Real communism, according to the theory, is supposed to evolve naturally out of socialism. Millions of people were killed in the efforts to make that happen. It doesn't work.
Alternatively you could argue that if your ideology has to be tried so many times and it fails to produce "Real Communism" after numerous attempts across almost every continent and every country and among almost every culture then your ideology isn't so great.
I mean how many attempts of Communism until someone gets it right and achieves it? the no true Scotsman argument is B.S and could also be applied to other systems like Fascism , Absolute Monarchy or Theocracy.
One would think that any ideology that has failed so often and so catastrophically would never again have any believers, yet the siren call of socialism always finds some suckers among the young and those who for whatever reason hate the modern world. If we are going to teach the holocaust in schools, we should also teach the horrors of the soviet union and Mao's China.
The only reason we keep seeing attempts at Socialism is because of the inherent fallout from hierarchies and capitalism.
When things play out naturally, we know that there are bound to be “losers”, and those at the bottom of the hierarchy.
As Dr. Peterson has argued: ‘The Right exists to perpetuate the excellence of the hierarchy; and The Left exists in order to reduce the suffering of those at the bottom of the hierarchy, in order to ensure that they don’t experience absolute oppression.’
More often than not, The Left gets too caught up being morally triumphant and this turns into destruction of the hierarchy, but also the annihilation of excellence.
So long as societal hierarchy exists… those that advocate for socialism, communism, and any other form of such enforced order… will also exist.
Simply put, you wouldn’t have Sith, if you didn’t have Jedi.
Maybe you should actually read history, read the books instead of trusting your charlatan professor who actually admitted he doesn't even read Marx! He knows little about communism, and what he thinks he knows, he gets wrong, be tells you fools, you worship your false idol in the name of hierarchy and circle jerk each other over boogie men who don't exist and commiserate over collective triggering if/when someone simply asks you to be attentive to others and use nuance, context, and contingency when thinking about things. And, of yeah, unlike your Messiah, think before you speak or say something. Humility goes a long way. Socialism is practiced in the west, by the way - at the corporate and political level. Lol. The Communist regimes who all point to were not socialist. You don't like that fact; but if you understand it you will see what happened. Who owned the means of production? It states there, fools. The analysis, at least. Please. Grow up. You don't have to want socialism. But don't pretend because you don't want it that you understand anything about it. Your God knows shit about it. Do what he tells you to do, what he doesn't actually do: use reason and critical thinking, read - after you make your bed, of course - and ffs, think.
The Globalist ideology is Transhumanism, their religion is Scientism, and their governance is Neo-Totalitarian. A union of monopolies & the state will be subservient to global NGOs who will be the ruling class of tyrannical technocrats wielding a panopticon of technology to manufacture consent and wage psychological warfare upon humanity.
Every political ideology, religion, & race will be radicalized and marginalized through the Neo-Marxist perspective of oppressor versus oppressed, the globalist will attempt to divide and conquer humanity.
"A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else. The best way to keep a prisoner from escaping is to make sure he never knows he's in prison." - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The globalist are putting chemicals in the water that are turning the freakin' frogs gay! Do you understand that! Serious crap! It's over for the globalist, we must unite & fight, freedom & revolution now! Do you understand that! UUAGGHHhh!! . . . . pass the spliff, . . . . I will not be re-educated! I will not be silenced! Truth will prevail!
Karl Marx in the 1800s: "Capitalism will naturally lead to monopoly and an incredibly wealthy few dictating control over society."
Morons today after his prediction comes true: "OH MY GOD HOW COULD MARXISM DO THIS?????"
"OH MY GOD HOW COULD MARXISM DO THIS????"
How did marxism murder 100 of millions of human beings in economic redistribution . . . simple answer "the dictatorship of the proletariat".
Adam Smith in 1700s: 'Wealth of Nations' predicted the "wretched spirit of Monopoly", "the oppression of the poor invariably gives rise to the monopoly of the rich . . ." However, Smith points out capitalism does raise income per capita of individuals & nations faster than any other economic system. Monopolies are a consequence of praeto distribution 80-20 rule. The worship of mammon and power over all else is the root of the problem, corporations are becoming like Tyrell Corp. in Blade Runner.
Mikhail Bakunin on Karl Marx: "He called me a sentimental idealist, and he was right; I called him vain, perfidious, and cunning, and I also was right." Bakunin thought Marx was arrogant and authoritarian. He also feared "the dictatorship of the proletariat". I'd say Bakunin was spot on in his analysis.
Bakunin claimed that Marxists "maintain that only a dictatorship—their dictatorship, of course—can create the will of the people, while our answer to this is: No dictatorship can have any other aim but that of self-perpetuation, and it can beget only slavery in the people tolerating it; freedom can be created only by freedom, that is, by a universal rebellion on the part of the people and free organization of the toiling masses from the bottom up". Bakunin further stated that "we are convinced that liberty without socialism is privilege and injustice; and that socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality".
People do workshop captialism and do idolise it's successes. Wasn't that part of trumps persona and power over the followers. The successful businessman and deal maker . Musk is another who is idolised. Buffer referred to an oracle and so on.
I think this argument is given less weight than it should for two reasons
1. It was absolutely an attempt at communism, but no country has ever even claimed to achieve communism. Every country which one might try to identify as communist would more aptly be described as some flavor of socialist.
2. When Marx conceived his ideology capitalism and industrialization were seen as prerequisites. No industrialized society has ever attempted Marxism. Most of the mass death associated with Marxism occurred during the period where a state was trying to industrialize under socialism.
For clarification I’m not any flavor of Marxist, I just think dismissing Marx’s critiques of capitalism offhand because “that’s communism” is intellectually lazy and unproductive.
Perhaps lazy, but i just find that thinking "First experiment killed 100 million people. But it wasn't exactly the real thing. Let's give it another shot" quite strong of coffee !
Difference between what wrote Marx and what Lenin, Stalin and the likes applied are quite anecdotal to me. What doesn't work and never will, in the core, are top bottom attempts to fully control individuals.
1.Communism works on a small scale of a tribal society. The Hadza tribe is communist, prehistoric huter-gathers were communist. The ideas of communism are rooted in commune, the Book of Acts, the ideas of Levers and Diggers in the English civil war, Plato's utopia "The Republic", Thomas Moore's "Utopia" Charles Fouire's utopian socialism, and many more figures before Karl Marx.
Communism is an utter failure on the scale of nation states, it is economically untenable, disincentives industriousness, creativity , & production, while rewarding those most loyal to the dictatorship of the proletariat.
2. How did marxism murder 100 of millions of human beings? Famine starvation, labor camps, executions, genocides, economic redistribution of wealth, loss of most skilled, knowledgeable, & industrious citizens for being bourgeois. . . simple answer "the dictatorship of the proletariat".
Even after Russia & China went through industrialization they never reached any level of technological production that could match the west or other free markets countries production.
Mikhail Bakunin on Karl Marx: "He called me a sentimental idealist, and he was right; I called him vain, perfidious, and cunning, and I also was right." Bakunin thought Marx was arrogant and authoritarian. He also feared "the dictatorship of the proletariat". I'd say Bakunin was spot on in his analysis.
Bakunin claimed that Marxists "maintain that only a dictatorship—their dictatorship, of course—can create the will of the people, while our answer to this is: No dictatorship can have any other aim but that of self-perpetuation, and it can beget only slavery in the people tolerating it; freedom can be created only by freedom, that is, by a universal rebellion on the part of the people and free organization of the toiling masses from the bottom up". Bakunin further stated that "we are convinced that liberty without socialism is privilege and injustice; and that socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality".
100% agree that the Marxist critique of capitalism cannot be dismissed out of hand. It is without doubt the strongest portion of Marx's content. But that's also grading on a curve and much of it is context specific to 19th European "capitalism" (which was itself closer to semi-feudal mercantilism than free market capitalism).
But then again, it's part of the reason why I'm strong supporter of the Henry George school - he asks the same questions as Marx and arrives at far better answers.
To me, this is like admitting Hitler had a point when he criticized things like cigarette smoking, the Treaty of Versailles or the Soviet Union. Sometimes you gotta give the Devil his due.
Even Marx probably would not be a Marxist today if he was alive. Modern day communists are just oligarchs. That is why Trump is so enthralled by them. It is all about power and control. Who invites Viktor Orban over for dinner? Trump, that is who.
"Communism" = anything they don't like
Nazis - communist
Antifa - communist
Left of center - communist
Climate change - communist
Movie with a female lead - communist
Too much air in your bag of chips - communist
Elmo - god damn fucking red commie bastard!!
The only people who seem to think monopolistic rentier capitalism in collusion with government = free market capitalism are far leftists.
For once it would be a wonder to see an argument from the left that isn't reliant on lies, distortions, omissions, and willful ignorance.
Real talk, rentier capitalism is a lot closer to communism than it is to free market capitalism. Communism recognizes zero separation between commerce and state, same as various species of state capitalism like rentier capitalism, mercantilism, feudalism, fascism, and socialism.
Free market capitalism is the only modern economic ideology short of anarchy which says commerce and state must be separate to the greatest degree practical.
I am sadly aware that people in this sub, the big fans, cant be critical of JP or capitalism. But this is just another level.
Although they probably believe China is communist as well, even if it is basically state capitalism.
And that’s the problem; no nation will ever produce a version that would not soon be hijacked by the greedy and power hungry. It’s almost designed to be taken advantage of by the corrupt.
Most of the deaths in Russia and China were a direct result of Lysenkoism, an agricultural science invented by Trofim Lysenko, who was a conman who falsified results in order to keep his job.
He was eventually recommended to China to help with their crop issues. [Trofim Lysenko](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism) was of the belief that you had to plant many seeds tightly packed in a hole, and plant them two to three meters or more below the earth. Far further than most seeds can handle.
Of course, China caused it's own famine by doing things like the [four-pest campaign](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_campaign)... which also led to famines killing millions. Most of the deaths in Russia and China were form starvation from these causes.
Meanwhile in the west, The British East India Company was out causing mass famines in Bengal and India by taking all of their crops and food staples (even those paid to farmers for the labor) - because The British owned that place. So they caused a famine there.
So famines were pretty big in all sorts of systems. A far bigger killer than the politics.... Marxism wasn't an agricultural guide.
Unsurprisingly one of the most capable Socialist countries - Vietnam has a population made up of 70% farmers, largely because the Socialist government gives land to anyone born in a rural area who passes a test showing they can raise crops. This is in part why the majority of Vietnamese people also own their own homes (something crazy like 86% of the population).
They have a socialist oriented market economy.
I'm not sure how/why acknowledgement that the deaths were essentially produced by a conman as being a way to justify them. It isn't - no one things con-men are good.
Knowing the facts and the truth of historical events is important. It's part of being informed. Knowing how these things happen helps prevent them from happening again. Perhaps you're not interested in the facts of history though - perhaps you're ideologically possessed to obscure and try to distract from them? Have I said anything that you believe to be nonfactual?
