4 ms·

Dead is dead, it doesn't matter if it's the klan's racial hatred, or if the eye of the party has randomly decided you are the kulak today.

ohgodplsno 6y ago
Sigh. You seem to not know about what marxism's goal is, so allow me to help you out. A classless, stateless society. There is no state. There is no party. There is no ruling class. There is noone to send you to the gulag.
- disposekinetics 6y ago
  My understanding was that someone would prevent me from owning private property or acquiring capital? I've read both The Communist Manifesto, and Capital, and they both left me with the impression there was going to be a violent revolution with people like me as the target. I'd be happy to be wrong however. Edit: I'm sorry someone is down-voting you. While I'm not sure I get it yet I want to hear your side.
  - jahaja 6y ago
    > My understanding was that someone would prevent me from owning private property or acquiring capital? You got this the other way around. Private property needs force to be upheld. The sacralization of private property is so deeply ingrained that people actually prefer the KKK to even thinking about limiting it. It's so dogmatic that it's depressing.
    - disposekinetics 6y ago
      > You got this the other way around. Private property needs force to be upheld. I don't follow this at all, but I'm willing to listen? How does private property require any more force to uphold compared to any other possible system? Even anarchy, if you want it to stay anarchy requires force if you have defectors.
      - puranjay 6y ago
        Private property implies ownership. The moment you assume ownership, you have to be ready to defend your claim against a counter claimant. How you defend this claim depends on where (and when) you live, but almost uniformly requires force - either directly (violence) or indirectly (court systems and police, aka violence by proxy). If there is no concept of private property, the need to defend ownership ceases. If no one owns anything, there can be no claims - and counter claims. Like a happy family where your brother's meal is also yours, and vice versa - depending on how hungry you are. For the record, I don't support the latter stance and believe Marxism is catastrophically ignorant of innate human tendencies. But as an ideology, it is worth exploring to reexamine our own relationship with and understanding of private property.
        disposekinetics 6y ago
        Thank you, I think I understand now. I appreciate you taking the time to make me get it.
      - jahaja 6y ago
        How do you imagine absentee landlords would be able to collect rent without force? Or an even more extreme example, how would the property right of the only water source in town be upheld without force? These things are far from natural, private property in the modern sense, is a social construct upheld by force.
        disposekinetics 6y ago
        Without force everything is voluntary, private property doesn't cease to exist as long as people have honor and abide by their word. It seems any reasonable system of people upholding their contracts would eventually result in private property?
        jahaja 6y ago
        There is nothing natural nor reasonable about absentee ownership. It has always been upheld by force. By kings, feudal lords etc. For other cultures, like for example native americans, the entire concept was completely foreign.
- Karunamon 6y ago
  That might be "the goal", but history shows us that the goal is never attained, and instead you end up in a perpetual dictatorship. Marx himself wrote in the manifesto: >The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible. >Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production You can't get communism without having a dictatorship or some other massively authoritarian government first (or at the very least, if you can, there's no precedent for it on the nation-state level), and autocracies, once installed, have a peculiar desire to continue being autocratic.
  - sudosysgen 6y ago
    Marx amended the manifesto shortly after the Paris Commune and said that seizing the state is not a good idea, and that instead one should try to build a society with as small government as possible using principles of direct democracy. He said this because for him the Paris Commune was proof that initiating socialism is possible without State power. Since he profoundly disliked the State, he thought that it was better to abolish the state and instead implement a government of direct democracy and freedom. Lenin, although he had read this and agreed with this anti-statist assessment, judged that it was not possible to implement such a strategy in Russia, because Russia was too big to rule coordinately in such a way, not in size of population, but in physical size and disparity. This was not necessarily an issue, but given the war that was raging at the time he decided that it was too risky to fragment the country at that point. He was also expecting that the rest of the world would see socialist revolutions, which was not unexpected at the time, but this was very optimistic. Since that did not happen, the state of the Russian Empire was maintained. This was, obviously, a huge mistake. He realized as much later, but did not see a way to fix that issue immediately. As he was making plans to prevent Stalin from taking power however, he unexpectedly died of a stroke at a very young age. All in all, Lenin, in the founding of the USSR made a series of mistakes that were so obvious that he eventually realized them. If he would have attempted to rectify them is an open and unanswerable question. The conclusion from all of this, that most socialists realize nowadays, is that attempting to install an autocratic Leninist state is a huge mistake. This is why most modern socialist experiments have been centered around libertarian socialism, that attempts to implement the ideas that Marx was persuaded by after the Paris Commune. In conclusion, you should read Marx's preface to the communist manifesto, in which he makes the points I have made above and warns against following the manifesto, claiming that history has proven him wrong and that it should not be considered as anything more than a vestigial document of nothing but historical interest. He also warns that his ideas on how to implement a socialist society are, unlike his analysis of capitalism, nothing more than suggestions and that one should let them be empirically proven or disproven.
- spoopyskelly 6y ago
  > You seem to not know about what marxism's goal is Is it to oppress everyone equally?
jahaja 6y ago
The USSR are no role model for modern leftists no matter how many times you folks repeat it.

