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Pomeroy posted:In what meaningful sense can you have democracy without centralism? If a minority will not faithfully carry out a majority decision with which they disagree, in what sense do you have democracy? If elements within the party conspire, make private arguments and agreements among themselves, to which their fellow party comrades are not privy, rather than raising them openly where their opponents have the opportunity to answer them, and where they cannot make contradictory arguments or promises to different groups or individuals without exposing themselves, in what way does it make a decision more democratic? Consensus is democracy with unity and without centralism, anarchy is democracy without either centralism or unity. They're both technically "higher" democracy because they propose to let everyone decide for themselves without being suppressed. The problem with both is that they're "solutions" to non-issues, while any real system of democracy was established to make decisions despite differences that could not be completely resolved. That's why declared consensus is often fake consensus, because people just pretended to have resolved their differences. There's no need to talk of democracy when there's no issue to solve, e.g. close friend groups might be the perfect ideal of democracy but no one calls them democratic. EDIT: Oh, and my ”consensus” shouldn’t be confused with most prominent ”consensus democracies”, which aren’t actually close-knit people forming consensuses, they’re groups that are highly distrustful of each other, each cooperating on the condition that they have veto power. They don’t form consensuses, they placate everyone enough that they feel it wouldn’t be right to use a veto. The one who does is an instant party-pooper, so they have a higher bar to vote against decisions than with a normal, non-veto vote. uncop fucked around with this message at 07:09 on Jul 28, 2020 |
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Jul 28, 2020 06:53
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completely unrelated to the previous Page's discussion, but here goes: about to watch the 1969 movie 'Z' and decided to look into a little into Greek politics were Savvas Konstantopoulos and Georgios Georgalas really marxists or is it yet another case of bullshit historical revisionism? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_junta#Characteristics_of_the_Junta quote:In 1970, Georgalas published a book The Decline of Consumer Society, stating the consumerism had destroyed the Christian spiritual values of the West, leaving Greece as the last solitary outpost of Christian civilization.[29] In the same book, Georgalas stated the solution to social problems was not as many believed increased employment, but instead "lengthy psycho-therapeutic programmes" which would create "the free man in harmonious co-existence with himself and his fellow beings" that sounds like the whackjobs in brazil today! maybe the two were informants to begin with. im showing my ignorance because i genuinely want an answer NOTE: This Something Awful forums user (previously known as "The Blackest Goon") is a Person of Color who chose the current iteration of his username ironically after years of having his remaining brain cells all but fried after monitoring the rise of online reactionary ideologies for a decade. BornAPoorBlkChild fucked around with this message at 16:53 on Jul 28, 2020 |
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Jul 28, 2020 16:47
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So, I'm gonna bitch about Liberalism and Conservatism for a bit. I hope that's OK. It seems to me that these two ideologies rest upon answering a core question: Why do some people get more stuff, and other people get less? Conservatism answers it simply: Those who get more stuff deserve it as their birthright. That is, they are born superior genetically, dynastically, members of a nation, etc. There are dozens of absurd and demonstrably false reasons, but the answer is basically "they deserve it." And Liberalism delivers this same answer too, albeit more nuanced. Those who get more stuff also deserve more stuff, but the explanation for a Liberal is that such things are earned through hard work, free market forces, intelligence, more demonstrably false things of all sorts. Liberalism is, in essence, a rationalization of the bigotry and hierarchies of conservatism. That's why Liberals love conservatives so much, and hate Leftists who reject the unspoken "truth" of deserved privilege. The irony here is that the conservative is closer to reality: the wealthy are wealthy because they were born wealthy.
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Jul 28, 2020 21:32
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Cpt_Obvious posted:So, I'm gonna bitch about Liberalism and Conservatism for a bit. I hope that's OK. Why can't there be multiple sources of wealth, with the different arms of capital competing against one another for policies that suit their own needs, eg finance capital which wants higher interest rates vs industrial capital which wants lower rates; productive capital that wants lower rents on land vs landlords that want higher rents
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Jul 28, 2020 21:36
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Race Realists posted:completely unrelated to the previous Page's discussion, but here goes: The Brazilian right isn't anti-consumerist at all though lol the Evangelicals are p ok with consooming as long as it's in the bishop-owned enterprises. If anything that anti-consumerist take is more for the online third positionist trads/marble bust/orthodox icon av twitter, the 'last bastion of christianity' of course being their country of choice depending on their chauvinism or projection.
