The Immortal Goon wrote:I don't speak Irish well at all.
My Italian isn't quite native speaker level yet either. And what?
The Immortal Goon wrote:The Irish I do speak, is modern Irish, which is not what my ancestors would have spoken deep in West Cork.
That Irish from West Cork, was not Goidelic that their ancestor spoke.
Goidelic was not the Celtic language that their ancestors spoke.
The Celtic language was not the Indo-European language that their ancestors spoke.
Sure. That's the development of a language. It doesn't mean that language is irrelevant. Do you not think that Ireland might be in a better position today in terms of being able to resist outside influence if most of its population actually spoke Irish, and not English as a native language? Or would this just mean capitulating to the local Irish ruling class?
The Immortal Goon wrote:...And on and on. What do you want me to do about this? Should I get down on my knees and cry and bitch and moan about it?
What specifically would this achieve?
The Immortal Goon wrote:What about the fact that I'm not mining copper like most of my family had been doing since the Paleolithic? I'm pretty happy not doing so. Should I shake my fists at the heavens because I'm literate?
No idea what point you're trying to make here. Is it that the orthodox Marxists who disappeared from the face of the Earth in '91 are the only hope for salvation and a bright future?
The Immortal Goon wrote:Whether you want to take this thing that far or not, the battle's over, man. It was almost 200 years ago. There's not a place on the planet that isn't part of a global capitalistic network in one way or the other. It's time to look ahead, not try to cover our eyes up and pretend something that happened hasn't happened.
Whether you feel good about this kind of advancement or not is completely irrelevant. It happened. Move on.
This is vague. Also:
quetzalcoatl wrote:There will be no proletarian struggle. Not now, not 20 years from now, not ever. Get over it. Jesus, wtf is wrong with you guys? Not even a complete collapse of Western capitalism will be able to effect such an outcome, but will simply result in some degenerate form of fascist order.
The Immortal Goon wrote:Marxists don't fret and cry over this stuff, it's done. Now let's take the privilege from the bourgeoisie being able to move about and exploit this system while the vast majority of the world cannot cross borders and are exploited by those who can.
What are the implications of this? Ultimately, the left-wing ideology of no borders meshes very well with the right-wing ideology of free trade. The human rights groups which presently represent the left in the West (and more than likely always will do) are simply cheerleaders for the continuation of a rapacious capitalism. Your solution is to confer the same privileges that privileged people have to under-privileged people in being able to migrate from one place to another. The result is that you want the working masses to simply follow capital to wherever it moves. Surely that will work well. Essentially:
Roland Breton wrote:To say 'long live the difference' does not imply any idea of superiority, of domination and of contempt: the affirmation of oneself is not the lowering of the other. The recognition of the identity of an ethnicity can only subtract from others what they have unduly monopolised.
The affirmation of the right to be different is the only way to escape a double error: that error, very widespread in the Left, that consists of believing that "human brotherhood" will be realized on the ruins of differences, the erosion of cultures, the homogenization of communities, and that other error, widespread in the Right which consists of the belief that the "rebirth of the nation" will be achieved by inculcating in its members an attitude of rejection towards others.
The Immortal Goon wrote:Their genetics are irrelevant. It's a single world, a world-capitalist system. Getting butt-hurt about what languages are being spoken in your country compared to Japan isn't going to stop that. It's been over for hundreds of years.
Somehow I think you're just waiting for a materialist version of Jesus.
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KlassWar wrote:Efficiently deport immigrants requires allowing the ruling the class enemy to have a functional police state with the capability and permission to engage in mass surveillance, racial profiling and all sorts of civil rights violations. And even then it probably wouldn't work: The militarized police forces to secure borders won't stop immigrants at all (the typical immigrant enters their chosen country legally and then just plain overstays... and not all immigrants are easy to tell apart from the local population. In any case this police state is not something we should allow the class enemy to have: The proletariat should work tirelessly to undermine the bourgeois police state, because it's the primary tool of the class enemy against us.
If immigrants aren't allowed in in the first place, there's literally no issue. There's no reason not to enforce borders. The fundamental disagreement is that leftists think that migrants can be assimilated, taught, and taken under the arm - which is fine when there are few - but with mass immigration, that's not happening. They are here to work, there are many, and that's it. Enforcing Europe-wide borders and for instance turning back migrant boats in cooperation with North African governments is something that every Mediterranean country ought to be doing instead of taking all of the migrants who happen to come along on board and then creating ghettoes around the metropolitan zones and the country's train stations. If the left is just looking for a substitute proletariat instead of caring for its own, I want nothing to do with the left, and neither do other indigenous working class people of European countries, hence the total lack of interest or care amongst working class people for the 'inclusive' leftist parties of today.
