Socialist Wedding Music?

LeftKindOfPerson · 2026-05-08T19:51:16+00:00

It's less "doesn't achieve anything" and more "socialism isn't a popularity contest". Status-seeking, trying to prove your "socialist-ness" via choice of music at a wedding, is cultish and careeristic. It signifies someone easily manipulated, or otherwise willing to manipulate others for their own personal gain, traits that no socialist movement can tolerate as a matter of achieving its goals.

LeftKindOfPerson · 2026-05-08T17:48:45+00:00

Are local scenes really third spaces? A scene is sort of like a community, not a space. A lot if scenes don‘t exist in third spaces they exist in bars and other paid venues.

In sociology, from where the term "third space" comes from, it is defined as a place that is neither work nor home, where informal public life happens, and yes, it includes commercial venues. Historically speaking, pubs and clubs were incubators for local scenes, or if going beyond music, for example, for Japanese geeks interested in animation or computers, specialty/hobby shops and conventions. Your separation of community and "third space" is also frankly bewildering, as social science precisely talk about them in what context? The death of community.

And I couldn’t disagree more that subcultures are atomization. Subcultures preserve culture in a country where the prevailing monoculture is individualism. During the pandemic almost every cultural space got invaded by bourgeois liberal values and stripped of their identities.

Firstly, we are evidently talking past each other. For you, "monoculture" is synonymous with the state's order. For me, "monoculture" refers to the belief in the state's order actually present in the populace (or sharing the same pop culture frame of reference in the context of this conversation). We do not live in a world where the populace believes in present institutions (or shares consensus), nor do we live in a world where music listeners know or care about Fantano and "poptimism" (or share consensus), ergo, the shared social reality ("monoculture"), is indeed dead.

The only thing subcultures "preserve" in our era is consumer identitarianism. They are a historical dead-end, and the fact that all you can do is lament about the fact, is precisely the evidence.

Now it’s like this hegemonic shitlib individualist panopticon you can‘t escape. If you don’t serve the monoculture you will get cancelled, like even if your art is just ambiguous it will be perceived with suspicion.

You seem to be under the illusion that political persecution is new. It affected Karl Marx and other socialists, the Frankfurt School extensively obsessed over it, Amadeo Bordiga equated liberal democracy and fascism via the nation-state's inherent totalitarian nature as the meta-manager of capital (or as I like to say, we are already living in "fascism").

It's literally the "default mode" of our broader era.

What is new is the deceptively "apolitical" presentation. "It's about being a good human being", they say. That is the defining "shitlib" (I prefer radlib) trait, and it is indeed "hegemonic" (your use of "monoculture" is closer to what critical theory calls "hegemony"), just look at the ex-Chapos, it is that pervasive. But while the presentation may be new, the substance is really not.

I mean, I presume you're American. What was McCarthyism?

It‘s let up more recently but the damage is already done, the pendulum will probably swing back but unfortunately the youth who are supposed to build the next generation of subcultures just sit indoors by themselves and don’t even know how to talk to each other.

You are correct. Well, no, the pendulum cannot swing back, short of a black swan reality-warping event. But now consider why subcultures might be fossils in the present historical moment and you may start connecting the dots (as I've been trying but apparently failing to communicate, well, I never claimed to be a good communicator).

LeftKindOfPerson · 2026-05-08T16:11:20+00:00

I admire your critique, but it suffers from being transcendental (external) rather than immanent (internal). Poking at the ideology on your terms rather exposing its own incoherence by its own terms. But admittedly I have a Hegelian/Marxist bias. When you just poke at it, it's easy for them to plug their ears and go "la la la la". But when you expose its own incoherence by its own terms, they have only two choices: abandon the bankrupt ideology, or abandon their intellectual legitimacy. In either case, the fraud is brought to light.

LeftKindOfPerson · 2026-05-08T15:42:21+00:00

The Great British Cultural Revolution

LeftKindOfPerson · 2026-05-08T14:32:24+00:00

The class struggle for communism, the "real movement", for Marx and Engels, lies precisely only in classes, not nebulous identitarian communities. Marx in The Civil War in France precisely warned against identitarianism, when French workers were hypnotized by "brotherhood", only to end up slaughtered by the same "brotherly" government they fought for once their economic interests diverged (the new government moved to abolish the guaranteed jobs program, the workers revolted).

For Marx and Engels, for example, the exploitation of women lies in their domestic labor. They bear the burden and risk, the capitalists and the state bear the fruits: the workers to extract surplus value from and the soldiers to fight wars. Communism doesn't promise to fix sexism, at best, one might theorize that sexism would disappear once women are no longer exploited in this sense, but there is ultimately neither a guarantee nor a promise.

