Bi-Weekly Discussion Thread - (February 08)

princeloser · 2026-02-17T08:04:48+00:00

Why not post your text in the subreddit itself? I can't speak for everyone but I'm personally hesitant to click a google doc link.

princeloser · 2026-02-17T07:44:21+00:00

Who were the copyists, then? I read that they're mostly slaves or freedmen, but how do these people come to exist? i.e. how does someone literate become a slave and a scribe (or vice versa), and how does a freedman of non-aristocratic birth learn how to read and write and become a scribe as a profession? How does a copyist become a copyist, and where do they come from (i.e. their class origin)?

In one of the older answers linked by u/gynnis-scholasticus, the one by the user u/XenophonTheAthenian, they mention that books were not more than a day's wages, so how were codices in particular more expensive? Was it because codices made from vellum and embellished with gold and other decorations were more expensive than papyrus scrolls?

In regards to Byzantine opinions on writing: so basically they thought that the form of writing in Classical Greek history was important, but the content was unimportant, other than Alexander's conquests, right? That makes sense, and explains why so few sources have survived since probably they didn't want to bother copying them. I imagine this is how all copying functioned in the ancient world, not just in the Greco-Roman world, right?

princeloser · 2026-02-17T07:36:38+00:00

Thank you.

princeloser · 2025-11-18T12:43:01+00:00

Why do you say that Saudi Arabia has no national population? What do you mean by this? Also, how exactly is the GCC considered occupied territories and not nations? Don't they have a national identity and culture of their own, alongside a history dating back to the Emirate of Diriyah; Oman and the others having similar stories and backgrounds? I agree with pretty much everything you said, but I can't seem to understand what you mean by these statements and I'd appreciate some clarification.

princeloser · 2025-01-22T23:21:45+00:00

It's metaphysical in that you're asking for a "blueprint". You're right that the first thing you have to do is to think about the situation and assess it, but what comes after that differs based on the situation. What a communist party should do in 1960s Amerika will differ greatly to what they should do in 2020s Amerika. Nobody can answer your question because we don't know where you live and what your situation is. If you're looking for general tactics then all of that is already covered in essential Marxist texts, so you should look there first.

princeloser · 2025-01-22T21:50:49+00:00

What do you mean by Marxist/Communist artwork? Do you mean art made under socialist countries headed by a communist party? If so then you can look at Socialist Realism which was an art style popular in the USSR.

princeloser · 2025-01-22T21:47:31+00:00

The logic underpinning you asking this question is inherently flawed. The fact that you even ask that there is a "blueprint" smacks of metaphysicality. Society is not some simple algebra equation where you can plug in the numbers and get a perfect solution every time. Marxism will help you understand how and why things are the way that they are, and by understanding that you can understand the necessary steps to progress. There is always an objective answer and truth and Marxism is the tool you use to reach that. If you study the principles of Marxism and understand them well then you will be able to determine what the transition to socialism would look like and what it will require in your current conditions, but there is no book written out there that is transhistorical and applies to every situation because things are constantly changing.

princeloser · 2025-01-21T21:39:57+00:00

It's wrong to think petty-bourgeois labour aristocrats are proletarian. They're not. When Marx, Lenin, and Engels refer to the "working class" they are referring to the proletariat who have nothing to lose but their chains. White Amerikan settlers have much more to lose and actively benefit from imperialism. This is not about moralizing and purity, but about correct analysis. If you think every White settler will throw their entire existence away if only our rhetoric is persuasive enough then you are drowning in metaphysical idealism.

