• emizeko [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    32·
    7 months ago

    aimixin on left unity

    “Left unity” is pointless. If you have a total of 5 leftists in your country, it doesn’t matter if they all unify, they’re still powerless. People seem to have this delusion that if only Marxists and anarchists stopped fighting, they could come together in countries like the US and take power, but in reality, this is more likely to be the result.

    It’s also completely backwards. No revolution has been carried out by only class conscious communists. Communists have to learn how to appeal to the masses, and the masses then have to support it. This is the problem, the highly class conscious communists will always be in small numbers, and will never have the numbers on their own, even if they all unify together.

    Historically, the socialists and communists that come to power are rarely even the result of “unity”, but it’s always one specific section overtakes everyone else by storm. That’s because some organization figures out a way to rally the masses, and once you get the masses on your side, all other organizations get in line or get destroyed.

    The problem is not lack of left unity, but lack of any organizations that have figured out a way to rally the masses. Nobody has figured out how to overcome all the anti-communist brainwashing and to have a message that appeals. It’s only been successful in colonized countries but not in the colonizer countries.

    People who act like there’s some simple solution that we’re just all too stupid to see, like, “if we just all stopped fighting we’d win the revolution!” are not appreciating just how difficult the problem is. The reason communists have not succeeded in colonizer countries is not because they’re all missing something “so simple”, but because the problem is fucking hard, and they have a mountain to climb.

  • ForgetPrimacy@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
    13·
    7 months ago

    Pretty unrelated question:

    I read Brave New World recently and it seemed pretty clearly anti-capitalist to me but… The reputation I remember for it, when growing up in a good christian home with my ears faithfully stopped up to “inconvenient” facts, was that Brave New World is all about the “Evils” of Communism.

    My read showed it to be absolutely anti-authoritarian (usually for terrible reasons) but one of the negative attributes of the book’s strawman society was that society’s obsession with new and complicated sports/games/products. Those products were shown to exist for one or both of two reasons: because they were hedonistic pleasures that kept people from thinking critically (okay) or because those things were needlessly expensive requiring many prole work-hours to produce. It was considered “patriotic” to consume those things not because those things were good but because the production of those useless things required the proles to work.

    Is my new understanding of the themes inaccurate? Or is it my childhood understanding of themes that are incorrect, colored as they are by the ever-oblivious critical “thinking” of the capitalists I was raised by?

    • ReadFanon [any, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
      7·
      7 months ago

      It’s been a long time since I read BNW but I think you’ve got it.

      Huxley was definitely more anti-capitalist than genuinely socialist in a Marxist sense, although I wouldn’t put it past him to be some sort of DemSoc or a fabianist or a utopianist.

      I think that a more apt way of putting it would be to say that Huxley was, at least in BNW, anti-industrialisation more than anything in particular.

      (Spoiler warnings ahead for a book that’s a century old, I guess?)

      With regards to birth, people became divorced from the natural process of gestation and various chemical additives were applied to the fetus, along with scientific-style conditioning, to create the necessary “grades” of humans to meet the needs of society, much like how produce is grown under different conditions for different purposes and graded according to different categories.

      Even the dominant society’s experience of nature and leisure is a sort of walled-garden that is simulacrum rather than “authentic” wilderness, whatever that is exactly.

      The lowest class being subjected to conditioning so they abhored nature is a good example of how Huxley perceived industrial society to go so far as to “pervert” nature and natural inclinations to the point of them being in total opposition to human nature.

      The application of orgies and drugs is all very much a scientific endeavour to maintain stability and (re)direct natural urges in people.

      Obviously there’s the sort of Walden-esque or anprim urge within BNW about the savage reservation and Huxley’s concern that, ultimately, humans would create a society so synthetic and curated that it would be downright intolerable - both for a “natural” human to exist within and for the manufactured man with their relationship to their natural instincts or whatever.

      (Of course I’m talking in broad brushstrokes and I’m pretty skeptical about claims of authenticity and what is “natural” and all of that stuff.)

      Obviously there’s the characters names - Bernard Marx and Lenina etc. - and these are (hamfisted) references that I think are more than pastiche but that they are Huxley warning about what he thought about the modernist projects of Marx and Lenin by “artificially” crafting a society to “produce” man according to scientific ideals with the application of scientific methods and research.

      Of course, there’s Fordism which is pretty obvious in what it represents too. (I guess “Taylorism” was already taken and even that must have seemed too hamfisted for even Huxley lol.)

      I feel like Huxley was pretty close to the mark with a corporatist, gentle style of fascism that we could expect to see within the secure borders of a soon-to-be nation.

      I think it’s a decent story and it has a much better message than Orwell’s. Huxley’s letter to Orwell congratulating him on plagiarising completing 1984 while basically softly gloating that he was right and Orwell was wrong is worth a read. Although I think Huxley was both right and wrong - his is the better take but there’s absolutely no reason why both predictions couldn’t coexist in an alternating way or a contemporaneous way (e.g. a boot stamping on a human face in the internal colonies or the dispossessed groups while the privileged get their Soma etc. or where you get your Soma and consumerism but the moment you step out of line you get the boot stamping your face).

      But underneath BNW is this idealistic notion of when humans were in their “right” place that I think is pretty naive, much like chuds who glamorise the 1950s or the Roman Empire or whatever - there’s this ahistorical, nostalgia-clouded view of when things were great and that gets coupled with a whole lot of underlying essentialist assumptions. I personally do not buy it. I think that Huxley is a good example of how a lack of genuinely materialist analysis often lead people to really bizarre anprim and similar sorts of conclusions, although that’s not to say that he didn’t have a vulgar sort of materialist approach to how he understood the direction that society was heading in.

      I can’t really remember the role of new consumer goods in relation to how they soaked up work-hours, I just remember them as fashion trends that need to be adhered to in order to be a “functioning” and accepted member of society.