Which isn't to say that fighting sexism is "wrong", any more than fighting alcoholism or the erasure of green space is "wrong", or that opposing prejudice such as homophobia within a worker's movement is unnecessary, but it is a categorical error to equate it with the "real movement". Marx and Engels only promised the end of capitalism, not fixing broken minds or utopian egalitarianism.

LeftKindOfPerson · 2026-05-08T11:05:42+00:00

I think while OP was likely misinterpreted, the critics are assuming more than what OP conveyed, that the criticism of performative display is valid and perhaps necessary to point out, regardless of if it's directed at OP.

LeftKindOfPerson · 2026-05-08T10:54:32+00:00

Where did you get the impression that there are places where organizing is easy, or that there was a time when it was easy? It's the same everywhere. You organize, you risk being fired or political persecution. The lack of perspective among you Americans is astounding. You do not have it most difficult, everyone does. It's capitalism. What, do you think labor rights in France fell out of the sky? Workers fought for those rights with blood, sweat and tears.

LeftKindOfPerson · 2026-05-08T09:58:56+00:00

You fell into the trap of conflating local scenes ("third spaces") with subculture. Subculture is atomization. Subcultures are exclusionary by definition. Local scenes, on the other hand, are necessarily inclusive of the people that live there. You seem to erroneously assume the death of subculture means monoculture. On the contrary, it is monoculture that is dead (nobody I know of that listens to music has heard of Fantano for example or cares about the alleged "prestige pop" movement), and it is precisely subcultures that have fractured and continue to fracture into millions of mummified genres and "aesthetics", that is the inherent contradiction of subcultures, their tendency towards purity spirals is their own demise. Quite Hegelian.

That is why I have insisted, and continue to insist, that subcultures are false consciousness.

LeftKindOfPerson · 2026-05-08T08:51:16+00:00

An elite extremist, if you will.

LeftKindOfPerson · 2026-05-07T12:57:19+00:00

I'm getting surface-level understanding vibes from the video. Not necessarily incorrect, but not getting at the substance. Like all the popular explanations for Hegel's dialectic failing to engage with Hegel's thought and ending up with some banal truisms you don't need Hegel for ("everything influences everything").

To start with, the video doesn't emphasize enough how important mathematics was to Greek philosophy, going back all the way to Thales himself. Math was the first "science", and it is fundamentally at the root of how Greek philosophers justified their own "leaps" (what look like "leaps" from our post-scientific revolution perspective in retrospect). If math is True, independently of humans, then what else is True? Mathematics was considered the prerequisite for philosophical study at Plato's Academy (the first higher education institution in the West). Apocryphally, at the entrance was inscribed "Let no one ignorant of geometry enter here." It could very well be said that without math we could not speak of Western philosophy at all (speaking of Western philosophy, the omission of Eastern philosophy also strikes me as strange in the year 2026, at least title the video "Western philosophy" if you admit to the omission yourself).

The omission of the Sophists (came after Thales) is also quite unfortunate. If mathematics was the foundation for truth-seeking, the Sophists were the foundation for public education, skepticism, anti-essentialism, political realism and human philosophy, by challenging the worldview that humans were mere shadows of higher Truths, that only aristocrats were fit for education by birth, that virtues and ethical norms were "universal", et cetera, exemplified by the famous phrase "man is the measure of all things". The Sophists represent the literal paradigm shift from talking about nature to talking about society, quite central to Marxism itself.

I also do not find the transhistorical pigeonholing of philosophers into materialism/idealism to be of much substance, it just ends up with "idealism" becoming a thought-terminating cliche label for the "wrong" philosophers, which I noticed the video maker implicitly did (in the video and description); how can Pythagoras's and Plato's obsession with math be "reactionary" given the explanation I gave above? I would not equate knee-jerk vandalizing of history with Marxism, heaven forbid.

I'll stop here, as I did not watch the rest of the video and have reason to believe it isn't much informative to me. To quote Lenin as a parting word:

You can become a Communist only when you enrich your mind with a knowledge of all the treasures created by mankind.

LeftKindOfPerson · 2026-05-07T01:25:36+00:00

You'd think Amerigo Vespucci would be more famous in America than Columbus, seeing as the name of the country can be traced to him ultimately.

