GarbageShoot [he/him]

nor is it to “de-Nazify” Ukraine

I think they do want to do this, since the Nazis are extremely hostile to Russia, so it’s crushing the opposition. Obviously this is pretty different from the historical de-Nazification efforts whose corpse Putin cynically puppets as cover for his actions.

If there are meaningful factions of Greater Russia Nazis in Ukraine, he’d obviously be fine with those as he is fine with them in Russia.

Defensible sentence technically, but I think it’s actually plausible with three hads and the second past perfect makes the sentence unnatural.

Frequently they blame ““communist”” politicians for letting the immigrants in

Oh sure, Owen was mistaken from the outset because his genuinely more-efficient way of running things isn’t going to be as profitable to the owning class, meaning that no amount of advocacy can escape the gravitational pull of the profit motive dragging it down into the mire of human misery. I was just talking about what he did that ruined his career from a practical standpoint by drawing the ire of the bourgeoisie, which was not his company town model alone.

Sorry to spam you with nitpicks, but I do feel obliged to say that while Einstein was certainly a socialist and spoke very well of Lenin and even Stalin, I don’t think we have evidence of him having a specific and cultivated political ideology that fit a label like “Marxism.” I think he was more of a generic humanist who appreciated what his Marxist contemporaries were doing.

Incidentally, how did Marx borrow from Proudhon? I fully only know of Proudhon through Discourse about concerning material he wrote and that quote about, ironically, wishing for a future where he would be executed as a conservative.

I think that what fucked over Owen, according to Engels, was not his coops but his assessment that they were inadequate and more fundamental changes to society were required, concerning marriage, religion, and something else that I forget. For just the coops, he was celebrated in a way that isn’t even that different from the OP, because he didn’t really shatter the existing paradigm, but produce an extremely productive version of it that just happened to be relatively pro-social.

Don’t you know that Stalin owned the whole Soviet Union?!?

I don’t see what the Zionist entity has to do with this, it’s not like they claim to be communist (though that would be a funny bit). I was talking about your reference to “dictator states” since Cuba surely is one of them, being communist.

I wish you wouldn’t believe what those very plutocrats you disavow tell you about Cuba.

Literally just read the list. It’s not ahistorical because it gets history wrong, it’s ahistorical because it has nothing to do with history. It has no ability to explain how and why fascism emerged when it did rather than sooner or later and thereby has very little understanding of what it actually is. It’s like defining a disease by a very loose checklist of symptoms, the fundamental causality is completely absent, so there is very little you can even do with it besides make a shaky diagnosis.

Incidentally, Trump isn’t a fascist. He flirts with being a fascist and in many ways has lit the way [something something tiki torches] for future fascists, but fundamentally, he’s just doing fascist-like rhetoric as a way to sell people on relatively normal neoliberal policy. Probably the most strange thing he did was bomb Qasem Soleimani, something that Democrats didn’t even really oppose on any grounds other than it being rash, despite Soleimani being a leader in the fight against ISIS. If I had to pick a second thing, it was probably lowering military funding to South Korea, which was just him being stupid and accidentally a clearly good thing to do. He’s not harder on immigrants than Democrats, he’s not harder on China or Russia, he’s just a normal rightist wrt to queers, he likes giving tax cuts to rich people, and he’s fussy in diplomatic meetings. He had very few policies that Biden didn’t immediately perpetuate. If you want to call the whole neoliberal edifice fascist, fine, whatever, but he’s not special in anything but aesthetics.

Eco is not a definitive authority and his little checklist is extremely ahistorical.

tl;dr: You’re deeply disingenuous and talking to you is a waste of time.

Maybe spend . . . more time getting a sense of humor

It wasn’t a joke

Never believe that [reactionaries] are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The [reactionaries] have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

I go on plenty of long rants, I have no right to complain. I’ll try to address what I find to be the more productive points.

Nobody really uses the word liberalism anymore

Here and elsewhere you exhibit a serious myopia. Can I imagine that there are some places, especially in the US, where use of the term as anything other than “Democrat” has died out? Of course. Does that mean in the whole world no one is using it? Absolutely not, there are many countries where its use is much more common and political analysts still use it even in America.

Like how would you define the difference between liberalism and neoliberalism?

Liberalism is a general philosophical movement that I have already defined. Neoliberalism is the dominant strain within the broader movement that is oriented around American imperial hegemony.

That word was specifically created to delineate the “rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, right to private property and equality before the law”.

I don’t care what Wikipedia told you about neoliberalism, that is not the history of the term. Neoliberalism emerged as a reactionary opposition to social democracy (which was popular due to the gains socialism was making in the East) once the Cold War started drawing to a close.

