/lit/ - Literature

>>22825607
For example, I think that cutting off family or friends is an evil thing to do, whereas leftists seem to delight in it and their only problem is that liberals don't go far enough in encouraging that sort of thing (which they already do quite a bit). I also think modern art is boring and prefer kitsch, which people tell me makes me some sort of a conservative.
Wondering if anyone else has made this journey. I feel stupid for not realizing this sooner, bashing my head against a wall all this time hoping the weirdo leftists I was encountering were just unread compared to me. I still think there might be an element of that, they often don't know about passages I quote to them. But overall I am mostly convinced that I am neither a leftist nor a liberal. I don't think I'm a conservative either (for example, I have no sympathy for nationalism) but I don't know what I am then. Possibly some sort of left-communitarian like Michael Sandel?
To make it /lit/-relevant, I thought of pic related and how he made the transformation from Trotskyist to conservative (with lingering leftist sympathies). What I've read has been mid though, for example he wants to maintain the market (just with a C-M-C cycle) which I definitely don't. But I might read him more to see if he has insights nevertheless.

> i want free stuff and don't want to work
> also i don't want to be excluded from a community for not contributing

>>22825625
I never said I don't want to work. And I want everyone to have free stuff, not just me. Interesting that you frame it as a self-interested position.
>also i don't want to be excluded from a community for not contributing
This is correct though yeah. I believe in unconditional love.

>>22825648
But how do you deal with such people? With unconditional love?

>>22825607
>I am opposed to professionalization (in the sense of paid labor), either by the market or the state, and think everything should be distributed freely and that individuals should work out of a motivation to help their fellow sentient beings
That's all well and good until you need anything that requires even the slightest degree of precision. Almost any dumb motherfucker can grow corn if they're taught how to. Fewer can grind a lens to the right thickness and curve for prescription glasses. Stuff like penicillin isn't just going to be made without "professionals." The only way I can see your society of gift-giving and fellow-feeling working is if everyone is basically a farmer and a lot of modern comforts are foregone. That's a trade-off most people don't want to make.

>>22825607
Also you sound like an anarchist, ie still a leftist. Just not a communist

No. I sympathized with certain left-wing views at various points but I’ve never in my life been a leftist.

>>22825607
>The way I would summarize it is by saying that I'm opposed to individualism and think people should be loyal to others and form a strong sense of community from which nobody can be excluded.
It’s kinda funny that you say this while disagreeing with your in-group for individual concerns.
Shouldn’t you be repressing this for the cause?

You posted a picture of Alisdair McIntyre so that coupled with this rambling makes me think you’ll be a trad Cath or Orthodox in a few years.

>>22825607
>>22825609
are you shigesato itoi? love your games man. no but really op you should play the mother trilogy if you haven't already, the third game namely has a town like this.

>>22825691
Also to note that what I quoted sounds a lot like advocates of nationalism would say, despite you saying you don’t care for it, OP.
A simplification, to be sure. But maybe seeing the good qualities in your so-called enemies and the negatives in your friends might have stopped you going down this cul-de-sac

>>22825669
Yes. Graeber is relevant here: https://twitter.com/davidgraeber/status/935087817033699328
Personally, I have a family member who does not "contribute" very much. Would I ever leave them on the street? No, that's unthinkable to me, despite the lack of "reciprocity". They are an intrinsically valuable part of my life.
>>22825671
You seem to assume that everyone who already knows how to do things will just disappear, rather than teach others. Although I am willing to make quite a bit of concessions WRT standards of living if it means a healthier society. You're likely right that I'm in a minority on this, but I think you also underestimate the extent to which similar things are feasibly proposed: Marx wanted to end the division of labor, but he certaintly didn't want some sort of return to subsistence farming.

>>22825607
Communism is fundamentally evil.

>>22825674
Hold on, how do I sound like an anarchist and not a communist? I'm opposed to freedom and equality which is anarchists' bread and butter. I hate their central ideal of "free association". On the other hand, the society I want would be moneyless and stateless, i.e. communist in terms of economy (or lack thereof).
>>22825691
>>22825704
Well I'm unsure about being opposed to "individualism" per se, that might have been too hasty wording. The term can be split into a few meanings. I like individualism in the sense of self-expression, individual flourishing, respecting individual differences, not treating individuals instrumentally. What I don't like is the sort of atomization where people abandon each other though, or narcissistically disregard the effect of their actions on others. In fact, I find it in tension with the first kind.
>>22825699
Yeah I've played all three, am a big fan. The Mother 3 town is my ideal basically lol.

>>22825607
Stirner, unironically. Die Einzige is a palliative against ideology. It's a pretty easy shift from anarchist to jaded non-left anarchist and into not giving much of a shit about anything but building your own personal milk shop confederacy.

>>22825763
>What I don't like is the sort of atomization where people abandon each other though, or narcissistically disregard the effect of their actions on others.
Oh yeah and I don't like Recht, it puts the petty squabblings of individuals above what matters. Reverts the importance between things and people.

>>22825772
Stirner is an egoist, he's like the opposite of what I'm about. I've read him and don't like him.

>>22825743
I assume you're talking about my OP, so: why? What bothers you so much about it?

>>22825607
you have to choose OP:
a multitude that doesn't start from an identarian position; one identity; or a logic of consequences and appropriateness

>>22825763
>stateless
I should perhaps retract this. I'm used to considering myself opposed to the state but I might change my mind on that. It would be a government very different from what we know, though.

>>22825607
>Pashukanis
The Marxist Legal Theory guy?

>>22825607
take the fourth political theory pill.

>>22825796
Have you looked at the utter failure anywhere it is implemented, leaving a red river behind it.

>>22825607
>>22825609
I think what you're looking for is the Monarcho-Ruskinite pill, or Tory Leninism, if you will.
https://graymirror.substack.com/p/based-ruskin

>>22825607
>>22825609
I am an ex-leftist myself, mainly because I realized (much like you) that leftists are insufferable morons. To me, leftists are the antithesis of Stefan Zweig's Nazi, who is the outcaste, the loser, taking revenge on the world out of resentmen; leftists are the overprivileged, the soft, naïve people of the world hellbent on the idea that they, the meek, will inherit the earth.

It sounds like you still have bourgeois ideals, which I recommend you work on eradicating from yourself if you want to calm the kind of restless energy that comes from political thinking. The world will not be and does not deserve to be saved. Also, your love of kitsch does indeed make you a conservative.

After a long political journey i have settled on individualist anarchism. Im an anarchist without even trying, as a neet hikkimorie im a lumpenprole. I work no job so im not a worker, so i cant be a commie. And nazis would send me to the camps if they got power. Also im a poor fag so cant be a crapitlist. So that leaves one thing for me to be.

I exist outside the capitalist system. I do not believe in revolution, but also not in the status qou.

>>22825796
you don't need to reply in good faith to retards

>>22825715
>You seem to assume that everyone who already knows how to do things will just disappear, rather than teach others
I dunno man there's a lot of complicated shit that makes a lot of stuff that we take for granted possible. I can't see how a society could eliminate the division of labor and "professionalization" without also doing away with stuff like manufacturing concrete. Like yeah, I'm gonna go work in the cement factory when everything is provided for free. Why? Out of some sense of duty? I can do something else

>>22825763
>I'm opposed to freedom and equality which is anarchists' bread and butter. I hate their central ideal of "free association".
I guess I misunderstood your whole "family-like fellow feeling" thing

>>22825609
>I don't think I'm a conservative either (for example, I have no sympathy for nationalism)
You don't sound like someone who knows anything about either conservatism or nationalism. Besides the vague feeling that you should voice your dislike of these things you don't really know anything concrete about now and then to fit in with other people who don't know and don't care about what lies on the other side of the trenches.

In other words, you shouldn't worry, you're still a true lefty.

>>22825607
>In both cases, it started to become difficult to ignore the disparity in values between me and them.
You've put a lot more thought into it than I have. I dunno. I find the ideals attractive and I like the materialist viewpoint and immanent critique, but "communist" felt a little too much like a suit that didn't fit. A little too exotic. Many people I was meeting had views I thought were too different from how I thought in some respects, were being taken in by what I thought were complete crackpots or lost causes, nor did I think they were able to navigate practical politics in a successful manner. Well it was a mixed bag, positive and negative. Or maybe I'm the problem or maybe you'll relate. Reading history when communists were involved, I usually think I would have supported the communists in that situation or conflict, but (a) usually the situation was so extreme that few people seemed to have any real "choice" to make in the first place and (b) every form of socialism to date has suffered from enormous flaws so boasting about any version seems kind of pathetic, and (c) it's practically history.

>>22825979
>After a long political journey i have settled on individualist anarchism.
You might like Crispin Sartwell who's an individualist anarchist. Kind of a lost tradition really.
https://www.splicetoday.com/authors/Crispin%20Sartwell
https://youtu.be/HqpgSy8c2RE

>>22825607
>Moral should statements.
>Caring about anyone or anything else beyond yourself.
Lmao.

I used to a communist, still fervently anti-capitalist and believe economic planning is the most promising way forward, but I stopped being an internationalist when I realized that there are literally billions of people who are a net negative to the world, either because they have been irreversibly miseducated or more often because they’re naturally low intelligence. Also, social liberalism is an enormous failure - child rearing has gotten much harder with the advent of modernity and cannot continue to be ad-hoc and conducted according to the whims of the parent(s), and the total liberation of women has crippled whole nations while their statesmen declare war on each other every time they sense weakness.

>>22825674
Retarded cultural hegemonists have no right to the anarchist moniker

Have any of you fart smelling faggots tried actually learning economics

>>22825607
As a young man I defended socialism in Youtube comments and owned a Che Guevara shirt. I have not been that lad in almost twenty years.

>>22825607
The dichotomy between action and belief, and the intersection it has with politics is always going to be problematic to try and navigate if you still want to differentiate between the ideology and the person. Marx and Engels wrote the only truly cohesive post-enlightenment political philosophy, there have certainly been other political writers but none have managed what they did since. In my experience virtually everyone I have spoken to is likely a socialist in terms of action, even if their professed belief system is rooted in something completely different. They may have even developed higher order coping mechanisms to justify this in their own mind. Tribal affiliations also play a part in this, especially for people who can't seem to differentiate the action and belief. All tribes have a totem they use for identifying other tribal affiliates, most of the time just having the knowledge of this totem and its relation to the tribe is sufficient to permit entry. You can even break this down to a person by person basis and speak directly to the believers and the disaffected members of the tribe based on context. The tribal system by nature is designed to exclude certain elements, so it is within human nature to seek to "cut out" people who seemingly profess or espouse different beliefs that run against the grain of the tribe. Tribal architecture is also inherently weak, it is ridiculously easy to destabilize a tribe, this imo is a large part of why the enforcement of "cutting out" is so critical to the adherents. There is no way to please everyone and if that is your goal you will fail. Being able to respect the core beliefs of tribal members and differentiate the person from the ideology is a critical aspect of maintaining a balance. The few who can do this may never become intimate members of any tribe but can freely conduct business with all. If this sounds like soulless rambling it is partially because it is, the only way to avoid triggering the instinct in a weak person is to avoid demonstrating too much strength, the outcome will be the same regardless, with this in mind your us vs them instincts are less likely to be activated, and that is ultimately what matters most, your innate desire to achieve the success of the endeavor, otherwise, why would you go to such effort to post this?

>>22826912
Marx was an idiot and so are you

first there are only 4 lives and 3 happens in a society
the 3 societies are
-hunter gatherer
-military society, with kings and kingdoms, emperors etc
-the commercial society in the form of the atheist democracy by subhuman anglos

each society provides a typical life. The 4th life is the one of the bums in the forest trying to be hermit or rascals.


You cant have a commercial power merged into a military power. A king is a military guy and the merchant class will collude with him. There is not enough room at the top

This is why the angloturds killed all the european kings after lots of propaganda and imposed their democracy crap

in less than 3 centuries the anglo scum turned the whole planet to shit

>>22825872
Yeah, he's pretty good IMO. One of the few Marxist thinkers I can still tolerate.
>>22825920
Lol maybe. I think I've heard of this.
>>22825966
>It sounds like you still have bourgeois ideals, which I recommend you work on eradicating from yourself if you want to calm the kind of restless energy that comes from political thinking.
Which do you have in mind?
>The world will not be and does not deserve to be saved.
Yeah as I realize most people are morally mediocre compared to myself (as >>22825671 points out) I am increasingly nihilistic and just want to be left alone with my loved ones while the world rots.
>Also, your love of kitsch does indeed make you a conservative.
Do you say this approvingly or disapprovingly? Do you like kitsch and are you a conservative?
>>22825979
I'm a NEET too, but there are some leftist writers who defend us. Look into Herbert Marcuse and Andre Gorz, they both re-oriented leftist politics away from the working class and toward the unemployed and "losers" of society. Also check out David Graeber. Michael Heinrich's reading of Marx is also relevant.
>>22826006
>I guess I misunderstood your whole "family-like fellow feeling" thing
There might be anarchists who are into this, but I think a better representative of how I think is someone like Virginia Held. Look at her paper "Non-Contractual Society: A Feminist View". Anarchists call her a conservative for these views.
>>22826069
Well I think nationalism is inherently exclusionary, which I'm against. I wouldn't be surprised if I turned out to be a conservative though.
>>22826369
I can sort of see sense in your view. I myself have mostly abandoned feminism - I view it as the epitome of everything I hate about the left. This is despite praising Held's paper above, but her kind of feminism is very unpopular and often denounced by leftists as conservative.
>>22826380
What do you mean by "cultural hegemonist"? Could you explain?
>>22826399
Yes, I know more about it than the average leftist does I think. Although I'm more well-versed in critiques of economics (whether Marxist or communitarian). A well-known communitarian sociologist did a study that showed studying economics is more likely to make you anti-social, which I completely believe (I feel it myself, unfortunately): https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/socf.12153
As for the Marxist side, I think Michael Heinrich does a good job of summarizining it in his intro to Capital.
>>22826490
What are you now?
>Marx and Engels wrote the only truly cohesive post-enlightenment political philosophy
I might agree with this if you cut out Engels, he was modernist as fuck.

>>22825607
The same thing happened to Lasch, Genovese and many others.

>>22827091
>I might agree with this if you cut out Engels, he was modernist as fuck.
Meant to direct this at >>22826912, obviously.
>>22827095
Yeah I suspect I would like Lasch, I'm quite sympathetic to what I've heard of him.

>>22827065
Europe became democratic because america started world war 1 at the whim of a socialist faggot president, if not for that communism would never have had the sufficient power vacuum to take root. The problem is leftists and always has been.

>>22827091
>cultural hegemonist
Behavioral theory that people act according to their culture as opposed to actual self interest, a favorite pet theory of communists hoping to solve the simpler economic problems with communism. Communists assert that a new socialist man can be culturally designed who will be willing to die and suffer for the common good and that is how they will get people to go to siberia and drive garbage trucks and generally do less desirable work.

>economics
Then you must understand that communism is literally impossible because you cannot factor prices without a market and therefore you have no ability to use resources efficiently or satisfy peoples needs.

>>22827091
>most people are morally mediocre compared to myself
>I'm a NEET too
Lol

>>22827118
I would say I'm a cultural hegenomist then, probably.
>Then you must understand that communism is literally impossible because you cannot factor prices without a market and therefore you have no ability to use resources efficiently or satisfy peoples needs.
This is Mises' version which is flat-out wrong, Hayek's version of the economic calculation problem is more formidable, but it says that socialism is difficult, not impossible. In any case the abolition of prices is my goal, not the mimicking of them. Quite a few leftist critics of economics I know have developed pretty sophisticated accounts of how communism would work without markets. I would look into value-form theory, start with Heinrich's introduction to Capital (he briefly addresses what you say in the last chapter). I would also mention systems like Parecon that while featuring some elements of market society I disapprove of, show that it can at least in principle be done without markets.

>>22825607
Yes, I went full /pol/tard at one point. Now I just think politics is brainrot horsepoop all around, but i find myself, recently, rebounding back towards the left if I HAD to put a label on it.
I'll be happy to explain why if anyone cares, but I don't want to effortpost rn unless someone will actually read it cuz I'm tired

>>22827125
Well, I'm a NEET due to mental illness. But I think resisting integration into a fucked up society is the first imperative of a moral person. In any case, everyone I know thinks that I'm the most moral person they know, despite my unemployed status. I've sacrificed quite a bit of my time to helping my neighbors repair their house, for instance, turning down offers of payment; I tend to think I'm a pretty good counter-example to the "human nature argument".

>>22827146
I care, feel free to effortpost.

