Comments by "Chompy the Beast" (@chompythebeast) on "Hakim"
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@MinecraftFleischer Your framework is entirely mired in that of capitalism. Yes, as others have pointed out, under capitalism, your description is accurate. Under a centrally-planned socialist economy, however, CEOs and capitalists are not the ones deciding how society's amassed wealth will be directed, but the people and the state, with careful consideration not for the profit of the few but for the benefit of the whole, make those choices instead. Gone, then, is the fear of capitalist venture and its potential associated loss, gone is the very motivation and source of that fear, and in its place, industry is aligned to more productive, less wasteful, less selfishly-inclined ends.
In short, capitalists ("businessmen", as you call them, though of course business will still require professional laborers even after capitalism's end) will neither be fronting their money for research nor making those decisions themselves, but the state and the people will. The idea that individual sectors of the master class, locked in ruthless competition with each other as they are, are somehow better decision-makers for all of society is a fantasy that is immediately dashed with even a cursory examination of wealth inequality and the ongoing existence of hunger, houselessness, and all other symptoms of poverty. Real democracy doesn't look like empowering gangs of plutocrats and oligarchs, it looks like a worker's state making choices with the input and for the direct benefit of the people.
One would have to pull out some very tongue-worn boots indeed and evince a love of dead-on-arrival "Reagonomics" (aka Neoliberalism) to argue that somehow society is safer in the hands of the wealthy few than in the hands of all of us. One might as well try to sell me on fealty to the Divine Right of Kings while they're at it at that point
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@ihl0700677525 Please, if you self-describe as a liberal, do not explain to me my own platform, especially if you're going to get it wrong while also arguing that an explicitly classist society is somehow also a meritocracy. That is, I'm afraid, a patently ridiculous claim. I just wanted to put the response to your classist stance out there for all who may scroll this far down this reply chain. When you speak of success, you speak of surplus value robbery – you argue, essentially, that "Might Makes Right."
In truth, friend, it doesn't matter what you or I choose to "believe." What matters is the material reality we are confronted with, and how we act in response to it
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@shizachan8421 Actually, as it happens, social mobility for the average American is growing less likely by the year, and today it is less likely than it was under late feudalism and the burgers in the 1600s. And you've seen of late how 'freedoms' are merely concessions granted by the ruling class that they can strip away at will.
As for standards of living, we can imagine worse, here in the Imperial Core. Well, those of us not in the 60% and growing demographic of people living paycheck to paycheck, let alone the 12% of people who go to bed hungry every night, or the hundreds of thousands who sleep on the street in a land where real estate is capital first, a home and shelter second. But for the children working for pennies, the impoverished working extremely dangerous labor, the starving workers of lands they don't own, the billions living lives far shorter and far beneath what they could be, were it not for the extractive forces of capitalism — for them, there is no falling further.
As you say, no matter what station we are in as a society, we can always imagine better, and that is a strength to be nurtured, not a threat to be quashed. Socialism is that better, and it is certainly a better better than falling to growing threat of ultra-privatized fascism. Socialism is merely the abolition of class, which essentially means that the >1% are no longer to be allowed to horde obscene wealth and power in a world of poverty. It is merely feeding and housing the working class by the very means that we now grossly overfeed the ruling class, even as many of us starve. Labor is entitled to all that is produces by right, and socialism is merely the fulfillment of that truth
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@Apsoy Pike You're not really dunking on socialists here, you're just kinda revealing that you don't know much about socialism yet you've been taught to hate it without understanding it. You can still have property under socialism. Private Property and Personal Property are two completely different things under Marxism. Personal Property is everything you're thinking of: Your home, your clothes, your TV, your toothbrush, etc. Private Property, on the other hand, refers to the means of production: Factories, mass swathes of real-estate, woods for logging, oil drilling platforms, etc. Under socialism, Private Property, aka the means of production, is to be held in common by the workers who build, maintain, and operate it — capitalist ownership, which does not labor and robs the majority of the capital produced by such means, is to be written out of the picture.
You'll still have the stuff in your house, and your house, too. It's just that now it won't be legal for corporations to own millions of unoccupied homes while some 650,000 Americans go roofless. Not only do you have nothing to lose and everything to gain from socialism, but the reality is that you and I and 99% of humanity stand zero chance of every even rising far enough to become a capitalist. And even if you broke the odds, would you really seek to become a robber baron in a world of poverty, rather than uplifting all the world and stripping away the rat race thar forces workers into competition with each other instead of with their natural class rivals?
In short, you've got it backwards. Labor is entitled to all it creates, and that is only upheld under socialism. Socialism is the worker finally being able to control the economy, let alone participate in it. Economic democracy is the explicit goal, and it will never happen under the petty dictatorships of CEOs, who live and loot like lords over serfs
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"Who cares" about human misery? Clearly not those posting on YouTube, justifying avoidable human misery by the sheer scale of it. I'll grant you though that your interest in concrete change is a very good one, and it is also very Marxist of you, very much in line with Dialectical Materialism. For that, however, you'd need to turn to something more substantial than a 15 minute YouTube survey.
There is an entire body of Theory out there, so much that I couldn't recommend all of it. But a really good introduction to the words and policies of an actual revolutionary leader can be found in Thomas Sankara's speeches, which are collected in a great little book titled We Are the Heirs of the World's Revolutions: Speeches from the Burkina Faso Revolution, 1983-1987.
