This is a place to share greentexts and witness the confounding life of Anon. If you're new to the Greentext community, think of it as a sort of zoo with Anon as the main attraction.
Be warned:
If you find yourself getting angry (or god forbid, agreeing) with something Anon has said, you might be doing it wrong.
He analyzed capitalism (and religion), and his model predicted regular worsening crises when the market couldn't expand further, leading to its eventual abolition.
He was employed as a journalist and published books on history and economics.
I swear libs just make stuff up that sounds right and then believe the shit they fantasized
> 4chan user
> lib
Pick one.
I do agree that anon's take is bullshit.
Lemmites just be spouting buzzwords at this point.
Liberalism is the philosophy of capitalism, the guy in OP is definitionly a lib.
Indeed, its why Australia's main conservative party (middle right) are called The Liberals
Yes, historically that is the case. Semantics drift over time, though. Even though both liberals and conservatives are classical liberals, only one actually still uses the liberal label. When you don't acknowledge semantic drift, you alienate others because they can't follow what you're saying. If you want to destroy capitalism, you need to make the circle of people bigger, not shoulder people out before they begin.
Phrased another way, you want to move the Overton window leftwards, not contribute to it shrinking to the right.
Nah. We don't need to surrender the overton window to liberals and let them dictate that the alternative to capitalism is capitalism, except the workers get more crumbs and minorities get conditional protections. Moving the Overton window left of the current rightwing framing requires people to realize how rightwing the current framing is.
Yes... by teaching people. Meaning you need to reach them. If the way you talk is a barrier to being understood, you're going to reach way less people, my man.
I'm gonna quote scripture, not cause I'm Christian or anything (catholic apostate atheist), but because my sister fell into a Christian cult so this is an example that quickly comes to mind (her "church" had a real goofy interpretation of this that a lot of new American Christian Cults regularly have). 1 Corinthians 14:3-8, where Paul tells the Corinthians, who were holding mass at the time in Hebrew, that they need to speak to be understood. If they hold mass speaking a language that no one outside their church understands, they only lift themselves up. But if they speak to be understood, then they can lift up everyone.
Sorry to say, while using liberal in the way you do is definitely a nice shorthand to be able to identify people who are safe for you to express your views with, it also alienates those who don't know what the historical term means. Speak Latin, dammit (that was how the catholic church misinterpreted Paul's teaching in this letter. And the new Christians use it to promote speaking tongues. Aren't religions great? /s)
I’d also chime in that definition change and can mean very different things in different places. It’s a bit silly how frequently I see other left leaning people, purely online, demonize anyone using liberal as a label.
To me it comes off as a bit manufactured division. It’s far too abundant to see on spaces like Reddit and certain Lemmy instances, yet near complete absent from offline discourse.
I agree, but these are not liberals. Don't let the far-right to have the word "liberalism"! They're conservatives or right-libertarians at best, and outright fascists at worst.
nobody cares about facts or details. they only care about marx = communism.
he was a better economist than he was a political theorist. but his economic works are long, boring, and technical, and his political works are far shorter and dramatic, so that's all the average undergraduate cares about.
Why would you say he's a bad political theorist? If we measure the success of a political theory by its ability to take, hold and exercise power Marxism is one of the most successful political ideologies in the world. Sure it never "beat" liberal capitalism but it came the closest of any other theory to challenging it.
Or are you doubting it's accuracy more then its success?
If we measure the success of a political theory by its ability to take, hold and exercise power
The success of a political theory should be measured by its ability to improve quality of life. Taking power may be a prerequisite, but that alone is not success. Seeing the seizure of state power as an end in itself is a mistake that leads to an authoritarian dead end.
By your definition the billionaires and the politicians they back would be unsuccessful political actors as they're making the quality of life worse for most people. I'd say they are very successful political actors, and that is the problem.
In my opinion politics is "war without bloodshed". It is a means by which a group can accomplish certain goals that another group opposes.
One side could have a goal of improving the quality of life for the poor while the other could have a goal of improving it for the rich. Politics is what both sides do to try and accomplish there goals.
Political theory is like military theory in the sense that it lays out strategies to defeat the opposition and accomplish those goals. While a military theory is proven correct by winning a battle, a political theory can be proven correct by winning an election.
Politics is a means, not an end. The end/goal is determined by ideology , class position, self interest, racism etc.
You don't have to adopt the ruling elites' definition of success. You talk about politics being a means and not an end, but you still insist on calling winning an election success. If the end/goal is determined by ideology then so is the criteria for success, and my personal criteria for success is improving quality of life for as many people as possible. Winning an election can be a means to that end, but just seizing power does not by itself merit the political theory that enabled it. Fascism has proven quite capable of seizing power in liberal democracies with capitalist economies, but I would certainly not call that success.
