Infighting
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Correct. Neither imperialism is glorified, nor is state-capitalism like the US Empire, Republic of Korea, Singapore, or Bismarck's Germany if you want an earlier example, are glorified by Marxism of any kind.
glorified by Marxism of any kind.
i didnt claim that.
nevertheless, china was oddly missing in ur list of state-capitalist nations that werent glorified..
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Are you now going to argue that that isn't an authoritarian act because it was justified? Because, guess what, every "authoritarian" believes their actions are justified
Protecting Jewish and other minorities rights to live and safety is not an authoritarian act. It is in fact protecting the most vulnerable's liberty. Anti authorization is not lawless. You are a very weird little person and I have no interest in trying to convince you Nazis are bad. I hope you can figure that one out on your own
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[dude with glasses in a communist t-shirt, arguing]
I'm the only leftist here, your opinions are TRASH[dude holding a theory book on smug, arguing]
Read theory you losers, you're all WRONG[dude in an anarchist hoodie, arguing]
Nuh-uh, I'm the only leftist here, you're SHITLIBS[the three dudes are now caught in a cartoon fight, glasses gone flying, punches everywhere, while a firing squad of nazis are targeting them with rifles]
[a confused nazi asks]
Why… why are they still arguing?
Infighting | The Bad Website
Infighting - A comic on The Bad Website
The Bad Website (thebad.website)
This thread keeps popping up and it just clicked and I had to ask:
Is the guy in the red shirt supposed to be Vaush?
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glorified by Marxism of any kind.
i didnt claim that.
nevertheless, china was oddly missing in ur list of state-capitalist nations that werent glorified..
Your claim, sarcasm aside, was that Marxist-Leninists have a history of glorifying imperialism and state-capitalism, which I rejected, and said not just Marxism-Leninism but all Marxism rejects both. Either you're trying to say Marxism-Leninism isn't Marxist, in which case some heavy justification is required, or I misunderstood your point, in which case I'd appreciate elaboration.
As for the PRC, I didn't list it as state-capitalist for the same reason I wouldn't list the US as socialist. The PRC has a socialist market economy. The large firms and key industries of the PRC are publicly owned, and the medium firms are heavily controlled by the state and rely on the publicly owned key industries to function. Private property and the bourgeoisie don't have political power because they don't control the large firms or key industries.
What distinguishes state capitalism from socialism is private ownership of the large firms and key industries, or public ownership. The US, Singapore, ROK, etc all have large megacorps with firm control of the state, which uses its power to relatively guide and plan the economy for private interest. In the PRC, the opposite is the case, since the large firms and key industries are publicly owned and planned, the bourgeoisie doesn't have political control, the proletariat does. This is reflected in over 90% approval rates for the government in the PRC.
The reason the PRC has a bourgeoisie and private property to begin with is because they haven't yet developed out of it. They are still in a relatively early stage of socialism, market forces are quite useful for small and medium firms to grow into centralized firms that can be gradually sublimated and folded into public ownership. This is a Marxist understanding of economics, and while it isn't what an anarchist would want, I don't personally define socialism in a manner that excludes Marxism.
Does that make sense?
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This thread keeps popping up and it just clicked and I had to ask:
Is the guy in the red shirt supposed to be Vaush?
Would be funny considering how much Vaush hates Marxism-Leninism.
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Protecting Jewish and other minorities rights to live and safety is not an authoritarian act. It is in fact protecting the most vulnerable's liberty. Anti authorization is not lawless. You are a very weird little person and I have no interest in trying to convince you Nazis are bad. I hope you can figure that one out on your own
I believe what @[email protected] is getting at is that all states are authoritarian, and that there are positive and negative uses of authority. Executing SS officers is a positive use of authority. Since all states are an extension of the ruling class, it is better for that ruling class to be the proletariat, rather than the bourgeoisie, and for the proletariat to use its authority to oppress the bourgeoisie and gradually sublimate capital until all production is collectivized, class ceases to exist, and by extension the state withers away, leaving only administration, management, etc.
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This thread keeps popping up and it just clicked and I had to ask:
Is the guy in the red shirt supposed to be Vaush?
It's the factory preset look for these pseudo-tankies that show up in my local activism group every now and then.
Always the big earring, unkempt beard, this specific shape of glasses, and the cheap aliexpress t-shirt with a political message on it.
Not my fault Vaush stole the look!
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I believe what @[email protected] is getting at is that all states are authoritarian, and that there are positive and negative uses of authority. Executing SS officers is a positive use of authority. Since all states are an extension of the ruling class, it is better for that ruling class to be the proletariat, rather than the bourgeoisie, and for the proletariat to use its authority to oppress the bourgeoisie and gradually sublimate capital until all production is collectivized, class ceases to exist, and by extension the state withers away, leaving only administration, management, etc.