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taxizen wrote:Nationalism arises as the complex of all the characteristics that emerges as the requirements for being of the republic, a citizen; to be one of the collective instead of someone outside of it. Language, geneological associations, place of birth and sometimes ideological affliliations have emerged as the classic markers for picking out who is in and who is out, but the emphasis varies from place to place.
Pretty much. What internationalists don't often like to realise is that the word democracy from ancient Greece actually means nothing if the 'people' in 'people power' isn't a population where only the autochthonous population have citizenship. 'People' isn't just 'persons', but a group of people with a shared history and common lineage and so on. The original sense of '
demos' is "land occupied by a people". This is essentially why the Middle East at the moment needs dictators and strongmen - because the people that live in Syria and Iraq previously lived under empires and there were no homogenising attempts by national/regional elites (who never existed). With the loss of the Ottoman Empire and its division, those countries are now essentially broken countries as evidenced by the rise of ISIS trying to unite the region under a catch-all Islamism.
So if we take 'democracy' to mean what it did in ancient Greece, and not the democracy of today that has been abstracted from its territorial and historical dimensions by referring to
actual abstract conceptions like liberal rule of law, we can see that nationalisms and regionalisms march hand-in-hand with democracy. And citizenship is also directly related to being a part of a particular territory, because an atomised individual with no roots has no desire by definition to live in a community (non-citizen in Greek is
idiótes from which the word idiot is derived). In the ideology of human rights - which leftist organisations have readily taken up in promoting their brand of humanitarian universalism - there are no 'citizens', but only persons, which is why citizenship has been mutated to mean 'universal people' instead of 'national people'. The Marxist conception of citizenship ends with socialism.
Essentially, the disagreement here is that there is no 'humanity', and the equality of political rights amongst citizens in Greece doesn't reflect a belief in natural equality. The left's insistence on this silly theme (and indeed the recurring theme of a belonging to humanity I think is basically just a secular transposition of Christianity's belief in humanity and equal judgement before God) is part of why they will continue to be co-opted by liberals, who agree with them in this regard. So apparently, we're all human beings belonging to a different culture or people, rather than the other way around. The ideology of human rights is now essentially a civil religion.
I don't know if I quite addressed what you wanted to talk about there but I took the opportunity to blabber anyway. With regards to nationalism, it's very plastic and can take many forms. But for Marxists, anything aside from internationalist communism is a capitulation to some variation on the ruling class. It's tiresome and silly.
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Eauz wrote:If we assumed status quo all the time, then progress would never have occurred in the first place.
That's if your assumption is that progress is only to be had with what leftist organisations are promoting today. Leftist organisations and parties today - the visible ones - are not for 'progress', or for the working class.
Eauz wrote:Random acts of violence, such as attempting to assassinate a leader is going to land you in prison and in some places at the bottom of a river or in a disgusting prison cell. Plus, eliminating the leader of a country does not mean that the socioeconomic system is destroyed. This is why it is important to take claim over the means of production and send the bourgeois class, as a whole, packing.
The working classes aren't going to be able to just expropriate the means of production. Somehow I don't think you would be complaining all that much if it were Marxist militias running around, blowing up bridges and trying to assassinate the leaders and representatives of the
bourgeoisie. I think you know that the potentiality of assassinating heads of state and prime ministers - what would amount to a serious shake-up in national politics - is not 'random'. Nobody wants to take the place of a dead man.
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fuser wrote:on immigration :
Basically The right wing just wants to beat up the weakest and most vulnerable part of society (me Strong!!) and see it as some sort of solution while ignoring the elephant in the room i.e. capitalism unlike left (real) which actually wants to address the crux of matter. Its not immigrants that are keeping wages in check but capitalism which will always maintain an army of unemployed people to keep wages in check, if you don't allow immigrants then they will simply export their shops to the lands of these immigrants. There is simply no benefit for native working class in this scenario.
I think if we look at the case of Japan, they were able to achieve their technological revolution far more quickly than Western European nations by favouring their domestic working population and by off-shoring some parts of industry involving low-level labour. The sociological disadvantages of this approach are far, far less than it is in the case of importing cheap labour and having alien populations with potentially contrary value systems settling in working class neighbourhoods. As a side note, this approach still allows Japan to choose and prioritise its trading partners (whereas mostly undifferentiated migration results in disparate peoples from different parts of the world coming into developed nations).
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Dagoth Ur wrote:Oh yeah the italian fascists. They're like the Romania of fascism.
This means nothing on multiple levels.