LinkedinLenin [any, comrade/them] @ LinkedinLenin @hexbear.net

Posts

0

Comments

60

Joined

2 yr. ago

That's just thought-terminating. There's no universal truth that ends do or do not justify means.

Is locking up a sex offender to prevent further victimization justifiable? Is taking bread from a store to feed a starving person justifiable? Is banning false advertisement justifiable? Is requiring licensure for medical practice justifiable? Those actions are all means that directly violate some conception of liberal human rights.

Additionally, there's often not a clear delineation, in the real world, between means and ends. The real world is made up of complex networks of powers and interests competing against each other, regardless of what can or cannot be justified. We believe in advancing working class power, interests, and rights, which by definition necessitates undermining the power, interests, and rights of the ruling class and its enforcers/enablers. Within that framework we accept and perform criticisms of the methods used to progress those goals, but only inasmuch as those critiques can help to refine strategy and inform future liberatory movements. Otherwise it's either carrying water for US interests or squabbling about the moral standing of dead people.

any system could be free enough of flaws to be above criticism- or that it's good enough to be worth the oppression of the few without hearing their voices and honestly considering their plight.

I don't think there's many MLs that would argue against you here, at least as far as ideals go. In fact you'll find a lot of internal criticism of past socialist experiments. It's just not really criticism if it's not taking into account historical context and/or if it's based largely on western misinformation.

What most western criticism of AES lacks is key historical context (this comment is very stream of consciousness so forgive me for being all over the place):

Threats of invasion, sabotage, espionage, assassination, etc have always been a threat to vested power, but even more so against revolutionary movements. Rosa Luxembourg was killed. Lenin was nearly assassinated (may have caused him to die early). Stalin may have been assassinated. Castro somehow survived hundreds of attempts and plans. Che was killed. Allende was overthrown (and maybe killed). Árbenz was overthrown. Malcolm X was killed. Fred Hampton was killed. Sukarno was overthrown. Sankara was killed. All this just off the top of my head, there's plenty more examples.

The Soviet Union had 20 years to somehow industrialize well enough to face European invasion, withstanding both internal and external attacks. The alternative was quite literally death.

The absolute strength, size, and resources of the US empire are unprecedented, which significantly alters the material conditions and thus the strategies that must be employed by revolutionary movements for survival. US intelligence agencies have become very good at manufacturing or manipulating social unrest to destabilize a country and set up a coup. Check out The Jakarta Method for an overview of some of these strategies.

So yes, ideally we would all interact freely in the marketplace of ideas, and bad ideas would be refuted by facts and logic. But the unfortunate reality is that bad faith actors and saboteurs have proven incredibly effective at materially undermining revolutionary movements, and thus any criticism of those movements must take that into account or it's a useless criticism.

People have lost sight of how much of our "free" time is actually just resting and recuperating in order to perform better during "work" time. Like, the 8 hours a day I sleep isn't really my time. The commute to and from work isn't my time. The basic maintenance and upkeep stuff, the unwinding from a stressful day, all that isn't truly my time, it's just preparing for and recovering from work time.

A two-day weekend makes this exceptionally clear. At least one of the days is usually spent catching up on all the stuff you couldn't do because you were working. The second day is rushing to try and get any enjoyment out of it before you go back to work. There's barely any actual agency or freedom, it's all part of the cycle of producing value for someone else.

Even worse if you're in a job without set schedules or weekends, like most service industry workers.

Someone paying $800 a month for their rent is gonna have paid $470,400 by the time they retire. That's like two fucking mortgages for the "service" of not being homeless.

It's just restructured feudalism at this point. We've abstracted away the direct relationship between landlord and serf, but over half our labor is still going to some third party doing none of the work.

That's just age-progressed brace. The whole temporary revolt was a trueanon bit

yeah a lot of US municipalities do this too. anti-homeless austerity measures bullshit, pearl clutching about the horror of an Other potentially experiencing pennies worth of social value.

even more fun is when getting an ID requires proof of address. motherfucker that is my proof of address, and is also required to get an address in the first place

knowledge should be freely available

Welcome!

The dunking culture is primarily useful as a tactic against bad faith actors, an attempt to alleviate the effort assymetry associated with engaging with them. It takes very little effort to spew nonsense and rile people up, and 10 times as much effort to kindly and carefully refute the nonsense.

