“Communism bad”
“Why?”
200 year old tropes so ancient they were debunked by Marx himself
Of course, you go through the motions of explaining the most basic political concepts that could be grasped by skimming the cliff notes for literally any Marxist works
“Friedrich Engels? Is he like the president of Germany or something?”
It’s like a kindergartener trying to teach you calculus.
In every American community, you have varying shades of political opinion. One of the shadiest of these is the liberals. An outspoken group on many subjects. Ten degrees to the left of center in good times, ten degrees to the right of center if it affects them personally.
- Phil Ochs, Love Me I’m a Liberal, 1968
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I think he’s read Solzhenitsyn too haha
I’ve read the Gulag Archipelago that Peterson recommends.
It’s the most propaganda ridden book I’ve read about the USSR, so many factual inaccuracies and lies.
Dude’s own ex wife said in an interview that it’s all nonsense
Western “communism studies” invariably consists of undergrad classes taught by either cold warrior professors or miserable academics, and the “study” consists entirely of regurgitating passages from whatever pseudointellectual anticommunist steaming drivel Anne Applebaum shat out this year.
The more Marx (or good Marxist theory more generally) that you read, the more you realise how detached from reality liberal discourse about anything even remotely connected to Marxist thought is. This is blindingly obvious in mainstream economics departments, where the average professor or TA normally manages to combine both shocking ignorance of any economic theory beyond their barrenly narrow purview, and depressing naivety when it comes to the apparent self-evidence of their arguments.
That being said, economics is only the most obvious example. Set foot inside the average history, sociology or anthropology department and the epistemic consequences of a lack of Marxist approaches becomes immediately obvious when you see the low quality of alot of the work being produced and ask why that’s the case.
History probably has the best showing, although it’s nothing like it was in the 1960’s or 70’s, and I suspect that that’s because history is an area where the necessity of a materialist analysis makes itself the most immediately obvious, and because the results in this area achieved by Marxist are obviously superior and so more easily form the basis for further productive historical analysis. For example the debates around the origins of capitalism out of late feudalism cannot avoid the Brenner Debate. You see the influence of materialist thought here even in thinkers who are not explicitly Marxist. Historians who are otherwise not rigorously materialist and politically liberal will still sometimes readily recognise the validity, or make use of, class-analysis.
Sociology is interesting because it’s mainstream’s basic methods seem deeply idealistic to me despite the fact that Marx is also one of the key figures in the development of modern sociology, and given that Marx’s political economy, as opposed to modern neoclassical economics, recognises that you cannot really engage in productive economic analysis beyond a very superficial level if you do not recognise that it’s essential to talk about the economic sociology, the economic institutions and social structures that serve differnent socio-economic functions and fit together in certain contexts to distribute the socio-economics functions amongst themselves, including the fundamentally important point of noting how different societies and different modes of production will see different social structures serve as the social relations of production. Otherwise you end up with an idealist theory of economic production.
Honestly though you also see this among self-described leftists or even ‘Marxists’ who do not understand the meaning of the term ‘value’ in Marx, i.e. that it is a technical economic concept, not a moral one (though through its social and political implications we are obviously naturally going to attach normative value to how it functions or affects us).
Another think that both liberals and soc dems do when discussing Marxism is taking quotes completely out of context and radically misunderstanding or misinterpreting what it being claimed or discussed. Which just makes all the more obvious the need for reeducation in the fundamentals of Marxism.
Say what you will about professional philosophy (and there’s a lot of negative stuff to say about it), but my experience has been that people with doctorates in philosophy tend to both understand Marx better and be more receptive to his points than people in most other departments. Maybe I’ve just gotten lucky, though.
I disagree. They talk about it in a way that looks different, but philosophy academics tend to functionally be very liberal and just have more sophisticated ways of defending roughly the same stupid positions
You’re correct that the big majority of philosophy academics are liberal. It’s good to bear in mind tho imo that philosophy professors are not the only people employed as philosophy educators or teachers and are far from the only people who have seriously studied philosophy, formally or informally. There are a decent number of Marxist philosophy PhD’s, not least from the combination of their experience of the labor market and the fact that they’ve had the time or priviledge to think critically about and ‘deconstruct’ certain key concepts that are essential parts of capitalist/liberal ideology.
The issue is not so much, imo, in areas of philosophy like philosophy of science, mathematics, language, logic or even epistemology and metaphysics. The more immediate issue is when it comes to areas like moral or political philosophy, or philosophy of economics. The biases in these latter cases are really evident and you are correct imo that when considering that social function they are largely serving as more sophicated mechanisms of ideological legitimation of liberalism or reformism. E.g. any western political philosophy department is going to be dominated by Rawlsians, i.e. the least politically relevant and most mind-numbingly boring political theory that was ever shat over the face of the earth. The most recent wave of Rawlsian thought is soc-dem in nature, looking at his late texts on ‘property-owning democracy’, meaning accepts to have soc-dem societies which ‘socialism’ has been reached by reform but in which there is still private property. Obviously even a slight understanding of Marxist theory dispells this idea as obviously incoherent. The reason it is still present is because it acts as a moral paliative that petit-bourgeois soc-dem intellectuals - who are intelligent enough to realise that contemporary capitalism is completely fucked up but are neither intellectually sophicated enough nor morally strong enough to correctly diagnose it or offer genuine solutions - can use to sooth their consciences.