>>22825607
>The main realization I've had is that (with perhaps very rare exceptions) leftists have the same values as liberals
That's because they were liberals, comrade.

>>22827168
Hopefully you're not bullshitting cuz I'm fighting exhaustion
So it started when I saw /pol/ type shit go mainstream and how normals just reduced it all to mindless slogan meme bullshit, at which point I was like OK, it's become pleb'd, and that started reminding me that being political at all, is stupid. It will always devolve into a few smart cynics exploiting the fuck out of watered down followerbrains, while any genuine believers get filtered out and drowned out.
So there was that. Then the Gaza shit happened and I snapped. Not even bc "fuck Israel," I'd get just as pissed if Kenya was fully openly killing kids over bullshit justifications and lying to everyone's faces about it.
I think and will always think communism is retarded, but the Gaza shit made me have to grapple with anti-colonialist arguments again, and I just decided they're mostly right. Colonial racism is totally unjustifiable evil bullshit that destroys lives just so we can...what? Buy iPhone? Totally ridiculous. I don't have any guilt about being white but these systems truly are evil and shouldn't exist. Gaza is the perfect touchstone for the reasons why it shouldn't exist. And it made me have to reconsider the claims of basically all non white peoples, and realize they're not just whiny or retarded. They're generally speaking, correct, about this specific topic.
Most right wing ideology is based on justifying systems that do things like this, and my conscience simply won't allow me to entertain any of that shit anymore.
So I tilt left, once again.

>>22827184
Are you sure? Leftists very often speak of communism/Marxism "fulfilling the promises of liberalism" due to immanent critique. There are also quite a few Marxists who are into Republicanism, which is a normative theory pioneered by liberals and very popular among them. Like I said, there are exceptions (for example those who read young Marx as a perfectionist), but they are rare.

>>22827168
I suspect he is another reformed edgelord of the Chapo variety.

>>22827187
>Most right wing ideology is based on justifying systems that do things like this, and my conscience simply won't allow me to entertain any of that shit anymore.
Yeah I can see sense to that view. I myself am relatively unread on right-wing ideology and what I have read has been pretty aligned with what you say; I agree that I don't want to endorse that stuff.

>>22827191
When I was right wing, it was because I hated a system that I saw as dehumanizing regular people, and justifying mass murder while lying about its virtuous nature.
Now I'm tilting, for the same reason.
Which is why I say politics is retarded and I'm probably not really tilting left again at all.
I think I'm just anti murdering and abusing innocent people. That's really my only principle.

>>22827199
To be fair, far left ideas do tend toward murdering mad innocent people if everything goes as planned, I understand those pitfalls tilting.
Religion is superior to politics as an organizational method of perception. But only because it leans closer to love. Anything that bamboozles people out of love is retarded end evil and i am simply done with it. There's no reason for innocent people, anywhere, to die.

>>22825607
>I considered myself a communist
>turgid blah blah ramblings
yeah we can tell lol

>>22826312
Dude, Stirnerism is a psy-op to desecrate the very foundations of your "ego" and make you feel atomized and disparate aka turning you into a tranny.

>>22825607
I'm the same OP. Reading MacIntyre was eye opening but what did it for me was going back and reading Lenin and Engels etc. and you realize these people had a poor grasp of Marx and just made stuff up. The average leftist adores these figures and thumps them blindly while being glued to a bunch of political positions they can't even be bothered to justify. Family values? Reactionary! Revisionist! They can be as anti-intellectual as a bunch of /pol/tards. A reasonable person might ask "how would a socialist state deal with social conflict?" Their reply is that a socialist society is one with no social conflict and therefore there's no point discussing it. When you go back and read Plato, Aristotle, the civic Republicans, Confucians etc. you realize there's a whole other way of looking at politics.

There are still great leftist thinkers, but these people have zero impact on actual leftists who are mostly dogmatic Lenin huggers or social democrats or anarchists who think knocking over trash cans is radical. Deleuze comes up with this idea of the dividual and rejects individualism and Enlightenment humanism, this has zero impact on most leftists outside of academic elitists who jerk off to this stuff but don't actually put these ideas into practice in any meaningful way. They remain idpol loving campus leftoids who read Anti-Oedipus and act like they're Neo.

>>22827217
>all you need is love bro
Stupid hippie

>>22827141
I already knew you were a cultural hegemonist, you depend on it, if cultural hegemony turns out to be bullshit, which it is, you will never save the most basic criticism of communism which is HOW DO YOU GET PEOPLE TO WORK RETARD. Mises is not wrong, you need price discovery and it can only be found by entrepreneurs. Hayek understated the issue, it is not just that the amount of calculation is unwieldy and next to impossible but now less so with the advent of calculators, the calculations need to be done in advance before the data for them can even be collected. Only a free market of entrepreneurs forecasting and guessing with most of them failing can accomplish the task. But more than that, even if communism could meet needs, which it can’t and the soviet union proved this with its dependence on capitalist market spying to even have some semblance of functioning, think about what you are undebatably losing, what you like to call advertisers creating want. Want cannot be created, this is some basic commie retard moral relativist bunk, if want can be created you could create anything to be want. Want already exists out there somewhere to be discovered, and the capitalist discovers it. We are enriched by the capitalist discovering wants, not debased by them forcing them upon us.

Parecon sounds like social democracy, correct me if I’m wrong. Social democracy is an oxymoron, you cannot have democracy without private ownership because you cannot have free speech without private ownership, if the government owns the paper and the presses you cannot possibly have freedom of the press.

>>22827248
I agree with your distaste for Lenin and Engels and their influence on the left, and I agree that both (especially Lenin) had a flawed grasp of Marx at best.
>>22827262
>HOW DO YOU GET PEOPLE TO WORK
You should read Marx's 1844 Manuscripts and Heinrich's intro, they both answer this question. The answer in Heinrich's intro actually doesn't depend on cultural hegenomy, and the one in the 1844 Manuscripts arguably doesn't either.
>Parecon sounds like social democracy, correct me if I’m wrong.
Yes you are wrong, it's a form of decentralized planned economy. Social democracy is a market economy with a heavy welfare state.

>>22827217
Communism is just atheist religion, continuing the misanthropic trend of altruism and sublimating the government for god as a miracle worker. For all the leftist blustering about the failure of pulling yourself up by the boot straps as an argument they don’t see the irony of thinking anything is possible through collective action. Anything is not possible. Power has limits through natural law. This is also why monopoly is not possible. Monopoly can only exist through government assistance but even then it will still collapse like the CAB which slowly assumed full control then buckled under its own weight from a lack of competition forcing efficiency. Governments themselves are monopolies and they always collapse, we live under a finance monopoly and it is collapsing. The hopes of the communist to centralize power completely into a good monopoly is destined for failure.

And for all the hatred of monopolies they don’t seem to understand that a union is a monopoly, and therefore if private monopolies are possible so are private unions and they contradict themselves thinking one is possible in the free market but the other is not. If private monopolies are a market failure, then private unions are necessarily a market success and there is nothing to fear from capitalism, they can just form a labor monopoly. The issue of scabs applies to businesses in a cartel just as much as it does to labor unions.

>>22827296
>this has been answered in a book
I fucking hate how you commies do this lazy bullshit, explain it in simple terms. I am not just telling you to read the road to serfdom and economic calculation in the socialist commonwealth. I have read capital faggot.
>social democracy
Social democracy is just democratic communism, government ownership with voting. And you cannot have a planned economy without centralization, you have no fucking idea what you are talking about.

>>22827296
And for the record marx never answered the basic criticism of communism now known as who goes to siberia, he did not specify how communism was going to work, he claimed communism is inevitable and that we don’t need to know how it’s going to work.

>>22827296
>marx wrote the solutions to all these problems in 1844!
>that's why every attempt at collectivism has failed often in shocking mass deaths but usually just very poor economic performance and political tyranny.
do leftists ever have a moment of clarity where they are conscious of how utterly ridiculous they are?

>>22825607
>am deeply opposed to this, and wish for a society of personal relations, which they would view as reactionary. I still want the abolition of markets, but I also want strong bonds of family-like fellow-feeling and think this should be actualized wherever possible
You and your family and friends are free to chose that kind of mindset but wanting and possibly forcing it on others (entire society) is fascism. You abandoned some leftist values but kept the others (fascism)

>>22827312
>I fucking hate how you commies do this lazy bullshit, explain it in simple terms.
Fair enough. Marx believes that it is human nature to enjoy working out of intrinsic motivation, but that the overwork inherent in and instrumental nature of capitalist production causes people to escape work wherever possible.
>What, then, constitutes the alienation of labor?

>First, the fact that labor is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home. His labor is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labor. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labor is shunned like the plague. External labor, labor in which man alienates himself, is a labor of self-sacrifice, of mortification. Lastly, the external character of labor for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own, but someone else’s, that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs, not to himself, but to another. Just as in religion the spontaneous activity of the human imagination, of the human brain and the human heart, operates on the individual independently of him – that is, operates as an alien, divine or diabolical activity – so is the worker’s activity not his spontaneous activity. It belongs to another; it is the loss of his self.
As for Heinrich, he does a good job of summarizing the part in Capital (often lost on readers) that's about how capitalist behavior is not human nature and that capitalist ideologues project it onto humans: https://i.postimg.cc/025w9BXw/Screenshot-20231214-081247-Drive.jpg

Hey anons, interesting thread so far.
Where would you say I belong if I've become tired of every discussion IRL and online defaulting to a political debate and despise the inability of people to view subjects and problems beyond the scope of a 'political issue' and people as nothing other than 'political identities'?
What if I've started to believe that individuals have better things to do for themselves and their society other than be active participants in "the world of democratic discussion", which today equates to being a recipient of media noise and then being expected to take a stance on the issues put forth, a process which is a ridiculous and amounts to nothing.
Would love to read something related to this kind of outlook.

>>22827348
>What if I've started to believe that individuals have better things to do for themselves and their society other than be active participants in "the world of democratic discussion",
All the eceleb/podcast personalities on yt would lose their income and kill themselves.

>>22827327
The 1844 manuscripts were not published until well after these regimes were established and were in fact often used to criticize these regimes.
>>22827337
I think those others maintaining impersonal relations are to blame for that. I do not moralize freedom the way you do.

>>22827361
so marx wrote the solution to all of mankind's suffering in1844 but decided not to publish it? why on earth did he keep such monumental knowledge secret?!

>>22827370
He tried to publish it but was unsuccessful. It was first published in like the 1930s or something.
I didn't say it was the solution to all the world's problems, just that it was an answer to the charge of "how do you get people to work without compulsion?"

>>22827345
>people just like work, any work, as long as it is for himself
And how is this a critique of capitalism and not of the state of nature itself? Surely the same applies to the coercion of nature demanding you work to survive, and therefore where is the evidence? Do you honestly believe that work, having never before been enjoyed, will be able to be suddenly enjoyed in a magical future of collective slavery to one another? Marx also talked about the division of labor being alienating, precisely the efficiency that has reduced our workloads so I hope you don’t think you are going to work less under communism. What a crock of shit you are trying to sell, work more but enjoy working? All of human evolution has been an effort to escape work, through the use of fire, through the mining of coal and the drilling of oil. The population explosion has been a direct result of escaping labor through efficiency. You are talking about mass death.

>>22827360
Guess what it comes down to is me being exhausted of what McLuhan had coined as "the global village", but I'm nearly equally opposed even to the "national village".
There's little reason for someone to get 24/7 coverage of shit that happened 700 km away from him and expending energy and grey matter so he can deal and imbibe a barrage of useless information.
I think it's cancer both for society but most importantly for the individual.

>>22827375
>how do you get people to work without compulsion?
the fact that marxists unironically can't figure this out is hilarious

>>22827378
>Surely the same applies to the coercion of nature demanding you work to survive
I don't think it does, there is a difference between social and natural compulsion. A lot of the secondary literature on Marx that's influenced by his younger writings (e.g. 1844) highlights this difference. One is alienating and the other is not, although I guess there is a sense in which nature is alien until it is tamed by human control (i.e. labor).
>I hope you don’t think you are going to work less under communism
I definitely do, the absence of the endless end-in-itself of capital will severely reduce workloads. The productivity that capitalist technology affords us allows us to return to pre-capitalist worktimes (which were limited by human needs rather than the profit motive: https://i.postimg.cc/FFpP3QxK/Screenshot-20231214-084629-Drive.jpg)) without the dysmal standards of living implied back then.
Ultimately, there are more important things than efficiency. Communism would not have an "economy", economizing is not the point of a healthy society. People will enjoy working when they are not compulsed to do it, especially to such a ridiculous extent, and part of that is that they will have much agency in what they will do with their time (e.g. no subordination of the individual to the division of labor). Few people would want to do nothing like a rock. Work and liesure will begin to blend to the extent that "work" will not be a meaningful category. Of course, capitalism is trying to blend them in the other direction, which is not what I mean. Per the Marx passage I quoted, your workplace would feel like home. On top of all this, there will be a strong sense of community (I guess what you would call cultural hegemony) that motivates people intrinsically rather than extrinsically, which I can attest is a great motivator.

>>22827420
What do you mean? I said that it was "figured out".

>>22827420
It’s not the only problem in that vein either, how do you even choose who does what work? Even if you can depersonalize people into mere homogeneous units of labor to be assigned at will like its a city builder video game, how do you figure out who is best at what? Aptitude tests? How do you know you will have the correct aptitudes for the work that needs to be done, how do you even make an aptitude test?

>>22827422
>precapitalism work times
This is not a thing, capitalism has only reduced the workload through increasing the efficiency of the worker. You are talking nonsense when you say that efficiency doesn’t matter and work will be reduced. Capital is not an end in itself it is investment of work to reduce work, it is the reason we work less. One issue with Greek society was the lack of investment in capital due to the abundance of slave labor, you will recreate this situation and make people work more. You don’t even provide a reason for why we won’t have the horrible standards of life of peasants who had no leisure time despite the meme of them working less. Life is an economy, an economy of calories at the very least and you cannot be healthy without it, and society does not exist. Society does not exist. It is a collectivist abstraction for the purpose of politicizing people and nothing more. You say people will have agency but this goes against the fundamental issue of scarcity, not everyone can do what they want all the time, what if those wants conflict? You can’t have two dictators, you can’t have everyone live in sunny LA and nobody live where it snows, where it monsoons, where there are harsh desert conditions, do you see now how fundamentally unsolvable the issue of inequality is? What is your reason for attesting this magical quality of community to drive you to work NEET boy?

>>22825607
>>22825763
I was going to post some shit about not tainting Big Mac with /lit/-users but I somewhat relate to you. You're some flavor of left-anarchist, though with the odd tendency of anti-egalitarianism. Tönnies book Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft can be a guiding light clearing up conceptual confusions, but remember that the subtitle to the book was "Abhandlung des Kommunismus und des Sozialismus als empirische Kulturformen". If you are scandi, read the better written Essay on Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft.

>>22827477
>What is your reason for attesting this magical quality of community to drive you to work NEET boy?
I already said that I do plenty of work out of a sense of community, but the sense of community in capitalism is very truncated so it's not a good indicator. In any case I already said I am disabled, stigmatizing NEETs is for productivist losers. As for the stuff about logistics, I don't know, I'm not an expert in that stuff I'm just some guy who reads too much philosophy. You could email a communist economist and ask them, try Andrew Kliman since he's pretty responsive to emails.
The rest of your post is commodity fetishism at its finest (i.e. you are confusing capitalist production with all production and projecting it onto history and even nature), at this point all I can do is ask you to read value-form theory if you actually care, I'm not going to be able to do it justice in 4chan posts. Reading anthropology would also likely help you in this regard.

>>22827504
No leftist can call themselves an anarchist fuck off, only the most retarded of all leftists think they are anarchists, the ones that rely completely on magical ideas of fixing human psychology to work seamlessly with their goals. No anarchist should have a hyphen, we anarcho-capitalists are merely not hiding our predilection, we are fundamentally just anarchists and no hyphen is needed.

>>22825796
not the guy but besides your disillusionment with people in the movement it's all "theory" the praxis is non-existent and isn't possible. It makes many non-empirical assumptions about human nature and has just historically failed when attempted through socialism every single time.

>>22827513
How are you disabled? You can read and type anyway, and that is employable. The government has only made it harder to employ you you know. The work you do for the community isn’t necessarily work for the community, idk I am assuming you mean your communism? Marx said so as much himself explaining the labor theory of value, any labor that doesn’t turn out valuable was not labor, really ruins the whole idea imo. You are confusing production by thinking there are multiple forms of it, it is all just production, some of it faster stronger better than others’. Value-form theory is meaningless, the money value of something is not an arbitrary capitalist distinction, it is a homogenized representation of what it is worth. And what does anthropology have to do with anything? Does it not concern you how many of my points you have had to ignore? You said you understood economics better than most leftists but you don’t even know the basic economic problems of communism you could get from a 5-10 minute youtube video.