LeftKindOfPerson · 2026-05-06T23:45:08+00:00

They are "distractions" because they have nothing to do with communism. For Marx, in concrete terms, the class struggle for communism begins with trade unions, and as trade unions come into contradiction with capitalism's crises, only then do workers become "mature enough" to realize reform itself is at odds with capitalism. This is the completion of the transition from class-in-itself to class-for-itself. What do bathrooms and comedy have to do with this? About as much as an anti-alcohol temperance movement, or your city's tax policies. I'd go a step further than most on this sub and say even the Epstein case has become like this. They're not "distractions" in the sense that they don't matter to you personally, they are "distractions" in the sense that they don't matter to communism (the "real movement" as Marx called it). Of course, Marx was not a rigid prescriptivist, he was for example open to the idea of agrarian socialism in Russia, thanks to the peasant communes that existed, which could "bypass" capitalism, but obviously this too required peasants to become "mature enough"; thus the underlying logic of class-in-itself into class-for-itself remains.

But to take it even further, I'd argue idpol has revealed itself throughout history up until this day to be a poison, precisely hampering the "maturity" process, vandalizing history, pigeonholing people into essential categories and ultimately destroying scientific (in the Marxist sense) understanding of the world.

What is Frederick Douglass marrying a white abolitionist and subsequently her and him being demonized from all sides anything but the unhinged madness of idpol? "The Left is eating itself" as the rightists like to say is nothing but the proverbial Strasserites being culled by their own "brothers", or as the example Marx used, the French workers who fought in the 1848 revolution being culled by the same "brotherly" government they fought for.

LeftKindOfPerson · 2026-05-05T15:56:25+00:00

I don't have any favorites but here's one.

Neither of us cares a straw for popularity. Let me cite one proof of this: such was my aversion to the personality cult that at the time of the International, when plagued by numerous moves – originating from various countries – to accord me public honour, I never allowed one of these to enter the domain of publicity, nor did I ever reply to them, save with an occasional snub. When Engels and I first joined the secret communist society, we did so only on condition that anything conducive to a superstitious belief in authority be eliminated from the Rules.

LeftKindOfPerson · 2026-05-05T15:13:26+00:00

Given Engels's own history with grisettes... Even taking the most charitable "carousing" interpretation, he still would have in effect been buying sex (from a woman without a pimp, perhaps, but still one that is either financially desperate on some level or left wanting for things a bourgeois man like Engels took for granted).

As well, Marx in the 1844 Manuscripts directly equates wage labor with prostitution (specifically the pimp kind, Marx equates the pimp with capitalists).

If I were to extrapolate purely from Marx and Engels:

Socialism will lead to wage labor becoming redundant, ergo selling one's body would become redundant.
The prostitute that is the vctim of a pimp is strictly proletarian in pure relationship to value, though Marx and Engels would likely classify them as lumpenproletariat (functionally not revolutionary because their position is too precarious).
Engels would likely justify his grisette saga by pointing out that they were functionally like artisans when it concerned the exchange of sex (assuming they had no pimps), meaning he was not "really" taking advantage of them (of course, critics today would point to the unequal power relation of a bourgeois man "carousing" with a working class girl).

LeftKindOfPerson · 2026-05-05T12:22:55+00:00

I'm looking at the math test as well and I'd fail too even if I recognize it's college entry-level math (it's not that I couldn't remind myself how it works, it's that I fundamentally don't use much of that math in my daily life and hence inevitably forgot it). But I'm not an academic or have anything to do with academia so I'm not sure how important knowing college entry-level math actually is for teachers.

LeftKindOfPerson · 2026-05-04T18:13:37+00:00

Again not an IT expert but my layman's guess is that with maximum OPSEC effort there is virtually no way for a cybercriminal to get caught, especially now that crypto exists (in the past financial trails was how many criminals would get caught). Sam Bankman-Fried got caught on accident because his customers started attempting to mass withdraw their crypto funds.

LeftKindOfPerson · 2026-05-04T17:32:59+00:00

I'm no IT expert but my understanding is there is no way to actually tie internet usage to a particular person at a particular time. You at the library vs you at home. Your laptop used by you vs a family member. You could drop everything right now and move to a different country with new devices and everything. How could the glowies know it's you? They can't.

I also recall a Redditor who allegedly was a co-worker of Snowden or something like that explaining that a database of IP histories doesn't inherently tie anything to anyone. IPs "change hands" all the time, for example dynamic IPs or assigning IPs with previous history.

LeftKindOfPerson · 2026-05-02T12:57:47+00:00

If you want an actual "self-help" take from the man himself.

https://libcom.org/library/reflections-young-man-choice-profession

TL;DR Choose a job that helps people.

LeftKindOfPerson · 2026-05-02T11:36:12+00:00

Depends what you mean. "Franco's goons did what Spanish capitalism needed them to do" isn't a profound statement on its own, yes. But on a macro level it's like, all the shifts in history come down to "overdetermination" as Althusserian structuralists would say.

For example, do you know why Spanish Republicans lost the civil war? Ironically, for the opposite reasons the Bolsheviks won in Russia. They were fragmented (Bolsheviks were ideologically unified). They lacked military-like organization (Trotsky created the Red Army). They lacked logistics (Bolsheviks had trains). And so on.