Since they're speeches he gave addressed to his people, they go into some detail about specific plans the Revolution did implement, and the editors even put in some statistics about the country before and after the Revolution, showing substantial growth in things like literacy and life expectancy and substantial curbing of things like infant and maternal mortality and deaths by treatable diseases. Understanding how so much can be achieved even in one of the absolute poorest places on earth and in our own Postmodern Era no less should open one's eyes to (among other things) the immense potential being squandered in places like the United States, with all of its resources and influence, and how that potential could be tapped and allowed to flourish under socialism.
If you want more nitty-gritty, number-heavy looks at historical or proposed revolutions, those exist in numbers too, but it's not exactly written for a general audience once you get that deep into the science. For history more related to socialism and how capitalism has fought against it, however, Michael Parenti's Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism is a book I'd recommend to anyone, and his Against Empire gives a great look at the United States in particular.
And if you really want some dry reading, there are plenty of scientific papers of note that have been published regarding revolution and socialism, covering any revolution or government you could ask for. But it's just as easy to get that information from the footnotes of texts meant to be read by a general audience, such as the ones above.
Anyway, long reply, sorry bout that, didn't have time to make it shorter. Have a good week
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"Communism" didn't kill millions, but rapid industrialization and modernization skipping over hundreds of years of development in mere decades while under global embargo took a heavy toll. Compared to the time it took China and the USSR to go from peasant societies to the #2 economies on earth, in the West, where industrialization happened first over hundreds of years, famine after famine, failure after failure, starvation after starvation occurred, killing untold numbers of people. At any rate, these problems are 20th century problems for those same nations―historical in nature and important lessons for developing countries today, but no longer the material conditions limiting the success of socialism in those places.
The United States of America would be a perfect breeding ground for successful socialism and communism with its high level of industrialization, though any new regime would inherit trillions of dollars of necessary infrastructure reforms that the current master class is just plain ignoring as best it can.
In short, as Marx noted, Capitalism is good at bringing agrarian societies into industrialized ones, Communism is good at taking industrialized societies into post-class societies. China and the USSR skipped over Capitalism, and thus faced rapid challenges that will not be faced by nations that have experienced Capitalism, such as the industrialized West
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@breeie9900 My friend, it is irrelevant to the conversation how many Native Americans were killed before the United States got involved. The point is, from 1776, Native populations in North America were reduced in number by a scale that more than qualifies for genocide. And how is America of the past "not America of today", but China of the past is the China of today? Even though America has not reversed its policies of Native oppression, but the Communists have absolutely reversed all disastrous policies that led to famine in a pre-industrial China? At what number of years have you set the goal posts such that America gets the pass but China doesn't, even though America's crimes were far greater and were deliberately genocidal in nature, while the famines that befell the peasant population of China were a tragedy that even the Chinese Communists themselves had never intended in their ultimately successful Great Leap Forward?
"Learn economic principle please, at least Keynesian or something. Just handing stuff out is not good idea..."
Is this perhaps a joke? You think that is what Socialism and Communism is, "just handing stuff out", and you would suggest that I need to brush up on theory?
It seems clear that I won't be able to crack this tendency of yours to infinitely apologize or excuse America atrocities while granting its political rivals none of the same treatment―nor indeed do I care to suffer your casual insults to my intelligence any longer. Frankly, it is obvious you are not even trying to see these matters from any perspective other than the one that demands you buck against anything that defies the American Empire's well-defined propaganda. That being the case, we aren't even really having a discussion.
I'd happily remind you that the Communist Manifesto is only about 30 pages and is freely available online, and I wish you a good weekend and upcoming week
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@BirdieTheGreat Not exactly. Each idea has its use in its time. Marx himself actually advocated that Communists support certain bourgeois parties in Europe at a time when monarchies were still holding sway, with the full intention of rather turning on those capitalists once they were in power. For Capitalism fundamentally lays the foundations for its replacement with Communism in the same way that Feudalism fundamentally lays the foundation for its replacement with Capitalism.
It was Lenin who argued half a century later that you could kinda skip the Capitalist phase with a strong central vision, and Mao expanded on that idea later still, and in a very real sense they were proven correct: Both the USSR then and China today rocketed from feudal peasant societies in mere decades to become the #2 economies on earth. The cost was great and lessons were learned, to be sure, as they were when England and America industrialized over centuries rather than decades, and all those lessons can be applied to future revolutions.
But Capitalism and Communism are completely incompatible with one another, you can't have a bit of both at once in a lasting system. In essence that's what Socialism might be said to be, but only insofar as Socialism is the transition phase between Capitalism and Communism. So I guess, in that sense, you're right: Capitalism and bourgeois influence don't just evaporate overnight, after all, and in the Socialist phase to come, it will look a bit like an impermanent mixture for a time
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@seanfoley974 Do you really think being opposed to the coercion inherent to classism is somehow a thing endemic only to privilege, only to the beneficiaries of classism, and unknown amongst those exploited by it? Surely not. Indeed, to dismiss the millions of communists around the world as nothing more than Californian teens buying Che tees at Spencer's would be indicative of a great deal of privilege, far removed from the realities of global capitalism or the exploitation of the poor.
I don't bother with leftist forums beyond what you're experiencing right now, because why preach or be preached to by the choir and all that. Politics are much better expressed with deeds than with words, or with better-organized words than are found in most subreddits if with words at all. Which is why I prefer to read from the wisdom of the giants on whose shoulders we stand more than I prefer to offer my uneducated opinion to strangers in meaningless places.
