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Psychology has a repeatability problem. Turns out Zimbardo wasn’t completely honest about how hands-off the researchers were. The Stanford Prison Experiment is the latest famous experiment in psychology that is proving difficult to reproduce.

I remember learning about this in school and the point being driven home: humans are selfish, and the only thing holding society together is a fragile veneer of civility, ready to burst free the moment no one is looking.

What does a selfish human species imply about society? It means that any vision of a community-oriented society, any revolution or reformation that purports to progress beyond a free capitalist market system in order to end capitalist exploitation, is naïve — nay, illogical.

Science has long been regarded as a pure discipline, abstracted from any particular society because of its faithful empiricism. Leftists ought to keep in mind that science, as with all knowledge, has a social character which cannot be separated from its time and place, and not therefore from politics. Science is a tool which may be wielded for technological progress within an egalitarian society, but by the same token may be used to lend authority to a ruling class who almost exclusively possess the means by which that science is carried out.

”[T]he human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.” —Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach

Anemone here

I watched Mandela: Son of Africa, Father of a Nation over the weekend and was kinda bummed by it. I was hoping for more insight into the revolution: how the revolutionaries made decisions, how and who kept the movement alive while he was in prison, what was the theoretical basis for their actions. Instead, it was more of an encyclopedic timeline summary of events, as if things just happened for no reason. Then of course Mandela’s election is presented as perhaps the most important result of the liberation struggle, not yknow the ending of apartheid.

Can anyone suggest a documentary on the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa that focuses on the revolutionary organization efforts?

Another banger from Radhika Desai, Michael Hudson, and Pepe Escobar. These three regularly appear together on various leftist media and are among the most accessible English speaking Marxist lecturers active right now.

This channel, Global University for Sustainability seems great so far, though I haven’t watched many of their videos yet.

Another channel these three appear on is Geopolitical Economy Report by Ben Norton, highly recommend that one too.

Source

Palestinians rallying for liberation: "this is just like the Nazis"

Right-wing Israeli party rallying for imperialism and genocide: "this is democracy"

The metaphorical “what if we killed Hitler before he became Hitler”

In studying history, we are restricted by practicality to study only such things that concretely happened. Surely this leads to something like survivorship bias, so we could be placing undue scientific emphasis on things which were unlikely given material conditions, yet occurred nonetheless.

Therefore some level of speculation is necessary I think, in order to learn from the things which went right due to the non-occurrence of events. Like the eternal dilemma of system admins, the proof of their usefulness is nothing happening, things not breaking, which in turn appears as proof that they were unnecessary in the first place.

Best I can come up with is the handful of averted nuclear deployments during the Cold War, but those are fairly well known.

Israel, I mean. For about 20 minutes in 1948 they were nonviolent, but then they weren’t, and here we are

Clickbait title in response to this dunk tank thread from today

The comments contain snark due to the comm they are in, so I wanted a more serious post on what Hexbears think about the question.

While in specific contexts it may be useful to define socialism one way or another, or to identify empirically how the average person understands the word socialism, it is in general a waste of time, if not entirely misguided for leftists attempt a universal definition of socialism.

Most of us have heard the famous excerpt from German Ideology:

”Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.”

It is worth taking a moment, even if you have read it before, to reflect on what Marx says here. One may read it as mere emphasis, a shift in focus away from static definitions and toward progress.

But it is more than emphasis. The point is that communism — which Marx tended to use synonymously with socialism although Lenin later drew a harder line — does not need defining, because it is not an abstract thing but a concrete process.

Socialism is defined by what it negates (productively, as in Hegelian sublation). Socialism has no universal definition because a socialist movement does not negate capitalism in the abstract, but a real historical capitalist society, in a real time and place. It is a dialectical process in which the contradictions within a determined and concrete present state give rise to a new, as yet indeterminate state, whose determination depends on the historical events yet to unfold.

It is true that socialists generally fight for worker ownership of the means of production. Marxists, however, are not deluded into believing they can make this happen through force of will alone. It must happen through this dialectical process. Humans may be determined by their material conditions, but humans also possess the ability to change their material conditions, through revolution:

”The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of changed circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men who change circumstances and that the educator must himself be educated. Hence this doctrine is bound to divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society. The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-change [Selbstveränderung] can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.”

If socialism were to have a universal definition, it would be the productive negation of a particular capitalist reality, peculiar to the time and place in which it occurs.

Avoid dogma, avoid definitions. It is what Marx would have wanted. He told me.