>>22827504
Yeah I would consider myself closer to left-anarchist than Leninist, in the past I've often considered myself an anarchist and you aren't the first to suggest it upon hearing my beliefs. I might still ultimately be one IDK, but I think it's best to avoid tying yourself to "-isms", being exasperated by people telling me I'm not a real leftist or whatever for some of my views is one of the things that prompted this post. The anti-egalitarianism is influenced by Marx (namely his critiques of "bourgeois right" and abstract labor) as well as some passing remarks in other thinkers. I think I've heard of that book, thanks for the rec anon.

Ok I guess I can’t interrupt your guys pretend playtime anymore. Have fun being unintelligible circle jerking pseuds.

>>22827540
>How are you disabled?
I have mental conditions that cause executive dysfunction (meaning I have little free time) and also make intellectual work tough. ADHD, PTSD, avoidant + borderline personality disorders, probably autism (going to get assessed in the spring), probably OCPD.
>Does it not concern you how many of my points you have had to ignore?
I feel like I've tried to answer you, but when I've ignored individual points in some cases it is because I am not an expert in this and in others it's because I feel like you aren't receptive to what I say. For example Marx does not have an LTV in my opinion, this is a central tenet of value-form theory.

>>22827558
>I am mentally disabled with BPD
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
>marx doesn’t have a labor theory of value btw
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

>>22827558
>and in others it's because I feel like you aren't receptive to what I say.
To give a clear example:
>You are confusing production by thinking there are multiple forms of it, it is all just production, some of it faster stronger better than others’.
This is just an assertion, not an argument. I told you that Marx's economic theory disagrees with this, you just stubbornly insist on the contrary. Which is fine but that's why I don't respond.

>>22827564
>I am mentally disabled with BPD
That's one out of six conditions I mentioned.
>marx doesn’t have a labor theory of value btw
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neue_Marx-Lekt%C3%BCre

>>22825607
You're like 5 years late to this trend.

>>22827571
You need to learn about marxs influences. Adam Smith and Ricardo are both cited in capital and argued for a labor theory of value. Your whole movement is a fucking scam by bad actors btw.

Keep it short. leftists always write a wall of text and expect me to give them the time of day

>>22827246
Nice argument retard.

>>22825607
Communism is the continuation of modernity by other means
There will be strong personal ties but they will be absolutely voluntary and not based on kinship or anything

>>22825609
>cutting off family or friends is an evil thing to do
I don’t think you can make this sort of generalization. If a child is raped by her father, is she evil for wanting to avoid her rapist?

I’d argue not. It’s reasonable to want distance from someone who wronged you, even if they’re a relative. We can generalize this observation to many cases: victims of domestic abuse, people with traitorous friends, and so on. “Cutting off” is a relatively minor consequence compared the many of the forms of harm that precede it.

I can grant that many people cut off their friends and relatives for trite reasons, but that’s hardly evil. At worst, it’s misguided.

>>22827613
What do you expect from a movement of midwits rote memorizing mystifying jargon and concepts that make no sense

>>22827613
>too many word
>grug no understand
>grug pretend not to read
>then anons no mock grug for be dumb
>good plan grug

>>22827626
I get the impression that OP is insufferable and as a result wants mandatory friendship

>>22826369
>there are literally billions of people who are a net negative to the world, either because they have been irreversibly miseducated or more often because they’re naturally low intelligence
I've had a similar ideological shift due to this realization. Leftists, and political theorists in general, tend to project their own intelligence and worldview onto the masses and design systems that work for the educated, empathetic, and enlightened (in their view, at least), not for the drooling, myopic knuckledraggers outside of their bubble. Whether they lacked early childhood development, intellectually stimulating education, parental guidance, or simply never had the genetic potential for intelligence, they are now nigh-irreversibly cognitively enfeebled.

So what is to be done? Seriously, I don't have an answer and I have not encountered any acceptable, practical, and effective proposed solution to a world full of idiots for whom it is already too late. I can't imagine any non-generational solution, and even that seems far-fetched given the decline of education.

>>22827593
I'm aware that Ricardo and Smith had an LTV. Marx did not, he was critiquing the LTV: https://i.postimg.cc/sxXBYC9k/Screenshot-20231214-102549-Drive.jpg (Michael Heinrich's work in general is good on this)
Marx was a critic of political economy, not a political economist. He did not critique the *content* of value but its *form*.
I haven't read/watched these so don't know how good they are but here's another Marx scholar saying something similar: https://davidharvey.org/2018/03/marxs-refusal-of-the-labour-theory-of-value-by-david-harvey/
And another: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TfVJy8PwIAQ
And another: http://digamo.free.fr/elson79.pdf

>>22825607
I stopped being one because I think modern chud theory explains things better and is more interesting. Most leftists nowadays are stuck in 1990, even 1960. Still like Marx and some others but that's no reason to stick around.

>>22825607
Marxists just like every other group are bunch of subhumans. Where is welfare state? Where are my NEETbux? I am suffering. I want every other shithead to suffer too.

>>22825607
why I left the left

>>22825607
>>22825609
wow epic! you're such a unique and special edgy chud trad based reactionary.

>>22825607
Sounds like you just don’t want to work.

>>22827626
Maybe in extreme cases it's okay, but I am a former victim of domestic abuse and rape who is in touch with my abuser (my father). I think it's good to forgive and also be mindfup of others' corcumstances.
>I can grant that many people cut off their friends and relatives for trite reasons, but that’s hardly evil.
I do think this is sort of evil.
>>22827656
I do want mandatory friendship, but just like with >>22825625 you assume this is out of self-interest for some reason. Quite the opposite: I have made it a point to stay in my friends' and family's lives no matter what, and the result has been an incredibly strong bond and much gratitude. I did cut off my dad for a while but decided to forgive him. My brother is obnoxious and rude to me but I stay in touch with him anyway. My partner could be toxic early on in our relationship but we've bern together for 10 years now and counting, and I have a friend who can be plenty annoying but even when I took a break from him after a hurtful argument I made it clear I was still there for him if he needed me. I don't want anyone to be alone. I am sorry that you have such a transactional view of relationships.
>I get the impression that OP is insufferable
What exactly gives this impression, out of curiosity?

>>22827695
Already addressed this in >>22825648

I believe everyone must be as alienated as possible and live in a pod and consuming all day. We only need two classes: worker ants and consoomers. AI can replace the creating class. No friends, no family, no social obligations. Capitalism can do just fine on its own without social relations. Human reproduction can be automated and children raised by iPads.

>>22827696
>I do want mandatory friendship
>I don't want anyone to be alone
But why? I don't think it's "transactional" to not want to keep a hurtful or destructive person in your life. Forgiveness can be powerful and transformative, but if it's compulsory it loses that.

>What exactly gives this impression, out of curiosity?
Your insistence on your own goodness.

>>22827696
>I don't want anyone to be alone.
While this is a nice thought, “mandatory friendship” is hardly a means of achieving it.

On a strictly practical level, forcing someone to associate with a person they dislike probably won’t endear them to that person, especially if the reason for that dislike persists, as they’ll be continually reminded why they wanted not to associate in the first place. At best, you have an asymmetric scenario where one person feels respect and the other contempt. At worst, the contempt gets expressed, souring the relationship further.

More broadly, I think using force to create relationships is a greater evil than loneliness. I went through a few periods of solitude in my life, and each time the fact that I had to attract friends (as opposed to just receiving them passively) forced me to improve as a person. I wouldn’t be the conversationalist, or the thinker, I am today without that social pressure — a pressure which begins with lack.

>>22827707
I more meant that you’ve done a lot of reading and theorizing, and I don’t think you’ve really worked. You’ve got all these ideas about how the world would be better if people just listened to you, but you’ve hardly spent a day with the proletariat in your life. Go work on an oil well.

>>22827681
Uh oh, take a step out of the leftist-not-a-liberal plantantion and they will hit you with the lowercase Something Awful irony.

>>22825607
>I think
Nobody cares what you think. Politics is a team sport, so get on the team or get off the fucking field. You, as someone who thinks people should be loyal to each other, ought to understand this. Don't you have a sense of loyalty to the fucking party? To the political project? You're not being asked to design policy, you're just being asked to promote it. Do your fucking job.

>"b-b-but i don't believe in the policy!!!"
Nobody cares. You have a choice: red team or blue team or fuck off. If you make that choice based on your hurt feelings instead of actual policy then you're a retard; if you make that choice based on policy you'll find that your ideology matters pretty much fuck-all because policy is so constrained by its context and so narrow in its focus, generally. In your lifetime you are likely to face one, maybe two, genuinely ideological political moments, and unless you're a fucking cabinet minister your opinion about them will be limited to thumbs up or thumbs down. That's all you have to think about. Your experience of the complexity of the world will exist in history only as a YES or a NO on a paper ballot somewhere. All the rest of your "political"-ness is a hobby, not a vocation, and your political "critique" is just another way to be a wine snob - in your case a particularly odious one.

I consider myself a communist, but like any sane person I keep my political opinions separate from my politics.

t. insider

>>22827741
>But why?
I don't know how to answer this question, it is just self-evident to me on an intuitive level. Do you not feel sorry for lonely people? Maybe it will sound less alien if i rephrase it from your phrase "mandatory friendship" to the phrase I used (>>22825648) "unconditional love". Telling how differently we formulate the same concept.
Do you not see why unconditional love is valuable?
>I don't think it's "transactional" to not want to keep a hurtful or destructive person in your life.
It has the basic form of "I'll give you X so long as I get Y". I'm influenced by Buber on this: it's impossible to actually hate someone in their entirety, if you will for someone out of your life you are reducing them to that one component of them that annoys you, which is objectifying.
Do you really want your friends to worry about staying on your good side and not crossing some boundary where they will be punished?
>Your insistence on your own goodness.
I don't feel like I've insisted on this, quite the contrary: it's other people in my life (except my brother...) who always insist on this WRT me.

>>22826312
the holocaust are workers are not spooks. the rest definitely are. i know i'm responding to bait, but it irks me when the le stirner meme is used incorrectly.

>>22827102
Basically you just hate the bourgeois way of life but you also see that communism will inherit the bourgeois attitudes towards family/kin/nation. Other Marxists that followed this path: Sorel, Otto Bauer, Lasch, Genovese, Piccone, Kazantzakis, Mussolini, Aimee Terese.

>>22827761
I disagree, as I said in >>22827787 persisting in my associations deepened my relationships, the opposite of your prognosis.
>>22827781
>Don't you have a sense of loyalty to the fucking party? To the political project?
No, those aren't people but abstractions. I seem to be unusual in that I feel a strong sense of loyalty to individuals but not things like nations or whatever. I scored very low on "loyalty" in YourMorals.org (quiz for moral foundations theory) because of this.

>>22827796
Seems accurate for the most part. Thanks for the suggestions.

>>22827812
>No, those aren't people
No, they're people. They are literally actual human beings. When I attend political events with my political party to do politics I spend the entire time interacting with actual flesh and blood humans who have hopes and dreams and needs and trauma. They are people that I have worked side by side with on campaigns for elections or to promote policies.

Do you participate in local elections? Have you ever stood for office? Do you campaign? Do you doorknock? For someone who has so many opinions about politics and leftists and rightists you sure sound like someone who has literally never once participated in any form of political activism of any kind, ever.

But I might be wrong.

>>22827838
Those are entities made up of people, but that's distinct from the individuals who make up that group. Feeling loyalty toward a party and toward the individuals in that party is not the same thing.

>>22827696
> mandatory friendship
> mandatory family
Just take the reactionary-pill and read Carlyle. What you want is slavery.
>>22827787
> I'm influenced by Buber on this: it's impossible to actually hate someone in their entirety, if you will for someone out of your life you are reducing them to that one component of them that annoys you, which is objectifying.
My time on this earth is limited. Why should I associate with people who consistently do me wrong?
> Do you really want your friends to worry about staying on your good side and not crossing some boundary where they will be punished?
Worry? No, but they should be considerate of my boundaries, and at least intuit some general boundaries all people possess. If they cross a boundary and I let them know and they respect it, so much the better as we have solved the dispute and learned more about one another, deepening our relationship.

>>22827812
>persisting in my associations deepened my relationships, the opposite of your prognosis.
You persisted freely, not because you were forced to. You had a pre-existing desire to improve those relationships, so you did. But desire can’t be imposed from on high.

At best, one can be incentivized to continue a relationship, either positively (as in the case of a dependent who benefits financially) or negatively (for example due to external social pressure). At worst, one is made to continue said relationship by threat of force. I assume you’re against force, so let’s address the other two cases.

If one’s motive for continuing a relationship is a positive reward, then one isn’t motivated by goodwill, but by the reward; one is effectively bribed into being complacent company. It may be possible for the two parties to reconcile, but this reconciliation is tainted by the bribe — the party who would have been left always wonders whether the other would still stay if not for the bribe, and the party who stays isn’t free to express their full range of feelings, since doing so risks the possible benefit.

A similar dynamic plays out for negative incentives — simply replace “bribe” with “lack of punishment.”

Ultimately, it’s the fact of your freedom that made staying with your father impactful. If you couldn’t have chosen otherwise, that unfreedom would have been an obstacle to reconciliation.

>>22827851
>Feeling loyalty toward a party and toward the individuals in that party is not the same thing.
I agree. You felt loyalty towards a "party" - an abstract idea, an ideology you call communism, and your loyalties have shifted towards some new random bullshit you made up. My point is that you are a fucking idiot for caring about any of this. Be like me instead and get out and meet actual human fucking beings and apply your innate need to be insufferable to activism instead of navel-gazing on 4chan and maybe worries about mandatory friendship or what-the-fuck-ever won't bedevil you on cold nights anymore.

That's what I mean by "loyalty to the party" - don't you have any loyalty to the needs of the actual human beings that you get into politics to help? Don't you have enough loyalty to them to shut the fuck up about your irrelevant personal feelings for five fucking seconds and grit your teeth and eat shit to get the policies through? I don't agree with every policy that my party promotes but I back all of them because, on the whole, working with and for my party is the best way to help the people I care about the most. Meanwhile you're sitting in the fucking corner whining about ideological purity while the world burns, and it makes me fucking murderous.

Anyway, now I'm rambling. I fucking hate people like you.

>>22827681
I can't tell if this is satire, it would register as satire if maybe you added more buzzwords

>>22827864
>What you want is slavery.
If you say so. This is a pretty typical accusation toward those who believe in unconditional care from those who value freedom. See >>22827378.
Did I somehow enslave my mother when she unconditionally cared gor me? What about my partner who promised me that they'll never leave me and will keep me safe forever? Is that "slavery"? What about the fact that I promised my partner the same, are we somehow enslaving each other? I don't think so, slavery is a legal relation where you own another person as property, not unconditional care. But if this is slavery then slavery is based.
>Worry? No
Then I suggest you change your attitude.

>>22827874
Whatever, I'm not going to fight for a cause I don't believe in. That's actually the whole point, I realized that I don't really believe in leftism. But I do support some leftist policies out of the loyalty to the needs of the people you're talking about. You don't need to be a groupthink sheep to do that.

>>22827903
>I'm not going to fight for a cause I don't believe in
Try fighting for people then, Mr "I Care About People Not Parties!!!"

>I do support some leftist policies
You don't get to vote for policies. If you give a shit enough to "support" anything you ought to be on the team. Anything less if just you being a lazy fuckface - which is fine, but if you're going to be that then at least shut the fuck up and stop pretending to care and just put the ballots in the boxes like any other normal person without the fucking essayposting.

>You don't need to be a groupthink sheep to do that.
Politics. Is. A. Team. Sport.

You are a hilarious waste of your own time.

>>22827915
Why do you have this assumption that I spend a gigantic amount of time thinking about this? Today is the first day in like a year that I've thought about politics deeply.

>>22825609
> For example, I think that cutting off family or friends is an evil thing to do, whereas leftists seem to delight in it
Not just leftists. It’s even recommended in the Gospels. Luke 14:26, “If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple.”

>>22827945
>Why do you have this assumption that I spend a gigantic amount of time thinking about this?
"I considered myself a communist for the past 15 years..."

Anyway I've said enough and I'm supposed to be going to the gym now anyway. Enjoy your night, loser.