And yeah, almost everyone on this website has hobbies and a bit of free time to devote to entertainment or education, hence why they're here. I put on vids about games in the background more than I play them, which I'm sure is pretty common. What isn't common, I guess, is having an account so old that my Likes are visible by default, and even less common that I haven't hidden them like most people do. If the scrutiny that opens me up to exposes that I find the medium of interactive gaming very interesting, I'm comfortable with that, even if the pass time is associated notoriously with a bourgeois audience. At any rate, that notion that anti-capitalists are somehow hypocritical for simply enjoying things sometimes is as silly as telling someone who wants life to be better that it's hypocritical to try to enjoy life, though I'm sure you didn't mean that either
Anyway, have a good weekend
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@breeie9900 Mao never murdered tens of millions. Many people died of famine, and that's terrible, but counting starvation deaths in the Chinese column but refusing to do so for America's global empire is patently and laughably unfair. America reduced the population of an entire continent to less than 10% of its numbers before their arrival. Wars started by or engaged in by America have indeed seen tens of millions killed. The number of civilians alone killed in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam is over two million, and that is just one conflict. Beyond the obvious instruments of war, global capital tolerates the deaths of countless people every single day around the world due to hunger, and we are fed lies about overpopulation rather than massive wealth hoarding. Hell, even in the heart of empire, some 14% of all US citizens go to bed hungry every single night, despite almost 50% of all food brought to market being thrown out and wasted in the United States.
At the end of the day, Body Counts like these are terrible ways to measure the worth or the merit of a system or a state. But if we do want to go down that road, the path of capitalist greed will take home the honors, will be more drenched in blood and hair and fingernails and gore: Even United Nations figures can bear any and all of this out.
Simply and respectfully, you have been deliberately misled to think of communists as bloodthirsty and capitalists as otherwise, and the numbers to prove that are freely accessible to you and all. But again, these numbers games are a childish way to reckon the suffering and the success of the human spirit
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@EngineerMFB I think I understand you, but that's a rather poor way of putting it for two reasons:
1) Such a period must be understood to be temporary and transitional. The goal, in as swift a time as is prudent, is to abolish private property and the market altogether. Anything short of this goal is mere capitalist reform, and is neither socialism nor communism.
2) Capitalism as a political ideology is the control of society by capitalists, by the 1%. In the above transitional period, capitalists must be suppressed, must be barred from the political sphere entirely, and instead, the working class must control the mechanisms of governance and means of production, even as it strives to rid itself of capitalist modes of production with the goal of establishing communism. Again, that is what many call socialism.
If we are describing the same thing, then abandon the "capitalism" rhetoric, and just say that you advocate for socialism
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4:24 I know this is a silly thing to point out, but is it not "read" as in the past tense in that idiomatic constriction? I could absolutely be wrong, but I always assumed it was meant to qualify what was just read in a slightly tongue-in-cheek way, it isn't using the imperative form of the verb sort of commanding the reader to go back and read the text in question differently.
The meanings are so close that it effectively doesn't really matter how you interpret it, it works either way. Not only that, but the words read (past participle), read (present active) and read (imperative) are spelled the same and pronounced only two ways, and on top of that, this is definitely one of those things you read but never say or hear said. I just find these ambiguous quirks of language mildly fascinating. And again, maybe I've been reading it wrong all along! Or maybe it works both ways.
Anyhow, thanks for this one, Hakim. Glad this is out there so we can try to move on from this weak form of modern red baiting
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@CassieAngelica Every systemic change came from Revolution. We did not gradually loosen the shackles of Old Empire or Monarchy, they were smashed. It means nothing that more Revolutions "fail" than "succeed" in the face of the fact that only Revolutions have ever found success at all. Check out Rosa Luxemburg's Reform or Revolution? for a clear explanation of the folly of Reformism: It works about as well Appeasement worked against the Third Reich, and we know what was ultimately required to win that battle.
What you are saying underneath everything else is that, ultimately, you prefer to doom the world to its present status quo rather than risk a threat to the benefit you presently enjoy within it. By rejecting revolution and hanging your hat on some nebulous slow change without any actual way of achieving it, you are saying that you're comfortable enough with the status quo to prefer it to the transitional difficulties which are undeniably required to improve it.
You are, it seems, as are many in the West and especially America, a profiteer of (bourgeois, settler-colonial) Revolution already. That is why you do not seek the tribulation of further Revolution. If you were pressed harder against the wall, you would inevitably conclude that fighting back is your only and final option. Perhaps if you had greater empathy for those who do not share your benefit, but then again, this is why the so-called "white moderate" is genuinely the greatest stumbling block to change in the modern world. Just ask Martin Luther King Jr. about it, read his Letter From A Birmingham Jail: You may find he's calling out most of the people in your life, as I did
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@MinecraftFleischer Patents stifle innovation, they do not encourage it. Patents also don't stop pharmaceutical companies from developing a 49th acne cream rather than producing much-needed malaria medicine. Patents encourage profit for their holder at the expense of any other end, which is bad for things like consumer products and downright horrific for medicine.
Patents don't push any company or society towards any goal other than the amassment of wealth for themselves. They have exactly zero other purpose, they do nothing for innovation. This is just the excuse that billionaire companies use to justify being billionaire companies who are, again, allocating their massive resources in ways not at all optimized for human life and well-being, but solely for the profit of their shareholders.
