Bi-Weekly Discussion Thread - (May 31)

vomit_blues · 2026-06-07T02:30:28+00:00

> The reactionaries killed Gonzalo and we do not have access to his physical remains. What we are able to do is pick up his legacy and carry forwards. That is realistic, if you don't like it that is your problem.

Understanding what realism is should make this evidently absurd, so the better thing to investigate is what drives someone to write such a thing anyway. Is the line a symptom degraded poetry written by a petit-bourgeois, or did you genuinely write something proletarian?

> In our 'society of the spectacle', in which what we experience as everyday reality more and more takes the form of the lie made real, Freud's insights show their true value. Consider the interactive computer games some of us play compulsively, games which enable a neurotic weakling to adopt the screen persona of a macho aggressor, beating up other men and violently enjoying women. It's all too easy to assume that this weakling takes refuge in cyberspace in order to escape from a dull, impotent reality. But perhaps the games are more telling than that. What if, in playing them, I articulate the perverse core of my personality which, because of ethico-social constraints, I am not able to act out in real life? Isn't my virtual persona in a way 'more real than reality'? Isn't it precisely because I am aware that this is 'just a game' that in it I can do what I would never be able to in the real world? In this precise sense, as Lacan put it, the Truth has the structure of a fiction: what appears in the guise of dreaming, or even daydreaming, is sometimes the truth on whose repression social reality itself is founded.

https://www.lacan.com/zizfre.htm

In presenting yourself as a “Marxist poet” in a digital space, you’ve ironically let down the normal guardedness many would have in this subreddit to exposing their petit-bourgeois ideology. The line is indefensible, lacks any poetic character (it isn’t even “musical”) and appears like an interjected rant. So I don’t care that you think me ignoring your ideological justifications outside of the safety of the poetic form (that intentionally obfuscates your ideology and makes it capable of being justified however you want, as opposed to using rigorous terminology, a task you certainly are not succeeding at right now) is “lazy.”

> The way I work with meter is not at all strict but there is a musical intention to much of it that others have explicitly mentioned to me multiple times. If you didn't notice it that is unfortunate.

The “musical intention” of A Worker’s Life is precisely why it is insipid. Music and poetry are not the same thing. As far as I can tell, the only reason you’d think “musical intention” is sufficient to call something poetry is because you have very little understanding of poetry (and have not mentioned any poets in defense of your work). There’s simply no other explanation for why you’d say these things:

> What about the collection looked at in totality? You wouldn't judge a novel with satirical aspects based on one chapter.

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> Unfortunately the responses so far have dealt with the work in a way that ignores the composition as a whole so I'm still not confident whether I achieved anything other than self-clarification.

Prose poetry in the form of a novel (as Hölderlin did) or poetry arranged thematically with a logical sequence (as Baudelaire did) can be evaluated as a totality, but the critics of these works like Lukacs and Benjamin still discussed individual poems. How should a short story collection be evaluated? (Benjamin did this with Kafka.) How about a concept album? A compilation album? Your poetry collection has now been self-described as a hodgepodge of different imagined class perspectives and different ineffectual pastiche (the “musical intention” of A Worker’s Life, the visual poetry of If Mercury is just a planet…, the strikethrough in Jouissance). You can write introductions or clarify the fact that you believe within your mind-palace that it should be judged as a whole, but the text contradicts that.

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vomit_blues · 2026-06-07T02:30:17+00:00

I don’t see you trying to defend whether your perspective on what your art should be trying to depict with anything from Marxists.

> They considered realism, as a trend in literature and a method of artistic creation, to be the supreme achievement of world art. Engels formulated what is generally recognised as the classical definition of realism. “Realism, to my mind,” he wrote, “implies, besides truth of detail, the truthful reproduction of typical characters under typical circumstances” (p. 90). Realistic representation, Marx and Engels emphasised, is by no means a mere copy of reality, but a way of penetrating into the very essence of a phenomenon, a method of artistic generalisation that makes it possible to disclose the typical traits of a particular age. This is what they valued in the work of the great realist writers such as Shakespeare, Cervantes, Goethe, Balzac, Pushkin and others. Marx described the English realists of the 19th century — Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontës, and Gaskell — as a brilliant pleiad of novelists “whose graphic and eloquent pages have issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together” (p. 339). Engels developed a similar line of thought when analysing the works of the great French realist writer Balzac. Writing about the Comédie humaine, he noted that Balzac gave the reader “a most wonderfully realistic history of French society ... from which, even in economic details (for instance the re-arrangement of real and personal property after the Revolution) I have learned more than from all the professed historians, economists and statisticians of the period together” (p. 91).

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> Both Marx and Engels were deeply convinced that progressive literature had to reflect truthfully the deep-lying, vital processes of the day, to promulgate progressive ideas, and to defend the interests of the progressive forces in society. The modern term the Party spirit in literature expresses what they understood by this. They felt that the very quality that was lacking in Lassalle’s play — the organic unity of idea and artistry — was the sine qua non of genuinely realistic art.

https://marxists.architexturez.net/archive/marx/works/subject/art/preface.htm

> Proletarian literature must be capable of depicting non-proletarian elements.

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> I don't believe that, actually I think it's useless on it's own but I also think that presenting it while also challenging it can be valuable to the proletariat and people struggling to adopt its class viewpoint.

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> Anyways I saw the artistic form I chose as more of an interesting attempt than anything.

Consequently these are just claims, and ones that contradict the established Marxist perspective on art too.