>>22827953
Well back then I was pretty involved in political stuff. In fact interacting with leftists is what turned me off.

>>22827947
Weird reading, it implies that suicide is recommended by the Bible.

>>22827886
> This is a pretty typical accusation toward those who believe in unconditional care from those who value freedom.
Because it’s what it is. Legally forcing people to associate is slavery. Your unconditional love can only be brought about through your mandatory friendship and mandatory family. This completely dissolves the charitable virtue from the relationship per Aristotle . Note I am not saying mothers should not unconditionally love their children (although I have quibbles with your belief people should unconditionally love their partner, having been witness to relationships where pretty words like that were spoken and subsequently reneged). My concern is what such a system would end up looking like.
>>Worry? No
> Then I suggest you change your attitude.
I’m confused. I don’t “worry” about whether my friends cross my boundaries because I wouldn’t be around people if they constantly crossed my boundaries. And if I suspect my actions might cross their boundaries I ask for their permission to take the action and vice versa. For example, I recently moved in with my best friend who’s in a band. I let them know prior that I would appreciate if they did not have band practice at the house if I had work the next day. If they made such a promise and constantly broke it, would I not be justified in being upset? This is a simple example, but if this is a recurring issue, or the promise which was broken is more severe, I don’t think no longer being friends with that person is unjustified. Supposing such a thing happened and I stop speaking to that person for a decade, could I honestly claim I “love” that person anymore? It seems to me that calling my sentiments toward that person love is not genuine.

>>22828016
Forgot to add, you never addressed my concern of why I should associate with disrespectful people considering our limited time on earth. I’ll grant Buber’s argument, but I’m not sure what his proscription is

>>22828016
Well I didn't say anything about legally forcing people to do it, I'm actually inclined to agree with Aristotle there. But as a counterargument: when the state forces a parent to care for their child, is that slavery according to you?
>Because it’s what it is.
Not really. Even if we agree legal forcing of association is wrong, I'm still not convinced that's slavery. Slavery is a property relation like I said.
>Note I am not saying mothers should not unconditionally love their children
Well then why aren't you condoning slavery? All I'm saying is people should unconditionally love each other the way mothers love their children.
With your example, I suggest replacing "friend" with "son" and seeing how that changes things. Why should it be different? I think it'd be best if everyone treated everyone else the way a mother treats her child, per the Held paper I shared earlier.

>>22828034
Because those people are intrinsically valuable, they're not to be measured against a finite quantity of limited time. I forget what Buber says in response but IIRC he more-or-less grants that it's an inherent problem of existence with no real resolution (Levinas takes this even further, he actually openly cals his service of the Other "slavery"). Personally, I try to aesthetically evaluate these people's presence in my life positively. Obnoxious grandmother with OCD that drives everyone else off the wall? Well she wouldn't be her if she wasn't that way.

>>22828067
>>22828067
> Well I didn't say anything about legally forcing people to do it, I'm actually inclined to agree with Aristotle there.
That’s pretty much the crux of my issue with what you are saying. What would such a system look like, and how would deviations be prevented or rectified?
> But as a counterargument: when the state forces a parent to care for their child, is that slavery according to you?
Yes, per my definition, not according to yours. The legal compulsion of association treats a person like property.
> Well then why aren't you condoning slavery?
Because it interferes with an individual’s ability to be virtuous, for both master and slave.
As for the child comparison, it mostly falls back to what I was saying about having limited time. I don’t have any children, so I don’t know how “unconditional” the love parents feel toward their children really is. Intuitively it strikes me as overly rational, I suppose, like treating each person as interchangeable and ignoring sentiments we are biologically predisposed to feel
>>22828092
Fair enough. Generally, that’s how I view people’s more annoying quirks as well lol. I know i sound harsh but I don’t want to give off the impression that I’m constantly cutting off people for the barest slight. I recently decided to no longer reach out to a person and put in effort to cultivate a relationship, so the idea of mandatory friendship or unconditional love toward this person made me uncomfortable, especially knowing I’ll see them again as we run in the same circles.

>>22825607
Nope I’ve almost always remained on the right in my 41 years of life. Always thought leftists were braindead nihilists. I humored breaking bread with Marxists a few years ago but I can’t get past their abject materialism.

>>22825893
I’m good, been down that path. Not a fan of anglophobic slavophilia

>>22825607
Im still ridin with biden
Im still feelin the bern
Im still jumping on (gary) Johnson (capitalized for BIGNESS not for notational accuracy)

Why?
Because:
>bernie sanders shits on Israel and is pro Palestine
>Biden is pro WEED dude lmao
>JOHNSON lol
Globalism is not so bad. Boomers are.

>>22827613
exactly, i can never read through these threads, too much fucking walls of text, if you're gonna write so much jargon then at least format it

>>22825607
I am a far right's leftist subverter.
Here's my ideology:
Sexy socialism,
Basically your rights are determined by your SEX OBJECT status and OBJECTIFIED your mom is by the MALE GAZE of $EX¥ FINANCE

It's basically feminist Natsoc: mom's rights uber alles.
All have a birth right that the government determines with your birth certificate. Your mother get a share of your life's earnings like a life tax and your dad's spouse stakes. Stonks are genetic stocks.
Brith rights are custody battles life long.
LET THE SEX WAR BEGIN!

>>22827187
What is an example of "colonial racism" that actually exists in the contemporary world other than Israel?

The fact that international d9nance capital saw National Socialist Germany as more of a threat to their hegemony than the USSR, should ring some alarm bells. NS also had a right and a left wing within it

>>22827516
Gay-sellschaftliche anarchisten

>>22828147
>The legal compulsion of association treats a person like property.
I can see sense to that view. As a couple of people in this thread correctly diagnosed, I am sympathetic to anarchist communism, so I'm used to not really thinking of normative commitments as being legally enforced (I'm told that existentialist ethics would appeal to me for this reason, and Buber tracks). When I bit the bullet and was like "yes I want mandated friendships" I was thinking of it in the sense of me autonomously mandating myself to be someone's friend, not in the sense of a legal mandate. I prefer this way of thinking because there's lots of things that people should do but a society that forced them to do it would be dystopian. I don't know where I stand on that nowadays, since I don't consider myself a leftist anymore.
Still, I'm unsure a legal mandate of association treats a person like property. If the state forces two people to stay married, are they the property of each other? I don't think so, seems nonsensical to own someone that owns you, and yet that's forced association. What about forcing kids to go to school, are they being treated as property because of that (many anarchists would actually say yes lol, but their view is not the norm and so presumably not yours)?
>Because it interferes with an individual’s ability to be virtuous, for both master and slave.
I think you misunderstood my question, I meant if you think mothers should unconditionally love children, then how is that not condoning slavery as per your accusation toward me?
>I know i sound harsh but I don’t want to give off the impression that I’m constantly cutting off people for the barest slight. I recently decided to no longer reach out to a person and put in effort to cultivate a relationship, so the idea of mandatory friendship or unconditional love toward this person made me uncomfortable, especially knowing I’ll see them again as we run in the same circles.
Understandable! In fact I mentioned my abusive father earlier, and how I actually did cut him off for a period; my brother guilted me for that and it made me angry that he did. So I definitely know where you're coming from. I hope you don't *really* think that I'm some nasty person who wants state-mandated slave-friends, but were rather trying to make me reflect through argument. I myself am no saint in this regard and cutting off every person in my life has crossed my mind at least once (although I feel bad about it). I think we can agree many people do it way too easily though, and also that it's sad when someone is alone and such a person should be extended a hand where the opportunity arises.

>>22825607
i was sort of left wing, at least economically speaking, for a while, and maybe i still am in a sense. i just think that people who have it in their power to prevent massive amounts of human suffering without having to sacrifice their own security have an obligation to do so. i crunched the numbers once and Bill Gates could house EVERY homeless person in the US and still have multiple luxurious houses of his own. so why shouldn't he be compelled to do so? is there any real moral justification for the government not forcing him to do that? and that's just one man. i also don't think any of this is at odds with an essentially right-wing ideology

>>22825607
>>22825609
I feel like I’m the opposite, I’m a ‘rightist’ who’s been reading as much as I can about political philosophy I’ve found the Marxist stuff very compelling as a social scientific outlook. I’m not a ‘Leftist’ in most senses, I still have the same non-mechanical outlook on how human societies develop, but I think Marxism provides insight into part of it. Particularly Ardono and Marcuse among the frankfurters.

>>22825607
Altho my beliefs have changed I still consider myself liberal & I do not consider the Democrats liberal; all politicians are cunts really.
OG liberals used to risk their lives & kill tyrants. Modern leftists are frauds.

Also my beliefs have genuinely gotten more conservative (still liberal tho). Conservatism is about self preservation above all, which is rational. It doesnt make sense to spread things so thinly.

> I considered myself a communist for the past 15 years until about a year ago.
Marx makes excellent critiques but his proposed solutions dont work.

> 1. interacting with leftists
What people claim to be isnt what they actually are. Love this quote from succession about Hollywood; '...your enlightened liberal ruthlessly segregated community...'

>>22828246
>>22825607
I'm also mainly right wing but have become very interested in certain left wing ideas. Can anyone place where I'm at? This is my ideal society
Left wing ideas
>raise minimum wage a lot, should be at least $40-$50 now to keep up with inflation (minimum wage used to have the purchasing power of today's $40 50 years ago)
>change the entire debt based currency system to a social credit system (look into this, it's not that you think it is)
>outlaw usury
>heavily penalize companies for injustices against workers (similar to workers comp that we have now)

Right wing ideas
>ideally Christian faith or at least Christian morals as the foundation of society
>ban abortion
>protect the family unit, paternalistic and traditional mindset of society (anti-social corrosive elements will not be allowed whether that's abusive parenting or people who decry the family unit and straight people)
>emphasis on wider community serving as the larger protective unit of individuals outside the family
>people can leave their doors unlocked because crime will be more strictly punished and laws more enforced while everyone will be well off enough and trustful of one another that they won't feel the need to steal
>deport all immigrants who cannot pass a stringent national test that weeds out whether they truly want to and are able to assimilate
>very strict on immigration from this point forward
>recreational drugs are outlawed
>porn is outlawed
>alternative sexualities will not be viewed as valid and not shown in media or taught about in schools

The right will call me a useless communist for the first ideas and the left will call me a turbo chud for the others

>>22827348
>>22827385
You need a small group of smart friends, not midwit e-acquaintances. The internet used to be replete with a myriad of such small, likeminded communities, but it is far too profitable a tool to exclude the unintelligent masses. Eternal September and all. So you just have to be a lot more deliberate in cultivating the right type of people.

I agree, though, the massive political /pol/arization post-2016 is so fucking exhausting. The majority of people follow one of a severely limited selection of leaders and dogmas, unable to think for themselves. They may have never been able to think for themselves, but at least before they followed less annoying shit that didn't inevitably permeate every aspect of their life and social interaction. But hey, that's what you get by focusing on (and thereby entrenching and legitimizing) identity politics instead of economics as the purview of the state.

>>22825607
>Marx, Graeber
You’re a liar or a absolute fool for 15 years. Don’t want to read the whole thread untangling this.
>leftist have the same values as liberals
Nonsense. Again you lie or are an absolute fool. Whereas you could make a case for Marxists and liberals goals, the leftist goal is drastically different
>institutional preferences
Here plainly enough we can see you haven’t ever read a lick of leftist literature, save maybe Marxian brand state socialism, and have probably never heard of what a commune is supposed to be. You read Bakunin and Kropotkin and you’ll learn the only “institution” is the community itself.
>I am skeptical of freedom
And there we have it. A coward looking for his cage.
>I am opposed to individuals
And nature. Of course. You were born in an artificial environment and cannot stand the idea of natural living. You want the binders of regimented conformity.
You were never a leftist. A Marxist, a fascist, you have always been.

Fianal
> I think leftists desire professionalization through it in practice. One of my realizations has been that leftists want to maintain impersonal relations;
Leftists want *community* back. Very friendly communities and large close-knit families relations
You want this? You have to renounce your Marxist tendencies

>>22828354
I've read some Kropotkin and thought he was okay, not great.
>Nonsense. Again you lie or are an absolute fool. Whereas you could make a case for Marxists and liberals goals, the leftist goal is drastically different
Well of course you're going to think that, the whole point of leftists (with rare exceptions) is trying to "expose" liberal institutions as fulfilling some values other than those promised. But I dislike the promised values.
>Leftists want *community* back. Very friendly communities and large close-knit families relations
If you're correct about this then I'm happy to call myself an anarcho-communist again. But it hasn't been my observation, honestly, outside of maybe Bookchin.

>>22828315
>>raise minimum wage
That point is moot since taxes should be lowered instead

>>22828374
We're gonna need a lot of taxes for government programs that help the people
For example mentally invalids need to be kept in high quality wards

>>22828315
This is moreorless national socialism

>>22828384
Not necessarily so. Social programs, if implemented correctly, can pay for themselves

>>22828395
Most /pol/ retards don't realize this and think protecting big business and cutting programs is the definition of being epic far right
>>22828400
Well that would be ideal. Not sure how invalids could generate money unless you send them to the coal mines which I don't think is morally worth the money they would make.

>>22827558
I seriously suggest you let go of politics at the very least until you're of sound mins.
Get some actual therapy, not whatever scammers you went to who simply stamp labels on your emotional disregupation and offer you pills/disability checks.

>>22828413
Invalids don't constitute a large portion of a population in a healthier society.

Yeah, the big business thing is a Marxist slur against NS and fascism. They were actual socialists, in a far more successful way than any implementation in the USSR

20th century Communism is an ideology and it functions like a religion at a certain point.

See if you can find Norman Finkelstein talk about the day he realized his Maoist ideology was bunk.

Many go through this process OP, but if you can be self critical after 15 years speaking the lingo then you will be okay and you are a good mind. Don't be ashamed, and don't swing over and be a reactionary.

Only ask what is true and try to figure it out seriously.

>>22825607
Sounds like your an anarchist

>>22828436
I'm going to therapy. Thanks for the concern though. And yeah I've been avoiding politics over the past few months for my mental health, today is just a short break from the break.

>>22828315
Anon you replied to here, those ideas are all only 'left wing' if you're in a conservative American state. Per Marxism, they're all reactionary ideas (as they're meant to improve the current state of things rather than abolish it). I wouldn't disagree with any position there if it was policy, but I don't think you're taking anything far enough.
I'd imagine you're, in the grand scheme of things, a pretty normal person in your politics? Maybe you liked Paleoconservatism? I was there once too. My issue always has been a deep sense that the liberal worldview (liberal as in post-18th century) is enormously wrong, and any politics which uses any Enlightenment thought as a premise cannot be correct. It wasn't until I actually read critics of the Enlightenment (Marxists, Phenomenologists, Existentialists, Frankfurt Marxists) that I felt I could actually explain what was wrong. You are American, right?
>>22825841
I mean yeah, how can a political entity be stateless? Even Marxists walked back the 'the state will fade away' shit. But based on this you've anarchist tendencies I never took seriously.
>>22827710
Real, here's your (You)
>>22828171
You too. Just to throw a bone to the ideologyspergs

>>22825607
Not sure if this has been asked OP, but are you Christian?

>>22827787
>Do you not feel sorry for lonely people?
Sometimes I do. Sometimes I think they bring it on themselves.

>Do you not see why unconditional love is valuable?
I see its value in certain settings but extending it to the whole world or even just everyone you know cheapens it. I also don't think it's possible for any person to love unconditionally at all times. And I'm not talking about cutting people out of your life for one annoying trait, but in your case what was the point in making peace with your dad after he abused you? Social shunning is an ancient punishment, and sometimes it is actually deserved. Answering hate and harm with love may make you feel like a nice and good person but do people really learn not to hurt others then? If you let someone like your brother continually treat you poorly he's just going to keep doing it, right?

>I don't feel like I've insisted on this, quite the contrary: it's other people in my life (except my brother...) who always insist on this WRT me
And you keep bringing that up

>>22827187
>colonial racism

You're an idiot and there's no such thing.
It's globalism and jewish strongarming of the west.

>>22828560
Yes I'm American and can you explain to me how those things aren't considered leftist even in Europe?

>>22825607
You're realixing ideology won't save us. You want "undonditional love" but this isn't possible in ideology, because everything is done from flimsy human ideals, which stand on a foundation of sand and can never be powerful enough to be seen as objective morality. Now you've had your political ideological phase looking for answers, but gotten nowhere and instead realising the issues of modernity stem from enlightenment and 20th century ideologies alike.

You're a Christian OP. That's the only religion you get unconditional love. Everything will make sense after you read some Lewis and Chesterton.

