[Albert]

TIG are you a cultural Marxist? You have to be, you said yourself you support immigration because it undermines capitalism in America. Yet you are one off those people who will scuff at someone using the term cultural Marxist as unintelligent racist redneck. All the while you are the living proof of a cultural Marxist.

[Political Interest]

So far as @political interest, sure, the Cold War, Red Scares, lazy discourse, and lax definitions that fill this thread up has done an excellent job of stifling the specter haunting Europe. But that is changing, and will change, as the world changes.

You have a pet issue where you want the state to hug you and tell you how proud it is of you for being born. That was never really one of Marx's concerns.

The second post in I explained to you about Eastern Germany, and you continue on with regret that there aren't more ethnic hugs involved in communist theory. Potemkin tried to explain some of the development, and the answer is you want more hugs.

Maybe you're barking up the wrong tree as we, as an ideology, are not interested in watching people prostate themselves as victims and beg for people to tell them what special snowflakes they must be for having been born.

Your ideology is a professional victim ideology. You have not built any socialism in any Western country.

All you have done is alienate the working classes and tell them how horrible they are for being born.

It is patently clear that the ideology that is preached by socialists in America and the UK is not the same as what was preached in the real communist countries.

And maybe it was always destined to be as such. Maybe Lenin saw a difference between the imperialist world and the oppressed nations? It is entirely possible that he always intended socialism in the West to have such a character as it currently does.

In any case, the socialism that Western Marxists seek to achieve will never happen. Trotsykite denigration of Stalinist achievements and the utter contempt that US Marxists display for their own working class will prevent any productive developments.

In the 1960s Western Marxists took socialism and merged it with identity politics. It has been that way ever since.

Sorry, but I actually have pride in my ancestors and what they achieved, like a real proletarian. Unlike faux Anglo-American commies. I truly respect the real English communists who went to Spain and sacrificed their lives for communism. I also respect the Stalinists like Harry Pollitt who actually met Stalin and wanted a real socialist state in Britain. I have no respect for 21st century Marxists who harp on about the "white power structure".

And where did anyone insult you? I did not see it. We merely made observations about the Western left and you have clearly taken offense. I do not include you among the ones I criticise and in fact I regard you as very intelligent and always appreciate your insight and analysis.

[Rich]

Marxism originated as a critique of 19th century capitalism, but it was therefore also a product of 19th century capitalism.

Marxism originated as a critique of 19th century Liberalism. Marxism originated as left Liberalism. Marxism invented a mythical system: the dictatorship of the proletariat. Its mythical because the dictatorship that Marxists create is always a dictatorship of Middle class and upper class intellectuals, with perhaps the token working class person. And just to respond to your post that I can no longer find, I reassert the claim that Kamanev was Middle Class. His parents may have been working class, but his education made him middle class and gave him huge privileges. There was no need for Kamanev to sell his labour in a factory or a mine.

Having created a mythical dictatorship of the proletariat, Marx created a mythical dictatorship of the Bourgeois, a mythical dictatorship of the Capitalists to be in opposition. Because that's what the term meant, a contraction of "Capitalist" mode of production. Like Christianity before it Marxism creates an analytical smoke screen of empty, vague or down right contradictory categories, or categories that have no real empiracal basis in history. Like Christianity most people can not be bothered to interrogate this body of theory, whether they are believers, agnostics or fanatical opponents of the ideology.

Yes our democratic Liberal societies are highly imperfect, yes they can certainly be improved, yes they come with oodles of hypocrisy, but on balance they are way better than your Middle class intellectual Marxist theocratic dictatorships.

[Decky]

So PI has noticed that he likes socialism but he self identifies as a right winger. Solution? Try and redefine socialism as left fascism so he does not have to admit that he was wrong about socialism being bad.

[The Immortal Goon]

TIG are you a cultural Marxist? You have to be, you said yourself you support immigration because it undermines capitalism in America. Yet you are one off those people who will scuff at someone using the term cultural Marxist as unintelligent racist redneck. All the while you are the living proof of a cultural Marxist

Your ideology is a professional victim ideology. You have not built any socialism in any Western country.

You really turned around victim play-acting by proclaiming I'm a victim for no reason at all. Next time try getting a little more nuanced by saying, "I know you are, but what am I?" With a little practice, you can start debating twelve-year olds.


This is seemingly very difficult for most in the thread, but why don't ye read the post on the first page where I explained that fixing immigration, in these contexts, is impossible in capitalism?

