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Larry Parrish posted:im just gonna let Mao Zedong speak for me on this. it's not an exact match to what you're talking about but it fits nonetheless.
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Nov 6, 2020 02:03
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Larry Parrish posted:that is to say, the principles of Marxist socialism are not contrary or in spite of normal human behavior; they are in spite of your behavior. as a poor american it's almost distastefully self-centered to consider yourself before others, at least in my family. when you can help others, it is your duty. to me, socialism is about extending that duty to help to everyone. capitalist liberal society encouraging self-first is against not only my principles, but my basic instincts That's not exactly how I read Mao here. I think he's saying that liberalism is corrosive to a revolutionary party and you shouldn't let liberals in it because it's like putting sugar in your gas tank. IE, keep your cafe communists the gently caress outta the vanguard.
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Nov 6, 2020 02:07
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Pentecoastal Elites posted:I think this is important because if humans some have innate drive towards greed (again, as defined as wealth-hoarding at the expense of others), I think communism is impossible in the long term because humans will inevitably reproduce societies where they can satisfy the need to express greed, in the same way that humans will inevitably reproduce societies with clothing and indoor living spaces so they can satisfy the need to protect themselves from the elements. I think that it is still in our collective interests to went to build a society that attempts to mitigate against greed, even if we grant that "innate greed" will make communism long-term unfeasible, as opposed to maintaining a society that... does NOT fight against greed. SSJ_naruto_2003 posted:This society, capitalism in general, rewards selfishness and punishes selflessness This is, very loosely, what materialism attempts to convey: we learn to behave in the way we do because of our material conditions, and in a system that requires that we constantly act in our own self-interest and at the expense of others, it "feels natural" for some to always behave in that fashion, because they have understood that attempting to act contrary to what capitalist society expects, is unsustainable and will bring about ruin. gradenko_2000 fucked around with this message at 04:12 on Nov 6, 2020 |
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Nov 6, 2020 04:09
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gradenko_2000 posted:I think that it is still in our collective interests to went to build a society that attempts to mitigate against greed, even if we grant that "innate greed" will make communism long-term unfeasible, as opposed to maintaining a society that... does NOT fight against greed. I want to make clear that in taking about greed and human nature I am arguing against this, posted upthread: BoldFrankensteinMir posted:Personally, I think people don't need to have greedy desires "generated" by anything, it's the natural state of man I think it's totally ridiculous and contrary to scientific observation to assume that greed is a fundamental part of what it means to be human. My argument is that although an individual can be greedy, or crude, or mean, or lazy, or whatever, greed as something that dominates human society arises from material conditions, not "human nature". My point is that if "being greedy" really is the natural state of man, striving to create a society that excludes greed is as pointless and impossible as trying to create a society that excludes interpersonal relationships or the use of language. I think it's clear that if we can point to any collection of behaviors and call it human nature, we won't find it contains "greed" as anything other than a transient mood or feeling like jealousy or pique or something. Cooperation, on the other hand, I think we would find. To bend this into a more explicitly Marxist idea, I'd argue that the contradictions of capitalism contain this relationship between greed and cooperation within the socialization of labor and the privatization of capital. Its resolution is within communism, and makes communism a more stable configuration of human society because it doesn't subject us to the same perverse and alien drive to hoard that capitalism does.
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Nov 6, 2020 04:54
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Where is the space for individual agency in socialist ideas? I consider myself a socialist but I’ve also been going through therapy. One major predictor of mental illnesses like depression or anxiety is identifying external conditions as more important to your sense of control than internal conditions - ie feeling that you have no or little control over your material situation. But this is exactly what Marxism is about - identifying the external, systematic causes of problems we face in our lives. One consequence of this is that right wingers suffer from depression and anxiety at a lower rate than the left. How do we create ourselves as socialists without succumbing to anxiety or depression in the face of what - at the moment - is a pretty poor situation for the left?
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Nov 6, 2020 05:41
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Purple Prince posted:Where is the space for individual agency in socialist ideas? I consider myself a socialist but I’ve also been going through therapy. Volunteerism is praxis. Go hand out sandwiches and try to radicalize some church folk. Go hang out with old people at a nursing home It feels good to help others! Wear a mask! Harold Fjord fucked around with this message at 06:01 on Nov 6, 2020 |
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Nov 6, 2020 05:59
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Larry Parrish posted:im just gonna let Mao Zedong speak for me on this Yeah, this is where you lost me friend. Trying to paint Mao as a champion for the interests of others is just flat-out ignorant. He starved his own people and rewrote the history books to cover it up. None of that is admirable or worth emulating. You all have made some excellent points, and this doesn't change that. But please be aware, by quoting mass murderers, you just play into the absolute worst stereotypes about the beliefs you're trying to defend.
