How many times are you gonna ask basically the same question?
this post was submitted on 13 Apr 2026
40 points (83.3% liked)
No Stupid Questions
47680 readers
843 users here now
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Until someone links them to a tiktok account that breaks down marxism into 15 sec soundbytes they can understand.
God forbid OP try and make an effort to learn about something... that's too much bro.
read engels
Read "The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists" by Robert Tressell. Or, if reading a book is too difficult, there's a graphic novel version I think.
You could try out a DSA book club. They sometimes read through fiction books that are much more entertaining than straight up economic theory (...for some) then everyone discusses. It's a very approachable way to start understanding marxist/leftist socioeconomic ideas. Link: Reading Groups
What if I prefer to study from the comfort of my bedroom? Just asking.
Most of them are virtual groups - no need to leave the bed!
There is no reason to study Marx other than you find it interesting or because it relates to something your interested in. There is very little utility in knowing the theory.
Marx was a genius similar to Freud. They changed the way we think and gave us new tools to examine the world. Beyond that, their particular ideals are often as wrong as two left shoes.
There is plenty of room on the left for people who reject, or are ignorant of Marx.
Dam, great reply
Read Kayanerenko:wa The Great Law of Peace. It's political theory from the Indigenous people that gave Engels the idea for communism.
Get your communism straight from the source, don't settle for the cheap European knockoff.
No, I meant this: https://www.booktopia.com.au/kayanerenk-wa-kayanesenh-paul-williams/book/9780887558214.html
That one looks like a very direct legal explanation of the law, which will be less useful to non-Haudenosaunee, because it doesn't explain everything to a novice level. Kayanesenh spends a long time explaining the fundamentals to the reader, and goes on a lot of tangents about some very important philosophy.
I get a “403 forbidden” error for that link. But thanks for steering me away from something I definitely wouldn’t have been able to finish.
I don't like Amazon but I'll have to resort to their site https://www.amazon.com.au/Kayanerenk%C3%B3-WA-Great-Law-Peace/dp/0887558216
Thank! Using that I was able to find a local seller who ships internationally https://www.kennys.ie/shop/kayanerenko-wa-the-great-law-of-peace-williams-kayanesenh-9780887558214
Which indigenous people?
Which indigenous people?
The Haudenosaunee (People of the Longhouse) on Turtle Island (North America), commonly known as the Iroquois.
You can... read Marx? Or find a podcast about him?
It's economics, "boring" or "dry" kinda comes with the package
If you want sexy you can try Che Guevara or Max Stirner (lol good luck)
Do you mean Marxism-Leninism? Thats what most people mean when they say Marxism, but there are lots of us who appreciate Marx and disagree with the trajectory his namesake took.
I don't mean Marxism-Leninism, I mean regular Marxism
If you want to explore classical Marxist ideas in an entertaining way, check out Michael Burns on YouTube. He used to run the channel Wisecrack and makes videos about philosophy, and he is a classical Marxist who talks a lot about Marx and Engels. That being said, these days you're not going to find much discussion of Marx that doesn't cover Marxism-Leninism in some way.
For clarity MLism was reverse engineered by Stalin to justify the violent oppression of the working class, it spread to other regimes that wanted to justify the same, but Lenin didn't have a lot to do with it.
Correct
There were still problems with Lenin imo but im just an anarchist, we all got killed or gulag'd
I heard Lenin decided to hold an election, didn't like the results, and decided to switch to a one party state after the election.
Also just get into anarchism instead. Anarchists are always sexy.
Stupid sexy anarchist.
Idk. I've always experienced that people who claim to be anarchists are just libertarians in hiding.
Anarchosyndicalism, not anarchocapitalism (it's funny the the autocorrect changes this to avariciousness). The former is left wing. The other is Ayn Rand.
I don't know what to do about that
Ive met tons of anarchists who had a firm grasp of anti-capitalism
It's easy to get that impression on Lemmy, but if you come to https://soulism.net/ you can read a manifesto from anarchists so far left that some anarchists refuse to believe in us.
there's a chick whose videos get posted on ~~videos@lemmy.ml~~ hexbear, I don't remember her name but it should be something super obvious. She seems to know not just the theory but also a lot about Russia in the period of time it was written in.
Also there's this guy on youtube called Andrewism. He interprets a lot of theory for adaptation in the future and for building community now where he lives. He's pretty cool.
edit: links
Very interesting, did not know about either, thanks!
I would start with Duck Soup.
Which Marx Brother is your favorite?
I really like Harpo
Things seeming boring and dry is your mind telling you that you're trying to learn something that isn't interesting to you. Fancy tricks to hide that core truth won't undo it.
Why do you think you want to learn Marxist theory? To have status among leftists? Go punch a Nazi. To understand modern or historical leftists? Their actions aren't guided by Marxist theory. To have status among political theorists, economists, and liberals? Lol. Lmao even.
