Socialism two-wolves-1two-wolves-2 Barbarism

  • lil_tank [any, he/him]@hexbear.net
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    4 months ago

    Europe is gonna go feral and the damn euro left is going to stubbornly refuse to escalate until half of their activists are dead or in prison

    • weeen [any, any]@hexbear.net
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      4 months ago

      In the UK, climate activists got 5 years for planning a protest right before thr barely policed race riots.

      The first top comment I saw on reddit discussing the riots was saying that it’s actually muslims’ fault for bringing their incompatible, violent ‘sand religion’ to the UK. Nothing good will come out of this country.

      • Gorb [they/them]@hexbear.net
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        4 months ago

        Correct this country is cooked, incredibly reactionary and the classism runs so deep you have poor dissolutioned people punching down on poorer dissolutioned people who punch down on even poorer people.

        If the UK had any culture at all its the culture of constantly punching down through every stratum of society.

    • thelastaxolotl [he/him]@hexbear.netOP
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      4 months ago

      well, we have a new hegemonic party like in the old times and the drug war is still ongoing, but the right and neoliberalism are demonised and seeing as fringe plus left ideas are becoming more popular so i say 60% bloomer 40% doomer, definitely better than our northern neighbors.

      how are things in guatemala?

      • Frogmanfromlake [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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        4 months ago

        Isn’t Morena significantly better than the PRI and PAN were?

        Guatemala has seen a strong return of leftism. The problem is that most “socialists” are social-Democrats inspired by Bernie Sanders of all people. I get he was popular here but it’s sad how we look to a foreign senator instead of reflecting off our own leftist politicians.

        Still, I’d much rather have them around than the far-right fascists that have been ruling for decades. It’ll just be a while before any form of radical leftism gains popularity at the national level.

        • thelastaxolotl [he/him]@hexbear.netOP
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          4 months ago

          they are a 5/10 compared to the 1/10 that PAN and PRI, maybe sheinbaum will be better, being ruled by berniecrats sounds bad but i can see how they are better than any neolib or fash

  • Thallo [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    4 months ago

    Has there been any real critical refutation of the idea that communism is inevitable? I remember Rosa saying that if you are a Marxist, then you MUST necessarily believe that it is inevitable as a matter of science, but…

    Idk… Couldn’t capitalism just keep collapsing and reforming? Or extinction? Or a different economic structure emerges?

    Lenin said that communism won’t simply emerge spontaneously and that it needs to be agitated for by people and communist parties. If we believe that capitalism is a European ideology that emerged from the material conditions of Europe, then it’s antithesis communism should be the same, right?

    I bring this up because I wonder if the European ideological strain could die out as it ceases to be relevant. Indigenous groups have economic and societal structures that defy categorization. Anarchists like to claim these structures, but they’re not.

    It seems like there’s an inexhaustible number political structures that could emerge rather than communism.

    • GalaxyBrain [they/them]@hexbear.net
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      4 months ago

      The idea thst animals can go extinct was new as hell during Rosa’s time. Fucking Andrew Jackson literally thought if they looked hard enough they’d find mastodons out there cause if God wanted a species dead he wouldn’t have made it in the first place. If you add the knowledge that yes, we can all die and there can be no more people ever again, the inevitability of communism is less scientific for sure. Given a long enough time span, I’m sure we would eventually get socialism but that’s no longer on the table.

    • Tomboymoder [she/her, pup/pup's]@hexbear.net
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      4 months ago

      I’m not a theory head, but I feel like what is being proposed is an end point where all contradictions have been resolved and there is no conflict between classes (or classes at all) and history moves in this direction through that inherent conflict/opposition.

      So it can take form in whatever way, but the eventual outcome in the long view of history will be the same, whatever it is called or thought of as. emilie-shrug

      • Thallo [she/her]@hexbear.net
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        4 months ago

        That makes sense

        In the same way that capitalism moves from disequilibrium to disequilibrium, couldn’t humanity just keep hopping from conflict to conflict?

    • macerated_baby_presidents [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      4 months ago

      i’m not familiar w good critical refutation.

