this isn't an attempt to seem profound or especially evolved in my thinking. up until recently, i haven't been forced to put things in a specific revolutionary perspective. i understood broad progressive ideals and thought that was sufficient. in the recent months, i have come to realize a few things:
(1) i cannot truly appreciate the depth of what needs to be done without confronting the fact that i will come into sharp opposition with many of the mindsets that were held by the people i'm studying from. it's not as simple as maybe marx being unable to articulate the issues of slavery in his work, but many other writers/revolutionaries having foundational practice and texts that i consider correct and helpful to bring us to actual liberation WHILE in their lives having done/said things i do not like.
many other people have been in similar positions and there is a logic to how to approach this (if they were alive, im assuming we would engage in "ideological struggle" but not sure how to do that with a text yet) so i'll be looking into that. as a result, this is influencing how i want to engage with anything made by people i disagree with at all.
(2) the way that i'm engaging with ideas is changing in real time, because i find that my previous logics were not enough to identify what i believe are the real issues at heart. i'm recognizing this with AI discussions and feminism especially. here are two examples:
genAI using copyrighted material being an unquestioned "bad" thing. i dont think i wholly loved copyright before, but i liked the idea of it as a "gotcha" against the tech as it showed this had to scrape so much data. and then...what? copyright especially as it exists w/DMCA is already heavily flawed. what does the careless data collection and "ownership" of the training data actually represent? these issues i have to identify instead of assuming it's inherently wrong
feminism has many people i disagree with for one, related to point 1. but for two, now that i am looking at revolutionary feminism as what can realistically bring us all out of oppression, i think i'll have to take the time while reading feminist texts to decide if they're actually identifying what i think is the correct issue (capitalism forms the base of the issue, while misogyny arises to reinforce and keep the boot on our necks), which is surprisingly uncommon.
will i edit this? idk. ok bye!