"What? Me? On equal ground with the dirty commoner? Good heavens, no!" - bourgeoisie
Don't assume the readers/hearers of the propaganda all believe it. The military must maintain recruitment numbers and they'll spend a lot of money to do so. So we'll hear a lot about how great they are. The DOD even spends a lot of time and money providing props and such for Hollywood movies. They even help edit the scripts to ensure the US military isn't put in a bad light.
It's not that the brainrot runs deep. It's more that the propaganda does. Don't blame the people for the stuff they didn't consent to.
Haha. Stalin's got a way with words for sure. But you are probably right about anarchists not reading him.
That's kind of what I was afraid of. I'm genuinely interested in a compelling critique. Like I mentioned, I haven't seen one. I still sympathize with anarchists but I truly don't understand how we do the switch-a-roo to communism with a snap. Like, nothing in history has worked that way, let alone, it would seem, a transition from class society to classless, arguably the greatest achievement of all time when it's done.
But, yeah, this is probably wrong place to ask. I'll seek out another Lemmy I guess.
Good Sources/Books On The Anarchist Perspective on State and Revolution
Either the work of Lenin, State and Revolution, or the actual topics themselves. I'm an ML and have come to understand why the dictatorship of the proletariat is necessary. But my anarchist comrades do not want that because of their authority issues. However, I have yet to see a convincing argument.
Basically, can anybody give me a resource for the anarchist perspective that debunks why, with still a class society, it's fine to do smash the state day 1 after the revolution? And how we would effectively prevent the state from reforming while still transforming culture and society away from class divisions (and all the problems emerging out of it)?
Not looking to debate this here but looking more for something to education myself better. I didn't go through anarchism, so there's a lot I'm likely ignorant of.
However, we must remember these people are people
Correction: these people are proletariat. We have the same enemy. Mostly, the only difference between us and them is that we're a little better at identifying the enemy than they are.
as Americans, how can we support struggles that are so far away?
Outside of laundering money to a leftist organization somewhere, I'm not really sure, TBH. Organizations like the International Socialist Alternative (ISA) exist as a kind of way to link up the global struggle across national boundaries. But I have no experience with them and don't know if that's a good or bad route.
And how come we are powerless to change things home?
This is all my opinion. I'm sure there's a way but I think it's pretty well-hidden. Most of human history is not revolutionary but rather the continuation of a bad system. So it's less likely you'd be living in a time of revolution than in a time under some class system that seems to be maintaining itself pretty well.
Having said that, we don't know when the opportunity will present itself either. So in my view, you may as well operate as if a great revolution is just around the corner. Educate workers, organize them, mobilize them, rail against the existing order, etc. The old "education, agitated and organize" addage.
So saying "we're powerless" isn't the point, I guess. Because we won't know whether we are or aren't until we try and either fail or succeed. Rather, I would say a better viewpoint is simply to acknowledge the fact that we aren't currently in a moment of historical change. But despite this, our work is pretty much the same either way. And it's a lot better to understand how political economy works anyway than to remain ignorant and be predisposed to the rat race of electoral politics and the whole spectacle of society.
Like, I can spot the neoliberal propaganda in Marvel movies quite easily. But not too long ago I didn't see it at all. I think there's value in that. I'm growing and learning. And I'm able to understand events in terms of class or class struggle.
Like the issue in Niger right now. As a liberal, I would be wanting to pick sides and know if they're good or bad and probably would have thought the new government was bad and we need to send in the troops. But as a Marxist, I'm like, "Oh, this is like international bourgeoisie against local bourgeoisie and local bourgeoisie has a current interest in decoupling them from neo-colonialism, which is good, but will probably betray that on down the line." Just being able to frame things by class and class interest is useful.
And, of course, in the context of the USA, your greatest impact is at the local level (county). Your vote actually does count there and it's at least possible to form a leftist org that forces policy changes on the local level to materially improve lives. Something along the lines of forming a mass line would be the approach here. But on the state and then national level, your vote is effectively useless. Because those processes are anti-democratic and they're mostly theater to give people the illusion of democracy and make us feel involved when really we're not actually doing anything that nudges power in the right direction ever.
