So, I’m not cool with genocide. Not cool with that at all. Even if they are landlords. I’m much more in favor of reeducation centers, personally. I’m against the death penalty on moral grounds. I believe that everyone deserves a second and third chance.
With that said, economically, I consider myself to be anarcho-communist or communalist or “left-communist” or whatever the fuck you want to call it.
But apparently all of that makes me a lib, and not welcome on the left? Is that correct?
*edit: I’ve now been banned from LemmyGrad, so yeah, that kind of confirms it. You guys are morons. Or a PsyOp meant to forever impede any sort of sea-change towards socialism.
Sure, if we’re arguing semantics then ok fine, I’ll grant you that semantic argument, even though the line between Classicide and Genocide is very thin. The children of landlords were born into it, yet tankies still want to see them killed, rather than educated.
Yes, I hold that both genocide and classicide ARE morally wrong. (And not only because I’m against the death penalty in all cases, either.)
But rather because the class someone is born into shouldn’t determine whether they live or die. The Romanov kids didn’t deserve to be killed. They had no choice as to what family they were born into. They could have been extremely useful to the cause if we could have reeducated them.
We CAN reform anyone. And those who were formerly influential capitalists would be infinitely valuable to turn to our side and help to promote our cause, no matter how long it takes to reform them - especially since they will be most able to teach other capitalists in a way that those who are from similar walks of life can understand. You have to be able to speak the language of the people you’re trying to teach, or they’re not going to understand what you’re trying to teach them.
M-Ls seem to just want to kill them and be done with it rather than put forth the effort of changing their minds. I have faith that they can change, because I have seen tremendous changes in people in my own life. People CAN and do change. Hell, I used to be a neo-nazi for crying out loud. People can change. If given the right resources and education.
Obviously I can empathize with that, but that doesn’t excuse deadly violence, in my view. And obviously landlording would be illegal in the society we want to create.
People forget though, that once you get rid of money as a concept in your society and replace it with satisfaction of needs, the profit motive evaporates naturally.
Greed is a byproduct of a combination of scarcity and mental illness - and both will have a means of solution in our ideal society, wouldn’t they? And that means isn’t just killing them, either. If it were, then we would literally be no better than actual nazis.
What about the children of landlords? Communist regimes killed them too. And there is no sympathy or regret for the deaths of the romanov children over in LemmyGrad. In fact, I’ve seen many many jokes about their deaths in various tankie subreddits over the years.
I think the main issue I have with MLs is that they seem to be in love with the vengeance-based violence and oppression they think must be used to achieve socialism - rather than even entertaining any alternative ways of attaining the end goal of socialism itself.
I also vehemently disagree that they place little value on ideological purity. They’re ALL ABOUT ideological purity, and insist that everyone must read every marxist piece of literature ever, as if merely reading those old scriptures will naturally convert anyone who reads them to a genocidal maniac like they are. I would go so far as to say that it’s religious at this point. They literally treat the writings of old communists as scriptures, and your daily sacrament is supposed to be partaking in the bloodlust and cynicism, to prove you are as pure as they are.
They’re in love with “dunking on libs” rather than trying to educate libs as to the efficacy of their viewpoints. It’s like they’re not interested in having us join their cause.
They just want to kill “libs” along with the rest of the reactionaries and capitalists. Even if those “libs” are fellow communists and socialists. If you disagree with the cult, they wish you dead. They’re impotent in their little online forums, so all they can do is to ban you. But rest assured, they get the same satisfaction from banning you from their forum as they would putting you against the wall. It’s their little form of putting you against the wall. This is not hyperbole. And they know it. They’re laughing at this right now as they read it, and going “haha, yeah, he’s right, actually.”
This is why I don’t agree that M-Ls (aka "tankies) are actually for the cause of achieving and maintaining socialism.
They’re redfash (yes, I used the forbidden word!) who are obsessed with the repression and revenge they want to inflict, and have zero concern for the society they say they are striving towards creating.
They hide behind a mask of “pragmatism”. Well, in my opinion, mass slaughter is not pragmatic. It’s evil.
