Comments by "William Innes" (@williaminnes6635) on "Why Communism is a Failed Religion" video.

@CAProductions051 The summaries I would recommend of refutations of the labour theory of value and therefore the central premise of orthodox Marxism would be those of Eugene Bohm von Bawerk and Jean Baptiste Say.
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Mugabe called himself a communist when he claimed to be fighting for majority franchise. Mugabe called himself a socialist when Zimbabwe's real GDP per capita was cratering.
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Russia also depended on the secret police before the communist revolution.
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dude you literally show a graph of Chile starting with double the GDP per capita of Cuba when you say they started in the same place
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@TheFoolish727 I mean...I agree with the literal meaning of the words he typed, since the video itself literally says that it won't engage with communist ideas themselves. My head canon is that Marx was just trolling for fun, but he was a compulsive who couldn't stop himself. Because he was a fairly heavy reader, it seems plausible to me that Marx would have been aware that Jean-Baptiste Say had disproven the labour theory of value as articulated by Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations. Marx therefore initially for his own entertainment and later because as a compulsive he could not control himself wrote a series of long shitposts which begun with the pretense that the labour theory of value had not been disproven. In fact, during Marx' life, he actually managed to get under the skin of the finance minister of the Austrian Empire, Eugene Bohm von Bawerk, to the point that the latter wrote a point by point refutation of Marx' ideas - the farmer with the six sacks of grain, the last of which he feeds to some parrots whose chattering amuses him, is the image from the summary of this refutation which has always stuck with me. (I still have yet to read the full text of Karl Marx and the Close of his System.) The subjective theory of value, as articulated by Say and Bohm von Bawerk, is the origin of those econ graphs that show a consumer and producer surplus existing to either side of a price point, as well as the refutation of the central point of orthodox Marxism. Without the labour theory of value, there is no exploitation. So this video is not really a debunking of Marxist ideas so much as it is an articulation of a theory of why it is that Marxist ideas continue to appeal despite their foundation on a 250 year old theory that was debunked about a decade or so after its publication. The video is an attempt at social history, in broad strokes, not intellectual history. It's more akin to "libertarianism is male astrology" than a blow-by-blow debunking. After all, somebody could be drawn to a particular argument purely on emotional grounds or due to their own self-serving bias, and that argument could independently of why they support it actually be both valid and make true assumptions. Tangentially, I disagree with the inclusion of Stalin. Stalin was the best thing that could have happened to the Soviet Union and the world at the time. He rejected worldwide revolution, held the bureaucracy to account during The Great Purge, was able to attract sufficient foreign capital and managerial expertise by embracing the mixed economy in order to make the Five Year Plans succeed and to industrialize the Soviet Union, and is rejected - I would say with some degree of intellectual honesty - as a communist by orthodox Marxists as well as enough Leninists and Trotkskyists. Stalinism to the extent that one approaches it through the lens of Marxism is a system which has come about in a fair bit of the former west, albeit in an iteration which lacks a Stalin. The Purge is seen as a bad thing mostly because it targeted the Soviet equivalent of the modern managerial elite, and this is the caste which controls the discourse.
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@TheFoolish727 The other tangent I would make is that the economic calculation problem generally cited as a rationale for why an all-encompassing command economy would not work ignores transaction costs - which are why corporations exist for instance in the black box theory of the firm - I always want to say that one was Drucker's - and also assumes human limits on decision making and surveillance. With the advent of algorithms and cheap mass surveillance, an electronic system which fulfilled Mussolini's ideal of all within the state, all for the state, none against the state could be viable. The algorithms would only have to make decisions for absolutely all aspects of human existence on the most granular level and informed by a panoptic level of surveillance which were more efficient in aggregate than the results of the current heavily regulated, taxed, subsidized, etc. system which happens to exist, not as compared to some hypothetical free market only ever approached by humans during the stone age prior to the formation of states - any gift economy amounts to an informal options market within which n participants have exchanged zero-strike calls on 1/(1-n) of the results of their production for any given period, t, and such evidence as exists suggest that most human interaction was through gift economies in prehistory - and to a certain extent in the Second British Empire outside of India and Canada. The idea that people should be allowed to make any decision whatsoever for themselves therefore must rely in practical terms on some other set of arguments than back of the envelope economic philosophy.
