https://digital.la84.org/digital/api/collection/p17103coll10/id/66/page/0/inline/p17103coll10_66_0
honestly was looking for a jordan peterson equivilant of “clean your room” and workout sort of rhetoric - but coming from communists
something along the lines of theory/ logical thinking that would state how required it was to work out and develop discipline - this was all rhetoric spurred after reading roderic day
dudes rock
Lenin having -3% chill about literally any subject he’s even vaguely interested in moment.
neurodivergent king confirmed
I read this wrong and initially thought Lenin was a huge muscle guy
My grandpa grew up in your so-called glorious Soviet Union. Want to know the truth about communism? After declaring him “bourgeois”, Vladimir Lenin threw my grandpa off Hell in a Cell and he plummeted 16 feet through an announcer’s table.
he maybe was
this is why my friends mostly won’t hike with me anymore
also I accidentally almost did the same traverse as him this week but weather got bad 😔
Mao had stuff to say about this. Keep in mind he was commanding a commie military most of the time. He would periodically write recommendations on why X and Y habits were liberal or revolutionary that were essentially just life advice and how to work together effectively.
A fascist worked out today, did you?
working out, like basically every other hobby, has nothing to do with marxism
What if my hobby is Marxism?
Checkmate, librul
Outrunning the cops does tho
Zhou Enlai’s Guidelines for Myself:
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/zhou-enlai/1943/03/18.htm
ty ty ty
Perhaps look for guerrilla warfare manuals written by communists. Probably has advice on staying fit as asymmetric warfare requires quick movements
Any specific recs?
There’s this big muscley comrade on tiktok who posts workout propaganda. can’t remember his handle
https://www.tiktok.com/@the_swoletariat_?
i was hoping for more theory though
The swoletariet?
Wasn’t Mao a big exercise guy despite being, well, big lol
Mao was an excellent swimmer.
One of the reasons he invited Kruschev to hang out with him at the pool while he made fun of him.
Yeah, Mao did some propaganda thing at one point where he swam across a river to i guess show people he was still healthy, and apparently it was a big deal? I don’t remember all the details.
He swam across a bunch of rivers. His most famous swim was just going down the Yangtze when he was old and out of his official position of power. They reported an impossibly fast swim for that one, lol.
the whole ordeal about the Yangtze river
Yeah that one was silly but he was actually a good swimmer
Lmfao I replied to the wrong comment, but yeah I agree
He was big when he was old, but dude kind of earned that after decades of slogging around China starving to death and being harried by Nationalist and Japanese armies. Like have you seen how many communists died on the long march? It’s terrifying.
If you work out marxistically you’ll be hungry and then you can eat beans.
responding to immediate external threats is not discipline. being forced to follow the capitalist’s routine is miserable, trying to impose one upon myself is similarly awful I just don’t also become homeless if I can’t make myself go to the gym or eat less than 2400 kcal in a day.
It’s not self-discipline, but it is discipline. It’s the difference between doing something a coach tells you to do vs. doing it yourself. I think the point here is more “you have the capacity to do a lot more than you might think,” and less “self-discipline is the same as discipline imposed on you.”
Working out, making your own food, ect. is the only time in our lives under capitalism we get to enjoy the full fruits of our labor without thievery
something along the lines of theory/ logical thinking that would state how required it was to work out and develop discipline
The “develop discipline” part is pretty direct: there’s a lot of work to be done to get from here to communism, and it won’t get done absent a certain level of discipline. Developing some kind of discipline is simply a prerequisite to getting big things done.
Working out is much more tangential, but it can be a good way to develop that discipline. It’s also healthy for you on an individual level, which can only help you contribute more to whatever leftist project you envision.
thank you for your write up, i love your podcast work!
Marx telling me to clean my room
Discipline applied by the bourgeoisie is ultimately just coerced self-discipline. We see a natural instinct to instill it in school children, and part of the purpose of grading a student is to rate them on a rubric of self-discipline (under capitalism). By the time most of us are finished with school, we’ve developed our own inner capitalist that tells us how to behave.
And that’s taxing! Having to moderate your impuse to tell a karen to fuck off, or to leave work early exhausts us, and makes it that much more difficult to self-regulate in other areas of our lives. Constant advertisements throughout the day take advantage of this as well.
I hear people call American Leftists lazy all the time and it drives me nuts because we’re mostly working class, and the US working class works more hours than anyone not specifically being colonized.
We’re not lazy, we’re tired, by design.
That said, if our forebears from the 1900s could find time to agitate during 16 hour workdays, we can too.