[I’m in a bit of a rush so it may be a bit disorganized and miss some points]
I agree with re-education when appropriate, in fact that’s pragmatic! Making use of the bourgeois’ class traitors is very useful and has proven so in the past. The idealist approach is the dumb one of killing them without exception just because of a class identification instead of deciding if they can be appropriated. Again, I don’t think merely being a part of a class is immutable, so I don’t support killing all people who were ever a landlord.
Hereditary monarchy is hereditary, but even then they can renounce their royalty (a recent example would be former Prince Harry). The Romanov situation was unfortunate, but in the middle of a war with the White Army who were possibly about to capture the Romanov family and re-establish a monarchy with them, I can see why they chose that option. The kids were in a horrible situation outside of their control.
Landlordism is a (shitty, but nonetheless) job. You don’t have to do it because your parents did it. It’s not an immutable thing, it’s an active decision, and one which they can stop at any time.
One critique of the re-education approach is: that’s probably not going to be a viable option during a revolutionary uprising (e.g. Chinese Civil War). If they didn’t stop being a landlord once the revolution began, it will probably take more than a few conversations or lessons to flip them once we seize their livelihood, and we probably won’t have the educational resources needed to attempt to educate them in the middle of the state and counter-revolutionaries trying to kill us. In the middle of a revolution, we probably won’t have the available resources to “put forth the effort of changing their minds”.
Marxism’s worldview doesn’t posit that the bourgeois are bad because they’re evil and mentally-ill sociopaths. It proposes they act against us because it’s within their material interest, and that historical movements are typically driven by material interests more than ideals. Most people won’t fight the ruling class just because “they’re evil and it’s our moral duty”, we tend to fight them because we are literally starving and being worked to death and alienated. To be able to care if they’re evil or not is a liberty that comes after we secure our means of survival. The ruling class don’t fight us because they’re evil and just decided they hate poor people, they fight us because we are a direct threat to their comfortable life.
This is a challenge for re-education. How do you convince someone who used to be lazy and rich that they should join our dangerous cause instead of hate us and seek revenge for ruining their convenient exploitation of us? This can work on occasion, if the landlord has more important values than their way of life, but always? No way.
I mean purity in a more moral sense. If material conditions force them into an unfortunate decision between compromising their values (e.g. censoring the press, or repressing political opponents) or allowing the revolution to fail through foreign exploitation of the freedoms they give, they will pick the first. This is why we see Lenin and various Chinese leaders openly saying “we need to allow capitalists in so we can learn their techniques and build our material resources”. An agricultural country can’t just fight the interference of the USA and its allies who had material interests in keeping the USSR and PRC as exploitable. If they didn’t compromise their values, they wouldn’t have been able to rapidly develop and fight off World War invasions.
If you’re more remote or protected like Zapatista-controlled territories or Cheran, and not fighting a ton of CIA+ interference, then you can afford more of those liberties and create a much, much, much better transition away from capitalism. And in these situations, I lean far more towards libertarian-socialist ideology. We know it can work there! But most countries, as important subjects of international asymmetric imperialism, don’t have that luxury and I see libertarian-socialism as unfortunately inapplicable to their situation. The Nicaraguans and other socialist countries often found this out the hard way, Parenti summarises it pretty well. - 2:20 onwards
That’s completely ignorant of what fascism is, how it occurs, and how we can stop it. If tankies are horrible, then just call them tankies! If capitalism is horrible, just call it capitalism! I’m sick of this silly idea that everything has to be called ‘fascist’ or ‘nazi’ or ‘liberal’ or ‘crony’ to make it seem bad. Why pretend it needs (inappropriately applied) qualifiers when it already speaks for itself?
I have a lot of problems with a lot of types of M-Ls, and I would even fight against some of them the same way I would fight fascists, but they are not fascists. Pretending they are is anti-constructive to understanding, modelling and predicting politics. Fascists and M-Ls are driven by different ideas and rationalizations and goals, even when their actions can be compared.
I appreciate you taking the time, I really really do.
Then you’re definitely not a tankie! :-)
Granted. In the heat of battle, that’s true. Which is one of the reasons I’m not really in favor of revolutions in general, and take a longer-term approach.