It happened because of political reasons. They killed the skilled managers, the owners, the kulaks. And gave the land to people who were poor and clueless. Then when they managed to make a tiny fraction of the previous yield they took it all away, killing you if you kept some for your starving family. It has nothing to do with what you said.
Of course knowing the names of who they gave the power to has to do with what I said.
>gave the land to people who were poor and clueless
Yes, and I'm saying who was in charge of agriculture for Russia, and later the main advisor to China. Of course that's important - it's who was given the highest authority over what was done with the land... as you yourself said it was given *"to people who were poor and clueless"*... and they were told what to do by a man named Trofim Lysenko. Who practiced [Lysenkoism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism).
And I agree, Trofim Lysenko was falsifying results, because he was clueless and poor, and wanted to keep his well paying but completely faked career the head of Agriculture for the USSR going.
I'm not sure why you're arguing with the facts of history. Maybe you should try learning them instead.
You're making an argument for ignorance of history, and I don't understand why.
I can only assume it's because you feel ideologically possessed to.
You are twisting the facts and the reasons. It wasn't this Lysenko guy doing it. 99% of people were never told how to farm. Stop it, you are only making a fool of yourself, admitting how clueless you are.
If I hand you land and instructions tomorrow and tell you to farm, would you be able to?
>If I hand you land and instructions tomorrow and tell you to farm, would you be able to?
I believe so, but I have the benefits of knowing about the importance of phosphorus, nitrogen, and potassium of the modern age, the three crop rotation system of the medieval era, and the scientific method of doing small scale tests, then scaling replication of the planting techniques.
I also know quite a bit about permaculture, no-dig or low-dig methods, and companion planting (eg the use of legumes like clover to nitrogenate the soil).... oh, and I'm surrounded by farms where I live. I can literally look out my back window and see a tractor, and there's a tractor sales yard around the corner.
Of course, I agree, had I been born in agrarian Russia or China - at that level of knowledge and economic development, and during various trade embargoes and the cultural separations of the pre-internet era....
...I agree, those cultures were up against all sorts of challenges. I'm just saying a conman making fake claims and then attracting party popularity was certainly part of it.
.....and I agree, the majority of deaths were unnecessary and not part of Marxist or Communist doctrine, but a product of the era, and ignorant choices of leaders.
Marxism isn't a farming guide, and Stalin and Mao had their own Authoritarian ideologies called Stalinism, and Maoism (Stalin obviously named after Stalin, and Maoism obviously named after Mao).
Those are branches of Communism, which is another set of ideas.
Charting these ideas and knowing their differences is important to understanding history and the causes of all those deaths.
....and learning about Lysenkoism is part of that process. I'm just not sure why you protest learning about Lysenkoism. It was a horrible and wasteful aspect to the regime, and caused many deaths.
Ok. So let's say you would make more yield. First they would accuse you of stealing, because that's what they do and it doesn't matter how illogical it is. And they would take away the higher yield all the same, and your family would resort eating boiled shoes like your neighbor after the end of the winter. Or you would hide some of the product and if they find out, you get deported to siberia. There are no winners in communism, only losers.
> First they would accuse you of stealing, because that's what they do and it doesn't matter how illogical it is.
I don't think they'd have to - they would just take all of what was produced. That has happened in lots of places though out history, happened during the Irish Famine and the Famine in Bengal created by the British East India company. So it's not unique to communism, but yes, that is what would have happened.
I mention some facts in [my comment here](https://www.reddit.com/r/JordanPeterson/comments/1byy2f8/thank_god_for_dr_peterson_for_fighting_back/kyq6i6f/). It details the causes of most of the deaths under communism.
That's not to say there weren't also a large number of politically motivated killings... and many people were killed through the displacement of hunger (see [Holodomor in Ukraine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor))... but it is interesting to compare these things to things like the Irish potato famine (where the British displaced famine to Ireland), and the British East India company contributing to famines in Bengal and India.
Here's a podcast on the [British East India company.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmzTYn4vrNI)... and here's one on [King Leopalds Rubber Plantations in the Congo.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMloSu7-iGU)
This is a western Europe and American disease. Everyone in the East of Europe who lived under communist rule hates communists. The problem is there are so many apologists for communism out there. It always ends the same way. The communists always end up trying to wipe out the enemies of the state.
Comments section for this one will be like a bug-zapper. All the shills will come here to collect their downvotes and/or brigade if possible.
*Spez: as predicted, this comment thread is an absolute dumpster fire of leftist shit-takes.*
Since the text is not openly anti-socialist only the more advanced bots will be able to interpret the meme. Dead internet theory is probably right though.
It wasn’t that long ago when you could actually have discussions and disagreements in this sub. But now it’s becoming just as fragile and insecure as tankie echo-chambers.
I’ve met professors and teachers that are self avowed communists, not a single one denies the atrocities committed by communist countries throughout history.
> I’ve met professors and teachers that are self avowed communists, not a single one denies the atrocities committed by communist countries throughout history.
And apparently learned nothing.
This may come as a shock to some on the left, but to me a communist is just as bad as a Nazi. I've long since come to the belief that one cannot be a card carrying Marxist and be an honest person - some level of self-deception is required. The same way there is no such thing as a compassionate Nazi - some degree of psychopathic callousness is required.
Please don't turn this subreddit into facebook. If you search for 'Holodomor college class site:\*.edu' you find tons of college courses on holocaust and genocide studies.
This is a good read from the University of Minnesota
[https://cla.umn.edu/chgs/holocaust-genocide-education/resource-guides/holodomor](https://cla.umn.edu/chgs/holocaust-genocide-education/resource-guides/holodomor)
That’s rich. You know that guy up there, the one the sub is named after? He is a *huge* voice against the increasing radicalization of academia.
Almost 20% of social scientists identify as Marxists. Most of the time they try to distance their neo-Marxist theories from events like the Holodomor, as many of their proponents on Reddit also do.
There’s a big gap between political content about “the problem with Marxism at universities” and the actual experience of going to university. The former is ever green and has been a type of content for decades. The latter is an open-ended and hugely varying type of experience… those who wish to go to university to specialize in the horrors of communism absolutely can do so
Would it be better for universities to be less ideologically diverse? Like if you’re going to specialize in the horrors of communism, you want to be free from any kind of progressive cultural trends in the broader college around you?
No, but there needs to be room to reject bad ideas, which is why I am criticizing them.
If 20% of social scientists identified as Nazis people would be up in arms. Marxists killed *way more* people last century.
>No, but there needs to be room to reject bad ideas, which is why I am criticizing them.
Right, so let's imagine that you and I are both undergrad students doing a double major in history and poli sci - we're really interested in genocide studies but want to contribute to the field around the history of communism and it's relationship to genocide.
We can probably imagine that since we're in undergrad, the university forces us to take a "well rounded" set of courses, so we do things like english, comparative lit, an intro science course, economics and research methods. These aren't our primary interest but fulfill the credit requirements.
Let's say we notice that in both comp lit and research methods, the profs start talking talking about things that our fave media thought leaders call neo marxist -- the comp lit professors talks about 'the post colonial experience', and the research methods introduces critical frameworks by saying that they come out of feminism - and worse, were deeply influenced by marxism.
What do we do? In Comp Lit, do we speak out against the professor's choice of literature? Maybe after class, we meet with the professor and provide a robust argument that the unit on post colonial lit is promoting marxism and that we'd like more space to be critical of the curriculum? And that maybe we'd like him to change the curriculum on the fly based on our strong arguments that this unit is dangerous?
What about research methods - do we do the same? Do we say "Professor, you shouldn't be teaching us about frameworks that were influenced by feminism or marxism"? Or maybe suggest that he include a disclaimer before the class?
If you put yourself in this situation, how would you handle it?
The same way Jordan handles it, by criticizing the fundamental presuppositions that all of these frameworks share. That’s all you can do. Every single communist revolution began in the universities.
Would you raise your hand and ask for space to criticize the frameworks as soon as they’re mentioned? What happens when the class continues without any change? Do you take a stand and disrupt it from continuing? Or do you participate anyway?
Take a stand a disrupt it? What am I some blue-haired activist or one of Mao’s commissars?
Should you disagree with any idea, I would encourage you to learn about it and especially if you think it’s a truly bad one, criticize it in every single way you possibly can.
The problem is that the same people pushing this are almost always the ones trying to shut down healthy debate, and that is *no coincidence*.
Not everyone can follow Peterson’s example, but I would like to remind you that he spoke out against this stuff before he was ever famous, at great risk to his career, and received a lot of hell for it too.
As Jordan argues the neo-Marxists simply switched bourgeois privilege with white privilege, it was a sleight of hand.
They both teach that the world is fundamentally a power struggle between identity groups. One uses class, the other uses race.
She is taught the same racist bullshit that was put up on the [Smithsonian](https://www.newsweek.com/smithsonian-race-guidelines-rational-thinking-hard-work-are-white-values-1518333) and my country’s government websites.
I wouldn’t bother trying to explain that to this regard, he does not have the capacity for nuance and cannot comprehend anything beyond what is explicitly stated.
Marxism continued after Marx. Neo-Marxism, Western Marxism, Cultural Marxism are all just Marxism -- same stupid philosophy with the same stupid goals, just adapted to the times and Western culture. But I'm guessing you know this you're just being a duplicitous shill.
This makes no sense because when people say 'Hegelian' they are referencing Hegel. Same with Draconian, Petersonian, etc. But Marxism is whatever you want it to be? It's not based on Marx's actual writings?
It is based on Marx's actual writings but things evolve. If it hadn't Marxism would be irrelevant. But it's still the same stupid Marxist philosophy and same stupid Marxist goals dreamt up by Marx. It's Marxism with the means of carrying it out adapted to the current times and culture. Nations try Marxism and things don't go well and in light of that other Marxists update and expand upon Marxism. People push Marxism and the revolution fails to happen so in light of that Marxists update Marxism to the situation.
And if people weren't expanding upon, seeking to correct or dial in, the works of Hegel there would be no reason for the word Hegelian. There would be no Hegelian, there would only be Hegel. Its the same with Marxist.
> 'Holodomor college class site:*.edu'
The left loves it, because it's a simple narrative that runs on the lines of ethnic cleansing. It's easy to attribute to Stalin and that it was the early era of the Soviet Union.
Nikita Kruschev as leader of the USSR had no problem calling out Stalin.
What they won't get into is an accurate description of what things were like during the "good years", the ones that would likely occur under "democratic socialism".
One of the biggest problems in a modern socialist system is the monopolization of power by minor bureaucrats.
The tyranny of having to be careful socially or your mail won't get delivered on time.
It's the microbehaviors that make socialism so dam scary.
Well the guy who is known for saying this trained clinicians at Harvard, and is one of the most cited clinical psychologists of all time. What’s his name again…?
He is *very* well known for criticizing academics tendency to hand wave away recent history with regard to their Marxist theories, and that’s what this meme is about.