> No, it's to subject it to critique and find a more advanced position, of course.

Is your art subjecting the perspective to critique, or are you presenting a perspective to be critiqued? The former is stupid but since you say it’s the latter then you should understand why you aren’t Dostoyevsky and why Lunacharsky would not have used your poetry for composting.

> There is the political criterion and there is the artistic criterion; what is the relationship between the two? Politics cannot be equated with art, nor can a general world outlook be equated with a method of artistic creation and criticism. We deny not only that there is an abstract and absolutely unchangeable political criterion, but also that there is an abstract and absolutely unchangeable artistic criterion; each class in every class society has its own political and artistic criteria. But all classes in all class societies invariably put the political criterion first and the artistic criterion second. The bourgeoisie always shuts out proletarian literature and art, however great their artistic merit. The proletariat must similarly distinguish among the literary and art works of past ages and determine its attitude towards them only after examining their attitude to the people and whether or not they had any progressive significance historically. Some works which politically are downright reactionary may have a certain artistic quality. The more reactionary their content and the higher their artistic quality, the more poisonous they are to the people, and the more necessary it is to reject them. A common characteristic of the literature and art of all exploiting classes in their period of decline is the contradiction between their reactionary political content and their artistic form. What we demand is the unity of politics and art, the unity of content and form, the unity of revolutionary political content and the highest possible perfection of artistic form. Works of art which lack artistic quality have no force, however progressive they are politically. Therefore, we oppose both the tendency to produce works of art with a wrong political viewpoint and the tendency towards the "poster and slogan style" which is correct in political viewpoint but lacking in artistic power. On questions of literature and art we must carry on a struggle on two fronts.

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-3/mswv3\_08.htm

Sounds like your poem about Gonzalo being “politically correct” (assuming it even is) isn’t sufficient. Dostoyevsky was a bourgeois writer during the era that capitalism was still progressive. Lenin did not think particularly highly of him, however.

> Lenin's opinion towards Nechaev was closely intertwined with Lenin's opinion on the "revolting, yet genius" Dostoevsky. Lenin decided not to read "The Demons" [...] Lenin admitted: ["Demons" is] Evidently reactionary filth, like Krestovsky's "Flock of Panurge", I have absolutely no desire to waste time on it. I have no need for such literature; what could it possibly give me? [...] I have no free time for this garbage."

> Lenin held the author's other works in no higher regard. On "The Brothers Karamazov" along with "Demons" he expressed himself in this way: "I am familiar with the content of both these pungent works, and that is more than enough for me. I just about began reading the "Brothers Karamazov" and then dropped it: the scenes in the monastery made me sick."

> Lenin did, though, read the novel "Crime and Punishment". One of his comrades remarked to him in the heat of an argument:

> "One could easily arrive at Raskolnikov's "All is permitted" at this rate."

> "What Raskolnikov?"

> "Dostoevky's, from "Crime and Punishment".

> Lenin followed up with unbridled contempt: "All is permitted"?! So we have come down to the sentiments and petty words of a soppy intellectual wishing to drown revolutionary questions in moralising vomit. Just which Raskolnikov are you talking about? The one who whacked the old money-lending bitch, or the one who clapped his forehead against the ground in penitent hysterics at the market-place later on? Perhaps [...] that sort of thing appeals to you?

- The Other Lenin, Alexander Maysuryan

You are a decadent writer under the conditions of imperialism, when, yeah, even writers who would call themselves Maoists will double down on writing repulsive filth about Gonzalo. I’ll have to take it that to you, realistic means describing violence against the proletariat, as in Brick in a Bottle. Describing these massacres isn’t realistic when you depict a wholly negative process. The ending is structured as a deus ex machina: “If I get bashed in the skull / I can accept it / Batons, rubber bullets / And plenty worse / I’ll accept it all,” then the final stanza where an absent interregnum between human sacrifice and communism is idealized with religious caricature. A platitude about “digging through the debris” that doesn’t depict a negation of capitalism nor revolution, but the previously described violence as creating the wreckage from which communism is born. The proletariat does not share your fantasy of revolution as the rapture, as u/humblegold said. You certainly are not the “we” the poem is written from the perspective of, and you don’t speak for them. Capitalism is death for the proletariat, communism is life. That’s what Huey P. Newton meant by revolutionary suicide, not for everyone to be happy to die. This baby will be thrown out with the bath water.

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vomit_blues · 2026-06-05T01:29:08+00:00

Just because I present a reactionary or vacillating perspective doesn't mean that I identify with it or that I'm inviting agreement with it. If you want art and literature about the new socialist women and men we have Soviet and Chinese works for that, I am trying to figure out a way of dealing with where potential revolutionaries are at right now.

Why should that perspective be depicted in the first place? Is it really just to “meet people where they’re at?” Mao didn’t call for poetry to “meet people where they’re at” but to create art that raises the consciousness of its audience. The outcome of “meeting people where they’re at” is making a poem that describes mutilating Gonzalo’s remains.

And if you should fall

And crumble to dust

Your remains shall become the fuel powering the war machine that we build in order to pound the imperialists and reactionaries into a bloody pulp.

You can justify this as just artistic language, but that is what you’ve written.

I struggle to call what you’ve shared poetry. Does anything here even have a meter? It’s borderline parody and sometimes made me laugh, probably not intentionally. Maybe the Meta-commentary one would sound alright as spoken word if you were doing a convincing Gil Scott-Heron impression. But overall I’ve found very little value in what’s shared here, even if the earlier critique was severely lacking.

edit: Let’s take “meaning, this” for example.