This is one of the reasons that Marx supported free trade. Because he believed that the only way to communism was through violent revolution.
As an accelerationist move, it would behoove communists to support anarcho-capitalists in all politics and media, so that capitalism can more quickly reach its inevitable point at which most people are starving and finally willing to revolt.
I really don’t like that idea. Because this guarantees even more suffering than just working now to gradually make life better for everyone.
I never said that it has to be done immediately. We can hold them in solidary confinement in gulags until they’re ready to sit down and earn their freedom by learning the errors of their ways. Or they can sit there and stew. It may take them 20 years to come around, but eventually the probably will.
I see that, and it makes sense given how much industrial espionage China is engaged in. I just feel like there are much more honest ways of building your industry than stealing the knowledge with which to build it.
I think compromising those moral principles of honesty etc. is what sets us back in the eyes of those who are already suspicious of the left. It goes against literally everything we stand for, and makes us hypocrites.
I think understanding the popular idoms of the language is important. When anyone, at least in America, thinks of the word “fascism” it basically means authoritarianism. It doesn’t matter what the motivation behind that authoritarianism is. Hitler’s motivation was well-intentioned, in his mind and the minds of his followers too. He didn’t think he was doing evil.
Hey, and I appreciate you taking the time and respect to have a fruitful discussion :)
That’s a good point you made, I was writing this with the assumption that social change would be through a rapid revolution uprising, which (unless the bourgeois and their security just let it happen… unlikely, I’d assert) would imply mass violence.
And while my impression is that Marxists (and certainly M-Ls) assume that is generally inevitable, there is evidence that it is not always the case, even with the transitional-state approach to communism: the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia came to power through a (uncontested) federal election. Sure, this was immediately post-WWII so the conditions can’t be assumed as typical, but it and some other example suggest that mass violence is not inherent for socialists to gain control, at least until resistance against them forces it (such as banning political parties and engaging in violent repression).
I personally don’t support the idea of intellectual property being valid. It’s artificial scarcity, especially relevant when it comes to technology and industry. It’s why we have life-saving drugs with prices arbitrarily raised 5456% (US$13.50 to $750 per pill) or 525% or the many other similar price gouging cases commonplace in the industry. Science should not be proprietary, it’s knowledge that benefits us all. Everyone should be able to use it.
For an exaggerated example, Cuban scientists or a USA corporation developed a vaccine to a deadly disease, I wouldn’t think twice about whether it’s “honest” to copy that discovery. Letting thousands or millions of people die so a corporation can earn money off their employee’s work is completely immoral. And while that is extreme, the same concept applies to smaller things, like greener technologies and more efficient industries.
I do acknowledge that copyright has a reasonable purpose under capitalism, but I certainly don’t support it to the extent it is now: copyright for up to a year makes some sense, 90 years after the author’s death is egregious and anti-social. But for materially-significant discoveries like medical and industrial innovation? That is all in the public interest. LibGen, the anit-paywall academic library, is completely justified in their mission and a huge benefit to humanity.
And when they say socialism, (according to polls and common discourse) they usually mean capitalism with basic nationalised services like healthcare.
So I am reluctant to excuse an idiom just because it’s popular. It trivializes important concepts and encourages an ineffective oversimplified view of history, which prevents us forming a model of predicting and understanding present events. At the very least, using those idoms in a political discussion is not appropriate. Even if it weren’t used as a pejorative, it’s still confusing terminology that contradicts the expected meaning of fascism in the context.
Totally with you on that! Especially when it comes to medical science and technology. I also agree with you on copyright.
You’ve got to speak the language of those you’re trying to communicate with, though.
Granted, since I’m speaking with people like you, who are educated in the vernacular of politics and history, I should probably know better than to use the common vernacular, because it just leads to misunderstandings like this, and people trying to nitpick and split hairs.
It’s like saying “oh, he’s a dickhead” and someone coming back with, “Wait wait wait, no, he’s not a dickhead. He’s an ignoramus! There’s a huge difference! And until you know the difference between a dickhead and an ignoramus, and have a master’s or doctorate in insultology, I refuse to engage with you. Banned.”