      I don’t think capitalism can keep collapsing and reforming forever. Extinction is possible (nuclear war, maybe climate change), and different economic systems are possible. The key thing is that as long as there are contradictions, there will be change. Under capitalism the biggest one is within the mode of production: capitalists organize labor in a way which results in great inefficiency and suffering, and this produces a class of workers who are incentivized to change the system. The longer capitalism goes on, the larger and more definite the working class becomes, sharpening this contradiction. Eventually something has to release the pressure: socialist revolution (likely via a DoP, which will have its own contradictions to work through on the way to communism), or a reconfiguration of classes into some new arrangement which will result in a different kind of conflict than bourgeois-proletariat. Social upheaval can blow off steam without fundamentally changing class relations, but pressure will just keep building up and it’s unreasonable to expect infinite, e.g., BLM outbursts to never turn into something more. Nukes may kill us all at once, but I think it’s likely that even though climate crisis will cause vast devastation, this will increase class conflict and therefore opportunities to resolve these new contradictions.

      the way I see it, all societies fall into

      • some class is in control (nobility = feudalism, bourgeoisie = capitalism, workers = dictatorship of proletariat, etc). resolving contradictions can lead to communism
      • there aren’t coherent classes. communism (primitive or otherwise)

      the theory of marxism can be applied perfectly fine to indigenous societies. go down and see if there are classes and what they’re doing in the same way as e.g. Mao in Hunan. you may very well find that there is not a proletariat! marxism doesn’t say that there will always be a working class, just that capitalism builds one

      Lenin said that communism won’t simply emerge spontaneously and that it needs to be agitated for by people and communist parties. If we believe that capitalism is a European ideology that emerged from the material conditions of Europe, then it’s antithesis communism should be the same, right?

      Well communism isn’t gonna emerge with a snap of the fingers, but what is guaranteed as long as we have classes is that there are going to be people who figure out what’s going on. Those are the ones Lenin said must struggle in order to get to communism. Marxism was discovered in European context, but it applies just as well whenever you’ve got classes and I don’t see any reason why it won’t keep getting rediscovered in different contexts if the original strain goes extinct.

    • chayleaf
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      4 months ago

      Rosa is the author of “The Accumulation of Capital”, which was called something like “theory of the automatic demise of capitalism” and opposed in the USSR.

      The book basically says that capitalism is impossible because equivalent exchange of value means there’s nobody to buy the products, and survives by appending more and more regions to the capitalist system, which allows unequivalent exchange. Lenin (and later Soviet Marxists) opposed it for being anti-revolutionary. It downplays the internal contradictions of capitalism in favor of the nominally anti-imperialist external contradiction analysis (which in itself is bad for framing it as a matter of fairness), and that devalues the revolutionary class struggle, even if that certainly wasn’t the intention (“automatic demise of capitalism” implies there’s no historical need for that), ironically it was also used for opposing national liberation movements under the pretext of it being impossible to strive for national interests without having to become an imperialist (this is basically KKE’s “Imperialist Pyramid” line).

      Sadly, this means there’s plenty of “Luxembourgist” social fascists.

    • Collatz_problem [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      4 months ago

      Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

    • IceWallowCum [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      4 months ago

      I think the problem here is defining what communism is supposed to be, or what constitutes these “political structures.”

      For Marx the “political structure” stems from the mode of production, what we usually call the base. In a very shortened form, it’s the interacting between productive forces, means of production and the property regime (and all its consequences). As Capital tries to multiply itself, capitalism has shown a development of the complexity and productivity of the means of production, along with requiring workers that are able to deal with this complex production (specifically, this is dealt with by having multiple people act in unity towards a single product), in other words, developing the productive force. As capitalism develops, it accumulates property under a central command while simultaneously making it a collective tool. So, in capitalism’s specific case, we’re dealing with private property that is only used by a capacitated collective.

      The developing self-consciousness and organization of this productive collective pressures the regime of private property, which will strike back violently to keep existing, in the specific form of blunting the collective organization at all costs, as well as pushing back against the superstructure reflexions of these changes (i.e. fascism). If the self-conscious productive collective is victorious, it has been through a period where: the means of production have been transformed; the productive forces have been transformed; the property regime has been transformed. Thus, we have a new mode of production, and a new “political structure.”

      This is the tendency of capitalism. But notice that this assumes a more or less constant development of technology, for example. What if climate catastrophes hit too hard too fast in the coming years? Parts of civilization could be severed from eachother, and develop in different ways, depending on what exactly gets destroyed. Would an electricity-starved modern nation still develop factories as we know them? Or would property get fragmented again? What knowledge and techniques would be lost or gained? That we can’t predict.