The answer is because that solves your little puzzle but doesn't leave you with a big liberal hug. So instead, all of ye make uninformed declarations about socialism that are so feeble that there is no way to even begin to respond to them. What am I supposed to add to someone that says he doesn't need to define socialism or fascism, for instance?

I say this all the time, it seems, and it ends up with right-wingers demanding to be hugged because of their hurt feels as a result. I will substantially lower the intellectual level in here and see if anything illuminates. By necessity, this is simplified:

1. Capitalism is designed to maximize profits.

2. A capitalist will use the cheaper labour available to maximize profits.

3. Organizing labour to resist exploitation, while embracing the first and second points, is liberalism supporting liberalism.

4. Excluding a group from organization makes the group more vulnerable, and thus cheaper, and thus more employable by capitalists. Because point 1 and 2 still stand.

5. Excluding a group from a geographic area means that production can take place in another country where labour is cheaper because of point 1 and 2.

6. Workers from another country can't go en masse to other countries because of points 1-6.

7. Every alternative to this system is godless communism, which is fascism, and much be completely dismissed from thought.

This is the absolute most basic way that I can explain how capitalism works. It's how capitalists themselves define it, it's how I would explain it to a child.

This does not make me part of your imagined conspiracy theory. It does mean that it's not hillarious that your solution to the issue, apparently, is to keep capitalism, keep all the inherent problems, but get a lot of praise for being white or native or whatever; while commuting that you won't solve the employment or immigration problem in any way whatsoever.

So you proudly call yourselves rednecks or whatever, double down on verbal hugs solving the problem instead of addressing the problem, and cry through tear-stained eyes while responding to communists that accept basic reality as a starting point.

Yes, socialists in different times and places use their knowledge, situations, and material reality to offer different solutions and analysis. This is stated like an insult, for some reason. But we aren't committed to the absurd belief that nothing will ever change, or has ever changed, because we live in our individual stations at this moment in time.

I can't imagine what is left to be said.

[SolarCross]

I wasn't defining anything just saying that a nominally socialist government behaves and attempts to make a society that functions a lot like a nominally fascist government. Though I guess that is a little unfair on the fascists, it isn't like Franco's Spain, Mussolini's Italy were nearly as nasty as the DDR or the USSR for example. Given the choice I know which one I'd prefer. Hitler's Germany was pretty okay too in comparison unless you happen to be jewish of course..

What a vague and insightful post! Let me try one without trying to define words or concepts:

Edwardian England behaves and attempts to make a society that functions a lot like the Ancient Egyption Middle Kingdom.

The Myng Dynesty behaves and attempts to make a society that functions a lot like a nominally Lakota society.

With these useless statements void of any of those pesky definitions, let me follow up with how they prove my ideology is right, as long as we marginalize the pesky Jew.

I can certainly see the appeal in posting like this. You don't need to actually know anything, and everything confirms your feelings instead of objective fact.

This thread delivers!

Okay you are butt hurt that I'd prefer to live under the despotism of Franco or Mussolini rather than the despotism of Stalin, whatever monkeys were lording it over the DDR or Castro. If it is any consolation, I prefer the despotism of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II over all of the above and by a large country mile too.

Also who wants to marginalise the "pesky jew" as you call them? Hitler's Germany may have been excessively hysterical over their existence (probably in no small measure due to their role in the formation of the USSR) but your mate Stalin had his issues with the jew too. You have to go back 1290 AD to find any serious jew hating in Britain. You can fling anti-semite poop at me but it won't stick.

[Potemkin]

You have to go back 1290 AD to find any serious jew hating in Britain.

And why was there no significant anti-semitism in England after that date, SolarCross? I suspect you know perfectly well. Hint: it had something to do with brutal deportation. England, as always, led the world in this as in everything else. We were deporting Jews two centuries before the Spanish thought of doing it.

[Conscript]

Here you go PI

I wasn't defining anything just saying that a nominally socialist government behaves and attempts to make a society that functions a lot like a nominally fascist government. Though I guess that is a little unfair on the fascists, it isn't like Franco's Spain, Mussolini's Italy were nearly as nasty as the DDR or the USSR for example. Given the choice I know which one I'd prefer. Hitler's Germany was pretty okay too in comparison unless you happen to be jewish of course..

^ fell for the horseshoe theory meme

[SolarCross]

And why was there no significant anti-semitism in England after that date, SolarCross? I suspect you know perfectly well. Hint: it had something to do with brutal deportation. England, as always, led the world in this as in everything else. We were deporting Jews two centuries before the Spanish thought of doing it.