No I'm pretty sure they pulled something from another post to try to misrepresent it because they're a bitter terminally online loser. That is a very generous interpretation though
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The communists were never "buddies" with the Nazis. The communists spent the decade prior trying to form an anti-Nazi coalition force, such as the Anglo-French-Soviet Alliance which was pitched by the communists and rejected by the British and French. The communists hated the Nazis from the beginning, as the Nazi party rose to prominence by killing communists and labor organizers, cemented bourgeois rule, and was violently racist and imperialist, while the communists opposed all of that.
When the many talks of alliances with the west all fell short, the Soviets reluctantly agreed to sign a non-agression pact, in order to delay the coming war that everyone knew was happening soon. Throughout the last decade, Britain, France, and other western countries had formed pacts with Nazi Germany, such as the Four-Power Pact, the German-French-Non-Agression Pact, and more. Molotov-Ribbentrop was unique among the non-agression pacts with Nazi Germany in that it was right on the eve of war, and was the first between the USSR and Nazi Germany. It was a last resort, when the west was content from the beginning with working alongside Hitler.
Harry Truman, in 1941 in front of the Senate, stated:
If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible, although I don’t want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances.
Not only that, but it was the Soviet Union that was responsible for 4/5ths of total Nazi deaths, and winning the war against the Nazis.
It's interesting to read that article on sci-hub. It's giving more specific details on what happened in 1939, but is otherwise in line with The Cold War & Its Origins. You don't need access to classified documents to understand the world, you can sit there in 1961 and get shit more or less right.
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No I'm pretty sure they pulled something from another post to try to misrepresent it because they're a bitter terminally online loser. That is a very generous interpretation though
I'm saying it because I've seen them make the same argument, as I have done myself, in different ways.
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It's interesting to read that article on sci-hub. It's giving more specific details on what happened in 1939, but is otherwise in line with The Cold War & Its Origins. You don't need access to classified documents to understand the world, you can sit there in 1961 and get shit more or less right.
Yep! Just having a fairly consistent and coherent understanding of the world is usually sufficient to get things more right than not, not everyone needs to be a grandmaster-level Marxist-Leninist with decades of reading and practice to view the world in a constructive way. Theory and practice is still necessary, but even liberals can acknowledge reality.
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Fair enough, though I do think this can still help with any broader approach to changing their overall mentality.
A moment of consensus on its own might not be enough to sway someone, but if they hear someone try and contradict what they had recently agreed on, it can then make them feel more cognitive dissonance, and potentially make them at the bare minimum just stop and think for a second.
If someone else is later trying to sway them in some way, it's going to be easier when that person says something, and they can think "I remember saying something similar" rather than "this is the opposite of what I already believe."
Plus, there's also just the sort of "exposure therapy" factor to it, as well. A lot of people are radicalized to believe that the "opposing side" is pure, limitless evil, and that they hate you and want you dead, so just interacting with them can be enough to help slowly deradicalize them.
For example, this Pew Research article states, regarding the likelihood of people to support trans people's existence:
"Though Republicans who know a trans person are more likely than Republicans who don’t to say gender can be different from sex assigned at birth, more than eight-in-ten in both groups (83% and 88%, respectively) say gender is determined by sex at birth. Meanwhile, there are large differences between Democrats who do and do not know a transgender person. A majority of Democrats who do know a trans person (72%) say someone can be a man or a woman even if that differs from their sex assigned at birth, while those who don’t know anyone who is transgender are about evenly split (48% say gender is determined by sex assigned at birth while 51% say it can be different)."
But of course, that isn't just limited to acceptance of people by gender. It also applies to race, social and economic status, recipients and non-recipients of welfare programs, people working in different industries, etc.
Again, not saying it's at all some magic universal way to change someone's mind, or that on its own it's necessarily a factor that can override their overarching condition, (hell, that quote from before shows that it had a much smaller impact on republicans than democrats even given the same exposure) but the more and more this happens, the stronger and stronger an effect it has overall, and I'd say that alone makes it worth doing.
True. And I'd expect you'd need fewer of these moments for younger people than older ones. Every little bump might be the one that diverts someone to a different path. I know it hasn't worked well on my older family members, but it was those kind of moments that helped my diverge from my religious upbringing when I was younger.
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Your claim, sarcasm aside, was that Marxist-Leninists have a history of glorifying imperialism and state-capitalism, which I rejected, and said not just Marxism-Leninism but all Marxism rejects both. Either you're trying to say Marxism-Leninism isn't Marxist, in which case some heavy justification is required, or I misunderstood your point, in which case I'd appreciate elaboration.