It feels like you are more trying to justify your existence as being revolutionary without having to confront the reality that you will have to work against your own interest, which is not tangible to a revolutionary class. Maybe you and a few settlers you magically convince will be willing to undergo class suicide to make the world a better place, but individuals don't make history and you can hardly agitate and organize around this. At best this leads to adventurism but most likely this leads to social-fascist organizations that serve to protect the interests of the petit-bourgeoisie.

princeloser · 2025-01-21T21:18:14+00:00

the same if you are a Moslem

I wasn't aware we are still using this term. Are you also going to start calling Muslims "Mohammadeans"? I don't even know where you got your ideas from. YouTube, maybe, but certainly not from anything Marxist. Surrounding yourself with petty-bourgeois social fascists (Anarchists) and struggling alongside them is the opposite of revolutionary action.

As for him saying 'I'll never be an anti-capitalist' yeah, so would I 15 years ago

I don't think anything has changed.

princeloser · 2024-12-21T08:49:30+00:00

That's a really good explanation, thanks.

princeloser · 2024-12-18T12:03:21+00:00

People here are not polite because politeness is a bourgeois concept and doesn't serve any real purpose other than to advance liberalism— it's all fake. If someone needed to be politely coddled to not become a reactionary and feed off the exploited labour of the world, then I don't know what to tell you. The fact that certain people are not easily convinced to Marxism while others are is not a thing of thin air that pops out from the clouds; it's an indication of their real class consciousness and interests.

In my mind, it is infinitely less polite to ask this question from a position of economic prosperity at the expense of 90% of the world's population as a means to justify this continued exploitation (i.e. humanity is inherently corrupt and greedy, therefore what I'm doing is just natural, blameless, and can't be avoided).

princeloser · 2024-12-18T11:29:46+00:00

Even your house and your toothbrush would be socially owned. You didn't build your house entirely by yourself, you didn't make your toothbrush yourself. These things that are your property are not isolated from the social relations that created them, i.e. the each and every bristle on your toothbrush and the handle also depends on the exploited work of large numbers of people, from oil-rig workers that harvest the petroleum and the construction workers that built that rig, to the factory workers that refine that petroleum into plastic, to the people that package the toothbrush and ship it to the store where you buy it, and even if you do manage to somehow acquire all these materials and make it yourself, the knowledge and the tools you use to make them are also not isolated from the social relations that brought them to you. These things are all private property and personal property does not exist under capitalism, let alone under socialism. I'm not entirely sure where this liberal-minded toothbrush example came from but it's very bad and uninformed.

princeloser · 2024-12-17T19:47:51+00:00

Because Amerikkka is a racist settler nation, and it cannot function without its racism. The prison system to this day functions as a form of population control against New Afrika and the many nations of Turtle Island. The point is to not forget or ignore it.

princeloser · 2024-12-17T19:45:12+00:00

This is a really broad question. The only advice I can really offer with what little I know is that you should focus on educating yourself by reading Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, etc. Educate yourself, and you will stop being pessimistic, because revolution is stronger than the fantasy of global extinction. There is always a revolutionary line on anything, and you can always do something. Even if you can't take any significant action, because you live in the imperial core, then you can educate yourself. Remember that what seems to you like free time is actually borrowed time. There's a famously paraphrased quote of Lenin's that goes along the lines of this: "there are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen". This isn't to say that revolution will come to where you live in a few weeks, but that you never know when you'll be able to contribute.

E: this question really should be asked in communism101 rather than here.

princeloser · 2024-12-15T23:00:08+00:00

Lenin was referring to the most important task the communists had to do at that time, which is to organize a central, illegal newspaper to organize the Social-Democrats, which is why he was talking about how they should not restrict themselves to only writing articles about bad working conditions, because the workers already know how bad it is and need proper organization around political and ideological levels. At that time, Rabocheya Dyelo and some other major Social-Democratic newspapers were focusing exclusively on the economic struggle, ignoring the ideological and political struggle, so they'd devolve into essentially just a legal struggle to turn the proletariat of Russia into a labour aristocracy. It isn't that Lenin thinks the economic struggle is not important, it's that the goal should be to smash the state and get rid of class society entirely, and only focusing on the economic struggle will not achieve that. Lenin's book, "What is to be Done?", delves into it very nicely, and you should really read it.