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Jul 28, 2020 21:40
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Cpt_Obvious posted:So, I'm gonna bitch about Liberalism and Conservatism for a bit. I hope that's OK. most conservatives are liberals
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Jul 28, 2020 21:41
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Cpt_Obvious posted:So, I'm gonna bitch about Liberalism and Conservatism for a bit. I hope that's OK. its because after conservatism largely ditched the ideas of monarchy and being members of the nobility there was no more reason for liberalism to exist
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Jul 28, 2020 21:42
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Ferrinus posted:most conservatives are liberals Counterpoint: all Liberals are masked conservatives.
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Jul 28, 2020 21:57
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Cpt_Obvious posted:Counterpoint: all Liberals are masked conservatives. the point is that modern conservatism is by any reasonable definition a branch of liberalism what we have to keep in mind here is that liberalism is an ideology that was originally created to provide moral justification for slavery and genocide abroad and mass repression of the working class at home
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Jul 28, 2020 22:07
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liberalism was developed because monarchs got too inbred to effectively manage the new modes of production that were emerging so a slightly less inbred set of morons whose nobility was wealth rather than god given right were put in charge
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Jul 28, 2020 22:15
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Cerebral Bore posted:the point is that modern conservatism is by any reasonable definition a branch of liberalism Conservatism is a branch of centrism. And centrists in liberal countries are functionally liberals. In countries where liberalism has been dominant for less then roughly 50 years, conservatives are less liberal.
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Jul 28, 2020 22:16
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Cpt_Obvious posted:Counterpoint: all Liberals are masked conservatives. many are, but i would identify "liberalism" as the actual ideology while "conservatism" is like a set of aesthetic and cultural preferences that may or may not be simultaneously held
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Jul 28, 2020 22:20
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Raskolnikov38 posted:its because after conservatism largely ditched the ideas of monarchy and being members of the nobility there was no more reason for liberalism to exist Raskolnikov38 posted:liberalism was developed because monarchs got too inbred to effectively manage the new modes of production that were emerging 
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Jul 28, 2020 22:23
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Ferrinus posted:many are, but i would identify "liberalism" as the actual ideology while "conservatism" is like a set of aesthetic and cultural preferences that may or may not be simultaneously held Raskolnikov38 posted:liberalism was developed because monarchs got too inbred to effectively manage the new modes of production that were emerging
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Jul 28, 2020 22:30
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Apparently David Harvey hosted a lecture series based solely on Marx's 'Grundrisse' and now know my reading goal is for the remainder of the year. Edit: https://twitter.com/profdavidharvey/status/1287870291666862080?s=20 Hilario Baldness fucked around with this message at 23:09 on Jul 28, 2020 |
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Jul 28, 2020 23:01
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Raskolnikov38 posted:its because after conservatism largely ditched the ideas of monarchy and being members of the nobility there was no more reason for liberalism to exist Not to restart "Orwell was a snitch" chat but I liked his line that there are no conservatives today, just liberals, fascists, and accomplices to fascists. The ideological justifications for monarchism (which, to be unnecessarily fair, often tried to paint it as a two way relationship, even as lopsided as it actually is) had all died away, so conservatives either just became cautious liberals with a few ideological hold overs or just ditched any justification for authority and openly worshipped power and violence for its own sake
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Jul 28, 2020 23:49
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Cpt_Obvious posted:Ideologies don't require codification. However, I would argue that Fascism is the codification of Conservatism. i disagree on both counts, or at least i don't think this is really helpful categorization or phrasing. in the first place, liberalism is the ideology of private property, free markets, and individual "choice" as expressed in autonomous control over ones' purchasing power, few to no explicit laws against expressing specific politics, etc. these are bedrock, non-negotiable principles of (for example) both the republican and democratic parties, who largely disagree over the amount of government regulation required to make a society founded on those principles work. when somebody argues with you at the thanksgiving table that communism could never work and only the profit motive