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Nov 6, 2020 06:12
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Purple Prince posted:Where is the space for individual agency in socialist ideas? I consider myself a socialist but I’ve also been going through therapy. I've found that anxiety and depression can come from a feeling of guilt for being responsible for whatever it is that makes us feel bad, and Marxism helps us realize that sometimes our sadness is understandable and externally driven. For example, let's say you are unsatisfied with your life. You feel your job is repetitive and unfulfilling, and you wish you had a better job that made more money and you actually like it. Liberalism lies to us and blames us for our situations. Liberalism points the finger you at you, the person, and says that your failures are your own faults. But Marxism explains that you don't make make poo poo money because the system is designed to cheat you out of your labor. You hate your job because you spend all day making someone else rich. You find it hard to make friends because capitalism twists you into competing with your coworkers instead of cooperating. If you feel alienated from society, it's because society is alienating. You feel lovely because the world is lovely. And, most importantly, you are not alone. Everyone around you is silently suffering, gorging themselves on vapid consumerism in order to stifle the feeling of emptiness where capitalism has stolen from you. So instead of internalizing that poo poo into a feeling of self-hate, find a way to cope by making the world a better place. Build something that you own. Organize with your coworkers. Don't push yourself at work; take extra long bathroom breaks. Slack the gently caress off. Don't get fired, but don't believe the lie that you're going to get a fair cut. Cuz you ain't getting poo poo. Most importantly, don't feel as though you personally are responsible for any of this poo poo. The world's just the way it is, so do the best you can.
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Nov 6, 2020 06:22
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BoldFrankensteinMir posted:Yeah, this is where you lost me friend. Trying to paint Mao as a champion for the interests of others is just flat-out ignorant. He starved his own people and rewrote the history books to cover it up. None of that is admirable or worth emulating. He didn't starve anyone, famines happened in China just like famines happened in the United States. Blaming Mao for famines is like blaming FDR for the Dust Bowl. Like, sure, they both had policies that affected those occurrences, but he didn't just wave a magic wand and murder people. Mao is bests known for his stances on housing. He provided secure housing for many, many citizens by seizing them from wealthy landlords and providing them for free. Also, he organized a lot housing to be built by the government. Killed a lot of sparrows tho. Cpt_Obvious fucked around with this message at 06:26 on Nov 6, 2020 |
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Nov 6, 2020 06:24
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BoldFrankensteinMir posted:Yeah, this is where you lost me friend. Trying to paint Mao as a champion for the interests of others is just flat-out ignorant. He starved his own people and rewrote the history books to cover it up. None of that is admirable or worth emulating. If you think the political philosophy of mass murderers is bad by the transitive property I have a book called The Jakarta Method for you here
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Nov 6, 2020 06:32
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uncop posted:It feels like y'all are just finding ways to make socialism sound like it's supposed to be this exciting high-stakes millenarian turnaround in order to assign artificial meaningfulness to the debate. But socialism is simple and boring. It's downright anti-excitement, mainly alleviating stressful uncertainties and providing people that bit more control over their lives. Things are going to stay the same much more so than they are going to change, people themselves would still be greedy and shortsighted assholes and so on. I really like how you put this. I don't think it's useless per se to discuss how various human foibles might play out in a socialist society but it's always important to root one's analysis in relations of mass power rather than relations of personal preference.
