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Allen's avatar

Hopefully in your quest to "understand" communism, Marxism socialism etc. you'll get past the rank sophistry of the likes of James Lindsay.

This guy is not only wrong on just about every point he shoehorns into his ridiculous attempt to "explain communism" he is simply making shit up and pasting his ludicrous ideas atop various other ideas which he knows nothing about.

While capitalist savages are ravaging the planet, waging war everywhere you turn and wiping out large swaths of people through medical tyranny we turn to such hacks as Lindsay to point the finger elsewhere?

Maybe this clown can tell us how Blackrock is actually a commie front and Bill Gates is secretly reading Marx' Das Kapital in his quest to monopolize the planet?

Think about what passes for political discussion in either the narrow terms of the "left" or "right" websites or in the larger sense of politics in America or the EU, as a whole. What is the basis the most fundamental basis for debate? What is the common language of that "debate"?

You can fill in the gory details of the problem: on the one hand, anything goes; on the other hand anything is acceptable and must be accepted (in the name of tolerance). Opinions are personal, categories are arbitrary and foggy, and the only basis for commonality is a very loose and changing list of policy statements that could just as easily be their opposites. It is not just mysticism and pop-theories that are at issue. There is a century worth of slogans, assumptions, "facts" which are "well known" or "commonly known." Even simple logic is not required.

Yes, class perspective is the key to it but the political chaos extends so far that even that is tough to put your finger on in a practical way.

Materialism, "cold" pursuit of the "truth" for practical reasons, basic class partisanship, a method for determining what is correct and accurate and what is not, agreement on these methods and the history from which these are derived - these are the most rudimentary tools of a political movement.

Otherwise, everything just spins like water in a toilet bowl just to be dumped into the sewer and get piped into the Idea Treatment Plant only to go through the same cycle once again.

It ain't "philosophy", it's a common language and method very rigorously adhered to at a hundred different levels of sophistication but fundamentally starting with the soldiers' quote in John Reed:

"If you aren't for one class, you are for the other..."

DanB1973's avatar

We don’t know much about the inside mechanisms of the “communist” states, other than second-hand stories and our own elaborations on the random snapshots that the media choose to relate. By “we”, I mean “we”, not the people who managed to flee their homelands and can provide more insight.

However, we can have a much deeper insight into certain developments in our own backyard. For example, how about our whole food supply system being controlled by 11 mega-corporations based in the US? Or, our whole media world being controlled by 6 mega-corporations based in the US? Or our whole financial system being controlled by 2 mega-corporations based in the US? How different are those from the similarly concentrated capitals of the communist reality?

Or our deeply professed religions like the cult of the successful entrepreneur, the “keep smiling” programming of the mind or the “fake it till you make it” denial of the actual circumstances? We have recently added the social media cult programming (deployed by one supposedly private initiative) and the smartphone ideology religion, both of which have already hijacked (and probably permanently compromised) our young generations. How different is this human cost, resulting in the mass of socially unfit people who will probably never contribute to the society? How different is the human cost which is the consequence of blanket poisoning of every person with fake or empty food and toxic household chemicals? How different is the human cost of providing “education” whose sole lasting effect is a lifelong debt and the absence of real work opportunities?

True, we are not dying right away. Instead, we are becoming overweight, chronically ill, physically unfit blobs perpetuating patterned days, with no deeper sense of purpose to our individual lives. The religions we have been given are not there for our salvation, though. Aren’t they more like a pre-formed grooves which hold us inside and are deep enough to discourage us from having a curious look outside? Isn’t this zombiefication our own version of the communist picture we are being shown?

I don’t mean elevating one over the other. All social structures exist for a reason, I guess. We may not understand or accept “their” reasons, because we have our own, and we value ours higher, obviously and reasonably. However... The laughter of the history is that the modern communism (whatever it means) is the product of our (Western) own making, through our own creators and agents, with our own money, supplies and resources, intricate labyrinths of diplomacy, politics, social engineering and economic incentives.

We have managed to spread it all over the place. Almost, if we don’t account for the last two standing: North Korea and Iran. Everywhere else, our dollars have become the top religion that determines literally everything. Was the collapse of the communism a deliberate development? Was it the reason why we have created the European Union, a replacement “they” white-stars block following the footsteps of yellow- or red-star “enemies”?

May we live in interesting times...

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