A terrible smelly person
I think perhaps you should read more of what Dr. King actually advocated for and said. He didn’t endorse violence, but he didn’t condemn it either. He typically didn’t come from it from this moralizing angle either, most of his emphasis was his belief that violence was first and foremost a poor tactic, but at the same time he understood why violence happens. You’ve probably heard his 1967 statement “a riot is the language of the unheard.”
When is violence permissable or moral then? Absolutely never? You have to imagine the types of situations people in the world face. I know a person from Gaza who was nearly finished with his university studies, now he lives in a tent with his mother and his little sister is dead. When I’m able to talk with him, he expresses almost nothing but violence and hatred against the Israeli state and the IDF.
Are you saying my friend Ali is in a bubble he should get out of? Or are you simply talking about your own experiences? Because even if so, you should at least feel some inclination of rage towards the people who did this to my friend.
If you just want to limit it to Haiti, Cuba, and the USSR, then yes each of those revolutions led to a vastly more humane society than the previous one. It also depends on who you’re asking. Tsar Nicholas II certainly didn’t see the Soviet Union as an improvement. Cuban plantation owners with dozens of slaves didn’t see socialism as an improvement. There are winners and losers in history, the losing side usually isn’t going to be pleased.
And who loses in a revolution? In a successful socialist revolution it’s the capitalist class, colonizers, slavers, the previous bureaucracy, regional landlords. The USSR went from a backwater literal peasant kingdom to a space faring modern country within a single generation, despite a famine and despite the brutal loss of life in WW2. It’s very easy to say the country that sends women to school to become nuclear engineers is not as brutally oppressive as the country with a monarch that forcefully sends women to become nuns. How do you determine oppression? Go look at things like literacy, child mortality, education, home ownership, access to clean water, and what kind of occupations women have. By those metrics, socialist revolutions typically and vastly reduce oppression.
I don’t know why you think we’re proposing a society without violence. We’re proposing a society where the working class wields the violence against the capitalist class until the capitalist class ceases to exist. We don’t like when violence happens to us and people in the same position as us. And if gaining more control over our own lives involves violence against the capitalist class, then that’s what it takes.
I genuinely couldn’t give a shit about a capitalist’s supposed civil rights, and I take John Brown’s advice for how to treat racists.
I make one “sort of” exception for Czechoslovakia. I regard it as the only time a country became socialist by voting on it, but they had to do a coup with the implicit threat of violence to enforce the new government. The communists won a plurality in 1946 and had a coalition government. Fearing that they’d lose power, they began stacking the cops and courts with ideological communists. This fear turned out to be true after the liberal parties kept doing sneaky tactics to undermine the socialists. So in 1948 the communists had a coup to consolidate power and ally with the USSR.
And I know this wasn’t “bloodless” or “civil” since this all happened in the shadow of WW2.
I really respect the area of Kerala and its commitment to their public. Very robust educational system, healthcare, and a focus on access to clean water. That’s just from stuff I’ve seen and read though, I’ve never been to India, I’m American.
I hope the best for India’s future, but it seems worrying from what I hear. I would hope for greater collaboration with China and an easing of tensions with Pakistan. India is a massively diverse place though, with multiple languages and even multiple writing scripts, so sometimes it’s amazing it’s a functional country at all.
Most of what I hear though is about India dominated by very right wing movements, but there’s a strong history of Indian working class movements as well. I’ll try to be optimistic about the future. Also as an American I am fully aware of my country’s horrifying exploitation of the Indian people. The Union Carbide disaster is still the worst industrial accident in history and its impact should never be forgotten
i’m tankie and gay and covered in feces (some of which is my own)
Oh, thanks for replying in good faith. A lot of people gave you hostility because you did say something that seems a little misinformed. And people get ruffled by seeing that kinda thing so often. But good on you for taking the time to read stuff.
I’d really recommend reading this: The Principles of Communism by Engels.
It’s very clearly written, short, and explains what exactly communist ideology is and who it represents.
In very brief: Communists believe there are two classes, workers and business owners. This is always a hostile relationship that can’t be mended, since the two want different things. So we propose the working class should abolish the business owning class.
Liberals do not believe this relationship is hostile, or they don’t believe it exists. Or they believe it can be mended through the use of state intervention. That’s one of the primary differences here.
Yeah there’s no reconciliation between communist and liberal ideology. They propose fundamentally different frameworks for how the world operates. Liberals place emphasis on individual actions, intention, sentiment, or how changing people’s minds is the engine of history.
Communists with a material outlook propose the primacy of material distribution and class. Liberals don’t believe class exists, or that it doesn’t operate as a coherent political interest group.
lmao did someone really report me over getting their precious little white feelings hurt?
Liberal means someone who’s either misinformed about their own interests, or someone who willingly aligns with capitalist interests.
Liberal isn’t some badge of honor. It’s the default ideology in every western nation.
Authoritarian is usually code for when white people don’t rule a country
It’s more the case that in human interactions with the elements, most of them exhibit a metallic phase because we’re exposed to the elements on Earth. Out in space elements do weird things. Gaseous clouds of gold, solid metal nitrogen. A lot of elements in the universe are in plasma phase, which isnt common at all on Earth.
Metals are metal on earth because their electronegativity gives them metallic bonds in our atmosphere.
Metals have what’re called delocalized electrons, where electrons just kind of wander around a metallic bond between atoms. Metallic bonds involve a very low level of attraction between the nucleus and its electron cloud. Turns out most elements have this, so they do metallic bonding.