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Nov 6, 2020 07:00
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Cpt_Obvious posted:Ok, so, you're not going to like what I have to say. Bringing this back from a few pages, thanks for the reply. I don't dislike what you have to say at all! I'm not sure I'm on the same page, but I suspect it might mostly be a semantic issue. I *think* the fundamental premise of the concept of a social contract is that it's dependent on the will/consent of the people to be valid. It's one of the aspects of Liberalism that I think is worth keeping, so to speak, but has been poisoned by other aspects associated with it like individualism, belief in property as a fundamental right... I don't disagree that a social contract isn't "real", but it feels like this is a difference of being descriptive of how a society operates vs. prescriptive about how it should operate. I would think that in a socialist society, the concept of a social contract is still a valuable goal, insofar as it's a way (in theory, admittedly) to explicitly vest the power of governance in the people as opposed to the state. Or at a broader level, a socialist society still needs some shared values of how things should be, which goes beyond being able to understand how material conditions contribute to how things currently are. Agreed however that America has never really been a country with a valid social contract, due to slavery and capitalist capture of the state. Cpt_Obvious posted:I don't know what you mean by "Economic Liberalism", but I assume it's the idea that freedom justifies capitalism? Not gonna lie I'm working mostly off wikipedia and my decade+ old memory of undergrad courses as a philosophy major, so definitely not trying to assert myself as an expert in any domain. quote:Economic liberalism is a political and economic philosophy based on strong support for a market economy and private property in the means of production. Although economic liberals can also be supportive of government regulation to a certain degree, they tend to oppose government intervention in the free market when it inhibits free trade and open competition. Economic liberalism has been described as representing the economic expression of liberalism.
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Nov 6, 2020 07:41
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Sharks Eat Bear posted:
It might help if you talked more about what those specific aspects are that you like and feel are "worth saving," since liberal/neoliberalism encompasses a lot of things and in addition to that it's hard to decouple the dead trees philosophy from the observed reality of liberalism in practice where the dead trees philosophy starts to look like a rationalization for a lot of bad faith action on the part of the powerful. E: like we're talking a lot about Marxism-Leninism and Maoism and vanguard revolutionary thought here but a) that's not the only philosophy of advancement toward socialism and b) participation in bourgeoise liberal democracy has put explicitly Marxist socialist regimes in power more than once. A lot of the anti-liberalism in ML writing is real world and hard learned lessons from dealing with liberal wreckers who talk a good game and then pipe-wrench the revolution as soon as they're in a position to benefit from that. The Oldest Man fucked around with this message at 07:59 on Nov 6, 2020 |
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Nov 6, 2020 07:51
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The Oldest Man posted:It might help if you talked more about what those specific aspects are that you like and feel are "worth saving," since liberal/neoliberalism encompasses a lot of things and in addition to that it's hard to decouple the dead trees philosophy from the observed reality of liberalism in practice where the dead trees philosophy starts to look like a rationalization for a lot of bad faith action on the part of the powerful. Thanks, that's fair. Just going by the wikipedia headline blurb that I quoted, I've commented on what I like and don't like below. I realize this is a gross over simplification but hopefully it's still enough to let you know where my head's at. Understood about the observed reality of liberalism being bad and the hard learned lessons. "Liberals espouse a wide array of views depending on their understanding of these principles, but they generally support: - free markets [I won't say I'm against the idea of ANY free markets existing, but I think the value/faith placed on free markets in neoliberalism is absurd] (edit: and should add, I don't even know if I believe that free markets exist in any meaningful way, so treating regulation of markets as undesirable is just silly to me) - free trade [I feel too uninformed to have a good take. I find a lot of anti-free trade rhetoric to be xenophobic/racist, but also not sure how free trade exists outside the context of imperialism and neoliberalism] - limited government [nah] - individual rights (including civil rights and human rights) [yes to the idea of individual rights, but I guess the real issue is what those rights are. Civil & human rights, yeah. Right to private property, nah] - capitalism [nah] - democracy, secularism, gender equality, racial equality, internationalism, freedom of speech, freedom of the press and freedom of religion [yep all around, with the caveat that I interpret internationalism as exposure to and love for other cultures in a way that's rooted in empathy/curiosity vs. more transactional focus of free trade] Sharks Eat Bear fucked around with this message at 08:23 on Nov 6, 2020 |
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Nov 6, 2020 08:20
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The Oldest Man posted:That's not exactly how I read Mao here. I think he's saying that liberalism is corrosive to a revolutionary party and you shouldn't let liberals in it because it's like putting sugar in your gas tank. IE, keep your cafe communists the gently caress outta the vanguard. It is what he's saying, however, more generally, he's explaining the true insidiousness of liberalism, which is beyond ideology. These people, simply put, do not believe in anything that doesnt benefit themselves in the moment. This is why they are so corrosive to mass movements, its why suburbs are so famous for being insular and lacking overall community structure. It takes looking past yourself and your own needs to form these things. So when people say socialism is 'counter to human nature' its because they're incapable of empathy, incapable of understanding that the self is not always priority number one. They are liberals.