The quest to enshrine all forms of private property, even making private property of mere ideas and concepts, is an inherently capitalist one, but it is not for the good of society by any means―in fact, patents, alongside other forms inherent theft, ought to be utterly abolished
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@apoc519 Why would it be good for working people to continue to have their surplus value extracted in some sectors but not others? If capital exists at all, it will consume all sectors, it cannot be segregated. It sounds to me like you're concerned that socialism will kill the innovation that comes from competition, which is a common misconception that Hakim actually has a video about, a video which he actually refers to and links here in this vid.
Competition can be good, but at the megacorp or societal level, it is more often than not merely wasteful. Multiple parties each spending immense resources not just to create a product but to beat their opponents to market with it inherently creates multiple times the waste: It would be better if resources were focused just on one entity and the market motivation was entirely removed, cutting resource consumption down immensely.
And as for the concern that only the market and its pressures can breed innovation: That is addressed in this very video around 7:49, which provides several products that were created first under socialism, thus proving that innovation is not stifled by lack of the market, but on the contrary, it is actually allowed to reach its full potential.
Competition of some kind, however, is inevitable. A wrench with a more ergonomic grip is in natural competition with an otherwise equal wrench with a less comfortable grip, for example, and that will remain true under any -ism. Likewise, the desire to improve the wrench will be present so long as wrenches are being used, no matter what the economic models of the future may be.
It is both scientifically and historically demonstrable that the market is not the only nor even the optimal impetus for innovation, and that's something that Marx himself writes extensively about in Capital
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@Apsoy Pike I feel like I have done a bit of what you're saying I haven’t done, frankly. If that's your reaction to my reply, if your understanding of these topics is at that level, then you need more than me typing you comments on YouTube to help you better understand. There are millions of pages written about this stuff, and I'm not capable of condensing the entire 101 pitch for socialism and against capitalism into brief YouTube replies, nor would it be reasonable to think I could.
I'd recommend to you first the very Manifesto, since it's only 30 some pages and you seem like you'd learn from reading it. That text exists to make that pitch as briefly as it can to a working class audience circa 1850, which is to say it's a brief survey that's written to be understandable. An even better, more contemporary and even easier to read text would be Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism by Michael Parenti. That text is amazing, one I'd recommended to anyone, especially if you want to understand the conflict between capitalist and communist forces in the 20th century and thus see their systems, deeds, and motivations contrasted.
But this argument you're making, that the failures I describe under capitalist societies might not be due to capitalism, but that the failures under socialist societies were somehow clearly because of socialism, is, frankly, mere dogma without a single example, and that in the face of my examples. You think capitalist police in the core of empire nearly matching the spending of the world's largest socialist army has somehow nothing to do with how socialist and capitalist societies allocate their funds? What could possibly be your explanation for America, the richest empire in history, having the highest incarcerated population on earth? What is your imagined reason beyond capitalism that explains how the wealthiest nation allows more than 12% of its people to go to bed hungry every single night, even as 40% of all food brought to market is thrown out and wasted?
Saying that how America spends its money and treats is people has nothing to do with the prevailing sociopolitical ideology is quite a strange and monumental claim to make — if socialism explicitly wouldn't tolerate poverty in the land of wealth, how is its absence not a factor in just such a land? How is the presence of an opposing ideology not relevant? How can anyone even think of deflecting these very clear socioeconomic issues away from capitalism's door while they happily pile up every conceivable socioeconomic failure at the threshold of socialism? Again, this is dogmatic, not fact-based.
Those who don't know what they're talking about focus on broad claims of success and failure without pointing to defensible examples because that is exactly how they were persuaded to distrust socialism and to implicitly trust capitalism in the first place: with blind faith, not with critical thinking backed by data and the scientific method. It is folly, juvenile even, to take petty jabs at great concepts without first attempting to understand their explicit goals, grievances, and methods. Reducing the debate to mere ideological posturing not supported by material reality is the stuff of sophomores and demagogues, and you and I are much smarter than that
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Is it being naive or overly-reductive to suggest that we do away with qualitative judgements like "good" or "bad" with regards to these things in the first place? The best of any language is the kind that is understood by your listener better, I guess, but that's a relative matter between each and every speaker, not a universal judgement.
In any case, language's evolution in certain segments of the population is almost always met with disdain from speakers of that language outside that demographic or clique. There really isn't any material basis upon which we could say who is right, who speaks the "better" version of the language, beyond perhaps sheer intelligibility by different audiences. But even in that regard, different dialects could be compared to different types of hammers: They're all recognizably hammers, and you could probably drive a nail with any of them, but different heads (dialects) are better suited to different jobs (different audiences). Standardization as a means of creating the largest possible audience is a reasonable goal, but it can hardly be argued that prestige dialects and accents really reflect that kind of standardization perfectly, yet they maintain their power. So when it comes to how we evaluate "good" and "bad" in terms of dialects, it seems unlikely that sheer utilitarianism is the primary factor.
And besides, without going into another tangent, diversity of language is fundamental to the arts, and represents itself not a thing to be stifled but the natural evolution of interpersonal communication.
I know social and class weight comes to bear with prestige dialects and all that, but I think "as linguists" that is a thing to recognize as a social phenomenon that exists but isn't one we should engage in beyond eroding or destroying prejudice. Engaging in discussions of which is "wronger" than the other is to participate in a conversation that probably shouldn't really exist at scholarly tables in the first place.
