Socialism

In current discourse on Lemmy, there is much fearmongering about “tankies,” yet this term is frequently ill-defined and moreover used as a thought terminating cliché. Roderic Day goes over the term, and offers contextualization and explanation for those who uphold and defend Actually Existing Socialism, in this short 8 minute article. My favorite paragraph is as follows:

“Anyway, the basic point is that socialist revolution is neither easy (as the Trotskyists and ultraleftists would have it) nor impossible (as the liberals and conservatives would have it), but hard. It will require dedication and sacrifice and it won’t be won in a day. Tankies are those people who think the millions of communists who fought and died for socialism in the twentieth century weren’t evil, dupes, or wasting their time, but people to whom we owe a great deal and who can still teach us a lot.”

If you consider yourself a Socialist, you have a duty to try to better understand and contextualize historical Socialist movements. It is only through correct analysis based on fact and not fiction that we can move onward.

There are many strains of Socialist thought. Why should Socialists adopt a Marxist line today? This question is answered concisely in this article by Roderic Day.

This article goes over why Marxists advocate for Public ownership of the Means of Production specifically, and not cooperative, communal, or otherwise similarly "worker owned" structures.

A common point of conflict among leftists is understanding what constitutes Socialism. This article explains common errors among Leftists in analyzing what a system needs to look like to be considered Socialist. If an economy has 10% in the Private Sector, is it Capitalist? What about 51%? Does the direction matter?

The short answer, proven in the article, is that it is determined by which class is in power, what the driving force of an economy is. Does the Private Sector drive the public, or does the public sector drive the Private? This can be accomplished by including heavy industry and inftastructure in the Public Sector, making the Private Sector reliant on socialized production and thus subservient to it, and maintaining Proletarian supremacy over the Private Sector.

The presense of Private Property and even billionaires does not mean Private Property drives the direction of the economy, and as Engels elaborates in Principles of Communism, the Dictatorship of the Proletariat can only absorb Private Property in the Public sector by the degree to which markets have formed large monopolist syndicates ripe for central planning, not out of pure decree:

Question 17 : Will it be possible to abolish private property at one stroke?

Answer : No, no more than the existing productive forces can at one stroke be multiplied to the extent necessary for the creation of a communal society. Hence, the proletarian revolution, which in all probability is approaching, will be able gradually to transform existing society and abolish private property only when the necessary means of production have been created in sufficient quantity.

Now, of course this doesn't mean Private Property is Socialist! This instead means you cannot look at individual aspects of a system, as was common of the Metaphysicians, but instead the entirety of a system with the context of the interactions of the various transformations and movements of all of the parts of the whole, as Dialectical Materialists. This is why philosophy is crucial to understanding Socialism, because you can't simply break up a system into its component parts, and analyze each sector. I repeat, you cannot accurately judge a system by breaking it up into its component parts and analyzing them individually in their own vacuum.

Therefore, dominance and direction are required. As no system is static, it will necessarily be heading towards either full socialization or privatization, and this vector is determined by what class is in charge. Social Democracy is Capitalist, therefore, as Private Property drives the economy and the bourgeoisie are in control. The fact that Private Property can only be abolished by degree, and not pure decree, means that Socialism is necessarily a transitonal stage, and can't be considered only a fully socialized economy.

Ultimately, the reason Marxists believe Socialized Production to come after Capitalist Production is because Capitalism prepares the grounds for Socialized Production as markets coalesce into monopolist syndicates, allowing for central planning. At different levels of development of various industries, markets or centrally planned public property might make more sense, you can't just decree large syndicates into existence. Throughout developmental stages, markets eventually stagnate as they naturally centralize, and this happens at different paces in different industries, therefore socializing production happens at different times, yet the system is still capable of being considered Socialist as a transitional phase to Communism.

For more information on Marxism, please check out my Introductory Reading List!

And please, discuss below! What do you believe constitutes Socialism, and why? Do you agree or disagree with the article?