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Nov 6, 2020 08:34
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Sharks Eat Bear posted:- free trade [I feel too uninformed to have a good take. I find a lot of anti-free trade rhetoric to be xenophobic/racist, but also not sure how free trade exists outside the context of imperialism and neoliberalism] A lot of anti-free trade rhetoric is xenophobic and racist. However, the second part of your gut reaction is basically correct without much further addition. Giving capital owners access to the labor, markets, and resources of countries without the political and economic power to resist them past the border has resulted in full power nation-scale looting with a side order of genocide more or less every single time, going all the way back to the OGs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_East_India_Company And it never stopped and continues right up to this day. Free trade is "free" in the sense that it removes barriers to capital interests going buck wild on exploitable labor, resources, and markets. But consider the following: why are capital flows meant to be free under liberalism while labor is still subject to the boundaries of the nation-state? Why does "free trade" involve protected and privileged legal status for capital when it operates in economically underdeveloped areas? It's because "free trade" is branding for a specific type of brutal exploitation packaged in a way that makes it seem like we're Doing a Freedom and not just continuing to force people off their land and into slavery to take the poo poo in the ground under them and chopping hands off and burning villages when they don't agree to any of that. In conclusion, Avatar was a documentary sent back in time from the future and that's why James Cameron can't deliver the sequels. Edit: I forgot to mention that it's also explicitly a weapon to disempower workers in the developed world by sending their work to places less able to organize resistance, so it's super cool for that reason too. The Oldest Man fucked around with this message at 08:56 on Nov 6, 2020 |
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Nov 6, 2020 08:48
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the short answer is why third world maoism is not actually a meme ideology; while typically incoherent angry rhetoric, it's a direct reaction to people have been poo poo on by Dole Fruit or Exxon etc for generations
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Nov 6, 2020 09:03
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Cpt_Obvious posted:He didn't starve anyone, famines happened in China just like famines happened in the United States. Blaming Mao for famines is like blaming FDR for the Dust Bowl. Like, sure, they both had policies that affected those occurrences, but he didn't just wave a magic wand and murder people. Is there not some sort of link between revolutionary centralized communism and famines though? I always figured it was just the massive social disruption and attempts to radically change how land and industry works means that they gently caress up the food supply in the process (and often end up subjected to trade embargos either deliberately or just because people are reluctant to risk it in unstable places). Which isn't to say you shouldn't change how land is owned and used, but just that you gotta be careful about it. It is, admittedly, also why I don't personally like the idea of big violent revolutions because they have a lot of collateral damage, not that I imagine very many people like them when they happen, rather they happen because all the alternatives are suppressed.
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Nov 6, 2020 09:11
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Larry Parrish posted:the short answer is why third world maoism is not actually a meme ideology; while typically incoherent angry rhetoric, it's a direct reaction to people have been poo poo on by Dole Fruit or Exxon etc for generations Thoughts on communism and the periphery by My Favorite Communist. quote:The reason for my joining the French Socialist Party was that these “ladies and gentlemen” - as I called my comrades at that moment - has shown their sympathy towards me, towards the struggle of the oppressed peoples. But I understood neither what was a party, a trade-union, nor what was socialism nor communism.
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Nov 6, 2020 09:20
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Larry Parrish posted:the short answer is why third world maoism is not actually a meme ideology; while typically incoherent angry rhetoric, it's a direct reaction to people have been poo poo on by Dole Fruit or Exxon etc for generations The meme ideology is maoism - third worldism, which is a tendency developed and subscribed to mainly in first world countries. That tendency's main thrust is that socialist praxis should be supporting third world movements through donations, advocacy, domestic terrorism etc. Third world maoism, of people who have been poo poo on by Dole Fruit or Exxon etc for generations, is just maoism.