I used to be a homosexual.

>>22825607
>>22825609
So basically, like all leftists, you are a delusional and useless retard

>>22825607
You are a wordcel, and it shows. You're just dumb. What's your IQ? 110?

>>22828660
You don't want to believe it, but Christianity is an ideology too

>>22828687
Obviously you believe that because your not a Christian.

There's a difference between believing something because a human said it, and believing something because God said it.

>>22828687
Revelation /= ideology

>>22825607
Write your book and promote the shit out of it.

>>22828572
No. Interesting question, what makes you ask? I can see the relation to agape.
>Sometimes I think they bring it on themselves.
One thing that puts me at odds with most people is that I resist (or maybe even lack, idk) intuitions of desert. Retributive justice never made sense to me. You can also see it in my economic views.
>in your case what was the point in making peace with your dad after he abused you?
He himself was mentally unwell and a pretty lonely person. He also tried very hard to change so I felt motivated to forgive him. Idk, I just think it's bad to make people suffer. If he isn't making me suffer then what's the point?
>If you let someone like your brother continually treat you poorly he's just going to keep doing it, right?
I can see where you're coming from, but in general I am averse to punishment. I'd rather he change for intrinsic reasons.
>>22828683
117. Although my verbal score was like in the 91st percentile lol.

>>22828812
Meant to tag >>22828608 after first greentext.

>>22828812
The world is suffering. You have to kill or be killed.

>>22828631
True, European colonialism never happened
How could I have been so blind

>>22827301
>Anything is not possible.
Blatantly incorrect. I can see someone hasn't thought through their ideas on a deep level. What the fuck is "natural law" in a quantum matrix of energetic potentials? Lmao
Everything is possible which is precisely why things like love are important
Humans hold the potential to build a situation for themselves, unwittingly, that is worse than biblical Hell

The central problem of leftism after Lenin is that it lost all faith in itself as something practicable in the real world. After Lenin it becomes self-evident that you can either be a brutalized Stalinist slave, or abandon leftism (as many leftists of the '20s and '30s did, often very bitterly or turning on it and becoming world-weary conservatives), or worst of all: become an "academic" under capitalism and write and think about leftism while never actually doing anything.

Adorno and Horkheimer both knew the student movements of the '60s were pathetic and were fundamentally bourgeois. They saw the writing on the wall. They at least maintained their ambivalence about being bourgeois intellectuals and antiquarians of Marxism in a world in which Marxism was effectively a domesticated animal living out its old age in the master's house. But their disciples were naive enthusiasts and utopian socialists like Marcuse and frankly bourgeois social-democratic accommodationists like Habermas. You might think western Stalinists like Althusser fall into the Stalinist category but they actually fall into the pathetically bourgeois category too, with a Stalinist veneer on top.

There is no honest way to be a leftist after Lenin. Especially after the fall of the USSR, you are JUST a social democrat. No matter how many tankie paintjobs you give yourself. Even the ones who go fight for Kurdish commies or whatever are just gay art kids from New York who take the Ultimate Plunge for Art Kid Street Cred: killing brown people in some shithole (while making sure to pause to take selfies). Not even worth mentioning so-called anarchists, who have nothing in common with their founding fathers. Just a bunch of left communitarians and utopian socialists with rich dads.

Consequently nobody who identifies as a "leftist" or who is typically called a leftist today is a leftist. Leftism is by necessity and by definition where praxis is and there is no praxis on the soi-disant "left." Third world socialists are also boring unless you are actually from that country and actually working class. Yet another LARP for art kids. "Let me memorize all the brown people movements!" Wow, glad I met you at Rochelle's party! You're a Geography major too??? We should vape and play Settlers some time! Fags. "I work in the coffee shop because I'm working class." Dad is a financial consultant.

If you want to be a leftist, go where praxis is and commit to the bit. Hint: Praxis is not in black communities full of people going schizo at 46 because they have not had a steady job in their entire lives and they have smoked heroic amounts of weed literally every single day since they were 13. Nor is it in Hispanic communities with an average IQ of 80.

>>22829000
If "real leftism," and for that same matter, "real fascism" were both able to be subsumed by the modern system of capital, than the logical conclusion to derive is that the solution to our woes is extra-political.

>>22829000
>become an "academic" under capitalism and write and think about leftism while never actually doing anything.
Haha this is basically most of them lol
It's just a big LARP

>>22829000
>Just a bunch of left communitarians and utopian socialists with rich dads.
Can confirm as OP.

>>22829000
>>22829078
Michael Heinrich lectures unions, Andrew Kliman tries to popularize Marxist Humanism through the MHI, Michael Lebowitz was a consultant for AES countries, I think it's safe to say David Harvey and Slavoj Zizek try to reach the public and in the latter's case keep in touch with third worldist movements. I don't think there's much substance to this claim that western academics do nothing practical. Like I think all of these people are more active than Adorno and Horkheimer who never even joined a party.

>>22828812
>I'd rather he change for intrinsic reasons
Good luck with that and enjoy being treated like shit in the meantime

>>22828652
Oh I’m American too. The actual issue is that America, unlike pretty much all European nations, has no history before the scientific revolution and the enlightenment. When you’re American and engaging in political thought, you generally start by assuming the assumptions of the enlightenment. We can’t help it; it’s internalized as part of our psychology. That’s why the furthest left conceivable American position is socialist Democrat (NOT entirely the same as Euro Democratic socialists), because Americans tend to assume the basic framework of American politics is already perfect. You don’t have the true richness of continental philosophy in America, and its resulting political nuance (on the right or left)
But in Europe your ideas would be center-left moderate social democrat positions, which is still a descendant of classical liberalism.
>>22828812
I ask because there are various forms of Religious Socialism which offer what you seem to be seeking. I’m Catholic and Catholic Anarchism has attracted me at times in the past

>>22829000
>>22829100
So the only legitimate Marxists today are the MAGA movement Marxist-Leninists?

>>22829181
Thanks and I won't.

>>22827873
Didn't catch this post but I agree with most of what you say. It's unclear to me whether you think this but I think normative pressure isn't really a negative incentive - unless perhaps it's done very dogmatically - but a form of persuasion.
>But desire can’t be imposed from on high.
Maybe not in a forceful sense but I think you can obviously create an intrinsic desire to do such a thing through persuasion and normative pressure. What I have a problem with is freedom being cited as a reason in itself to do something; you should exercise your freedom ethically and others should be free to criticize how you exercise it. From what I understand this is an existentialist non-liberal notion of freedom.

>>22829224
So it's ok for others to deliberately do "evil" to you, but you won't engage in the lesser "evil" of putting an end to that? You're just a masochist, man

>>22825607
no opinion on your final stance OP but props to you for leaving the left after long, sustained engagement with its ideas. most of the people on /lit/ who hate leftism have never actually read any substantive left thinkers -- they've been memed into kneejerk right-wing stances. I disagree with where you ended up but I can't fault you.

>>22829310
Not OP but one of the posters above, very based response. What are your positions, just out of curiousity as someone else who takes ideas seriously

>>22829000
I still like Mao.

>All individual and all specific things have their births, development, and deaths. Every person must die, because he was born. Man must die, and Chang San [i.e., any Tom, Dick or Harry] being a man, Chang San must die. None can see Confucius who lived 2,000 years ago, because he had to die. Mankind is born, and therefore mankind must also die. The earth was born, and so the earth must also die. Nonetheless, when we say that mankind will die and the earth will die, it is different from what Christians say about the end of the world. When we talk about the death of mankind and the death of the earth, we mean that something more advanced than mankind will come to replace it, and this is a higher stage in the development of things. I saw that Marxism also has its birth, its development and its death. This may seem to be absurd. But since Marx said that all things which happen have their death, how can we say that this is not applicable to Marxism itself? To say that it won’t die is metaphysics. Naturally, the death of Marxism means that something higher than Marxism will come to replace it.

[...]

>Objects all must go towards [their] opposite side. The more the praise, the heavier the fall. I am preparing to fall and be broken to pieces. That is no worry. Matter cannot be destroyed, but it is shattered into pieces. The whole world has over 100 [communist] parties. Most of the parties don’t believe in Marxism-Leninism. [These] people have also beaten Marx and Lenin into pieces, so what of us?

>>22829000
>Consequently nobody who identifies as a "leftist" or who is typically called a leftist today is a leftist
This is where you're wrong. They are leftists. They just follow different ideologies from leftists of the past. Leftism is not a coherent belief system, it's a spectrum of ideals. The idea that Leftism is synonymous with Marxist ideals is ridiculous when leftist politics pre-date Marx. There is also a case to be made that today's leftists still are Marxists of the cultural Marxist variety, maybe not a correct case but it's a compelling interpretation nonetheless.

>>22829308
I didn't say that the first part is okay. I don't really believe in retaliation for evils done.

Damn you people really care about starving people to death

>>22829454
As we all know, nobody has ever starved to death under capitalism.

>>22829462
Correct, nobody has had to turn to massive amounts of cannibalism under capitalism like they had had to under communism.

>>22828184
China is also national socialist and no one fears them except burgers

>>22825607
I was a lefty , then fresh out of college I worked at a non-profit for 3 years. Now I am center - right leaning. Funny thing that situation is pretty common

>>22829448
But is it retaliation to just remove yourself from the situation? If you let it continue happening and don't do anything about it, you must be okay with it to some extent

>>22829310
Thanks.To be honest I'm still unsure of what I am, I'm just to the point where I don't care about being considered part of the "leftist" club anymore, so I've lost the pressure to conform.
>most of the people on /lit/ who hate leftism have never actually read any substantive left thinkers -- they've been memed into kneejerk right-wing stances.
Yeah it's hilarious, so many attempted critiques I see on here are a joke. Like that person who thought they were schooling me on Marx based on shit they picked up from r/badeconomics until I posted >>22827660 and they stopped responding lol.

>>22829634
I think so? I don't think being hurt by a loved one and being unwilling to hurt them back is an endorsement of the first hurt, just a sort of asymmetrical other-regardigness.
Also, on an intuitive level, I think there's a difference between removing oneself from a situation and like completely cutting someone out from any present or future care or companionship.

>>22829650
I am that anon, and you are the joke, probably female too. How am I supposed to school you on Marx when you believe in a conspiracy theory pushed by revisionists that capital doesn’t represent Marx? You were unable to respond to the problems of communism raised by Hayek in road to serfdom too, what right do you have to feel like you won the argument?

Your whole movement is a sham, you faggots are unable to discuss the veracity of your ideas, instead you focus on discussing inane bullshit like what label you should get from what kind of marxist am I internet quizzes, and what leftists are doing with each other. You communists never try to educate and recruit nonmarxists, besides trying to scare people into conformity with a collective for protection from the evils of the bad collectives, instead you circle jerk each other and strategize by trying to torture your enemies making the main virtue of your movement “I am winning the war hahaha” because you cannot educate people on something that doesn’t make sense. Logical fallacies are your bread and butter, all your arguments get reduced to them, usually bulverism. The real purpose of leftism is just to centralize power to protect rich elites from being out competed in a fair fight and you are just a useful idiot.

>>22829685
It's not a conspiracy theory, it's careful scholarship. Admittedly there are still a lot of Marx scholars who believe that he had an LTV but I prefer the New Marx Reading. I just thought it was funny that you thought you knew Marx better than me when I was on another level. I actually think it's your ideology that's led by bad actors, contemporary Austrian economics is mostly due to Koch brothers funding to universities.

>>22829713
I never thought I knew marx better than you, I know that marx is not something worth knowing, and you give no reason to believe he is by picking and choosing what parts of capital you want ascribed to him.

Your ideology is good for bad actors, I don’t merely think you are funded by them, you want to centralize power, do you really not see the inherent risk of centralizing it for a bad actor? Do you really have no second thoughts fighting your dreaded enemy of monopoly with monopoly? The mises institute is a profitable organization, and lou rockwell could easily fund it himself, what koch brothers austrian economics are you referring to? Austrian economics makes SENSE, you do not, clearly that doesn’t mean anything to you with how shamelessly you will say things like decentralized planned economy. Cultural hegemony in essence is just plain idealism, you could apply it as an argument for anything you want, any system is possible in your eyes and nothing matters except how we direct the people, you live in a retarded fantasy land devoid of external factors and you just. don’t. care.

>>22829196
The problem with that is that Marx came after the enlightenment not before

>>22828413
>Most /pol/ retards don't realize this and think protecting big business and cutting programs is the definition of being epic far right

No, no they do not.

>>22827773
Ah that place sucks

>>22829650
truth.
>>22829685
>I am that anon
no the fuck you're not -- embarrassing!

>>22829778
I know. Your point?

Collectivism (socialism or communism) will never work on the national scale because it relies on everyone always treating the good of the collective (the class) as paramount, and working towards that instead of working for individual gains. Collectivism only works in small groups where the benefits of an individual's own contribution is clearly and obviously visible to that individual, and the individual has a genuine care for the people in the group he contributes to. Which is why collectivism never works well at scale and can only be sustained by force. Prove me wrong.

>>22825607
>What changed my mind was two things: 1. interacting with leftists and 2. reading more historical leftist literature
>I was a leftist until I actually knew what it was.
What a garbage thread.

>>22829790
You claim Americans have a built-in enlightenment era perspective to politics. This would imply we completely understand Marxism since it’s clearly left wing (save for Stirner) which most of us do not. If that wasn’t true then our understanding of politics would be theocracy versus realism, or something like Plato versus Aristotle, which a lot (Clifford Bates figures into this) Americans completely understand. Your argument holds no water.

>>22829787
Fucking retard leftist lmao, god you are so low IQ, truly a great representation of the left

>>22829801
Yeah good thing he came to his senses

>>22829801
They are still a leftist, these faggots are debating whether or not they are a strict marxist or just a biqueer demisocialist

>>22825607
It sounds like what you want is a return to the familial warmth of the pre-agrarian tribe. Your intellect is rebelling against the self-detachment of abstract rationality and you are working backwards, unknowingly towards the statistical rationality of your genetic heritage.

>>22829805
Marx wasn’t an enlightenment thinker. He regularly criticized the ‘dead objects of empiricism’ which half the enlightenment observed. The strongest critics of the enlightenment today are Marxist Frankfurt school of thought philosophers.
I’m just saying American culture’s preconceived notions, and thus the preconceived notions of American people, objectively stem from the branch of the enlightenment going on in 18th century Britain. Not that individuals can’t study or understand other philosophy. It’s an objective statement about American culture, you saying it ‘holds no water’ is based on nothing comparatively.

>>22825607
As a life-long righty, I've been trying to learn more about leftists, if only because I admire their will to power. They get shit done and we simply don't. What material do you suggest for people open to the "intellectual Left" of days gone by?

I'd argue leftist leanings can only exist in an environment already secured by some sort of structure; meaning leftism only comes about when people have nothing better to do than sit around and think about how we can transfer the wealth of people who do things to those who do nothing.

>>22830002
Marx is in fact just a continuation of the Enlightenment, particularly the economists. He is more Anglo than German. Most "counter-Enlightenment" figures are really just products of it too like Nietzsche and Rousseau. The only thinkers totally out of the fold of the Enlightenment are people like Ruskin and Carlyle hence why they aren't too fondly remembered today despite their proto-socialist leanings (also, Muslim thinkers)

>>22830008
>They get shit done and we simply don't.
You think it's a coincidence that lefty vs. chud nowadays often translates to rich vs. poor, upper class vs. lower class, beneficiaries of liberalism vs. its casualties?

>>22830014
historically proven to be untrue

>>22829213
Those people are either depressed twins rallying behind their debate daddies who are nepo baby twitch streamers with mansions but who continually grift off their followers. But of course never do anything. Zoomers are pathetic.

Good, time to be apolitical. It's good to realize that there are much better things in life that bring you enjoyment or fascinate your mind than reading people chewing each other over boring repetitive stuff. Go read Moby Dick or War and Peace. They both are great novels that may make you fall in love with literature, and surely are better than whatever political books you read.

>>22829540
Kek this. Being a kind of ferverent defender of social justice, equality and a equal-distribution-economy hoping to make an impact in a non-profit you get red pulled very quickly how insufferable, lazy and incompetent thr people working there are. Yet their salaries are in the top 20%, and they use it to move to high end white neighborhoods and put their children in all-white private schools, despite their incessant pandering to and selfsatisfaction of creating a more ecomically, ethnically and culturally diverse society. At least companies are more honest: we know their intentions which is to make as much money off of as many people as possible. And they're often rewarded for creating products that actually solve a problem (marketing can be deceptive and vile though). Non profits get a bunch of government handouts for doing nothing, as long as they send back some bogus report that shows they used the money for projects that had some impact, often for abstract causes like "strengthening the trust for democracy" or something like that, while most of that money goes to their pay checks.

