I’m disappointed that the conversation got so heated, but mostly for selfish reasons (I think the anger was warranted, because infantile is kind of a rude word, you did apologize here and I appreciate it but I mean I just understood their reaction in the moment). I think you raised a very interesting point (that of the similarity of “cuteness” and religion as the opiate of the masses), which, I actually somewhat agree with.

But, rather than reflecting negatively on every positive emotion the proletariat has experience, what I do think is that this coincidentally raises a good criticism of the usual Marxist critique of religion- more specifically, the criticism of religion encouraging complicity.

I certainly could go the route of dismissing every ounce of relief that the proletariat feels as counter-revolutionary, and that would make some sense, as it is true that it technically makes it easier to live with capitalism. But I think that is flawed, and it is flawed in a way that is very prevalent in Marxist thought, and that a lot of Marxists don’t seem to notice.

There’s this assumption that the proletariat can be radicalized into effectively robots, who do not experience any emotions, and crave nothing but freedom. This is provably untrue with literally the most simple test- just examine your emotional state of an average day and you’ll notice that a vast quantity of it is spent not craving freedom. Because freedom is an abstract, albeit useful, concept that is pretty low on our priority list, even when it’s supposedly the most important thing to someone. Tons of necessary biological functions and cravings completely supersede it, and while they can be suppressed temporarily, that takes energy and sometimes even actual training.

Unfortunately for those of us who want to be revolutionaries driven only by our yearning for freedom, one of these is the human drive for pleasure. We can suppress it and subvert it and bypass it in many different ways, but it always comes back as some kind of coping mechanism. It can even return as the desire for self-satisfaction from denying oneself.

While there might be some way, in theory, to overcome this, expecting every member of a socialist movement, let alone vast swathes of the proletariat, to give it up just so they can feel more motivated for revolution doesn’t make sense.

In fact, this is seems to be the root of the issue with most Marxist’s criticisms of religion (and by extension, other forms of “opiates of the masses”) come in. Rather than criticizing the actually ideologically complicit elements of it (the idea that suffering is virtuous, the implication that you do not need to proactively solve your own problems), religion becomes problematic because it provides relief, the idea being, that without that relief, the proletariat would want revolution more. And that’s true, but it’s also very silly.

The proletariat wanting revolution if they didn’t have the relief of something doesn’t mean anything. It’s a silly “what-if” scenario that people use to convince themselves to pursue a fruitless goal, and it’s a “what-if” that could be applied, with equal validity, to a lot of other very silly ideas.

It not a good idea (to be clear, this is all about our current material conditions- it might be at some point) to get rid of cat videos because it provides relief to the proletariat, for the same reason it is not a good idea to start destroying food stores to try and agitate them. Both are just fantasizing about the proletariat lacking something and then revolting, an understandable fantasy, but one that is very impractical to accomplish.

We would have to commit vast swathes of man-power to destroy the means of cat video production, likely fight actual, lethal battles against Pinkerton forces, and most importantly, piss off a huge amount of the proletariat at once to get it done. This would cost a massive amount of effort for literally no upside, because the proletariat definitely would be discontent, but mostly discontent with us.

Even if we magically could remove cat videos from existence, the increase in class consciousness might not be that large. I theorize that finding relief in things is a constant psychological response that humans have, and we’d basically be playing whack-a-mole with random cultural phenomenons

You’re trying to change the material conditions to be worse so that the proletariat revolts, but if you can change material conditions, why not just revolt then and there?