It’s only when atoms start to get a little wobbly do they exhibit enough electronegativity to perform ionic or covalent bonding, where the molecules donate electrons. Electronegativity increases on the right side of the periodic table when electron valency starts getting lower. And that’s the non-metal side.
So the answer is basically that you need more of an electrical charge to exhibit the things we’ve classified as non-metals. Metals are more chill and generally less reactive.
I should also mention that non-metals have a liquid/solid metallic phase at certain temperatures and pressures. I remember a Chinese study a few years ago claiming to have made metallic nitrogen.
The film’s problem was casting Brad Pitt as Durden and changing the ending so that he’s successful. The movie made him attractice and charismatic. The book makes it clear the narrator is completely unhinged and fixated on his hatred of women and femininity.
The book is very clearly a story about straight men not being ok. “straight guys would rather punch each other naked Ina basement instead of go to therapy.” The movie doesn’t translate that well, so it reads more like a criticism of 90s work culture. Which is fair, but it often misses what Palahniuk intended.
To also be fair though Palahniuk seems to like the movie, but really despises young straight men admiring Durden as some antihero. He elaborates that feeling in the comic sequels.
I do see it as an economic problem. Precarity is going to induce loneliness and tension. People are working more hours and there’s simply less ability to connect. There are fewer “third spaces” (places outside of work or home) these days, so people have reduced capacity to develop bonds with one another. All of that is going to generate mistrust and lack of friendship among people.
Political tensions are high too, for instance, I would refuse to live with someone who expresses casual transphobic because I wouldn’t trust them to be around me.
Furthermore this is a niche internet forum with a lot of nerds who have general social anxiety. Probably not a good cross section of a population.
The aversion to housemates represents a breakdown in social trust in general, plus people are just more precarious. You’ve got to hope your housemates can pay rent when all of you hold tenuous employment. One person losing their job is a disaster for everyone else. One person moving out can also be a crisis.
I lived with housemates around 2010 to 2016 and it was a constant struggle to keep bills paid, plus we’d have to share vehicles and that was difficult since sometimes one of us would work nights, some of us days. Also revolving door of girlfriends/boyfriends who’d come in and eat our food or borrow cars.
Not great experiences. Honestly some fun times looking back on it all. Was nice to be around friends or do movie nights. But otherwise it was a struggle to keep together.
Marx talks about most of what you just mentioned in the first chapter of Capital. Socially productive labor transforming nature is the source of value in any society. He also mentions rarity as a source of value, like I remember him specifically mentioning pearls as an example a few times.
He included machinery and technology as what he called “constant capital,” and the labor is the variable capital. To say Marx didn’t consider technology would suggest he was unaware of what a factory was and that he didn’t observe the industrial revolution as it was happening. He was born in 1818. He watched Germany in his childhood go from empty fields full of peasants to factories, railroads, and telegraph lines in his adulthood. You know what made that technology possible? Labor? And who operates that technology? Laborers. This is all cooked into his work.
I’d also like to point you over to the Grundrisse, the chapter called Fragment on Machines, where Marx even speculates on if machinery were all fully automated, saying laborers could move aside from production and just become just “watchmen.” This part is good:
“Capital itself is the moving contradiction, in that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as the sole measure and source of wealth […] On the one side […] it calls to life all the powers of science and of nature […] to make the creation of wealth independent (relatively) of the labour time employed on it […] On the other side, it wants to use labour time as the measuring rod for the giant social forces thereby created”
He’s saying capitalism would have a hard tike reducing labor time to zero through technological advancement, since it would defeat the concept of value itself. In simple terms, how would you even price anything if there was no labor cost involved? How would a capitalist sell their product or assign value to it? Who would they sell it to?
The show plays into several right wing fears, like widespread gun control (cops need permission over radio to unlock their guns), black people getting paid reparations, white people living in shantytowns (nixonville), cigarettes are illegal, religious people becoming a persecuted minority, stuff like that. The first few episodes play up an angle of “what if cops mainly profiled poor white people.” That’s because the premise is that there’s been an uninterrupted 30 year liberal hegemony under president Robert Redford, similar to how the 1980s Watchmen comic took place during an uninterrupted conservative domination with Nixon.
The glorifying cops part is because it dips into the idea there are some good cops who are struggling against an entrenched structure of bad cops. That’s the whole arc of the show, the main character Angela is a “good cop” who is routing out the “bad cops” in order to repair the structure. It’s the liberal nonsense idea that putting oppressed minorities into positions of power like wealth, the cops, politicians, etc will correct the structure, since the problem is presented as individuals within that structure rather than the thing itself. In the show’s attempts to subvert/criticize corporate liberal dystopia, it still presents the same conclusions.
Although another way of reading it is that it’s a criticism of how generic American liberals, even when granted full control over society, still manage to recreate the same conditions. That’s a better and more interesting reading honestly. But I’m stuck because I know that Damon Lindelof (the writer) is himself a generic rich Hollywood liberal type.
I actually like the show by the way. Jeremy Irons was good. The Trent Reznor soundtrack is beautiful too.
I know this is just a forum and the libs are always confused by nuance, but exploitation does occur in socialist countries, just in a vastly different character and at a much smaller scale. Cuba for instance does have private land owners who employee workers, and China of course has various large corporations.
However these are symptoms of the positions the nations find themselves within. Socialist nations tend to find themselves in the middle of capitalist encirclement. Until the last capitalist is extinguished, class based exploitation will continue to exist.