>>22825607
>>22825609
I might be telling you stuff you already know, so sorry in advance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WEIRDest_People_in_the_World

That might go some ways to explaining why the people you've come across are insular and prefer to be alone. Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich and Democratic societies produce a unique kind of alienated "individual" compared to other countries/regions.

>weirdo leftists I was encountering were just unread compared to me. I still think there might be an element of that, they often don't know about passages I quote to them
I called myself a "right winger" for damn near seven years without even knowing what the fuck a "right winger" was. Most political engagement boils down to petty point-scoring from failsons looking to shore up a facile self-concept (myself included).

I was never "political", I never believed in anything. It was all copesville shit, a LARP. Real politics involves communities, and going outside and doing things with other people is the last thing anybody wants (as you've ascertained). It's better to stay inside and claim the credit afforded to activists without any of the hardships they endure.

Christopher Lasch might be up your alley, but you probably already know about him. Wish I had more to offer you, you seem like an interesting person.

>>22830256
Nice try kid, but there's no such thing as being a-political. Being politically passive is a political act itself. Man is a political animal is one of the most basic truths we know since the ancient Greeks. You're part of a society, you earn and spend money, pay taxes, take part of society in different ways. It's always indirectly political when you're partaking socially within a governmentally controlled society. Only way to be a-policial is moving to the woods and being self sufficient like Ted K. Saying you're a-political is just a sneaky way of saying "you're above it all", superior to those plebs obsessed with politics. You're not.

>>22830260
Sowell said he was disillusioned because they ousted him for doing his job, he was trying to figure out the minimum wage for puerto rico and when he devised a system for determining it everyone looked at him like he was the devil for putting them out of work

>>22830271
>You're part of a society, you earn and spend money, pay taxes, take part of society in different ways.
You are an individual*, you earn and spend money, you are stolen from by the government*, you are grouped into a nonexistent abstraction of people as a whole in order to justify that theft*

>>22827345
>Fair enough. Marx believes that it is human nature to enjoy working out of intrinsic motivation,
Wow, I can see why you would say "look it up" instead, since this is a retarded simplistic nonsense belief, demonstrably untrue if you examine literally any society ever.

>>22829806
>he doesn't know that high IQ is correlated with left-leaning political views

>>22830343
>this is a retarded simplistic nonsense belief
>>22827345 is oversimplifying to get the point across. it's more accurate to say that what makes people people, what distinguishes us from animals, is that they purposefully modify their environment to suit their needs. (basically.) we can point to other animals that also modify their environment, but they don't do it out of free will and they don't produce *more* things that they then use to modify other aspects of their environment. so for example a beaver builds dams; but they do it from instinct, not conscious choice. and beavers don't construct dam-building machinery from wood and use that to build the dam. only people do things like that.

you could look this up yourself, but you won't, because you don't actually have any interest in learning about your ideological opponents. you'd rather feel smart online. this is the thing about chuds that really makes me sad -- I want them to be smart. I want them to be worthy intellectual rivals to the left. but they're not, they never are, they've never seriously thought about what they profess to believe, they can never accurately articulate their opponents' stances, they've never even read anything from their OWN side. they just regurgitate whatever sounds le based. this is why I have so much respect for >>22825607, a man who actually put in the work and decided against it rather than kneejerk screeching

>>22829769
>Your ideology is good for bad actors, I don’t merely think you are funded by them, you want to centralize power, do you really not see the inherent risk of centralizing it for a bad actor?
Well I think one of the better critiques of socialism is that unifying economic and political power leads to authoritarianism. That historically seems to be true. Still, I am hopeful a decentralized planning system like Parecon can work. You should check it out, it's really not that bad: https://participatoryeconomy.org/
>Cultural hegemony in essence is just plain idealism, you could apply it as an argument for anything you want, any system is possible in your eyes and nothing matters except how we direct the people
I mean, I guess this is true? I can certainly imagine many kinds of societies (including ones I would disapprove of) being driven by cultural hegemony. I'll acknowledge it's pure idealism, I'm a pretty idealistic person. Although, you should be aware that Marx's arguments for socialism rest on nothing but materialism, he started out as an idealist but after beig critiqued by Max Stirner (an egoist) he started making all of his argumentation without reference to idealism.
>>22829795
I don't feel like this tracks particularly well with the historical record. Did socialist countries fail due to scale making fellow-feeling impossible? I don't think so. Many people risked their lives and died for the establishment of such countries in the first place.
>>22829809
The leftists call me a reactionary and the reactionaries call me a leftist, what does this mean?
>>22829920
Likely! You're not the first person to make this claim. I've never found the idea of anarcho-primitivism disgusting the way other people seem to.
>>22830002
>Marx wasn’t an enlightenment thinker.
I agree with this but you should acknowledge that it is a controversial claim, he is often seen as an enlightenment thinker.
>He regularly criticized the ‘dead objects of empiricism’ which half the enlightenment observed.
He only started doing this in his late works, like Grundrisse onward. Before that he believed in empirical transparency.>>22830008
>They get shit done and we simply don't.
I actually feel like they don't get anything done due to endless squabbling.
>What material do you suggest for people open to the "intellectual Left" of days gone by?
Try the authors I listed in my OP. I think a good entry point for what I like about Marx is On the Jewish Question, then Notes on James Mill, then the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, then Critique of the Gotha Program. All of these are pretty short except the 1844 Manuscripts.
You might also want to check out Heinrich's "An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx's 'Capital'" for a summary of his magnum opus.
>>22830081
I can see the others, but how is Nietzsche a continuation of the Enlightenment? I see no resemblance.
>>22830256
I agree, this approach has been relaxing for me.

>>22830540
>>22830263
Yeah I already know about the WEIRD book and Lasch, thanks for the suggestions though.
>>22830271
I don't think passively benefiting from society automatically makes someone political. Being political requires a much more active engagement. You should read Hume's "Of the Original Contract".
>>22830496
Yeah, IIRC there was some study that showed libertarianism is correlated with low intelligence lol.
>>22830507
Good summary!

>>22827091
>What are you now?
An adult with a job who votes for right-wing conservatives.

>>22830579
>An adult with a job who votes for right-wing conservatives.
>fuck you! I got mine!
conservatism is literally just greed and sexual anxiety as an ideology, isn't it. you're scared that a poor black man with a big dick will take your money and fuck your wife. that's all it is

>>22830600
My country does not have that many black people in it and I hope to keep it that way.

>>22830602
fascinated by how this exactly demonstrates what I'm saying

>>22830602
I feel like the only way someone can have irrationally hostile views like this toward black people is if they've never interacted with any meaningfully, which checks out. Some of the nicest and most caring people I've met are black.

>>22830496
being liberal is not "leftist" number one and number two that chart is outdated and you may as well ba comparing the federalists vs the whig party. Since 2016 all those intelligent liberals are now far right nazis according to the leftist mouthbreaters like you. 90% of what you morons call the "far right" are actually left leaning liberals

>>22825607
Congratulations you are a
>The way I would summarize it is by saying that I'm opposed to individualism and think people should be loyal to others and form a strong sense of community from which nobody can be excluded.
National
>But I also think that modernity and its values inappropriately instrumentalizes people. I am opposed to professionalization (in the sense of paid labor), either by the market or the state, and think everything should be distributed freely and that individuals should work out of a motivation to help their fellow sentient beings
Socialist

>>22830653
>National
How? I specified that it has to be a community that nobody can be excluded from. Nationalism is inherently exclusionary.

>>22830651
Do you have any response to people that isn't forming conspiracy theories? And then you projected it onto me in >>22829685 lol.

>>22830540
Ok I am going to go through this parecon website and break it down with you
>Values
>Before designing new institutions, first we need to be clear what values a desirable economy should be based on. The key values of a participatory economy are defined as:
>Self-Management
>= For every individual to have a say in a decision based on the degree that they are affected by it.
>If we reject authoritarianism and top-down control in our political system, shouldn’t we also demand democracy in the economy too?
>In workplaces today, workers lower down in the hierarchy have very little meaningful control over their work lives. Many would support the idea of expanding democracy at work, but what exactly do we mean by economic democracy? It shouldn’t mean that everyone has a vote on every decision. A better approach is to call for self-management, defined as having a say in decisions in proportion to the degree you are affected by the outcome of a decision. If you are affected more than others by a decision, then you would have more say than they do; if you are affected less, you would have less say than they do.
This is just streamlining one of the worst aspects of democracy, tyranny of the majority. It is one thing to restrict voting rights but to do it in random ways based on value judgements of the people involved? Insanity. This is going to discourage people from being part of the class that is affected negatively, leading to shortages of work.
>Institutions in the workplace and wider economy should be organised in a way to maximise this decision-making norm. Self-management maximises human freedom by giving people control over their lives. The capacity to analyse and evaluate the consequences of our actions, choose among alternatives based on our assessments, and the ability to act on them are important human needs that any desirable economy should seek to fulfil.
I fucking lol at how all arguments are about freedom at the bottom of it, you are all just trying to minmax freedom through restricting rights for better outcomes, this is why I say libertarians are to politics what god is to philosophy, you are trying to beat us at our own game. This also necessitates centralization, all democracy does, we currently live under centralized government it just gets a lot worse when they meddle in the economy. It raises the question of who evaluates the consequences and for whom, who whom as Lenin once said, identifying a huge problem with power in general, and let us not forget the famous aphorism of lord acton, power corrupts.

After reading Dostoyevsky yes

>>22830735
>Justice
>= To fairly share burdens and benefits so that any differences in income from work are based on differences in effort or sacrifice.
Again the issue here will be shortages in work, nobody will do the less valuable work, presumably management if I my assumptions are correct about the intent of this statement.
>Today’s societies are the most unequal in human history. But what is a fair distribution of the burdens and benefits of economic activity?
This is untrue, we live in some of the most equal times in history, particularly before leftist economic involvement fuckery and the elimination of golden handcuffs for government monetary expansion, and the finance cartel of central banking, since the 70s. The growing wealth gap is a direct result of interference in the economy, not from a lack of it, the most hurt by our regulations are small business, you are hurting the little guy. Large businesses love regulation and have lobbyed for it for centuries.
>Income is each person’s share of the social product.
No, income is what you trade your work for.
>Most will agree that receiving greater income than someone else based on luck or having unfair advantage is not fair. Inheriting wealth, being born with favourable genetics or having access to better opportunities, training or information, are all factors beyond our control. The only factor we have direct control over is the level of effort or sacrifice we wish to make and therefore should form the moral basis for income for work.

>>22830738
Equality is not an end in itself, this is part of the big time retardation of leftism, nobody would want a world where we are all equally poor over unequally prosperous. Inheritance is an important aspect of property rights, an inheritance tax would reduce productivity and the general welfare of the society because there would be no reason to work after you have enough for yourself, it would hinder capital investment and the growth of firms which we depend on for the gainful employment this system wants to equalize. I know this does not outright call for an inheritance tax, but this needs to be said. What it is calling for though is a negation of the benefit taking advantage of better circumstances, which simply means that people will not take advantage of them. Do you not see the error in silencing those with better information? If there is no reward for it there is no reason to obtain better information. The main issue here is you cannot actually define value and by trying you will necessarily lose actual value.
>Effort or sacrifice can take many forms, such as choosing to work longer hours, or performing less pleasant or dangerous work. It is moral to also provide income based on need to those who are unable to work.
Sure I suppose the disabled are an issue but charity has a far better record of helping those in need than an inefficient government that takes a cut. Just let the christians handle it for petes sake. The less fortunate are also going to benefit from a superiorly productive economy reducing the prices of goods. While it may not be fair to be disabled, it is also unfair to enslave us to them, and you will have people hoping for million dollar wounds as they call them in the military.

>>22830739
>Solidarity
>= To foster an awareness of shared interests, togetherness and concern for the well-being of others.
>The logic of market economies is such that interests are pitted against each other, so that for one person to get ahead it is often at the expense of someone else. Instead, solidarity requires creating conditions that reveal how our interests are intertwined, so that for one person to advance we all advance in the spirit of mutual-aid, cooperation and togetherness.
Free markets are a shared interest, take Ayn Rands example of two people at a job interview for one job, it is in their best interest that they can both apply to it rather than it automatically going to one, it is not that one person gets it at the expense of another. Again the broke record issue here is why would anyone get ahead if they get the benefits for staying behind, you will create shortages.
>Solidarity is about fostering concern for the well-being of others and granting others the same consideration in their endeavours as we ask for ourselves. The ties in a society that bind people together as one have been a powerful creator of human well-being throughout human history. It is clear that for human beings, cooperation is an important part of human life and we should try to organize economic institutions to encourage instead of discourage people from acting out of solidarity with others.
The most powerful creator of human well being in history is capitalism, lol. This is just a baseless value judgement.
>cooperation is good b-because i-it just is okay!!!
It sounds like crabs in a bucket to me.

>>22830745
>Environmental Sustainability
>= To nurture our natural environment and protect it for future generations through conservation and sustainable practices.
>The climate and ecosystems on our planet Earth sustain all human life. It is therefore vital that while meeting our economic needs, that we protect and steward our natural environment without diminishing the ability of future generations to meet their needs and continue to progress. This means leaving future generations conditions at least as beneficial as those we enjoy today.
Climate change is just a meme to take away our freedom and centralize power like leftism in general but nonetheless I have responses. Goverments are inefficient and wasteful, this is an empirical fact of government controlled industries like waste management. What is profit but sustainability, the efficient maximizing of inputs for outputs, this goes back to the main problem of communism in general that you have no input costs and therefore cannot possibly calculate outputs. And this is communism, there is nothing here that hints at a decentralized market, more of your leftist predilection to just using whatever word implies good and not caring about the true meaning, which again is just because it isn’t a real movement but pure game theory to empower the elites. Environmental issues are not a new issue of modern times, it is a problem as old as time called the tragedy of the commons, and the solution is simply to not have commons. By parceling out all the land on earth, including the oceans, we can protect the earth as a legitimate investment of individuals. The ocean will never be fished out if the fisheries are privately owned, right now we encourage overfishing through government leasing of fishing licenses, encouraging everyone to get their fill in the time allotted. People treat rented property worse than owned property, it is just a fact. I highly recommend reading hans herman hoppes democracy the god that failed for deep thoughts on time preference. I will end by saying that energy companies lead the charge on clean energy because they need to take care of their stock which will be reduced if fossil fuels get depleted, but fossil fuels are far from depleted and we have more now than we ever expected to have left. The mises institutes youtube channel just put out a great miniseries on fossil fuels.

>>22825607
you were never a real leftist

>>22830748
>Efficiency
>= To use our scarce resources and human talents wherever they return the greatest increase in human well-being.
There is no reason to believe you can do this better than the free market.
>Many people who are critical of the present economic system are turned off by the word ”efficiency”. This is for two reasons: many seem to think that the word efficiency is the same as profit maximisation – which it is not, and secondly, we are often told that the virtue of free markets are that they are efficient – which they are not. For example, an efficient economy would not result in climate breakdown, financial crises, booms and busts and persistent unemployment.
Lol these are just central bank problems. Inflating the monetary supply is what causes booms and busts. You cannot conflate what we have now with capitalism, capitalism should have no government and hard money. At the very least hard money, not even minarchists would say otherwise.
>Efficiency means meeting our economic goals, with as little waste of resources, time, labour and energy as possible. If our goal is to maximise human well-being for all, then we don’t want to squander our scarce resources, or needlessly waste our time and energy performing burdensome labour or doing jobs with no social value.
Again government is empirically wasteful compared to free market operations of the same industries. Milton Friedman called this the soft budget constraint, citing that although there is always a budget constraint the governments is not damning until the currency collapses from printing, the lack of a budget constraint allows inefficiency to exist. You are banking on the government magically being the entrepreneur who makes it out of the 99 who fail.

