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23 hours agoi am eternally more of a halloween boy but christmas can be not half bad as well. a holiday that at its best is about love and togetherness is one a good socialist can find value in 
PowerLurker [he/him, they/them]
not postin anymore
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- 238 Comments
Joined 4 months ago
Cake day: September 9th, 2025
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ey ey you too redcuban
techbro James Sunderland be like “gotta find my wife in Soylent Hill”
(is this anything yall??? should i keep more stuff in drafts???)
food is objectively better with double-to-triple the recommended garlic but i also have IBS so
is a good one!!also
and their cool variation 
my gf writes poetry in rhyme, which i think is considered “out of vogue” in contemporary poetry. so! for Christmas i had the idea of researching well regarded contemporary poets who still write in rhyme/verse and bought her 4 separate collections of poetry, one by each writer i found so she can sample around if she doesn’t connect with any given one.
pretty thoughtful gift if i may say so myself
hope she likes it 
spoiler
this post was a joke btw, lol let’s try to have a swell christmas yall!!
well well well, guess who just got kicked out their org for - yup, you guessed it - the correct analysis of material conditions 🙄
so i’m back here. in the trenches. with my real comrades, in the real struggle…
lenins my GOAT, fr
even the most censored poster, bleeds…
when the flesh is cut
cries lonely tears…
when the heart is broke
what topics should I and/or others post about to boost site engagement???
taking votes for a 24 hour period
2·3 days agoi’m sure there are good comrades in Red Star but i just don’t really see the vision of “build a party out of the disjointed non-party.” i would get it if DSA were a genuine mass org, like idk a large labor union or network of labor unions or an established-but-not-exclusively-ML mass labor party, but it’s not. it’s basically one small niche organization among a few in a super nascent proto-left. bigger than the others, sure, but if you cut out the (majority) paper members not all that dramatically so.
and the problem that the american left has of having a predominantly downwardly-mobile-labor-aristocrat character (not casting moral judgment just analyzing the playing field) is if anything more acute in DSA than a lot of other orgs, which further undercuts its status as any kind of mass organ of working class power that a Party can grow out of.
If i don’t publicly post about my life and thoughts am I really even having them?
- signed a soft skeptic about capital K knowledge but sympathetic to certain flavors of metaphysical idealism while also being a hardcore historical materialist
okay this conversation has come up a couple times across a few different threads recently so i want to outline with a lil bit more rigor my thinking on how historical materialism and metaphysical materialism are very much Not The Same Thing - they’re somewhat related but ultimately different conversations, built around very different lines of questioning that are trying to do very different things:
nerd shit
a metaphysical materialist who is also a historical materialist is saying: between two very different categories of material phenomena - category A) types of matter that are used as resources by human beings & the mass social structures built around that, vs. category B) internally felt beliefs in the emergent phenomenon known as consciousness (which is the result of a bajillion endlessly complex chemical reactions), particularly in individual humans who are deemed Great Men - A makes far more sense as the prime driver through which to analyze history (i.e. it has greater predictive power and coheres better with many common sense presumptions people use to navigate reality).
a metaphysical idealist who is also a historical materialist is saying: between two very different categories of Qualia (basically conscious experience, the Metaphysical Stuff of Thinking and Feeling) - category A) qualia/experiences that are perceived as external resources used by human beings & the mass social structures built around that, vs. category B) qualia that are experienced as the internally felt beliefs of individuals (particularly those deemed Great Men) - A makes far more sense as the prime driver through which to analyze history (i.e. has greater predictive power and coheres better with many common sense presumptions people use to navigate reality).
obviously no one talks like this in common speech because it’s incredibly cumbersome so we shorthand, but both of these positions are coherent. it’s also worth noting that Marxism doesn’t reject the existence or relevance of category B, either (the ideas of human beings = the superstructure, material conditions = the base), just that the superstructure is produced by and less influential than the base (though it still shapes the base in a feedback loop).
i do think religious marxists run into a bit more genuine contradiction that is harder to parse - at least if they believe in the omnibenevolent model of god of the Abrahamic religions - but i’m very much not formally religious, don’t believe in that conception of god for a number of reasons, and don’t want to oversimplify these belief systems that i have so little knowledge of so i will stop here. (i also didn’t touch on mind-body dualism because i’m not at all versed in modern arguments for it and personally find it less convincing than the other two frameworks, but i suspect you could make it work more or less coherently w/ historical materialism.)
s/o wmill galaxybrain leroyjenkins & a few others for keeping the commitment to journalposting alive the general mega has gotten kinda stale without it ngl ngl
procrastinating on cancelling my family christmas plans a couple states over out of guilt/shame but i am just too burnt out and have all of one day off for christmas and i need to not lose my mind (worth noting my relationship with my family is very much mixed and i’d also just prefer to spend the holiday with my gf locally)
5·3 days agoi see your point, i do think the Abrahamic idea of an omnibenevolent god runs into some contradictions and tensions with historical materialism. broader metaphysical questions about the ultimate nature of things i do still see as beyond its purview (even if the theorists themselves didn’t) but that’s a larger conversation.
does historical materialism actually assert anything about the ultimate metaphysical nature of reality though? i’d argue no. it just asserts itself as the most useful/coherent model for analyzing history under a certain set of common sense presuppositions.
like i think there’s an ambient belief in metaphysical materialism in Marx and Lenin’s work, sure, but i don’t think it really depends on any metaphysical belief to operate. you can be a religious dualist or a metaphysical idealist or whatever, and not think history is most predominately driven by great men and internally manifested first principles. (there’s probably a more vigorous philosophical way of expressing this argument i’m too lazy to express rn in a shitpost)
as a millennial i feel like i shouldn’t say the term “aura farming” but why tf does lenin farm so much aura and look hard af in like 95% of the pics of him out there??
guess theres a reason hes my GOAT