if I believe the current capitalist system is failing us, and that some form socialism is the way to emancipate us, and yet all I do is post all day instead of doing praxis, does it mean anything at all?
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Didn’t Marx say, practice without theory is blind; theory without practice is sterile?
He also said
The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.
Mao also addresses this in On Practice
Marxists hold that man’s social practice alone is the criterion of the truth of his knowledge of the external world. What actually happens is that man’s knowledge is verified only when he achieves the anticipated results in the process of social practice (material production, class struggle or scientific experiment). If a man wants to succeed in his work, that is, to achieve the anticipated results, he must bring his ideas into correspondence with the laws of the objective external world; if they do not correspond, he will fail in his practice. After he fails, he draws his lessons, corrects his ideas to make them correspond to the laws of the external world, and can thus turn failure into success; this is what is meant by “failure is the mother of success” and “a fall into the pit, a gain in your wit”. The dialectical-materialist theory of knowledge places practice in the primary position, holding that human knowledge can in no way be separated from practice and repudiating all the erroneous theories which deny the importance of practice or separate knowledge from practice. Thus Lenin said, “Practice is higher than (theoretical) knowledge, for it has not only the dignity of universality, but also of immediate actuality.” The Marxist philosophy of dialectical materialism has two outstanding characteristics. One is its class nature: it openly avows that dialectical materialism is in the service of the proletariat. The other is its practicality: it emphasizes the dependence of theory on practice, emphasizes that theory is based on practice and in turn serves practice. The truth of any knowledge or theory is determined not by subjective feelings, but by objective results in social practice. Only social practice can be the criterion of truth. The standpoint of practice is the primary and basic standpoint in the dialectical materialist theory of knowledge.
Marx sure posted a lot. Posting is praxis.
I thought Kant said that
For Kant its: “Without sensibility no object would be given to us, and without understanding none would be thought. Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.” In The Transcendental Logic section of The Critique Of Pure Reason. Marx definitely riffed on that famous quote somewhere, but I can’t be bother to find it right now; I guess its kind of an example of how Marx & Engels turned idealism on its head into dialectical materialism so to speak: not a duality between objects of perception and the concepts of the mind, but between our understanding of the world & and our actions within it. Anyways, as others have pointed out a more apt way of putting it is Marx’s final these on Fueurbach in my opinion.
I see very similar quotes attributed to him, so maybe.
I mean technically posting is propaganda which is definitely better than nothing
It was only due to the terminally online nerds at r/GZD that helped me find the truth amongst all the propaganda
And I bet most people here who do organize were probably radicalized because of some online stuff they read
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Posting is praxis tho. Even if you don’t personally organize in a structure, you can contribute by providing psychological support for others and helping to radicalize or correct through political education.
I do recommend joining an org, though. Not to assuage any praxis guilt, but to become familiar with what people are doing in your area and to become better-situated to take action.
No, but you probably have acted on it without realizing. Have you ever given food or money to a homeless person? To me, this is a quintessential “this person might have the soul of a communist” action that your average person can do (and would presumably feel compelled to do) without having an organization backing them, or without strong theoretical knowledge, etc.
As people are also saying, you can consider posting to be a form of propaganda, although I personally get a “bullshit cope-ass shit” vibe from that line. Like, I can’t really disagree, insofar as it has to be better to just have those ideas and sentiments out there at all rather than not, but I dunno dawg, a lot of people’s posts actually suck ass and aren’t what I would consider good propaganda (mine too, just saying), and posting is just so fucking lame that I don’t want to give it much credit I guess.
Yeah, hard disagree with the “posting is praxis/propoganda” takes on here. It strikes me as an incredibly cynical sort of solipsism.
Two people set out to build a small airplane by themselves.
One immediately went to the backyard and start building shit, despite having no fundamental understanding of physics other than knowing that the goal is to be able to fly.
The other instead went to get an engineering degree, and along the way discuss their ideas with others in the field, improving the good designs, eliminating the bad ones, and using the knowledge they learned to apply to this project.
Who do you think will succeed first?
Sometimes you don’t need to win the game by 100 points, you just need to win. Most of us already have enough knowledge to get started.
I will remind you that many communes and socialist uprisings had been attempted, even before Marx’s times, and I urge you to seek out why so many had failed, and only those who followed the path of scientific socialism has ever achieved some form of lasting success.
The emphasis here is to approach this in a scientific manner, to understand the dynamics and inner workings of capitalism, how it had changed since the past century, and only then, can we really have a realistic chance of defeating capitalism and surviving the ensuing counter-revolutions.
I’m not telling you not to read theory. I think it’s important. But you can’t expect everyone to be a scholar of theory. In any examples of successful and enduring revolutions you can cite, you will absolutely find that the masses of people involved did not hold advanced degrees (or equivalent knowledge) of socialist theory. Material conditions precipitate the revolution. You are quite right about defeating the counterrevolution-- that requires strong leadership grounded in solid theory, to maintain the material conditions necessary to satisfy the people, of whom relatively few will ever be scholars.
The engineer still needs to actually build the plane.
Back to the OP, an engineer that never builds planes is ideology without action.
Both [Wright] brothers attended high school, but did not receive diplomas. The family’s abrupt move in 1884 from Richmond, Indiana, to Dayton, Ohio, where the family had lived during the 1870s, prevented Wilbur from receiving his diploma after finishing four years of high school. The diploma was awarded posthumously to Wilbur on April 16, 1994, which would have been his 127th birthday.[27] Orville dropped out of high school after his junior year to start a printing business in 1889, having designed and built his own printing press with Wilbur’s help. Wilbur joined the print shop, and in March the brothers launched a weekly newspaper, the West Side News. Subsequent issues listed Orville as publisher and Wilbur as editor on the masthead.
you probably do more than you realize
Potential energy is different from kinetic energy. One does not alleviate the need for the other.
