What Dialectical and Historical Materialism does to a MF

Ah yes, if a Communist is young, they are naiive, and if a Communist is older, they are cyncial and regressive.

The double-think is strong with you.

On the other hand it’s been about 20 years since I read the work of Marx and Weber. I had classes on social stratification, feminism, materialism, and conflict theory. I’m pretty rusty.

Critique of the Gotha Programme is a quick read on how Marx envisions the transition to Socialism and eventually Communism.

How do we put the genie back in the bottle when we released it so very long ago? Let’s try looking at children. Education would certainly help, but can you teach empathy without the help of the parent(s)? Even if the parental figures teach empathy and structured education enforces these teachings, we come to secondary groups. This would be groups like the child’s friends or peers.They are considered more important to childhood development after a certain age (12? Not the same for everyone of course maybe an average). If the members of these secondary groups do not value empathy, the child who was taught it by their parental figures and enforced by education will begin to value it less.

This is a very ideas-focused view of society. Largely, culture and values are shaped by Material Conditions amd Mode of Production. This is the concept of Base and Superstructure, the base being the material conditions and mode of production, and the superstructure being ideology and culture.

We move beyond class society through collectivization and Socialism. This society then moves on to Communism.

I don’t know the answers. Believe me I want fully automated post-scarcity space communism. I really want it. I just can’t see the way there.

Believe me, everyone wishes we could jump hundreds of years to higher-stage Communism. Anarchists even think we can approximate that now, which is a whole other school of thought. However, Socialism is a drastic improvement on Capitalism, and lower-stage Communism is a drastic improvement on Socialism as well. Progress should not be impeded because the target is far away, especially if the process of building it is itself progress.

China takes a dub.

Some instances on Lemmy are going through a Red Scare, I doubt they can explain.

Lemmy.world and Lemmy.ca tend to be right-leaning even if they have some Leftist comms. The fediverse still appeals to leftists, but liberals have their own enclaves.

According to Harvard in 2020, 95.5% do. That certainly isn’t 100%, but it’s pretty high, I would say.

You are the perfect person to ask, because you claimed Communism cannot work because “power corrupts” and “human nature.” I am not saying you are a Capitalist. Your ideas regarding Marxism are immaterial and vibes-based, which is why I am trying to get you to take a Materialist stance.

Why does power corrupt? How can representatives be held accountable? What determines “human nature?”

1. Power itself does not corrupt. People generally act in their material interests, and in Capitalism, this is dominated by the profit motive, like all class society. The bourgeoisie are focused on making profit, no more and no less. The Capitalist State is molded by the class in power, ie the bourgeoisie, and thus serves the interests of Capital. In an alternative, collectivized system, these same dynamics would be abolished, with a different set of challenges taking their place, such as the question of allocating labor.

2. Representatives can be held accountable via democratic measures, ie a representative democracy. Worker councils and parliaments can handle coordination and check against corruption.

3. Human Nature is determined by material conditions. Humans are thought to be competitive naturally because Capitalism is competitive, even though the average worker does not care, only the bourgeoisie do. In different Modes of Production, “Human Nature” appeared very different. In primitive Communism, for example, Human Nature was cooperative and communal, class society arose from technological advancements like the agricultural revolution.

You need organization, yes. What is “fair?” Why can’t there be democratic processes keeping these people in check? What does “human nature” have to do with this, does the local post office go rogue?

I understand that the basis of Capitalism is that it isn’t fair in any way, shape, or form, but why does that mean it’s better?

Why would “power corrupts” mean Communism can’t be fully implemented? What on Earth are you talking about, specifically?

Did the workers own their means of production? No. In fact, a lot of worker’s cooperatives were not only nationalized, but turned into the same kind of exploitative enterprises they were made to escape the corporate world, but this time it was in the hands of the state, and the factory had “this factory belongs to the workers” written on it.

The Workers did own the Means of Production via a Worker State. It was fundamentally not “the same kind of exploitative enterprises” because production was not done in service of profit and accumulation in the hands of the few, but for and by the workers. We see the effects of this with high housing rates, free healthcare, education, and extremely low poverty rates.

Those are often done under more “human-faced” capitalist states. These states are just social-autocracies: all the social benefits of social democracies, without any democracy, unless you call liking a dictator and their pet projects at gunpoint a “democracy”.

Every Socialist state has been democratic to some degree, believing the state is simply structuted entirely due to the whims of “powerful people” is laughably oversimplified. Social Democracies should be analyzed based on how they gained their resources. Social Democracy in the Global North is Imperialist, Social Democracy in the Global South is progressive, though not sufficient.

