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Post videos you genuinely enjoy and want to share, duh. Celebrate the diversity of interests shared by chapochatters by posting a deep dive into Venetian kelp farming, I dunno. Also media criticism, bite-sized versions of left-wing theory, all the stuff you expected. But I am curious about that kelp farming thing now that you mentioned it.
Low effort / spam videos might be removed, especially weeb content.
There is a cytube that you can paste videos into and watch with whoever happens to be around. It's open submission unless there's something important to commandeer it with at the time.
A weekly watch party happens every Saturday (Sunday down under), with video nominations Saturday-Monday, voting Monday-Thursday. See the pin for whatever stage it's currently in.
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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)
Much of Marx, Engels, Stalin, Mao, and other diamat theorists' writing is specifically written to attack the idealist/metaphysical world outlook. I think that it's clear that they are making claims about the nature of reality, because the point of the philosophy falls a bit flat otherwise. But they're also committed to ruthless criticism of their own ideas and (at least in the best case) improve the theory when new contradictions appear; I don't think that it's likely that revolutionary movements in the near future will change their philosophical positions to accommodate religious people, but I guess you're also right that the usefulness of the model is really the only thing that has to be constant about it.
i 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.