ohgodplsno 6y ago

Sigh. You seem to not know about what marxism's goal is, so allow me to help you out. A classless, stateless society. There is no state. There is no party. There is no ruling class. There is noone to send you to the gulag.

disposekinetics 6y ago
My understanding was that someone would prevent me from owning private property or acquiring capital? I've read both The Communist Manifesto, and Capital, and they both left me with the impression there was going to be a violent revolution with people like me as the target. I'd be happy to be wrong however. Edit: I'm sorry someone is down-voting you. While I'm not sure I get it yet I want to hear your side.
- jahaja 6y ago
  > My understanding was that someone would prevent me from owning private property or acquiring capital? You got this the other way around. Private property needs force to be upheld. The sacralization of private property is so deeply ingrained that people actually prefer the KKK to even thinking about limiting it. It's so dogmatic that it's depressing.
  - disposekinetics 6y ago
    > You got this the other way around. Private property needs force to be upheld. I don't follow this at all, but I'm willing to listen? How does private property require any more force to uphold compared to any other possible system? Even anarchy, if you want it to stay anarchy requires force if you have defectors.
    - puranjay 6y ago
      Private property implies ownership. The moment you assume ownership, you have to be ready to defend your claim against a counter claimant. How you defend this claim depends on where (and when) you live, but almost uniformly requires force - either directly (violence) or indirectly (court systems and police, aka violence by proxy). If there is no concept of private property, the need to defend ownership ceases. If no one owns anything, there can be no claims - and counter claims. Like a happy family where your brother's meal is also yours, and vice versa - depending on how hungry you are. For the record, I don't support the latter stance and believe Marxism is catastrophically ignorant of innate human tendencies. But as an ideology, it is worth exploring to reexamine our own relationship with and understanding of private property.
      - disposekinetics 6y ago
        Thank you, I think I understand now. I appreciate you taking the time to make me get it.
    - jahaja 6y ago
      How do you imagine absentee landlords would be able to collect rent without force? Or an even more extreme example, how would the property right of the only water source in town be upheld without force? These things are far from natural, private property in the modern sense, is a social construct upheld by force.
      - disposekinetics 6y ago
        Without force everything is voluntary, private property doesn't cease to exist as long as people have honor and abide by their word. It seems any reasonable system of people upholding their contracts would eventually result in private property?
        jahaja 6y ago
        There is nothing natural nor reasonable about absentee ownership. It has always been upheld by force. By kings, feudal lords etc. For other cultures, like for example native americans, the entire concept was completely foreign.
Karunamon 6y ago
That might be "the goal", but history shows us that the goal is never attained, and instead you end up in a perpetual dictatorship. Marx himself wrote in the manifesto: >The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible. >Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production You can't get communism without having a dictatorship or some other massively authoritarian government first (or at the very least, if you can, there's no precedent for it on the nation-state level), and autocracies, once installed, have a peculiar desire to continue being autocratic.
- sudosysgen 6y ago
  Marx amended the manifesto shortly after the Paris Commune and said that seizing the state is not a good idea, and that instead one should try to build a society with as small government as possible using principles of direct democracy. He said this because for him the Paris Commune was proof that initiating socialism is possible without State power. Since he profoundly disliked the State, he thought that it was better to abolish the state and instead implement a government of direct democracy and freedom. Lenin, although he had read this and agreed with this anti-statist assessment, judged that it was not possible to implement such a strategy in Russia, because Russia was too big to rule coordinately in such a way, not in size of population, but in physical size and disparity. This was not necessarily an issue, but given the war that was raging at the time he decided that it was too risky to fragment the country at that point. He was also expecting that the rest of the world would see socialist revolutions, which was not unexpected at the time, but this was very optimistic. Since that did not happen, the state of the Russian Empire was maintained. This was, obviously, a huge mistake. He realized as much later, but did not see a way to fix that issue immediately. As he was making plans to prevent Stalin from taking power however, he unexpectedly died of a stroke at a very young age. All in all, Lenin, in the founding of the USSR made a series of mistakes that were so obvious that he eventually realized them. If he would have attempted to rectify them is an open and unanswerable question. The conclusion from all of this, that most socialists realize nowadays, is that attempting to install an autocratic Leninist state is a huge mistake. This is why most modern socialist experiments have been centered around libertarian socialism, that attempts to implement the ideas that Marx was persuaded by after the Paris Commune. In conclusion, you should read Marx's preface to the communist manifesto, in which he makes the points I have made above and warns against following the manifesto, claiming that history has proven him wrong and that it should not be considered as anything more than a vestigial document of nothing but historical interest. He also warns that his ideas on how to implement a socialist society are, unlike his analysis of capitalism, nothing more than suggestions and that one should let them be empirically proven or disproven.
spoopyskelly 6y ago
> You seem to not know about what marxism's goal is Is it to oppress everyone equally?

jahaja 6y ago

The USSR are no role model for modern leftists no matter how many times you folks repeat it.