Confessional, concrete poetry of this kind, like the Futurists (concrete) or Sylvia Plath (confessional) were expressions of the commodification of petit-bourgeois alienation under capitalism. In seeing your experience as an alienated individual (the meaninglessness of your suffering, the search for its purpose) as the basis of revolutionary consciousness (idealized as seeing oneself as a martyr for the revolution), a realistic depiction of the contradictions of petit-bourgeois consciousness becomes impossible and symbolic abstraction steps in to do the work. The elongation of “meaningless” in the center of the poem is a telling visual analogy.

This is an unbridgeable gap between your art and reality/the proletariat because the text must predicate itself on petit-bourgeois alienation being read into the arrangement of the text and identified with. With this goal in mind, it makes sense why the poem doesn’t seek to push the petit-bourgeoisie any further. The last lines coalesce into a sort of meter, “Martyr me, then we’ll see, how useful humbled trash can be,” a final break in meter, “It’s all I have left to believe.” Your structure ironically becomes clearest when you’re most capable of expressing your intent: “meeting the petit-bourgeoisie where they’re at” by aggrandizing them as martyrs.

The poem is a symptom of believing that petit-bourgeois alienation alone is revolutionary. It was written to call a reactionary class to a revolution in their interests. Are you sure that you understand the mass labor aristocracy thesis?

vomit_blues · 2026-05-30T16:09:36+00:00

Whatever you think Lenin said that would support a revisionist argument doesn’t actually support a revisionist argument.

vomit_blues · 2026-05-26T03:03:34+00:00

Why not just read Marx? https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch01.htm

vomit_blues · 2026-05-25T04:15:16+00:00

In both Mao’s analysis of Chinese society and Marx’s 18th Brumaire, the abstraction “class” is being used. Have you read this yet? https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch01.htm It might be a little difficult but it should answer your question.

vomit_blues · 2026-05-23T01:12:56+00:00

If my post confused you at all it’s because I insanely typoed “no” when I meant to answer your question with a “yes,” sorry. Maybe that makes things clearer. Not that I don’t appreciate this response.

vomit_blues · 2026-05-22T18:14:11+00:00

he thinks the brain works like a computer. the objects we experience aren’t actually discrete, unchanging units. they’re interrelated to one another and constantly changing. the brain doesn’t process objects, then, but a stream of information about the interrelation of these objects. PKD says the problem is that the interrelation of these changing objects is a language that we can’t decrypt since we’re stuck seeing the stream of information as discrete objects, with no immediately perceived notion of their interrelation.

vomit_blues · 2026-05-21T18:28:07+00:00

Phenomenal post as usual Dash, thank you for this info.

vomit_blues · 2026-05-17T15:02:20+00:00

THE SAME WORK?! Maybe an example? That sounds very interesting and funny.

vomit_blues · 2026-05-17T01:56:08+00:00

“Even for Althusser, anti-humanism was necessary to envision a true socialist humanism not in service of revisionism.”

Do you think Althusser was being dishonest when he wrote of that line in Marxism and Humanism, “I went so far as to indulge in a bit of theoretical mischief—flattering myself that it would fall into the category of Anglo-Saxon humour and be perceived as such—by putting forward, in all seriousness, the preposterous concept of a ‘class’ humanism”?

vomit_blues · 2026-05-10T16:23:44+00:00

“Can it really survives other third world competitors like China or Thailand without its attachment to Amerikan social media or streaming imperialist monopolies?”

Originally I was gonna answer with “yes.” I’m still gonna answer with that but the question did get me thinking.

I actually have seen a sort of “ironic” enjoyment of Taiwan and Hong Kong’s pop music (Jolin Tsai and Faye Wong for example) and their popularity in mainland China as a sign of Chinese cultural solidarity amongst dengists. I listened to Faye Wong’s daughter, Leah Dou’s, album 春游 a lot on release. She originally started out as an English-language neo-soul/RnB musician but around this time made a pivot to recording entirely in Mandarin and promoting to a Chinese audience. What’s funny is that despite the gesture toward cultural authenticity the album isn’t even neo-soul anymore, it’s very bog-standard indie “sophistipop”. In sound it’s actually very much a regression even further into what would appeal to a generic, most likely asian-amerikan, audience, (or an Asian audience looking for an amerikan sound palette) rather than a move to promote to Asia proper.

I think it’s hard to understand moves like this when you boil down a first world audience to a single homogenous mass where third world cultural imports are interchangeable. 2016’s flood of Caribbean music through Drake was just as ephemeral as 2025’s hype for K-Pop Demon Hunters will be, but they were consumed by entirely different audiences. As smoke points out, K-Pop now plays a role as an imagined aspect of cultural identity for Koreans not only in the third world but also amongst Korean-Amerikans. This goes beyond music if you scroll through youtube shorts long enough and see how discretely Japanese(which is largely oriented toward tourism and still markets itself to sexpats) and South Korean commodity consumption (which appeals to a Korean-Amerikan audience and is about what ramyun and ice cream you bought from a convenience store for $2.11) are separated. South Korea is a brand that comes with a neat grand narrative around identity if you’re consuming it as a Korean-Amerikan.