But perhaps I am misinterpreting something about what you said and I'm just going on a tangent, maybe this is just the analysis of a philologist rather than that of a linguist haha
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Without committing whataboutism, you already know that capitalism and fascism have managed to commit those selfsame atrocities, so why is it better to putt around under these systems currently committing atrocities than it is to move on from them while learning from the atrocities of former socialist experiments? You claim not to demand perfection, and I believe you: You're evidently comfortable with capitalism, after all. If you're looking for some sort of "Third Solution", Fascism is right over there―you can join the rest of the anti-communists hanging out there, I'm sure your claim to be leftist will make a huge difference.
Seriously, you've told us what you don't want, and I think most would agree that genocide is obviously undesirable (and fuck anyone who disagrees). But what is it you do want, then? Because if you offer nothing but criticisms, what makes you any different from any other right winger, any other capitalist?
Also, democracy and communism can indeed go hand in hand.
Also also, Human Rights are a myth created by the state of the exact same variety as the Divine Right of Kings: "God" apparently grants "inalienable rights" to people, but the state moderates those rights on god's behalf I guess, and can grant them one year and strip them away the next. It's all nonsense used to prop up the ruling class with religious authority. Humanity needs no bourgeois-certified "rights" in order to be free from exploitation or to have accesses to lifesaving medical care, etc
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America literally does all of those things. America literally has Gulags: We have the most incarcerated population per capita on earth. 1 in 7 Americans goes to bed hungry every single night despite the fact that 30-40% of all food brought to market going to waste. The nation is built on slave labor and the genocide of the people who lived here first. We have around 600,000 people living on the streets and treated like criminals for doing so. We have more than 50% of the wealth of the richest empire in human history in the hands of a mere 50 aristocratic families. We have the #1 and #3 most expensive militaries on the planet, with #3 being American Policing, which has absolutely no targets but the very people forced to foot their bill. Our economic system collapses into recession approximately every decade, and every single time we respond by bailing out the rich and leaving the poor to get poorer. We murder innocent people all over the world in the name of maintaining the imperial authority, to absolutely no benefit of our general population, indeed to their detriment.
Communism is the lesser evil, my friend. Keep watching Hakim's vids, and when you feel yourself kicking back hard at something said, pause and consider it first: Do not respond as you have been programmed, but only as you actually consider the ideas presented. This is a difficult thing for anyone to do, but as Westerners living under capitalism our whole lives, it's important, because it's the only way we break free of the convenient lies and narratives we've always been told to excuse the rotten system we live in
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@ShihammeDarc Russia and China moved from peasant populations to industrialized nations in a matter of years, doing what took England and America centuries. Without the USSR, all of Europe would almost certainly have fallen to fascism (instead of the third of it that did during the Cold War, thanks to the US). And speaking of Star Trek Socialism, the USSR beat the West to Space―we absolutely don't need Musks and Bezoses to get us there. Those nations were not without many mistakes and even some willful atrocities, but the lives of billions of people have by now been improved by the efforts, both domestic and international, of China and the USSR. But that's a whole 'nother pair of fields of study.
In short, it's fair to say that our conception of those countries is extremely biased by nature here in the West, and that while many Western criticisms are valid, we are made to focus only on those failings, even as we are made to focus only on our own system's greater merits
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Like much Theory written in times and spaces far removed from our own, I am glad to be appraised of it, but I am disinterested in adopting the rhetoric in its entirety (not that that's to be expected of a thinking reader in general). I'm sure I'll be accused of Western decadence or some such, but I ain't buying the pervasive current of impotent machismo infused herein. Authority is to be expected of strong leaders, but the appeals here are often to Regressivism and backwards ideologies, not forward-thinking social orders that don't seek to quash the human spirit into ugly and outmoded concepts like gender norms.
Old guards who seem to insist that such prejudice is somehow necessary for Socialism to succeed seem to have forgotten the strong de-emphasis on gender roles that the USSR adopted, considering as it did those ideas to be the Western Decadence, not their abandonment. This sort of reestablishment of bigotry is essentially just cultural differences being confused or lumped in with Theory in order to justify ignorance and prejudice while accusing those who call it such of "decadence". It's the same homophobia we've fought amongst Regressive Western establishments, ironically, for generations.
My comrades aren't bigots, and that's the way I like it
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@amirmirzaei3940 lol, my friend, I say once again: The video literally opens with a 'warning' that it is a parody. Go ahead and check, it literally could not be more prominently-placed or any clearer: 0:00 . It reads, and I quote: "This video is partly satire. An exercise in how disingenuous American and American-centric reporting or discussion of other countries is like. The facts stated are true, while the narrative structure is mirroring the emotional and confused delivery of this type of media."
It seems you let your desire to lash out against this vid cloud you to its actual contents, indeed, its actual opening. Not sure how you missed that and then went on to be so confidently incorrect in your judgement, but with all due respect, I guess this is just proof of what you yourself are suggesting: Quality satire will lose the intellectually-lacking audience member quite rapidly, no matter how well marked as satire it is, haha
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@CassieAngelica Fair enough on my assumptions. Setting them aside: Left disunity is a problem, but the right is clearly not 'unified' either, they're just coalesced under the present status quo. The problem you identify is not endemic to leftist politics but to the politics of subversion in general. Naturally, there are going to be many proposed solutions to a problem of such magnitude. But equally naturally, they will not all be equal in all ways.
Practically speaking, only Revolution has been historically or can be scientifically demonstrated to achieve what it is we seek to achieve. Reforming capitalism will never lead to the replacement capitalism, it will only make a "cuddlier, friendlier" capitalism at best, and even then, all we're talking about there is concessions to the petite bourgeois in relatively wealthy countries, never to the wage- and more literal-slave labor of the majority of those nations or the planet as a whole.
