A life time ago I lost a friend to Objectivist philosophy. Not wanting to lose said friend, I read The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged to try and figure out why he was acting like an asshole all of a sudden.
I took a couple points of psychic damage in the process, but at least I can stand my own when offering counter arguments against their edgy philosophies.
What are some other works that it would be handy to be knowledgeable of the next time a philosophical edge lord tries to quote me into a corner?
I’m looking to be more well informed in conversation.
I recommend doing the opposite. Read good texts and widely so that you can recognize the flaws in others’ rationales and school them when they try to pretend thst the Lexicon of one capitalist weirdo is somehow respectable. Some of this is philosophy but I would say that history and media criticism are even more important. Many arguments about “human nature” or how things should be vs. how they are are clouded by false histories and being unable to recognize manipulative thought processes.
Reading, say, Mein Kampf to learn about “the enemy” is of little value. “The enemy” didn’t become who they are because Hitler wrote a convincing book and you won’t argue them out of a position because you call them out when they quote it incorrectly or something. To understand Nazis you have to place them in their historical and political context. Who funded them? What was their class composition? Who opposed them and how? What were they a reaction to? And in modern times, who do they now appeal to? Are the mainstream cultural elements that overlap witg Naziism? Not just Trumpers, but mainstream liberals and “apoliticals”?
I would recommend starting with authors like David Graeber, Michael Parenti, Mike Davis, Michael Zinn, or Malcolm Harris for easier political-historical reads. To dive deeper you can read the texts they reference. And FAIR.org and the Citations Needes podcast for media criticism.
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.
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.
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
- George Orwell
- animal farm
- 1984
++++
- Leon Trotsky’s
- “The Permanent Revolution and Results and Prospects”.
And perhaps additionally:
- My life
- The Revolution Betrayed
- The Spanish Revolution, 1931–1939
- Stalin: An Appraisal of the Man and His Influence
++++
- Joseph Stalin
- “History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks)”
And perhaps additionally:
- Marxism and the national question
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
- Orwell was a Trotsky-fanboy
- Orwell was not warning about totalitarianism, he simply did not like Stalin because Stalinists attacked Trotskyists during the Spanish civil war that Orwell was fighting in and he got targeted.
- Orwell’s books have been used by the CIA as propaganda. The CIA somehow turned these books into bestsellers!?
- Trotsky is bad
- because he was in favor of permanent revolution, whatever that is.
- and because he was against ‘socialism in one country’ (which cannot be called national socialism as some fascist already took that name) that Stalinists were in favor of.
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.
- George Orwell