There is a well-known internet proverb, the bullshit assymetry principle:

"The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it."

Anyone who has been in a few software chatrooms, a political communities, or any hobby groups has probably seen the eternal fountain of people asking really obvious questions, all the time, forever. No amount of patience and free time would allow a community to give quality answers by hand to each and every one of them, and gradually the originally-helpful people answering get sick of dealing with this constantly, then newcomers will often get treated with annoyance and hostility for their ignorant laziness. That's one way how communities get a reputation for being 'toxic' or 'elitist'. I've occasionally seen this first hand even on Lemmy, and obviously telling people to go away until they've figured out the answer themselves isn't a useful way to build a mass movement.

This is a reason why efficient communication matters.

Efficient teaching isn't a new idea, so we have plenty of techniques to draw from. One of the most famous texts in the world is a pamphlet, the Manifesto of the Communist Party, a way for the Communist League to share the idea of historical materialism to many thousands using a couple of dozen pages. Pamphlets and fliers are still used today at protests and rallies and for general promotion, and in the real world are often used as a resource when someone asks for a basic introduction to an ideology.

However, online, we have increased access to existing resources and linking people to information is easier than ever. I've seen some great examples of this on Lemmy with Dessalines often integrating pages of their FAQ/resources list into short to-the-point replies, and Cowbee linking their introductory reading list. So instead of burning out rewriting detailed replies to each and every beginner question from a propagandised liberal, or just banning/kicking people who don't even understand what they said wrong (propaganda is a hell of a drug), these users can pack a lot of information into their posts using effective links. Using existing resources counters the bullshit assymetry principle. There's a far lower risk of burnout and hostility when you can simply copy a bookmarked page, paste it, and write a short sentence to contextualize it. No 5 minute mini-essay in your reply to get the message across properly, finding sources each time, getting it nitpicked by trolls, and all that. Just link to an already-polished answer one click away!

There are many FAQ sites for different topics and ideological schools of thought (e.g. here's a well-designed anarchist FAQ I've been linked to years ago). There are also plenty of wikis, like ProleWiki and Leftypedia, which I think are seriously underused (I'm surprised Lemmygrad staff and users haven't built a culture of constantly linking common silly takes to their wiki's articles. What's the point of the wiki if it's not being used much by its host community?).

Notice that an FAQ is often able to link to specific common questions, and is very different from the classic "read this entire book" reply some of you may have seen before - unfortunately when a post says "how can value com from labor and not supply nd demand?", they're probably not in the mood to read Capital Vol. I-III to answer their question no matter how you ask them, but they might skim a wiki page on LTV and maybe then read further.

(Honestly, I think there's a missed opportunity for integrating information resources into ban messages and/or the global rules pages, because I guarantee more than half the people getting banned for sinophobia/xenophobia/orientalism sincerely don't think anything they said was racist or chauvanistic - it's often reiterating normal rhetoric and ""established facts"" in mass media; not a sign of reactionary attitude. The least we can do is give them a learning opportunity instead of simply pushing them further from the labour movement)

It is a sign of the depth of the structural crisis of capital in our time that not since the onset of the First World War and the dissolution of the Second International—during which nearly all of the European social democratic parties joined the interimperialist war on the side of their respective nation-states—has the split on imperialism on the left taken on such serious dimensions. Although the more Eurocentric sections of Western Marxism have long sought to attenuate the theory of imperialism in various ways, V. I. Lenin’s classic work Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (written in January–June 1916) has nonetheless retained its core position within all discussions of imperialism for over a century, due not only to its accuracy in accounting for the First and Second World Wars, but also to its usefulness in explaining the post-Second World War imperial order. Far from standing alone, however, Lenin’s overall analysis has been supplemented and updated at various times by dependency theory, the theory of unequal exchange, world-systems theory, and global value chain analysis, taking into account new historical developments. Through all of this, there has been a basic unity to Marxist imperialism theory, informing global revolutionary struggles.

