Welcome again to everybody. Make yourselves at home. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is the weekly discussion thread!
P.S. Update on those stability improvements/enhancements I mentioned in my previous weekly thread: they’re finished. The matrix server uptime is now better. Suspiciously better, some might say. Anyway, enjoy the reliability >:3
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☭ Theory discussion group on /c/theory@lemmygrad.ml
☭ Find theory on ProleWiki, marxists.org, Anna’s Archive
I’ve been thinking about verbosity/garroulessness for several months, since I tend to swing from that to being terse to the point it seems rude. With declining literacy and reading comprehension rates in Western societies, it would behoove us to find a middle ground, since attention spans are also in serious decline, for many varied reasons, not the least of which is physical exhaustion and mental/emotional overwhelm.
I’m struggling with how to find a way towards tercity and unintended rudeness. I need to also work on patience, since impatience fuels intentional rudeness.
Most people are capable of reading long texts as long as they are interested in them. Maybe we can focus on “stepping stones” in order to build this interest.
Informative memes and pamphlets can be used to agitate workers with false consciousness. If they become advanced workers, then they will be able to read The Capital or something.
At the end of the day though, most workers won’t reach advanced levels.
deadass attaching the esoteric meme you did to that post about capital as a true god (or basically the essay just restating WHY capitalism dictates US rather than us being able to delude ourselves that we control its whims was very effective to getting me to read.
i think here you’re also mostly making reference to memes which in effect are like slogans or other heuristics or rhetoric like that that still simplify things in ways that might be erroneous, but are at least effective in capturing people’s attentions and somewhat transmitting the ‘right’ idea (however vulgar or rudimentary it may be at the end compared to the actual full logic/theory)
but at least for me memes about history (not the mainstream whitewashed ones but actual documentation and broadcast of imperial crimes) attached to elementary observations/diamat were able to push me out of the simplistic idealist worldviews i had before (anarcho communist adjacent) and make me desire to Read theory. and i also think that it helped me be able to transmit otherwise very extremely out there ideas to friends who wouldn’t have received the idea of reading lenin or stalin or mao well (even if sometimes i worry at the start my own mistakes might have poisoned their understanding.) i think it’s a good starting point, especially with the most casual or simplistic events like the gazan genocide or even explaining how things like epstein’s island can be an unequivocal bipartisan horror (if usa centric discussion/peers)