Because it's not "failing", the Internet is fragmenting off into large factions. Step 1 has been capitalism commodifying information, resulting in most information taking one of two forms: siloed off into private databases or SEO sites designed to fish people into siloed off sites. Step 2 is now taking the form of political factions as the world becomes multi-polar again (China, USA and Russia, essentially). Large super powers push their domination in the form of information and each claiming they're right so you don't need to worry about all that other stuff.
The concept of the Internet being global is dead. The concept of the Internet being content created by regular people for regular people is dead. Search engines are just showing us this with their results. Which is why sites like duckduckgo aren't even enough at this point. We are, in effect, just entering a "dark age" of the Internet, where we can expect whole sections to simply not be accessible to us anymore.
To build an entirely new search engine, with broad indexing and showing us real results again that are relevant, you'd need massive amounts of capital. You can't get that capital from private investment because there's no profit in doing this. You can't get that from public funds because it's not in the interest of governments to go against their chosen hegemony. You'd have to grass-roots the effort, which would be a very precarious endeavor that, even if it launched (which would be a miracle), it would be difficult to maintain. Even models like Wikimedia aren't actually sustainable. Wikipedia ultimately curtails to the Western world, as it's moderators and editors largely make up the same hegemonic viewpoint. And Wikimedia doesn't have to do indexing of the entire web, which, at minimum, requires substantially more compute power than they currently use.
EDIT: It's also worth mentioning at this point that a project to "fix the Internet" is probably low on the list of things to "fix" right now. So any leftists taking on the challenge should be aware that they're spending gobs of resources and time on something that only the upper-tier of individuals care about in this world. Time and money would be better spent towards humanitarian aid as people get displaced due to climate change. Or in funding revolutions for areas of the world that are ready for it. By no means am I suggesting we should do a Google rewrite. I'm simply pointing out that everything we should have predicted capitalism doing to information is coming to pass and while things are shitty, they'll definitely get shittier and we shouldn't be surprised. Nor should we really care much, IMO. Because the core issue is just the contradictions within capitalism manifesting themselves into the Internet. Trying to fix the Internet is working backwards and, frankly, will probably be a fruitless endeavor. We Marxian-read leftists should know better.
For the USA? My sad opinion is, for the moment, that we don't. We are trapped.
But I think I doesn't matter. Once you scale your vision beyond the borders of any particular country, you realize there's a lot we can do here and now to fight for socialism. Namely, supporting struggles elsewhere, such as in the Philippines.
Sublation Media (Douglas Lane) just had an interview with Benjamin Studebaker about this. In Studenaker's book, The Chronic Crisis of American Democracy, he argues that we have unresolvable problems that can really only get worse at this point. That is, the prevailing winds will be austerity and a retraction of democracy and freedom as capitalism fortifies itself against the global changes that challenge it (China, global warming, African liberation, S. American liberation, etc).
It's probably worth a listen: https://youtu.be/PD3qsR8GrX4
I'm not saying to despair but rather to keep your Marxist chops sharp and recognize how things are changed so you can know what's possible and what isn't. Only if we're honest about the reality of the situation can be seek real options for what to do about it.
There is a mismatch between leftists' understanding of theory and their understanding of the real-world development of socialism. I think, though, the more we get interested in how, exactly, we change he world, the more we'll be willing to stop clobbering others over the head and calling them "revisionists" and, instead, we willing to actually learn and understand what AES is up to and how they manage the external and internal threats of the bourgeois (petite or not).
I like the quote from Castro when he had his last visit to China:
Xi Jinping is one of the strongest and most capable revolutionary leaders I have met in my life.
Cuba has a lot of land-owning people and is still undergoing economic reforms. They're still evolving. And so is China. China's got billionaires. But the existence of these things doesn't mean they are not building socialism. It just means that this is what socialism looks like in our time.
The USA was a bourgeois revolution but it did not end the slave system. It wasn't until later that it could. I think too many leftists fail to realize that during periods of transition (which can last hundreds of years), there is going to necessarily be a mix of elements from both systems (old and new). But this is precisely what material dialectics says will be the case.
I love how, with the Snowden leaks and more, we know definitively that the US government is collecting all our data but people are super scared right now that China might be spying on them.
One thing's for sure: capitalism seems to be miles ahead of any socialist country when it comes to propagandizing their citizens. Because the best propaganda is the kind that you don't even know is there.