Seeking reform is to doom us all, especially the lowest of the low, with hollow promises backed by absolutely no theory, no praxis, no power. Reformism is a lullaby for the damned, an opiate for the masses to fill their heads with nothing but ideals that will never see the light of the world by their own means. At least Revolution has an undeniable chance, if executed in due manner and time: Reform has not been demonstrated to possess that possibility.
After all, if Reform worked, why has it not happened? Reformists are burdened with explaining why concessions made to the working class been rolled back of late, rather than accelerated. Don't you understand the violent force that maintains the present capitalist hegemony? Don't you see how frequently they use that violence? To pretend violence doesn't achieve anything and to discredit Revolution that way is to be in denial, and indeed, it is even to apologize for the violence that befalls us on a daily basis. For the truth is, Revolution has not "failed" in recent days as often as it has due to mere left disunity, it has done so because it is met with extreme violence from the right: It is met with not reform, but counter-revolution.
Again, I see that you were talking about reading more theory with the other person in this thread. I recommend once more Rosa Luxemburg's Reform or Revolution?, where she outlines this more-than-a-century-old debate as well as anyone has ever done. Her words have only been proven more true over time.
Rather than reinventing the wheel engaging in ancient debates, it is better to at least come to those debates armed with the wisdom of the giants on whose shoulder we stand. Otherwise we're just engaging in myopic, self-aggrandizing, and (for the sake of actual change) rather pointless squabbles in the dark, when we could instead shed much more light on such important discussions as this one.
In the end, it seems, we both want real change, so let us start from there and arm ourselves with all means we can in order to actually achieve it
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@alexanderboulton2123 I think, on the contrary, that the crimes of the world's most powerful empire far exceed the crimes of the little old DPRK. It isn't even a contest. From native genocide to the world's largest incarcerated population to imperialist wars that have killed tens of millions of innocents from South America to the Levant to Southeast Asia... I could go on, of course, and I'm sure you could throw in several more crimes for which history will condemn us as Americans who passively tolerated them to be perpetrated.
At any rate, if there's a point I'm making, it's this: Whatever instinctive distrust and disgust you feel towards the DPRK, it is cosmically foolish not to apply that very same brand of condemnatory scepticism to the biggest bully in the planet's history, your own side.
Also, fascism really requires the ideological supremacy of a single group elevated to the bourgeois class on the backs of every other lesser group's proletariat, usually with little to no regard for the humanity of those other groups. In that more accurate regard, America is much closer to fascism than the DPRK: In fact, it is fascist, and amongst the many villainous crimes of the Kim dynasty, fascism is not one of them
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@chris135x Yes, everyone understands the difference between planning to do something and actually doing it. This is a very obvious notion, and I don't know why you think people don't understand it to begin with. In fact we use the word "praxis", that is, putting theory into action. But such action is misguided or even outright impossible without a plan, without the theory.
Socialism is based upon scientific principles, observed sets of data and peer-reviewed conclusions, not mere intuitions and emotions. Dialectical Materialism is a huge part of the 'theory' underpinning socialism and communism, and understanding it is essential to anyone hoping to bring about a socialist revolution. After all, if one doesn't understand the principles of a science (like, say, physics), how can they hope to conduct fruitful experiments in that field? How could a physicist hope to model the movement of stars without even understanding what gravity is, or what absolute magnitude means? Any action such an ignorant physicist would take would be unlikely to benefit the field of physics, would be unlikely to yield any useful fruit. This is why it is important for socialists who want to actively bring about socialism to understand the theory (or theories) which underlies socialism―it isn't because they think great change is achieved by sheer reading alone the way you seem to suggest.
All of this is pretty much covered in the brief 30-something pages of the Communist Manifesto, which is freely available online. If you want to avail yourself of any knowledge on this subject, that quick read would do a lot to dispel some of your misconceptions. But to be clear: Nobody who reads this theory is under the impression that doing so is the same thing as actively achieving socialism in their society, they merely understand it to make them more effective at going out and doing that. And if more people read the theory (which so many simply refuse to do out of prejudice), then that would make such work even easier overall.
If you have any questions about this I'd be happy to try to answer them as best I can
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@kestis958 Kestis my friend, you have stumbled onto one of the fundamental and core debates that has gripped socialists since the days of Marx: Reform or Revolution? Woefully, I must report that Reform alone simply does not work. It has never worked. The USA has the world's 3rd most funded army in its police: That army isn't going to roll over to "reform", and the powers that be aren't going to just give up when they have that much force to back their authority. And since the USA also has the world's largest incarcerated population, it is clear they are not afraid to use that force.
This isn't me being pessimistic, it's unfortunately been demonstrated time and again.
However, not all Revolution is bloody: The Burkina Faso Revolution did not require a single shot. Yet, of course, the counter-revolution 4 years later that saw Thomas Sankara murdered by a Western backed-coup certainly did. So you see: Even in socialist experiments' destruction, even in their "failure", (counter-)revolution, not reform, always plays a role.
But if you're finished with soaking in takes on the greatest issue of our age in YouTube replies, I would recommend you check out the relatively short book Reform or Revolution? by Rosa Luxemberg. It's still considered one of the greatest treatises on this debate ever penned, and her words have only proven more and more correct with the passage of history. In her examinations of the merits and demerits of both methods of abolishing the Tyranny of the Bourgeoisie, you'll probably conclude as she did, especially with the 20th century now behind us, that the world is already run by extraordinary violence, and that asking nicely alone will never bring that to an end, even if not all Revolution need be as violent and protracted as, say, the American Revolution.
