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What's the Point of Studying Marxism-Leninism? (hexbear.net)

submitted 5 months ago by RedBear@hexbear.net to c/askchapo@hexbear.net

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I've read the Communist Manifesto and found myself agreeing with the ideas presented. However, I'm left wondering: what's the real point of studying Marxism-Leninism more deeply? It feels like the principles are clear, and it's unlikely that a deeper understanding of them will lead to significant change.

It seems to me that content creators, like those from podcasts like Deprogram, have a more direct influence on people's perspectives today. So, I'm curious, why should we invest time in studying these ideologies when there are more immediate ways to engage with and affect the world? What benefits can understanding Marxism-Leninism actually provide in today's context?

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[–] ChaosMaterialist@hexbear.net 5 points 5 months ago

It's one thing to understand an idea, and another to put it into practice. However waiting for workers to do the reading themselves individually is Waiting for Godot. Podcasts don't spread themselves. We must be the vanguard for these ideas. Antionio Gramsci :gramsci-heh: advocated for the creation of Popular universities where people would educate their fellows for this reason. We must make the ideas presented as self-evident in others as it does in ourselves. Podcasts/Breadtube/etc can be useful here because they can condense a complex idea into an easily digestible nugget. I keep a couple of playlists full of them so I can out-of-pocket share one that is relevant to some discussion I'm having in the real world. By design media is not a dialectic; people cannot converse with the author directly. Through study we can embody these ideas and bring them into a full conversation, a dialectic, with others.

In order to teach, you must gain both an understanding of the material and the honest good-faith questions/objections raised. It will also educate you on the bad-faith and wrecker arguments so you aren't hijacked. At the same time the powers-that-be won't simply give up power, so we must be educated in how they respond to the growing sentiment. I can personally attest that studying the materials instantly outs the bullshit arguments and bad-faith commentators. How would we know if a particular Podcaster or YouTuber isn't :fedposting: unless we also have an understanding of the theory?

An example would be the two day pizza counterargument frequently used by anti-communists against labor theory of value, which is countered by Marx in the first chapter of Capital in one paragraph.

Some people might think that if the value of a commodity is determined by the quantity of labour spent on it, the more idle and unskilful the labourer, the more valuable would his commodity be, because more time would be required in its production. The labour, however, that forms the substance of value, is homogeneous human labour, expenditure of one uniform labour power. The total labour power of society, which is embodied in the sum total of the values of all commodities produced by that society, counts here as one homogeneous mass of human labour power, composed though it be of innumerable individual units. Each of these units is the same as any other, so far as it has the character of the average labour power of society, and takes effect as such; that is, so far as it requires for producing a commodity, no more time than is needed on an average, no more than is socially necessary. The labour time socially necessary is that required to produce an article under the normal conditions of production, and with the average degree of skill and intensity prevalent at the time. The introduction of power-looms into England probably reduced by one-half the labour required to weave a given quantity of yarn into cloth. The hand-loom weavers, as a matter of fact, continued to require the same time as before; but for all that, the product of one hour of their labour represented after the change only half an hour’s social labour, and consequently fell to one-half its former value.

Or the counter for the "mud pizza" anti-communist argument:

A commodity is, in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another. The nature of such wants, whether, for instance, they spring from the stomach or from fancy, makes no difference.[2] Neither are we here concerned to know how the object satisfies these wants, whether directly as means of subsistence, or indirectly as means of production.
...
The utility of a thing makes it a use value.[4] But this utility is not a thing of air. Being limited by the physical properties of the commodity, it has no existence apart from that commodity. A commodity, such as iron, corn, or a diamond, is therefore, so far as it is a material thing, a use value, something useful. This property of a commodity is independent of the amount of labour required to appropriate its useful qualities.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm

Finally big reason for theory is to learn what others did historically. If somebody wrote an instruction booklet for a successful Revolution wouldn't you want to read it? At the same time a (depressing, demoralizing) number of people are dead going down the wrong path, and we the living would like to avoid that fate. There is also just as many paths that go in circles, to the exhaustion of workers and delight of the ruling class, that we want to avoid. The ultimate purpose of theory is to motivate us into a correct action; aka Praxis.