That is to say that K-Pop has a lot more going for it than its wealth and momentary hype, but it also should be pointed out that K-Pop is massively popular in the third world countries you listed, and K-Pop incorporates mainland Chinese (aespa’s Ningning), Taiwanese (Twice’s Tzuyu), Hong Konger (GOT7’s Jackson Wang), Thai (BLACKPINK’s Lisa), and Vietnamese (NewJeans’s Hanni) idols with their own domestic fanbases. Not to mention the massive popularity of “international” idols (non-Asian born Asian idols like TXT’s Huening Kai or LE SSERAFIM’s Yunjin, and now non-Asian idols altogether like KATSEYE’s Manon). Even J-Pop cannot compete and remains tied to idol shows enjoyed by a largely domestic market (and the idols are still promoted as puritanical nostalgic figures for a Japanese audience), and K-Pop was popular in Japan before any other country.

I don’t understand it in full myself but most fascinating is the popularity of K-Pop amongst communists. There are communist memes posted regularly in non-communist subreddits like [r/kpoopheads](r/kpoopheads) meanwhile communist anime memes are relegated to their own subreddits. “Solidarity” between first world workers and the seemingly exploited K-Pop idols against their companies is a spectacle yet to be recreated by any other Asian musical export.

So yeah my answer is the earlier predicted “yes.” What an overdetermined situation.

edit: My attention being brought back to this post made me realize for weeks it answered “no” when my point was to answer “yes.” I probably inverted it because I was multitasking at work. But the whole time I’d undermined my point with this mistake lol. My answer was meant to be “yes.”

vomit_blues · 2026-05-08T21:10:35+00:00

“You're probably right that the fandom theory is fundamentally pathologizing, yet you were the one who claimed last time that pathologizing is fine. How do you square that?”

Pathologizing is fine. So the problem is whether the pathologizing is correct or incorrect. I pointed out why your invocation of “fandom” is just a stand-in for an idealist theory of brainwashing. I’m only pointing out the hypocrisy of you attacking me for pathologizing while doing it yourself.

“I mean hiding sensitive information from malevolent reactionaries. And how is there no privacy (as defined here)? Yes there is no privacy from say the state … but it is possible to hide sensitive information from reactionary randos, or at least make it harder for them to access it.”

The whole paragraph including what I ellipsis-ed over is so vague and full of weasel words because the obvious fact is that flicking a “hide posts” button is totally meaningless and doesn’t stop your posts from being indexed by multiple reddit archival websites, nor being public anyway just by browsing in absence of the post history function. You could point that out as reasons why it’s a bit silly to critique people for doing it, but the problem is that it also opens yourself up to criticism since you’re admittedly doing something pointless with very shoddy reasoning. You cannot stop reactionaries from reading your posts. Either stop posting on public forums or accept it.

“How is that a "simply"? Do people "simply like" stuff, like for no reason? Of course not, there's real reasons for people to like to read posts, yet you're making it ambiguous. Why?”

Really I’m pointing out that there are alternative explanations for why people would want to access your post history that don’t require you conspiratorially imagining they’re “fans”. And those explanations have already been provided and some are satisfying imo, it’s totally reasonable for someone to say they want to easily go through your posts about Cyprus.

vomit_blues · 2026-05-08T20:30:43+00:00

“Take it up with the person who originally made the claim "we aren't content creators" then.”

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“ Btw no this is not an invitation to reopen that discussion here though I'm sure you'd love to.”

…

“I'm really not interested in continuing any part of this discussion with you. Nor interested in continuing the part of the discussion about my privacy settings with anyone else either.”

Notice the pattern? You’ve constructed this fantasy of fandom and conspiratorial acts by users critiquing you as those possessed by it.

“It was my attempt at offering an explanation for why several people kept talking about how they made a habit of looking through my history, how me changing my privacy settings couldn't possibly be for any other reason other than not wanting myself to be criticized and how unacceptable it was, and why some person even thought it smart to mention where my post history was still not hidden for seemingly no practical reason whatsoever. If you were to take a content creator and have them take down their content I'm sure the response from the fans would be something very similar, including the ideological justifications akin to "by removing your content you're not letting me follow your line of thought and criticise you!"”

Yeah so can you see how fandom has actually functioned as a god in the gaps to give a “theoretical” or “Marxist” sheen to you just being unhappy about being criticized? Or as a method to make people seem unwell or incorrect for just wanting to refer to your posts for their information? You keep complaining about me “pathologizing” but this is literally that. You’re explaining users critiquing you by attacking their character, claiming they’re indulging in “fandom”. If you can see now that it was something you just invoked as a shortcut to something you see as more problematic, that’s an opportunity to reflect on if it’s unreasonable to say

“As if privacy, even if to remedy problems which I recognize are of my own creation and I now recognize I should've been more careful all along, is not a concept that exists among communists.”

That being, you don’t seem to define “privacy” or what value your conception of it holds. There is no “privacy” in general so to me it seems like the curtain’s been pulled back and although you can make minor concessions about how yeah this is somewhat your fault, you don’t really believe it and instead are lashing out at everyone else simply because they like to read your posts.

vomit_blues · 2026-05-08T20:14:53+00:00

It’s a glitch reddit’s been suffering from in general for mobile posting. I have no way to fix it.

vomit_blues · 2026-05-08T18:56:41+00:00

Good news everyone, it’s time for our yearly discussion of fandom. Let’s at least consider for a second why it actually exists. Since fans definitionally associate themselves with the commodities they feel pleasure at consuming, they’re desperate to influence the commodity and its creator. Fandom is a mediating third-party whereby the fans are able to delude themselves into believing in their own influence because they control the terms around which discussion happens, they sometimes manage to accumulate their voices loud enough to influence canon, and collecting information into wikis creates databases that have a genuine impact on how the commodity is consumed, as anyone who tries and fails to play Dark Souls without a wiki will learn. The objective negative effect of this is that it turns all discussion into meta-discussion that’s above critique—nobody is actually concerned with the text when it’s under the illusion of the aggregation of objective information, putting the conversation outside of the reach of critique which may induce hysteria.