Difference is that redditors spread racist rhetoric on the internet and Marx wrote the book Americans burned on social media when Russia attacked Ukraine, tho he is German.
Marx wrote the book Americans burned on social media when Russia attacked Ukraine
That's amazing. I personally heard someone mention that the Ukrainians just hated communism shortly after the invasion. It took me kind of by surprise and it was actually a little while later that I put two and two together and figured out they meant Russia.
And also Putin is arguably post fascist or ultraconservative, total opposite of communism. His favorite ideologue even called Ukraine and its language a "Leninist fabrication, to divide and conquer the Russian nation".
Never made any financial contributions, I assume OP means, completely missing the mark about Marx being anticapitalist. Ignoring the obvious: We still talk about Karl Marx, even make unprompted greentexts about him, proving a social contribution
We still talk about Karl Marx, even make unprompted greentexts about him, proving a social contribution
Furthermore, you actually have the time to do something other than slave away to the bourgeoisie. Sure, you might not have a lot of it in your own experience, but child labour and 16 hour days were completely normal before Marx.
Marx had the idea the surplus value the capitalists are actually profiting off of is the commodity of the worker's putting in time. I mean, he didn't really consider it a commodity, just pointed out how capitalism commodifies human labour.
But yeah pretty much all trade unions and socialist parties owe their existence to Marx.
"Didn't make any contributions" such ragebait
His books and writings are a contribution anyway. Plus he was already wealthy so idk if mooching off his family is accurate at all.
Working a job is not neccessarily making a contribution to society, not a good contribution oftentimes to be sure.
He was also wealthy to begin with, as was Engels. But his books and writings are a contribution in any case even if he didn't get rich off them as OP suggests here.
He didn't oppose religion that much, definitely not in "a reddit atheist" way, opium has been commonly used in medicine as a painkiller those days: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_of_the_people
Tldr, he is saying religion is a human response to inhuman conditions.
He was saying that people need someone to tell them on Sunday that working until you die for nothing is fine because it'll all be great after you die. He made a strong argument for religion just being another capitalist tool that keeps the people in line, doped up just enough to work another week. Sure, if opiate addiction in response to abuse is human, then that's pretty damn human.
He even argued that religion mirrors the hierarchical structures of the government it exists under, which is pretty spot on.
I never took his writing to be pro-religion.
Sometimes the better at thinking you are, the less sense working for others makes. The less sense spending time doing bullshit makes. The less sense spending time away from loved ones makes. I dunno, bro just needed a UBI
Bold words from a 4chan chud
Russia did though, before the revolution Russia was still mostly agrarian and way less developed then western europe. Under communism they developed faster then any other country up to that point and nearly caught up to the west.
People often compare the soviets to western europe and say they're poor, but Russia was half a century behind the west before the revolution, and the revolution/ civil war caused even more destruction. A better comparison would be a country like Mexico which also was mostly agrarian and just finished a revolution in 1920. Compared to that the Soviet union did pretty well living standards wise.
Just look at there war performance , WWI Russia lost to Germany whose main focus was on the western front, WWII Russia was able to halt Germanies full force after they had conquered France and drive them back.
Lots of countries have done that. Has nothing to do with communism, so much as a leadership of the nation that was desperate to modernize due to fear of being invaded or falling into international irrelevancy.
My comment was in reply to another one saying something along the lines of "Russia poor because communism". So it was more about how communism can lead to development.
Either way though I would say its development was largely because of communism. The czarist regime faced similar pressures and didn't develop like Russia did in the 30s
An even better comparison would be Poland which faced an even greater existential threat from its neighbors and didn't industrialize as quickly. For example Poland built about 150 of there tp7 tanks in the interwar period while the Soviet union had around 25,000 tanks built before the war. Even accounting for the Soviet unions 5-6x population that's still a lot more production capacity per capita.
The Soviet industrialization during the interwar period was unprecedented and relied on a command economy to force the peasants off the land and into the cities, at the cost of a famine that killed millions.
A better comparison would be a country like Mexico
A better comparison would be Finland, which was literally a part of Russia.
We kept market economy. Russia didn't.
Capitalism sucks, but so do planned economies. Socialist market economies are the thing.
Also WWII Russia won by having tons of disposable troops to toss at any enemy position. Not because their economy was magnificent.
Russia also was unable to take Finland, despite us having way worse military equipment and way less people.
Anon is right on the Marx.
if there is to be talk about philosophy, there should be less trifling with the label “atheism” (which reminds one of children, assuring everyone who is ready to listen to them that they are not afraid of the bogy man), and that instead the content of philosophy should be brought to the people.
--Karl Marx, Letter to Arnold Ruge, 1842