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Reposted by Bryn

🐔 Brian Bucklew 🐔 ₑͤ＞∿＜ₑͤ ∞🌮 @unormal.bsky.social · 4h

humans are a kind of ape that loves fermenting stuff

Bryn @slimewave.me · 10h

Crazy work for you to quote tweet a thread in which you’re getting your ass handed to you while managing to be both pedantic AND wrong

beelzabbab.bsky.social @beelzabbab.bsky.social · 10h

Every conversation against a Marxist necessarily boils down to them saying "All evidence against me is contrived by an international conspiracy of my enemies!" Which is literally the same thing fascists say when faced with facts.

Bryn @slimewave.me · 10h

No, I really don’t think I’m in the mood to listen to you cite the Hearst Press and their Nazi sources in order to claim that gommunism killed one bajillion and the Tsar wasn’t actually that bad to minority groups, actually. But thanks for the offer!

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Bryn @slimewave.me · 10h

I could point out that pogrom-rousing and antisemitism more generally were specifically illegal under Stalin whereas antisemitic terror was functionally state-sponsored by the tsarist regime that proceeded. I could point that out, but I’m not in the mood for your semantic needling & goalpost-moving

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Bryn @slimewave.me · 10h

No, I really don’t think I’m in the mood to listen to you cite the Hearst Press and their Nazi sources in order to claim that gommunism killed one bajillion and the Tsar wasn’t actually that bad to minority groups, actually. But thanks for the offer!

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Bryn @slimewave.me · 11h

Now there’s a magical threshold where ideas become popular enough that the ruling class changes their mind. Too bad single payer being supported by a majority of Americans just isn’t enough. Pay no attention to the tons of majority-unpopular legislation passed every year bc donors want it

beelzabbab.bsky.social @beelzabbab.bsky.social · 11h

They're not as popular as you think they are.

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Bryn @slimewave.me · 11h

Okay, now you’re just making up stuff I never said, and then making sweeping claims that are completely counterhistorical as stated

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Bryn @slimewave.me · 11h

Anyway, I literally just said that those ideas I was talking about previously are plenty popular. The ruling class does all kinds of unpopular shit all the time and they don’t give a shit that it’s unpopular. What are you talking about

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Bryn @slimewave.me · 11h

No, the ruling class changes its stance on something like Civil Rights legislation or New Deal-type programming when their hand is forced by a well-organized mass of people containing at least a subset of militants who are willing to back up their demands with force

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Bryn @slimewave.me · 11h

I don’t know how to explain to you that class consciousness being a prerequisite for a suppressed class to seize power, even a modicum of it, is a core load-bearing Marxism 101 type concept, and that this is not some gotcha that the theory fails to explain

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Bryn @slimewave.me · 11h

Anyway, ideas don’t really matter much without the organized force of a class giving them teeth. Lots of sensible ideas have broad appeal in the US, like single-payer and GND-esque approaches to climate change, and that popularity doesn’t matter because the ruling class won’t let that happen

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Bryn @slimewave.me · 11h

I mean, class struggle doesn’t preclude the possibility of poorly-organized classes in which many members have been misled about who they should sympathize and identify with. Those sorts of things are pretty broadly agreed upon by Marxists.

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Bryn @slimewave.me · 11h

Depends on the nature of the ‘splaining you’re trying to do, I suppose, but I think that as a heuristic for understanding history and predicting future behavior at the group level it’s pretty hard to beat, honestly. Doesn’t require assuming people are perfect rational actors w complete knowledge btw

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Bryn @slimewave.me · 12h

I’m getting more and more unclear on what you’re arguing against and how anything I’ve said really relates to whatever that position is. I think that most of what you’re arguing for is easily reconciled with the way I view the world, and the rest is, y’know, bird analogies

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Bryn @slimewave.me · 12h

Okay I’ve totally lost the thread of what you’re trying to say here because ‘Marxists have never taken an interest in conducting material analysis of social phenomena’ and ‘materialism has yet to explain birds’ makes me think you’re working with a totally different construct than what I’m talking ab

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Bryn @slimewave.me · 12h

What I was getting at was more about purpose and causality of the world—having a materialist approach to these matters will in turn inform how someone understands them

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Bryn @slimewave.me · 12h

To be clear I was being more florid than precise in my word choice there, I agree that forming and communicating understanding must necessarily involve the mind. That said I think the largely-material media through which we do the observing & communicating (apparatus, speech…) matter greatly too

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Bryn @slimewave.me · 12h

I think one of the richest illustrations of this deadendedness was when Peter Thiele enlisted Bjarke Ingels for his deep-sea mining company, right around the same time BIG was being courted by Meta to design the Metaverse. Oops! All vaporware! (Even hyper-extractive industry, I guess)

Himbo Blacksmith🇿🇦🇮🇹 @himboblacksmith.bsky.social · 13h

what i mean by this is that there's no obvious industry to invest in rn. Unless you're investing in green industry and biotech, which have a future, but these guys are beholden to other interests that are, uh, vindictive.

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Bryn @slimewave.me · 13h

Yeah, I’ll admit, the stupider this shit gets the more convinced I get that all the circa-2020 “they’re building bunkers and going to space and automating everything and leaving us to burn alive” was absurd levels of cope and meant to break morale because otherwise why are they panicking so hard rn

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Bryn @slimewave.me · 13h

I mean, I don’t know if anything can “explain the world” like, in totality or as a blanket statement. If anything materialism sort of takes the word at its word, views it as self-explanatory in the sense that it requires no justification other than that it is. Can YOU explain the world?

beelzabbab.bsky.social @beelzabbab.bsky.social · 13h

It's because material analysis cannot explain the world.

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Bryn @slimewave.me · 13h

… then I wonder if that explanation gets any more mileage or offers any utility as a go-to sort of heuristic for predicting and interpreting ruling class behavior. I’m just shooting from the hip here, when I talk about economics proper it is always as a hack and a vulgar materialist on principle

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Bryn @slimewave.me · 13h

Anyway, if we look at them gallivanting around setting money on fire like the Nolan Joker, and we say yeah, this is literally infantile tantrum shit, but it’s a behavior that’s conditioned by membership in a capitalist class that IS happy to break stuff when they don’t get their way 🦂🐸

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Bryn @slimewave.me · 13h

…shit that seems to benefit no one. Shit like promising to tank the US economy to bail out fucking ARGENTINA. I mean maybe someone’s conspirabrained some Trump Crime Family scheme that’s going on there, idk, there’s no shortage of policy decisions with capitalist motives that petty in scope

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Bryn @slimewave.me · 13h

And I got that some of this was about disciplining workers, using AI as a premise for unsustainable mass layoffs as a bluff in the hopes of rehiring people for less, etc. But there was so much dumb shit that I struggled to explain with vulgar materialism aside from “stupidity needs no motive”

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Bryn @slimewave.me · 13h

I had been thinking about it more in terms of, y’know, flailing because Line Must Go Up because growth avenues are closing up, the US empire was already slowly imploding, etc. And prior I had thought that there might be actual capitalist collusion to do a controlled demolition to pop latent bubbles

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Bryn @slimewave.me · 13h

Some1 Good At The Economy feel free to correct me here but it seems like almost all of the inscrutably stupid shit that’s happening in the US government and the corporate world is kind of one big capital strike (in a loose sense)—scuttling the world economic order, big tech setting money on fire etc

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