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Nov 6, 2020 09:26
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BoldFrankensteinMir posted:Yeah, this is where you lost me friend. Trying to paint Mao as a champion for the interests of others is just flat-out ignorant. He starved his own people and rewrote the history books to cover it up. None of that is admirable or worth emulating. quote:That tragic history behind the revolution vanishes in the historiography and propaganda that encompasses the negative cult of heroes. While in their reading of Russian history they pursue the repression of the Second Time of Troubles, for the great Asian country they skip over the Century of Humiliation (the period that stretches from the First Opium War to the seizure of power by the communists). Just as in Russia, in China it’s ultimately the revolution led by the communist party that saves the nation and even the state. In the biography of Mao Zedong earlier cited, not only do they ignore the historical background briefly restated here, but they blame the Chinese communist leader for most of the horrors caused by the starvation and famines that affected China. A rigorous silence is maintained with regard to the embargo imposed on that great Asia country after the communists came to power. quote:Finally, there is controversy over the contribution of [the El Niño Southern Oscillation] to the agricultural catastrophe of Mao’s Great Leap Forward. The drought-famine of 1959–61, which killed 20 million peasants (the death toll officially admitted in 1980 by Hu Yaobang) was the most deadly of the twentieth century, perhaps of all time. Given the PRC’s impressive commitments to food security and disaster mitigation in the early 1950s, as well as its dramatic success in raising average life expectancy the scale of this holocaust is stupefying and, for many sympathizers with the Chinese Revolution, almost inexplicable. Certainly, the “strong” El Niño of 1957–59, which also produced a famous famine and nearly a million refugees in the Brazilian sertão, was the likely culprit responsible for the onset of drought in 1958–59, but recent interpretations radically disagree over the relative importance of climatic and political determinants. In Hungry Ghosts, a Robert Conquest–like exposé of Mao’s orchestration of “the darkest moment in the long history of China,” Jasper Becker fails to mention any natural context for the famine whatsoever, although Chinese meteorologists have characterized the drought, which affected one-third of the nation’s cultivated acreage, as the most extreme of the twentieth century. For the first time in human memory, people could actually wade across the Yellow River. ___ OwlFancier posted:Is there not some sort of link between revolutionary centralized communism and famines though? The link between centralized communism and famines is that the USSR stopped having them after the 40s, and then Russia started running into food shortages again after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. An examination of famines in the modern period indicates that it's almost never about an inability to physically produce or deliver sufficient food to meet the subsistence needs of the population, but rather an inability of the population to procure the food for lack of ability to pay, combined with state and private forces that collude to enforce the "rules" on the acquisition of food. It's an ideological phenomenon. gradenko_2000 fucked around with this message at 09:36 on Nov 6, 2020 |
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Nov 6, 2020 09:31
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My comrade Gradenko expresses it much more intelligently, but yes. Communist administrations are much more vulnerable to famines and other critical market shortages... but the last even remotely socialist regime to exist without NATO or CIA interference was probably early Christians in literally 100 AD, or maybe the Cathar movement in the middle ages.
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Nov 6, 2020 10:54
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gradenko_2000 posted:___ Hell, stepping away from communism for a second, the irish potato famine was chiefly the complete failure of capitalism. The irish had enough to feed themselves as a nation even with the potato blight, but they were compelled to sell it away and the laissez-faire whig gov halted even the paltry food relief tories organised before. As has been proven time and time again, governments/entities that plan withstand crisis efficiently. Soviets got into space on the fraction of resources America needed, and how they built engines is STILL state of the art. Vietnam had the best coronavirus response in the world by far. And if you are iffy about centralised government, both Rojava and EZLN are entities that exist in literal war zones/militarised crime cartel zones and manage to even introduce equality, liberty and egalitarianism in areas that struggled with all these issues just years before. dex_sda fucked around with this message at 11:12 on Nov 6, 2020 |
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Nov 6, 2020 11:05
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To be sure I absolutely would not suggest that capitalism doesn't cause famines, more just that in the current time I do worry about the effects of things like embargos and major industrial rejiggering on a society that relies on global trade for food security (which is a lot of societies) Of course we might be getting that anyway if the current UK government keeps on with brexit lol. And also yes "don't be communist or the capitalists will deliberately starve you to death" is not exactly a ringing endorsement of capitalism.
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Nov 6, 2020 11:09
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dex_sda posted:Hell, stepping away from communism for a second, the irish potato famine was chiefly the complete failure of capitalism. The irish had enough to feed themselves as a nation even with the potato blight, but they were compelled to sell it away and the laissez-faire whig gov halted even the paltry food relief tories organised before. The other example of this is the British parliament extolling the virtues of railroad construction in India as thereby making it impossible for the region to ever experience famines... only to have these railroads be used in practice to shuttle foodstuffs across the subcontinent where they could fetch the highest prices, even as the grain and millet had to be placed under armed guard to prevent starving people from simply taking the harvest by force, out of desperation. Sharks Eat Bear posted:- free trade [I feel too uninformed to have a good take. I find a lot of anti-free trade rhetoric to be xenophobic/racist, but also not sure how free trade exists outside the context of imperialism and neoliberalism] "Free trade" is, in general, a bad idea, because what it essentially means is that countries are not allowed to engage in protectionist behavior. This means that countries that are not-yet-industrialized, are never going to be able to industrialize, since any domestic production/manufacture will be cannibalized by cheaper imports from already-developed countries, and then the not-yet-industrialized country cannot impose tariffs on those imports, since tariffication is in violation of free trade principles. The Global South becomes trapped as merely being a consumer of the advanced finished goods produced by the Global North, as well as being a source of raw material, but are never allowed to become producers themselves.
