The US state department lawyers and the British House of Lords have evidence. That’s why they’re pursuing convictions of the Chinese leaders involved. No, wait— sorry, I misremembered. They both concluded there is insufficient evidence.
Damn, I don’t know what you’ve started here but the number of presumably white people coming up with all sorts of reasons to argue why black people shouldn’t have reparations is… is it a white settler moment? Then to follow this up with ‘you need to include white people or they’re not going to like it’ is… maybe Malcolm X was onto something about white liberals.
Marxists aren’t, or shouldn’t be, dogmatic. It’s the method that they uphold. Plus, Marx didn’t live to see the USSR, China, Cuba, etc, so it’s not possible to know whether he would maintain that position (taking your claim at face value).
You’re a fount of knowledge, new (to the grad) comrade. Keep it coming.
Essentially, it means fascism is the method by which liberalism defends itself in the face of progress and revolution.
By your definition, every community is a tankie because every communist rejects idealism. If these are the only two options, the only option left is to choose a team. But that can’t be right because you imply that some communists aren’t tankies.
Further, does it count as a definition if other people use the term in different ways?
If so, how do you know who is a communist and who is a tankie without asking them how they decided to show (critical) support for XYZ?
By your definition, you must first know whether someone has strong reasons to support XYZ before being able to decide that they really decided because XYZ was on the right team. That would be exhausting and fraught with the problem that nobody is going to say they didn’t do the reading; if they give an argument, how do you determine whether it’s valid or a cover for ‘choosing by reference to team’?
I’m unsure if it’s possible to define ‘tankie’ by reference to ‘communist’ without also defining the latter and showing how they’re different.
Reducing all the nuance of Marxism, socialism, and communism to
“from each according to his ability to each according to his need”
is problematic.
It’s not going to lead to much explanation and it ignores the hundreds of thousands of other words that Marxists have written.
This is in addition to the problem that “from each according to his ability to each according to his need” is the goal of communism and you’re arguing with someone who (rightly) says communism hasn’t been reached.
socialism with Chinese characteristics
is the answer…
There are some good arguments for a wealth tax (without distinguishing land from other assets, which would be easily avoided via financial arrangements):
This is a promising idea. Ultimately, it won’t work.
Landowners raise rents and business owners keep wages low because they are controlled by imperialists. Land-holding capital is only one piece of the puzzle. As promised, I wrote something longer about this topic, here: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/1052415
One solution is to tax imperialists, rather than the ‘landowners’ and ‘speculators’, but they won’t allow it unless the alternative is revolution. This is how the US got its New Deal. The organised unions, socialists, and communists and offered an ultimatum: New Deal or what the Russian’s had.
The US bourgeoisie bent over backwards, increasing taxes to almost 100% above a threshold to stave off a domestic revolution. (In foreign states, they backed paramilitaries, etc, to stave off revolution). Then they spent the best part of a century rolling back those taxes and the welfare services they were spent on.
You can read about this in:
The lesson is, you can argue for higher taxes on the bourgeoisie if you like, you may even get them to agree, but they will connive until you are complacent and then betray you.
I’m using the definition of commodity explained in chapters 1–3 of Marx, Capital, vol I.
Capitalism is commodity-producing society. In this political economy, the means of subsistence – things we need to survive – are produced for their exchange value and their use value. Socially necessary labour time is the only source of this value. This roughly coincides with your definition, that a commodity must be manufactured in some way.
But the Wikipedia definition is incomplete. At some point in the history of capitalism, humans come to fetishise commodities. At this point, even things that are not produced as commodities, such as land (including their minerals, trees, etc) are treated as if they have value and, from then on, are commodified.
It is the same process that commodifies women, meta data, etc. These things are not produced as commodities, yet they are treated as having a use value and an exchange value. One of the ways that this occurs is through financial derivatives, such as potato futures. This allows someone to buy and exchange something that does not yet exist: hence the commodification of everything under capitalism, even things that aren’t ‘produced’ or aren’t yet produced.
This is favourably referred to in the Wikipedia article that you referred to, under ‘commodification of labor’. A direct reading of Marx and an analysis of the implications of his work reveals the additional argument that I provided about the commodofication of land.
This ‘commodity form’ is the root of the problem that you identified to begin with, about rent/wages. I have prepared something about that, which I will post soon.
Land, as all else, is commodified under capitalism.
I’d add that this debt is relevant in one important way already.
The state borrows from the bourgeoisie. Partly to pay the interest on previous loans given by the same bourgeoisie. Partly to pay for contracts with that same bourgeoisie. Partly to pay to everyone else in general, who then use this money to pay for things at the stores, etc, owned, again, by the same bourgeoisie.
So the same people who lend the government money end up either taking, being given, or otherwise receiving that very same money. But now the government owes them, rather than being owed. No wonder the bourgeoisie has the cash on hand to lend it to the government.
In the meantime, the bourgeoisie uses that money to buy assets, inflating prices. Inequality gets greater, and the life of the ordinary person is made that much harder, more oppressive.
None of us have just landed here from outer space. This information means more than just the numbers presented because people who read it know varying degrees of the context. You might, for example, although I wouldn’t understand the motivation, use this new data to re-interpret something that Vaush, if they speak about such topics, has said about political economy.