They came back within a few centuries and stayed ever since. The sea change in attitudes came with protestantism, no? I dislike jesus creepers generally but prods at least are less prone to anti-semitism than papists. I don't really blame King Edward I for signing the Edict of Expulsion, he had not much more choice in the matter than King John did on the magna carta. The barons wanted it because the jews allowed King Edward a rich source of cash unprotected by the magna carta, they wanted the jews out to weaken the king, the church hated them as they always have.. actually King Edward was the only friend they had in England.

[Potemkin]

Here you go PI

This problem has always existed of course. As early as the 1840s, in the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels were complaining about the cranks and utopianists which the socialist and communist movements seemed to attract:

A part of the bourgeoisie is desirous of redressing social grievances in order to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society.

To this section belong economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class, organisers of charity, members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, hole-and-corner reformers of every imaginable kind. This form of socialism has, moreover, been worked out into complete systems.

We may cite Proudhon’s Philosophie de la Misère as an example of this form.

The Socialistic bourgeois want all the advantages of modern social conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting therefrom. They desire the existing state of society, minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elements. They wish for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat. The bourgeoisie naturally conceives the world in which it is supreme to be the best; and bourgeois Socialism develops this comfortable conception into various more or less complete systems. In requiring the proletariat to carry out such a system, and thereby to march straightway into the social New Jerusalem, it but requires in reality, that the proletariat should remain within the bounds of existing society, but should cast away all its hateful ideas concerning the bourgeoisie.

And Orwell was still complaining about such people 90 years later, in the 1930s:

...there is the horrible and really disquieting- prevalence of cranks wherever Socialists are gathered together. One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure quack, pacifist and feminist in England.

Some things just never change.

[The Immortal Goon]

Okay you are butt hurt that I'd prefer to live under the despotism of Franco or Mussolini rather than the despotism of Stalin, whatever monkeys were lording it over the DDR or Castro. If it is any consolation, I prefer the despotism of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II over all of the above and by a large country mile too.

It's been so long since I've debated right-wingers, I forgot how they confuse substance with flavour. The second time in a row, the only substance is, "I'm not butt-hurt, I'm just saying butt-hurt things. You're butt-hurt because you hurt my fragile feelings!"

The substance of the post, and the vast majority of it, was about how you can't just define anything however your feelings dictate you to do so, because it doesn't make any sense to do so. You can't compare Edwardian England with the Middle Kingdom of Ancient Egypt just because your feelings tell you that they are the same.

You can't compare Hitler and Stalin because of your feelings.

In either case, you could probably find some kind of parallels, but first you're going to have to find some kind of academic thesis and apply it. For instance, Edwardian England and the Middle Kingdom of Ancient Evypt both had colonial issues near their borders and a transition from types of grain.

This does not mean that Edwardian England was the Middle Kingdom of Ancient Egypt. I would have assumed that would be obvious, but I also assumed a right-winger might have contextualized further than, "I know you are...but what am I?"

Then again, I've been reduced to explaining what an example is.

[SolarCross]

It's been so long since I've debated right-wingers, I forgot how they confuse substance with flavour. The second time in a row, the only substance is, "I'm not butt-hurt, I'm just saying butt-hurt things. You're butt-hurt because you hurt my fragile feelings!"

The substance of the post, and the vast majority of it, was about how you can't just define anything however your feelings dictate you to do so, because it doesn't make any sense to do so. You can't compare Edwardian England with the Middle Kingdom of Ancient Egypt just because your feelings tell you that they are the same.

You can't compare Hitler and Stalin because of your feelings.

In either case, you could probably find some kind of parallels, but first you're going to have to find some kind of academic thesis and apply it. For instance, Edwardian England and the Middle Kingdom of Ancient Evypt both had colonial issues near their borders and a transition from types of grain.

This does not mean that Edwardian England was the Middle Kingdom of Ancient Egypt. I would have assumed that would be obvious, but I also assumed a right-winger might have contextualized further than, "I know you are...but what am I?"

Then again, I've been reduced to explaining what an example is.

I don't self identify as "right wing" any more than I self identify by a similar propaganda perjorative "heretic" and for the same reasons, I am not a follower of the respective cults that use those terms to denote their enemies. You don't care of course, fanatics never do. Meh this is just a forum for people with too much time on their hands to spew up their opinions as if the world cares, I did that and so have you, no need to be snobby, your opinions are just as equally worthless as mine.