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Nov 6, 2020 11:16
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OwlFancier posted:To be sure I absolutely would not suggest that capitalism doesn't cause famines, more just that in the current time I do worry about the effects of things like embargos and major industrial rejiggering on a society that relies on global trade for food security (which is a lot of societies) I think it's realistic to suggest that any country that undertakes a socialist project is under a very real threat of suffering disruptions to its food-production and food-logistics chains (and not just food, but many other basic goods), even simply as a function of trying to reconfigure to a collectivized form of production, not yet counting the rest of the capitalist world deliberately trying to gently caress with them. Having said that, it means that a socialist movement needs to approach the project carefully. To paraphrase Malatesta, you cannot attain the moral emancipation of being able to avoid all the bad things as long as the current conditions of political and economic subjection apply, and so we should not use the possibility of these bad things happening, as a prohibition against attempting to break the vicious cycle.
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Nov 6, 2020 11:28
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No I agree, especially given that capitalism looks set to cause catastrophic disruption to our ability to feed people anyway. But that is broadly why I would prefer it if the change came from the bottom up rather than in a great fiery rush from above, not least because the last few decades have put me off the idea of ardent ideologues of any stripe wielding central government power. I think that structurally makes them very prone to loving people over and loving things up even if they don't intend to. I trust people who work in an industry to be more capable of ensuring it functions than I do anyone sitting in a fancy office in the capital deciding that they need to make number go up.
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Nov 6, 2020 11:32
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Also, since I am an anarchist who considers EZLN to be a very realistic implementation of anarchist praxis and therefore am super interested in them, I wanna loop back to the discussion about how people are inherently greedy or not. Consider: in 1994, when Marcos led their first rebellion, Chiapas in Mexico was absolutely a capitalist place exploited by capital and a crime/substance abuse ridden hellhole. It was also struggling heavily with issues like domestic violence. EZLN managed to take some territory, and thanks to socialist roots they gave radical feminists the power needed to address issues impacting women. Within years - thanks to radical democracy on which the Zapatistas function - the women put forward alcohol and substance prohibition as a law, on the basis that they disproportionately feel the effects through abuse. Men had doubters, but ultimately accepted out of solidarity. Fast forward 25 years, and not only are women's rights basically sacred to every man in their territory, but the prohibition made them all resilient to cartel influence and have fewer health issues. Nobody would dream of repealing prohibition there now. That's the sort of rapid change that can result when society is reorganised, and to be concrete in regards to the greed issue: zapatista coops have impact on the local school curriculum. So they introduced more science and especially agricultural science, but also more social-based humanities, and in particular, they allow kids to change the curriculum too. What this resulted in by now is that their kids, completely by themselves, started having 'resistance' classes - they consider resistance to problems important for their future, so they have classes where they play at devising their own mostly nonviolent protest/anti-authoritarianism strategies, and they are so clever some of those strategies were adopted by the adults (source: Luchas 'muy otras', a great collaborative inside look tome about the Zapatistas). It only took the kids growing up in an equitable, cooperative environment to consider it worth fighting for. I contend this is universal. (and it's why I think ussr failed, as their approach retained too much of the world structure where opportunism and oppression were rewarded, but that's neither here or there) Zapatistas made similar strides in crime (their system is bottom-up and by now, thanks to the removal of impetus for crime, their prison is basically for decor, they rarely need it) and other areas. Of course, they aren't perfect and they are in particular VERY insular - but who can blame them, when capital has done it's darndest to destroy every socialist movement of every flavor that came before? dex_sda fucked around with this message at 11:48 on Nov 6, 2020 |
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Nov 6, 2020 11:40
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Mexico in general is very based and it sucks so bad that the American narrative is that it's a lawless shithole. I don't have much contact with my family south of the border, but from what I hear basically all main stream messaging is completely detached from reality.