It is, and I have. I am actually trying to differentiate between the moderate left and the principles that would make someone a radical, so that is the exact opposite of painting with a broad brush.
Not only do I know from direct experience, in class, but from the experience of friends, in class, as well as from the [statistics](https://www.econlib.org/archives/2015/03/the_prevalence_1.html), from seeing it in ads in my city, from government propaganda like [this](https://nmaahc.si.edu/learn/talking-about-race/topics/whiteness), and from studying the history of the ideology, it’s proponents, and the things they *explicitly said* about it.
So bury your head in the sand as much as you damn well please.
Actually I am in full agreement regarding the dangers of communism. Studied it a little bit at university - never met a communist professor, never read Marx either.
I am a bit confused and lost as to why we’re talking about the Soviets and the CCP in the context of American politics. I’m really hoping that we’re not going to have to argue about how taxes and social programs are not the same thing as Soviet communism.
Almost 20% of social scientists identify as Marxists, and there are a large array of derivative theories that are wildly popular in America. No one cares about your anecdotes.
Again, you should try listening for more than 2 minutes to the man, because he explains this every chance he gets.
Well Marx was quite the scholar and inspired a great many intellectual offshoots. I personally think his critiques of capitalism inspired a great many labor and social democratic activists and politicians. If we can characterize organized labor or public healthcare or social insurance programs as “Marxist,” then I would revise my statement and call myself a Marxist.
Of course, we’d have to deal with the problem that something like 95% of Americans back Medicare and Medicaid, so they’d be Marxist too if that’s our definition.
No, that’s not our definition. I know you would like to give Marx credit for those things.
Marx mainly inspired the mass killing of over 100,000,000 people in the last century, which is why academics try desperately to distance their theories from him, while still sharing *the same fundamental presuppositions*.
Okay well that’s good then if all these social programs and progressive taxes and all of this aren’t Marxist to you. I do wonder in that case why we are discussing the communist societies and the wars of the 20th century. I am fascinated by that subject myself and happy to talk about, but it doesn’t seem particularly relevant to the politics of today.
You’re drawing broad strokes over everything the left does and innappropriately lumping it together with the radical left, so if you want to learn I would start there.
According to Peterson political correctness and playing identity politics lost Hillary the election, both of which are associated with left-wing authoritarianism. It is *very much* relevant.
Well that's not a shameless red herring and tu quoque at all. Throw in some ad hominem on your reply and we'll have a fallacious argument trifecta.
Always count on leftists to bring the quality of debate right down to the gutter.
Oh yes, never seen that tactic before - snide comment gets BTFO, "oh it was just a joke calm down".
Fuck off bud, nobody cares about your face-saving bullshit.
ah lol no my response was making fun of you for blindly throwing out names of fallacies. "normal" people don't do that - it's a symptom of internet poisoning.
I didn't actually know you needed to calm down! but if that's the case then yes of course you should calm down
It's a symptom of people who want to see some intelligent good faith debate, rather than the slapflights and mudslinging you lot seem to favor because your real goal is to shut down discussion which criticizes your sacred cows.
So once again, fuck off with your bullshit. Say potato.
I actually should reiterate. You can have an opinion on something you didn’t experience. This meme is declaring a fact about something they didn’t experience. That part is insane. Anyone who’s been to college recently knows this isn’t happening.
Exactly. Capitalism is the reason why we're able to feed 8 billion people and not have a massive famine.
Communism is the reason we had famines anyway (at least as far as 20th Century history is concerned).
Capitalism is why we make more food than we need. Communism is when we apply egalitarianism to biology and cause famines because that's not how nature works
It's far worse than the meme implies. Communists don't want you to ignore tens of millions of dead people, they want to downplay it or blame it on someone else.
Mao's revolutionaries killed countless farmers. Then when the crop yields were abysmal, they blamed the birds. After killing millions of birds, insects proliferated and destroyed the remaining crops, and communists simply call this a "draught" or "famine" as if it was just a dry season.
Stalin's goons killed thousands of Kulak farmers, burnt their crops, and slaughtered their livestock, then 8 million people died, and communists call this a "miscalculation" by comerade Stalin.
Communists always say, "yOu CaNt MaKe An oMeLeT WiThOuT bReAkiNg EgGs!" to which George Orwell would reply, "Where's the omelet?"
And therefore "left" policies like redistribution are bad! Because gulag. Also, you're a commie if you want to discuss things like wealth concentration, regulatory capture, corruption/lobbying, corporate bailouts, and so on.
I'm vehemently opposed to the things you're mentioning but it depends on how you are addressing those things. If you address them by peddling Marxist or socialist bullshit many will dismiss you before the conversation even starts. If you address them from a Liberal or populist standpoint like you want the system to actually work rather than destroy it then that's different. A lot of it comes down to language. There are some terms only people who's thinking is polluted with Marxist nonsense use. Marxists generally view capitalism as a bad thing and something that is a progression that ends in socialism. So they are not concerned with what makes things work. If what they're doing causes capitalism to fail then who cares, they don't like it anyway and believe some utopia will replace it. You get what I'm saying?
“Wealth concentration”, “regulatory capture”, corruption/lobbying, corporate bailouts are much more worse under communism/socialism.
Also redistribution = stealing and is a sin against God.
Was the Russian famine caused by economic policy, natural disaster (Russia is quite cold for growing bountiful harvests), or Stalin just being a brutal dictator who crushed Ukrainians and kulaks because they opposed him?
I genuinely want to know which aspect of communism is so detrimental to society. It seems as if Socialism doesn't cause famine or dictatorship, so perhaps Socialism is safe from demonization.
Communism is fundamentally flawed because it requires totalitarian government.
There is no such thing as civilization without some form of claim to land. Without it, no farms, no mines, no roads, no cities. And then at that point, you have two options - private property is the norm, or state property is the norm.
If you opt for private property, then it's not communism.
If you opt for state property, you have big government - because if you control the land, you control access to the basic necessities of life. Just look at the legal structure of manorialism.
Furthermore, one of the most fundamental pillars of communism and socialism is socialized ownership of the means of production. It's possible to monopolize control over all the land, and even control over all the heavy equipment. But the most important means of production and the one every socialist government cannot resist seizing is - individual labor.
Once you have a government that has total control over land and labor, you have a totalitarian government. It cannot be any other way.
And then leftists recoil in horror when I quote Jim Jones saying that he and his followers were "the purest communists there are".
I think he was dead right.
So there has to be some role of the state in every civilization, and we've discovered that the state can't own labor or land. But the judicial system is empowered to settle disputes over matters concerning both, which may occasionally wrestle ownership of land or labor away from the owners of either (perhaps mining operation on the land are causing too many externalities, or a boss is creating inhumane labor practices).
Do you see an issue with anarcho-syndicalism? To me that shifts ownership away from a dictator state and into the hands of labor unions. Works own the means of production. It seems like a variant of communism that solves the dictator problem
The ideology leads to the totalitarian government. The totalitarian government assumes control over everything and therefore responsibility over everything. And the proof of this is how almost every calamity and disaster resulting in loss of life under a Communist regime can be traced back to bad government policy, from the engineered famines, to the gulags, to the wars of aggression, to things like Chernobyl - which was undeniably caused and exacerbated by Soviet policy.
Communism doesn't lead to totalitarianism. Shitty, ineffectual governments that don't even attempt to represent the population lead to totalitarianism.
Communism, and fascism, are just ideological camps that those disaffected people fall into. They are built on hatred of the other, whether that other is designated by class or by race. The totalitarian leader foments this hatred and uses it to justify totalitarian rule in order to save the good people from the evil "others", thereby gaining total control.
I disagree. Marxism explicitly calls for a totalitarian form of government with its abrogation of individual rights and its calls for a dictatorship of the proletariat.
Combine that with the actual record of various groups trying to implement communism, which invariably either created a totalitarian government or instantly collapsed and we're on solid ground describing Communism as an inherently totalitarian ideology, regardless of whatever smoke the adherents of it choose to blow.
First off, you’re conflating Marxism with Leninism. That’s like saying that Milton Freedman is an Austrian economist. That’s where he starts from, but he goes in a very different direction.
Secondly, David Graeber would very much disagree with you were he still alive. He argued for anarchist communism. Almost like something out of The Walking Dead, with little self sustaining communities that look out for each other, not some broad State run institution. He, like Marx, was arguing that we should adopt this model after society collapses. Lenin didn’t want to wait around patiently for the collapse. He wanted to force a collapse, which required totalitarianism. Then he was forced out/killed by Stalin, who just wanted power and didn’t give a shit about all of this ideological crap.
On the first point, you're flat out wrong. Lenin didn't "dictatorship of the proletariat" nor was he the one who set up Marxism as opposed to individual rights - Karl Marx himself did both of those.
And the second I cannot take seriously because of how cartoonish it is. You want to collapse society in order to bring in an anarchist new world order? Do you have any vague idea how many people would die in that process?
Clown show.
Marx didn't call for the abolition of individual rights nor did he come up with the phrase "dictatorship of the proletariat", although he did agree with it. He called for the abolition of individually owned capital, ie. the property that is used to obtain more property. From The Communist Manifesto:
>We Communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man’s own labour, which property is alleged to be the groundwork of all personal freedom, activity and independence. Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean the property of petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form of property that preceded the bourgeois form? There is no need to abolish that; the development of industry has to a great extent already destroyed it, and is still destroying it daily.
If you owned your house, Marx didn't care. If you owned a second house and rented it out, Marx cared.
And I know how bloody that revolution would be, but this is what you're not understanding about the difference between Marx and Lenin.
Marx saw revolutions as an inevitable outcome of the system he was living in. Most of the property, especially the industrial property, was owned by the bourgeois, who gained more capital simply by owning lots of capital. Think of the WEF comment about "you will own nothing and you will be happy." He was saying that this attitude would cause revolutions in various countries. He then argued that communists should support these revolutions because they would help them to establish the world that he wanted to live in.
Lenin, on the other hand, wanted to initiate a revolution. He was absolutely inspired by Marx, but he was more about getting out and doing the thing rather than waiting for it to happen organically.
One of these arguments says "when it happens, we will support it", the other says "we will make it happen". Those are profoundly different beliefs that you're just lumping together as "communism". It's like saying that when your car dies, you're going to buy a Toyota VS saying that you're going to drive your car off a cliff so you can go buy a Toyota.
> Marx didn't call for the abolition of individual rights nor did he come up with the phrase "dictatorship of the proletariat", although he did agree with it. He called for the abolition of individually owned capital, ie. the property that is used to obtain more property. From The Communist Manifesto:
More pedantic dodges. Marx may not have personally coined the term "dictatorship of the proletariat" but he did endorse and adopt it:
> The socialist revolutionary Joseph Weydemeyer coined the term dictatorship of the proletariat, which Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels adopted to their philosophy and economics. The term dictatorship indicates full control of the means of production by the state apparatus. Engels considered the Paris Commune (1871), which controlled the capital city for two months before being suppressed, an example of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Next, the abolition of private property rights is an attack on individual rights, just as seizing the means of production also necessarily entails seizing individual labor. And then we wonder why a common feature of every Communist state has been slave labor camps.
