ChicagoCommunist [none/use name]

Obfuscation of class, cultural hegemony, is necessary for capitalism to persist.

At the same time, false consciousness is not the primary thing keeping well-off workers in the imperial core and periphery from revolting. They may buy into whatever delusions to avoid feeling guilt for their position, but when it comes down to it they benefit from imperialism. If given a choice between their humanity and their privileged position, they’ll happily abandon their humanity.

For the rest of workers, developing class consciousness is important, but more important (or maybe part of the same process) is presenting an organized alternative to the bourgeois state. People may agree or disagree with whatever ideals, but they’ll support the entity materially benefiting them.

The government tried to take away our houses, failed to provide food and medicine and education, abandoned us during the increasingly devastating environmental disasters. But this party calling themselves the Workers Front came in with aid and services. I don’t know much about politics but they have my support.

The manufactured false consciousness for the lower working classes is well-funded and omnipresent, but it’s ethereal, smoke and mirrors. A video of prosperity repeated 24/7 is not equivalent to real food on a real table. If the bottom falls out on material flows, the illusion breaks (and the bourgeois state has to increasingly turn to violence to enforce its power).

Only a small percentage of people are and will ever be political and ideologically disciplined. Others will get thrust into political action by their material circumstances, and it’s the role of a party to help them organize and realize their power.

Based

But also didn’t most sites used to have an “over 13” check? Think I remember having to lie about that for gmail and Yahoo answers and the like

Lol I figure if I have them nearby I’m more likely to read them eventually. Which is true, but “eventually” is doing a lot of work.

I’ve started most of them fwiw, but only finished like 20%.

Nice to have on-hand to reference tho, especially as search engines continue to decline.

Ooh thanks for the share! I have his super imperialism but also haven’t read it yet. I’ll check these links out

Off the top of my head:

Eric Hobsbawm was a Marxist historian who wrote the Age of series. The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789 - 1848 isn’t quite pre-capitalist but might be of interest to you. I have yet to read it even though the series is on my shelf, so I can’t vouch for it.

Caliban and the Witch was already recommended and is a good read.

The Dawn of Everything isn’t strictly materialist but is a good read, mostly focusing on pre-history and non-european cultures. Also Debt by one of the same authors.

Gerald Horne is a prolific writer, known for The Counter-Revolution of 1776. Looks like most of his work is also early capitalism forward, but what I’ve read and heard from him is good.

The Bourgeois Revolution in France 1789-1815 is a good class analysis, pretty interesting.

Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent might also partially fit in the timeframe you’re looking for.

I’d be very interested in anything 0 -1500 AD because it looks like my library is lacking there.

When I heard about gmg years ago I blew it off as probably just a boring gimmick, but after 84 posts you’ve finally changed my mind.

So many of them go from milquetoast drivel to legitimately funny simply by removing one of the most boring main characters ever designed.

The bleed a stone method is more successful as a primary strategy in my experience. guess I’ll die is a great backup strategy though, right behind the adventure time gambit.

undermined their imperative power.

Maybe this is me being a vulgar materialist but on a larger scale I think ethical considerations are mostly normative and derived from power relations, and superstructural. There’s a strong tension to define right and wrong around whatever material/class interests are at play.

It’s good that there’s people thinking about ethics and trying to hash out detailed and coherent models and whatnot, but I think for most if not all people ethics is gonna be very vibey and dynamic, maybe instinctive or intuitive.

Which meshes, I think, with your final statement. Actually-existing ethics isn’t particularly scientific nor mathematical. Imo it’s constantly being produced between people at every level of relationship, and philosophical models are tools that help us communicate and hone in on ethical concepts, perhaps identify contradictions and power dynamics.

I don’t think any theoretical model is gonna be able to perfectly describe the complexities of human ethics, let alone prescribe “good” actions in broad strokes. But any of them might be useful lenses to judge a situation by.

Utilitarianism is useful (ha) in situations like the prisoner’s dilemma, where a selfish action results in less overall benefit than a non-selfish action, despite potentially resulting in more personal benefit. Most of us won’t face the exact prisoner’s dilemma, but there’s frequently decisions to be made with a similar structure:

Some task has to be done, neither I nor my roommate want to do it. But I know it’s harder for my roommate to do (for whatever reason) so the utilitarian action would be to do it myself because that results in less misery than if my roommate did it.

I have a pizza. Theoretically I could eat the whole pizza, but the second and third slices aren’t nearly as enjoyable as the first. So sharing the pizza with other people maximizes overall utility at the cost of marginal personal utility.

I gain omnipotence and decide to construct a universe where one person is tortured for all eternity to avoid a billion trillion gazillion people from ever getting an eyelash stuck in their eyes. This maximizes utility because a billion trillion gazillion times negative 0.01 utils outweighs 1 times negative 1000 utils.

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