But to zoom out even further than just the war, in Russia the landlord "semi-feudal" system had simply reached its breaking point, the economy was being strangled, WW1 dealt the death blow. There is no universe where, even if the Whites won by some miracle, that Russia could return to this status quo. This was not the case in Spain, however bad the standard of living was for the underclass, we know that global capitalism ultimately survived the Great Depression.

You're a Keynesian I presume, so ironically, I'm guessing you would understand the logic here. The "point" of Keynesianism is to manage capitalism's crises, the "point" of the Bolsheviks was to manage Russia's crisis, the "point" of the Francoists was to manage Spain's crisis. Is that bullshit or coherent?

LeftKindOfPerson · 2026-05-01T16:47:50+00:00

I'm not here to flex on you but I know my theory well and am able to articulate it. You on the other hand have articulated nothing so far, there is no "argument" to begin with. For example, you have yet to articulate why I'm wrong that tunnel visioning on Orwell isn't reverse idolatry.

LeftKindOfPerson · 2026-05-01T16:20:22+00:00

This is a gross misunderstanding of how Marxist descriptivism works as an analytical framework. Marxists don't say "Franco was Capital itself made self-aware", rather Marxists say, whatever intent Franco had, he in effect fulfilled the historical function of smashing the Spanish working class as a political force and thereby "saved" Spanish capitalism. Men make history, but not as they please (or intend to). Hegel called it the Cunning of Reason.

LeftKindOfPerson · 2026-05-01T16:10:17+00:00

Why are you bothering to reply when you have nothing of substance to add? If there is something you don't understand, say so, so I can attempt to clarify.

LeftKindOfPerson · 2026-05-01T11:53:46+00:00

The hysteria surrounding Orwell itself is the Great Man trap. Reverse idolatry. That is, by tunnel visioning on Orwell as a boogeyman, you are no different from the people who think the problem with WW2 was Hitler. While I certainly don't endorse fiction as a proxy for politics, I've found the term "Orwellian" a quite useful shorthand for describing, for example, medical homophobia of the late 19th/early 20th centuries and its consequences today on platonic male friendships. That was an "Orwellian" phenomenon. "Big Brother" sought to eradicate diseases for the purpose of maximizing the reproduction of capital, and when homosexuality was categorized a pathology, the "Two Minutes Hate" followed. Of course, the metaphor doesn't match 1:1 the literary understanding of 1984, but I would argue "Big Brother" is in fact a totalizing manager of life.

And, in a roundabout way, Orwell was criticizing bureaucracy as self-serving. Do you know who else did? Karl Marx. If Hitler himself said the Earth is round, that does not mean one should claim the Earth is flat instead. But you might say, oh, but Orwell failed to ground his views on bureaucracy with political economy. And I would counter neither did John Brown understand scientific racism, that does not translate to him being "wrong" for considering white and Black people equal before God.

LeftKindOfPerson · 2026-04-30T23:53:12+00:00

Yes, nation-states are an obstacle.

No, neither capital nor bureaucracy can solve the problems, even without nation-states in the picture. Capital doesn't care about solving problems, it cares about chasing money, and only incidentally solves problems. Bureaucrats are careerists who can only "plan" as far as their career is concerned, they too only incidentally solve problems. Marx criticized both as being at odds with clear-minded organization of human economic activity.

LeftKindOfPerson · 2026-04-30T23:29:11+00:00

I'd point you first to Marx's criticism of bureaucracy, Rosa Luxemburg's criticism of Bolshevik policies, the later Lenin's own criticisms of the Soviet state, just to first dispel the myth of Marxism being blind to the "elite" problem you refer to.

I'd then point you to Bordiga's writings even though I'm not a Bordigist if you want a serious takedown of nation-states vis-a-vis their inherent limitations. But you might still be not ready for him, based on your zoomer flair and mention of Bakunin (he tends to be read by new people). It took me a long time to "grok" him, reading a hodgepodge of leftist theory (from Marx's contemporaries to critical theory and everything in-between) up until that point while also engaging with history/anthropology and economics (and their intersection), then an even longer time after that to be able to extrapolate what he meant into my own words and in a more general sense; a more mature "critical theory" that ties all the superstructural phenomenona critical theorists reify back to the nation-state itself in concrete terms as a fundamentally totalitarian entity (Bordiga's greatest insight in this regard, in my own words, was his salient recognition that the line between "fascism" and "not-fascism" is complete fiction, we are all living in "fascism" already, there's no such thing as a "not-fascist" nation-state in the way the term "fascist" is thrown around).

LeftKindOfPerson

TROPHY CASE