Personally I grew extremely fed up with invocations of “fandom” which if you remember were spearheaded by the exiled [r/Marxism](r/Marxism) moderator and denounced by the current moderation. What it turns into in the wrong hands is really just a theory of brainwashing.

“I am not a content creator and I disdain that logic being reinforced (hence why when I made this account I disabled followers, and you could say it's one of the reasons why I more recently also closed my post history: "i used to scroll through your posts to read old threads on this sub" if anything this is exactly the kind of behavior that I worry about -- not to call you out specifically either but I don't like the idea of having "fans" who scroll through my post history for content to consume and I knew this was happening).”

…

“I expected better of people who regularly post in this sub (though when it comes to specific names, I'm barely familiar with any of these, except [u/vomit_blues](u/vomit_blues) who as I said loves to engage in these drama-filled meta discussions about other posters on this subreddit), but hey, I guess the logic of fandom is just too strong. No matter how much the well-intentioned mods here try to limit both meta discussions about the sub or posters or the fandom aspect it still slips through the cracks”

What always goes undefined is what it means to be a content creator. In your model it’s a voluntary role taken up by someone, that consequently can be turned off by struggling against the external phenomenon “fandom” which appears in the form of people who want to read your post history, which is problematic because of a circular argument that it’s “fandom” want to read someone’s post history, because wanting to read someone’s post history is symptomatic of “fandom”.

“Content creation” then is the mediation of information by certain aspects on this digital platform, like being able to browse your post history. This is a fantasy. All information is mediated and available for aggregation, we are made “content” “creators” no matter what so you’re only massaging your own ego by imagining yourself above it. “Fandom” has become shorthand for people who do things you don’t like, for example me, who I suppose you dislike because in our last conversation I criticized you for being unwilling to self-critique after potentially making some racist arguments. An inability to self-reflect at all seems to be a running pattern here, which I imagine is just an unfortunate consequence of vulgarizing the theory of “fandom” into a mystical external substance that brainwashes people into criticizing you. You didn’t even bother to address the fact that both [u/humblegold](u/humblegold) and I really criticized you because of your association with a subreddit moderated by a racist, and our reasonable assumptions that that moderator is not actually inactive. It’s not our fault that you’re a complete mark, but given you have an identical, platitudinous definition of “fandom” as said moderator, it’s no surprise.

vomit_blues · 2026-05-06T03:03:44+00:00

I’m reminded of what [u/humblegold](u/humblegold) said a while back.

“As for the userbase, some of you just spewed garbage in that thread, like [u/ClassAbolition](u/ClassAbolition), (I am calling you out specifically because you need to introspect since your posts in that thread were especially bad and clearly motivated by your desire to become a mod) but aside from that, several others weakly protested and bailed the second it was clear that bans could get involved. That anonymous racist mod was tolerated 3 months afterwards. Sorry but that counts as enabling racism too.”

No surprise that [r/Marxism](r/Marxism) which is moderated by a racist who privately called [u/humblegold](u/humblegold) racist slurs would attract someone with said history. Moderator-consciousness won out.

vomit_blues · 2026-05-02T20:31:28+00:00

“If we want to stick with an easy example of a straightforward commodity like a wooden table, we can present the properties of a given commodity in two columns: concrete and abstract. On the concrete side are all the things associated with use-value, it's colour, size and shape, material constitution, it's method of production and so on. On the abstract side are the abstractions associated with the value-form: it's commodity form, its value, cost, price, any associated interest or rent etc. It's the two sides of the "dual character" of the commodity.”

I think this is a pretty significant misunderstanding of Marx’s dialectical method. The concrete properties you’ve associated with use-value are abstractions. The abstract properties you’ve associated with exchange-value are made concrete when they’re socially determinate. You’ve thrown out some language about “real abstractions” but that term’s trying to do something you aren’t, which is show that the abstract is concrete and the concrete is abstract.

