overview for afellowkid

Informal poll: What’s your favorite bird in c/comradeship@lemmygrad.ml

[-] afellowkid@lemmygrad.ml 2 points 6 months ago

Not sure of my favorite but check this out

As someone majoring in Communications studies, I'm trying to find a book that blends Communications and Marxism or Marxism-Leninism together. Does anyone have any recommendations on what to read? in c/communism@lemmygrad.ml

[-] afellowkid@lemmygrad.ml 2 points 7 months ago

I just found out about this guy today, and after a cursory look into his work, I thought of your post because it seems he is potentially covering this kind of thing, Prof. Oliver Boyd-Barrett. This page lists the courses he teaches as "The Political Economy of Mass Communication", "The Political Economy of Hollywood and the Press", and "Media Representation and Propaganda in Times of War and Terror". And when I looked him up he has books titled (for example) "Media Imperialism", "Approaches to Media", "Conflict Propaganda in Syria: Narrative Battles", "Western Mainstream Media and the Ukraine Crisis: A Study in Conflict Propaganda".

Considering that I only just now found out about him, I can't exactly vouch for his work, but he wrote this 2021 article about Ukraine which is how I found him.

*Permanently Deleted* in c/communism@lemmygrad.ml

[-] afellowkid@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 1 year ago

Regarding your announcement--thank you OP for starting up this project, I looked forward to it each week that it went on, and appreciated seeing everyone's reflections on the texts. I also liked the simple format and gradual pace. I hope everything works out well with your IRL needs and commitments. Take care!

My study response--As last week I found myself unable to answer the study questions quickly enough, I am going to go with a bit more of a free-form response this time so I don't end up taking too long to participate. And since I barely participated last thread, I'm just going to make my reply this time be about the text as a whole.

If anyone sees errors in my response, please let me know. I'm not trying to write authoritatively but rather to check my understanding and see whether I can summarize a few of the major points.

Response

I think a quote from early on in this work seems to summarize one of the major points Marx is making throughout the text. He writes: "If the silk-worm's object in spinning were to prolong its existence as caterpillar, it would be a perfect example of a wage-worker." (Ch. 2)

In other words, it's as if a silk-worm is spinning not to become a moth, but to just keep spinning and spinning, generating silk indefinitely to remain a caterpillar indefinitely. I believe Marx is likening this to the process of the wage-worker surrendering their value-creating labor-power to the capitalist class, whose interest it is to make this relationship become only more deeply entrenched and prolonged, and therefore uses the value generated by the worker's surrendered labor-power to deepen and expand the system of wage-labor under bourgeois dictatorship. As the silk-worm metaphor implies, this is not the most sensible way of doing things from a worker's perspective. Normally, the silk worm would spin its silk to then use it to eventually undergo transformation into a moth. Likewise, it's implied that a worker would use their labor-power to create value the worker themself can actually access and benefit from, bringing a transformation in the mode of production, bringing society to a new stage.

In Chapter 8, Marx talks about the implications of the worker's real wages versus the worker's relative wages. Speaking of rises in real wages over time, Marx writes: "the more speedily the worker augments the wealth of the capitalist, the larger will be the crumbs which fall to him"--however, even if real wages are rising with profits, when we look at relative wages, we see "a widening of the social chasm that divides the worker from the capitalist, and increase in the power of capital over labour, a greater dependence of labour upon capital." (Ch. 8) As usual, Marx is calling our attention to the relationships between things. Rather than just look at a line representing real wages go up, we need to pay attention to the growing gap between wages and profits and the implication that this has for the relative social positions of workers and capitalists:

If capital grows rapidly, wages may rise, but the profit of capital rises disproportionately faster. The material position of the worker has improved, but at the cost of his social position. The social chasm that separates him from the capitalist has widened. (Ch. 8)

Toward the end of this work, in the end of Chapter 8 and throughout Chapter 9, Marx turns his attention to explaining the overall effects that the growth of productive capital has on wages, the need for expanded markets, and on causing the competition between workers to intensify:

This war [of capitalists among themselves] has the peculiarity that the battles in it are won less by recruiting than by discharging the army of workers. The generals [the capitalists] vie with one another as to who can discharge the greatest number of industrial soldiers.