[The Immortal Goon]

Fine. Do you want to talk about your hurt feels as a special snowflake, or talk about communism?

We have a forum for both. Maybe you're in the wrong one.

[Atlantis]

Insinuations about other people's feelings don't help the discussion.

The bottom line remains that the real socialism did not work, not because of outside forces but because of internal problems. That is the hard truth every socialist today has to face.

Speculating about a hypothetical worker's paradise is not useful. Past experience clearly shows that the free market achieves better conditions for workers than socialism. That the resulting consumerism may present an even bigger issue is another discussion.

PI is right in pointing the finger at the relation of socialism and migration as the left's greatest current contradiction. Even if liberal minded middle-class leftists are in favor of migration, the bulk of left voters has turned its back on internationalism. The resulting National Socialism will invariably have fascist tendencies.

In Eastern Germany, Die Linke (follow-on party of the GDR communist party SED) has been the greatest looser in the refugee crisis. In recent polls, Die Linke has lost 8%. Left voters are leaving Die Linke in droves to vote for the anti-immigration AfD. Left parties have the choice between turning against immigrants and disappearing. While Merkel has followed a pragmatic course combining the right to asylum with international cooperation and measures to control immigration by regulatory means and border controls, the dogmatists of Die Linke continue to demand unconditional welcome for all immigrants. They even demand new taxes to pay for ever more lavish integration programs for the newcomers.

The narcissistic far-left has never made a positive contribution to society. The result will be that moderate forces regroup into new center-left parties to promote the social market economy, which has been the most successful system so far.

[The Immortal Goon]

So, not addressing in any way whatsoever anything any socialist said in the thread, you say your feelings beat reality because of your need for feels.

This thread is the greatest promotion for socialism I've seen in years.

[Decky]

PI is right in pointing the finger at the relation of socialism and migration as the left's greatest current contradiction. Even if liberal minded middle-class leftists are in favor of migration, the bulk of left voters has turned its back on internationalism. The resulting National Socialism will invariably have fascist tendencies.

Internationalism does not mean what you think it means. It has never meant a support for open borders. It means workers states helping each other out. For example the massive military aid Vietnam got to help it curb stomp the yanks or the missiles the Soviet Union gave to Cuba to defend it.

What is it with right wing people are not people able to tell the difference between liberalism and socialism?

The open borders lets hold hands and teach the world to sing people are middle class liberals and have nothing to do with working class socialism today or ever. There is no contradiction as you are talking about beliefs held by two different groups not one group. We hate Liberals as much as anyone.

[Atlantis]

Internationalism does not mean what you think it means. It has never meant a support for open borders. It means workers states helping each other out. For example the massive military aid Vietnam got to help it curb stomp the yanks or the missiles the Soviet Union gave to Cuba to defend it.

You confound internationalism with imperialism.

So, not addressing in any way whatsoever anything any socialist said in the thread, you say you're feelings beat reality because of your need for feels.

I guess you didn't read my posts. If you had, you would know that I showed by facts and arguments that virtually everything you said (poor peasants sob stories, and the like) is erroneous.

It's no my fault if you chose to ignore the facts.

[Frollein]

George Orwell wrote:
...there is the horrible and really disquieting- prevalence of cranks wherever Socialists are gathered together. One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure quack, pacifist and feminist in England.

I may have to read Orwell after all. Where did he write this?

This problem has always existed of course.

Do you - or Marx, or Orwell - have an explanation for this phenomenon?

[Potemkin]

:lol: I may have to read Orwell after all. Where did he write this?

It's in his book The Road to Wigan Pier, which describes his travels through the working-class areas of the industrial North of England during the 1930s.

Do you - or Marx, or Orwell - have an explanation for this phenomenon?

In most capitalist societies, socialism is, and has always been, a fringe movement which seeks to criticise and ultimately radically change the existing conditions of life and the existing habits of thought of society. It's therefore obvious why cranks and mountebanks of all varieties would be attracted towards it.

[mikema63]

The crazy people always show up at the meetings. In a large enough political group you don't really notice the 2 weirdo's in the crowd, but when only ten people come the weird one stands out.

Honestly I think most people in most groups are pretty weird and out there but larger groups just have respectable looking people to be the face of the group in the media.

Plus weird people usually are the types who want to feel special and gravitate to minority ideologies.

This is a pretty weird thread by the way. Have we finally given up any logical categorization system for ideologies?