Image Transcription:
An 8-panel Phoebe Teaching Joey meme.
The first panel is Phoebe from Friends saying "Russia".
The second panel is Joey from the same show replying with "Russia".
The third panel is Phoebe saying "has invaded".
The fourth panel is Joey repeating back "has invaded".
The fifth panel is Phoebe saying "Ukraine".
The sixth panel is Joey repeating back "Ukraine".
The seventh panel is Phoebe saying the completed phrase "Russia has invaded Ukraine".
The final panel shows Joey proudly proclaiming "NATO just started a proxy war".
I exclude Tankies from the far left. Because at its heart, the left is anti-authoritarian. Tankies lost the plot somewhere and decided that full authoritarianism was the way to go, regardless of the human suffering that lead to.
An authoritarian regime that claims to be communist is no closer to the communist ideal of a stateless utopia than a fully capitalistic state. If the capitalistic state is democratic with popular socialist programs, then it's actually closer to the communist ideal than an authoritarian state that merely claims communism. I'm using European democracies as my gold standard.
The problem with tankies is that they have latched on to the Stalinist notion of the necessity for dictatorship to achieve the unification of the proletariat and the dismantling of the Plutarchy. The other problem is most of them are Soviboos obsessed with Russia and the USSR in general.
It would be fine if they were consistent. Wrong, but fine.
What grinds my gears is the full on simp-itry of Putin and Xi in particular. None are communist in any way. Both full on capitalists. I would argue USSR was never communist but even so the cut off date was 1991 everything after has absolutely no left wing whatsoever.
Tankies are just atheist MAGAs with a different God Emperor they worship.
Tankies are just anti America edge lords. I'm surprised they haven't started claiming Iran is somehow a communist country.
They fall for the fallacy that because America hasn't done great things in its history, "not America" must be virtuous and a moral paragon. They don't realize that there can be even darker evils instead. It's a simplistic worldview where the bad guy's enemy must be a good guy, not an even worse bad guy.
Give them enough time and dissonance and they’ll get there.
If Xi is a full on capitalist, how do I make the capitalists in my country charge billionaires with crimes and actually convict them?
Here in the US, our capitalists are so brazen they steal billions a year in wage theft, they spend the majority of their companies profits on stock buybacks and lay off employees while making the remaining workers pick up the extra load with no extra compensation, they buy politicians and literally write the majority of all of our regulation. They bury studies that show their contribution to the climate crisis, they spend billions on misinformation campaigns to take the targets off their back.. they sabotage renewable energy and prevent meaningful investment in public transportation. They lobby to further increase our military budget, which serves primarily as a welfare pot for military industrial corporations, who can charge exorbitant prices for garbage products, and who’s lobbying efforts have sufficiently restricted the market as to prevent new players from entering.
I mean, fuck dude, there is literally more inequality than prior to the French Revolution. We’ve walked straight into neo-feudalism, and people are more concerned with utopian visions of the future than actually creating change in the present.
I think the difference is Hierarchy.
Xi and Putin put themselves at the tippy top while in the US due to how "democracy" works, who's in charge can shift around. Billionaires here are the higher ups while the government acts as contractors/employees to them. You can't fire your boss.
So what you’re saying is, in China, the capitalists aren’t the boss, but they are here?
I'm with you on this one. I kinda always thought Marx's and Engel's point was:
I don't think they had in mind that the next step after capitalism would be going back to despotism. Like you said, these people lost the plot.
George Orwell's Animal Farm captures it perfectly. Everything is going (mostly) great until the Pigs take over and become despots.
"All Animals Are Equal but Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others"
The pigs telegraph every move before they actually change the rules. When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time is a core lesson of the book.
Also if you see the writing in the wall get out early like snowball or you'll end up at the glue factory.
The politicians have been doing that too.
And if you let capitalism keep on going while doing nothing to stop, curb or circumvent it, you'll end up back at feudalism, except with CEO's & middle managers instead of kings & lords.
Abandoning worker enfranchisement in favour of authoritarian autocracy is neither communist nor left wing - they're just red-coded fascists.
Imagine the level of brain rot required to praise Stalin as a champion of the people.
Stalin was a champion drinker. You got to give him that. Which actually makes it worse.
Well, no. It's not. The left/right spectrum is mostly understood as an economic spectrum, with the right believing in individual ownership of capital, the means of production, and land (and, of course, personal property), with the left believing in collective ownership of capital, the means of production, real estate (and in fringe cases, no personal property). Collectivism doesn't necessarily mean anti-authoritarian; anarchists are just one flavor of collectivists.
Marxist theory states that authoritarian control is a necessary precondition to absolute communism, until everyone is enlightened enough (more or less; I'm greatly simplifying this, since his treatise is 500+ pages and dense as hell) to be able to fully self-govern in a communist utopia.