will cause people to research cures for diseases, they aren't, for example, expressing that they're a "capitalist" - a capitalist is someone who owns capital. they're saying those things because they're a liberal! a liberal may or may not be a conservative. at some point conservatives were the people actually opposing liberalism because they would prefer to Conserve the old feudal relations of kings, churches, and peasants or whatever. now the thing that conservatives are probably interested in conserving is leave it to beaver style suburbia or explicit segregation laws or whatever, since theirs is an emotional and aesthetic attachment to a real or imagined past. however, their actual POLITICS are liberal - they want free speech, free markets, and private property, with a lil government intervention but not too much. "fascism" separately can be defined in plenty of ways, but "scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds" is a popular saying for a reason. fascism is among other things capitalism in decay, and it commonly features both a reaching backwards towards a mythic past but also a relentless progress towards an imagined future, and any liberal who wants to preserve liberalism in the face of liberalism's many contradictions is going to have to slide towards fascism whether or not they (consciously realize that they) hate gay people
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Jul 28, 2020 23:53
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Ferrinus posted:"fascism" separately can be defined in plenty of ways, but "scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds" is a popular saying for a reason. fascism is among other things capitalism in decay, and it commonly features both a reaching backwards towards a mythic past but also a relentless progress towards an imagined future, and any liberal who wants to preserve liberalism in the face of liberalism's many contradictions is going to have to slide towards fascism whether or not they (consciously realize that they) hate gay people the simplest example of this i could conjure up is that at some point someone has to reckon with the fact that crime rates are disproportionate to racial demographics, and conclude that either A) racial difference or B) economic and material circumstances drive history. if it's B, there is no justification for allowing capitalism. but that would be uncomfortable. so they drift to A, whether they realize it or not
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Jul 28, 2020 23:57
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social conservativism is basically dead, it died in the sixties and just went away. it's the ideology of social cohesion, slow reforms and well-defined liberties and obligations at each step of the social ladder. it's basically the ideology of the aristocracy. it used to be possible to quite genuinely be a very decent person and a cognisant conservative under a banner of fear of excess etc. most contemporary self-described conservatives are just hateful, if they're cynically self-interested that's usually the least horrifying ones, because they believe in nothing but tribalism and power and will fight very hard to maintain those even as the policies they promote erode their precious cultures - this then gets turned outward into the nastiest kinds of chauvinism, but it's not really conservativism except for being generally aligned with the powers that be liberals are an often revolutionary breed, and while many contemporary conservatives are also liberals (and they share the obsession with individual rights) they're notably different in e.g. their view on when violence is acceptable and the role of the state. the modern liberal believes in objective truth and good faith, the contemporary conservative absolutely does not
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Jul 29, 2020 00:08
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What are some good leftish texts by poc and women or on Africa and South America? Right now on my list are Black Bolshevik Black Jacobins Are Prisons Obsolete? (basically anything by her tbh) Wretched of the Earth How Europe Underdeveloped Africa An Indigenous Peoples History of the USA
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Jul 29, 2020 00:31
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SSJ_naruto_2003 posted:What are some good leftish texts by poc and women or on Africa and South America? Right now on my list are I think Immanuel Wallerstein's World Systems books started as an attempt to explain imperialism in Africa and then grew in scope from there
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Jul 29, 2020 00:34
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Marighella's Urban Guerilla Manual
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Jul 29, 2020 00:40
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Open Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galeano Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism by Kwame Nkrumah. Edit: The Groundings with My Brothers by Walter Rodney Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg Atrocious Joe fucked around with this message at 00:44 on Jul 29, 2020 |
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Jul 29, 2020 00:41
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Atrocious Joe posted:Open Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galeano I like Galeano but he helped push a really simplistic view of the Triple Alliance War by pushing the blame entirety on the dastardly UK being afraid of plucky lil' Paraguay when it really wasn't the case at all.