[...] The more productive capital grows, the more it extends the division of labour and the application of machinery; the more the division of labour and the application of machinery extend, the more does competition extend among the workers, the more do their wages shrink together. [...] the forest of outstretched arms, begging for work, grows ever thicker, while the arms themselves grow ever leaner.

...I have spent more time on this than I originally meant to, and so I need to end here. As I mentioned above, please point out any errors in my understanding, as this is just me writing to try and see whether I understood the text well or not and whether I could identify (some) of the text's main points.

Thanks again OP, I'm glad you started this study group.

CIA is hosting a podcast to whitewash their organization in c/genzedong@lemmygrad.ml

[-] afellowkid@lemmygrad.ml 0 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Listened to ep. 1.

tl;dr: Thank you for your service o7o7o7o7 9/11 never forget Soldier Protecting Sleeping Child Meme

Their first guest was the current CIA director. Basically they all just talked about how the CIA has made countless hidden sacrifices for the American people and that while their failures are widely publicized, the dedicated sacrifices they make and the danger they face is hardly known, they talked about the ~~CIA gender neutral bathroom~~ CIA Memorial Wall of their fallen comrades and got excited about how its the CIA's 75th birthday and how Biden came to their birthday party, then congratulated themselves for saying "Russia bad" before this year and for doing the Ayman al-Zawahiri drone strike and how it brings justice for 9/11 victims etc. and said how "generations" of CIA personnel have been keeping Americans safe, thanked the CIA director for his service, oohed and aahed at his life story, etc. Talked about how they are now recruiting Mandarin speakers for their new China department. They also praised the CIA for its dedication to protecting America and stressed in particular that the CIA is "apolitical".

Arguing with anticommunists is so pointless in c/comradeship@lemmygrad.ml

[-] afellowkid@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Undecided people are generally the most willing to really listen.

Once people begin down a path of having an opinion on something, it becomes harder to change their view. This is because of mechanisms in the brain that automatically activate when we make difficult choices, mechanisms that serve to resolve cognitive dissonance. As the abstract of this study states: "A choice between two similarly valued alternatives creates psychological tension (cognitive dissonance) that is reduced by a post-decisional reevaluation of the alternatives." In other words, when we see two options that both seem somewhat reasonable, but must choose only one, we experience cognitive dissonance. The brain kicks in to resolve this dissonance, creating positive associations with the choice we made and creating negative associations with the choice we rejected.

What happens when we encounter dissonance-generating information about the choice we now prefer, our brain once again tries to solve the dissonance, by becoming less responsive to information that doesn't conform to one's already held beliefs, with certain areas of our brain failing to activate when we encounter dissonance-inducing information (such as disagreement or facts that go against our position). To put it simply, we respond very actively and positively when something confirms our beliefs (resolving dissonance), and respond somewhat negatively or impassively when something contradicts our beliefs, or even double-down and tune out dissonant information, to a degree that is measurable on brain scans. (Here is a thread I made about this a while back.)

I am not an expert on psychology or neurology, I just decided recently to study up on experimental psychology and neurology regarding things like decision-making, confirmation bias, forming opinions, etc. and soon I want to do some study into what happens to people psychologically/neurologically while in cults, as well as other organizations such as religions or political parties. My reason for doing this is to become better at communicating with people who have really entrenched themselves in a certain stance and have a fact-repellant mechanism going on. So far the main thing I have seen mentioned alongside studies into this kind of thing, is that because people are more responsive at a neurological level, to agreement, it is a decent strategy to begin such arguments by agreeing with them in some way, and I imagine it's also a good strategy to give people room to deal with their cognitive dissonance as it is generally a subconscious mechanism that actually makes it measurably harder for them to respond to facts. However, I know from experience it's very hard to be patient enough to do this, especially when the person is being combative or holds a very bad position, so I understand simply not engaging with ideologically entrenched people and focusing more on undecided people (which is generally what I do, and I think it is worthwhile and effective for people to do so).

However I hope that in the future, through a scientific understanding, I can develop a strategy for reaching people who are not just the middle, "undecided" types but that can also reach toward more ideologically entrenched people when I do run into them and have the time and energy needed to deal with their dissonance response on a case-by-case basis.