Running a worker state takes many cogs and many democratic movements, as compared with Capitalism where the bourgeoisie and the managers they employ have absolute say. It is a given that Capitalist employment is antidemocratic, when you measure only the State in Capitalism with the entirety of the economy and state in Socialism, without also acknowledging the utter lack of any democracy in the Capitalist economy, you are cherry picking.

Would my far-right government be considered a socialist country, because it boasts about record-high employment boosted by emmigration and the humiliating public employment program (work full 8+ hours at a state institute or street cleaner for half the minimum wage, so car makers don’t have to pay taxes), and about higher and higher wages that are nearly completely offset by inflation? Is stuffing the prime minister’s childhood friend with so much money he became a billionaire at the cost of smaller businesses going bankrupt a socialist move, just because he happens to be Hungarian (and also doesn’t have “berg” in his family name, nor has a “suspiciously large nose” as some insiders told me why a Hungarian business needed to go)? I guess critical support for Viktor Orbán then, since he hates the west and its human rights…

Unsure of what this tangent has to do with the topic at hand.

What’s stopping him is “civility politics,” even when he’s been handed a path to thoroughly purge corruption and fascism from the supreme court, he won’t.

The GOP has shown they do not care at all about civility, and will abuse this rule.

To not play by the same rules when people’s lives are at stake is a deep moral failure, and shows that politics are simply a game for the DNC when faced with a GOP that doesn’t care.

Lefty Memes sees heavy Liberal traffic, in my experience.

Lemmy is a federated Reddit-style Social Media platform like Mastadon is to Twitter/X.

Your instance should be one focused on that which interests you, like Lemmy.ml for FOSS and Privacy, or programming.dev for programming, etc. Shop around and find one with a good community you like that is federated with instances you also like. This means your Local Feed will have your interests.

You want one that is federated with other instances you want to see, so you can browse All for general content.

Finally, you can manually create your own feed by subscribing to communities you want, and browsing by Subscribed.

What counts as “True Socialism?” What metric would AES states have to pass to be considered a genuine and authentic movement that isn’t completely arbitrary and vibes-based?

Does a drastic improvement in life expectancy, literacy rates, housing rates, educational access, healthcare access, diminishing wealth disparity, and decreasing hours worked not count as “true and authentic?”

"But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society. Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.

In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!"

• Critique of the Gotha Programme, Karl Marx

It is anti-Marxist to disparage Socialist movements for not being an immediate Communist utopia without recognizing the context and Material Conditions said Socialist Movements took place in.

Nature, red in tooth and claw. The competitive drive is not uniquely human but it is human nature.

This is mostly unfounded. Humans are cooperative, by nature. The dominant ideas of society are largely driven by Mode of Production. Capitalism is competitive, ergo Liberalism is the dominant ideology, but this is only the case within the myopic frame of the last few centuries. Mode of Production has shifted with technological advancement, which has also shifted “Human Nature” with it.

Capitalism, for all its faults, tries to harness that nature for good.

Capitalism wasn’t designed in a lab, but emerged out of feudalism. It doesn’t “try” to do anything. Functionally, it services the maximization of profit, with little care for the wellbeing of society at large.

Every other system rests on an assumption of benevolence, either from the few (monarchies, dictatorships, oligarchies) or the many (communism, anarchies).

Incorrect, and unfounded. Please explain exactly why Communism rests on the assumption of benevolence, in any way, referring to the structures Communists wish to implement.

History has shown that assumption to be a fatal mistake.

More vague assertions, this time with the undertone that it is somehow ideas that drive history, and not Material Conditions. This is an anti-scientific, anti-Materialist assertion.

What reasons are those, exactly? Vibes? Vague idealism?

Because he’s labeled “IMF,” the biggest Imperialist tool in the world at the moment, and one working intimately with the US and the rest of the Global North. They take advantage of crisis in the Global South, often created by the Global North, by giving needed loans in a predatory manner and add conditions that they must privitize and sell to international companies.

This meme references Kenya and Haiti, the problems with which Putin and Russia are largely uninvolved while the US and the IMF absolutely are. You could create a different political meme with Russia and Ukraine if you want, but it would need an entirely different format, not just adding Putin to this meme.

Not every political meme denouncing the US and IMF needs to denounce Putin as well in the same meme, that doesn’t imply support for Putin.

1. Why are people stupid and lazy? Is this a new thing? Why are conditions worsening?

2. Correct.

3. Correct.

4. Kinda vibes-based but strikes the target. It’s less that lying is encouraged, but that profit drives the system and money greases its wheels. Follow the dollar.

Kind of. American Proletarians have a unique position of enjoying the benefits of a super-exploited class of domestic immigrants paid lower wages via threat of deportation, and Imperialistic hegemony, but are also enslaved by vast amounts of debt. This is very different from standard Capitalism, but not quite feudalism. It depresses the revolutionary potential of the American Proletariat for as long as Imperialism is the status quo.