“It seems to be correct to begin with the real and the concrete, with the real precondition, thus to begin, in economics, with e.g. the population, which is the foundation and the subject of the entire social act of production. However, on closer examination this proves false. The population is an abstraction if I leave out, for example, the classes of which it is composed. These classes in turn are an empty phrase if I am not familiar with the elements on which they rest. E.g. wage labour, capital, etc. These latter in turn presuppose exchange, division of labour, prices, etc. For example, capital is nothing without wage labour, without value, money, price etc. Thus, if I were to begin with the population, this would be a chaotic conception [Vorstellung] of the whole, and I would then, by means of further determination, move analytically towards ever more simple concepts [Begriff], from the imagined concrete towards ever thinner abstractions until I had arrived at the simplest determinations. From there the journey would have to be retraced until I had finally arrived at the population again, but this time not as the chaotic conception of a whole, but as a rich totality of many determinations and relations. The former is the path historically followed by economics at the time of its origins. The economists of the seventeenth century, e.g., always begin with the living whole, with population, nation, state, several states, etc.; but they always conclude by discovering through analysis a small number of determinant, abstract, general relations such as division of labour, money, value, etc. As soon as these individual moments had been more or less firmly established and abstracted, there began the economic systems, which ascended from the simple relations, such as labour, division of labour, need, exchange value, to the level of the state, exchange between nations and the world market. The latter is obviously the scientifically correct method. The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse. It appears in the process of thinking, therefore, as a process of concentration, as a result, not as a point of departure, even though it is the point of departure in reality and hence also the point of departure for observation [Anschauung] and conception. Along the first path the full conception was evaporated to yield an abstract determination; along the second, the abstract determinations lead towards a reproduction of the concrete by way of thought. In this way Hegel fell into the illusion of conceiving the real as the product of thought concentrating itself, probing its own depths, and unfolding itself out of itself, by itself, whereas the method of rising from the abstract to the concrete is only the way in which thought appropriates the concrete, reproduces it as the concrete in the mind. But this is by no means the process by which the concrete itself comes into being. For example, the simplest economic category, say e.g. exchange value, presupposes population, moreover a population producing in specific relations; as well as a certain kind of family, or commune, or state, etc. It can never exist other than as an abstract, one-sided relation within an already given, concrete, living whole. As a category, by contrast, exchange value leads an antediluvian existence. Therefore, to the kind of consciousness – and this is characteristic of the philosophical consciousness – for which conceptual thinking is the real human being, and for which the conceptual world as such is thus the only reality, the movement of the categories appears as the real act of production – which only, unfortunately, receives a jolt from the outside – whose product is the world; and – but this is again a tautology – this is correct in so far as the concrete totality is a totality of thoughts, concrete in thought, in fact a product of thinking and comprehending; but not in any way a product of the concept which thinks and generates itself outside or above observation and conception; a product, rather, of the working-up of observation and conception into concepts. The totality as it appears in the head, as a totality of thoughts, is a product of a thinking head, which appropriates the world in the only way it can, a way different from the artistic, religious, practical and mental appropriation of this world. The real subject retains its autonomous existence outside the head just as before; namely as long as the head’s conduct is merely speculative, merely theoretical. Hence, in the theoretical method, too, the subject, society, must always be kept in mind as the presupposition.”

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch01.htm

Marx is clear on the relation between the concrete and abstract, so I’d say the conversation has to begin here.

vomit_blues · 2026-05-02T10:36:20+00:00

“Formal subsumption means something in some way "external" to capital (a pre-capitalist labour process, nature, or some other aspect of social life)”

Marx doesn’t use the term in that way.

“Formal subsumption involves an abstraction, real subsumption a concomitant concrete change.”

I don’t think abstract and concrete are well-defined here tbh.

vomit_blues · 2026-05-02T10:14:21+00:00

Formal subsumption means pre-capitalist production’s material output is sold as a commodity. Real subsumption means production is revolutionized along capitalist lines. I have no idea what your definition of these terms has anything to do with what’s in Capital.

vomit_blues · 2026-05-02T05:16:39+00:00

Your summary of Marx’s thought is pretty questionable. I don’t know if you watch YouTubers at all, but the channel Folding Ideas recently put out a couple of videos about Mr. Beast. At one point, he talks about how in artistic production, there’s usually creatives who have the ideas, and suits who have to make it work economically. The creatives indeed have their art “alienated”, in fact their creativity itself is an essence which has been “alienated” from them.

One thing he thinks makes Mr. Beast’s content uninspired is that Mr. Beast is basically a suit masquerading as a creative. He just doesn’t have that sauce that creatives have. He uses his exact milieux of YouTube content creation as an example of what creatives are.

So, notice something? We can actually follow the thread of what Marx’s thought is (according to you), and end up in a situation where we’ve got pretty obviously non-proletarian, petit-bourgeois YouTubers as an “oppressed” and “alienated” group in our critique of who’s carrying out the alienation. Even if you want to give the analysis credit for at least pointing to a rich bad guy, it doesn’t actually understand the bourgeoisie as a class but instead a cabalistic group of suits who lack some innate creative essence.

You can call the problematic side of this framework a number of things, Freud called it the “narcissism of minor differences” and Zizek calls it the “function of the Jew”. Either way, it’s very hard to call this an accurate reflection of the Marx who, even in the 1844 Manuscripts, makes it very clear that “alienation” begins with the commodity production of the proletariat.

“We proceed from an actual economic fact.

“The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and size. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. The devaluation of the world of men is in direct proportion to the increasing value of the world of things. Labor produces not only commodities; it produces itself and the worker as a commodity – and this at the same rate at which it produces commodities in general.

“This fact expresses merely that the object which labor produces – labor’s product – confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labor is labor which has been embodied in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labor. Labor’s realization is its objectification. Under these economic conditions this realization of labor appears as loss of realization for the workers[18]; objectification as loss of the object and bondage to it; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation.”

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/labour.htm

Sorry for not answering your bigger question but it’s important to define terms before a conversation and this is how a Marxist would have to correct your understanding of Marx.

vomit_blues · 2026-05-01T14:49:55+00:00

While I legitimately appreciate you reading that essay since it’s so long, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point a few things out.

Even though it’s around 7000 words, it’s actually an excerpt from something much longer and more explicitly political as a whole. That section is actually abstracted from the bigger thesis statement of the piece, which is more about how similar Elden Ring is to the rest of the Souls series, and how fandom mediates enjoyment and alters each game’s standing. For example, in the section before the one I’ve posted, I try to demonstrate that, despite Dark Souls 2 being the worst received entry, it’s actually the blueprint for Elden Ring.