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Nov 6, 2020 11:54
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Larry Parrish posted:Mexico in general is very based and it sucks so bad that the American narrative is that it's a lawless shithole. I don't have much contact with my family south of the border, but from what I hear basically all main stream messaging is completely detached from reality. It's complicated, afaik there are absolutely areas that are some degree of a 'shithole' in regards to cartels, but you are correct that any main stream messaging is completely devoid of nuance and paints the country where you have both super-neoliberal secessionists in the north and an honest-to-god million-strong quasi-anarchist project in the south with broad strokes
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Nov 6, 2020 11:56
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gradenko_2000 posted:The other example of this is the British parliament extolling the virtues of railroad construction in India as thereby making it impossible for the region to ever experience famines... only to have these railroads be used in practice to shuttle foodstuffs across the subcontinent where they could fetch the highest prices, even as the grain and millet had to be placed under armed guard to prevent starving people from simply taking the harvest by force, out of desperation. Thanks, that all makes sense to me. I had reflected on this recently and my gut feeling was very similar, so nice to hear some validation. The way I thought about it was that free trade will necessary be exploited by capitalists insofar as they are unconstrained in moving the means of production to wherever labor is cheapest and least protected, which is obviously a wildly asymmetrical advantage because labor is effectively constrained within a small geographic area due the financial and social costs of moving, restrictions on immigration, etc.
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Nov 6, 2020 15:45
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Sharks Eat Bear posted:Bringing this back from a few pages, thanks for the reply. I don't dislike what you have to say at all! I'm not sure I'm on the same page, but I suspect it might mostly be a semantic issue. I *think* the fundamental premise of the concept of a social contract is that it's dependent on the will/consent of the people to be valid. It's one of the aspects of Liberalism that I think is worth keeping, so to speak, but has been poisoned by other aspects associated with it like individualism, belief in property as a fundamental right... If you actually want to apply a materialist lens to the social contract, we must analyze the relationship between human beings as the manifestation of the contract. Social contract theory doesn't really holds out as a description of government, especially if it assumes consent. Oppressed people don't "consent" to oppression. Slaves do not "consent" to slavery. It is coercion that enforces these contracts, not consent. And calling it consent erases the violence necessary to enforce it. So, that raises an interesting question, "Why frame the social contract as 'consent' at all?" All the history of the world is one rear end in a top hat punching someone and taking their stuff. A king takes the food from peasant, a boss takes the labor of the worker. Neither the worker nor the peasant 'consent' to this relationship, they'll just die if they don't take part. They are coerced into compliance. So what does painting their compliance as "consent" do? It justifies this oppression as "consent" instead of the violence it obviously is. And this really portrays the stark contrast between rationalism and materialism: Rationally, no man would ever consent to unfair bargain. Materially, if I have a gun I can make you "consent" to whatever the gently caress I want. So the entire idea of the social contract is fine in theory but completely falls apart in practice. Sharks Eat Bear posted:Basically Economic Liberalism is the ancestor of Neoliberalism, and is obviously complete bullshit. But I think the broader concept of Liberalism has some good stuff and a lot of bad stuff, and unfortunately all the bad stuff has really won out over the past few centuries. But when I read the constant attacks on Liberalism here, it makes me wonder how much is really an attack on economic/neo-liberalism. I suspect there's probably some theory on how broad Liberalism necessarily results in economic liberalism, but that link isn't obvious to me and I don't think I've heard that nuance discussed here. It sounds like Economic Liberalism is just an application of Liberalism to an economic structure. In that sense, they are one and the same. Neoliberalism is supposedly a different beast that bucks the ideology of individual responsibility entirely because it uses the government to save private industries that have ostensibly failed all on their own. However, from a materialist standpoint neoliberalism is nothing particularly special or unique. Governments have always been run by the wealthy, and they have always been used to secure and expand the property of the wealthy. The only difference is that neoliberalism encodes that protection into the law. Lenin wrote about the imperialist nature of capitalism years before FDR manifested neoliberalism here on Earth. Edit: whoa boy, forgot a rather vital 'doesn't' in there. Cpt_Obvious fucked around with this message at 17:14 on Nov 6, 2020 |
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Nov 6, 2020 16:20
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OwlFancier posted:Is there not some sort of link between revolutionary centralized communism and famines though? I always figured it was just the massive social disruption and attempts to radically change how land and industry works means that they gently caress up the food supply in the process (and often end up subjected to trade embargos either deliberately or just because people are reluctant to risk it in unstable places). Which isn't to say you shouldn't change how land is owned and used, but just that you gotta be careful about it. Having seen a bunch of awesome posts here in this thread, this relationship seems to be reversed: Communism doesn't cause famine, famine causes communism. Cpt_Obvious fucked around with this message at 16:27 on Nov 6, 2020 |
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Nov 6, 2020 16:22
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The Oldest Man posted:E: like we're talking a lot about Marxism-Leninism and Maoism and vanguard revolutionary thought here but a) that's not the only philosophy of advancement toward socialism and b) participation in bourgeoise liberal democracy has put explicitly Marxist socialist regimes in power more than once. A lot of the anti-liberalism in ML writing is real world and hard learned lessons from dealing with liberal wreckers who talk a good game and then pipe-wrench the revolution as soon as they're in a position to benefit from that. Wait, I am interested in this. Which ones?