That being said, you do often see a correlation with how deeply or seriously people are interested in philosophy and their interest in Marxism. The danger is that these people are often simply intellectual Marxists or Marxians with an abstract idea of politics. This is generally far from being entirely their fault, but it is a danger. In practice they are often interested more in abstract argument about certain ideas as opposed to the empirical and historical adequacy of Marxism as a theory of social reality.
Also pretty funny when liberals see when we criticize them because they think we sound like chuds because they can’t comprehend that chuds are also liberals.
It’s not even just being ignorant but confident, I saw a post on
the other day saying “communism has never given any rights to women, why are there women communists”Typical lib response was to ignore that it just literally isn’t true and instead say that they showed token support for “propaganda”. Some were even saying that the rights women had gained, such as the ability to own land, vote, and divorce, were also only done for propaganda purposes. They actively ignore the evidence presented in front of them in favour of “ooOoOOOOoOOoO COMMUNISM SPOOKY EVIL”
for those spellbound by the bourgeoisie (libs and conservatives) communism is anything they don’t like!
It goes back to the presentation of politics and political history as fundamentally a logic puzzle whereby you deduce the most freedom-y system in the abstract and everything descends from that. You see this all the time with the Founding Fathers where the revolution is taught as being purely about their ideals of what a just state should be and any historical context, discussions of their material interests, is brushed to the side or treated as a footnote. So it’s not just there’s an ignorance of historical context, it’s that they outright dismiss it as being important.
This is why we get “Communism 200 billion dead vuvuzela no iPhone” when it comes to nominally socialist states but when it comes to US atrocities it’s always “that’s not what we truly are, those are hiccups on the path to a more perfect union.” If they think the logic puzzle fits, then deaths don’t matter because we need to trust the process.
Idk, my version of that as a former lib was “wait so if the solution is social democracy, why can’t we have it?” which inevitably drove me to communism.
Yeah it’s like, gee the world would be a better place if the capitalists in charge simply allowed us to have a better and fulfilling life that isn’t an endless struggle to earn resources that aren’t even scarce using the left over money we earned them after they skimmed 99% of it. They could be more generous and still stay insanely rich! Everybody wins!
Yeah that would sure be great. They’re never going to do that. Become a communist.
I was just reading this thread on r/neoliberal yesterday (ik that sub is basically cheating) that is exactly what you speak of here. An echo chamber of “Marx was wrong about almost everything” with almost no specifics or demonstration of understanding of the actual theory. In the few cases where they happen to mention a real Marxian term like alienation, it’s purely a vibes thing for these libs. They’ll take the alienation stuff, thank you, because Marx was right about workers being depressed and stuff. No no, don’t worry about the content and motivation of Marx’s theory of alienation or the progression of thoughts which led him to it; it is sufficient to take the results based on your gut intuition.
I doubt they’ve read a single word of Marx. They reed the Debooooonking articles but don’t care to read the original source material.
Imagine a prosecutor showing up to court with zero evidence other than “he just looks guilty”. That’s the liberal standard.
lol I just looked back at the same thread and found this amazing take by another Marx Understander
Had he lived to be 200, Karl Marx would almost certainly have become an ardent capitalist.
Liberals don’t even know that some Marxist economists (David Harvey) can be annoying in their dialectical praise of capitalism as an engine of historical progress.
Had he lived to 200, he’d have become the methuselan overlord of Earth based solely on how messianic that seems
I for one, welcome our new unfathomably ancient overlord. May he live centuries past us all
Reminds me of a debate I had.
Poster said “Marxists lack nuance”.
I asked which one of these works lacked nuance in his opinion: The German Ideology? The Grundrisse? Anti-Dühring? Or maybe slightly more recent stuff like Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks?
The reply: “Marxists don’t understand human nature: it’s about the stronger monkey having things.”
The irony didn’t even hit him. He was dead seriously try to sell me this “human natooor is strong dogs fuck” as a social theory.
I’ll just mention it is not even about reading Marx’s actual works; it is not really necessary to read all the volumes of Capital. It is about the method of inquiry and intellectual honesty.
If you want to know Marx, then reading any modern Marxist economic text is sufficient (for example, Michael Roberts’ Marx 200); other texts like the Communist Manifesto are not even that long, and I’m sure Lenin’s Imperialism has already been distilled down by other Marxists somewhere. There are also YT etc…
The point, though, is intellectual honesty, and as you said, you don’t learn a theory by first going to read what the critics have to say. Sure, that may be, and arguably even should be, part of the inquiry, but they make no effort to actually understand the Marxist point of view; they don’t seek Marxist sources. They take the conclusion as granted to them on a silver platter.
the way libs talk about communism is on the same level of sophistication as evangelicals explaining how evolution is bunk
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realizing this has actually helped my mental health so much. liberals are fundamentally unserious about politics, so I simply don’t have to care what they think, in the same way I don’t care about childrens opinion on topics they dont understand. it’s very liberating, I’ve found
Death to America
200 year old tropes so ancient they were debunked by Marx himself
In the very first lecture of my Macro 101 course in undergrad, my libertarian econ professor talked about how if the LTV was correct then an inedible mud pie would have as much value as a real pie. I was delighted when I first read Capital and I saw that Marx debunked this very myth like on page 4. Marx is great at anticipating objections and then thoroughly responding, it’s just the libs don’t bother to read him.