Si vis pacem, para bellum, as they say, and to put it another way: If you desire peace, seek to end the violence already embroiling the working world
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@non1263 My friend, the same species that is capable of murder is capable of devoting a lifetime to raising and loving a child. There is nothing more endemic about greed to our species than generosity: The issue is not our nature, the issue is sheer survival. If there is enough for us all, that issue is solved. Arguing that socialism is a failure out of the box because the odd sociopath exists is tantamount to justifying capitalism because it indulges sociopathy. That isn't the mark of a "successful" society (as opposed to socialism's "failure") at all.
I would counter your implications and suggest that it is you who has too much spirituality and not enough Dialectical Materialism clouding your judgement. And moreover, I question your incredibly grim diagnosis of the human race: Just because the wolves rule for now does not indicate that that is our "biological destiny" or anything like that. Indeed, that is the stuff of naked Eugenics and Fascism: That is what you are evincing.
Socialism is not Utopian. If you were to read even the 30 pages of the Manifesto (available for free online), then you would know that Marx and Engels specifically rejected Utopian ideologies. Socialism is more congruent with the human animal than Capitalism could ever pretend to be, though even still, that is not the foundation of its claim to legitimacy (nor indeed is it Capitalism's claim as you insinuate it is, for that matter). To argue that somehow cruelty within the human spirit demands society-wide justification and supplication is to advocate for a ruthlessly violent master class of the few to dominate all the well-meaning people of the world. Only the "spiritually" feal, those broken to bending their knee to abstract concepts without any physical evidence by nature, would ever cleave to such a false and frankly repulsive view of the human animal
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That bit about the "Gnostic Left" is indeed beyond ridiculous, and speaks more to the Millenarian paranoia of American "Evangelical" Christians than it does to anything else. But if anyone is interested in academic examinations of historical Gnosticism (of both the Christian and Jewish variety), Dr. Justin Sledge and his channel ESOTERICA have some excellent vids on the subject!
He covers all manner of topics regarding ancient and medieval and even modern science, religion, and arcana, with spotlights on topics within Christianity, Judaism, and Islam most especially, and he does so from the educated and respectful perspective of a dialectical materialist. Highly recommend his content to anyone with an interest in understanding not only the esoteric histories themselves, but the sociopolitical ramifications those belief systems had, both for those in and out of power. Especially easy to recommend to a (leftist) academic crowd as seems to populate this channel's community
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@apoc519 Ah, the old "human nature" argument, because I guess I'm to believe murder and theft are more human than love and community, even though instances of the latter vastly outweigh the former. And the "authoritarian" argument too, you're pulling a few of the common ones out. In a way, that's good. For, friend, if you live in the USA, you are forced to pay for the world's #1 and #3 most funded military organizations, with the cops being the latter. If you live in the USA, you live in the country with the largest incarcerated population on the entire planet―yes, even more people behind bars than in China, with its one party rule and one billion more citizens. What indeed do you think all of that violence, all of that force, all of that authority is for?
Every single nation which will shoot you if you get too close to overthrowing it is "authoritarian" by definition. Which is to say, every state is authoritarian. The United States, again, has a second army larger than any outward-facing army on earth but for one. That police army has literally no targets but the very people they force to pay their bills. There is no honest way to deny the fact that the United States is is at least as "authoritarian" as any other nation state on the planet.
Likewise, if you literally do nothing because you "don't HAVE to do anything", what happens to you in America? Poverty? Homelessness? Starvation? Being treated as a prime target by not only your neighbors but the heavily-armed and violent police? You have the "freedom" to become a statistic in the United States as much as anyone ever did in the USSR. I am apologizing for neither―why do you insist on apologizing for one but not the other?
Edit: I misread you initially, I see that you think under socialism, everyone will suddenly just become lazy or something. Setting aside the fact that the USSR was the world's #2 economy and that labor forces are always greatly amplified under worker's states as a historical fact, this argument strikes me as itself naive of human natures: As if productivity is hateful to the human animal, and we'd all just stop doing anything the second we didn't feel a gun to the back of our heads. Well, even if that is true, no society could function without effort from its members, so such indolence would immediately provide the pressure you're talking about naturally. But it wouldn't even be necessary to twist people's arms: Look at how hard the world already works for scraps! If conditions and rewards were improved, that would be an incentive to continue, not the opposite. If you're arguing that people need to kept starving like watch dogs in order to best perform, then I have to ask, what is it you really want from life? Would you wish for such an existence yourself? If so, ah, why?
The truth is, friend, it isn't about authority. It isn't even about violence. It's about whose authority, whose violence.
It is human nature to hate violence, to hate exploitation, as much as it is to commit them. Arguing that capitalism is more aligned with humanity because it appeals to the worst in it and empowers a global oligarchy of the most cruel of wolves in our midst is a very strange position to occupy, and an extraordinarily pessimistic one I think, far more so than any optimism I may be evincing.
But if you research what Marx really said, he himself despised idealism. Dialectical Materialism now underpins virtually all of the social sciences today, from anthropology to linguistics to archaeology, etc. It is a scientific framework, not a naive and nebulous dream. And just like those social sciences, the science of socialism is likewise founded upon those principles. The issue you and I are having right now is that you have not availed yourself of that science, so it seems to you as hopeless as the propaganda we've both grown up with would paint it.
