JucheBot1988 @ juchebot88 @lemmygrad.ml

Kimilsungist-Kimjongilist.

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3 yr. ago

1957: America panics over Sputnik

2023: America panics over a stupid balloon

Man, have the fascists gone soft

All bought off by Putin, obviously.

Counterpoint: no American actually recognizes any of those symbols

"Lenin was literally Thanos"

"Yeah, but Vladolf Putler is even worse than Hitler" (cue stupid argument about how KGB oppression was turned inward, but Hitler really loved Germany or something)

Yeah, I think my meme-brain was talking there.

Good points, which I'll try to answer.

1. I think there is a difference between personal immortality and the continued applicability of ideas. Indeed, ideas often become most applicable after the death of their originator, simply because they attain a degree of separation from that originator, and are thus more "abstract" and "universal." The originator of a particular idea or philosophy is often not cognizant of the full application, simply because he or she is an individual shaped by particular life experiences during his or formative years. This is why (for instance) any debate about whether Mao would personally have approved of contemporary China is irrelevant; SWCC flows from his ideas, and that is what qualifies the modern CPC as following Mao Zedong thought. If the continued applicability of certain ideas beyond the death of their originator is not accepted, we may as well abandon not only Marxism, but any kind of philosophy or ideology whatsoever. It is true that we cannot apply ideas dogmatically, without reference to material conditions; but that itself does not argue against the idea's continued existence and vitality, any more than the fact that one must use a screwdriver correctly argues against the existence of the screwdriver.
2. I tend not to be optimistic about the ability of individual human beings to really adapt to new experiences, and to synthesize them into a coherent worldview -- at least beyond a certain point. In my experience anyway, and a whole lot of history and literature seems to reflect it, most human beings don't really change much after the formative years of childhood and adolescence. Everything after about, oh, 24 or 25 seems to be mostly crystallization, or in the best case scenario, development of what was already there. There are exceptions, but they are rare. Thus if Confucius were alive today, he might not be exactly the same person he was during his (historical) lifetime, but I very much doubt he'd have changed enough to deal coherently with the problems we face. The fact is, humanity changes it outlook as the material circumstances change. Individual human beings often do not.
3. About fear of death being individualistic: we fear death precisely because we identify our essential being entirely with our specific individuality. But this is not, as Marx points out in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, the truly human way to look at death. Man is a species-being, and our outlook on death (in our particular experience, a human phenomenon), should be from the standpoint of species-being. That is, we identify our true essence with what is common and socially-developed -- i.e., the essentially human characteristics of independence, creativity, and consciousness -- and do not feel any loss at death, because we know these things will continue as humanity continues. This state of mind is not inconceivable; it is that which drives communist martyrs, even those who who were hardline atheists, to suffer death for the sake of the people.
4. The goal of socialism is not specifically to provide a life without suffering, but to provide a life that is, in human terms, meaningful. A level of material abundance in accord with the particular stage of the development of production is certainly necessary for this. But material abundance is a means to an end, for one can be as rich and comfortable as one likes and still be a miserable, useless old bastard. (Just ask Jack Ma, or rather, ask the regulatory officials who had to deal with Jack Ma). Human beings find happiness (in the deepest sense) by serving the people, and a human being's short life is what makes such service meaningful. It is said that "death is the great equalizer," and this is usually meant in the negative sense of "kings must die as well as commoners." But it also has a positive sense, in that it enables everyone to achieve a similar level of revolutionary heroism. Each human being is given their life, and given it once -- which means that spending or giving up that life for the sake of something larger than oneself is a uniquely meaningful sacrifice. This is ultimately, what is meant by a "communist morality:" not something metaphysical, but a recognition of individual meaning in specifically human terms.
5. Your last point is especially well taken, that if immortality is scientifically possible, all this is probably moot. However, as someone who is not a scientist, and doesn't have the leisure or money to become one, I still have to form some kind of tentative opinion on the issue. And it is this; bourgeois scientists have been promising this kind of thing forever, and while life expectancy has certainly increased, individual lifespans have not lengthened all that dramatically. (The Hebrew book of Qoheleth, written between 450 and 180 BC, has the line "the lifespan of a man is seventy winters, or eighty if he is strong.") I find it a bit suspicious that the capitalist media is trumpeting immortality again, right when the system is well and truly collapsing; it seems a distraction like UFOs, or Elon Musk saying that the colonizing Mars is the solution to all earth's problems. I am not totally unsympathetic to an individual's fear of dissolution, but so far, it seems to me that the domain of that kind of thing is still religion and philosophy -- things outside the domain of science, revolutionary science included. There are religious communists, and communists who believe in the immortality of the soul. I respect them as comrades, but am very suspicious of any attempt to drag a metaphysical concept like immortality into the realm of science.

the gun is good, the penis is evil

Unironically good slogan, which we should reclaim and use against horny reformist libs

Furthermore -- and this to my mind would be the single biggest problem with immortality (a concept I still think is a pipe dream) -- most people's and ideas and worldview tend to crystallize at a certain point, and never really change after that. Death and the emergence of a new generation are a natural check; each new generation realizes in a different manner some facet of what it means to be human. With immortality, we would likely see stagnation, with the world run by people whose ideas matched material reality three or four hundred years ago. Think of tradition in the very worst sense, as a "dead weight" which current humanity is trapped under; and now imagine that tradition still living and enforced by the actual people who created it.

To me, that line from How the Steel Was Tempered is the complete expression of communist morality and a truly human attitude toward death: "The most precious thing a man possesses is his life. It is given once, and never given again. And it should be spent so that in dying, one can say: I gave it all, my whole life, my whole strength, for the greatest thing that there is -- the fight for the liberation of humanity."

Reversing aging and trying to stop death is dumb. It's probably impossible, and certainly individualistic. I believe it was Mao who said, toward the end of his life, something along the lines of "just as the true communist willingly sacrifices himself for the good of the people, so the older generation accepts death for the sake of the new generation."

LATE EDIT: can't find the specific Mao quote I was thinking of (I may be misremembering), but here's something similar, from his speech to the 8th Party Congress:

The Chinese people consider weddings as red happy events and funerals white happy events. I find them very rational. The Chinese know dialectics. Weddings will produce children. A child is split out of the body of the mother. It is a sudden change, a happy event. One individual is split into two or three, or even 10, like the aircraft carrier.

The common people find the deaths, changes and occurrences of new matters happy events. When a person dies, a memorial meeting is held. While the bereaved weep in mourning, they feel it is also a happy event. Actually, it is. Just imagine if Confucius were still living and here at this meeting in Huai-jen Hall, he would be over 2,000 years old and it wouldn’t be so good! If one subscribes to dialectics and yet disapproves of death, it will be metaphysics. Disasters are social phenomena, natural phenomena. Sudden changes are the most fundamental law of the universe. Birth is a sudden change; so is death. In the several decades from birth to death, it is a gradual change. If Chiang Kai-shek should die, we would clap our hands in joy. If Dulles should die, none of us would shed a tear. This is because the death of matters of the old society is a good thing, hoped for by everyone.

I used to think that, then I sat down and read the thing. A lot of it is objectively great ancient literature, on the level of Virgil's Georgics or the Homeric hymns.

As a thanksgiving for victory, Saddam supposedly wrote out the entire Koran (or some verses from it) in ink mixed with his own blood. I rather doubt it ever happened, and I'm not sure that Islamic law would even allow it, but the idea is still kind of badass.

This Nazi Bible thing, on the other hand, is just stupid and blasphemous.

At the risk of sounding like a commie boomer, I'm convinced that liberals' weird fascination with Stalin's sex life is borne out of feelings of inadequacy in that particular realm.

The "Oh yeah, they're communist too" of the communist world

The absolute scale of corruption in the US, and the sheer shamelessness of said corruption, are pretty unbelievable. We're sort of good at projecting a facade of invincibility, but inside, this place is collapsing by the day.

Comically large window brush

but but muh Potemkin villages!

I was in Detroit about two years ago, and I swear, there was an actual abandoned skyscraper right across from the bus terminal.

Nooooo, not the dystopian green urban spaces! Need some more gritty and real, with trash and literal shit on the sidewalk, like NYC!

They and neoconservatives are almost the only people in America -- besides a small coterie of genuine Marxists -- who have any understanding of geopolitics. Which really says something about this God-forsaken country.