Red_Shift [comrade/them, he/him]

I think there’s confusion between 1) the real, material events of people experiencing gender dysphoria, systemic racism, sexism, etc, and 2) the capitalist hijacking of these concepts to further its own interests. People see #2 and conflate it with #1 and assume they are one and the same.

Prolewiki has a succinct description of this in relation to the reactionary CPGB-ML party:

A 70-page pamphlet written by Ranjeet Brar, Edward Renyard, and Joti Brar titled Identity politics and the transgender trend: where is LGBT ideology taking us? confuses the LGBT struggle with the liberal appropriation of that struggle. The pamphlet claims that “it is not gender that alienates men from women, it is our social relations”, completely oblivious to the fact that gender is a historical social construct, and that the existence of trans people even precedes the use of the term. Overall, this approach is a form of right-opportunism that has repackaged bourgeois political lines as being of a Marxist character, fundamentally distorting the party line away from a materially-based analysis of gender.

Yeah, if we were in 1910’s Russia there wouldn’t be a massive population to point to as communists as reinforcement, but it wouldn’t make them any less correct for being communists. All ideologies start out as a minority. Liberalism was also a minority when it was first emerging but it still became the dominant ideology.

To try to steelman the point in the meme though, there is probably some value to seeing that 90 million people support something and then looking into it to see if there’s anything valid there. It should raise some concern that you could be wrong, but it doesn’t mean you are.

Man famous for acting like a child on TV who was paid with public funds condemns people for taking public funds when they actually need it.

the ladies go crazy for his lectures on Babylonian political philosophy

I remember having some general concept of power and money corrupting, and people in power furthering their own interests when I was a liberal. “Corruption” is this weird word that they use to cover up the system being inherently opposed to the working class by making it seem like it’s just a few bad apples doing it. So you go on just thinking that if you can only get a good apple in power then good things can happen because it’s the people who have been corrupted, not the system.

Blue Parenti is from Texas and has a southern drawl. He never went to college because that shit is woke. He writes self help and get rich quick books with scantily clad women on the covers, which has made him a millionaire. He lives in a mansion in the West Bank on top of the ruins of a Palestinian settlement. His favorite economist is Thomas Sowell. Once, Christopher Hitchens challenged him to a debate but he declined on account of agreeing with Hitchens on basically everything. When he met George W Bush, Blue Parenti congratulated him, shook his hand, knelt down and blew him right there on the spot.

Well, I will say that I am interested in some of the arguments Anark was bringing, particularly the unity of ends and means. But I’m not a big fan of the case he brings against the USSR, China, etc. I think there’s a theoretical disconnect there, which I suspect centers around whether or not you accept / utilize the dialectic. Anark, actually very much like S4A who he is criticizing here who also does not think China is socialist, does not utilize the dialectic when analyzing whether or not something is socialist. Can’t fault him for it since the dialectic isn’t part of anarchism (right?) but if you are going to somehow be attempting to refute Marxism, you’re going to need to touch on the dialectic otherwise the Marxist analysis is going to sound like gibberish. Instead, he just kind of responds to that gibberish strawman instead of taking on the dialectical form of the argument.

As succinctly as I can: Anark is taking a snapshot view of China and asking whether or not X or Y trait associated with capitalism is present. If those traits are still present, it’s capitalist. This is a very common take even among Marxists, but not a dialectical one. Think about it this way. Imagine looking at a still picture of a car driving down a road. You can look at all the features of the car, all the traits of the car in that snapshot, the engine, tires, interior, but it’s not going to tell you the direction it’s headed, the road it’s on, whether there is a cliff 500 meters in front of the car, etc. The internal traits of the vehicle itself don’t necessarily dictate a specific direction that it can be driven in, or a past direction that it came from. The Marxist argument is that taking a snapshot of China right now doesn’t tell you about whether it’s on the road to socialism or not, because you have to zoom out and look at the history of the country, the material conditions over time and the general tendency of those conditions to see the road the vehicle is on, the surrounding environment that the vehicle exists in. Anark didn’t respond to this point, probably because S4A himself doesn’t understand it.

But this is where the disconnect on ends-means unity comes in because my understanding is that Anark believes that the internal traits of the social machine do necessarily dictate a direction. So that by looking at its current traits you can determine something about a future state, e.g. liberatory means result in liberatory ends. The problem I’m having with that argument though is, how did Anark come to that conclusion? What gets you to ends-means unity as something that is valid and sound? What would make a Marxist accept that claim?

