Arseny Avraamov was an early Soviet pioneer of experimental and electronic music, incredibly ahead of his time. In 1917 he was appointed Culture Minister, and went on to create musical experiments, including electronic instruments that converted drawn visuals into audio. His most famous moment was a public performance of an experimental symphony he created for the 5th anniversary of the October Revolution, held in Baku. He conducted the piece standing on a rooftop, waving 2 red flags.

An interesting thing that happened during the slave revolt of the Haitian Revolution, is that about 500 Polish soldiers, after realizing they were being used by the French to suppress a slave revolt, joined the Haitians instead and fought on their side. A Polish legion was fighting there under orders from France, probably hoping that they would receive support from France for Polish independence in turn. However, many of them began to sympathize with the Haitians, seeing commonality between their independence struggles.

Some people think that family abolition is a "new left" idea. In truth, not only did Marx and Engels hold this position, the early Bolsheviks did so too. They believed that, with socialism, the family would wither away, and they directed their social policies towards this end. The original Bolsheviks believed that with socialist communal life, daycare centers, public laundries and communal dining halls would replace unpaid domestic work, freeing women to be economically independent of, and equal to, men.

Something that isn’t mentioned enough in discussions of Hitler’s rise to power, is that before the Nazis, there had already been a proto-fascist coup in Germany in 1920, known as the Kapp Putsch. However, it was defeated by the organized working-class. 🧵 The coup was supported by military officials and capitalists, and contained nationalist and monarchist elements. Its aim was a military dictatorship made to crush workers’ power. Many of its participants would later join the Nazi party. (Note the swastikas on their helmets)

Norman Bethune (1890-1939) was a Canadian surgeon and communist, who volunteered as a medic fighting the fascists during the Spanish civil war, and later under Mao's red army during the Sino-Japanese war. He died of an infection during his service, and while being relatively unknown in his home country, became known as a nationwide hero in China, receiving a eulogy from Mao himself.

The following is from a beautiful text he wrote while in China, titled "Wounds":

It's the busiest month of the year for me, I shouldn't be on Twitter but I came just to address this meme bc it's driving me insane. I ignored it the 1st time I saw it bc I didn't take it seriously but I still see it being unironically shared around and just HAVE to address it. The placing of Chomsky next to Lenin & Marx is a bit weird since he's not very aligned with them, and he's already notorious for his "blue no matter who" stance so including him isn't very persuasive. The quote itself isn't persuasive either, as it assumes that the best way...

Imagine how different popular political opinion would be if people were taught real working class history. If they knew who fought for what. That it was, for example, mainly socialists and communists who fought for the weekend, for the 8 hour work day, for safety regulations. Let's take the example of racism, and ask yourself whose side you're on. A lot can be learned about a political movement by seeing who its enemies are. In the days of American slavery, defenders of slavery would attack abolitionists by calling them socialists and communists.

People who say that voting is the only, or most important, or most effective form of political action, would probably be very confused finding out about the women working at various factories in Lowell, Massachusetts in the 19th century. Lowell was a mill town, very significant in the Industrial Revolution. By 1840, its mills employed 8,000 workers, most of them women. The working women, fed up with poor working conditions, low wages, and proposals for further wage cuts and rent hikes, began organizing strikes.

Traditionalists under late capitalism are such an interesting symptom. They'll orient their ideals to things like kitschy American 50s advertisements, the very point of which is to create an ideal-ego for the consumer to identify with and then associate with a product.

https://twitter.com/Western_Trad/status/1272221721697886208

"The viewer "narcissistically identifies" with an image-repertoire that defines the ideological content of a period in history. ... Like all Lacanian identifications, this filmic experience produces a misrecognition. ...

Although it varies in content, reactionary ideology almost always shares structural similarities. First of all, there is the assumption of an already-existing, natural, well-functioning whole, which simultaneously serves as an ideal. Most commonly this is the nation-state. Then, to deflect blame from this perfect whole, all problems and dysfunctions are attributed to some parasite, some illegitimate invader coming in from the outside. The most obvious example is "the Jew". The idea is: if this parasite was eliminated, everything would be good.

I've been getting into Postone recently and it's everything I wanted from an interpretation of Marx. It highlights all the best about Marx as a critic, while bypassing many of the pitfalls of 20th century Marxism that were criticized by poststructuralists. Postone views Marx not as proposing a metanarrative, but as proposing a critique immanent to capitalism. Baudrillard criticized Marxism for unjustifiably positing the basis of capitalism (labor, productivism) as the basis of all societies.

In the 70s, workers in the UK occupied a Lucas Aerospace factory, striking for higher wages and job security. However, they decided that they no longer wanted to produce weapons, so the workforce collectively brainstormed for new production plans. Taking into account the available technology, skills, and resources, they drew up suggestions and plans for 150 different products, many eco-friendly, including wind turbines, energy-efficient heat pumps, and hybrid power packs for cars, which were groundbreaking at the time.

Sometimes people speak as if anti-essentialism is a relatively rare, or relatively recent, or exclusively postmodern, or exclusively leftist, idea. It’s not. Anti-essentialist views can be found throughout the history of Western philosophy. It's been associated with the left because debates about essentialism often occur in the context of race, gender, nationality, etc. For example, is gender something a person essentially is, or is it something constructed/performed/imposed/subject to change?

I’ve seen “market socialism” come back in popularity recently with figures like Richard Wolff, and as much as I appreciate him for popularizing aspects of Marxist theory, it’s something that I’m against, for the same reasons Marx was. The fundamental elements of capitalism are wage labor, capital accumulation, and generalized commodity production. A co-op economy abolishes none of these. It maintains the most harmful aspect of capitalism: production for profit, rather than for use.

A thread on the right-wing use of "postmodernists":

You might have noticed that JBP and his fans alternatively refer to Marxists, intersectional feminists, postcolonialists and even plain left-libs as "postmodernists". It clearly doesn't refer to any specific theoretical strand. Even when you point out how everything they know about postmodern theory is wrong, they just go "It doesn't matter, the practical consequences are the same". It's like acting like they have theoretical backing behind their label uses is just there to give those labels weight.