I tend to agree that a democratic society that has strong collectivist tendencies while preserving strong individual autonomy is more desirable than an authoritarian gov't. Personally, I tend towards anarchism, but my view of humanity has dimmed enough in the last decade that I no longer believe that it's a viable form or governance.
That's actually Leninist theory, Marx never went that direction. And Lenin was the one who betrayed the revolution to seize power, followed by a true despot in Stalin.
The actual origin of the terms Left and Right go back a bit further than Marx, they go back to the French Revolution. There was a vote, the question was, "Should the king have an absolute veto over new laws passed by the assembly" Those who said yes sat on the right of the podium, those who said no sat on the left.
Those on the left wanted no king at all, they wanted the people to have the power.
Communism was only deemed a left-wing ideology because the people held the power, not the wealthy few.
As a note, conservatism was also created out of the French Revolution, as a sort of blowback against it. It uses wealth to create and enforce social hierarchies.
Anyway, once you've betrayed the revolution and installed a dictator, communism is not considered left-wing, it's a tool of authoritarianism, where the king owns all and merely allows the peasants to live in his kingdom.
I would love if the US adopted a Euro style social democracy. Shit would be so much better.
Take it from a European - no it wont, we're like 2 steps behind you in the race to the bottom.
Don't aspire to have the polite facade over the dumpster fire like we do, aspire to abolish the system entirely.
Well, at least we have some variety and an actual political spectrum, that's still better than red-blue monoculture.
lol, no, no we don't..
E: not in the mainstream "ever likely to be elected" category anyway, they all serve capitalism here too
Have you ever looked at the European parliament? Have you looked at the communists and Trotskyists in some European countries' parliaments? They're there, you can look it up.
Can you even call yourself real multiparty system until you have viable Bonapartists, though?
We have anything people will vote for, for better or for worse. The same can't be said for the US or the UK, because of "first past the post".
Which country? Europe has a pretty large spectrum of policies depending where you live. On average though I'd say your standards of living are still better than what the average American would enjoy.
My problem with the far left is they seem entirely unable (in history) to contain the leftist authoritarians. They're like, "surely this time my associate who daily says we need to move faster and more violently won't do violent things to me to get their way!" Then they're surprised to be the next "moderate" reformer to end up in front a firing squad.
At least learn from history!
I'm anarcho-transhumanist. Posthumanism just wants to get rid of/enhance people, I want people to evolve into truly self-sovereign entities.
What's your take? I mean, technically transhumanism is a kind of posthumanism... but is there any variant that could be more anti-authoritarian?
Well... now that's an answer. Guess I've asked for it, haven't I? 😀 Thanks for being thorough.
Now, I know nothing of WH 40k. My take on the "post" vs "trans" difference, is that "post" refers to whatever will come after, whether more or less humanist, while "trans" refers to a "beyond" state, or specifically an incremental evolution from humanism. While "post" doesn't necessarily seek the destruction of humanity, something like a self-annihilation would still qualify as "post", but becoming a global hive-mind, which we're kind of doing right now across the Internet, would be both "post" and "trans".
The "trans" in transgender however, means more of an "across", as a switching from one to another. I think the meaning of "beyond" from how I see transhumanism, would be better matched by genderqueer, which itself is an umbrella term for a lot of different aspects that are neither this, nor that, nor nothing, but something else.
It's a good point that we might already be posthuman, and transhuman in both meanings: from barely human, we're on the path, to whatever lies beyond. Humans still get born as "just humans", but from then on very few come to be nothing more than human for any extended period of time. Unless... we include in humanism the augmenting ourselves with external accessories, and replacing parts with replicas as closely functionally similar to the original as possible.
Interesting that you'd mention furries, I guess you're right in that it's a form of transhumanism. If we could, and made it legal to, transform our bodies at will, that would definitely lead to a lot of variation. Both in external appearance, and in internal structure. Guess that ties into the body modding and tattooing trends. From that point of view, social rejection of furries would be a xenophobic reaction we're already seeing in some parts of society. Hopefully body modders would become allies. I wonder if both the popularity of body mods, even as simple as tattoos, and the push for the acceptance of non-heteronormative behaviors, could be in part a reflection, and in part a building block, of some sections of society wishing for a larger evolution. In that sense, the fight for trans and queer rights might actually be seen as the fight for early forms of transhumanism. That's... interesting.
I wonder what the next steps could be. It's on one hand positive, and on the other kind of sad, that large sections of society haven't even reached a heteronormative parity, while we're talking here about going way beyond that.
Well said!
Once you're talking about a "dictatorship of the proletariat" you're not anti authoritarian... let's not "no true scotsman" communism, being anti authoritarian is something that can be true of communists and capitalists but isn't intrinsically true of either.