Make sure you’re ready… taking the goblinpill too soon is like learning about Lord Xenu before you hit clear in scientology. Your head literally explodes

“Goblins are real enough to send your soul to hell unless you become like a child and deal with him” - Goblin Miner Gramps

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myFKmJ7GYfw

I think it’s one of those things where you need to already be there ideologically to get it. If you just bring some liberal in here, their internal red scare propaganda alarm is going to go ballistic and all they’ll see is just crazy take after crazy take. Sounds cliche but they need to do some reading or learning first so they can understand why we support AES, why Stalin wasn’t as bad as they say, the importance of the class character of the state, the economic strangling of the USSR by the west, difference between bourgeois and proletarian democracy, etc. If they aren’t interested in learning about those things or find it too boring or are too ideologically opposed to even consider them, then I’m not sure this person is ready to dive into these topics in a serious way yet.

What if we took it to the extreme, instead of just having our own flooring, what if we also had our own walls, ceiling, plumbing, etc? Like, imagine a sort of large box that we put on a piece of land with all the parts pre-assembled and already in there? Not sure what to call it. Then we own that and live in it, instead of walking around with pieces of floor tiling to reinstall in another place owned by someone else. Just a thought

If you look at the other sales on Abebooks they are often signed, same with Amazon. So what happens is, the first person who made that post saw a signed 90+ year old first edition, and posted it for like 1000 dollars. It doesn’t really matter what it’s actually worth, this is a common strategy in online posting to extract as much profit. So then the next people coming to upload see the original posting of like 1000, they see that it’s crazy overpriced so they might lower it 100 or 200, but even then it’s still 800. This goes on and 30 postings later the price is still high at 200 because it started high. If there’s not enough volume then it will likely stay high, as is likely the case with this book which is exceedingly rare.

Socialist books in general outside of bourgeois translations of Marx and Engels are incredibly rare in the west and censorship of anything potentially pro-soviet during the cold war was a very real thing

This would require them being not completely paranoid about the poors stealing all their nice things and feeling like they’re being ripped off by paying the poors more than they’re worth. Being super rich poisons your mind and so they’ll be suckered in by meritocracy and protestant work ethic type stuff that makes them think people need to work non stop to deserve a decent life. So this type of idea, while resulting in a better outcome for them, would seem unappealing because they’d see it as just paying for everyone else to jerk around.

Plus their rich friends who they compare themselves to would make fun of them for making such bad business decisions

I’m for getting rid of bourgeois “democracy” at any point, multi party elections would just benefit imperialism, the question is, is it being replaced by any form of proletarian democracy? Are there any elections within the party? Are unions and workers organizations given power within the party to vote? If they continue with a one-party socialist democracy, then I think that’s exactly what they should be doing. But having no or a low amount of socialist democracy within that structure would be concerning. Right now I’m not certain that we have enough info to make that judgement call yet.

False consciousness is a hell of a drug

Because it isn’t the best explanation of why things change given the available evidence. Putting aside all the other points entailed in mechanical materialism which badly fail given new discoveries in physics and cosmology, this third point rejects that what something is, what makes a thing a thing is to carry within it a contradiction that moves it to become something else. That change can be internal and necessary to its own characteristics rather than external. An atom is only an atom at a specific time, place, state, etc. There was a time when no atoms existed, and there will be a time when all atoms decay or combine into something else.

Motion does not have to be impressed upon matter by some outside force, but above all it is necessary to look for the inner impulses of development, the self-motion, inherent in all processes.

Mechanical materialists have to reject this, and it’s simply a worse model that ignores internal change.

On consciousness, from my understanding the majority view is functionalism which basically states that the specific material and arrangement of the brain doesn’t matter so long as it’s able to produce the software required to generate subjective experience. So in a sense most philosophers would probably say that consciousness can’t be directly reduced to neurons. It’s sort of like, you cant see a video game by looking at the physical chips, its all been abstracted at so many levels that a direct connection to physical brain neurons only leads to loose associations with broad concepts, like memory or mood. Marxists would throw in that social factors play a huge role in what we consider consciousness and identity, so not even fully reducible to one brain and body.

What is that blue patch of solid color on the right side? It looks like someone went over it with the airbrush tool in MS paint. Would Ai leave that or has someone covered up something?

“They who can give up collecting STDs to obtain ultra HD goon sessions deserves neither syphilis nor goonery” - Ben Coomlin

Those were the good days. I also remember with Diablo and Starcraft if I lost the case I could randomly type in numbers for the CD key and it would eventually land on a real one.