If it makes you feel better to call me “idiotic” then I worry about you, because that is not the sort of thing that people say to each other when they are secure and confident in themselves. I only want to help educate people and challenge them to question the narrative that keeps us unable to change our living conditions. One of the things I would like to challenge is this tendency to otherise people who disagree with us. Its okay for people to have disagreements and lively debates to help each other see and educate. But if you’re not used to it it can be stressful and cause people to lash out, blame and name call. So I’m sorry if this has caused you stress. I have discussions like this all the time, and you might not really be used to it, or feel like I’m trying to make you look stupid with my response, which is why you retaliate by calling me idiotic. I’m not trying to do that.

Moving on from your subjective impression of my response, there are several things that I feel need to be addressed. One is your tendency to hate and blame “humanity” as if there aren’t incentive structures built into our political economic system. For one, capitalism is a system of forced competition, it pits people against each other, from the bottom to the top of the class hierarchy. This can cause people to behave in extremely self interested ways, when modern anthropology has demonstrated that we are innately social creatures, who are creative in nature. This idea that humans behave in self interested ways without any encouragement by the system that we need to interact with in order to live, is the result of alienation caused by capitalist social relations. This is a topic of incredible complexity and I don’t trust that you are acting in good faith in this discussion, however of you would like me to explain more I would be happy to. But to put it succinctly, misanthropy is no substitute for history.

Secondly, slavery is one form of production, feudal serfdom is another, capitalist exploitation is another, and socialism is yet another. The engine of all human history is our historical mode of production, which generates classes of humans that exist in conflict with one another. Markets are not capitalism. Mercantilism certainly predates capitalist primitive accumulation by hundreds of years, but mercantilism is not capitalism even if it served as a historical precursor. Markets do not create new value, value is created under capitalism when capitalists pay workers less to produce goods than what they can sell it for in a marketplace. Markets can exist in transitional stage socialism, and probably will, for a time at least. But the means of production will be controlled democratically by the workers, not individual capitalists. The thing that made capitalism historically progressive is that it socialized production. Rather than a single craftsman making something to sell on a market, capitalism industrialized the economy, breaking each step of the production process down so that many workers are used to mass produce one part or step in the production process. However the value of this production process is privately owned. This is an inherent contradiction. Socialism will also socialize production, but it will socialize the fruits of that production for common enrichment. This contradiction is what makes capitalism extremely wasteful and inefficient, despite it being more efficient than feudal forms of productive tithing, which was individual producers giving goods to their nobles. Please look up “anarchy in production” if you want to learn more.

Also capitalism isn’t able to meet human needs, it can only generate profit. If cancer medicine can be sold to some rich lady’s cat then it will be, whereas under socialism it would go to the people who actually need it, so that they can continue to be productive. Also a great deal of productive labor is unpaid – capitalist production would never be able to reimburse people for housework, despite it being a necessity for workers to remain healthy and continue to produce goods at their job. And before you say it, anthropologists and sociologists such as Silvia Federici have shown that at various historic times, housework was compensated for, just not necessarily with money (which is a stand in for value and merely allows for the slight of hand that makes these toxic social relations inherent to capitalism practically invisible to the individuated, alienated worker.)

And wrt the Soviet Union, if you would like to debate the conditions which created black markets, then I urge you to sharpen your pencil as I have studied the history of the fSU and other socialist experiments in great detail. Im not a youtube socialist, i have a decade of organizing experience and education, and surround myself with others who make that seem meagre. So don’t think you are going to be able to get away with flattening an entire 70 year history of a dynamic, productive albeit deeply flawed attempt at socialist productive social relations, with some hand waving. If anyone is guilty of magical thinking in this regards it is you, I’m afraid.

But please limit our discussion to one topic at a time, as pursuing too many threads will not resolve some of the misunderstandings you have about historical production and socialist experiments in the 20th century. A big reason I study these movements is to understand what mistakes were made, when and why, and who was partly responsible. Indeed I am not without criticisms of the fSU and many 20th century experiments, but I’m not satisfied to just take the word of the people who benefit most from this tragically unjust system, as you seem to be. I have more curiosity and discipline than that. I hope you can be persuaded to take it upon yourself to try to become educated in these matters, or at least be open to the actual history in all its complexity and contradiction, and not just the cliff notes version furnished by wealthy elites and their toadies in the media. Also please limit the insults. I won’t be goaded, you will not get off easy. I haven’t insulted you as I have no beef with you, I have beef with the system and the fact that you defend it is illustrative of your confusion, which is not your fault but the fault of centuries of concerted effort to obscure these relations and demonize the resources you might access to try and understand them better.

Then you have to join in the fight for those things and educate yourself. This world is not getting better, and the reason for that is the productive political economic system in which we live.

I have the same values and I am a Marxist communist. That means I work for political struggle with the systems that oppress and exploit to for improving conditions for all, and also work to try and educate workers about the class dynamics of this struggle, and the revolutionary potential of the working class.