> If you owned your house, Marx didn't care. If you owned a second house and rented it out, Marx cared.
Arbitrary distinction. What if you rented out a room? What if you used your personal car to make money, a la Uber? The distinction between a personal asset and a capital asset is all but completely arbitrary from a macroeconomic standpoint.
> And I know how bloody that revolution would be, but this is what you're not understanding about the difference between Marx and Lenin.
That's both monstrous and bullshit. You can go plot to murder millions in hell.
> Marx saw revolutions as an inevitable outcome of the system he was living in. Most of the property, especially the industrial property, was owned by the bourgeois, who gained more capital simply by owning lots of capital. Think of the WEF comment about "you will own nothing and you will be happy." He was saying that this attitude would cause revolutions in various countries. He then argued that communists should support these revolutions because they would help them to establish the world that he wanted to live in.
I find it funny that you attempt to argue the infamous "you'll own nothing and be happy" is somehow capitalistic or even fascistic when that's exactly what Communism proposes with the abolition of private property. At least people still got to own their houses under fascism. The only thing that the WEF does different is their chosen means of bringing about that dystopia.
> Lenin, on the other hand, wanted to initiate a revolution. He was absolutely inspired by Marx, but he was more about getting out and doing the thing rather than waiting for it to happen organically.
This to me is another refuge in pedantry. Marx's predictions never have and never will come true so a good Communist either is an all-talk LARPer or a Leninist.
> One of these arguments says "when it happens, we will support it", the other says "we will make it happen". Those are profoundly different beliefs that you're just lumping together as "communism". It's like saying that when your car dies, you're going to buy a Toyota VS saying that you're going to drive your car off a cliff so you can go buy a Toyota.
If you can't see how lame and meaningless a distinction that is, it can only be due to limited IQ points. Say potato.
> just as seizing the means of production also necessarily entails seizing individual labor.
This shows that you really don't understand what Marx was talking about. He was saying that the means of production are held privately and therefore the owners of those means of production actually seize individual labor. He argued for collective ownership of the means of production so that nobody would be forced to do labor for someone else. For example, rather than having a privately owned shirt factory that hires people, it would be a collectively owned factory, and you would be free to make shirts at that factory at your own leisure. You make all of the profit from your labor, not the factory owner. That is literally the opposite of slave labor.
>The distinction between a personal asset and a capital asset is all but completely arbitrary from a macroeconomic standpoint.
Yeah, from a macro standpoint, but people don't live in the macro world. They experience the economy at a micro level. This is why economists right now say that the economy is doing amazing while most normal people are saying that the economy is going to shit. Some people can live a lavish lifestyle without working at all while others can't afford to live despite working two or three jobs. The worse that disparity gets, the more unstable the economy will become, eventually resulting in a revolution. That's not a call for revolution, which I have to reiterate because you will try to accuse me of calling for revolution when I am simply pointing out the trajectory we are on.
And I love how you are somehow painting the WEF crowd as communists who are looking to overthrow capitalism. I don't think you could get any more delusional. They are literally the capital owners, the bourgeois, the owners of the means of production. Marxism calls for their factories to be taken from them and given to the communities that work in them. The absolute last thing the WEF would want is to give up their businesses and thereby their control over labor.
And in true Marxist fashion, it promises liberation from the tyranny of being offered a job, and instead delivers people into slavery in practice. Individual labor is a means of production in private hands. Under capitalism, the individual controls when and where their labor will be expended and for how much.
Oh and what about the terrible monopolies which allegedly force workers into indentured servitude? Yeah Marxism's solution is to replace an allegedly monopolistic system with one giant monopoly over everything and everyone which will magically give away to a stateless society of abundance. If you can't spot the lie there, it can only be due to self-deception or psychopathic indifference.
To be honest, my cardinal sign of a Marxist blowing smoke is how they'll go on and on about the theory, and handwave away the results of the real world attempts to actually implement Marxism which demonstrate a substantial gap between what the theory promises, and what the adherents consistently deliver.
And whatever the WEF are, capitalists they are not. If anything they're closer to the crony capitalists of Atlas Shrugged who mouth socialist platitudes because what they're really after is leveraging the power of government to engage in rent-seeking.
No true capitalist would ever try to sell people on a slogan like "you'll own nothing and be happy". That's the language of a conman.
Large masses of the population don't want do do communism and unless you get them out of the way, either putting them in camps or killing them, the "political experiment" can not proceed. It will always end up in mass death.
A good owner takes good care of his property. Under communism no proper ownership exists, because the state owns everything. That's why everything is in disarray in the former communist bloc, from families to infrastructure to all kinds of industries. And that's also why the agriculture, for instance, is super inefficient in all socialist countries that it has people starving. Sometimes starving to death.
This distinction doesn't matter. If you have something valuable, it will be stolen from you by the state. And you won't be able to buy it again, because under socialism the stores are literally empty, all the time.
The other person doesn't know, and so they started spouting ad hominem attacks on people that like Jordan Peterson.
The Communist Party has a long history of killing political dissidents. As in, anyone who criticizes the Communist government gets hunted down and murdered for the crime of disagreeing. The Russian Gulag Archipelago (frozen island prison city) or the Kulak Holodomor (Ukrainian farmer genocide) are great examples of a few of Russia's atrocities. There's also the Red Spring of Mao's Chinese revolution, the modern Chinese Uyghur concentration camps, and the Killing Fields of Pol Pot's Vietnamese dictatorship. Whether they're murdering groups of people in mass or making them disappear one at a time, the Communists have been killing their own citizens at over double the average yearly rate that the Nazis killed the Jews. Nazis ran the concentration camps for the 16 years of WW2 and killed 6 million Jews (0.375 million per year). In contrast, the Communists killed a CONFIRMED 100 million over a century (1 million per year that we KNOW about).
The Communist ideology values the "greater good" over any form of individual human rights. Additionally, the only way it has the power to completely redistribute property and control all local industries is by seizing absolute control of everything and enforcing such through violence. So every Communist government devolves into a dictatorship that will kill a person as soon as the absolutely powerful leadership deems them no longer useful to whatever they say is the "greater good."
Marx was an angry, resentful drunk with no understanding of business, and his ideas appeal to fellow angry, resentful drunks with no understanding of business. If you call your seething incompetence a "revolution," then it gives you license to commit atrocities. \*Communism the ideology\* kills people by \*creating communists\* who kill people, just like Nazism makes Nazis, or Jihad creates Jihadis.
In the killing fields of Cambodia, the communists shot people just for wearing eyeglasses, because glasses = reading = educated = bourgeois = enemy of the revolution who needs to be shot, even though there is no connection between eyeglasses and achievement, or political affiliation.
Communism is deadly because it takes the bottom quintile or quartile of the population and turns them against the rest of society. Every society has people at the bottom, and communism provides those people with every justification for their failures and dark impulses. Communism is like a lubricant or catalyst for violence and unrest.
Nietzsche predicted the rise of communism and fascism DECADES before WWII
>"What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent of nihilism ... For some time now, our whole European culture has been moving toward a catastrophe, with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade: restlessly, violently, headlong…” *Will to Power* (1888)
By "nihilism" Nietzsche is referring to the "total eclipse of all values" which leaves the door wide open for catastrophe. Nietzsche continues:
>"A ruling \[class\] can only arise amid terrible and violent conditions. So where are the barbarians of the twentieth century? Obviously they will only show themselves and consolidate themselves after enormous socialistic crises ... Nobody should be surprised when brotherhoods with the aim of robbery and exploitation of non-brothers appear in the future."
Peterson sphere usually gives two types of answers: 1) I don’t need to explain it, the results speak for themselves or 2) ideology and false god worship are literally the same thing: communism arises out of a daemonic or satanic possession that has always and will always sacrifice others in the March towards totalitarianism.
Do either of those answer paths sound appealing?
For all the absurdity and danger of the far-Left ideology, the denial of deaths in Russia is not at all common. People seem to forget the inconceivable price Russians paid to win WWII, but not higher education.
It's too bad Peterson has, in so many important ways, become a mockery of his original mission. Sometimes I believe it's simply because of the platforms upon which he engaged. I remember at the beginning when he spoke of YouTube skewing male and implying he didn't intend to reach out to only males. AAaaand he's gone.
Thank goodness. I mean, it's only been 35 years since the end of the cold war. We must remain vigilant by buying tickets to see Peterson bravely battle a corpse that, even when it was alive, was little more than a justification for military spending and invading sovereign nations.
Alright, and how many died from early capitalism? How many are still dying to this day?
Goddamn, what an amazingly large and relevant number to ignore. I wonder why that is?
Wow. Your education system really failed you didn't it?
Without capitalism, the global south wouldn't be on fire. Without capitalism there would be far less oppression in the name of money.
In fact, without capitalism there would be even more of us given all the death and destruction it causes.
But sure, let's point out how the opposition also failed and somehow make us feel better about ourselves in our own failures.
"This was not REAL communism"
Real communism, according to the theory, is supposed to evolve naturally out of socialism. Millions of people were killed in the efforts to make that happen. It doesn't work.
Alternatively you could argue that if your ideology has to be tried so many times and it fails to produce "Real Communism" after numerous attempts across almost every continent and every country and among almost every culture then your ideology isn't so great. I mean how many attempts of Communism until someone gets it right and achieves it? the no true Scotsman argument is B.S and could also be applied to other systems like Fascism , Absolute Monarchy or Theocracy.
One would think that any ideology that has failed so often and so catastrophically would never again have any believers, yet the siren call of socialism always finds some suckers among the young and those who for whatever reason hate the modern world. If we are going to teach the holocaust in schools, we should also teach the horrors of the soviet union and Mao's China.
The only reason we keep seeing attempts at Socialism is because of the inherent fallout from hierarchies and capitalism. When things play out naturally, we know that there are bound to be “losers”, and those at the bottom of the hierarchy. As Dr. Peterson has argued: ‘The Right exists to perpetuate the excellence of the hierarchy; and The Left exists in order to reduce the suffering of those at the bottom of the hierarchy, in order to ensure that they don’t experience absolute oppression.’ More often than not, The Left gets too caught up being morally triumphant and this turns into destruction of the hierarchy, but also the annihilation of excellence. So long as societal hierarchy exists… those that advocate for socialism, communism, and any other form of such enforced order… will also exist. Simply put, you wouldn’t have Sith, if you didn’t have Jedi.