As for the PRC, I didn't list it as state-capitalist for the same reason I wouldn't list the US as socialist. The PRC has a socialist market economy. The large firms and key industries of the PRC are publicly owned, and the medium firms are heavily controlled by the state and rely on the publicly owned key industries to function. Private property and the bourgeoisie don't have political power because they don't control the large firms or key industries.
What distinguishes state capitalism from socialism is private ownership of the large firms and key industries, or public ownership. The US, Singapore, ROK, etc all have large megacorps with firm control of the state, which uses its power to relatively guide and plan the economy for private interest. In the PRC, the opposite is the case, since the large firms and key industries are publicly owned and planned, the bourgeoisie doesn't have political control, the proletariat does. This is reflected in over 90% approval rates for the government in the PRC.
The reason the PRC has a bourgeoisie and private property to begin with is because they haven't yet developed out of it. They are still in a relatively early stage of socialism, market forces are quite useful for small and medium firms to grow into centralized firms that can be gradually sublimated and folded into public ownership. This is a Marxist understanding of economics, and while it isn't what an anarchist would want, I don't personally define socialism in a manner that excludes Marxism.
Does that make sense?
Either you're trying to say Marxism-Leninism isn't Marxist, in which case some heavy justification is required, or I misunderstood your point, in which case I'd appreciate elaboration.
my claim was not about marxism or marxist-leninism, but specifically its adherents.
i dont think that marxism inherently glorifies state-capitalism or imperialism, but i recognize that an uncomfortably large portion of its adherents do.as to ur explanation of chinas economic system..
it seems that u define socialism as public ownership of industry/means of production, and capitalism as private ownership of these.
i would argue that public ownership should refer to the public i.e. the populace of the area, not the state that claims to represent them, yet according to u is disapproved of by 10% of its people.
and when the state owns all/most of the firms, and the workers/proletariat does not own them, this is another form of capitalism: one where the state owns the means of production. therefore, state capitalism.
id recommend this video series that tries to explain the state and its function in different historical contexts:
part 1:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTwxpTyGUOIits also available in text format if u prefer reading:
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anark-the-state-is-counter-revolutionary -
This is literal ruling class propaganda. No Marxist or Marxist-Leninist is against LGBT, thinks Nazis or nationalism has a point, claims Putin is leftist, etc.
Stop trying to stir division, astroturf.
wrote last edited by [email protected]How about I talk about every time Marxist-Leninists betrayed other leftists and executed them? It's an extensive fucking list.
Also, just look it up. You will find examples of what I said within minutes. But if you wanna be lazy, go ahead.
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Either you're trying to say Marxism-Leninism isn't Marxist, in which case some heavy justification is required, or I misunderstood your point, in which case I'd appreciate elaboration.
my claim was not about marxism or marxist-leninism, but specifically its adherents.
i dont think that marxism inherently glorifies state-capitalism or imperialism, but i recognize that an uncomfortably large portion of its adherents do.as to ur explanation of chinas economic system..
it seems that u define socialism as public ownership of industry/means of production, and capitalism as private ownership of these.
i would argue that public ownership should refer to the public i.e. the populace of the area, not the state that claims to represent them, yet according to u is disapproved of by 10% of its people.
and when the state owns all/most of the firms, and the workers/proletariat does not own them, this is another form of capitalism: one where the state owns the means of production. therefore, state capitalism.
id recommend this video series that tries to explain the state and its function in different historical contexts:
part 1:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTwxpTyGUOIits also available in text format if u prefer reading:
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anark-the-state-is-counter-revolutionarywrote last edited by [email protected]Regarding Marxists and imperialism/state capitalism, I suppose I just disagree with you there, either we are using different definitions of imperialism just like we are using different definitions of socialism and state capitalism, or you're seeing something I don't.
As for me, and socialism vs capitalism, socialism is essentially a mode of production by which collectivized ownership forms the principle aspect of society, ie the base. In practical terms, that means the large firms and key industries, which have control over the rest of the economy (controlling the rubber factory means you have power over the rubber ball factory, as an example). Capitalism is the reverse, privatized ownership of the large firms and key industries, and thus bourgeois control.