The capitalist class is no longer able to run society the way that they have. They will run nations into the ground, they will destroy this planet, they will kill millions systematically (as happened recently during the utter failure to deal with covid), they will enslave nations to produce those “goods” an ironic name for the incredible evil done with sweatshop labor. Unemployment is created by the system, which in turn causes the unemployed to suffer and starve in order to keep wages low.

There are no rules that say luxury goods couldn’t be produced for consumption, except for the rules made up by the capitalists who do everything they can to destroy the government of socialists, to put them under embargo and sanction, affecting the masses of innocents more than anyone else. They have and will push their country’s leaders to invade the country, killing hundreds of thousands or millions if necessary, so that their workforce can be exploited to produce their commodities. They have and will back mass murdering warlords, repressive religious fundamentalists and genocidal fascists to preserve the economic and political system that benefits them. If nations trying to provide support, housing and education for their people are under constant threat and attack from capitalist nations, how exactly are they supposed to dedicate a large part of their consumption to luxury goods? If they can’t import goods either then yes it becomes difficult to access luxuries. That doesn’t take a genius to understand; but to ignore it and still criticize a socialist nation for it takes a determination to misunderstand. I’m troubled by it and I think you also should be since you are the one who are so determined.

Too much is made, most of it is wasted. We are forced to drive cars while public transportation is dismantled, adding massive waste and pollution to our environment. There are thousands of train derailments every year, too many of them leaking carcinogenic chemicals into water supplies and neighborhoods. Industrial plants leak or dump pollutants into water supplies, making many people sick or worse, and do extensive lobbying and hire big law firms to protect against legislation and prosecution by affected communities. Cops whose job is to protect the private property of capitalists, that should belong to the workers, will beat and terrorize you for speaking out against genocide that your country pays for, all so that countries with mineral and oil resources are destabilized and hence easy pickings for finance and industry, that as I’ve explained pollutes, exploits, destroys the population of the affected nation.

All for your consumer “goods,” your fucking treats. You don’t even understand where they come from, you don’t understand how the system you defend works, or for whom. I urge you to educate yourself about this, and take seriously the threat of climate catastrophe and likely collapse. I’ve included a podcast that features an economist where you can begin.

Workers must seize this system and destroy the old structures that underwrite their continued exploitation. I stand with the workers, the planet, the people. You stand with the very rich who exploit you and steal your time, health, energy, freedom. And why do you? I’m very curious.

I appreciate the clarification and good will, comrade.

Honestly I find this comment irritating, as you’re basically accusing me of being a crypto-reformist, when I explicitly call for an end of capitalism. As if I’m not constantly educating myself, And others to guard against this tendency of anti-marxism. Because I used the term “democratic socialism”, regardless of the fact that I acknowledge the wrongheadedness of the reformist strains, still you say I might fall into anti Marxism. If that happens it won’t be because I acknowledge democracy; and the fact that you think so little of my actual irl work because of my use of this term is insulting.

I’m going to refrain from criticizing you point by point, as you pedantically have done to me, and insist that I’m actually a good comrade, and hope you’ll come to the realization that the movement needs us both. Otherwise we are just going to in-fight, which if I wanted to do that I would debate within the org that I work with, where I might be seen as a human, rather than online where the medium itself encourages back-biting, factionalism and elitism by design.

In other words, cut me a break comrade.

Yes this is what I believe as well but to many people Socialism is synonymous with authoritarianism. Many of those people are amenable to Socialist ideas if not able to be won over completely as you and I have been.

Also, (not to begin the debate about AES) but I think its fair to say that where many socialist projects have failed is in the arena of democracy. Maybe its just a feature of the tradition I come from, but to me that commitment to democracy has to be constantly renewed. Not bourgeois democracy but worker democracy. The working class has to learn real democracy in order to engage in political struggle in preparation to overthrow the ruling class.

Lenin was constantly stressing and renewing his commitment to democratic process, which was one of the reasons he was able to create the revolutionary party after 1905 that was able to seize power in 1917. And while he had no illusions about the limitations of democratic process within his historical moment, he always “bent the stick” in that direction which in my opinion was one of the things that made him such an effective leader prior to and up through the civil war period ending in 1921.

So I will always stress the importance of democracy, not only for the historic necessity and precedent but also because it is not enough to be good materialists (and there certainly has been a history of bad ones) but also good dialectitians, which means contextualizing our project through unificatiokn of the subjective and objective; and to fail to do so is to fail to be dialectical Marxists. If I have to work and debate with some Harringtonites in the process well that is just a necessity of the historical moment.

Just going to keep posting this every time it comes up.

We could reduce energy and materials cost of global production worldwide to 30% current capacity by planning production instead of leaving it to the market, and greatly increase the standard of living for everyone on this planet. But first we have to get rid of capitalism and institute democratic socialist planning.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/7n1POfYMo1I3kcy0oqSm6l?si=8ikYVJN8TIupvjoaCMRssA

That’s not what Republican politicians usually hire women and children for

Jones gonna break it down for ya

It’s interesting that with the new affidavit leak, just a few years ago he was a never-Trump moderate, and now he’s distinguished himself as one of the most vile, feckless, shameless chuds in the game.