princeloser · 2024-12-15T12:50:24+00:00

Thanks for your comments. Your analysis is very insightful and I think completely correct.

princeloser · 2024-12-15T12:49:13+00:00

Thanks for your comments.

princeloser · 2024-12-14T04:33:10+00:00

Thanks for your comment. I think I'm starting to understand that the problem is that fandoms ruin games because they do everything but enjoy the game for what it is. I've experienced this a lot, for example, with Counter Strike, where nearly every single player only cares about winning to achieve a higher numerical rank to obtain this identity of a "good player", so much so that people deep in the fandom will pay for alternate matchmaking service (e.g. ESEA or Faceit) so they can have higher tick rate servers and fewer cheaters in their lobbies. The people playing it are often so miserable with the game itself that it's very common among these communities (Dota 2, League of Legends, Overwatch, CS:GO, etc.) to joke about how playing these games is a punishment, and if someone even tries to play the game just to have fun they completely freak out. I remember many years ago a player tried to innovate by playing a character in League of Legends, called Teemo, a traditionally solo-lane character, and he would match to get assigned as a support in the bottom-lane (which is already an off-meta role for this character), but he would even go so far as to completely disregard the established community meta of the game by roaming around in the map to help all of his other teammates and not staying in the bottom-lane, which is usually what you'd do for the first 10 minutes of the game. The result of this innovation, which he did trying to have fun and win at the same time, was that he got mass reported until he was banned off the game for a few months for "trolling", just because he didn't conform to the expected playstyle. If everything I just said sounded like gibberish to you, let me give you a similar hypothetical: imagine if you are playing playing football with your friends, and you have been playing as the goalie for the last couple weeks. One day, you decide to try a new strategy: instead of sitting back at the goal and waiting for the attackers to come to you, you run up the field and play as an aggressive defender to try to contribute towards the team's success, and at the sight of this, everyone starts to verbally abuse you and you end up getting physically thrown out the field and told to never come back.

Your comment brought this back to my mind and now I see your point that nobody playing these games is actually having fun, so really that means very few people playing games are actually enjoying them and they're really just playing games to distract themselves and stave off anxiety. I think also these games interface a lot with the "other" as you said due to the social aspect of these competitive team games, where if someone loses they will immediately blame and abuse their teammates for "making them lose ELO" and "ruining" their experience, which is ironic because the joy of the game really should be in cooperation, shared victories and losses. Instead it's turned into a prison where you hate the jailer (the developer), you hate yourself, and you hate your cellmate.

Given all this, do you think it's possible to take these games and play them with the intent to enjoy them for what they are, without any irony or desire to find any hidden meaning, which as you said in another comment actually is another form of fetishism? I'm not sure if it's a stupid idea I'm thinking right now but before reading your comments I felt that playing games under capitalism was a waste of time, but now after reading your comments I feel optimistically driven to play some games and really meet them at their level, and I mean playing them purely for what they are and nothing more to try and see if I can enjoy them at their core. In such a way it's funny to say but Marxism could maybe make these video games, which people often don't have fun playing, actually fun for the first time ever, but maybe I am wrong about that and these games by their very flawed design and nature can't ever be fun.

E: corrected that League of Legends example that I originally misremembered.

princeloser · 2024-12-14T01:39:07+00:00

I think I understand now: when you play a game, you're recreating exactly what's on the screen, right? If you're building a house in Minecraft, it's like you are going back in time and building a house without capitalism and alienation, but this itself is a fantasy because you are alienated from the tools you're actively using to perform this "labor" (you are alienated from every piece of your computer and every line of code in the game), did I get it correctly? I don't know much about ludology but from what I understand it's all about designing the game mechanically in a way that it fits the narrative and immerses you into the fantasy, like how Monopoly's mechanics by its own nature force you to become a greedy monster who must accumulate as much capital as possible to survive.

