FunkyStuff [he/him]

The obvious answer is that the Clintons are heavily implicated, but in a more general sense, the point of blackmail is to extort someone into doing something on the condition that you don’t release the blackmail. That’s why they got Epstein to connect with so many academics, celebrities, and other public figures. If they were to just release the blackmail, it would lose intelligence agencies all their leverage.

If you have to go back to the time where agriculture was first being developed to find a jump in quality of life comparable to what Communism brought to China, does that not show that Communism brought about an enormous improvement to the Chinese people? Even if it technically isn’t the most significant improvement in all of history (which is still kind of a fuzzy thing to quantify)?

And how is it relevant that they only improved the quality of life of their own people, beyond just being pedantic about the claim “largest increase of quality of life in human history”? Like, was it necessary for Mao to invade all the neighboring countries and modernize them too so they could qualify? Very strange way to move the goalposts.

• Monster or Liberator? by Carlos Martinez
• How did Mao manage to kill ~78 million people? by Godfree Roberts
• The Long Game and Its Contradictions. Audiobook
• The Rise of the Chinese People’s Communes by Anna Louise Strong

I see you’re defending your heroes by parsing words and cherry-picking books and news and rallying your arguments (and propaganda) to defend them. I expected nothing less from you; it’s exactly the same thing a Trump supporter would do.

Meanwhile you do something a million times more honorable and simply refuse to confront new information, dismiss it all as propaganda, and say your opponent is equal to a Trump supporter (for what? for having principled stances that he backed up with multiple sources? How often do Trump supporters back up their claims with sources that aren’t PragerU videos or AI generated images?). You’re implying that Dessalines is being intellectually dishonest when he has done nothing incorrect in this conversation: he made a claim to counter your unsourced claim, cited his sources, and when you refused to learn anything at all he’s just calling you out for falling back on Western propaganda. Is any of that wrong?

This kind of post-truth nihilism is completely fruitless. If you dismiss evidence that contradicts your preconceived notions on the basis that evidence against other unrelated facts might also exist, then the only valid beliefs are the ones you already have. You’ve arrived at an epistemological position that rejects all new knowledge and positions all knowledge you already have as infallible.

Why not evaluate the claims and their evidence, instead of starting from the position that any defense of Mao is comparable to defending the Nazi Holocaust? Not to mention, if you did come across a group of Holocaust deniers, is this really the weak response you’d give them? Not even going to produce any evidence in support of your own claims?

Hi, I’m very concerned about violent imperialism. Can you explain how China fits that description?

Well, yeah, but there’s plenty of Jews that have olive skin or darker (especially Mizrahi, Sephardim) so surely they aren’t literally going at whatever agency gives the OK to new settlers?

What stops Palestinian Diaspora from just pretending they’re Jewish so they can go back home?

I grew up speaking Spanish, still speak it every day fluently, but mostly think in English because my high school and higher education was mostly in English + I started mostly consuming English media as a child.

Then they don’t actually understand capitalism, do they? If someone told me they understood thermodynamics but kept trying to build a perpetual motion machine, even if they were using some thermodynamics concepts in their attempts, it’s still clearly the case that they don’t understand thermodynamics. If you claim to understand that the root cause of your problems is capitalism but you keep voting for pro-capitalist governments, did you really understand anything at all?

That doesn’t make any sense.

Redditor until the end

Yes? Obviously not on lemmy, but do you think in general most people have identified capitalism as the root cause of material scarcity and alienation? Do you think they’d keep voting for liberals and fascists if they had?

You’ll get vol. 2 and vol. 3 from watching all the dang lectures we link too.

Here’s the latest one I linked, Michael Hudson on Marxism, Parasites, and Debt Cancellation

Because (and this is genuinely just my own experience; I’m totally sure this isn’t a universal constant) I see a lot of Marxists and MLs talking a lot about “when the revolution happens” and not a whole lot about the revolution being fought right now, everyday.

It’s unfortunate that the MLs in your area are that way. I think it’s interesting that I’ve seen the opposite where I am in the global south. Student groups tend to have a lot of wonderful anarchist tendencies and lots of people who have come to understand politics via online forums (I guess that’s partly true of myself, except I sort of ended up on the other side). Meanwhile, when you go to Palestinian solidarity marches, the labor movement, and other things on the ground (well, except for when student groups demand something from the university) it looks a lot more traditional left wing, with the usual Trotskyist groups and some ML.

I guess if I can point to anything in this dynamic it’s that there isn’t really a huge difference in how effective the different groups are at accomplishing their short term goals, so IMO it would just make more sense to figure out which ideological line is most attractive to the people it’s supposed to serve in a given area and stick to that.

Thank you for the thoughtful answer. I’ll reflect on those points.

Just one final question that’s a bit unrelated: I’ve seen a tendency online from anarchists to be extremely critical of revolution, in general. Some say that Marxists are doing nothing because they’re all waiting for “the glorious revolution” that will fix all problems. Some say that revolution is a gradual process that happens through many reforms. Other say that revolutionary politics are reactionary because the revolution will inevitably harm a lot of marginalized people, like the disabled who won’t have their care infrastructure while there is a civil war going on. I think you can probably spot a lot of contradictions and weaknesses in those arguments, maybe to the point that it looks like I’m presenting a strawman. But I actually mean to ask with genuine interest: what do we say to those people? If there are people who lose faith in revolution because they’re more concerned with morals and “anarchist principles” or “anti-authoritarian principles” to ever actually join a revolutionary struggle, how do we win them back?

Sure, but can you offer me at least one example? I don’t mean to bore you with the Socratic method so I should just lay my cards on the table:

In my view, either you aim to exist outside of the state until the state ceases to exist, which is a morally admirable view but extremely fragile. The second the state acquires enough hegemonic force to wipe you off the face of the planet, they will and you will leave no trace, so there goes your revolutionary project (that you never stood much of a chance to defend, either).

Or you do want to use the state to wage class war. In this case, that’s really the same as what the Marxists want, fundamentally at least. You’re just stronger in your moral condemnation of the state, while Marxists focus on functionally describing how the struggle from the current capitalist status quo can evolve into a stateless society via a historical process.

There’s something qualitatively different between the poor man’s desire for money and the rich man’s desire for money. The poor man has a functional, material desire for money that arises from his physiological needs. Through a dialectical process, money (and commodities more broadly) has gone from an intermediate that is used to satisfy needs, use value, into an end in and of itself. The ideological fetishization of money is what leads to the rich man desiring more money, and the fact that capital exists as a means to do so is what allows the lifestyle of endless greed to even exist. Acquiring capital and living in service of that capital, with the goal of making it multiply further, is what drives the capitalists.

Therefore, what is needed to abolish both of their enslavements is to kill both their masters, who is one and the same, and is called capital.

STEM nerds vs humanities nerds

More developed and socialized productive forces = less scarcity = less need to use the state to enforce some kind of order = classes wither away