  • IHave69XiBucks@lemmygrad.ml
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    4 months ago

    Personally i think its gonna be both. A lot of places will collapse into barbarism/warlordism/fascism, and there will be a few places that manage to be stable under socialism, and those places will slowly over the course of centuries carry the rest of humanity to a better future kicking and screaming. If you live in the west tho i think a period of barbarism is inevitable. I also think we are heading toward a mass depopulation event globally. I expect by 2100 the global population will be much lower than now, and be mainly concentrated in the few socialist countries that survive with most of the world being very low population. The main reason i think people will die is famine. I do think we will see some nuclear exchanges but it will likely be limited in scope. As nations collapse that have nukes other nations still around should leap into action to secure them pretty quickly so even in a scenario where we see massive countries like Russia, and the USA collapse i think their nuclear arsenals will remain secure.

    South East Asia will probably be pretty stable assuming China doesnt get nuked too badly by the USA so if your worried about your own personal future id recommend moving somewhere like New Zealand, Alaska, Pacific Islands, anywhere close enough to SEA to benefit from their success and potentially migrate there once the storm passes, but far enough away and isolated enough that you wont get caught up in any conflicts during the bad years.

    My prediction would be that 2025-2030 we will see WW3 really start to take shape but itll be largely cold with some isolated conflicts for awhile. Then it should be over by 2035 as i expect once fighting really starts itll be fast. I think there is a good chance WW3 ends because there is a limited nuclear exchange which devastates population centers in specific regions, and the horror of it causes people to start negotiating again and agree to peace. Dont think theres gonna be a clear winner, but may be someone who does better economically afterward. Then youll have a decade or two of global economic collapse, this will be when the famines begin to get pretty bad in places that already import food. (If your in Egypt leave ASAP)

    During the economic collapse i expect the ash from the nukes/fires caused by them, climate change, and collapse of global trade to all contribute to a worldwide famine. This is where we may see the largest death tolls in human history, and depopulation on a scale almost unimaginable. People really underestimate the power of a famine since most of us havent lived through one, but all it takes is weeks. You lose 30% of our food production and you lose 30% of the population. The range of loss could be anywhere from as low as 15% to as high as 80% global population loss depending on how bad things are. There will probably be areas with tons of food that have no way to get it to other places too. So expect mass migrations to areas that have plentiful farmland, and water. Arid regions that import food will be largely abandoned.

    This is of course just my take on it and im just some autistic weirdo who has an obsession with history and politics, but i will say i tend to have a nose for this stuff. Im good at picking up on patterns and like to make predictions based on them and while im usually not 100% on point i tend to get the general idea right. The specifics are what i tend to be wrong on.

    • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      4 months ago

      and the horror of it causes people to start negotiating again and agree to peace

      The horror of anything doesn’t seem to influence contemporary politics all that much anymore, at least when it comes to warfare and killing. This part of your prediction is the one that is the most iffy for me. Blood-for-blood escalation, like in the very old doomsday scenarios, seems much more likely to me if nuclear weapons are actually used, even once.

      • weeen [any, any]@hexbear.net
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        4 months ago

        If that happens at least we’ll all be dead pretty quick… My main fear is climate change, because it will first affect the people who barely contributed to it and are already suffering, while the people who contributed because of greed will be safe for much longer.

        Capitalism is the root of climate change but the west will probably turn to ecofascism to protect it, I just want the oppressed to see retribution but I don’t have any hope for the near future

      • IHave69XiBucks@lemmygrad.ml
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        4 months ago

        Nuclear weapon use isnt like the horrific things we see today though. Its something that 1. The powerful are also fearful of, and that they wont be spared from, and 2. Something that does extreme damage not just to humans but to economies, and infrastructure. The horrors of today are squarely placed upon the shoulders of the downtrodden to bear the weight of so those in positions of privilege find it easy to ignore them. But have Los Angeles wiped off the map in an instant and that wont be so easy to ignore. Look to 9/11. The death toll wasnt even that high compared to other atrocities that have happened since, but it has a lasting and profound effect on the western worldview and policy because it effected those who should be immune to the woes of war. In their metal towers, with all their wealth, their blood flowed. Thats what they fear. The same way war in Ukraine caused so many to freak out but war in the middle east is seen as expected. Its too close to home. Once the powerful dont feel safe anymore they will agree to peace.

        • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          4 months ago

          If any particular individual that has direct command over nuclear weapons, that happens to follow Ayn Rand’s delusion of “I will not die, it is the world that will end” and sensed their own death was imminent, would you count on that then?

  • Tomboymoder [she/her, pup/pup's]@hexbear.net
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    4 months ago
    Christian shit

    Even if barbarism comes first, God ultimately has final say in history and he can bring about good from man’s evil.
    Socialism is inevitable and even more inevitably He shall wipe away every tear. 🙏