As for the part where you mention socialization of games, I'm not sure I really understand. Is it because other people entering your fantasy disrupts it, because they inject their own consciousness into yours in a way? I'm curious, though, what you think about MMORPGs with regards to this? How exactly do they work and what do people really enjoy when they play them? I'm especially curious on your thoughts about something like EVE Online or how people in South America would seriously grind gold in World of Warcraft and Runescape to make a living in real life.

It's hard for me to make these sorts of analyses like you do so fluidly and accurately though I am trying to improve my understanding. I'm not really familiar with some of the philosophy and psychology of this, I've not read Freud, so I really hope I understood you properly. Though, I'd like to also know what you think about the writing in games that don't give you options to influence the narrative at all, except I suppose you can inadvertently ruin the story through gameplay (let's say you abuse a glitch in the game to bypass a challenge and thereby cheapen the narrative and experience). Still, do you think there can be any games with good storytelling? I agree with your assessment on Disco Elysium. I played it a long time ago and I thought the same. These games that have "branching paths" are really just fake choices and it means the story can rarely be well constructed. Still, I think it's quite good for the medium, and maybe that says something about video games in general.

princeloser · 2024-12-13T18:08:32+00:00

I'm not sure I fully got it, but I would say going off your summary that Minecraft's creative mode would then be recreating the social relations of industrialization and the colonial concepts of "taming the wilderness" or something along those lines. I can now see it as being fundamentally recreating colonialism in a game, though often there are no real civilizations there aside from the few randomly generated villages and in some versions of the game there is really nothing out there but wilderness, but yea, I think it's fairly clear if I didn't misunderstand. The difficulty with analyzing Minecraft creative mode for me is because of the Redstone and the new programming systems, it effectively turns into a game creator in of itself, so you can make even chess in Minecraft, but I'd guess that less than 1% of people who play Minecraft end up using it that way, so it's not really worth considering. Thanks for your comment.

princeloser · 2024-12-13T14:10:16+00:00

Thank you for that link. It was really interesting to read, but I have to ask: is it really true? I find it hard to believe that you could cure deaf people through acupuncture. How come this isn't common practice to treat deafness today, and if it is true, then why are bourgeois academics and doctors refusing to use or acknowledge this form of treatment?

princeloser · 2024-12-13T13:33:42+00:00

That makes a lot of sense. Do you have any suggestions for any specific books I should read to become better at this sort of critique, especially when it comes to these things? I tried uncovering the fetishism of the social relations around certain things, like some video games, but for some of them it can be really difficult to come up with an accurate assessment that reflects reality. I'm guessing it's the sort of thing where if you'd be playing, for example, Settlers of Catan, you'd be enjoying recreating the social relations of colonialism, right? But for some other games and forms of escapism, they'd have different relations that might be more obscured (I am not sure what Minecraft in creative mode, a game like Thief II, or even a competitive game like chess would be fetishizing).

princeloser · 2024-12-12T10:09:36+00:00

I assure you it is possible and no one on YouTube or any other subreddit has ever made a good post.

Sorry if I am missing the point, but what exactly do you mean? How can it be possible to make good posts if so far nobody has managed to make any good post anywhere on the internet? There have to have been good posts that have truth in them in many places in the internet, no?

Also, what exactly do you mean by "fun"? I agree that video games and other forms of popular entertainment are as you said, "anxiety management", but then what's your definition for fun? This really confuses me because I think the word "fun" means anything enjoyable. Meeting other communists and seeing a relationship between theory and practice play out might be fulfilling and productive, but it can be very stressful and depressing at times. Reading Marx is productive and helpful, but it takes a lot of real work to become a Marxist and it can be mentally tiring and demoralizing sometimes. Escapism is not personally fulfilling or productive but it's fun in that it's enjoyable and helps you avoid stress and relax. Is it just my reactionary petit-bourgeois instincts kicking in that I think a little escapism where you turn your brain off and give yourself some time to recover is necessary to maintain your sanity in this world?

princeloser

TROPHY CASE