It’s world news to people who know that when the US faces financial trouble some countries get carpet bombed and the rest of us get fucked over in other ways.
Is there a way of getting a surplus without having a debt?
This is not a rhetorical question.
Richard Seymour talks about the dangers of social media platforms in The Twittering Machine. This isn’t trifling. It leads to real harm. One factor is downvoting, as you say.
It’s so easy to click it nonchalantly because you disagree. But to the person who only sees potentially thousands of downvotes, it can hit their mental health hard. Maybe this depends on the kind of content, but idk. I’d expect someone to feel more down if they’re being genuine, giving advice about a hobby, something else that is personal in some way. This probably includes politics, as politics reflect values and can be wrapped up in a how someone sees themselves as a ‘good person’; which makes it difficult if you’re then made to think you’re wildly off the mark and, possibly, a ‘bad person’.
If downvotes are getting you down, you may want to reassess how you engage with social media. The best antidote is logging off for a while. Touch grass, get some fresh air. Don’t engage with the communities that give you grief.
More broadly, yes, Reddit is toxic af. More so than many other places. Twitter can rival it at times but the format can take the sting out of some of the pile-ons. Some of that toxicity has come to the fediverse.
It’s been especially noticeable since the API thing as new users have just seen the fediverse as a Reddit alternative. As in, Reddit but on a different server with a different brand name. Many seem not to have cared whether the culture is the same here. Or they haven’t realised that an instance might have instance-wide rules (it’s not only community rules that one must understand).
Up until the API thing, Redditors occasionally brought Reddit toxicity with them, but they were outnumbered and tended to change their ways or disappear. Now, they might get support for that kind of behaviour from other new users.
In fact, if you look at some of the user accounts of the people chastising you – for (a) being concerned out yours and others’ wellbeing and (b) for wanting to improve/maintain a positive culture – or dismissing your concerns, they’re new accounts, probably come from Reddit recently with some of that toxicity. Maybe this would have happened two months ago? I can’t remember anything like it around here, though.
Here’s hoping the Reddit culture a swift end.
It’s okay for us to disagree on our assessments of AES, but these disagreements must be based on some common understandings. I don’t think we’re there at the moment. Partly this comes down to the way language has shifted in the last 200 years.
The dictatorship of the proletariat is to be contrasted with a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. It means ‘dictatorship’ in the way that liberal democracies are dictatorships because they are governed by consistent (class based) institutions that hold executive, legislative, and judicial power.
The meaning of dictatorship has changed. Back then it more clearly meant something like ‘governance by’, and Marx’s contemporaries would have inferred this meaning.
A dictatorship of the proletariat means the workers, not the capitalists, control the state and the means of production. In the words of one scholar, it means something like:
… either state-controlled [where the state is controlled by the proletariat] or private-but-worker-controlled economy with a democratically elected government and not necessarily single party.
The idea being that capitalism is a class-based political economy, and communism is the abolition of classes. The dictatorship of the proletariat is the stage of history where the workers have control of the state/means of production. Once the workers have such control, the distinction between bourgeois and proletariat falls apart. At that point we have reached communism.
You might even challenge the way that this has been tried so far. I would say to look again, if so. But either way, it doesn’t change the theory. One can detest the way that an idea has been put into practice without rejecting the theory. As Kwame Ture advises, an ideology should be judged by it’s principles, not it’s practicioners.
No state has yet reached communism. The very idea is an oxymoron as communism is stateless. What some few states have begun to achieve (but no state has quite got there yet, as the class struggle is ongoing, although China, at least, is close) is socialism.
Marx used different terms in different works to discuss all this. As primarily a critic of capitalism, he didn’t really flesh out a theory of socialism or communism in the way that you suggest. For that, we must look to Engels and to Lenin’s State and Revolution. Nonetheless, a birds eye view of Marx’s work reveals that he advocated for socialism (a dictatorship is the proletariat) as a stepping stone to communism. The logic of this progression grows directly out of an historical materialist analysis of class society.
At the same time, there is another sense of the Marxist concept of communism, but I don’t think this is the one you mean. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels wrote:
We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.
Further, in the Communist Manifesto, they wrote:
Communists everywhere support any revolutionary movement against the existing social and political conditions.
In this sense, Marxist-Leninists are ‘literally communists’ but Marxist-Leninist states cannot be ‘literal[] communism’ but they are socialist (or trying to be).
If you want to read a short text about socialist governance, you might enjoy Roland Boer, Friedrich Engels and the Foundations of Socialist Governance. His Socialism with Chinese Characteristics may also be of interest for giving a detailed analysis of governance in China.
You can still disagree with MLs, AES, and the above definitions and propose other definitions, but that would involve speaking at cross purposes. It might also involve idealism because throughout history the only revolutionary socialist projects to have succeeded for a significant time have been guided by Marxism-Leninism. It’s okay (albeit idealist) to have a different concept of socialism but a definition based on concrete examples must look to Marxism-Leninism.
And one cannot simply dismiss the experience of the attempt of billions of people trying to build socialism as not socialism because it doesn’t match an esoteric and contrasting definition of socialism.
Edit: fixed paragraph for quote
The modlog is public. You can see exactly what comment led to the ban if you search for it.