>>22830752
>Diversity
>= To recognise that each individual is unique and to create a large variety of options for people to fulfill their lives.
And if too many people want the same out of the variety, what then? This is a fundamental issue of equality that I mentioned earlier in the thread and you didn’t respond to. Not everybody can live in the best place to live, not everybody can go on vacation to the best place to visit, at the best time.
Diversity refers to people having a large variety of choices to fulfil their needs and desires. Since humans show a large variety in preferences, tastes, potentials and lifestyles, the best life for one is not necessarily the best life for another. Variety adds to the richness of all our lives.
This whole section is just lmao, but how does the free market not provide diversity. In the USSR there was just one kind of car for the majority. This is actually supposed to be a real argument for communism, that it can be more efficient than capitalism because of its LACK of diversity. Hayek refuted this as well, I can’t remember exactly what he said though.
Diversity is about rejecting conformity, homogenisation and regimentation in favour of flourishing variety of options and outcomes in our lives. The other benefit diversity brings is not placing all our eggs into one basket. It is important to experiment with different ideas, explore different options, and encourage minority viewpoints, in case one path followed turns out to be wrong.
Ah yes, having different people will somehow save us from any potential market failure produced by fucking with peoples reasons to succeed. A good illustration of how the word somehow really means somebody.

In conclusion this is not decentralized and it doesn’t have a market, you are fucking retarded. Considering the typos I am quite scared of how much extra voting power the writer of this website is going to have.

>>22830752
>Diversity
>= To recognise that each individual is unique and to create a large variety of options for people to fulfill their lives.
And if too many people want the same out of the variety, what then? This is a fundamental issue of equality that I mentioned earlier in the thread and you didn’t respond to. Not everybody can live in the best place to live, not everybody can go on vacation to the best place to visit, at the best time.
>Diversity refers to people having a large variety of choices to fulfil their needs and desires. Since humans show a large variety in preferences, tastes, potentials and lifestyles, the best life for one is not necessarily the best life for another. Variety adds to the richness of all our lives.
This whole section is just lmao, but how does the free market not provide diversity. In the USSR there was just one kind of car for the majority. This is actually supposed to be a real argument for communism, that it can be more efficient than capitalism because of its LACK of diversity. Hayek refuted this as well, I can’t remember exactly what he said though.
Diversity is about rejecting conformity, homogenisation and regimentation in favour of flourishing variety of options and outcomes in our lives. The other benefit diversity brings is not placing all our eggs into one basket. It is important to experiment with different ideas, explore different options, and encourage minority viewpoints, in case one path followed turns out to be wrong.
Ah yes, having different people will somehow save us from any potential market failure produced by fucking with peoples reasons to succeed. A good illustration of how the word somehow really means somebody.

In conclusion this is not decentralized and it doesn’t have a market, you are fucking retarded.

>>22825607
>community
hmmm my communitay
>from which nobody can be excluded
even if i broke into your dormitory (individual rooms would be abolished after the revolution) and ejaculated all over your pillows every night?

now tell me brother, what's your poison? heroine, trans dick, self-asphyxiation

>>22830762
If you broke into their dorm and destroyed their stuff you would be a celebrated member of the proletariat with a slap on the wrist sentence where you get to bully them in the gulag like a slave master working for the guards while they serve out their 25 year sentence for having an opinion.

>>22825607
>and think everything should be distributed freely and that individuals should work out of a motivation to help their fellow sentient beings
this nigga thinks we live in a world of abundance
solve this riddle: how many sacks of rice can Bezos' expropriated yacht buy when there's no one farming rice?

>>22825609
You might be interested in monasticism and intentional Christian communities. I have one such community of about 20 families near me. They run farms and a small market and eschew most technology. They aren't Amish though, and grew up with technology. They use some batteries and solar power at time; it's really more about keeping things simple.

Also near me is a Trappist Abbey. There they run a farm and sell food. Now that most of the monks are older, I am not sure if they still do all the manual labor for the farm, I only saw two novices last time I was there and a few guys under 50.

But they live in community and want for nothing because they aren't trying to horde up wealth. Farming leaves you plenty of time, medieval peasants, even with their poor technology and less developed crop lines still worked significantly fewer hours than people today at a 9:5, like 1,200-1,400 hours versus 2,080 as the standard without why overtime. So they also write and make art, or crafts.

They keep to the Liturgy of the Hours, so they meet to sing hymns, chant the Psalms, and pray the traditional seven times a day.

What you come to see in these communities is that setting aside desires that only make us miserable leads to greater happiness. No longer striving, we can focus on the truly important. The Amish around me live almost a decade longer, staying fit enough to take care of themselves far longer, despite getting little medical care. They also have significantly higher networths despite using little technology and having to raise far more children simply because they aren't constantly consuming, etc.

I do think they are too closed off from the world though. The monks tend to get more right, they invite all people in and let them stay with them, and there are other orders that are even a good deal more active in their communities, running schools, shelters, and hospitals, etc.

>>22830770
>it's really more about keeping things simple.
it's usually more about keeping child rape out of the sight of the authorities

>>22830770
Communities like that need to be organized around faith. Secular attempts all fall apart in decades at best. There are no secular intentional communities spanning centuries, let alone millennia. After all, why should one not pursue egoism and wealth, commit adultery, etc. in a godless community? It there is no God, then everything is permitted.

To be sure, even more atheistic thinkers can identify the work of the Logos in moral life and history. You have your secular Hegelian, etc. Yet this unpersonal, abstract, emergent tendency towards moral perfection is never enough to motivate a lifetime of unconditional love for one's fellow men.

We must all become Alyoshas, and eventually Father Zosimas if we want to live in harmony. Alas, most of us here are Smerdyakovs, at best Dimitris or Ivans. Worse still, we're proud of being Ivans rather than Zosimas...

>>22830775
Why would predators go to the more contemplative orders? They go to a parish or to mendicant orders. I imagine some in the more ermetic orders to years without even seeing children, and they wouldn't have any reason to be alone with them.

Predators go where the kids are. The biggest institution for offenses against children (outside the family) is the public school system. Next is summer camps. That has everything to do with where the predators know to look.

>>22830750
This is exactly what I mean ironically.

>>22830804
i'm talking about the intentional community, not the monks. stop being facetious

>>22830775
>Teenagers who are biologically adults are bound in holy matrimony, have children, and enjoy 70 years of faithful marriage.
>"Nooooo! You groomed her! She can't get married, she needs to explore herself."
>Girl in secular world ends up having sex at the same time or even earlier, has been with 15 men by age 23, has been sodomized by then, has engaged in drunken one night stands, has been date raped three times, doesn't get married until she is 33. Has one kid before getting divorced after two years. Makes more money but has less financial security because of consooming.
>"Yasssss. So empowering!"

As yes, the horrible grooming or people like the Amish. How dare they get people married as they come or age! They need a 15 years of adolescence to "explore," in order to be happy.

>>22830750
Why? I might agree but what makes you say so?
>>22830738
I'm only going to respond to disagreements not based on differing values, since your initial charge is that the economy won't "work", not that it's unfree or whatever.
>but to do it in random ways based on value judgements of the people involved?
I don't think what's being suggested is doing it in "random ways". It says in proportion to how individuals are affected, that's not random. For the record I'm actually opposed to democracy, but I'm not convinced by uour statement here (which your claim of work shortages is antecedent on).
>Again the issue here will be shortages in work, nobody will do the less valuable work
IIRC they plan on equally distributing "empowering" and "disempowering" work to individuals through a coupling mechanism, so I don't see why this would happen.
>The growing wealth gap is a direct result of interference in the economy, not from a lack of it, the most hurt by our regulations are small business, you are hurting the little guy.
No, it is a result of neoliberal deregulation starting in the 80s. Your buddies the Chicago boys (plus Hayek, insofar as he's distinct) have been the basis of economic policy over the past few decades. Also I do not care about small businesses, I am opposed to all businesses. And there are no businesses in Parecon.
>>22830739
>would reduce productivity and the general welfare of the society
You seem to conflate these two things, which is controversial (but typical of capitalist ideologues like yourself). Many workers would take the consumption penalties of more liesure time.
>Sure I suppose the disabled are an issue but charity has a far better record of helping those in need than an inefficient government that takes a cut.
This is not true. Some disabled people I know would be dead if not for welfare.
>it is not that one person gets it at the expense of another.
How so? Rand is talking about competition for opportunity whereas parecon is talking about competition for outcome. The latter clearly happens in labor markets.
>The most powerful creator of human well being in history is capitalism, lol.
Possibly, but people are looking for alternatives that have not been tried yet.
>Environmental issues are not a new issue of modern times, it is a problem as old as time called the tragedy of the commons, and the solution is simply to not have commons.
I'm pretty sure most environmental destruction is coming from private firms, as confirmed by every environmental activist I know. But people like you will claim those firms are secretly enabled by the government so I guess there's no winning.
>There is no reason to believe you can do this better than the free market.
The point is, and this seems foreign to your worldview, that efficiency is *one among many* values listed. It's not the only value.

>>22830752
>You cannot conflate what we have now with capitalism, capitalism should have no government and hard money.
Capitalism is defined as private ownership of the means if production and has always had a state. See: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/socialism/#SociCapi, you'll see nothing in this definition about hard money or the absence of a state.
>Again government is empirically wasteful compared to free market operations of the same industries.
Again, efficiency is not the only value. I believe they themselves say this somewhere on the website, that even if capitalism is proven to be more efficient, other values might trump that and prefer Parecon.
>Not everybody can live in the best place to live, not everybody can go on vacation to the best place to visit, at the best time.
Not everyone has the same idea of the best. I actually agree that equality is a bad goal. To cite Marx:
>But one man is superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies more labor in the same time, or can labor for a longer time; and labor, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labor. It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right. Right, by its very nature, can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only – for instance, in the present case, are regarded only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored. Further, one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal.
>In conclusion this is not decentralized and it doesn’t have a market
I didn't say it had a market. I said it is an example of decentralized *planning*. I have seen no evidence that it isn't decentralized. Here is the SEP once again to show you I didn't make up this distinction: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/socialism/#CentPartPlan
Notice that I have linked the SEP page for socialism twice now to counter the very strange claims you make. You would have come across this page if you did even the slightest good-faith research into socialism. >>22830507 is absolutely right about your epistemic viciousness.

>>22830496
>90-110 IQ range
Your opinion doesn't matter. I want a study showing what views 130+ generally have, and I'm willing to bet there will be no correlation towards anything because actually intelligent people tend to reach their own conclusions and disagree with each other. If anything it will just correlate with obscure ideologies only autists care about.

>>22830762
>even if i broke into your dormitory (individual rooms would be abolished after the revolution) and ejaculated all over your pillows every night?
Yes. Unconditional means unconditional.>>22830767
>when there's no one farming rice?
Where's this assumption coming from?
>>22830770
That does sound appealing! I looked into intentional communities and didn't like most of them, although the ones I did like tended to be Christian. Unfortunately I'm pretty hard atheist and have a bad history with religion so I get turned off, but I should keep an open mind: I have always found certain tenets of Christisnity appealing, like the ones you emphasize here.
>>22830797
Well, as I mentioned I'm quite hard atheist (even anti-theist) but am motivated by unconditional love toward humanity to an unusual degree. So I wouldn't assume such things so quickly.

>>22830305
Yeah that's exactly how it works. Non-profits are devised of people who want a comfy job while making as much money as possible doing as little work as possible. When I worked at one 50% of work hours went toward having small talk coffee hour meetings, "strategic workshops" which was just brainstorming a bunch of half assed ideas, writing them on sticky notes and putting them on the walls in deferent categories, while everyone is aware that no ideas will be realized, no changes will be done (literally the same modus-operandi for decades and no one wants it to change) and meetings with investors who try to delegate work loads to each other, while no one actually does anything. They have the guise of doing serious work and having huge impact but inside it's just a cirkus. If you try to order the cirkus a bit and do real work you become persona non grata. Women especially will use tactics such as name calling, usually they will say you're using "master suppression techniques" to opress and dominate others, whole in reality you're just trying to do your job well. This is why the most incompetent people get hired at NGOs, they hire based on how skilled you are at petty beaurocractic office politics and keep status quo, buttlick the government authorities you get handouts from, not how well you do your job.

>>22830845
>don't think what's being suggested is doing it in "random ways". It says in proportion to how individuals are affected, that's not random. For the record I'm actually opposed to democracy, but I'm not convinced by uour statement here (which your claim of work shortages is antecedent on).
By random I mean arbitrary. Same thing really. You are not simply going to change the value of labor by redistributing the rewards, you are going to be changing what people will want to do by changing the value of labor, hence you will experience shortages of what becomes less favorable, which I presume is going to be management. I don’t know what you mean by a coupling mechanism.
>No, it is a result of neoliberal deregulation starting in the 80s. Your buddies the Chicago boys (plus Hayek, insofar as he's distinct) have been the basis of economic policy over the past few decades.
The main issue is the money printing that took off wildly in the 70s, yes regulation from the 30s (that caused the great depression) got rolled back in the 60s and that was a good thing because it was choking the economy. The chicago school is a practically keynesian and definitely more your boys than mine.
>Also I do not care about small businesses, I am opposed to all businesses. And there are no businesses in Parecon.
Lmao, then how is it decentralized in literally any way?
>You seem to conflate these two things, which is controversial (but typical of capitalist ideologues like yourself). Many workers would take the consumption penalties of more liesure time.
More productivity is more leisure time, I did not say more work, more productivity = less work for the same results, less productivity = more work for the same results.
>disabled people
Again increasing productivity and lowering prices will make it easier for them to survive, and frankly disabled people are not enough of an argument for enslaving everybody. I refuse to believe the truly incapable of providing for themselves have been routinely mass murdered through history.
>competition for outcome
This is absolutely in our best interest for the work going to who will do it best ie efficiency ie productivity ie better standards of living and also the issue of how do you get people to do less desirable work with equal outcomes how is that not getting through to you
>but people are looking for alternatives that have not been tried yet.
Might I suggest, laissez faire capitalism?
>I'm pretty sure most environmental destruction is coming from private firms
They are enabled through government, through government commons, most pollution occurs on public property.
>Capitalism is defined as private ownership of the means if production and has always had a state
We have never had private ownership of the airwaves, we have never had private ownership of minting, that is the big one. How is it a free market if government controls the money?

>>22830874
That Marx quote to me sounds like it just damning marxism in general, a lot of capital felt like that to me, like what is the point of an LTV that defeats itself by discounting less valuable labor, but I don’t want to rehash your conspiracy theory about Marx not having written capital.

What the hell is your definition of centralization lmao, and have you honestly done good faith research into capitalism, because you don’t seem to even be aware of the most basic criticisms of communism, you don’t seem to be aware of price discovery.

>epistemic viciousness
Tough talk from someone who is going to punish people for their virtues to reward people for their vices

>>22830899
>Where's this assumption coming from?
it's coming from the fact that farming rice is hard on your back and no one does it because they want to help le communitay
they do it because they need to survive.
if you give me free stuff and I just need to work according to my abilities, you'll see how fast my abilities will sink

you're still a commie, btw

>>22830899
>Yes. Unconditional means unconditional
then you're a retard.
>have a bad history with religion
lol no you don't. reading sartre at 15 doesn't make it a bad history with religion

>>22830820
i'm talking about literal child rape, which happens a whole lot and you know it.

>>22830665
>loyal to others
>strong sense of community
loyalty = choice from alternatives = value hierarchy = exclusion
i suppose you could try to define some sort of global nation but frankly the ideas of loyalty and community fall apart without boundaries of some sort
To steelman, then, what makes a community?

>>22829000
>mexican farm laborers who go on strike aren’t “real leftists” because they’re too low-IQ
least racist post-lefty

>>22830845
>Why? I might agree but what makes you say so?
I was just messing around. If anything, you're still a leftist
>resentment for the better turned out
>still want common ownership of the means of productions
>just doesn't like the vibes bro. leftists are so weird
yeah, no shit. you're jumping ship now because leftards are at an all time low in social clout.

Considering left wing politics died 3+ decades a go, I'd assume there are many ex-leftists floating about. It was really common for ex-communists to become hyper-individualist libertarians in the 90's. Very weird transition from one extreme to the other but I suspect being anti establishment and a contrarian was more important to them than ethics, ideology or convictions.

>>22825607
>>22825609
What exactly does communitarianism mean to you? You want personal relations and bonds of friendship and a quasi-familial model for your dream polity. That's all well and good. But you want that in the abstract? I have a hard time understanding you. In most respects I think you and I are very similar, but that's precisely what makes me both a reactionary and a nationalist (albeit of a non-chauvinistic and cynical type, as many others seem to be).