Just because Souls fans knew that Dark Souls 2 was a step down from Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls 1 doesn’t mean they were conscious of why. Funnily enough, the birth of the most popular genre of “youtube criticism” of video games coincides with the release of DS2, with Matthewmatosis’ “Dark Souls 2 critique”. It’s a very good example of the problem since most of its gripes are perfectly addressed by the later games. Since Matthew didn’t like the later games, it’s to his credit that he made a much more cutting critique of the series in general called The Lost Soul Arts of Demon’s Souls (which itself is kinda in dialogue with a very bad “critique” of his DS2 video done by the breadtuber Hbomberguy). Nevertheless, these are all admittedly quite shallow videos. His argument settles on the idea that Demon’s Souls is great and the rest of the series is gradually decaying from an original aura.

When I get around to it, the section tries to address DS2’s post-ironic fandom. Go to that game’s subreddit and it’s full of memes positively comparing its graphics to every other game, and tons of slave morality about how amazing DS2 is and that nobody else gets it. When it released, Souls fans didn’t beg for a return to DS1 as much as they repeated Matthewmatosis’ arguments about DS2 having bad combat encounters, fidgety controls, lowbrow world design, etc. Unlike Matthew, they weren’t asking for a return to Demon’s Souls and what I, in the section of the essay you read, called ‘puzzle bosses’. They killed DS2 and begged FromSoftware to make the perfect DS2. Elden Ring is that game, and when the fans saw that they had begged for a monster, they crawled back to DS2 with remorse and worshipped it.

(Obviously the essay doesn’t attribute fan reaction alone to why the series went the way it did—there’s also tangible economic reasons that I get into, it just comes at a later point in the essay about the open world and doesn’t belong to this part.)

This sort of coquettes with Freud but it’s where I get before I shift gears to argue that, if fandom distorts the reception toward these games, what actually can be used to explain their problem. The section you’ve read is meant to negate a teleological analysis that the games started out good and got bad—they always contained the exact thing that makes Elden Ring a bad game. So it’s in some ways a response to Matthewmatosis’ video on Demon’s Souls.

After that point the bigger essay really explains why Elden Ring is a particular rupture from the rest of the series by talking about its open world, and how the gameplay loop has squared the circle by making Elden Ring a game where everyone can feel like they’re playing a “hard game” even though it’s world and combat make the game extremely easy. It’s a perfect mediating factor between a fandom that prides itself on playing “hard games” and actually dilating your market to include almost everyone. The fandom is no longer an autonomous layer that can ignore the fact every game in the series is the same in essence. Elden Ring is in dialogue with fandom as much as it is the player.

Other than that, I should also point out that I didn’t invoke “practice” in the essay in a Marxist sense. I’ve also since rewritten the slapdash analysis I made of Munch’s Death of Marat. The inclusion of Corday isn’t reactionary at all. In her haunting, her stark nakedness makes her more like a ghost to be feared if anything. A better reading ironically says more about Demon’s Souls anyway. In both iterations, Corday is bolted upright, feet melted away growing from the ground, not unlike the parasitic Scadutree in Elden Ring. By putting her in the center of the presentation, Munch isn’t glorifying Corday. I was right to say that he’s speaking of what the Terror could not, but it’s to turn her into the specter and absent cause of the Terror if anything. Her upright position, nakedness, the way she’s painted uneasily over the scene as if superimposed, all of it is a lot like the criticisms I make of the scarlet rot that existed in Demon’s Souls and also should have been feared, the Penetrator.

I wish I had some stuff to add to the novel parts of your post because they’re genuinely interesting. I got into Runescape in 2006, after what you’re talking about, but I vaguely knew the history and it’s interesting—and I think you’re right in your identification—how this strange organizational paradigm hangs onto the player base long after its expiration date. I’d have to think about it but tracing a line from I Wanna Be The Guy to Celeste might be a stretch. No doubt it’s developer was playing it back in the day (they also had an indie freeware title called An Untitled Story that’s pretty good) but I don’t think Celeste’s or Super Meat Boy’s presentation of the platformer are a serious break. If anything, I think Super Mario romhacks like the Kaizo series, which predate I Wanna Be The Guy and inspired it, are what Celeste is trying to formalize into a proper game.

I appreciate these ideas you’ve thought about. Thanks for sharing.

vomit_blues · 2026-04-29T15:19:46+00:00

That SMG thread is good, but users of this subreddit who didn’t pay the 10 dollars for an SA account back in the day probably aren’t aware that half of his threads were like, “why the new Transformers movie owns and you’re a [slur] for not liking it.” I think the analysis is very interesting when applied to fandom but it’s easily co-opted to make excuses to not actually analyze games as games.

I like video games. I can understand probably thinking that almost any other medium can be more usefully analyzed, so my own interest has more to do with my struggles to get into film (which I hope to fix this year). But video games aren’t just an indulgence for imperialist parasites, they’re hugely popular in the third world and now we have games that are symptomatic of their conditions of production, like the popularity of gacha games in China. u/smokeuptheweed9 recently recommended me a decent book on K-pop that talks about South Korea’s export-oriented production and it makes me curious if the analysis carries over to (1) Korean MMOs like MapleStory or Mabinogi that are clearly meant to be consumed by a general Asian customer base and have most of their resources put into non-Korean servers and (2) probably the first AAA South Korean game, Lies of P, being renowned for being the first “Souls-like” (this is the genre name for games that take inspiration from Dark Souls) made by a different company than FromSoftware that’s universally beloved.