As an Ohioan it was always clear he was a disgusting freak, there was a lot of discussion about him when his elitist couch-cucking manifesto was released, but he’s really turned up the volume on the worst parts of Republican discourse. Just goes to show what “mainstream” conservative discourse is, and where it is headed – as well as what the backlash will be if they keep on it.

It is extremely bad

This is extremely brave

Dude Looks Like a Lady by Aerosmith

What they tell you that it is -vs- what it actually is.

The political and economic system hides everything from us so that all we see is the individual and all these fragmented pieces – and our education only reaffirms this viewpoint. It isn’t until you educate yourself as a worker and understand the system from a class perspective (Marx) that you can begin see it in its totality for what it really is.

What if everybody did something to slow or reverse climate change? Like organize democratically to overthrow capitalism.

A better standard of living could be achieved with 30% of current production because of how incredibly wasteful and redundant capitalist production is. That leaves a ton of headroom for treats, and we can still strike a metabolic balance with our planet.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/7n1POfYMo1I3kcy0oqSm6l

What do you mean? there are plenty of British recording artists

Yeah I can tell you have some experience in political spaces, most people online lose their cool talking politics, but you’re just firmly stating your position. Which I disagree with, and that’s okay! I disagree with people inside my own orgs all the time, sometimes loudly! The fact is its a very complicated system. And power is deeply entrenched. There’s nothing to be gained for the org that’s too “radical” to engage in mainstream politics, every city has a group or two like this. They can even have very good politics and analysis but you have to be able to build power, and frankly its just easier to talk a big game and collect dues payments or donations.

It seems to me that you’re at least a progressive, as you are reform minded and that’s great! That basically puts us on the same side of systematic injustice. There might be some issues we couldn’t reconcile but in my experience it doesn’t necessarily mean we couldn’t work together or even end up on the same side of a protest. Despite my polemics, I’m a through and through humanist. But I’m deeply skeptical of parliamentary democracy, not to the degree where I discourage voting, but I’m more concerned with educating workers and regular people than the politicians. I’m proud of the educational work we’ve been able to accomplish in the last year alone; it wasn’t long ago that democratic leaders were calling support for Palestinians a Russian misinformation campaign, now its one of the most pressing issues for the international working class. Not saying “we did that,” but we did our part in boosting the signal and cutting through the noise.

Anyway I very strongly do not believe lobbyists are necessary to democracy and I work to try and create a world where they wouldn’t be (although that’s not exactly the highest on our list of priorities, god knows.) But in the world as it exists today, these structures exist and that’s just a fact. I believe the work I contribute to is a necessary part of a healthy democracy, and you’re a reasonable person who believes that lobbying work is an important part of the system.

Today, the system needs us both to work together and part of that is having lively discussions and educating one another. Maybe some piece of what you said will stay with me or serve as a reminder some time in the future, and maybe the reverse also. We don’t have to be won over to each other’s ideas for them to have an effect. And we got all these other people contributing to the discussion as well. That’s pretty cool to me. So yeah we have a difference of opinion, but we are both coming from a place of education and experience, trying to solve the same problems from different ends of the same dynamic system. At least I hope that’s what’s going on here.

Thanks for the discussion, I appreciate you.

I volunteer with a few (American) political organizations and have connections to politicians and organizations. we have people who we elect democratically who are highly educated, highly motivated, and politically plugged in who talk with politicians all over the world all the time! We are in coalition with an elected politician who is a member of the Irish Daìl, which is like their house of reps, every day we talk with him and ask him questions, and his organization and ours trade information, ideas, articles, book recommendations, you name it. We’ve sent delegates to Cuba to meet with the President, and groups who oppose his government. Weve sent peoole all over the country and the world for political work and ive gotten to have some amazing experiences participating just a little bit in this kind of work. If people won’t talk to us we hold rallys and protests and make them talk to us. Similar to how you described, we pay dues, publish magazines and even participate in national and international debates. Our members have been on tv, podcasts, YouTube, and we are working toward creating our own. And that’s just one of the orgs I’m in, another has members in congress, and its not the GOP or the Dems.

So sorry, no, you’re wrong. Even if there are (purely hypothetical) cases where the system you are describing does work for people, there is no accountability to the people and it really only works to keep professional operators in Washington speaking on behalf of their own interests and the interests of the orgs that pay them. I know good people who are lobbyists, who lobby to do good things. But their position is in no way a political necessity. Grassroots bottom up politics is not only possible its the only way to have real democracy. The top down structures you advocate for only create and reproduce the conditions of exploitation, poverty, immiseration and war. Sorry friend, but I just dont buy it.

Noted!

Wow thanks so much for breaking that down for me! The discussions I’ve been having here and the information devs are sharing is really kicking me off the fence about learning Rust