- 10 Jul 2017 16:04
#14822097
I am in no way surprised that you'd like to talk about virtually anything that has nothing to do with the subject at hand. The issue was about why Milo feels like Muslims hate him. The answer is that there is violence in the Middle East perpetrated by reactionary regimes and groups that were funded, armed, trained, and developed by the West to fight the commies. It is amazingly self-explanatory why this started to become a big issue in the 1990s.
The fact is that the communists didn't last long enough in the Middle East, as you pointed out.
Internationalism here has a different context though. For Marxists, there is a worldwide system with two international classes that are opposing each other. It is a development devoid of being good or evil. Simply something that happened:
For left-leaning liberals, there is a moral imperative to make everyone like themselves (this includes any number of good-natured imperial projects, the Americans always drowning on about being, "the last best hope," and, "a shining city on a hill," and all that). One is embracing reality and explaining how it works, the other is justifying it.
This is more interesting in a lot of ways. As with many things Marxist, this was up in the air in the 19th century, resolved by the Bolsheviks, and then torn asunder by the Stalin-Trotsky debate.
The big issue was whether these social issues were the result of the base or superstructure in a society and how they could be influenced. No less than Gramsci fiddled with Marx's model, so there is plenty to be tinkered with.
The initial issue was most clearly, in my opinion, laid out in the DeLeon (a pope of Marxism) and Connolly (Irish Marxist and martyr) debate. DeLeon had proposed, and maintained, a social program that involved sex, marriage, etc, etc. Connolly maintained that they lived in a capitalist society and needed to focus on the emancipation of the working class; that this would begin the change of whatever social issues came up.
The stuff about the Soviet "New Man" later was largely about the generation that would grow up not knowing a strictly capitalist society. Lenin in his interview with Zetkin (and by his actions) make clear he was still taking Connolly's line of allowing the changes in society to dictate the social issues. This changes under Stalin, who argues things have changed enough that the body politic should take control of the social mores. Naturally Trotsky disagrees and everyone argued about that for the rest of eternity.
This all said, within the Marxist sphere of influence, this is a question about what mechanisms alter society and its relations both practically and whatnot. I'm more of a Connollyist:
In this, the left-leaning liberals are somewhat inverted. They do not embrace the political and economic freedom of our class, but want only the, "faddists and cranks" elevated. Which, fine. In most ways they're more fun and at least not as cynically evil as the rest falling in line to lick their master's palm while the master strangles a worker.
This is a long way of saying that the liberal that leans a bit to the left and the socialist superficially will find themselves on the same sides of these issues, you're correct, but usually we arrive there by mere accident.
Alis Volat Propriis; Tiocfaidh ár lá; Proletarier Aller Länder, Vereinigt Euch!
Rugoz wrote:Oh please. Communists are intellectually bankrupt. If they had any intellectual honesty they would dissolve their little cult.
Rugoz wrote:Anyway, what I'm interested in here is whether secular regimes in the ME (of which there were many) actually achieved some lasting changes among their respective populations. Atatürk arguably did, but even there we see a backlash. Whether the communist regime in Afghanistan would have achieved it is a hypothetical question, it didn't survive long enough.
I am in no way surprised that you'd like to talk about virtually anything that has nothing to do with the subject at hand. The issue was about why Milo feels like Muslims hate him. The answer is that there is violence in the Middle East perpetrated by reactionary regimes and groups that were funded, armed, trained, and developed by the West to fight the commies. It is amazingly self-explanatory why this started to become a big issue in the 1990s.
The fact is that the communists didn't last long enough in the Middle East, as you pointed out.
JohnRaws wrote:Perhaps. The only valid argument that Milo actually makes is that the so called "Left" in the US and World-Wide Left are both pro-immigration. Communism and Socialism have almost always been internationalist.
Internationalism here has a different context though. For Marxists, there is a worldwide system with two international classes that are opposing each other. It is a development devoid of being good or evil. Simply something that happened:
Marx and Engels wrote:The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.
For left-leaning liberals, there is a moral imperative to make everyone like themselves (this includes any number of good-natured imperial projects, the Americans always drowning on about being, "the last best hope," and, "a shining city on a hill," and all that). One is embracing reality and explaining how it works, the other is justifying it.
JohnRawls wrote:Also Comminism/Socialism has been more open-minded and oriented on Social Issues
This is more interesting in a lot of ways. As with many things Marxist, this was up in the air in the 19th century, resolved by the Bolsheviks, and then torn asunder by the Stalin-Trotsky debate.
The big issue was whether these social issues were the result of the base or superstructure in a society and how they could be influenced. No less than Gramsci fiddled with Marx's model, so there is plenty to be tinkered with.
The initial issue was most clearly, in my opinion, laid out in the DeLeon (a pope of Marxism) and Connolly (Irish Marxist and martyr) debate. DeLeon had proposed, and maintained, a social program that involved sex, marriage, etc, etc. Connolly maintained that they lived in a capitalist society and needed to focus on the emancipation of the working class; that this would begin the change of whatever social issues came up.
The stuff about the Soviet "New Man" later was largely about the generation that would grow up not knowing a strictly capitalist society. Lenin in his interview with Zetkin (and by his actions) make clear he was still taking Connolly's line of allowing the changes in society to dictate the social issues. This changes under Stalin, who argues things have changed enough that the body politic should take control of the social mores. Naturally Trotsky disagrees and everyone argued about that for the rest of eternity.
This all said, within the Marxist sphere of influence, this is a question about what mechanisms alter society and its relations both practically and whatnot. I'm more of a Connollyist:
James Connolly wrote:In the first place, I have long been of opinion that the Socialist movement elsewhere was to a great extent hampered by the presence in its ranks of faddists and cranks, who were in the movement, not for the cause of Socialism, but because they thought they saw in it a means of ventilating their theories on such questions as sex, religion, vaccination, vegetarianism, etc., and I believed that such ideas had or ought to have no place in our programme or in our party. I held that, if under the Socialist Republic individuals desired to have a Freethinker’s propagandist, a Jewish Rabbi, a mesmerist, a Catholic priest, a Salvation captain, a professional clown, or a Protestant divine, they would be perfectly free to maintain them for any of these purposes provided that society was reimbursed for the loss of their labour. In other words, that Socialism was compatible with the greatest intellectual freedom, or even freakishness. And that, therefore, we were as a body concerned only with the question of political and economic freedom for our class.
In this, the left-leaning liberals are somewhat inverted. They do not embrace the political and economic freedom of our class, but want only the, "faddists and cranks" elevated. Which, fine. In most ways they're more fun and at least not as cynically evil as the rest falling in line to lick their master's palm while the master strangles a worker.
This is a long way of saying that the liberal that leans a bit to the left and the socialist superficially will find themselves on the same sides of these issues, you're correct, but usually we arrive there by mere accident.
Alis Volat Propriis; Tiocfaidh ár lá; Proletarier Aller Länder, Vereinigt Euch!