To gleam a better way to have a succesful revolution that results in a better society? Okay, cool, do you have a community of people that won't starve to death within days of trade being cut off? If no, congratulations, now you know all Marxist theory that you need to know until you do have such a community.
While I do strongly oppose fascism in all forms, call me a liberal hippie (Hi, liberal hippie!), but I prefer not to fight, and violence is NOT a good tactic. However if I do know martial arts, and some fascist hooligan comes at me, I would probably kick their ass in self-defense.
I'm looking to study socialist theory because I'm getting very sick and tired of capitalism going unchecked, as well as the conditions of the very archaic bourgeois-capitalist system that enable people to push others around because of who they are.
Do you have a community of people that won’t starve to death within days of trade being cut off?
I assume you're talking about the famines that happened in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin - there are factors into why that happened such as the bureaucratization of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and lack of the agricultural tools needed for farming. If the US were a socialist country and they'd bring them a bunch of tractors and such (like in the alternate history story "Reds! A Revolutionary Timeline"), the famines wouldn't happen. NOT being rude, NOT being insensitive, just saying.
Oh and I prefer regular Marxism and left-communism. Seriously!
I assume you’re talking about
No, I'm talking about you, dear liberal hippie, having a community that can survive a transition away from capitalism. Once you have that you can talk about the finer details like what to do once you've survived or what to do with the labor left over after you've done what is necessary to survive.
Unlike the USSR, we now live in a world where food production is highly commercialized, globalized, and industrialized. What if John Deere used Starlink to brick every tractor in your revolutionary polity with a malicious software update? What if the same happened with every food processing factory and food warehouse?
There is value in learning things that at first glance seem boring or dry.
Why do you think you want to learn Marxist theory? To have status among leftists? Go punch a Nazi. To understand modern or historical leftists? Their actions aren't guided by Marxist theory. To have status among political theorists, economists, and liberals? Lol. Lmao even.
It's also possible that OP is studying this stuff simply because they are interested in political philosophy
If they are interested in it, then why is it boring to them? Genuine question.
There is value in learning things that at first glance seem boring or dry.
Is there? If the school system is any indication, people can spend literal years studying things they find boring without retaining them. Plus they can develop a hatred for the subject. Plus all sorts of bad intellectual habits like pretending they know the answer so they're allowed to move on.
I agree that things that feel boring to someone can turn out to be important to them, but that's a contextualization issue, not a nose-to-the-grindstone one. As the game design adage goes; you have to show the lock before having them hunt for the key.
If they are interested in it, then why is it boring to them? Genuine question.
Being interested in something is not the same as being entertained by something. You can value the knowledge you gain from studying something even if, while you're studying the material, you find it challenging.
Is there? If the school system is any indication, people can spend literal years studying things they find boring without retaining them. Plus they can develop a hatred for the subject. Plus all sorts of bad intellectual habits like pretending they know the answer so they're allowed to move on.
Yeah you can have some bad outcomes studying stuff you're not interested in, but it can also be very rewarding. I can't really argue with you about this because I'm just pulling from my own personal experiences here. If you've never had the experience of studying something dry and finding it rewarding, then there's not much I can say.
Boredom isn't a lack of entertainment, it's a lack of interest. Learning something challenging feels frustrating, captivating, even maddening, but never boring.
I can’t really argue with you about this because I’m just pulling from my own personal experiences here.
In the business, that's called "anecdotal evidence". The reason you can't argue with me is because anecdotal evidence is kind of irrelevant compared to the statistical observation that children spend decades reaching a median fifth grade reading level.
In the business, that's called "anecdotal evidence". The reason you can't argue with me is because anecdotal evidence is kind of irrelevant compared to the statistical observation that children spend decades reaching a median fifth grade reading level.
I am not making a scientific claim. I am making a claim about my personal experience. That's like someone saying "I find painting to be personally fulfilling" and then you're like 'um acktually that's anecdotal evidence". Touch some grass
I thought the 1848 manuscripts were pretty rocking when I first read them.
I always felt Marx's finished products had a kind of dull exposition, at least for large parts. I think he felt he had to lay out a system like that. But the unfinished stuff, even the Grundrisse have a lively dialectical feel that is pretty captivating.
I've always understood Marx as a historian who used the perspective of resources as the lens to view history. I don't think he was going out of his way to figure out how to get the working class to rise up.
I've been always a bit partial towards Herbert Marcuse, someone who I regard as part of the Marxist thought. I think his book One-Dimensional Man was a interesting read as an explanation to our modern technologically advanced society.
Do you mean 1844? I couldn't find 1848
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_and_Philosophic_Manuscripts_of_1844
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/preface.htm
Oh yes 1844, got confused with the later revolutions.
Nope
Don't.
I mean you can look for cartoon guide to marx or something like that. Maybe youtube has some videos about it that are not so dry?
No.