Even in capitalist society the needs of the workers were to some extent met by the provision of playgrounds, kindergartens, play groups, etc. . . . But bourgeois society was afraid of going too far towards meeting the interests of the working class, lest this contribute to the break-up of the family. For the capitalists are well aware that the old type of family, where the woman is a slave and where the husband is responsible for the well-being of his wife and children, constitutes the best weapon in the struggle to stifle the desire of the working class for freedom and to weaken the revolutionary spirit of the working man and working woman. . . . The father and mother are ready to agree to any terms when their children are hungry. Thus, keeping women in the captivity of domestic life and keeping the family unit functioning as an autonomous economy that sinks or floats on its own, not only operates on the basis of a shrinking love, but also shrinks the aspirations of the unit to its most immediate needs and economic concerns. People can scarcely think about radical social or political transformation when everyday concerns about the security of their basic existence colonize their consciousness. Provisions granted within capitalist society are partly meant to preserve the basic situation of privatized family life while preventing conditions from getting so miserable as to make revolution worth the risk.