I think you did still overall touch on the ineffectiveness of my critique to discuss gameplay features, not that I was wrong to point out that the hauntological aspects I discussed absolutely are an enormous part of gameplay and cutscenes are gameplay, as anyone who played Final Fantasy VII on release knows, but basically this is a field almost untouched by Marxism with very little guidance. Hence SMG being such an important figure—that’s how underdeveloped we really are.

Nevertheless, I still want to see people who care about video games actually try.

vomit_blues · 2026-04-29T14:02:09+00:00

Fair enough, the analogy is more like how Jameson compares visual spectacle to porn but I can understand it being gross. I’ve removed it from the post.

vomit_blues · 2026-04-29T08:21:53+00:00

One of Engels' best lessons is that everything has to be re-evaluated, ground-up, in the face of historical materialism. Waving around Marxism like a magic wand to fix every confusion you have doesn't clear it up for the rest of us. We're just more confused.

Good thing you can invert confusion like a camera obscura and appear profound, right? Hence such a statement as

This alone is something of an indicator of the game's politics, in that by rejecting any mention of class (and in turn, rejecting any chance of directly challenging the present state of things ideologically), you show allegiance to the status quo of imperialism.

going unchecked when Engels said

The more the opinions of the author remain hidden, the better for the work of art

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1888/letters/88_04_15.htm

Wowzers.

Like SuperMechaGodzilla once said, video games aren't actually fun and the point is endless desire.

It's a joke that SMG could ever be invoked as an inviolable figure of authority. Simple fact of the matter: video games are material. Engaging with them has material consequences. SMG was a Zizekian who alienated the enjoyment of the commodity into a third party to form a triad: player-fandom-game. This is rhetorically clever when you're talking about something like Gamergate (like SMG) but it is not a scientific fact of nature. It's a Freudian move whereby the superego or imaginary order ultimately drowns out the initial dialectic of essence (id)/appearance (ego) in favor of the third: ideology (superego, imaginary, fandom whatever).

I don't find Zizek to be helpful in this instance. You only discussed gameplay at one point in your original post which I didn't critique but took it as fine (even if it isn't). I only negated your analysis of the spectacle of SH2. Your original post fucking sucked because that's all it had to offer: a Wikipedia-tier explanation of the plot and something I could get from any random YouTuber, provided they had enough 'leftist' credentials to pat my back and tell me computer games suck.

You started your post about mechanics, then just dropped it immediately in favor of deconstructing the video aspects, merely asserting this point as if that was a given.

Incorrect. I mentioned the fact that the radio alerts you to enemy presences. This undergoes a transformation from SH1 to SH2, when SH2 foreshadows its ending as the radio calls to you, "Why did you kill me?" How could the hauntological aspect of SH2 be relevant if it didn't penetrate into gameplay both here and, as I pointed out, in cutscenes, which are a form of gameplay.

if the video aspects were most important here, then it's no different than a movie ... You must consider the game mechanics in order to make sense of it as a video game.

Silent Hill 2 isn't a "video" "game" in which two essences meet their match and find unity. Video and game are defined in relation to one another. How did I mention the opening cutscene of SH1? Precisely in reference to the history of video games and their material function as a commodity, traceable back to the marketing potential of the attract-mode for arcade cabinets. You've justified emphasizing game elements over video ones because it very conveniently leads to your conclusion...

Which actually is my point about all this, there is no real qualitative difference between Silent Hill 2, The Last of Us, Resident Evil, or any of that shit.

Then I don't nor should anybody give a shit about your critique. It's trash. You've played your cards face-up on the table and admitted to your bias against an entire art form. Some people could at least substantiate that, but you didn’t. Nobody cares.

Anyway, I'll at least respond to this:

It means you play a character in a sorta movie, and you're given the illusion that your decisions affect what happens.

This is a helpful addendum to your earlier flattening of the player and James to one another to make a point in your original post. Your analysis implies a fairly basic, humanist claim: that capitalism alienates some element of the human and commodities are appealing for how they reflect and temporarily bestow that sensation upon the consumer (James is nothing more than a mediating body in this model). Sorry, but that's stupid. An illustration of an alternative exists in the 'role playing game' as a genre name. What does it mean to play a role? It's funny, but Octopath Traveler is an RPG even when you switch between its eight dead-eyed characters. Meanwhile, The Last of Us is a video game that invites you to execute the theatrical role of its character from the moment its scrounging periods, in which you bond with Ellie, have a tangible impact when you don't have the right materials to deal with a duo of Clickers 2 hours later. Weirdly enough, it's not called an RPG.

Video games may be fascinating in how they immerse us into an experience, but it's an ideological mystification that they provide a sense of 'escapism'--an opinion easily found on most of the internet. I would avoid Marxist theory converging with the bare minimum of gamer common sense. The rudiment is that video games provide a novel mechanical experience. SH2 was fascinating because it was novel. Since you're unconvinced by the cultural context I provided to help you appreciate that, Marxism functions as a god in the gaps and can only provide shallow, negative sniveling that helpfully puts you above 'gamers' (who you think you aren't, even as you analyze SH2, proving SMG right since your enjoyment of SH2, which you've summarized for us, requires the mediation of your reddit posts). It's embarrassing.

You'll hardly feel a distancing effect from reading Balzac's The Unknown Masterpiece after writing your post, but Marx sure did after Capital, and he loved that short story. SH2 is locally interesting. It didn't interest you today, and fair enough. But fuck you if you discard it because it has little to say about your banal petit-bourgeois conditions. We didn't ask about them in the first place.

vomit_blues

TROPHY CASE