But I assure you, if socialism was such a phantom, such a hopeless lost cause, then it would not have led to the Revolutions that it has, and it would not continue to be the greatest fear of the Capitalist class to this very day.
Keep challenging. Keep asking questions. I promise you, nobody is more scrutinizing of socialism than an educated socialist. If you keep up this inquiry and allow yourself to set aside prejudice more and more as you go, eventually you will come to some of the the same logical conclusions as billions have before us.
Don't let anyone tell you genuine inquiry into these subjects is a bad or foolish thing, my friend. Keep it up, and have a good week
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@ShihammeDarc There is not a way forward with capitalism any more (or less) than there was with feudalism. That is the very topic of this video. Dialectical Materialism*, a theory which underpins all modern social sciences from archaeology to demography, makes it clear that conditions for capitalism's overthrow are naturally, inevitably provided by capitalism's success.
*Since that term Dialectical Materialism is so wordy, a brief definition of it (if you aren't familiar) could be summed up like this: The material conditions of any society are the primary factors in shaping that society, and the primary factors in any social change a given society experiences. So social arrangements that make sense at certain levels of technology or productivity, or in certain environments, do not necessarily make as much sense in other contexts. Those contexts are what drive social change.
Capitalism has changed the material conditions of the world more vastly than any other social arrangement in history. But in so doing, it has in fact laid the very groundwork for its inevitable replacement with a system that better reflects the new circumstances in which we find ourselves. This isn't an attack against capitalism any more than it is an acknowledgement of its success. But feudalism before it laid the groundwork for capitalism, too: Capitalism's replacement is truly as inevitable (and indeed desirable) as feudalism's replacement was.
I very much doubt that what replaces capitalism will manage to last for eternity, either. But the explicit goal of socialism is to create a society that frees itself from the exploitative cycles of previous systems: It seeks to not only outmode the exploitation of capitalism, but to make that exploitation fundamentally impossible to achieve by eliminating the source of all previous social upheavals: Class divisions, and thus class conflict.
To conclude, I find it strange that all the most fervent support of capitalism comes from pointing to humanities ugliest elements, as if those are the things we should enshrine in society. It is all so ludicrously pessimistic: As humanity has capacity for greed and selfishness, so too does it have the capacity for self-sacrifice, for love, and for what may be called justice. These traits are no less innate than our less social ones. Suggesting that capitalism is fundamentally necessary because the human animal is just so vile that capitalism is all it deserves is truly to believe the lies of the wolves, it is to simply justify the worst behavior that we are told to relentlessly tolerate by the master class. And at any rate, it's hardly an argument that stands up to rational inquiry: "Life ain't fair, therefore society should be intentionally unfair" is nothing less than cyclical, slavish thinking.
In short, the true glories achieved under feudalism did not disappear under capitalism: The true glories of capitalism will not disappear under communism, either. Arguing that enabling the worst of humanity's cruelty is somehow necessary to achieve anything worth achieving was rhetoric used by the Monarchists and the Fascists and the Roman apologists of old, too, and they were as misguided by their masters then as those saying the same thing in defense of capitalism are misguided by their masters now.
Anyway, I hope you have a good rest of your week
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@ShihammeDarc Also, there were dozens of Republican and bourgeois capitalist revolutions in the world going back as far as the Dark Ages. All of them were brutally crushed by arbiters of the old status quo, just like socialist experiments of the 20th century. So once again, your argument against communism is the same as was made against capitalism for centuries, unfortunately.
Things move much quicker now, so it won't take that long for the next revolution to finally stick. Cuba still exists, after all, despite being a tiny island nation less than 100 miles away from the richest empire in history that has launched hundreds of attempts to overthrow it while also being under embargo from more than half the world for more than half a century. Imagine how much more successful it could be without those restrictions imposed on it, like every other socialist experiment has suffered before.
Besides, arguing that socialism "failed" and that capitalism "succeeded" by pointing to these crushed socialist nations is a bit like that Eric Andre meme: In frame one, the Capitalist West shoots democratically-elected socialist governments in Asia, Europe, Africa, and South America. Then in the next frame, the Capitalist West turns to the camera and says "Wow socialism is a failure" with the gun still smoking in its hand. Parroting that idea is like echoing the gloating of a murderer as he is still standing over his victims, it's ridiculous
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@IsomerSoma Nobody is defending genocide, at least I most certainly am not. The question of whether the 1933-1934 Great Famine constituted a genocide is one that is ill-settled historically, but genocide or not, there is no need to pretend that the consequences of rapid and forced collectivization were not far more severe than anyone should be comfortable with when considering future programs, given the knowledge that we have now.
On the other hand, it also cannot be denied how important the incredible development of industry was in staving off Nazism. Only the most blackhearted fascist would have preferred the Russian, Ukrainian, and other Soviet peoples to be systematically executed by the Germans in an unmitigated genocide in its purest form, as so many were in fact subject to before the Germans were ultimately expelled.
Tankie is a word used by anti-communists from both the Right and the Left to denounce literally every socialist experiment that wasn't crushed by bourgeois imperialism within a year, even experiments which gained power without bloody revolutions. Thomas Sankara was a beautiful soul who came to power in a bloodless coup, but I've been called 'tankie' for denouncing his execution at the hands of CIA-backed reactionaries. Violence isn't a 'tankie' phenomenon, and those who wield that word will inevitably justify any number of violent means of maintaining the conspicuously anti-socialist status quo despite the moral high ground they nebulously claim
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