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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
yes, but they are not the *extreme*, those are the people who think the system must be overthrown by force of arms, not, oh I don't know, people supporting a statue of an infamous racist being removed from a Uni campus, or someone not supporting the ownership and use of nuclear weapons
advancing the front into TV TropesRegarding definitions of socialism, I'd say that Marx wouldn't consider dividing land among the peasants to be socialism. The orthodox Marxist version of socialism has big state-owned collective farms where people work as laborers, as Stalin implemented. (Karl Marx admired big business for its efficiency in increasing productivity.)
Dividing the bourgeoisie's farms among the farm workers is neither capitalist nor orthodox socialist, but I would call it a version of socialism. (I believe the first one to really try it was Lenin's New Economic Plan.)
the extreme right and extreme left are two very different beasts who stand for two very different things, while neither are fans of democracy, the left are at least honest with the whole "screw democracy, VIVA LA REVOLUCION!" aspect, the right on the other hand use democracy to gain power and then pull it away as soon as they are in power (see: Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy) and stand for very different things, the right on the superiority of a certain group (most commonly white Christians) "yes you suffer, but it is because you were born less than I", while the left take a collectivist, "for the greater good" approach "yes you suffer, but it is so the whole may eventually prosper!"
advancing the front into TV TropesAll I can say about this debate about extremes...is that political discourse has fallen on very low standards. In America, it was always weak because nobody even knows what Liberal and Conservative even means.
The Republican party are not classical conservatives. Angela Merkel is. They are not preserving institutions, they are radically deinstitutionalizing existing institutions and laws and as of the gutting of the Voting Rights Law are set to bring back Jim Crow and reverse the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement. This is reactionary. And their idea is more or less to establish a one-party state, since they intend to reverse anything and everything done by a Democrat president unless its stuff the force them to approve...and they do this despite being incredibly unpopular and unrepresentative of their own constituencies.
That's how politics is in the mainstream. Online its even worse. Especially since conspiracy-paranoid thinking is now in the White House.
I wouldn't say it's post-truth or post-fact...this is pretty much America's glaring intellectual weaknesses on display. The same mentality that invented the Lost Cause, an easily refutable lie and propaganda is at work here...
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Marx also died more than 130 years ago, and while he certainly made some valuable observations, and was one of the pioneers of modern sociology, Marxism belongs in the same pile of severely outdated social sciences as Freudian psychology.
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I don't think the history of democracy is nearly long enough to say that with any degree of certainty, especially when there are multiple examples of authoritarian left leaders rising to power through the democratic process, ie Hugo Chavez.
edited 26th Nov '16 8:09:33 PM by CaptainCapsase
Freudian Psychology is not outdated mein freund. These days its making
a big
comeback in neuroscience
. And the NHS is recommending a return to the Couch
.
As for Marx, there is a nice quotation here by Louis Menand that explains why that guy is still rad as hell. These days income inequality is the major field of interest in most economists. The world's most important economist of the last five years Thomas Piketty is advocated a graduated tax on income wealth, and Marx put that recommendation in his manifesto decades ago.
The thing is there are new challenges and limits at hand. Some of them don't resemble the classic form of the struggle of Labour V Capital in the 19th Century. You also have a future of greater mechanization and that points to a future without jobs
and that's creating tensions and existential issues unlike anything people faced and unique because it's come at a time of peace rather than war and instability.
edited 26th Nov '16 8:13:56 PM by JulianLapostat
My favourite part about classic Marxism is that the majority of CEOs count as proletarians.
edited 26th Nov '16 8:17:41 PM by Stormtroper
And that's how I ended up in the wardrobe. It Just Bugs Me!![]()
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Until such a time as artificial general intelligence becomes a reality, the fear of automation eliminating jobs falls victim to the same Luddite fallacy that arose during the industrial revolution. There is not simply a single "lump of labor" to go around. The real concern, at least for the next few decades, is going to be the sudden displacement of large numbers of workers, and an continually growing education required to remain employable, and even then, those distortions would sort itself out in good time were it not for the probable political consequences that would follow. Not unlike what actually happened as a result of industrialization.
As far as the applicability of classical sociology in the modern day, it's not completely without merit, but the same could be said of Newtonian mechanics, which has long since been super ceded by general relativity and quantum mechanics.
edited 26th Nov '16 8:30:01 PM by CaptainCapsase
Non Sequitir much. Marx certainly didn't have a simplistic dislike for capitalists and businessmen on a personal level. His best friend Friedrich Engels owned a factory and he subsidized Marx's research and contributed to it. They would insist that it was dialectical materialism at work, the Thesis (Business Class) is creating the means for its destruction.