Thanks. I'll check that out.
I don't think there's real evidence the Uyghur thing is actual genocide. Nothing points to that. We might be able to say that China is overdoing it and has fallen into the territory of negatively effecting the culture and identity of those people. But it's certain not actual genocide. They're dealing with serious issues of terrorism on their borders and the ideology of those terrorist factions has latched onto their culture and identity. Sussing all that out is an impossible task. Yet they must do something because too many innocent people were being killed by bombings.
I don't agree with China's methods there. Simultaneously, I can recognize that when the USA has similar issues (9/11 attacks for example), they chose outright war and killing millions of innocent people in the name of defeating terrorism (which they, predictably, never accomplished). So, um, if given these two bad options, I think China did better.
But, more importantly, I think China's trajectory is much better. As capitalism gets more desperate, it's been closing borders, allowing helpless immigrants to drown in boats, destabilizing countries, etc. Meanwhile, China continues to improve their methods of dealing with sticky situations and not just rolling in the tanks at the first sign of trouble (like they used to).
Anyway. That's the extent that I know about that stuff (lots of listening to David Dumbrill's stuff on YouTube).
But you are right that conversation is impossible while the "Uyghur issue" exists.
McCarthyism. It was basically like the Soviet Union purges but for capitalists (against communists).
My personal view is that the first mass wave of communism and socialism (19th and then 20th century) took the bourgeoisie by surprise. They learned their lesson and now spend a lot of effort on building and maintaining liberal ideology and squashing any real socialist movements quickly. Meanwhile, the proletariat doesn't even know who they are so there's no class consciousness building and they're constantly stuck in the spectacle that is the labor/consume cycle.
Does Anybody Have Good Sources on Policy Around Religion in The PRC?
As the Western world grows more intolerant and various nations continue to favor their preferred religions over others, I've become more critical of the Western claim of superior religious freedom. But inevitably, I get into it with liberal online who, having bad sources or none at all, claim that China is worse when it comes to religious freedom.
I don't think it's useful to defend everything a state does. They often make mistakes and use their violence in the wrong way. But I do think China in particular doesn't have the same issues with religion as the Western countries do. Namely, they don't allow one religion to dominate over others or set their laws on the basis of religious beliefs. To me, that's an incredible step forward (I like in the USA, where women's reproductive rights were just taken away in part on the grounds that the Bible (supposedly) says so).
But I'd like to be a little more educated. Finding any good resources on China these days is like trying to find anything on the internet before Google existed: you gotta just feel in the dark and hope you get lucky.
I cannot reason with the libs. They do not reason well. For example, pointing out the sheer lack of religious freedom that many face in Western countries does not phase them. They don't care (usually they're privileged to not).
So can somebody point me in the right direction? Even a book or paper on the topic would be great.
It's whack, unless we're talking about a glove you wear while eating ice cream so the melted ice cream doesn't get on your hands!
I would say yes. It was incredibly common in his day and just because you weren't a member of the Communist party didn't mean you weren't a socialist. I can't really see anything about his politics that isn't socialist so I'd say yes.
WRT innovation following the economic need, that's sort of universal and logical. It wouldn't make sense for the startup Google to begin writing a search algorithm for the Internet if there's no Internet. The development of the Internet created new possibilities but then created brand new problems: how we going to find all this new content?
WRT capitalism's different natures at different times, this is NOT STRESSED ENOUGH by leftists! In the early days of capitalism, it was a massively progressive, innovative and yes, even positive force in the world! It no longer is. What changed? What changed was exactly what you said: when it's goal was to supplant the old system and establish a new one (aka revolutionary), it was a positive force. Now that it's goal is to specifically STOP any and all revolutionary changes globally, it became a negative force.
The key is technology. As technology moves humanity from scarcity to abundance, in each area, one after the other, we have two choices: 1) accept this and allow ALL people access to the things or 2) build artificial scarcity (paywalls, patents, military conquests, coups, etc) so that this new abundance can be monopolized and controlled. This is the very heart of what is being fought against.
The important thing here is not just that capitalism changed from a positive to a negative force in the world, but to also note that so will socialism. Socialism, after it fully supplants capitalism, will fight against changes towards communism. It will betray its own objective. Indeed, all socialist projects already have this tendency. The struggle will always continue.