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Jul 29, 2020 00:47
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V. Illych L. posted:social conservativism is basically dead, it died in the sixties and just went away. it's the ideology of social cohesion, slow reforms and well-defined liberties and obligations at each step of the social ladder. it's basically the ideology of the aristocracy. it used to be possible to quite genuinely be a very decent person and a cognisant conservative under a banner of fear of excess etc. most contemporary self-described conservatives are just hateful, if they're cynically self-interested that's usually the least horrifying ones, because they believe in nothing but tribalism and power and will fight very hard to maintain those even as the policies they promote erode their precious cultures - this then gets turned outward into the nastiest kinds of chauvinism, but it's not really conservativism except for being generally aligned with the powers that be Hate to go debate nerd but this just seems like a case of no true Scotsman to me. By your definition modern European socdems are social conservatives (which may very be the case!), but to say that social conservatism is "dead" is just flatly false
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Jul 29, 2020 02:31
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Ones personal morality plays very little role in one's ideology
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Jul 29, 2020 02:32
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V. Illych L. posted:social conservativism is basically dead, it died in the sixties and just went away. it's the ideology of social cohesion, slow reforms and well-defined liberties and obligations at each step of the social ladder. it's basically the ideology of the aristocracy. it used to be possible to quite genuinely be a very decent person and a cognisant conservative under a banner of fear of excess etc. most contemporary self-described conservatives are just hateful, if they're cynically self-interested that's usually the least horrifying ones, because they believe in nothing but tribalism and power and will fight very hard to maintain those even as the policies they promote erode their precious cultures - this then gets turned outward into the nastiest kinds of chauvinism, but it's not really conservativism except for being generally aligned with the powers that be I would seriously argue that social conservatism was always just an ideological self-description of actual conservatism rather than something that ever actually existed. When you say "ideology of the aristocracy", you aren't wrong but it's not what they actually believed, but rather what they believed they believed. Actual conservatism has always just been an ideology of caste birthright that transformed under capitalism to mean birthright in bourgeois property. The mask has historically always come off of conservatism whenever something happened that demanded action based on the real beliefs that were in complete contradiction with the professed beliefs. The reason we have been comparing conservatism to fascism for quite a while is that the mask has been mostly off for a long time now. Conservatives aren't going to conserve social achievements that go against their core ideology, the only way they can go is toward reaction. And fascism is the social form that reaction has reliably taken in the capitalism's period of imperialism. Conservatives tend to instinctively adore fascism whenever they see it, including the actual Nazis before WW2. They just generally don't like taking the mask off, because it's part of their personality and the way they fit into their liberal circles: they don't want to believe they believe that society would be better if it were rebuilt around a fascist model. But it's still on the back of their minds, ready to burst out whenever they see things that offend their core sensibilities, such as people who they consider to be below them getting one up on them. And they get ecstatic when they see some "hero" violently purging such things from view, revealing their caste sensibilities when they genuinely feel that their good guy can do no crime in the fight against their bad guys. Of course, conservative parties don't include just conservatives, but also all kinds of liberals that want to preserve hierarchies of liberal (non-birthright) "merit" and see the conservative platform as a means to do so. Those are the people running from Trump and others. Conservatism is actually in stark contradiction with liberalism, which believes in equal right between people just for being people, or just for being part of the same national community. Liberalism is inherently incompatible with castes that have different rights based on birthright. People, of course, are perfectly capable of holding contradictory views: probably literally everyone does it. So, lots and lots of historical individuals have been both conservatives and liberals, forced to develop ideology about themselves (such as the whole social conservatism story) that seemingly reconciles the two irreconcilable sides. They're the, the aristocrat-turned-bourgeois, the bourgeois-revolutionary slaveowner, the settler-colonial land-robber, the billionaire heir etc. In the end though, one side is going to be dominant and will be offended when representatives of the other one do something offensive to it. They're going to either sneakily discard people from their liberal conception of humanity and attempt to destroy them for little slights, or be horrified when their peers do, and want to get as far away from it as possible.