Returning to the state, the state is an extension of the ruling class, not a class in and of itself. This is principly the Marxist stance, here. The reason state ownership in a principly publicly owned economy is socialist, is because that necessitates proletarian control. If the bourgeoisie only control the medium firms, and only to the extent that they cannot work against the common, collective plan, then they have no political power, the proletariat does. The small firms are largely cooperative or petite bourgeois property in the PRC, meaning the bourgeoisie proper really only has the non-essential, smaller-scale industry. As a side note, 10% is actually higher than the disapproval rate. Disapproval is highest at the township level, but gets higher the more central you get, with only 4.3% disapproving at the top level:
State ownership is not juxtaposed with proletarian ownership, if the proletariat actually directly owned and controlled the tools they used, they would not be proletarian, but petty bourgeois. Cooperative ownership, in small-scale firms, is petty bourgeois ownership. This isn't intrinsically an issue in a broader socialist economy, but without collectivized ownership you cement class divisions, ie each cooperative is its own competing cell, rather than existing in the context of a collectivized economy run by all in the interests of all.
Capitalism, on the other hand, relies on the M-C...P...C'-M' circuit of reproduction. State-run industries don't have to adhere to this, they don't need to run a profit and they don't need to compete in a market, but in capitalism, this is the dominant mode of production over the largest and key firms and industries. The difference between how the US, for example, and PRC functions is dramatic, and its why the PRC has such large approval rates.
As for the state, Marxists and anarchists have different views. Marxists see the state as an instrument of class oppression that exists as long as class does, and so in order to get rid of it, all property needs to be gradually sublimated into collectivized property, across all of society. The principle difference is between centralization and collectivization vs decentralization and horizontalism.
I appreciate the link, but as a former anarchist myself I'm already familiar with the anarchist perspective. I'm not trying to debate anarchism, or try to explain why I agree more with Marxism and Marxism-Leninism, just defend Marxism from what I recognize as misrepresentations of it. Anark's central premise seems to be that the state creates classes, which fundamentally relies on either a different definition of class at best or a misunderstanding of the state and class at worst.
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The only thing that matters is policy, I'll work with anyone as long as it's toward an egalitarian society with wealth redistribution.
Labels are nice for classifying, but not for executing. I don't care if you identify as leftist, or liberal, or progressive; I care if you support good policies.
hear, hear
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It does help that the overarching theme of the right is centered around taking as much for yourself as possible and not caring about the collateral damage. The right is full of single-issue voters who might, say, not actually explicitly hate gay people but who also don’t give a shit about their rights and safety if it means they can keep their guns. The left, almost definitionally, needs to consider the complexity inherent in not being able to ignore the effects that any given policy might have on others and this means that there is so much more opportunity for conflict.
You’re correct, of course, I’m just pointing out the difference such that it might help attack the issue from a better perspective.
There's the nuance the original post relies on ignoring. But it's supposed to be a humorous joke-post anyway.
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It's the factory preset look for these pseudo-tankies that show up in my local activism group every now and then.
Always the big earring, unkempt beard, this specific shape of glasses, and the cheap aliexpress t-shirt with a political message on it.
Not my fault Vaush stole the look!
wrote last edited by [email protected]pseudo-tankies
I'm not even sure whether this is supposed to be an insult anymore. Is a "tankie" better or worse than a "fake tankie"?
In a thread complaining about leftist infighting, there's a special irony in liberals singing out a leftist who is simultaneously too far left and not far left enough.
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The only thing that matters is policy, I'll work with anyone as long as it's toward an egalitarian society with wealth redistribution.
Labels are nice for classifying, but not for executing. I don't care if you identify as leftist, or liberal, or progressive; I care if you support good policies.
wrote last edited by [email protected]I’ll work with anyone as long as it’s toward an egalitarian society with wealth redistribution.
Okay, but here me out? What if we just privatize the mechanism of wealth redistribution? Also we're going to be spending a bunch of money on foreign wars, but don't worry - this time the people were fighting are ontologically evil, we promise. Yes, we will have to make deep cuts to social services in order to pay for the war (while still running enormous deficits because haha, psych, deficits don't matter), but it will be vital to get the Moderate Conservative on board with our program.
Also, we control every branch of government, but we still need to compromise with fascists in the opposition.
Okay, why are you leaving? You're clearly not serious about progressive reforms.
And STOP SAYING NICE THINGS AND CHINA! This is a red line we will not tolerate!
You know what? You're not serious. We're forming a coalition with Liz Cheney. See you in the losers bracket next year.
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You're the reason we lost control of the government.
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Okay, now stop voting for a popular leftist mayor, or we'll burn this whole party down.
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I'm saying it because I've seen them make the same argument, as I have done myself, in different ways.
Their argument is that I'm not anti authoritarian. Afaict you're not making that argument. I'm not interested in fighting about what is or isn't a true Scotsman. This devolves quickly into if you believe in the government having any power, that's an endorsement of authoritarianism and now no one can be anti authoritarian if they believe in any kind of enforceable law.