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@CAProductions051 Cheers. https://cdn.mises.org/Karl%20Marx%20and%20the%20Close%20of%20His%20System.pdf
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@tanimation7289 There have been no revolutions meeting the standard of orthodox Marxism. Neither Russia nor China were deemed to be particularly close to the stage of development Marx termed capitalism, a prerequisite for any revolution meeting the standards set by Marx himself. What have been attempted have been heterodoxies of Marxism, which have become heavily inflected by the preexisting cultures of where they were applied, and which if anything deserve to be judged in terms of their success or failure in terms of the criteria they set for themselves. For instance, Mao publicly stated that the goal of the Cultural Revolution was Han ethnocide, or the cultural genocide of the indigenous people of China proper within their own traditional geography. The weakening of the social entrenchment of the Eastern Tradition in its former heartland must therefore be seen as at least a partial success of this policy. The genocides of Xinjiang and Tibet could be argued in similar terms to be partial successes, defined in Maoist terms.
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By the definition of genocide used by the United Nations, I would question whether any of the examples in A qualify. Obviously they're examples of mass manslaughter, but genocide only counts if it targets an ethnic or religious group. If a government wants to kill everybody with autism, for instance, and goes around targeting children with autism - as the trans rights movement appears to do so - then while this constitutes the imposition of conditions calculated to make it impossible for the group to exist - through sterilization, the removal of children from their families is specifically noted in the UN definition of genocide in particular - so, the involvement of child protective services to "protect trans kids" for instance - a neurological minority - or a class minority in your examples - can not be the subject of a genocide as they are excluded from its definition.
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I personally don't mind self-described communists as individual people, at least in my part of the world. One of them introduced me to Robert Nozick's arguments while trying to make an argument against anarchism prior to beginning to identify as the opposite gender following a number of police contacts after he - at the time - had given lip to a cop after calling the cops on his own library room event claiming the Proud Boys - before they had been listed as terrorists in this jurisdiction - had taken over his library room for a ritual fist fight, and when the cop asked him to leave as a person who had not registered his organization as an official student club, he had decided to try to argue his case - clearly enough he just wanted the attention - then he got a bit spicy about a year or two later at a counterdemonstration for an antiimmigraiton rally, and the police took that as his third strike. Not a bad guy, just a bit off. One of my good friends is a communist, though not that into it, which may be as a result of having a diagnosis for a mental illness for which he is medicated. Self-described socialists, on the other hand, are bags of dog shit as human beings and the least intellectually honest and ethically inclined individuals I have ever met. I have bottomless contempt for the kind of person - at least from this part of the world - who openly claims to admire Sweden or similar Scandinavian systems. You'll never pin down a socialist on what exactly they believe, but they will always be the most useless parasitic incivil unpleasant selfish immoral shit stains you will ever encounter, at least in this part of the world. What's socialism? Who knows. What's a socialist? The worst asswipe you will ever meet in your life.
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The definition of right and left hand magic you use is exactly the opposite of that used by Alastair Crowley.
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Well, not exactly, but for Crowley, the right hand path involves trade-offs - animal sacrifice for minor favours - whereas the left hand path involves sacrifice of the soul of the "priest" himself. It's been a while since I read my Crowley and the hard drive where I was keeping it - and the better half of my readings from undergrad - crashed during pandemic.
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"do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law"
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Anarch? That's a reference to the dude who wrote Storm of Steel - er, Ernst Junger. It was an idea from his one book that was set in a speculative Morocco, Eumeswil. The anarch is to anarchy as a monarch is to monarchy. The anarch does not have rights to be exercised but responsibilities to be upheld.
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and your reference to postmodernism I think depends somewhat on your typical audience's willingness to throw a steelman your way and infer "free floating weaponized postmodernism of the post 2000s point of the long march through the institutions of the Frankfurt School variety" - back in the 1990s and before, Marxists hated postmodernism, because postmodernists found Marxist ideas a pleasing intellectual amuse bouche.
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