Then they don’t actually understand capitalism, do they? If someone told me they understood thermodynamics but kept trying to build a perpetual motion machine, even if they were using some thermodynamics concepts in their attempts, it’s still clearly the case that they don’t understand thermodynamics. If you claim to understand that the root cause of your problems is capitalism but you keep voting for pro-capitalist governments, did you really understand anything at all?
That doesn’t make any sense.
Redditor until the end 
Yes? Obviously not on lemmy, but do you think in general most people have identified capitalism as the root cause of material scarcity and alienation? Do you think they’d keep voting for liberals and fascists if they had?
You’ll get vol. 2 and vol. 3 from watching all the dang lectures we link too.
Here’s the latest one I linked, Michael Hudson on Marxism, Parasites, and Debt Cancellation
Because (and this is genuinely just my own experience; I’m totally sure this isn’t a universal constant) I see a lot of Marxists and MLs talking a lot about “when the revolution happens” and not a whole lot about the revolution being fought right now, everyday.
It’s unfortunate that the MLs in your area are that way. I think it’s interesting that I’ve seen the opposite where I am in the global south. Student groups tend to have a lot of wonderful anarchist tendencies and lots of people who have come to understand politics via online forums (I guess that’s partly true of myself, except I sort of ended up on the other side). Meanwhile, when you go to Palestinian solidarity marches, the labor movement, and other things on the ground (well, except for when student groups demand something from the university) it looks a lot more traditional left wing, with the usual Trotskyist groups and some ML.
I guess if I can point to anything in this dynamic it’s that there isn’t really a huge difference in how effective the different groups are at accomplishing their short term goals, so IMO it would just make more sense to figure out which ideological line is most attractive to the people it’s supposed to serve in a given area and stick to that.
Thank you for the thoughtful answer. I’ll reflect on those points.
Just one final question that’s a bit unrelated: I’ve seen a tendency online from anarchists to be extremely critical of revolution, in general. Some say that Marxists are doing nothing because they’re all waiting for “the glorious revolution” that will fix all problems. Some say that revolution is a gradual process that happens through many reforms. Other say that revolutionary politics are reactionary because the revolution will inevitably harm a lot of marginalized people, like the disabled who won’t have their care infrastructure while there is a civil war going on. I think you can probably spot a lot of contradictions and weaknesses in those arguments, maybe to the point that it looks like I’m presenting a strawman. But I actually mean to ask with genuine interest: what do we say to those people? If there are people who lose faith in revolution because they’re more concerned with morals and “anarchist principles” or “anti-authoritarian principles” to ever actually join a revolutionary struggle, how do we win them back?
Sure, but can you offer me at least one example? I don’t mean to bore you with the Socratic method so I should just lay my cards on the table:
In my view, either you aim to exist outside of the state until the state ceases to exist, which is a morally admirable view but extremely fragile. The second the state acquires enough hegemonic force to wipe you off the face of the planet, they will and you will leave no trace, so there goes your revolutionary project (that you never stood much of a chance to defend, either).
Or you do want to use the state to wage class war. In this case, that’s really the same as what the Marxists want, fundamentally at least. You’re just stronger in your moral condemnation of the state, while Marxists focus on functionally describing how the struggle from the current capitalist status quo can evolve into a stateless society via a historical process.
There’s something qualitatively different between the poor man’s desire for money and the rich man’s desire for money. The poor man has a functional, material desire for money that arises from his physiological needs. Through a dialectical process, money (and commodities more broadly) has gone from an intermediate that is used to satisfy needs, use value, into an end in and of itself. The ideological fetishization of money is what leads to the rich man desiring more money, and the fact that capital exists as a means to do so is what allows the lifestyle of endless greed to even exist. Acquiring capital and living in service of that capital, with the goal of making it multiply further, is what drives the capitalists.
Therefore, what is needed to abolish both of their enslavements is to kill both their masters, who is one and the same, and is called capital.
STEM nerds vs humanities nerds
More developed and socialized productive forces = less scarcity = less need to use the state to enforce some kind of order = classes wither away
a lot of people think the new pope Leo XIV chose his name in honor of Leo XIII but he actually was giving a subtle nod to Leon Trotsky. That’s because he’s about to be extremely annoying about China for the next 15 years.
The contradictions of capitalism are universal and inherent to the system. Much the contrary, as soon as the major seats of global financial capital are defeated I don’t see why the unwashed masses of the world would wait very long to seize power. As the system currently stands, comprador colonial governments only maintain stability because they can buy weapons and maintain large armies thanks to the imperialist powers.
I’m not an anarchist but in their defense, while anarchism proper has never had lasting success the Zapatistas are much less centralized than other socialist experiments and have taken a lot of inspiration from anarchist principles. Left unity should mean that we take an earnest and good faith approach to learning about what we have in common, not just seizing any opportunity to dunk on the other “team.”
Also, even MLism still recognizes that different contradictions demand different approaches. Marx doesn’t prescribe a one-size-fits-all approach either. For some revolutions the right move is a guerilla struggle. For others a general strike. For others it’s about landless peasants doing protracted struggle. So on and so on.
There still has to be a point where there is a state and then a point where there is not. Are you advocating for seizing control of that state before it seizes to exist, or does your political program want to stay outside of the state until the state stops existing?
But how do you expect people to pick up weapons and fight a revolution without understanding just how horrible capitalists have been to them? I don’t think people should be guided by hate, I agree with you there, solidarity is much better than hate as a guiding principle. But the way I see it, people already hate a lot. They hate minorities, the homeless, foreigners, entire foreign states, etc. etc. So the function of our agitating propaganda is to redirect the hate that people feel towards things that haven nothing to do with their oppression into the actual source of their oppression, the capitalist system.
You never explained what you believe in. You just came here with a kneejerk reaction to the meme that criticizes the way westerners often do want an idiotic peaceful revolution, when we explained why we disagreed with your reaction you have just been on a tirade against “hate” which is deeply anti-materialist. If you agree with the revolutionary agenda then by all means, I’m sorry for dogpiling you, but you shouldn’t spend so much energy arguing against people who also agree with you on the broad strokes?
But you still can’t provide any evidence that white people are systemically oppressed in South Africa? As the comment you’re replying to says, most white people in SA live in formal housing in suburbs. They still actually have the property, land, and wealth passed down from colonization and apartheid. Their government isn’t really even challenging that, they still facilitate the exploitation of the black population, especially those far away from urban centers who work in mining and farming (as in the farmworkers, not farmers). If the white farmers themselves weren’t being attacked, most of us probably would’ve never heard about the inequality that still exists.
Just to make my point clearer, in Zimbabwe they actually took the land away from the Rhodesian settlers and gave it to revolutionaries, and even that wasn’t genocide per se.