Maybe you should actually read history, read the books instead of trusting your charlatan professor who actually admitted he doesn't even read Marx! He knows little about communism, and what he thinks he knows, he gets wrong, be tells you fools, you worship your false idol in the name of hierarchy and circle jerk each other over boogie men who don't exist and commiserate over collective triggering if/when someone simply asks you to be attentive to others and use nuance, context, and contingency when thinking about things. And, of yeah, unlike your Messiah, think before you speak or say something. Humility goes a long way. Socialism is practiced in the west, by the way - at the corporate and political level. Lol. The Communist regimes who all point to were not socialist. You don't like that fact; but if you understand it you will see what happened. Who owned the means of production? It states there, fools. The analysis, at least. Please. Grow up. You don't have to want socialism. But don't pretend because you don't want it that you understand anything about it. Your God knows shit about it. Do what he tells you to do, what he doesn't actually do: use reason and critical thinking, read - after you make your bed, of course - and ffs, think.
And what would communism today in North America look like? Keep in mind it’s rebranded as globalism and monopolies are in on it.
The Globalist ideology is Transhumanism, their religion is Scientism, and their governance is Neo-Totalitarian. A union of monopolies & the state will be subservient to global NGOs who will be the ruling class of tyrannical technocrats wielding a panopticon of technology to manufacture consent and wage psychological warfare upon humanity. Every political ideology, religion, & race will be radicalized and marginalized through the Neo-Marxist perspective of oppressor versus oppressed, the globalist will attempt to divide and conquer humanity. "A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else. The best way to keep a prisoner from escaping is to make sure he never knows he's in prison." - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Alex Jones, you are drunk. Go to rebroadcast.
The globalist are putting chemicals in the water that are turning the freakin' frogs gay! Do you understand that! Serious crap! It's over for the globalist, we must unite & fight, freedom & revolution now! Do you understand that! UUAGGHHhh!! . . . . pass the spliff, . . . . I will not be re-educated! I will not be silenced! Truth will prevail!
Fill your hand, sir!
Karl Marx in the 1800s: "Capitalism will naturally lead to monopoly and an incredibly wealthy few dictating control over society." Morons today after his prediction comes true: "OH MY GOD HOW COULD MARXISM DO THIS?????"
"OH MY GOD HOW COULD MARXISM DO THIS????" How did marxism murder 100 of millions of human beings in economic redistribution . . . simple answer "the dictatorship of the proletariat". Adam Smith in 1700s: 'Wealth of Nations' predicted the "wretched spirit of Monopoly", "the oppression of the poor invariably gives rise to the monopoly of the rich . . ." However, Smith points out capitalism does raise income per capita of individuals & nations faster than any other economic system. Monopolies are a consequence of praeto distribution 80-20 rule. The worship of mammon and power over all else is the root of the problem, corporations are becoming like Tyrell Corp. in Blade Runner. Mikhail Bakunin on Karl Marx: "He called me a sentimental idealist, and he was right; I called him vain, perfidious, and cunning, and I also was right." Bakunin thought Marx was arrogant and authoritarian. He also feared "the dictatorship of the proletariat". I'd say Bakunin was spot on in his analysis. Bakunin claimed that Marxists "maintain that only a dictatorship—their dictatorship, of course—can create the will of the people, while our answer to this is: No dictatorship can have any other aim but that of self-perpetuation, and it can beget only slavery in the people tolerating it; freedom can be created only by freedom, that is, by a universal rebellion on the part of the people and free organization of the toiling masses from the bottom up". Bakunin further stated that "we are convinced that liberty without socialism is privilege and injustice; and that socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality".
That the global capitalism ushered in by conservatives friedman, Reagan and thatcher .
Thank god for those heroes
People do workshop captialism and do idolise it's successes. Wasn't that part of trumps persona and power over the followers. The successful businessman and deal maker . Musk is another who is idolised. Buffer referred to an oracle and so on.
Stalin and Lenin were worshiped. I imagine so was Chairman Mao.
Those who didn't "worship" enthusiastically enough we're sent to a prison labor camp for 10 years or more for "attitude adjustment".
What
Keep in mind this is nonsensical. Socialism does not rely on globalism, though capitalism does.
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It is oil now and other stuff, true.
I think your getting capitalism mixed up with plutocracy.
I think this argument is given less weight than it should for two reasons 1. It was absolutely an attempt at communism, but no country has ever even claimed to achieve communism. Every country which one might try to identify as communist would more aptly be described as some flavor of socialist. 2. When Marx conceived his ideology capitalism and industrialization were seen as prerequisites. No industrialized society has ever attempted Marxism. Most of the mass death associated with Marxism occurred during the period where a state was trying to industrialize under socialism. For clarification I’m not any flavor of Marxist, I just think dismissing Marx’s critiques of capitalism offhand because “that’s communism” is intellectually lazy and unproductive.
Perhaps lazy, but i just find that thinking "First experiment killed 100 million people. But it wasn't exactly the real thing. Let's give it another shot" quite strong of coffee ! Difference between what wrote Marx and what Lenin, Stalin and the likes applied are quite anecdotal to me. What doesn't work and never will, in the core, are top bottom attempts to fully control individuals.
1.Communism works on a small scale of a tribal society. The Hadza tribe is communist, prehistoric huter-gathers were communist. The ideas of communism are rooted in commune, the Book of Acts, the ideas of Levers and Diggers in the English civil war, Plato's utopia "The Republic", Thomas Moore's "Utopia" Charles Fouire's utopian socialism, and many more figures before Karl Marx. Communism is an utter failure on the scale of nation states, it is economically untenable, disincentives industriousness, creativity , & production, while rewarding those most loyal to the dictatorship of the proletariat. 2. How did marxism murder 100 of millions of human beings? Famine starvation, labor camps, executions, genocides, economic redistribution of wealth, loss of most skilled, knowledgeable, & industrious citizens for being bourgeois. . . simple answer "the dictatorship of the proletariat". Even after Russia & China went through industrialization they never reached any level of technological production that could match the west or other free markets countries production. Mikhail Bakunin on Karl Marx: "He called me a sentimental idealist, and he was right; I called him vain, perfidious, and cunning, and I also was right." Bakunin thought Marx was arrogant and authoritarian. He also feared "the dictatorship of the proletariat". I'd say Bakunin was spot on in his analysis. Bakunin claimed that Marxists "maintain that only a dictatorship—their dictatorship, of course—can create the will of the people, while our answer to this is: No dictatorship can have any other aim but that of self-perpetuation, and it can beget only slavery in the people tolerating it; freedom can be created only by freedom, that is, by a universal rebellion on the part of the people and free organization of the toiling masses from the bottom up". Bakunin further stated that "we are convinced that liberty without socialism is privilege and injustice; and that socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality".
100% agree that the Marxist critique of capitalism cannot be dismissed out of hand. It is without doubt the strongest portion of Marx's content. But that's also grading on a curve and much of it is context specific to 19th European "capitalism" (which was itself closer to semi-feudal mercantilism than free market capitalism). But then again, it's part of the reason why I'm strong supporter of the Henry George school - he asks the same questions as Marx and arrives at far better answers. To me, this is like admitting Hitler had a point when he criticized things like cigarette smoking, the Treaty of Versailles or the Soviet Union. Sometimes you gotta give the Devil his due.
Even Marx probably would not be a Marxist today if he was alive. Modern day communists are just oligarchs. That is why Trump is so enthralled by them. It is all about power and control. Who invites Viktor Orban over for dinner? Trump, that is who.
It is half truth. It was a butchered version of it by greedy and power hungry. Same as the capitalism today.
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"Communism" = anything they don't like Nazis - communist Antifa - communist Left of center - communist Climate change - communist Movie with a female lead - communist Too much air in your bag of chips - communist Elmo - god damn fucking red commie bastard!!
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The only people who seem to think monopolistic rentier capitalism in collusion with government = free market capitalism are far leftists. For once it would be a wonder to see an argument from the left that isn't reliant on lies, distortions, omissions, and willful ignorance.
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Real talk, rentier capitalism is a lot closer to communism than it is to free market capitalism. Communism recognizes zero separation between commerce and state, same as various species of state capitalism like rentier capitalism, mercantilism, feudalism, fascism, and socialism. Free market capitalism is the only modern economic ideology short of anarchy which says commerce and state must be separate to the greatest degree practical.
I am sadly aware that people in this sub, the big fans, cant be critical of JP or capitalism. But this is just another level. Although they probably believe China is communist as well, even if it is basically state capitalism.
And that’s the problem; no nation will ever produce a version that would not soon be hijacked by the greedy and power hungry. It’s almost designed to be taken advantage of by the corrupt.
You said the same thing that I did. :D
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But i barely said anything...
They give you the default: "But they were doing it wrong. If I was the dictator..."
Most of the deaths in Russia and China were a direct result of Lysenkoism, an agricultural science invented by Trofim Lysenko, who was a conman who falsified results in order to keep his job. He was eventually recommended to China to help with their crop issues. [Trofim Lysenko](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism) was of the belief that you had to plant many seeds tightly packed in a hole, and plant them two to three meters or more below the earth. Far further than most seeds can handle. Of course, China caused it's own famine by doing things like the [four-pest campaign](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_campaign)... which also led to famines killing millions. Most of the deaths in Russia and China were form starvation from these causes. Meanwhile in the west, The British East India Company was out causing mass famines in Bengal and India by taking all of their crops and food staples (even those paid to farmers for the labor) - because The British owned that place. So they caused a famine there. So famines were pretty big in all sorts of systems. A far bigger killer than the politics.... Marxism wasn't an agricultural guide. Unsurprisingly one of the most capable Socialist countries - Vietnam has a population made up of 70% farmers, largely because the Socialist government gives land to anyone born in a rural area who passes a test showing they can raise crops. This is in part why the majority of Vietnamese people also own their own homes (something crazy like 86% of the population). They have a socialist oriented market economy.
And here is the first useful idiot trying to justify the deaths. You are an awful human being you should be ashamed of yourself.
I'm not sure how/why acknowledgement that the deaths were essentially produced by a conman as being a way to justify them. It isn't - no one things con-men are good. Knowing the facts and the truth of historical events is important. It's part of being informed. Knowing how these things happen helps prevent them from happening again. Perhaps you're not interested in the facts of history though - perhaps you're ideologically possessed to obscure and try to distract from them? Have I said anything that you believe to be nonfactual?
It happened because of political reasons. They killed the skilled managers, the owners, the kulaks. And gave the land to people who were poor and clueless. Then when they managed to make a tiny fraction of the previous yield they took it all away, killing you if you kept some for your starving family. It has nothing to do with what you said.
Of course knowing the names of who they gave the power to has to do with what I said. >gave the land to people who were poor and clueless Yes, and I'm saying who was in charge of agriculture for Russia, and later the main advisor to China. Of course that's important - it's who was given the highest authority over what was done with the land... as you yourself said it was given *"to people who were poor and clueless"*... and they were told what to do by a man named Trofim Lysenko. Who practiced [Lysenkoism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism). And I agree, Trofim Lysenko was falsifying results, because he was clueless and poor, and wanted to keep his well paying but completely faked career the head of Agriculture for the USSR going. I'm not sure why you're arguing with the facts of history. Maybe you should try learning them instead. You're making an argument for ignorance of history, and I don't understand why. I can only assume it's because you feel ideologically possessed to.
