I commend the attempt but the content is not above criticism.
The audience of the Gotha Program was essentially the same as JT’s audience, and Marx found it important to produce a polemical critique against reformist tendencies.
We don’t necessarily want support from social democratic groups who have demonstrated fickleness in historical periods like the 1918 German revolution.
We shouldn’t water down the essential tenets of revolutionary theory when appealing to the proletarian masses. We shouldn’t focus so much on distribution, on vague “equality”, or on bourgeois electoral democracy.
These gateway videos should be honest and focus more on the necessity of a total revolution in production, the necessity of a change in our way of life, not merely reform in existing political institutions.
Maybe I'm just a cranky Marxist — JT's videos are great as a gateway to socialism for the most propagandized Westerners. But does anyone else pick up on an apparent socdem tendency in the explanations provided in videos like this one?
His argument for socialism boils down to moralistic criticism of unequal distribution, and pointing to socialism as a society in which all people receive a guaranteed minimum income, in other words, a more egalitarian society in terms of value received.
Is this not almost identical to the utopian arguments of the Lassalleans whom Marx criticized in his Critique of the Gotha Program?
Lots of western historians study history extensively and still don’t escape the ideology of their class. Even a well-meaning Marxist is prone to have bad takes on history depending on who they read because, let’s face it, not everyone has the time or the will to read and vet primary historical sources.
The essential thing is not necessarily to be a History Knower but to recognize that every social relation is historically contingent. That includes wage labor, the state, race relations, religion, etc. If it is social then it typically has a material basis which can change over time. Because they usually lack this perspective, non-Marxists are more inclined to have reactionary takes on both current and historical events, regardless of how much history they know.
One excellent book I’m trying to finish is Michael Parenti’s The Assassination of Julius Caesar. Just one example of how historians have distorted the past due to their class lens.
I think Pepe would agree with you. There is no single cause or reason, it is just one of many, in the broader geopolitical picture he paints in the video.
Until recently I was a Verizon Wireless customer. Their website is a complete mess. Typos everywhere and I would encounter exceptions every visit. Many times I would encounter loops in their flows and never be able to complete a task. I very frequently had to call in so that a supervisor could just force through what I needed.
And that’s just the front end.
I completely agree with you, the back-end billing and other processing is probably a nightmare. From professional experience I can say it can either be quite manageable, or nigh impossible, to make small changes like this depending on how shitty the foundation is.
I think the ISPs are overdue for a complete overhaul but they can’t/won’t because there is no market or regulatory pressure to spend the money. They literally don’t care how shitty their services are.
You should have GPS without any service at all. You might need data for the map to load, depends on the app. If you’re lucky and the app automatically cached it when you had signal, or you manually downloaded the offline map, then you could navigate home in airplane mode.
All of this is moot because I think I remember reading the rest of this story. The hiker wasn’t really lost, they simply went on a hike without telling anyone, and ignored calls during that time because they were trying to unplug.
First step is abolishing wage labor and private property. Transitional political forms take on some form of direct democracy, probably something similar to soviet councils.
Whataboutism is a meaningless brainworm which the user invokes in order to ignore their own cognitive dissonance and inconsistent standards. You cry "whataboutism" when @very_poggers_gay@hexbear.net was correct to point out your own double standard. "All of this sounds at odds with representative democracy" implies that you believe genuine democracy is something we currently stand to lose.
What you need to understand is that Marxists are not interested in imposing utopian futures on the world. "What do you have in its place?" is the wrong question. Better questions: What currently prevents genuine democracy? What are the material conditions which both produce and maintain it? Then you get to work on changing those material conditions and removing the real basis which produces the problems.
With modern technology I wonder how necessary representative style governments really are. Electronic voting already exists and works quite well, and is probably the most secure form of voting as long as it can be audited. Of course, at some point administration has to come down to individuals, but as long as those individuals are held accountable in some way then it seems that the actual democratic step (i.e. voting on policy) need not be mediated through representatives as is oft repeated to justify the status quo.
You might have been referring to this with republicanism, but there are different types of representation, too. Parliamentary democracies are not obligated to obey the wishes of their subjects, whereas soviet (council) democracies are a form of direct democracy, where representatives are merely delegates and are obligated to obey/communicate the wishes of their subjects. In my comment above I had in mind the parliamentary type, since that is the kind in which there is a buffer between citizens and political institutions which is used by the bourgeoisie to suppress changes which would undermine capital.
Representative "democracy" alienates the common man from the political process while maintaining a semblance of democracy. For this reason it is the ideal political form for capitalism, an economic system which alienates power from the masses and concentrates it in the hands of a few.
Class interests are the primary axis on which all political activity turns. Getting the working class to
What we saw as Reddit at its best was, from a capitalist's perspective, Reddit at its worst.
And capitalists will allow this "at its worst" phase in order to capture the market, before squeezing it. This pattern is consistent in many industries.
![quarrk [he/him]](https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/7e8d5408-881d-44be-96ed-78f21c878bbb.png?format=webp&thumbnail=128)
I commend the attempt but the content is not above criticism.
The audience of the Gotha Program was essentially the same as JT’s audience, and Marx found it important to produce a polemical critique against reformist tendencies.
We don’t necessarily want support from social democratic groups who have demonstrated fickleness in historical periods like the 1918 German revolution.
We shouldn’t water down the essential tenets of revolutionary theory when appealing to the proletarian masses. We shouldn’t focus so much on distribution, on vague “equality”, or on bourgeois electoral democracy.
These gateway videos should be honest and focus more on the necessity of a total revolution in production, the necessity of a change in our way of life, not merely reform in existing political institutions.
Choice excerpts from the Gotha critique: