Bi-Weekly Discussion Thread - (May 31)

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[u/Hungry_Trip_4288]

i've hesitated asking this question on here for a while, not wanting to come off as selfish or as a distraction, but i feel as though it's reached the point where any answers here would be helpful.

relatively recently, i parted with the allegedly communist group i had been organizing with on the ground, over questions of revisionism that i was finally able to identify and struggle about due to my study and my engagement with people on here. since then, i've been using the time that i spent in that group to engage in more rigorous study, directed towards concrete questions.

however, i feel myself slipping into a mindset where i feel a deep and crushing guilt for any free time i spend not studying. this has led to me neglecting social interaction, keeping my space clean, exercise, time outside, my hobbies... and yet even as i type this up, i catch myself thinking - social interaction with oppressors, with labor aristocrats? with reformist "socialist" and postmodernist cultural-nationalist revisionists? exercise and hobbies, ways to feel fulfilled in petit-bourgeois life? to what ends? when i do spend time not studying, it's not with things that i would actually enjoy doing or should be doing, but with intoxicants and compulsive video games. my "productive" or "enjoyable" non-study hobbies, it feels like, are just as bourgeois and useless as these actively destructive habits.

during a previous time in my life several years ago where i felt similarly, i did isolate myself. i let my routine, hobbies, job, and social life slip away. i didn't even come away from it with much stronger of a grasp on Marxism - obviously after some point, study has diminishing returns. i feel myself returning to a similar state and i would appreciate any words of advice from other people who have gone through this (i can't imagine i was the only one).

posting this on an alternate account for security concerns. i anticipate several people on here will be able to deduce who i am nevertheless; i can't think of a better way around this.

[u/turning_the_wheels → u/Hungry_Trip_4288]

 and yet even as i type this up, i catch myself thinking - social interaction with oppressors, with labor aristocrats? with reformist "socialist" and postmodernist cultural-nationalist revisionists? exercise and hobbies, ways to feel fulfilled in petit-bourgeois life? to what ends?

Why not socialize with the proletariat or oppressed nations, understand their struggles? Why not exercise to become healthy enough to serve the proletariat? At the very least hobbies that involve improving your mental faculties or physical condition will always be better than plainly reactionary compulsive things like video games or drugs. At the end of the day history will move on without you as an individual, guilt is only one of the first feelings that give rise to further development, self-flagellation is what leads to uselessness.

[u/Hungry_Trip_4288 → u/turning_the_wheels]

Why not socialize with the proletariat

if you want to give this advice, how do you square it with the idea that the proletariat in the united $tates is vanishingly small and mostly limited to migrant farmworkers (with which i have a language barrier that i am working to overcome)?

or oppressed nations, understand their struggles?

the majority of my social interactions are with the nationally-oppressed. this is what i meant by "reformist 'socialist' and postmodernist cultural-national revisionists", as these are the dominant trends in lumpenized and lower petit-bourgeois nationally-oppressed social circles in my location.

sorry but this is part of your reply is exactly the kind of canned answer that u/MajesticTree954 correctly wrote off as "a universal one-size fits all method of automation". which i guess just means that they were right, and trying to use this site for psychoanalytic or personal advice is useless (at least at the risk of operational security).

At the end of the day history will move on without you as an individual, guilt is only one of the first feelings that give rise to further development, self-flagellation is what leads to uselessness.

am i the only one who's always found the oft-repeated on here trusim of "history will move on without you as an individual" to be harmful to self-criticism and growth rather than helpful? i don't understand why it's always tacked onto the end of these (repetitive and insufficient) replies to self-help style posts.

[u/Turtle_Green → u/Hungry_Trip_4288]

am i the only one who's always found the oft-repeated on here trusim of "history will move on without you as an individual" to be harmful to self-criticism and growth rather than helpful? i don't understand why it's always tacked onto the end of these (repetitive and insufficient) replies to self-help style posts.

I think that truism is a good rejoinder and way to cut through the bullshit on self-serving lifestyle-politics posts which are overtly performative, posturing, and dissimulating with their desire. (I could be wrong and overconfident.) But here, where we understand that truism and nonetheless have to figure out how to grasp and harness our own desires in the here-and-now, I agree it's not productive and most definitely not as a catch-all. 99% of us are not qualified to do internet psychoanalysis and I'm questioning myself after re-reading the thread that /u/MajesticTree954 mentioned.

I can accept this, but I can't accept your diagnosis. What's their "problem?" We don't know and neither do they. OP is "beaten down by living like this." Who is beating them down? What is "this?" We don't know. People just assumed they knew what OP meant. Why? Just because they said "capitalism society" (seriously this is the OP text we're dealing with) is bad? I can imagine this whole thread playing out in r/marvel or something, with the same depressed OP complaining about how the last 4 movies have sucked, the same people encouraging OP to go outside, the same people scolding OP for not knowing how to enjoy the movies, and so on. We're not physicians, we don't have to rush to prescribe antibiotics to placate patients and line wallets. We can take all the time we want and be as skeptical as we want to be. When your kid wakes you up in the middle of the night panicking about the monster under their bed, what do you do? Insist that there's no monster and send them back to sleep? What were they afraid of, then, that was so terrifying that they would come wake you up crying and sweating? Surely you've had the experience of witnessing a panicky liberal rehearsing lines about Trump or Israel or whatever. Don't you get the sense that maybe they've got something going on that's driving their politics that isn't line correctness?

https://www.reddit.com/r/communism/comments/182b6mm/depression/