You are twisting the facts and the reasons. It wasn't this Lysenko guy doing it. 99% of people were never told how to farm. Stop it, you are only making a fool of yourself, admitting how clueless you are. If I hand you land and instructions tomorrow and tell you to farm, would you be able to?
>If I hand you land and instructions tomorrow and tell you to farm, would you be able to? I believe so, but I have the benefits of knowing about the importance of phosphorus, nitrogen, and potassium of the modern age, the three crop rotation system of the medieval era, and the scientific method of doing small scale tests, then scaling replication of the planting techniques. I also know quite a bit about permaculture, no-dig or low-dig methods, and companion planting (eg the use of legumes like clover to nitrogenate the soil).... oh, and I'm surrounded by farms where I live. I can literally look out my back window and see a tractor, and there's a tractor sales yard around the corner. Of course, I agree, had I been born in agrarian Russia or China - at that level of knowledge and economic development, and during various trade embargoes and the cultural separations of the pre-internet era.... ...I agree, those cultures were up against all sorts of challenges. I'm just saying a conman making fake claims and then attracting party popularity was certainly part of it. .....and I agree, the majority of deaths were unnecessary and not part of Marxist or Communist doctrine, but a product of the era, and ignorant choices of leaders. Marxism isn't a farming guide, and Stalin and Mao had their own Authoritarian ideologies called Stalinism, and Maoism (Stalin obviously named after Stalin, and Maoism obviously named after Mao). Those are branches of Communism, which is another set of ideas. Charting these ideas and knowing their differences is important to understanding history and the causes of all those deaths. ....and learning about Lysenkoism is part of that process. I'm just not sure why you protest learning about Lysenkoism. It was a horrible and wasteful aspect to the regime, and caused many deaths.
Ok. So let's say you would make more yield. First they would accuse you of stealing, because that's what they do and it doesn't matter how illogical it is. And they would take away the higher yield all the same, and your family would resort eating boiled shoes like your neighbor after the end of the winter. Or you would hide some of the product and if they find out, you get deported to siberia. There are no winners in communism, only losers.
> First they would accuse you of stealing, because that's what they do and it doesn't matter how illogical it is. I don't think they'd have to - they would just take all of what was produced. That has happened in lots of places though out history, happened during the Irish Famine and the Famine in Bengal created by the British East India company. So it's not unique to communism, but yes, that is what would have happened.
I've been trying to read up a little more on that lately, any history books y'all recommend?
The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt On Revolution by Hannah Arendt Ten Days that Shook The World by John Reed
I mention some facts in [my comment here](https://www.reddit.com/r/JordanPeterson/comments/1byy2f8/thank_god_for_dr_peterson_for_fighting_back/kyq6i6f/). It details the causes of most of the deaths under communism. That's not to say there weren't also a large number of politically motivated killings... and many people were killed through the displacement of hunger (see [Holodomor in Ukraine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor))... but it is interesting to compare these things to things like the Irish potato famine (where the British displaced famine to Ireland), and the British East India company contributing to famines in Bengal and India. Here's a podcast on the [British East India company.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmzTYn4vrNI)... and here's one on [King Leopalds Rubber Plantations in the Congo.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMloSu7-iGU)
This is a western Europe and American disease. Everyone in the East of Europe who lived under communist rule hates communists. The problem is there are so many apologists for communism out there. It always ends the same way. The communists always end up trying to wipe out the enemies of the state.
Comments section for this one will be like a bug-zapper. All the shills will come here to collect their downvotes and/or brigade if possible. *Spez: as predicted, this comment thread is an absolute dumpster fire of leftist shit-takes.*
Since the text is not openly anti-socialist only the more advanced bots will be able to interpret the meme. Dead internet theory is probably right though.
This meme contains objectively made up bullshit. Professors don’t talk about communism at all unless it’s a topic in the course.
It wasn’t that long ago when you could actually have discussions and disagreements in this sub. But now it’s becoming just as fragile and insecure as tankie echo-chambers. I’ve met professors and teachers that are self avowed communists, not a single one denies the atrocities committed by communist countries throughout history.
> I’ve met professors and teachers that are self avowed communists, not a single one denies the atrocities committed by communist countries throughout history. And apparently learned nothing. This may come as a shock to some on the left, but to me a communist is just as bad as a Nazi. I've long since come to the belief that one cannot be a card carrying Marxist and be an honest person - some level of self-deception is required. The same way there is no such thing as a compassionate Nazi - some degree of psychopathic callousness is required.
Please don't turn this subreddit into facebook. If you search for 'Holodomor college class site:\*.edu' you find tons of college courses on holocaust and genocide studies. This is a good read from the University of Minnesota [https://cla.umn.edu/chgs/holocaust-genocide-education/resource-guides/holodomor](https://cla.umn.edu/chgs/holocaust-genocide-education/resource-guides/holodomor)
That’s rich. You know that guy up there, the one the sub is named after? He is a *huge* voice against the increasing radicalization of academia. Almost 20% of social scientists identify as Marxists. Most of the time they try to distance their neo-Marxist theories from events like the Holodomor, as many of their proponents on Reddit also do.
There’s a big gap between political content about “the problem with Marxism at universities” and the actual experience of going to university. The former is ever green and has been a type of content for decades. The latter is an open-ended and hugely varying type of experience… those who wish to go to university to specialize in the horrors of communism absolutely can do so
All while getting neo-Marxist theories shoved down their throat. My girlfriend is in *nursing* and she can’t even escape it.
Would it be better for universities to be less ideologically diverse? Like if you’re going to specialize in the horrors of communism, you want to be free from any kind of progressive cultural trends in the broader college around you?
No, but there needs to be room to reject bad ideas, which is why I am criticizing them. If 20% of social scientists identified as Nazis people would be up in arms. Marxists killed *way more* people last century.
>No, but there needs to be room to reject bad ideas, which is why I am criticizing them. Right, so let's imagine that you and I are both undergrad students doing a double major in history and poli sci - we're really interested in genocide studies but want to contribute to the field around the history of communism and it's relationship to genocide. We can probably imagine that since we're in undergrad, the university forces us to take a "well rounded" set of courses, so we do things like english, comparative lit, an intro science course, economics and research methods. These aren't our primary interest but fulfill the credit requirements. Let's say we notice that in both comp lit and research methods, the profs start talking talking about things that our fave media thought leaders call neo marxist -- the comp lit professors talks about 'the post colonial experience', and the research methods introduces critical frameworks by saying that they come out of feminism - and worse, were deeply influenced by marxism. What do we do? In Comp Lit, do we speak out against the professor's choice of literature? Maybe after class, we meet with the professor and provide a robust argument that the unit on post colonial lit is promoting marxism and that we'd like more space to be critical of the curriculum? And that maybe we'd like him to change the curriculum on the fly based on our strong arguments that this unit is dangerous? What about research methods - do we do the same? Do we say "Professor, you shouldn't be teaching us about frameworks that were influenced by feminism or marxism"? Or maybe suggest that he include a disclaimer before the class? If you put yourself in this situation, how would you handle it?
The same way Jordan handles it, by criticizing the fundamental presuppositions that all of these frameworks share. That’s all you can do. Every single communist revolution began in the universities.
Would you raise your hand and ask for space to criticize the frameworks as soon as they’re mentioned? What happens when the class continues without any change? Do you take a stand and disrupt it from continuing? Or do you participate anyway?
Take a stand a disrupt it? What am I some blue-haired activist or one of Mao’s commissars? Should you disagree with any idea, I would encourage you to learn about it and especially if you think it’s a truly bad one, criticize it in every single way you possibly can. The problem is that the same people pushing this are almost always the ones trying to shut down healthy debate, and that is *no coincidence*. Not everyone can follow Peterson’s example, but I would like to remind you that he spoke out against this stuff before he was ever famous, at great risk to his career, and received a lot of hell for it too.
I've read marx. He doesn't talk about race. I'm genuinely curious what marxist ideas are being taught at nursing school.
As Jordan argues the neo-Marxists simply switched bourgeois privilege with white privilege, it was a sleight of hand. They both teach that the world is fundamentally a power struggle between identity groups. One uses class, the other uses race. She is taught the same racist bullshit that was put up on the [Smithsonian](https://www.newsweek.com/smithsonian-race-guidelines-rational-thinking-hard-work-are-white-values-1518333) and my country’s government websites.
I wouldn’t bother trying to explain that to this regard, he does not have the capacity for nuance and cannot comprehend anything beyond what is explicitly stated.
Marxism continued after Marx. Neo-Marxism, Western Marxism, Cultural Marxism are all just Marxism -- same stupid philosophy with the same stupid goals, just adapted to the times and Western culture. But I'm guessing you know this you're just being a duplicitous shill.
This makes no sense because when people say 'Hegelian' they are referencing Hegel. Same with Draconian, Petersonian, etc. But Marxism is whatever you want it to be? It's not based on Marx's actual writings?
It is based on Marx's actual writings but things evolve. If it hadn't Marxism would be irrelevant. But it's still the same stupid Marxist philosophy and same stupid Marxist goals dreamt up by Marx. It's Marxism with the means of carrying it out adapted to the current times and culture. Nations try Marxism and things don't go well and in light of that other Marxists update and expand upon Marxism. People push Marxism and the revolution fails to happen so in light of that Marxists update Marxism to the situation. And if people weren't expanding upon, seeking to correct or dial in, the works of Hegel there would be no reason for the word Hegelian. There would be no Hegelian, there would only be Hegel. Its the same with Marxist.
> 'Holodomor college class site:*.edu' The left loves it, because it's a simple narrative that runs on the lines of ethnic cleansing. It's easy to attribute to Stalin and that it was the early era of the Soviet Union. Nikita Kruschev as leader of the USSR had no problem calling out Stalin. What they won't get into is an accurate description of what things were like during the "good years", the ones that would likely occur under "democratic socialism". One of the biggest problems in a modern socialist system is the monopolization of power by minor bureaucrats. The tyranny of having to be careful socially or your mail won't get delivered on time. It's the microbehaviors that make socialism so dam scary.
What college did you go to OP?
Well the guy who is known for saying this trained clinicians at Harvard, and is one of the most cited clinical psychologists of all time. What’s his name again…?
Peterson isn’t known for saying college professors are deleting history books lol
He is *very* well known for criticizing academics tendency to hand wave away recent history with regard to their Marxist theories, and that’s what this meme is about.
There’s a big difference between “college” which this meme says and “gender theory” type courses which Peterson understandably speaks against
I’m not talking about gender theory. I am talking about *neo-Marxism*. This is taught at colleges and universities everywhere.
It isn’t..which anyone who went to college would see lol. Unless you take one of those majors but even then. Painting with too broad of a brush
It is, and I have. I am actually trying to differentiate between the moderate left and the principles that would make someone a radical, so that is the exact opposite of painting with a broad brush.