However, today this Marxist theory of imperialism is commonly being rejected in large part, if not in its entirety, by self-proclaimed socialists in the West with a Eurocentric bias. Hence, the gap between the views of imperialism held by the Western left and those of revolutionary movements in the Global South is wider than at any time in the last century. The historical foundations of this split lie in declining U.S. hegemony and the relative weakening of the entire imperialist world order centered on the triad of the United States, Europe, and Japan, faced with the economic rise of former colonies and semicolonies in the Global South. The waning of U.S. hegemony has been coupled with the attempt of the United States/NATO since the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 to create a unipolar world order dominated by Washington. In this extreme polarized context many on the left now deny the economic exploitation of the periphery by the core imperialist countries. Moreover, this has been accompanied more recently by sharp attacks on the anti-imperialist left.

Thus, we are now commonly confronted with such contradictory propositions, emanating from the Western left, as:

1. one nation cannot exploit another;
2. there is no such thing as monopoly capitalism as the economic basis of imperialism;
3. imperialist rivalry and exploitation between nations has been displaced by global class struggles within a fully globalized transnational capitalism;
4. all great powers today are capitalist nations engaged in interimperialist struggle;
5. imperialist nations can be judged primarily on a democratic-authoritarian spectrum, so that not all imperialisms are created equal;
6. imperialism is simply a political policy of aggression of one state against another;
7. humanitarian imperialism designed to protect human rights is justified;
8. the dominant classes in the Global South are no longer anti-imperialist and are either transnationalist or subimperialist in orientation;
9. the “anti-imperialist left” is “Manichean” in its support of the morally “good” Global South against the morally “bad” Global North;
10. economic imperialism has now been “reversed” with the Global East/South now exploiting the Global West/North;
11. China and the United States head rival imperialist blocs; and
12. Lenin was mainly a theorist of interimperialism, not of the imperialism of center and periphery.

If these didnt upload correctly let me know I'll delete the post. Conversation I just had in a local discord where dude didn't even read my comment and attacked me for not being onboard with Harris and fed me a fearmonger. So over fucking dem voters man.

I just dont have any leftists in my life to gripe with, sorry. 🤣

EDIT: Ive always gotten on well with this dude and we agree on a lot, which really made it worse that he didnt bother reading what I wrote. I just deleted my comments and left the server (its just a small side server for our area anyway.)

Interview with Gabriel Rockhill about his article, Capitalism’s Court Jester: Slavoj Žižek.

The interviewer doesn’t have much interesting to say IMO. I would skip over most of his segments.

[The cultural imperialist project] polices the left border of critique, but it does it at an objective vs subjective level. And what I mean by that is that there are coordinates for what the dominant discourse is, and what people need to know if they want to be in these conversations. And it creates a reality, which was very much my reality coming up, where I was interested in radical theory, because I grew up as a farm kid working construction. I knew what exploitation was. I knew what oppression was. I knew a lot of horrible things about the world because I was living them in the capitalist empire. And I gravitated toward what I thought were the most radical things, but I was not aware of the objective conditions that structured that radical discourse in such a way that all of the real discourses—which were anti-imperialist and liberatory—were actually largely excluded from those debates. And so I read a bunch of Negri and Žižek and Badiou and all of these people, and eventually realized, well, I’m looking in the wrong place. I’m looking in the place that the empire tells me I should look for radical theory.

I've noticed that talking to people that some common tropes seem to come up when topics like socialism come up.

Basically I hear a lot of defense of capitalism that boils down to capitalism is good because "I personally benefit". As well as "I've heard bad things about socialism", ie taxes are too high in countries with good healthcare and social programs.

I wanted to know if other people have these issues come up in conversation and if people more well spoken than me have a way of getting through the road blocks and have some easy starting points for discussing things with people.

I feel like propaganda and fear mongering have placed a divide that make talking about things harder