Using concepts as defined pre 1960 is problematic at least because we had massive advances in science and understanding of how humans, society and economics and systems of power work. Game theory, mass psychology, sociology, and technology has advanced

When I read this, I screamed into a pillow, I am so sick of seeing this fucking argument. It’s just an excuse for philistinism (i.e. ignorance and refusal to study), and for throwing out ideas hostile to American hegemony (since the apotheosis of neoliberalism was circa 1980). Let’s just throw out gravity, nitrogen fixing, democracy, representative government, and all the rest of it because now we have smartphones! But I’m being uncharitable, you give a more specific condition in a moment:

so that we know these ideas as seen originally do not work, since we have historical evidence of their failure

When a new system emerges and is smashed by the old powers, that does not establish that the idea “doesn’t work” but that the historical circumstances of its emergence then and there was unable to resist reactionary forces, which is a useful datapoint, but not for the argument “gommulism doesn’t work”.

The opposite of someone what believes in liberal values is a fascist

If we’re using “liberal” like most people in the world use liberal, this is completely incorrect and that fact is well-established by history. Fascism as a historical movement was born as anticommunist resistance aimed at preserving capitalism, which is why the Nazis had immense help from liberal foreign powers who they would later attack. Fascism is not the opposite of liberalism, it is liberalism in decay and fighting viciously for its own preservation.

In my opinion, any serious socialist or communist today must be in favor of “limited personal free market” where individuals or small groups of individuals have the liberty to produce, innovate and become entrepreneur,

This is too big a topic, we can get back to it later if you want. My short answer is that you are relying on buzzwords that completely obfuscate what you are talking about.

because we now know that this is a fundamental expression of human nature. E.g. build some cool keyboards and sell them on etsy or whatever

??? This has the fun quality that you are either saying that trying to be, like, a CEO is fundamental to human nature, which is baseless nonsense, or you are saying something more along the lines of “humans like creating things and changing their environment, perfecting and reinventing tools to streamline production and so on” which is literally basic Marx!

And I doubt you’d find serious socialists today that really want to defend the original maxist/leninist or maoist theories of socialism.

You will find Marxists all over the world, myself included, who will tell you that the basic principles of Marxism are correct and that having an actually successful socialist movement depends on not distorting them. Incidentally, you can read the Lenin I linked you to learn all about people trying to distort Marxism back circa 1914.

Like before, you are demonstrating myopia. I’m sure you don’t know any Marxists (evidently) and you probably haven’t met very many on the internet, but there are multiple Marxist countries and countless Marxist movements around the world. Maybe they (not necessarily I, but they) have something to teach you that you can’t get from pontificating and navel-gazing.

I believe 90% of all humans share the same values but are reprogrammed through lies and emotional manipulation.

This is elitist nonsense and I will link you to my favorite essay, though it’s a little long and circuitous: https://redsails.org/masses-elites-and-rebels/

The short version is that people act in their self-interest and it takes a fair amount of education, whether through lived experience or exposition, to understand that their interest is with the common interest. People broadly espouse falsehoods not because they have been cleverly tricked, but because they care about what is “really true” far less than they care about what it does for them to do that espousing.

I believe that instead of arguing about the finer points of old ideologies from the barbarous times pre 1950 we should be working on tools to control or negate these corrosive and corrupting influences (Wealth caps? Sortition? AI?).

AI is garbage techno-rapturism and sortition was literally used in ancient Athens, meaning it should be thrown out if we follow your logic (along with voting generally). Wealth caps are not asset caps, so they are meaningless here.

The liberals should be your allies.

You have two choices, either start using liberal like the world does or, I guess, conclude that the Democrats are also part of the right, because I can tell you with confidence that Biden has never been and never will be my ally. Either choice is an improvement from current conditions, I suppose.

Why do they get to redefine the meaning of words and erase concepts? They were wrong or deliberately lying bastards.

When someone says he believes in liberal values (liberty as a synonym for freedom) it is just a bad tactics to (deliberately) misunderstand them to mean freedom to oppress and attack them for it.

It’s just a matter of what “liberalism” is. That’s how language works in material reality, that things gain new meanings based on social circumstances. It’s like saying “That person isn’t black! Their skin and their hair are clearly just dark shades of brown”. In some sense you are correct, but you only get there by ignoring the other meaning of the word, which is clearly the one being used. Words don’t have any other meaning except that which was socially constructed.

I believe it is important to wake people up that what capitalists say with freedom is a lie, that people cannot be free if they their socioeconomic situation doesn’t allow them to. We need to reclaim the word “freedom” as encompassing the freedom from exploitation, economic servitude, lies, constant imaginary terror, or threats of real violence. That news and social media has become a prison of distorting mirrors and lies.

You sound very much like a nascent socialist. I agree with this completely.

PS: Obviously freedom cannot be an absolute or principle but a compromise with society. I’d be curious what you would call the concept of both individual and economic liberty. Like what “should” someone say when they want to say they believe in liberal values? Socialism? :)

Well, without a definition of freedom, it’s very difficult to answer this question. Part of the reason is that we can (as even liberals will tell you) frame “freedom” as “freedom from” and “freedom to”, and these freedoms typically represent opposite values. As a crude example, consider the freedom to kill versus the freedom from being killed. Thus, there is no such thing as absolute freedom, though socialists certainly had things to say, as you did earlier, about the lack of freedom experienced by someone who is destitute, as well as the lack of freedom in a class system, where the state is necessarily organized by the ruling class to suppress the underclass.

