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submitted 6 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) by edie@lemmy.encryptionin.space to c/soviet@hexbear.net

Hello everynyan, we're finally going to start reading This Soviet World.

Week 1 we are reading "On Interpreting a World" and Chapter 1: "The plan for Remaking the World."

EPUB, and link to a PDF, of the book can be found on Comrade's Library. If you find problems with the EPUB tell me and I will fix it. Dessalines has made an audio book.


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[-] RedWizard@hexbear.net 8 points 4 days ago

It is deeply frustrating sometimes, to try to convince someone of an insight you feel so strongly; to feel a guilt, as though if you could only explain it better that your friend will understand what you mean. But sometimes it does not matter, there may not be any set of words that will make a person understand. Only experience can.

This is so true, and also what a great analogy! At some point, there is no explaining the rules, you just have to see them in action, or brushed up against them as you try to play the game. It is true that once you've understood just how much property regulates the way you live, it's impossible to ignore. Just as a small example from my own life recently: My SO was watching a YouTube video of someone house hunting, something on to pass the time while she worked, but it was almost impossible for either of us to enjoy because of just how extravagant the whole ordeal was. You can basically write off the entire HGTV catalog as a Marxist, all you see is wealth trading hands.

The line about truth is also one of my favorites.

Whether the world is to be changed by trying one at a time to improve human beings or by changing the social environment that makes human beings

Yeah, this is a real killer thought. I think about stuff like this all the time. What would I be like if I just had more time? What kind of son, husband, father, co-worker, friend, or community member would I be if the society I lived in [afforded me the time to/was centered around] [improve/improving] myself in each of those roles I play? How much more could I be doing, then what I'm doing right now? There is this ever-present feeling of ennui within capitalist life that I believe is created from this feeling of never having enough time for the things you need to do and the things you want to do. Mark Fisher describes this well in Capitalist Realism, when he talks about the "centerlessness" of capitalism.

"The call center experience distils the political phenomenology of late capitalism: the boredom and frustration punctuated by cheerily piped PR, the repeating of the same dreary details many times to different poorly trained and badly informed operatives, the building rage that must remain impotent because it can have no legitimate object".

"As a consumer in late capitalism, you increasingly exist in two, distinct realities: the one in which services are provided without hitch, and another reality entirely, the crazed Kafkaesque labyrinth of call centers, a world without memory, where cause and effect connect together in mysterious, unfathomable ways"

It's this endless clerical work, a world of black boxes and rotating faces full of amnesia that drains minutes, or hours, of your "free time" each week. It's death by a thousand cuts, this endless tedium that bleeds your energy and will to seek your own personal improvement. You spend two hours driving every day to work and home, 8 hours minimum working (often more). Most of the jobs you do for those hours can amount to being a middle man between two other people, emailing back and forth, stitching two pieces of data together, so someone else can look at it. Only for you to spend your off time, calling insurance companies, calling doctor's offices, performing the maintenance of your own life. I think its part of the reason the capitalist world fears remote work so much. They know that the illusion of "necessary labor time" vanishes the second you can perform your assigned duties outside the confines of their controlled space, where the hawks circle over head. My SO can only garden in our front yard, because she has two work from home days a week, in the summer its three!

Anyway, I could keep going!

this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2026
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