Materialism passes into its own negation now.

To be an idealist is the most materialist position lmao. Okay, but actually, the base has lost its power. Just as humans dominate the nature they rely on, the superstructure dominates the base in modernity.

When the proletariat identifies itself as the bourgeoisie, we get lulled into a false class consciousness. We are powerful and ambitious individuals in control of our destiny. The value we place on free will is misguided. The Greeks knew this shit.

Now that the realm of ideas has passed into material reality, the only way to fight the dominant ideology is within it. It encompasses all acts.

No amount of subversion breaks the binds here. We are useful opposition. We are the Satan that God employs as his own opposite. As long as this state of affairs continues, there is no victory and there will be no revolution.

How do you break out? I don't know yet. I don't even think that it's definite that you can. I emphatically reject the belief that capitalism will be broken by its own contradictions. It absorbs all.

As the DNC can absorb #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter and then dispense with them as soon as they become a hindrance, capitalism absorbs leftism in so far as it must to defang it. That's literally all social democracy is. When the imperialist state props you up, it must also

prop up the megacorporation to which you are subject. The quality of life is abstractly higher for all, but the corporation is just that much better-equipped to exploit you. As life gets better, your life gets worse. "Quality of Life" negates itself. Where do you go?

I believe in the power of contradictions to end capitalism, I just don't believe the contradictions are there anymore. Marx was not wrong, Marx was right at the time. And so was Lenin. But the contradictions of imperialism have been suppressed now too.

I believe our primary contradiction is that most of the economic structure of the United States is simply an agreed-upon pseudo-truth. It consists of entities and people and places that exist only on paper. I do think using the natural resources will eventually become untenable.

But I don't know if that must even lead to a breakdown necessarily. Capitalism could simply move more of itself into the knowledge-service dichotomy of labor today. The world doesn't need to hold up for the imaginary economy to continue.

Just as the "economy" has no effect on the life of an average person, the natural world has a negligibly small effect on the "economy".

I'm saying we are coming to an apex in regards to climate change and we may be able to use this breaking point, but if we as communists miss this opportunity, I think we enter a wholly invented reality in which "capitalism" lasts forever, even as the world burns

and society slides into neo-feudalism and then the coming Neoleviathans (a la @metaspinoza). The stock market can survive any catastrophe because it only ever existed conceptually. Until we stop believing in it, the lines go up regardless of reality. Coronavirus proves this.

What this boils down to is that we have an imperative to be ready. Organized. I don't accept Ulysse's pessimism but I refuse to accept complacent optimism. I think we are at a historically important moment here. Use it.