sometimes i'll read articles that take multiple paragraphs to explore something marx said and after slogging through it i'm just like "oh you mean like how it feels to be a service worker. ok, thanks"
sometimes i feel like relying on dead academics for discursive pretext just makes your shit inaccessible
> [five paragraphs about "alienated labor"]
< oh so like
< how it feels to do meaningless busywork at the behest of people who don't care whether you live or die so you can eat
< yeah that needed five paragraphs to explain
look maybe i'm oversimplifying here but pretty much everything marx wrote about is just how our daily lives work now. there's no need to mire the things we live every day in texts over a century and a half old. what do you gain? what clarity does it add?
i'm gonna live to see the communist manifesto's 200th birthday (fingers crossed)
@garbados which reminds me: i keep asking
what, exactly, does capitalism predict?
https://glitch.social/@meena/100669603553488267
nobody's answered it yet
@garbados Because if you can name it you can begin to understand it collectively. Language is a tool of collective consciousness.
@dredmorbius@mastodon.cloud@garbados Realising that it's more than just evil people or some vast conspiracy is helpful.
That clicked for me reading the first few paragraphs of A.H.M. Jones, "Augustus":
43 BCE, but it could have been 1848, 1970, or 2018.
There's something systemic here. And understanding that might help.
@dredmorbius @garbados
A qualified defense of using old academic terms: it ties you into the longer general tradition of thought about a subject, so that you know what key word to look for elsewhere.
Like, Society of the Spectacle & Simulacra and Simulation are two great tastes that taste great together, but in order to synthesize the two together you need to translate terminology from Debordisms to Baudrillardisms, & those have independent traditions.
@dredmorbius @garbados
In this way, it's useful to stockpile terms.
Lots of people regularly independently rediscover widespread situations, name them something different, and then write overlapping but non-identical things about them. A very straightforward way to produce new insights is to synthesize two traditions that don't talk to each other much, and then rephrase it for an audience that's part of a third tradition.
@dredmorbius @garbados
Also I should clarify:
Synthesizing different traditions isn't necessarily a part of class consciousness. The author of (say) a Teen Vogue explainer on marxism needs to know how to code switch, but the reader isn't necessarily going to go any deeper into the discourse.
Some folks need to keep on top of the different strains of philosophy, and some folks only need to have enough of a familiarity to enact it.
@garbados
Conspicuous consumption of labour : making other people do pointless jobs just to show how rich you are.
This is the origin of ironing, starched clothes, white clothes, and a whole lot more.