Yeah I guess when I mean “being critical of abstraction” I mean like theoretically critical, not anti. I’m against abstractions being used incorrectly. An abstraction can be neutral, good even, but if misapplied it creates all sorts of problems.

My main criticism isn’t people using abstractions to understand, its not checking to see if the ones we are using bear out in real conditions.

I think there was a time when almost no one thought in terms of abstraction. And now its like the only way that most people think. Well like in said I have a lot of work to do

Being critical of abstraction is kind of my thing these days. IMO most people are more concerned with making or adopting abstractions that convincingly pass as real, because the abstractions validate people’s lived experience, rather than dig into the actual concrete conditions.

The real mindfuck comes when we realize that people can be totally idealistic in their understanding, and simultaneously very effective at certain kinds of organizing because they have more experience with a domain of practical work than they do with theoretical understanding of that work. Because people can be kinda negative its obvious to us that people can have seemingly good theory but really bad organizing instincts, but the other side always stands out to me as well.

Anyway, always good talking to ya comrade

“Look at the asteroid” is what a tankie would say /s

I think about the stuff he wrote about Italian theater every time I think about live nation and ticket master.

I think another thing I deeply appreciate about Gramsci’s writing is that given the fact that his prison notes never had to like “bend the stick” the way other leaders did. I think it gives an unusually long tail of relevance for his work, because he was working with abstractions, which reemerge over and over throughout struggle, and not messy revolutionary conditions.

But its incredibly sad what happened to him. Anyway thanks for your insight, I have an urge to help clarify these theories – it seems like 90% of the analysis of Gramsci I’ve read has come from Neolibs and reactionaries who can only comprehend his theories cynically (the other 10% coming from DSA’s very good Mountain Caucus). But imma need to sharpen my pencil a bit I guess

Sees an asteroid hurtling toward earth

don’t worry about that, the real problem is craters, which is caused by unicorns

Asteroid getting closer

Fucking unicorns creating disinfo about the cause of craters. Asteroids are indifferent and couldn’t be responsible for catastrophe, proving craters are caused by unicorns

Society becomes divided into two camps, an asteroid cult and people trying to stop the asteroid

the asteroid cult are a bunch of loons but the anti asteroid people are falling for unicorn propaganda, therefore are themselves morally equivalent to malicious unicorns

Asteroid hits earth, leaving a giant crater

Fucking anti asteroiders and their shitty craters.

I’m more worried about the crater than the asteroid

We really lost a lot when the fash locked him up, thank god his notebooks got smuggled out.

I see, thanks for the explanation. I hadn’t thought of the two things quite that way, that they fit together. False consciousness is the subjective manifestation hegemony’s objective condition.

Thanks

I don’t think Gramsci ever wrote about false consciousness, and what you’re describing is closer to the German Ideology than Gramsci’s theory of hegemony.

Like sorry if this is way out of whack but I think its like if someone wanted to understand Lenin’s formulation of imperialism and then I explained Chapter 15 of Capital v1. Like the theory is in there, but understanding it requires seeing how Marx’s “capital has x tendency” relates to specific, verifiable evidence.

If youre interested I will find the proper essays in Gramsci to post along side here, I just gotta dig in my book a little bit!

I gotta read some Paine, great quote. I keep having conversations about how society changes today, hopefully it isn’t just a local phenomenon

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.

My boss is getting annoying with this shit.

I’m stuck on x issue

Have you tried putting x into ai?

Yes I’ve been doing that for two days.

Really? Huh. It should work.

K well no it doesn’t.

Just copy the error and put it into Claude

Yeah…I’ve been…doing that.

It should just give you the solution

The common denominator of all USAmerican leftists

He will be in office in 2028 though

He had more than a point

I legit haven’t seen it since it came out, I just remember it being weird, but I was also very young. It holds up?

Your distress call has been received. A team has been deployed to the extraction point

They’re the worst

The greatest trick Satan ever pulled was selling advertisements for water chestnuts in recipe magazines. As a result, his evil essence has insidiously befouled many otherwise delicious dips, stews and cassaroles.

Ppl be like “but Chinese food” yeah I bet Chinese water chestnuts are yummy compared to the canned packing peanuts called for in my aunt’s spinach artichoke dip, or maybe the Chinese know how to cook em, idgaf, why then does my local Kroger sell canned water chestnuts but there’s no Chinese wood ear to be found? Because wood ear don’t belong in Aunt Louse’s Spinach artichoke dip either!!!

I’m not arguing that the problem is local government and not capitalism. I am saying they work together in very specific ways.

Capitalism is not a ghost or the devil. It is a particular set of social relations. Defining it abstractly like the big bad in season 1 of some superhero movie is not practical. In order to learn to defeat capitalism we have to fight the forms it takes in order to expose how it has corrupted government, democracy, human rights; but also to show that capitalism will never stop taking different forms and the bourgeois will never stop trying to swindling their way into more and more power, until the profit motive has been totally negated on every level.