I’ve just finished a Marxist book club reading series, including Lenin and Marx and Rosa and several others.
My original studies were on anarchism. Graeber, Chomsky, lots of Anarchist Library articles.
My new studies are Postmodernists. Foucoult, Derrida, Marcusa, etc.
First things first:
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I think Marxists are way too proud of themselves and what they call science. I find Marxism useful but little more than a nice to discuss academic theory. I find serious flaws with it, and am annoyed that so many people seem to identify so strongly with it. In that way im very much in agreement with anarchists and postmodernists. The other thing is that Marxist-Leninism was infiltrated and defeated by capitalism many many times now, and sometimes even without its defeat it led to dystopia. I’m just not excited about this ideology at all, and I think it’s become a bit cringe to continue down this path. Capitalism and state is stronger today than it’s ever been. I think this has lived past its valid era.
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I think anarchism has a lot more truth and wisdom, but is not very powerful. I am unsure how to bring about this kind of society, which is true communism. It seems it will always devolve into a retelling of Marxist stages of history, feudalism, monarchism, capitalism. However I do think there are ways to prevent this if people are mass educated and localities are armed to prevent domination. But also, we live in a day of nukes, and I’ve never read an anarchist treaties on how to manage the nuclear arsenal anarchically. The more you organize anarchism though, the less it’s anarchism. I also worry about how much this turns into vigilantism and mob violence.
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I agree a lot with postmodernists, the concept of truth and morality since learning all the atheist rhetoric in my 20s are very vague to me. Understanding cultural truth, media power, the disparity of grand narratives, the collusion of the Everyman with the system (rather than it being purely a class duality) is “true” to me. However, even more so than #1 or #2 this very much lacks a revolutionary theory.
Then there’s the infighting. When you read the literature everyone “proves” each other wrong and shows how their “revolutionary vision” is impossible and not worth doing. People in socialist theory argue so strongly about such vague ideas. People really think that they are looking to achieve a thing called socialism, but I don’t think they will ever be satisfied with any system they find themselves in. They set impossible goals and then yell at the clouds that it hasn’t been obtained.
Sorry that’s my rant, I also am yelling at the clouds at my own intellectual defeat. I kinda feel like the best we can do is a kind of nihilism and intentional community.
Think Marxism is scientifically flawed? Think anarchism lacks vision? Think infighting is too much? Then it sounds like you’d agree with soulists.
Soulists follow a scientific paradigm that centers psychology and solves psychological problems of human nature in tandem with what Marx called material problems. We view capitalism and the state as social constructs, building upon intersectional feminist theory and addressing them as problems of propaganda and informational warfare.
We don’t need to have a revolution to start doing praxis. Overthrowing Capital and the state is one of our big goals, but there’s tons we can do to build our society before then, and we’re already doing it. We know exactly what our end goal looks like, because we’ve already done it on a small scale. All we need is to amplify our warfare.
While we have plenty of issues with reactionaries infiltrating the community, our position in these struggles is always to side with the marginalised. Queer, BIPOC, disabled, neurodiverse, etc. If someone has a different perspective than us but still stands with the oppressed, then we stand with them. That’s because we don’t believe in a single reality, so there’s plenty of room for differing views to coexist. It’s common for us to believe in all the gods, of every religion, just to be tolerant of everyone. Of course, we leave behind any exclusionary parts of all religions.
Most of us generally agree with this manifesto explaining soulism: https://medium.com/@viridiangrail/a-soulist-manifesto-4d0456dcb75a
One of the first things I looked up on this involves someone wanting us to dismantle the hierarchy of gravity… maybe a bit too much woo for me.
Soulism has been the target of a lot of satire and people who don’t understand it pretending they do. Gravity is a law that nobody consented to, but it’s not high on the soulist agenda. Natural laws we’d rather dismantle include old age, infant mortality, capitalist realism, and what transphobes call “basic biology”. Note that the latter two are very clearly myths, but reactionaries claim they are natural laws. Soulists don’t believe in reality, so we don’t need to draw a semantic distinction between fake natural laws and real ones. We think reality itself is fake.