https://www.reddit.com/r/Kommunismus/comments/1lne4zh/was_sind_hier_so_die_meinungen_zum_gsp/?tl=en
According to this reddit post, they seem to be a cult pushing pseudo intellectual garbage. They profess to be “anti morality” and against dialectical materialism too, which i find kinda odd.
If they’re against dialectical materialism then they are by definition not Marxists.
Here’s a criticism of the group, but it’s in german and my firefox translation sounds bad. https://kommunistischepartei.de/diskussion/standpunkt-gegen-den-marxismus/ (I found it in the reddit thread above.)
It looks like gegenstandpunkt/GSP has a positivist view of materialism, which is a materialism without being dialectical. I am concerned about this because if you, or anyone reading this, put gegenstandpunkt in the lemmygrad search engine to find posts/comments you will see an active user heavily influenced by this weird deviation.
It would be nice to have someone here who is German to clear things up cause I’m pretty sure GSP is a cult.
I am concerned about this because if you, or anyone reading this, put gegenstandpunkt in the lemmygrad search engine to find posts/comments you will see an active user heavily influenced by this weird deviation.
Yeah, me circa 2 years ago probably lol. (Edit: huh, there’s a second person)
Be in GS circles long enough and you’ll see how often there is no desire to change the world to improve one’s own life. I had it admitted to me by a few GS people. Their lives are good, so why risk anything? Criticism is enough, and if you criticise well enough… you get enlightenment, better ways of thinking, and society will change if enough people lose their enthusiasm for the state and capitalism.
I don’t know what to make of them. I don’t interact with their structures anymore though. And that’s definitely for the best. Unpleasant people… but maybe because they’re Germans.
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they’re a big joke in all german leftist circles and left adjacent communities - they’re mostly known for being all about theory and not doing any praxis at all.
people who claim to be members are usually the least pleasant people to talk to.
that’s all i can tell.
They’re a pseudo-left-communist quarterly magazine (not actually an organisation since 1991, when their predecessor, funnily named “Marxist Group”, dissolved) that is known for its dense writing style and being notoriously aggressive and annoying to interact with.
They see activism as currently useless because most people on the left have views that according to them are a dead-end that has kept the left in stagnation for decades - something that needs to be fixed before anything productive can happen. Criticism of moral argumentation and nationalism are shared by the communist left, but its views of the state are the main source of controversy in Germany. The state acts in self-preservation and it chooses to support a capitalist economy and the interests of the bourgeoisie, because the people running it see it as the best way to advance its own interests. Thus, it can act against the class interests of the bourgeoisie, or decide which faction to favor, according to what it wants to. If you talk to them, you’d probably get something more nuanced, but that is what they write. They also are critical of Lenin. I am not sure why exactly, but the way they criticize the state does lead some GS-influenced people into Anarchism.
They’re rapidly growing in influence in the left, mostly in groups that only mostly agree with them, thanks to a couple of large podcasts. Someone influenced by them, journalist and podcaster Ole Nymoen, has become a hate figure of the liberals last year because he wrote a book denouncing militarist propaganda and has thus been given lots of (negative) publicity. This growing influence has led to attempts at pushback from MLs and more recently Trotskyists, but the criticism I read so far has been pretty bad.
C. Derick Varn has recently examined one of their texts on his show… and has argued with one of GSP’s influencers in the comments lol. Unlike the above-mentioned criticism, he did actually investigate the source material. GS people are infamous for going “you didn’t understand the argument correctly upon disagreement”, as well as reliably showing up whenever they are mentioned, and are hard to push back against.
The Illusion of Critique: Gegenstandpunkt’s Radical Critique of the State (1) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xbYicjuQTY
The Illusion Of Critique: Gegenstandpunkt’s Critique of Democratic Law and its Limits (2) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUmLZxSX0dc
If you speak German, Fabian Lehr also had a long discussion with Ole Nymoen and Simon Dressler on GS-influenced criticism they had of the recent anti-conscription protests:
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