Are these dumbasses aware that they’re not the first people in the world to think of the most basic and simple objections?
“socially necessary labor time” is a phrase to liberals like garlic to vampires
It’s lovely to hear people say that Marx has been debunked. Have they read Marx? No, of course not. The debunkers who they DID read hadnt either so this conversation is always pleasant
They aren’t interested in the truth. They’re interested in “debunking” Marxism by any means necessary. It’s the political version of the gamer thing where you don’t need to actually play the game to decide it’s bad because professional opinion havers already told you what to think.
What is the debunking, for those of us who are unread savages.
value is produced not by “any labor time that i imagine” but by “socially necessary labor time.” mud pies are not socially necessary in any context, and it would be an absurd counterfactual to attempt to defend. the hypothetical society too stupid to realize that mud pies are worthless.
mud pies are not socially necessary in any context
how did this fascism end up in my anticommunism??!?!?!?!?!?
Liberals keep saying history is written by the winners while simulatenously believing everything Westerners wrote about communism after the Cold War.
You also get libs from ex-socialist countries that go
"You wouldn’t like communism like I lived it in x Warsaw pact country "
Then they follow that with the most racist, fascistic thing possible. Happens everytime
Don’t forget born in 1992
Even PhDs aren’t great. I’ve had history professors tell me directly that communism in practice is the same as monarchy. One time a sociology prof I had was having a casual chat with me about why socialists can’t achieve their aims unless they integrate within American Protestantism. Then he called Marxism a religion.
For the life of me I just want some educated liberals who know their class position and I want them to be openly evil about it. That would be so much easier. I thought that’s what self-identified neoliberals would be, but even they’re very confused.
For the life of me I just want some educated liberals who know their class position and I want them to be openly evil about it. That would be so much easier. I thought that’s what self-identified neoliberals would be, but even they’re very confused.
You have to look for these among social democrats of the 90s and early 2000s in Europe. Many of them were former Marxists in the 60s, 70s, throwing bombs at cops etc. They adapted to throwing bombs at middle easterners and implementing radical market reforms (increasing the exploitation rate) to “fix” Capitalism accomplish capitalist goals.
or the life of me I just want some educated liberals who know their class position and I want them to be openly evil about it.
You mean Hill dawg and Obama
The most common experience I’ve seen new leftists talk about is how overwhelmingly large the left is and how much there is to learn. The average switched off liberal has missed out on decades of political education.
The part that infuriates me the most when libs talk about history is how little research they do. “Oh I watched a documentary” dude I have studied history at the “college level” or whatever you call it for 2 decades. I’m still learning new things. Go back to putting an Einstein book on your shelf instead of reading it. I’m a dumbass sometimes but I’m still putting in the work and I ain’t proud of a lot of things I’ve done but I am proud of that.
Communism isn’t a thing we can achieve. It’s a goal. We strive to make it real. But it’s elusive. You just try to make life better for others. It’s all we got. You’d think with the west’s fascination with establishing “christendom” they’d fucking understand that you don’t judge an ideal because it failed to be real. You keep working for it. If it makes lives better that is a success. Even if it is limited it still happened!
Contrast that with fascism where the whole goal is to continually drag the human race through hell. Communism “failed” because it wasn’t a utopia - but libs are sure willing to give fascism another turn at the wheel.
Communism in the Bolshevik sense really only “failed” because it existed in a context of warring capitalist nation-states with massive monopolies on imposing international violence, which strangled it from without. There were internal factors too, to be sure, but Communism in it’s purest abstracted sense has existed successfully for centuries in societies all over the world, either before the age of the great capitalist empires or in isolation from those empires. Graeber/Wengrow detail in the Dawn of Everything that many of the native american tribes we genocided, to name a single example, lived in a state that we could only call communistic.
It’s almost like as soon as the entire world is subjugated to the idea that profit for its own sake is immutable and good, and then that imperative is enforced upon the world by violence, ideologies that place the health of societies over profit can’t exist??
But the fact that the capitalist death machine was able to successfully genocide all those people trying different ways of living proves that capitalism is the best possible economic system! This is just straightforward Darwin!
it is fucking astounding the number of “intellectuals” who still think Darwinism is a moral framework. READ DARWIN YOU FUCKING FUCKS!!! THE WHOLE POINT IS THAT IT’S A WASTEFUL, AMORAL SYSTEM, and imposing it deliberately IS FUCKING EVIL!
one of my favorite lectures of all time is this lecture by Stephen J Gould on Darwin’s revolution in thought
guy writes about how natural selection, and nature as a whole, is an unending arms race of infinite brutality, cruelty, and exploitation
Libs: We should strive to emulate this