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Jul 29, 2020 06:36
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of course, when push comes to shove they're only enthusiastic about ground rent &c, but the mass following of old-style conservativism tends to still have a strong preoccupation with individual liberty and obligation - the arch-example of this type is the peter hitchens variety of weirdo much like the social democratic elite, when it comes down to it, is interested mainly in keeping a homogeneous and disciplined labour movement, whereas the rank and file will tend to genuinely believe in equality of outcomes and natural justice - if you seriously push an older social democrat, they'll almost inevitably revert to venerating wage labour. social democracy, incidentally, has also been pushed firmly to the margins even in its own parties my point about contrasting old-school social conservativism and contemporary conservativism is to emphasise the difference in social interest between the aristocrats and high bourgeoisie of old, and the contemporary financialised bourgeoisie. whether you want to call it a different ideology (i'd argue that it is, since the trappings are so different and it appeals to very different people) or the same one with a different direction isn't that important, but that the nature of conservativism has changed and how *is* important - and i'd argue that the 'social' part just no longer applies as the ruling class has been liberated from the land, so has conservativism
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Jul 29, 2020 11:08
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I finished Losurdo's "Stalin: The History and Critique of a Black Legend". I feel like he doesn't quite stick the landing with a good conclusion at the end, but a lot of it is a powerful polemic against this trend of pro-capitalist academics to deliberately represent Stalin (and Mao, and others) as genocidaires, equal to Hitler, for ideological purposes. There's a lot of material in there about how perceptions of Stalin in the West were basically all up to whether the Soviet Union was a convenient ally at the time, and there's a great bit where he lays out the case that the West did this to Robespierre and the Jacobins, and Louverture and the Haitians, and Lincoln and the Radical Abolitionists as well - they're all "anti-white" criminal gangs presiding over mass murder in order to discredit them, because of what they represent to the current world order. Further, that if one were to apply these same standards to, say, liberalism, capitalism, Christianity, or Protestantism, then all of those are also atrocious ideologies, and that people like John Stuart Mill, John Locke, John C Calhoun, Churchill, the Founding Fathers, George W Bush, and so on, would be no less "monsters" than allegedly Stalin was.
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Jul 29, 2020 11:12
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Yeah, I think Losurdo's specialty in general is navigating ideological narratives, uncovering purposeful political obfuscation through points of mutual inconsistency between various revisions of them, and elaborating on what the purpose seems to be based on what kind of narratives were later built upon those obfuscations. It's hard to explain, but he seems like an actual master of what more naive marxists are trying to do when they dogmatically assert that certain people believe certain things because it's materially beneficial for them. He has a method that allows him to uncover the actual empirical processes behind the development of ideological narratives, and doesn't need to fall back on dogma as a heuristic. I feel like reading him taught me a lot more than what he directly said.
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Jul 29, 2020 12:00
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gradenko_2000 posted:Further, that if one were to apply these same standards to, say, liberalism, capitalism, Christianity, or Protestantism, then all of those are also atrocious ideologies, and that people like John Stuart Mill, John Locke, John C Calhoun, Churchill, the Founding Fathers, George W Bush, and so on, would be no less "monsters" than allegedly Stalin was. Once again gonna recommend Liberalism: A Counter-History from this same author.
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Jul 29, 2020 12:56
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https://twitter.com/yehoak/status/1288337737746186241?s=19
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Jul 29, 2020 16:49
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one point i want to make about social conservatism is that i think it actually DOES have a material basis that fits hand-in-glove with liberalism such that it shouldn't be understood as JUST atavistic degeneracy or whatever. deeply-etched beliefs about the suitability of lack thereof of black people, women, etc for certain kinds of work and other participation in civil society helps to maintain the various de facto caste systems that we use to A) limit how many resources are actually allocated towards the public good and B) maintain consistent and easily-invoked standards for who gets shunted into the reserve army of labor like i said, a liberal can't ACTUALLY stop being racist - if they were, they couldn't support capitalism any more. so by hook or by crook they are going to construct an ideological universe for themselves that makes it just and proper for mexican migrants to be consigned to poorly-regulated and poorly-compensated manual labor while being denied the rights concomitant with full citizenship, whether or not the words they use to describe that universe include "haplogroups" or "culture" or "merit" or "rule of law" or what
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Jul 29, 2020 17:33
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https://twitter.com/StateDept/status/1288569760800821249?s=20
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Jul 29, 2020 21:45
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well i for one am glad that we cleared that up
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Jul 29, 2020 21:51
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now we know
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Jul 29, 2020 22:18
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antirevisionist mike pompeo
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Jul 29, 2020 23:36
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extremely based state department
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Jul 29, 2020 23:40
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does this mean that people defending china are repeating state department propaganda?
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Jul 30, 2020 01:17
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*coming around* it really is the world factbook
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Jul 30, 2020 01:23
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