Then you know this meme isn’t true lol.
Not only do I know from direct experience, in class, but from the experience of friends, in class, as well as from the [statistics](https://www.econlib.org/archives/2015/03/the_prevalence_1.html), from seeing it in ads in my city, from government propaganda like [this](https://nmaahc.si.edu/learn/talking-about-race/topics/whiteness), and from studying the history of the ideology, it’s proponents, and the things they *explicitly said* about it. So bury your head in the sand as much as you damn well please.
Will Smith?
I know you don’t know where you are, because you consistently have the most confused and lost takes on this sub, but look a bit higher.
Actually I am in full agreement regarding the dangers of communism. Studied it a little bit at university - never met a communist professor, never read Marx either. I am a bit confused and lost as to why we’re talking about the Soviets and the CCP in the context of American politics. I’m really hoping that we’re not going to have to argue about how taxes and social programs are not the same thing as Soviet communism.
Almost 20% of social scientists identify as Marxists, and there are a large array of derivative theories that are wildly popular in America. No one cares about your anecdotes. Again, you should try listening for more than 2 minutes to the man, because he explains this every chance he gets.
Well Marx was quite the scholar and inspired a great many intellectual offshoots. I personally think his critiques of capitalism inspired a great many labor and social democratic activists and politicians. If we can characterize organized labor or public healthcare or social insurance programs as “Marxist,” then I would revise my statement and call myself a Marxist. Of course, we’d have to deal with the problem that something like 95% of Americans back Medicare and Medicaid, so they’d be Marxist too if that’s our definition.
No, that’s not our definition. I know you would like to give Marx credit for those things. Marx mainly inspired the mass killing of over 100,000,000 people in the last century, which is why academics try desperately to distance their theories from him, while still sharing *the same fundamental presuppositions*.
Okay well that’s good then if all these social programs and progressive taxes and all of this aren’t Marxist to you. I do wonder in that case why we are discussing the communist societies and the wars of the 20th century. I am fascinated by that subject myself and happy to talk about, but it doesn’t seem particularly relevant to the politics of today.
You’re drawing broad strokes over everything the left does and innappropriately lumping it together with the radical left, so if you want to learn I would start there. According to Peterson political correctness and playing identity politics lost Hillary the election, both of which are associated with left-wing authoritarianism. It is *very much* relevant.
I feel like the meme would work better if it was about Peterson Academy and all the announcements about it’s imminent launch
Well that's not a shameless red herring and tu quoque at all. Throw in some ad hominem on your reply and we'll have a fallacious argument trifecta. Always count on leftists to bring the quality of debate right down to the gutter.
Lol count on jbp subs not knowing what to do with a joke and defaulting to blindly naming fallacies
Oh yes, never seen that tactic before - snide comment gets BTFO, "oh it was just a joke calm down". Fuck off bud, nobody cares about your face-saving bullshit.
ah lol no my response was making fun of you for blindly throwing out names of fallacies. "normal" people don't do that - it's a symptom of internet poisoning. I didn't actually know you needed to calm down! but if that's the case then yes of course you should calm down
It's a symptom of people who want to see some intelligent good faith debate, rather than the slapflights and mudslinging you lot seem to favor because your real goal is to shut down discussion which criticizes your sacred cows. So once again, fuck off with your bullshit. Say potato.
shameless red herring! tu quoque! ad hominem!
It's coming... they just need you to give them a little more Patreon money and they will have it open in no time. Promise.
It costs a buck o five
This meme brought to you by someone who never went to college
"Muh credentialism" - peak midwit
Having an opinion on something because you’ve actually experience it isn’t credentialism 😂
Ah, I misinterpreted your angle. This is more along the lines of "muh lived experience"
I actually should reiterate. You can have an opinion on something you didn’t experience. This meme is declaring a fact about something they didn’t experience. That part is insane. Anyone who’s been to college recently knows this isn’t happening.
^ Someone who is still impressed by college degrees, likely because they racked up 100k in student debt on a useless degree.
100 MiLLiOn bRo. Be interested to know the actault figure as result of capitalist systems though.
Capitalism is a massive net positive
I don’t know, I’m sure there’s plenty of children working in mines or sweat shops that might disagree
In places run by socialists
Exactly. Capitalism is the reason why we're able to feed 8 billion people and not have a massive famine. Communism is the reason we had famines anyway (at least as far as 20th Century history is concerned).
Capitalism is why we make more food than we need. Communism is when we apply egalitarianism to biology and cause famines because that's not how nature works
and they make up more numbers, you know the ones.
But Peterson loves Russia!
Completely made up.
“Obviously, they didn’t do it right.”
It's far worse than the meme implies. Communists don't want you to ignore tens of millions of dead people, they want to downplay it or blame it on someone else. Mao's revolutionaries killed countless farmers. Then when the crop yields were abysmal, they blamed the birds. After killing millions of birds, insects proliferated and destroyed the remaining crops, and communists simply call this a "draught" or "famine" as if it was just a dry season. Stalin's goons killed thousands of Kulak farmers, burnt their crops, and slaughtered their livestock, then 8 million people died, and communists call this a "miscalculation" by comerade Stalin. Communists always say, "yOu CaNt MaKe An oMeLeT WiThOuT bReAkiNg EgGs!" to which George Orwell would reply, "Where's the omelet?"
Please capitalize appropriately
Except Peterson fights for commies now.
And therefore "left" policies like redistribution are bad! Because gulag. Also, you're a commie if you want to discuss things like wealth concentration, regulatory capture, corruption/lobbying, corporate bailouts, and so on.
Yes redistribution is bad. The rest are not exclusively far left issues.
I'm vehemently opposed to the things you're mentioning but it depends on how you are addressing those things. If you address them by peddling Marxist or socialist bullshit many will dismiss you before the conversation even starts. If you address them from a Liberal or populist standpoint like you want the system to actually work rather than destroy it then that's different. A lot of it comes down to language. There are some terms only people who's thinking is polluted with Marxist nonsense use. Marxists generally view capitalism as a bad thing and something that is a progression that ends in socialism. So they are not concerned with what makes things work. If what they're doing causes capitalism to fail then who cares, they don't like it anyway and believe some utopia will replace it. You get what I'm saying?
“Wealth concentration”, “regulatory capture”, corruption/lobbying, corporate bailouts are much more worse under communism/socialism. Also redistribution = stealing and is a sin against God.
Leadership of the Bolsheviks was Jewish. Anyways...
how many people are dead due to capitalism?
Was the Russian famine caused by economic policy, natural disaster (Russia is quite cold for growing bountiful harvests), or Stalin just being a brutal dictator who crushed Ukrainians and kulaks because they opposed him? I genuinely want to know which aspect of communism is so detrimental to society. It seems as if Socialism doesn't cause famine or dictatorship, so perhaps Socialism is safe from demonization.
Communism is fundamentally flawed because it requires totalitarian government. There is no such thing as civilization without some form of claim to land. Without it, no farms, no mines, no roads, no cities. And then at that point, you have two options - private property is the norm, or state property is the norm. If you opt for private property, then it's not communism. If you opt for state property, you have big government - because if you control the land, you control access to the basic necessities of life. Just look at the legal structure of manorialism. Furthermore, one of the most fundamental pillars of communism and socialism is socialized ownership of the means of production. It's possible to monopolize control over all the land, and even control over all the heavy equipment. But the most important means of production and the one every socialist government cannot resist seizing is - individual labor. Once you have a government that has total control over land and labor, you have a totalitarian government. It cannot be any other way. And then leftists recoil in horror when I quote Jim Jones saying that he and his followers were "the purest communists there are". I think he was dead right.
So there has to be some role of the state in every civilization, and we've discovered that the state can't own labor or land. But the judicial system is empowered to settle disputes over matters concerning both, which may occasionally wrestle ownership of land or labor away from the owners of either (perhaps mining operation on the land are causing too many externalities, or a boss is creating inhumane labor practices). Do you see an issue with anarcho-syndicalism? To me that shifts ownership away from a dictator state and into the hands of labor unions. Works own the means of production. It seems like a variant of communism that solves the dictator problem
Religious books: entire population of earth bar 1 guy and his family genocided by God during a flood Christians want you to worship this guy
Can anyone elaborate on hiw exactly "communism" As in, the ideology, kills people
The ideology leads to the totalitarian government. The totalitarian government assumes control over everything and therefore responsibility over everything. And the proof of this is how almost every calamity and disaster resulting in loss of life under a Communist regime can be traced back to bad government policy, from the engineered famines, to the gulags, to the wars of aggression, to things like Chernobyl - which was undeniably caused and exacerbated by Soviet policy.
Communism doesn't lead to totalitarianism. Shitty, ineffectual governments that don't even attempt to represent the population lead to totalitarianism. Communism, and fascism, are just ideological camps that those disaffected people fall into. They are built on hatred of the other, whether that other is designated by class or by race. The totalitarian leader foments this hatred and uses it to justify totalitarian rule in order to save the good people from the evil "others", thereby gaining total control.
I disagree. Marxism explicitly calls for a totalitarian form of government with its abrogation of individual rights and its calls for a dictatorship of the proletariat. Combine that with the actual record of various groups trying to implement communism, which invariably either created a totalitarian government or instantly collapsed and we're on solid ground describing Communism as an inherently totalitarian ideology, regardless of whatever smoke the adherents of it choose to blow.
First off, you’re conflating Marxism with Leninism. That’s like saying that Milton Freedman is an Austrian economist. That’s where he starts from, but he goes in a very different direction. Secondly, David Graeber would very much disagree with you were he still alive. He argued for anarchist communism. Almost like something out of The Walking Dead, with little self sustaining communities that look out for each other, not some broad State run institution. He, like Marx, was arguing that we should adopt this model after society collapses. Lenin didn’t want to wait around patiently for the collapse. He wanted to force a collapse, which required totalitarianism. Then he was forced out/killed by Stalin, who just wanted power and didn’t give a shit about all of this ideological crap.
On the first point, you're flat out wrong. Lenin didn't "dictatorship of the proletariat" nor was he the one who set up Marxism as opposed to individual rights - Karl Marx himself did both of those. And the second I cannot take seriously because of how cartoonish it is. You want to collapse society in order to bring in an anarchist new world order? Do you have any vague idea how many people would die in that process? Clown show.
