That’s dope. The one thing I always find frustrating when bickering over politics is people not even caring to read or learn more. I have a lot more respect for my friends when they do, even if all it does is give more nuance to their takes.
Hell if I never decided to read more shit I’d still be a right winger with the rest of the nutcase family.
Right, learning is always good. The thing is, every fringe group, whether it’s MAGA, anarchists, or ML or whatever, everyone wants you to read their docs.
And while I’m willing to check some stuff out, I’ve come to conclusions based on arm-chair reasoning such as “no government can ever be trusted”, “humans are fallible, and putting some of them above others is inherently problematic regardless of the system”. I’ll read but am doubtful something will be able to convince me to trust in government or someone with power.
We can be critical of past and existing socialist projects, but we can’t ultimately forget that they must be supported and given grace in the face of the primary contradiction that is Global North imperialism. As long as our societies are influenced by class relations, states are going to exist for the foreseeable future. To think a socialist state shuld be abolished immediately in the context of being surrounded by imperialist predators is an irrational expectation…
Because of this, we are skeptical of the messaging coming from imperialist states. We support the countries that are attempting to progress humanity past capitalism, which is destroying us. For those of us in the imperial core, we understand that any criticisms we have of other socialist revolutions can’t ultimately be trusted. Those criticisms – whatever they may be – have zero relevance to the nations that are battling for survival in spite of the empire we live in.
We should cautiously inspect the propaganda we consume from all states, socialist or not. But we omly continue to amass reasons to be downright cynical of anything coming out of Western governments.
Agreed! Criticism of the 20th century, both it’s failures and it’s successes, is vital to moving forward! We can’t treat our past comrades as saints, nor ignore them, and they wouldn’t want us to! Imagine knowing that those who came after you refused to learn from the mistakes you made! I can’t imagine anything more horrible for someone who devoted their life to a scientific understanding of economy than people refusing to learn from observation.
I’ll read but am doubtful something will be able to convince me to trust in government or someone with power.
I know you said you’re bowing out in another comment but I just want to say that states are bad, all states. States do bad things in pursuit of maintaining themselves. This is true of the capitalist state. This is true of the socialist state. What matters here is who they do their bad shit in service of, what class are they serving, the proletariat or the bourgeoisie.
We are communists. We want a stateless society. We want this because we know states are bad.
I think the only real difference in our views is the classic one. I simply don’t see the dictatorship of the proletariat as not having the same tendencies toward corruption as every other. I can’t imagine an organization powerful enough to defeat capitalism willfully giving up it’s own power after it’s job is done.
It will attract psychopaths like flies to shit like every other power structure.
I would strongly suggest reading State and Revolution to understand the reasoning on the function of the DotP. It is fundamentally oriented towards the tendencies of power and people following self-interested motivations in aggregate over time. No one is talking about “giving up” anything. The proletariat is to oppress the bourgeoisie by means of more genuinely democratic governance (that obstructs the power of capital that is exerted in liberal democracies) and erode the bourgeois class over time until it no longer exists. No power is surrendered at any point in that process, but the people who need to be oppressed are decided on class lines that cease to exist by the very same process as the class is oppressed.
You can find both text and audiobook versions online pretty easily, and hopefully the most famous work of the founder of the first Marxist state is not on the same level as QAnon manifestos to you.
I’m bowing out y’all, it was fun. Definitely will be looking into this event and checking some references people pointed me to.
That’s dope. The one thing I always find frustrating when bickering over politics is people not even caring to read or learn more. I have a lot more respect for my friends when they do, even if all it does is give more nuance to their takes.
Hell if I never decided to read more shit I’d still be a right winger with the rest of the nutcase family.
Right, learning is always good. The thing is, every fringe group, whether it’s MAGA, anarchists, or ML or whatever, everyone wants you to read their docs.
And while I’m willing to check some stuff out, I’ve come to conclusions based on arm-chair reasoning such as “no government can ever be trusted”, “humans are fallible, and putting some of them above others is inherently problematic regardless of the system”. I’ll read but am doubtful something will be able to convince me to trust in government or someone with power.
We can be critical of past and existing socialist projects, but we can’t ultimately forget that they must be supported and given grace in the face of the primary contradiction that is Global North imperialism. As long as our societies are influenced by class relations, states are going to exist for the foreseeable future. To think a socialist state shuld be abolished immediately in the context of being surrounded by imperialist predators is an irrational expectation…
Because of this, we are skeptical of the messaging coming from imperialist states. We support the countries that are attempting to progress humanity past capitalism, which is destroying us. For those of us in the imperial core, we understand that any criticisms we have of other socialist revolutions can’t ultimately be trusted. Those criticisms – whatever they may be – have zero relevance to the nations that are battling for survival in spite of the empire we live in.
We should cautiously inspect the propaganda we consume from all states, socialist or not. But we omly continue to amass reasons to be downright cynical of anything coming out of Western governments.
Agreed! Criticism of the 20th century, both it’s failures and it’s successes, is vital to moving forward! We can’t treat our past comrades as saints, nor ignore them, and they wouldn’t want us to! Imagine knowing that those who came after you refused to learn from the mistakes you made! I can’t imagine anything more horrible for someone who devoted their life to a scientific understanding of economy than people refusing to learn from observation.
I know you said you’re bowing out in another comment but I just want to say that states are bad, all states. States do bad things in pursuit of maintaining themselves. This is true of the capitalist state. This is true of the socialist state. What matters here is who they do their bad shit in service of, what class are they serving, the proletariat or the bourgeoisie.
We are communists. We want a stateless society. We want this because we know states are bad.
I think the only real difference in our views is the classic one. I simply don’t see the dictatorship of the proletariat as not having the same tendencies toward corruption as every other. I can’t imagine an organization powerful enough to defeat capitalism willfully giving up it’s own power after it’s job is done.
It will attract psychopaths like flies to shit like every other power structure.
I would strongly suggest reading State and Revolution to understand the reasoning on the function of the DotP. It is fundamentally oriented towards the tendencies of power and people following self-interested motivations in aggregate over time. No one is talking about “giving up” anything. The proletariat is to oppress the bourgeoisie by means of more genuinely democratic governance (that obstructs the power of capital that is exerted in liberal democracies) and erode the bourgeois class over time until it no longer exists. No power is surrendered at any point in that process, but the people who need to be oppressed are decided on class lines that cease to exist by the very same process as the class is oppressed.
You can find both text and audiobook versions online pretty easily, and hopefully the most famous work of the founder of the first Marxist state is not on the same level as QAnon manifestos to you.
Idk, sounds like a Q drop
Why?