>>22830966
>I don’t know what you mean by a coupling mechanism.
They want to make it so that if you do x attractive job you also have to do y burdensome job.
>The main issue is the money printing that took off wildly in the 70s, yes regulation from the 30s (that caused the great depression) got rolled back in the 60s and that was a good thing because it was choking the economy
I was responding to your claim about income inequality's history. It's undoubtedly higher now than it was in the social democratic era.
Insofar as the dismantling of the welfare state is needed for capitalism to function, that is a good argument against capitalism. Most socialist critiques of capitalism are based on the claim that social democracy can't deliver on its promises.
>Lmao, then how is it decentralized in literally any way?
You could read about it. They propose a system of workers' councils that doesn't rely on any central authority for its planning.
>More productivity is more leisure time, I did not say more work, more productivity = less work for the same results, less productivity = more work for the same results.
Productivity is defined as the rapidity of production. This is usually accomplished through the increase in relative surplus labor, which creates a treadmill effect where increases in productivity are invested into expansion of capital (the end in itself) rather than into increased free time. Which is why we have longer worktimes than any non-capitalist society and also why the current 40 hour workweek (as overlong as it is) was won primarily through working class struggle, not productivity.
>I refuse to believe the truly incapable of providing for themselves have been routinely mass murdered through history.
You'd be surprised (if you replace "through history" with "through the history of capitalism"). Read what Hobbes says about disabled people.
>how do you get people to do less desirable work with equal outcomes how is that not getting through to you
You should look more deeply into Parecon and its mechanisms, which is just one proposal. I mentioned the coupling mechanism.
>Might I suggest, laissez faire capitalism?
We more-or-less already tried that in Victorian period, it resulted in 12-16 hour workdays with 6 day workweeks. No thank you!
>They are enabled through government, through government commons, most pollution occurs on public property.
Untrue. You can see this, for example, in the fact that fossil industries spend billions on climate change denial (something that seems to have affected you judging from >>22830748).
>We have never had private ownership of the airwaves, we have never had private ownership of minting, that is the big one. How is it a free market if government controls the money?
We certainly have private ownership of the bulk of the MoP. I don't think stuff like airwaves or oceans count as means of production in the strict sense, they're more like land in that they're pieces of space/nature needed for production.

>>22829278
>normative pressure isn't really a negative incentive - unless perhaps it's done very dogmatically - but a form of persuasion.
The devil is in the details. Pressure ultimately comes from people, so it’s only effective when those people matter to the individual being pressured. If I simply don’t care what a certain group thinks or says about me, they can’t pressure me except by disassociating from me. But that would violate the very norm of association the pressure aims to uphold. So normative pressure only works if I already care about norms, in which case I wouldn’t need much pressure to begin with. Ultimately, for the worldview you’re describing to function, everyone has to agree already.

To get concrete for a moment, consider the stigma against homosexuality. If a gay kid has no choice but to live with homophobic parents*, that kid won’t magically stop being gay — their desire is already there. The “best” the kid can do (on the view of a conservative who values maintaining existing social ties above all else) is live a celibate life in the closet, assuming they value their relationship with their parents over their romantic and sexual fulfillment.

But that’s a painful way to live, often more painful than establishing new kinship relations with people who accept them, gay desire and all. So in practice, even if the parents don’t exile the child (which I’m assuming your worldview rules out), the child doesn’t merely abandon their old household, but founds a new one.

Notice that we’re not mediating between a binary (no association vs association) but choosing between various kinds of association (parental vs romantic, and parochial vs secular communities). In effect, the gay person has a forced choice between various social milieus, and chooses the one most compatible with their pre-existing desire.

The same is true for many interracial couples, religious converts, migrants, and so on. The choice to walk away from one relationship is often a choice to enter another; it’s not a negative-sum game.

* let’s stipulate, for the sake of argument, that the homophobia is so extreme that it can’t be overcome.

>>22831102
>in the fact that fossil industries spend billions on climate change denial
it's 2023. BP, Exxon, Equinor/Statoil, Petrobras, Total all make climate hysteria propaganda now. David Koch is dead, nigga

>>22831110
Gay faggotism should be oppressed.
If you raise your children right they won't be gay.
A kid that has the need to be gay has become perverted for some odd reason probably because you showed him tentacle hentai and talked about jacking off.

>>22831117
suck me from the back, chuddy

>>22829278
>you can obviously create an intrinsic desire to do such a thing through persuasion and normative pressure
that's how you call the mulatta commissars now?

>>22831130
Faggots are a waste of oxygen.

>>22831117
>>22831130
>>22831144
get a room

>>22825607
What was your involvement in the 2020 Riots and similar BLM protests since the death of Trayvon Martin. Surely, you've been involved as a committed leftist of 15 years, so you must have some interesting stories

>>22830982
>but I don’t want to rehash your conspiracy theory about Marx not having written capital.
He wrote Capital, you just read it differently from many Marx scholars.
>have you honestly done good faith research into capitalism,
I feel like I have. I've spent some time looking into Friedman and Hayek. Price signals/ECP and the soft-budget constraint aren't new concepts to me. I've tried showing you thinkers that counter them but nope!
>>22831014
>and no one does it because they want to help le communitay
You'd be surprised. You should look into some anthropology on pre-modern societies. Or collectives like Zapatismo. But there is also what I mentioned with Marx's 1844 Manuscripts above.
>.
>if you give me free stuff and I just need to work according to my abilities, you'll see how fast my abilities will sink
That sounds like a you problem and not a problem with me. Although, there's an extent to which I'd be glad to see you work less due to the absence of capitalist compulsion.
>>22831019
>then you're a retard.
A sign of antisocial personality disorder is seeing those who expose vulnerability to others, forgive others, etc. as "suckers". I'm more pointing this out for any spectators than for you, since you're unlikely to care (in the right way, anyway).
>lol no you don't. reading sartre at 15 doesn't make it a bad history with religion
Much of my PTSD comes from being bullied (and sometimes beaten) by schoolchildren and even teachers for being an atheist in a 99% catholic town.
>>22831026
I don't think they do; many internationalist socialist thinkers believe in community. Marx talks about community a lot in his younger writings, and Engels was interested in communitarian forms of socialism, while both were unapologetic internationalists. The way I would respond to your equation is by denying that loyalty involves a choice from alternatives. If I am loyal to my mother, does that somehow make me disloyal to my partner? I don't see why such loyalty can't be extended universally. It's about valuing *every* individual as the unique component of our human community. that they are, with which we cannot do without.
There's an old left-wing song that starts with "If we should consider each other, a neighbor, a friend, or a brother, it could be a wonderful, wonderful world, it could be a wonderful world." The point here is a hope that communitarian ties can be extended to everyone, as difficult as it might sound.
>To steelman, then, what makes a community?
I think it's general social friendship, i.e. extending a certain attitude of solidarity to multiple people.
>>22831046
Do you have in mind people like Sowell, Nozick, Popper (if he counts)? I usually hear about Trotskyists turning neocons.

>>22831067
>>22831067
Well I guess I have a non-exclusionary notion of community that seems foreign to many on the left (which causes them to drop community) and on the right (which causes them to be exclusionary). But there is a tradition of communitarian internationalism. Maybe look into Cohen's "Why not Socialism?", it discusses his "principle of community" that he explicitly hopes to extend to the entire world.
>>22831110
>>22831067
Well I guess I have a non-exclusionary notion of community that seems foreign to many on the left (which causes them to drop community) and on the right (which causes them to be exclusionary). But there is a tradition of communitarian internationalism. Maybe look into Cohen's "Why not Socialism?", it discusses his "principle of community" that he explicitly hopes to extend to the entire world.
>>22831110
Thanks for the thoughtful post, you've given me quite a bit to chew on. I don't know if I'm willing to bite the bullet and say the gay person should stay with their homophobic parents, but I at least think they should stay in the parent's life in some way, maintaining communication and bring willing to help when in need.
It's interesting how you frame this, because to my mind the problem here is that the parents are homophobic (something you assumed for the sake of argument is immutable, but I find this to be a problematic assumption). That's an absence of unconditional love, the son presumably represses out of fear of abandonment or some other punishment. Imagine that we reframe it as gay parents with a homophobic kid: is it okay for the parents to dissociate? I don't think so (and that would conventionally be more harshly termed "abandonment"). My mom, the other day, when I was having one of my BPD episodes and I was expressing regret for how I treated her during it, promised me that she loves me and "nothing will ever change that". I think it's safe to say both her and I would experience a dissociation (especially from her end due to my financial dependence, there were times in my life where I would have been left destitute and without care without her; and this I don't think causes a "bribe" so much as extra stakes and altruistic motivation from her end) as abandonment and a lapse in love. Hopefully this shows you where I'm coming from.
To get back to your homophobia example, what causes me worry for the gay son is the relative power parents have, or rather worry about the parents' character in using that power. In my case I trust my mom with that power, but it can lead to some bad shit as I know with my dad. But ideally in a communitarian society where family-like relations are widespread and default, there wouldn't be such centralization of power to cause abuse etc. My dad could get away with significantly less when my mom was home or when my grandparents were visiting.

>>22825607
>a strong sense of community from which nobody can be excluded
Those bonds are formed around race and common struggle not some commie preschool bullshit.

>>22831355
>"principle of community" that he explicitly hopes to extend to the entire world
Anon that's fine and all but are you sure you're actually a socialist and that you aren't secretly on a quest to befriend the entire planet? Because it sounds to me like your desire may not even be political in nature.

>>22825980
Nice projection

>>22828972
Once again a leftist resorts to fairy tails as an argument. Women and faggots were left out of these conversations in the past for a reason.

>>22831374
There's definitely unfriendly socialists (one of the reasons I reconsidered being a leftist like in the OP) and friendly non-socialists but I thonk there is some correlation. I mean, Cohen is advocating for socialism in that summary you greentexted. I also mentioned Virginia Held (>>22827091) and Martin Buber (>>22827787; check out his politics section on the IEP:https://iep.utm.edu/martin-buber/#H4)) who are maybe less ambitious than Cohen/young Marx/me but also associate their care ethics with political implications. Here's another example of that (which I felt mixed on FWIW): https://www.versobooks.com/products/2625-the-care-manifesto

>>22829634
You need to know when to leave well enough alone. It figures this is a thread full of control freaks with hyper parentalism

>>22831036
They are workers, but pretending that it's praxis to paint your faggot fingernails and talk about them all day at Bard College is not praxis. The point is that knowing and cataloging all these people is a highly bourgeois activity. Even the way your post is written follows a pattern that every other piece of shit queer pseudo-leftist follows:
>X Y's are Zing!
where X is some third-world group of browns, Y is the subset that makes you cool for knowing it because it makes it look like you spend all day poring over leftist deep lore, and Z is the thing they're doing which you claim to care about
>Mexican farm workers are striking!
>Kurdish communists are fighting reactionaries!
>Zapatistas* are organizing!
*Zapatistas contains the brown within it because it's ethnic and foreign sounding which rich white social democrats LOVE, almost as much as they love being part of an activity or group that most average working stiff white people would expect to be white and stuffy, but there's a BROWN guy or a FAG at the helm!!!, like a Shakespeare staging. "Leftists" (aka liberal progressives) love when they're part of the British group at college and the chair for three years running is a Paki, because they are imagining in their heads that some old white lady is going "W-What? British history.. led by a Paki?! That's not British!!" and they're replying "Hmm? What? Oh! I didn't even notice such things ... Ha-ha-ha, I guess I just see Rajesh as SOOOO British that I don't even notice?" Because "leftists" (liberal progressives) are really just rich bourgeois kids who see brown people as their pets and like to dress them up and give them little pats. Even if it's across the globe, all they are doing when they say "Lmao, so Zapatistas don't count as organizing then?" is going "Let me show you pictures of my little brown dog! Yes, he's a pure-bred brown, he even lives in a jungle or something!"

>>22829000
>The central problem of leftism after Lenin is that it lost all faith in itself as something practicable in the real world.
the problem of leftism is that it's inherently a bourgeois pet theory ever since the french revolution

>>22831046
You’re a retard

>>22831421
It's not so much about paternalism as it is about unconditional care. I don't know to what extent the latter implies the former but I don't think you need to be a "control freak" to love others unconditionally. In fact the people I know who are the most the way I am in terms of disliking cutting-off and motivated toward + expecting unconditional care are also some of the least paternalistic.
Of course, what's interesting is I interpret this from a first-person perspective (much like Buber's I-Thou) while most people in this thread seem worried about like, imposing commandments/force. It's just not how I feel about ethics.

>>22831426
>Even the way your post is written follows a pattern that every other piece of shit queer pseudo-leftist follows:
>>X Y's are Zing!
>where X is some third-world group of browns, Y is the subset that makes you cool for knowing it because it makes it look like you spend all day poring over leftist deep lore, and Z is the thing they're doing which you claim to care about
>>Mexican farm workers are striking!
>>Kurdish communists are fighting reactionaries!
>>Zapatistas* are organizing!
Those are just news headlines Anon.

>>22830121
Real converts from Left to Right are the most dangerous, and there are quite a few out there already. I think many who are drawn to principles of the Right are inhibited (hence the conservatism), in ways people drawn to the Left are not. The consequence being that a lot of real idiots are drawn to the Left who end up doing a lot of damage and harm, which creates crises in people like OP. That doesn't mean there aren't idiots on the Right, it's just that they're dealt with differently.

>>22831583
>Real converts from Left to Right are the most dangerous
Well that was the story of the neoconservatives, wasn't it? So, obviously, they're unpopular today but put yourself in the thought process of somebody on the left who believes in equality, secular culture, reason, and an Old-Left world revolution in the name of progress... but then you look around and the left doesn't believe in any of that. They express a solidarity but compartmentalize it, and they protest abuses in one place but are blind to them in another, which reminds you of worst programmatic hypocrisies of the communists that you might've accepted at one point, but it didn't sit right even then, but you just didn't say anything. Dialectically there should be a relationship between means and ends, but the left you're looking at has no ethical limitations, is contemptuous toward democratic processes, and is champing at the bit to engage in violence precisely in order to provoke crises inimical to everything I just described... like a caged animal looking for a way out. Then one of your friends says "We Are All Hamas" or something:
https://youtu.be/ifVybe3-5aE

And this would look insane. Or even like a new form of fascism that's emerging. And all those values that the left was supposed to have? The only people saying they're for that are the vilified neoconservatives and they're adding, "come on over, the water is warm."

>>22831251
Sorry I missed your post. I have avoidant personality disorder (and likely autism) so I have always been reluctant to go to org events. Most of my experience is attending reading groups etc., my formal training in philosophy made me a good teacher for noob leftists. That said for the BLM protests, I did go to a few. To be honest I don't have many exciting stories, just getting into arguments with people and being overwhelmed by noisy stimuli lol.

>>22830496
IQ is correlated with a higher level of education.
Higher education inculcate behaviors and values required to hold a job.
Those behaviors and values required to hold a job are downstream from business practices.
Business practices evolved to facilitate exchange and increase profitability, in fine accelerating capital accumulation.

Leftist (or in your graph, "Very liberal") values are nothing more than the tool of capital, they contribute to the downfall of traditional group separations in order to produce a homogeneous workforce, which results in reduced transaction costs.

You leftists are nothing more than oil lubricating the cogs of the capitalist machine. I bet this supposed relation between IQ and political ideology would fall flat if you controlled for the indoctrination effect of college education.

>>22830770
You in Kentucky?

I read Sydney Hook's The Meaning of Marx (1934) and I found myself agreeing much more with the "Why I am Not a Communist" responses within it, particularly the one by John Dewey, which is short and sweet.

>>22831426
You’re attacking a strawman. Aside from blowing your thesis about brown people not being “the real proletariat” the fuck out, the reason people study these movements is to learn from their successes and failures, and to organize more effectively in the future. Knowing, for example, that police are more likely to attack striking workers than to defend strikers from violence, leads us to the practical conclusion that organizers should be armed and trained in self-defense, rather than reliant on police for military protection.
>inb4 fixating on “lol of course you can’t trust the state” instead of addressing the actual point
There are more sophisticated examples, like the situationist international’s theory of recuperation, but I don’t want to type out a whole synopsis of society of the spectacle.

most wordy /lit/ thread i've seen in a while

>>22832060
>Those behaviors and values required to hold a job are downstream from business practices.
Lots of people with grad school degrees are unemployed or have shit jobs lol. Especially in the fields you likely hate most like the humanities or anthropology/sociology.
If your theory were correct, then trade schools (in countries where that's applicable) and majors like engineering or economics or busines would have the most left-leaning politics, but it's quite the opposite.
The average IQ in academia is something like 125. It's where the smart people of the world gather. I don't think they're getting "indoctrinated" lol, although maybe there is an element of background bias (i.e. many coming from rich families), but that is the opposite causation from your theory.

>>22830540
Nietzsche was the self-destruction of the Enlightenment. He continued its atheism and took it to the natural conclusion of tearing down all remnants of Christianity and morality. He was very much a product of the movement although he also attacked it. Voltaire was one of his favorite writers.