There is no such thing as a “dictatorship of the proletariat”. That's just a democracy.
No, a dictatorship is when there's one person in charge, and their word is law. You know, like a king, just one not born into power. A dictator seizes power. Like a king's ancestors did.
A dictator can be "enlightened" or some bullshit, but they're still one person calling all the shots, and dictatorships are still the single most corruptible form of government every created.
It isn't a democracy if you pick a class of people (e.g., property owners) to disenfranchise, and make the argument that an open democracy favors the wealthy and therefore you won't have one.
You gotta use the actual examples of the folks applying the term to evaluate what it means.
By your weird logic, taxes on the wealthy aren't democratic, even when the majority votes for them.
True communism is merely that, extreme taxes on the wealthy until there are no individual factory owners, just communal owners. As for land, nothing in communist ideology says that you cannot own your own home, just the opposite. What you cannot do, is own all the homes in a neighborhood and charge ruinous rents.
Communism is about ridding society of the parasite class, those rich bastards who abuse their wealth to exploit others, often causing real harm.
Society creates laws to prevent one person from harming another. We just need to acknowledge the very real harms that the rich inflict on people every day.
Hell, wage theft is the number one type of theft in the US, with dollar amounts greater than all other types of theft combined.
Of course they are; abolishing the vote because the majority doesn't vote the way you want, however, isn't democracy.
So all the communist governments of the 20th century weren't "true" communists; it's a bit no true scotsman, don't you think?
Going back to my original comment, no they weren't. They were dictatorships, and dictatorships can't be communist, no matter what the propaganda they put out. A dictatorship is closer to feudalism than communism. The King owning everything, even your house is no different from "the State" owning everything, even your house, because at the heart of it, the dictator is the state.
True communism might have a government, but it will be made up of the people, and it will serve the people. People would own their own homes, and collectively own their workplaces. It would be like putting the union in charge of the work site.
That's the dream, but the dream is often betrayed. A dream betrayed is a nightmare.
Also, the rich assholes are actively trying to abolish the vote because the majority support taxing their asses. Because in a capitalist society, the rich hate the poor, and work to prevent the poor from having a voice.
My point (and I can't stress this enough) is that a political philosophy that relies on dismantling democratic processes and disenfranchising a large portion of the electorate to function is not democratic, even in theory.
Marx's conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat may not have been authoritarian, but Lenin's was; I understand what you are saying (essentially that communism must be democratic, and that therefore anything that calls itself communism that is not democratic must in fact not be democratic).
At the same time, communist theorists have made up marvelously positive-sounding terms that boil down to "dictatorship is good if it's the right dictator", and that's what tankies (the people OP was referring to) use to justify supporting authoritarianism.
If you'd like to define "true communism" as excluding all actual communist regimes, do you -- I'm not trying to argue over whether communism is good or bad in theory.
A few points;
A; The rich are not a "large portion of the electorate" They are a tiny minority with extremely outsized influence.
B; Lenin betrayed the revolution. He established a dictatorship, which is feudalism with a coat of paint. And yeah, tankies idolize that shit. They see the rich (or the merely educated) as an enemy to be hurt, and once the rich are gone, they turn on other enemies of the State. Tankies are much closer to Fascism than Communism.
Their king doles out wealth to the loyal, and uses the power of the State to hurt their enemies, enemies who Dear Leader tells them to hate.
A sort of Feudalist Fascism, it's a step back from even capitalism, which Marx saw as a necessary step between feudalism and communism.
It's clear you feel very passionately about this, I'm certainly willing to concede that it's theoretically possible for an entirely democratic country to choose a genuinely communist model in an entirely democratic way.
I do see a path to it, one that Marx thought he saw, but it was far too early for.
It relies on automation. Marx saw this starting in factories, there were more goods produced in one day than any single village could need in a year. But the problem was, those goods still took human labor to make, and toiling away in a factory leaves little time for revolution.
The modern world is rapidly changing, jobs are vanishing now in ways that have never happened before. In the past, it was some rich asshole getting richer off of my labor. Now it's some rich asshole getting richer off of an AI trained on my data.
We're not quite there yet, but soon the predictions of the video "Humans need not apply" will come true.
When no one has a job anymore, when no one can have a job, well, then you'll see a democratic push for then next step towards communism, UBI.
Countries that resist UBI will see revolution, and will then likely fall to dictatorship.
All of this will be on a backdrop of climate crisis, where governments are forced to take desperate measures to try to save what they can. Which will be another vector for possible dictatorships, because it's easy for people to fall prey to a single voice yelling that they alone can fix all the problems of the world if you just trust them. This yelling is usually quietly followed with them telling you who their enemies are, and that they believe that hurting said enemies will fix things.