From my Cold War primary source shelves: J. Edgar Hoover’s Masters of Deceit (1958) replete with high school student scholarship contest! #history#ColdWar#books#America#Communism
Jonathan Chait is real mad that leftists aren't taking liberal shit anymore. I got the link from archive.is to avoid giving his BS any extra clicks. It's way longer than it needs to be. This paragraph caught my attention though because it's at least an attempt at clarifying what liberals see as leftism and why they're wrong (which is why they should shut the fuck up, because they have been proven so very fucking wrong, so often, and for so long):
I don’t want to bore you...
lol
by attempting the umpteenth definition of liberalism,
Funny how liberals hate defining liberalism
so I will lay out the distinction as briefly as possible. On economic questions, leftists have an overwhelming bias for state action over markets, while liberals are more selective.
This is incorrect. Leftists differ radically on how much state action over markets is needed. What unites leftists is the belief that we need democracy in economic realms as well as political ones. (I personally don't accept fully authoritarian MLs as leftists, one can debate that, but that's where I stand.) Liberals think it's just fine for us to have democratic politics but for most people to work for institutions that are run as dictatorships.
...On politics, liberals take very seriously notions of individual rights and universally applicable principles, while leftists tend to criticize political liberalism as a recipe for maintaining inequalities of power between the privileged and the oppressed.
Sort of true, but Chait tellingly leaves out the substance of the leftist critique, the reason why they think that political liberalism is a recipe for maintaining inequality, to wit: the lack of democracy in most people's workplaces. If economic power is concentrated while political power is distributed, then inevitably political power will become concentrated as well. Because money is power.
Anyway, Chait hates "Solidarity" the book and he also hates solidarity the concept. Of course he gets paid to represent left-of-center thought at major USA publications. Feel free to discuss your disgust for this type of guy further in replies.
Digging into this paper by Sullivan and Hickel, and I am a bit distressed by the way authors misrepresent and distort their sources to fit their political narrative.
They mix and match statistics whenever it suits their narrative. They talk about a rapid increase in life expectancy in Maoist China and attribute that to expanded public health care and education, but when it comes to citing numbers, they cite the death rate.
No corporation or private entity should be allowed to own land (property). Land should belong only to those who live and work there.
Discuss... #Capitalism#Socialism#Communism#Auspol
Happy #InternationalWorkersDay! Especially in these times when we could probably use a new workers international as a spiritual successor of the first.
It suddenly occurred to me that pretension, is a fascist value. That the ostentatious show of wealth is an inherent part of fascist ideology. Because the wealthy and those that aspire to it will always support the system that allows them to be part of the privileged class. And what's the good of being in the correct class if there is not discrimination and reprisals against the others #class#economy#communism#anarchism #capitalism
COMMUNISM IS FREE TIME FOR ALL and nothing more. Any political regime or mode of production that does not have as the ultimate goal of society the reduction of working hours in tandem with the satisfaction of basic human needs cannot be considered truly free. That is the the permanent goal, not something you try and just because you fail once, or10 times, you have to give it up. You have to try 500000, 10000000000, ∞ times. Otherwise, there will be absolutely nothing to distinguish human beings from wild animals.
#Marxism#Communism#FreeTime#Freedom: "Marxism is about leisure, not labour. The only good reason for being a socialist, apart from annoying people you don’t like, is that you don’t like to work. For Oscar Wilde, who was closer in this respect to Marx than to Morris, communism was the condition in which we would lie around all day in various interesting postures of jouissance, dressed in loose crimson garments, reciting Homer to one another and sipping absinthe. And that was just the working day.
There are problems with this vision, as there are with any ethics. Are all your powers to be realised? What about that obsessive desire to beat up Tony Blair? Or should one realise only those impulses that spring from the authentic core of the self? But by what criteria do we judge this? What if my self-realisation clashes with yours? And why should all-round expression beat devoting oneself to a single cause, like Alexei Navalny or Emma Raducanu? Do human capabilities really grow malevolent only by being alienated, lopsided or repressed? And what if we’re half in love with the powers that alienate and repress us, installed as they are inside the human subject rather than purely external to it?
Hegel and Marx have an answer of a kind to the problem of clashing self-fulfilments, which goes like this: realise only those capabilities which allow others to do the same. Marx’s name for this reciprocal self-realisation is ‘communism’."
Today is 87 years since Antonio Gramsci died at the hands of the Italian Fascists.
Gramsci, a founder and leader of the Italian Communist Party, was imprisoned by Mussolini’s regime in 1926. During his imprisonment he wrote extensively about history, politics and society.
His work on the role of culture, ideology, and the consent rulers obtain from those they rule has been influential in understanding how groups gain and maintain power.
"And it's eerily similar to the double standards enjoyed by the apparatchiks back in the Soviet Union."
Yes, absolutely.
And there is yet another similarity: the #fascist movement in #Italy with its #BlackShirts came into existence b/c the #Italian landed gentry and industrialists were afraid of losing their property to the plebs, like their #Russian counterparts in the #OctoberRevolution of 1918.
"It is certain that the coming Revolution — like in that respect to the Revolution of 1848 — will burst upon us in the middle of a great industrial crisis. Things have been seething for half a century now, and can only go from bad to worse. Everything tends that way — new nations entering the, lists of international trade and fighting for possession of the world’s markets, wars, taxes ever increasing."
Peter Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread #communism#socialism#anarchism#libertarianism
"Everywhere you will find that the wealth of the wealthy springs from the poverty of the poor."
Peter Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread #communism#socialism#anarchism#libertarianism
"But a free society, regaining possession of the common inheritance, must seek, in free groups and free federations of groups, a new organization, in harmony with the new economic phase of history."
Peter Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread #communism#socialism#anarchism#libertarianism
"It is not difficult, indeed, to see the absurdity of naming a few men and saying to them, “Make laws regulating all our spheres of activity, although not one of you knows anything about
them!” "
Peter Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread #communism#socialism#anarchism#libertarianism
I always find there’s an interesting parallel to be made between #christianism and #communism .
Does the fact that the inquisition and fascist contemporary evangelical churches exist make the teachings of sharing, non-violence, love and forgiveness wrong ?
Same for existence of gulags or state repression in USSR vs the possibility of a classless society not designed on exploitation and profits.
@peterg75@santiago@sashin@Legit_Spaghetti
Not only does communism not require a government, it's incompatible with any government. #Communism, at its core, advocates for the abolition of hierarchical structures, including government, to achieve true freedom and equality. Any attempt to impose a centralized authority in the name of communism betrays its fundamental principles.
@santiago@peterg75@sashin@Legit_Spaghetti
An immediate abolition of the state is a far more effective method of achieving #communism than using state socialism. By bypassing state #socialism and directly implementing decentralized, cooperative structures, we can avoid the pitfalls of authoritarianism and accelerate the transition to a stateless, classless society.