Especially in an ecosystem where accuracy and kindess is less important for "winning" an argument than coming off as more confident (see the effectiveness of wojack memes in calcifying opinion) or popular, it's a necessary evil to be able to respond to such actors without wasting too much time. Relevant is Sartre's analysis of antisemites:

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

Now all that being said, not all of us are as good as "turning it off" as we need to be. But despite that my experience with Hexbear is that there's a ton of users there very capable of good faith disagreement and discussion.

Generally if you engage in good faith, most of us should as well. Most of us were in a similar position to you at one point.

I'm sure there's probably a few Hexbear users that think that, but as far as I can tell it's the minority. Maybe I'm wrong

In any case, there's a lot of us who prefer to interact in good faith. Personally that's why I left Reddit years ago, because people there are too at each other's throats instead of interested in finding common ground and developing ideas.

Might be stretching the bounds of this question because it's a passage from Grapes of Wrath, but it always gets me.

Personally I just think your distinctions are a bit idealistic. Maybe useful as abstract definitions, but too removed from real world economics to make strong statements about it.

For example, a regulated market economy is kind of the natural state of capitalism, unless perhaps you zoom in on single transactions. As capitalism was struggling to emerge out of feudalism, the newly emerging capitalist class had to contend with governmental entities that arose out of feudal economic relations (and thus were geared towards protecting the power and wealth of the landlord class against the peasant class). In that struggle, as the capitalist class gained dominance, they tended to enact laws that protected their interests against both the old landlord class as well as the new working class.

In regards to central planning, that's a tendency of complex economies to drift towards for a variety of reasons. Capitalism tends towards monopoly (because monopoly is the most profitable state an enterprise can strive towards), and in later stages of monopolization, the economy is de facto, if not de jure, a centrally planned economy. ln the US, a large amount of our industry and distribution is centrally planned by corporations like Amazon and Walmart, large agriculture corporations, etc. And I imagine companies are going to continue to consolidate.

The big problem is this central planning is done without our or society's best interests in mind, their primary purpose is to benefit the company's shareholders. What some of us theorize is that once it reaches a point of consolidation, that infrastructure can then be seized, and systems can be set up such that the efficiency and whatnot is preserved, but the purpose is changed to benefit everyone (as much as possible) instead of a small number of shareholders. That's very theoretical and general, of course. The specifics and nuances will depend a lot on the specific conditions we live in.

I completely understand! It's good to stay neutral about things you aren't sure about, I respect that.

You bring up a good point, about western influenced things being dominant. We all start off with some core assumptions that are taught to us by the society we grow up in. It's good to examine those assumptions at some point, because they may be limiting. If you happen to have any questions, feel free to ask!

Ah okay!

Fwiw you may get some pushback on Centrism here, because a lot of us see politics differently than simply a matter identities and ideals, like most Americans seem to. We're more interested in who owns what and who has power, more along the lines of classical economists like Adam Smith and Marx.

For example there's no central point between a master and an enslaved person (the material reality), their material interests are mutually contradictory. Similarly, we don't think there's any Centrism to be found between working people and elites, at least no real one. What's good for them is bad for us, and vise versa.

Do you mean centrist by chance? Centralist means like central control or organization.

Oh I can empathize with that struggle. If I get time this week maybe I'll try to write a basic summary of it.

I agree with the sentiment, but please do read the essay I linked. It really changed the way I thought about things.

It's very much about strategizing and analysis, not moralizing or dividing or anything like that.

Jesus Christ lmao

Eh I just don't think there's much utility in being so strict with categories. That's fine as a shorthand though, and for explaining to coworkers who aren't familiar with the theories.

But the point of a material analysis is to, well, analyze. What are people's material interests? How do those interests shape a person's revolutionary or reactionary potential?

Rather than try to illustrate it myself with made-up examples, I'm gonna delete the paragraph I wrote and just post an actual material analysis from history

Idk I don't think that's a very useful or accurate way to look at things. I do a lot of organizing and mutual aid alongside leftists of all types, (as well as liberals).

From a materialist lense, middle class usually refers to the small business owners, landlords, etc. Petty bourgeoisie basically. They historically tend to welcome fascist ideology out of fear of losing their privileged position in society.

So there's a difference between the working person who might get caught in a false consciousness versus the tenuously well-off person who's somewhat class conscious. The latter is likely a lost cause more often than not. The former can often be reasoned with if we can speak to their experiences as a worker and cut through the spectacle.

But yeah the Liberal use of the term "middle class" as someone occupying arbitrary income brackets is an immaterial abstraction with very little utility for either prediction or description.