Framed in terms of ideals, as I suggested earlier and the Lenin piece says, socialism is the political and economic equality of the people (economic equality here not meaning the equality of how much money you have, but the masses being able to decide production instead of an elite owning class, though that itself is conducive to everyone getting what they need on the basic principle of organizing production towards serving everyone).

PPS: Thanks for the short text, it’s hilarious

Lenin is an entertaining guy. The letter I shared is his punchiest work in that respect, but I think the book State and Revolution is also entertaining in its own way, as well as dealing with issues a bit larger in scope than liberal-professorial sophistry.

Calling liberal when you’re really just for the freedom to exploit and economically subjugate so nobody can stop you is also a slight hijack.

The flagship liberals were mostly slavers who wanted to go from being merely the richest people in the colonies to the deified ruling class of a country. Liberalism is the leveling of political powers so that uneven economic power dominates. It was this way with slave plantations, with laissez faire, with the “progressive” era of finishing up slaughtering the natives but keeping more of the trees this time, with Jim Crow, redlining, the red scares and with neoliberalism. That’s all of American history besides the (you got me) illiberal World War I - II period.

Or we can just go and look at the social context of authors like Locke, who were advocating for the sacredness of personal property because he was among the wealthy and saw how rowdy the masses were getting.

I believe in freedom or liberty as a word for a specific value.

And it is . . .

A vast majority of all normal human beings believe in this value

Still no clue, but now we are declaring that a “vast majority” of all “normal” human beings believe in it! Are we to believe that some highfalutin theoretical value is just independent of culture? Must be something

Not all are sane enough to understand that as a society you have to make compromises.

If you remember one thing from my comment, remember the historical context at the start. If you remember two things, let the second one be this: If you were arguing with a libertarian, right there is where you lose. You let them question-beg what freedom is and let them play champion to it exactly like they want to, as even their hijacked name signifies [“libertarianism” used to refer to a strain of anarchism, and not the newage “leftlib” thing either].

I feel like socialists and libertarians / neoliberals are trying to gaslight us into thinking freedom means something different, something materialistic. Well not gaslight exactly, but stealing or hijacking a word like you say. Like trying to redefine what feminism means.

You are absolutely right on libertarians, as I described with their very name above. You are incorrect on both neoliberals and socialists.

Neoliberals have already indoctrinated basically everyone in the anglosphere because they have spent decades as the uncontested dominant power. It is the water you swim in that you don’t even have a name for, and that’s just how they like it. Americans are the best example of this because, while I think your definition of “liberal” is untenable, theirs is overtly pathetic. To them, it is a synonym for “left”. They just don’t have a word for what, say, Brits call liberal, because that’s kind of everything in their reference point! Well, except theocracy, but they’re still working on that word.

As for socialists, well, I think you’d need to readdress your objection first, because:

“Freedom” is a political concept.

Political concepts, I am sure we can agree, have no significance outside of reality.

Reality is material.

Freedom’s significance depends on its materiality. QED.

Conversely, anyone who told me that they wanted to tell me about their politics but that it had no meaningful relationship to material reality is not someone I would listen to talk for any reason. Now, I’m not saying you’re saying that – I doubt you are – but your explanation struggles to hold up to that. I used [admittedly crass] deduction for refutation there because it was convenient, but I hope you don’t think I have any particular interest in deceiving you. I just don’t think that a starving person in a desert is meaningfully free, though we haven’t gotten that far yet.

Complete aside, but the discussion about muddling word meanings reminded me of my favorite short text by Lenin:

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/mar/11.htm

A lot of people on hexbear hate chapo (despite that being where c/askchapo is, due to hexbear formerly being chapo.chat) but I think it’s alright. The most recent episode starts out with a very informative segment about sanctions.

I would counter relative to the other answer you got that liberalism is based on a leveling of the political rights of citizens while resisting a leveling of economic rights (despite some calls for it even at the time). Feudal governments absolutely were also based on the defense of the rights of their citizens and indeed even some classical slave societies, but the difference is that those societies had [more pronounced and varied] castes which each had different political rights.

Liberalism was a revolution led by merchants and other propertied people against the aristocracy, i.e. people with the greatest economic rights opposing those with the greatest political rights, leaving the former completely unchecked except sometimes by popular power.

Incidentally, and this explains some of the bickering in this thread, communists of all stripes are people who advocate that both political and economic rights are leveled, which manifests as the economy being controlled by popular mandate rather than private ownership.

Anyway, I’m mainly commenting to say if you have other political questions, you can usually get very thorough answers from c/askchapo

Linguistically, that’s usually how it is used in America (but not elsewhere), “liberal” means “left”

Aren’t you literally doing the thing you accused them of? Deriding their entire ideology? It’s almost like you aren’t an ally and you’re just lying through your teeth!