And in any case, its a moot point because American politics has a hard enough time to grapple with Keynesian Economics or even Adam Smith, leave along Marx. Charlatans like Ayn Rand is the guru for House Speaker Paul Ryan and his epic-government-budget-cuts that will roll back LBJ's Great Society and make Bush-era tax cuts seem FDR-esque. In this anti-intellectual climate, I am okay for a return to Ricardo at this point.
edited 26th Nov '16 8:24:16 PM by JulianLapostat
I'm fine with people reassessing Freud, but only as long as they leave behind Lacan. Seriously, I can't stand the kind of textual analysis that people have derived from him.
And Marx still has value, at least regarding his development of historical materialism and critiques of capitalism, both of which have been substantially built on.
But Communism? No. "Workers of the world, unite!" is far easier said than done.
edited 26th Nov '16 8:31:23 PM by Eschaton
The majority of CEOs are paid in wages.
(Yeah, I'm aware that wouldn't fly under any concept of socialism within the last century.)
edited 26th Nov '16 8:24:31 PM by Stormtroper
And that's how I ended up in the wardrobe. It Just Bugs Me!Correct, I think that's a good point and that's why what I said doesn't really apply to socialism nowadays, but when you do so to XIX's century Marxism wherein wages imply exploitation, well...
Admittedly, I haven't read Das Kapital, so he might have contradicted this there, but from the Manifesto that's what one gets.
edited 26th Nov '16 8:48:41 PM by Stormtroper
And that's how I ended up in the wardrobe. It Just Bugs Me!False equivalency perhaps, but I do feel like certain elements of the left created this huge problem we have - and this is coming from a self-identified liberal who hates the Republicans of today, is all for gay rights, is an atheist, and is on the autism spectrum (we have a lot to lose here too).
Thing is, there's been so much fucking wolf-crying from elements of the left, that now that we've got wolves in plain fucking sight running things, people don't believe it. Maybe this is one of those "people ignore problems until they're impossible to ignore" things, and we have to wait for things to get truly awful for Trump voters and those raised under them for people to actually start doing shit.
And I do think political correctness culture, "safe spaces", "social justice warriors" being offended about every little thing, etc. helped fuel this nonsense as well. It's a reaction, an overreaction that could really fuck up our country, but a reaction nonetheless.
I want the pendulum to swing back to the left sooner rather than later, but I hope if nothing else that this swing to the right breaks enough people that they realize how badly they screwed up and take the Republicans down finally.
I would rec beware of (mainly) relying on higher education to increase employability, especially if you have to take out a loan for it cause the college-educated barista has been a thing for years now.
One thing to be jobless. Another thing to be jobless and in debt.
The sighs are bad enough that... hah... it has caused me to make peace with junk food corporations cause well - sick people are less likely to go on riots.
Plants are aliens, and fungi are nanomachines.![]()
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Well, that's part of the definition, but another big part is that they're forced to submit to wage labor, because they don't control the means of production, which certainly doesn't apply to CEOs.
BTW, I don't blame you for not having read Capital — I couldn't even finish the first chapter. It's not that it's boring, it's just long as fuck.
edited 26th Nov '16 8:57:35 PM by henry42
One does not shake the box containing the sticky notes of doom!But unless the CEO is also the company's owner (which typically isn't the case in large ones), then they don't own the means of production either.
edited 26th Nov '16 9:04:39 PM by Stormtroper
And that's how I ended up in the wardrobe. It Just Bugs Me!Yeah, as someone with Asperger's, the complete lack of any mention, before literally a few posts previously, of how people with atypical physical, neurological, and mental faculties might be affected by this is troublesome, to say the least (note: I've been engrossed in Pokemon for the last few days, and just skipped over 80-some pages of this thread, so if it has been brought up, please forgive my ignorance).
From arguments I've had with family members who are Republican in Colorado and Kansas, I know exactly the kind of self-sabotaging rhetoric we've discussed previously.
Here's the deal: they thing kicking all the immigrants out and ending trade deals to bring jobs back to American shores and have only Americans do them will fix their economic situation. They blame Democrats for eliminating the available work and flooding those positions that still exist with non-citizens.
At the same time, they oppose basic income because it violates their philosophy that everyone should be responsible for his or herself. Automation does not herald the arrival of a post-capitalist society in their eyes. There's an infinite number of jobs out there, they say, so there's no excuse for not being able to find one.
According to the rural Republican worldview, we live in a society where there is and will always be an infinite number of jobs and the only excuse for not having one is that you, personally, are a failure - but also they need someone to stick it to the Democrats because their policies have resulted in an insufficient number of jobs. They see no contradiction with this.
edited 26th Nov '16 9:18:00 PM by TobiasDrake
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.

I also find the golden mean thing extremely obnoxious because, while not necessarily explicit in this regard, it feeds into post-facts politics.
"Oh they're both just as bad as the other, so the truth must be somewhere in the middle!"
Nope.
Climate change is real.
Evolution is real.
Racism is still around and is more powerful than ever with this election's results.
There is no "middle ground" for any of those things because they are facts. And all of those are things that Republican politicians have denied or downplayed over the years.