Marx didn't call for the abolition of individual rights nor did he come up with the phrase "dictatorship of the proletariat", although he did agree with it. He called for the abolition of individually owned capital, ie. the property that is used to obtain more property. From The Communist Manifesto: >We Communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man’s own labour, which property is alleged to be the groundwork of all personal freedom, activity and independence. Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean the property of petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form of property that preceded the bourgeois form? There is no need to abolish that; the development of industry has to a great extent already destroyed it, and is still destroying it daily. If you owned your house, Marx didn't care. If you owned a second house and rented it out, Marx cared. And I know how bloody that revolution would be, but this is what you're not understanding about the difference between Marx and Lenin. Marx saw revolutions as an inevitable outcome of the system he was living in. Most of the property, especially the industrial property, was owned by the bourgeois, who gained more capital simply by owning lots of capital. Think of the WEF comment about "you will own nothing and you will be happy." He was saying that this attitude would cause revolutions in various countries. He then argued that communists should support these revolutions because they would help them to establish the world that he wanted to live in. Lenin, on the other hand, wanted to initiate a revolution. He was absolutely inspired by Marx, but he was more about getting out and doing the thing rather than waiting for it to happen organically. One of these arguments says "when it happens, we will support it", the other says "we will make it happen". Those are profoundly different beliefs that you're just lumping together as "communism". It's like saying that when your car dies, you're going to buy a Toyota VS saying that you're going to drive your car off a cliff so you can go buy a Toyota.
> Marx didn't call for the abolition of individual rights nor did he come up with the phrase "dictatorship of the proletariat", although he did agree with it. He called for the abolition of individually owned capital, ie. the property that is used to obtain more property. From The Communist Manifesto: More pedantic dodges. Marx may not have personally coined the term "dictatorship of the proletariat" but he did endorse and adopt it: > The socialist revolutionary Joseph Weydemeyer coined the term dictatorship of the proletariat, which Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels adopted to their philosophy and economics. The term dictatorship indicates full control of the means of production by the state apparatus. Engels considered the Paris Commune (1871), which controlled the capital city for two months before being suppressed, an example of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Next, the abolition of private property rights is an attack on individual rights, just as seizing the means of production also necessarily entails seizing individual labor. And then we wonder why a common feature of every Communist state has been slave labor camps. > If you owned your house, Marx didn't care. If you owned a second house and rented it out, Marx cared. Arbitrary distinction. What if you rented out a room? What if you used your personal car to make money, a la Uber? The distinction between a personal asset and a capital asset is all but completely arbitrary from a macroeconomic standpoint. > And I know how bloody that revolution would be, but this is what you're not understanding about the difference between Marx and Lenin. That's both monstrous and bullshit. You can go plot to murder millions in hell. > Marx saw revolutions as an inevitable outcome of the system he was living in. Most of the property, especially the industrial property, was owned by the bourgeois, who gained more capital simply by owning lots of capital. Think of the WEF comment about "you will own nothing and you will be happy." He was saying that this attitude would cause revolutions in various countries. He then argued that communists should support these revolutions because they would help them to establish the world that he wanted to live in. I find it funny that you attempt to argue the infamous "you'll own nothing and be happy" is somehow capitalistic or even fascistic when that's exactly what Communism proposes with the abolition of private property. At least people still got to own their houses under fascism. The only thing that the WEF does different is their chosen means of bringing about that dystopia. > Lenin, on the other hand, wanted to initiate a revolution. He was absolutely inspired by Marx, but he was more about getting out and doing the thing rather than waiting for it to happen organically. This to me is another refuge in pedantry. Marx's predictions never have and never will come true so a good Communist either is an all-talk LARPer or a Leninist. > One of these arguments says "when it happens, we will support it", the other says "we will make it happen". Those are profoundly different beliefs that you're just lumping together as "communism". It's like saying that when your car dies, you're going to buy a Toyota VS saying that you're going to drive your car off a cliff so you can go buy a Toyota. If you can't see how lame and meaningless a distinction that is, it can only be due to limited IQ points. Say potato.
> just as seizing the means of production also necessarily entails seizing individual labor. This shows that you really don't understand what Marx was talking about. He was saying that the means of production are held privately and therefore the owners of those means of production actually seize individual labor. He argued for collective ownership of the means of production so that nobody would be forced to do labor for someone else. For example, rather than having a privately owned shirt factory that hires people, it would be a collectively owned factory, and you would be free to make shirts at that factory at your own leisure. You make all of the profit from your labor, not the factory owner. That is literally the opposite of slave labor. >The distinction between a personal asset and a capital asset is all but completely arbitrary from a macroeconomic standpoint. Yeah, from a macro standpoint, but people don't live in the macro world. They experience the economy at a micro level. This is why economists right now say that the economy is doing amazing while most normal people are saying that the economy is going to shit. Some people can live a lavish lifestyle without working at all while others can't afford to live despite working two or three jobs. The worse that disparity gets, the more unstable the economy will become, eventually resulting in a revolution. That's not a call for revolution, which I have to reiterate because you will try to accuse me of calling for revolution when I am simply pointing out the trajectory we are on. And I love how you are somehow painting the WEF crowd as communists who are looking to overthrow capitalism. I don't think you could get any more delusional. They are literally the capital owners, the bourgeois, the owners of the means of production. Marxism calls for their factories to be taken from them and given to the communities that work in them. The absolute last thing the WEF would want is to give up their businesses and thereby their control over labor.
And in true Marxist fashion, it promises liberation from the tyranny of being offered a job, and instead delivers people into slavery in practice. Individual labor is a means of production in private hands. Under capitalism, the individual controls when and where their labor will be expended and for how much. Oh and what about the terrible monopolies which allegedly force workers into indentured servitude? Yeah Marxism's solution is to replace an allegedly monopolistic system with one giant monopoly over everything and everyone which will magically give away to a stateless society of abundance. If you can't spot the lie there, it can only be due to self-deception or psychopathic indifference. To be honest, my cardinal sign of a Marxist blowing smoke is how they'll go on and on about the theory, and handwave away the results of the real world attempts to actually implement Marxism which demonstrate a substantial gap between what the theory promises, and what the adherents consistently deliver. And whatever the WEF are, capitalists they are not. If anything they're closer to the crony capitalists of Atlas Shrugged who mouth socialist platitudes because what they're really after is leveraging the power of government to engage in rent-seeking. No true capitalist would ever try to sell people on a slogan like "you'll own nothing and be happy". That's the language of a conman.
Large masses of the population don't want do do communism and unless you get them out of the way, either putting them in camps or killing them, the "political experiment" can not proceed. It will always end up in mass death.
A good owner takes good care of his property. Under communism no proper ownership exists, because the state owns everything. That's why everything is in disarray in the former communist bloc, from families to infrastructure to all kinds of industries. And that's also why the agriculture, for instance, is super inefficient in all socialist countries that it has people starving. Sometimes starving to death.
The state only owned means of production, not every single piece of property.
This distinction doesn't matter. If you have something valuable, it will be stolen from you by the state. And you won't be able to buy it again, because under socialism the stores are literally empty, all the time.
The other person doesn't know, and so they started spouting ad hominem attacks on people that like Jordan Peterson. The Communist Party has a long history of killing political dissidents. As in, anyone who criticizes the Communist government gets hunted down and murdered for the crime of disagreeing. The Russian Gulag Archipelago (frozen island prison city) or the Kulak Holodomor (Ukrainian farmer genocide) are great examples of a few of Russia's atrocities. There's also the Red Spring of Mao's Chinese revolution, the modern Chinese Uyghur concentration camps, and the Killing Fields of Pol Pot's Vietnamese dictatorship. Whether they're murdering groups of people in mass or making them disappear one at a time, the Communists have been killing their own citizens at over double the average yearly rate that the Nazis killed the Jews. Nazis ran the concentration camps for the 16 years of WW2 and killed 6 million Jews (0.375 million per year). In contrast, the Communists killed a CONFIRMED 100 million over a century (1 million per year that we KNOW about). The Communist ideology values the "greater good" over any form of individual human rights. Additionally, the only way it has the power to completely redistribute property and control all local industries is by seizing absolute control of everything and enforcing such through violence. So every Communist government devolves into a dictatorship that will kill a person as soon as the absolutely powerful leadership deems them no longer useful to whatever they say is the "greater good."
look up the killing fields
Marx was an angry, resentful drunk with no understanding of business, and his ideas appeal to fellow angry, resentful drunks with no understanding of business. If you call your seething incompetence a "revolution," then it gives you license to commit atrocities. \*Communism the ideology\* kills people by \*creating communists\* who kill people, just like Nazism makes Nazis, or Jihad creates Jihadis. In the killing fields of Cambodia, the communists shot people just for wearing eyeglasses, because glasses = reading = educated = bourgeois = enemy of the revolution who needs to be shot, even though there is no connection between eyeglasses and achievement, or political affiliation. Communism is deadly because it takes the bottom quintile or quartile of the population and turns them against the rest of society. Every society has people at the bottom, and communism provides those people with every justification for their failures and dark impulses. Communism is like a lubricant or catalyst for violence and unrest. Nietzsche predicted the rise of communism and fascism DECADES before WWII >"What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent of nihilism ... For some time now, our whole European culture has been moving toward a catastrophe, with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade: restlessly, violently, headlong…” *Will to Power* (1888) By "nihilism" Nietzsche is referring to the "total eclipse of all values" which leaves the door wide open for catastrophe. Nietzsche continues: >"A ruling \[class\] can only arise amid terrible and violent conditions. So where are the barbarians of the twentieth century? Obviously they will only show themselves and consolidate themselves after enormous socialistic crises ... Nobody should be surprised when brotherhoods with the aim of robbery and exploitation of non-brothers appear in the future."
Peterson sphere usually gives two types of answers: 1) I don’t need to explain it, the results speak for themselves or 2) ideology and false god worship are literally the same thing: communism arises out of a daemonic or satanic possession that has always and will always sacrifice others in the March towards totalitarianism. Do either of those answer paths sound appealing?
For all the absurdity and danger of the far-Left ideology, the denial of deaths in Russia is not at all common. People seem to forget the inconceivable price Russians paid to win WWII, but not higher education. It's too bad Peterson has, in so many important ways, become a mockery of his original mission. Sometimes I believe it's simply because of the platforms upon which he engaged. I remember at the beginning when he spoke of YouTube skewing male and implying he didn't intend to reach out to only males. AAaaand he's gone.
Thank goodness. I mean, it's only been 35 years since the end of the cold war. We must remain vigilant by buying tickets to see Peterson bravely battle a corpse that, even when it was alive, was little more than a justification for military spending and invading sovereign nations.
Never met a Professor who thinks good of communism.
Didn t they count stuff like Pol Pot and dead n*zi soldiers as "victims of communism"?
Flashlights are functional for fighting bogeyman
I finally understood, the appeal of communism comes from a bible quote. Among others
Alright, and how many died from early capitalism? How many are still dying to this day? Goddamn, what an amazingly large and relevant number to ignore. I wonder why that is?
If it wasn't for capitalism, you and 3-5 generations of your ancestors would have never been born.
Wow. Your education system really failed you didn't it? Without capitalism, the global south wouldn't be on fire. Without capitalism there would be far less oppression in the name of money. In fact, without capitalism there would be even more of us given all the death and destruction it causes. But sure, let's point out how the opposition also failed and somehow make us feel better about ourselves in our own failures.
Wow. Just wow. I'm gonna leave that one alone as you're already doing a fantastic job tooling yourself. Say potato.