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Nov 6, 2020 17:12
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DrSunshine posted:Wait, I am interested in this. Which ones? Unless I'm mistaken the most obvious example would be the Bolsheviks participating in the Provisional Government. As Lenin explained in "An Infantile Disease", even if you don't set out to actually win any legalistic victories via your participation in bourgeois democracy, at the very minimum, their sandbagging of the efforts of the communists will serve as an example to the people that the bourgeois democracy needs to be overthrown, because LOOK AT WHAT THEY'RE DOING, THIS ISN'T GOING TO WORK.
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Nov 6, 2020 17:24
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DrSunshine posted:Wait, I am interested in this. Which ones? Two that come to mind immediately are Salvador Allende in Chile and Communists' repeated victories in the Indian state of Kerala. vyelkin fucked around with this message at 17:32 on Nov 6, 2020 |
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Nov 6, 2020 17:30
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gradenko_2000 posted:Unless I'm mistaken the most obvious example would be the Bolsheviks participating in the Provisional Government. As Lenin explained in "An Infantile Disease", even if you don't set out to actually win any legalistic victories via your participation in bourgeois democracy, at the very minimum, their sandbagging of the efforts of the communists will serve as an example to the people that the bourgeois democracy needs to be overthrown, because LOOK AT WHAT THEY'RE DOING, THIS ISN'T GOING TO WORK. Why does the Provisional Government count as bourgeois democracy rather than just democracy? Are all forms of democracy bourgeois in nature?
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Nov 6, 2020 17:30
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Cpt_Obvious posted:Why does the Provisional Government count as bourgeois democracy rather than just democracy? Are all forms of democracy bourgeois in nature? Or existing bourgeois democracy isn’t democracy. Can’t have a democracy while the rich have a parallel voting system based on buying off politicians. The existence of private ownership of capital means the wealthy are aristocrats in all but name.
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Nov 6, 2020 17:43
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gradenko_2000 posted:Unless I'm mistaken the most obvious example would be the Bolsheviks participating in the Provisional Government. As Lenin explained in "An Infantile Disease", even if you don't set out to actually win any legalistic victories via your participation in bourgeois democracy, at the very minimum, their sandbagging of the efforts of the communists will serve as an example to the people that the bourgeois democracy needs to be overthrown, because LOOK AT WHAT THEY'RE DOING, THIS ISN'T GOING TO WORK. IIRC Lenin was adamant though that it should be with their own party and their own platforms
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Nov 6, 2020 17:49
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Cpt_Obvious posted:Why does the Provisional Government count as bourgeois democracy rather than just democracy? Because the state of the Russian Revolution after the abdication of Nicholas II was up in the air as to whether they would "stop" at a bourgeois liberal democracy, ostensibly to develop their productive forces via the (full/complete) adoption of capitalism, or if they'd "continue on" to socialism directly. The Provisional Government generally represented the interests of those who favored the former, which is why it also had to be overthrown in turn. Cpt_Obvious posted:Are all forms of democracy bourgeois in nature? I wouldn't say so. Communism desires democracy, and in turn it desires the abolition of capitalism because capitalism is incompatible with democracy. CYBEReris posted:IIRC Lenin was adamant though that it should be with their own party and their own platforms oh, I agree. If, as a communist, one decides to participate in parliamentarianism at all, one should at the minimum vote for the communist candidate and the communist party.
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Nov 6, 2020 17:52
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