Engaging with the actual implications of the ideology - when it isn't just vibes and speeches but "what would it mean to implement this" - and it turns out it means nonstop stupid awfulness that devours itself and everything around it - turns out to be pretty informative, as an exercise.
I do think it is hard to avoid vibes with Marx...
The thing about Marx is that he wrote more or less about the theory of the firm in a way that has zero predictive value about the behavior of firms or economies. Quite the opposite. The application of his ideas to government are a horrorshow.
And like, the labor theory of value wasn't his - it was quite popular in economic theory at the time. It's just very wrong in very obvious ways. The other irony is that the industrial revolution was terrible for workers, but the real progress in labor rights did not come from communists.
Which in turn made them more violent.
I mean, every revolution has that moment when you realize the theory doesn't "work" without the intense and constant application of state violence.
True, but it’s amusing with communists, since they assume the working class will just fall in line.
But Stalin killed more German leftists than Hitler. The arguments have always been thus:
And the German leftists worked with Nazis to undermine social democrats. Why are communists like this?
Because a government collapse followed by a coup against the fragile social democrats is how the Bolsheviks got power. That was the playbook they had and didn’t appreciate the likelihood that the other illiberal authoritarian party might come out on top instead of them.
Good times.
I have an evolutionary just-so story (an inherently suspect mode of explanation) that says we evolved as a social primate in competition and exchange with adjacent groups, and we still see "nearby" groups as our primary competition/interest. It's where the short term easy local gains are.
The question was rhetorical, but I appreciate the answer.
personally i love it when the discussion about white people doing marxism ends in an evidence-free evopsych theory. kinda ties the whole thing up in a pretty little bow. south america exists btw, hope this helps
perhaps because the social democrats worked with the precursors of the Nazis to murder German leftists
ah yes Stalin, every Communists favorite hero lmao
I do think that the threat of communist revolution/communism as a semi-viable alternative to capitalism was key the rise of labor rights and the welfare state. That Sword of Damocles was what forced capital to the negotiating table.
My more fanciful notion, that I'm not quite sure I believe, is that the Western neoliberal turn away from a lot of those policies can be directly traced to communism's relative decline as a viable political system in the 70s and 80s. Obviously this only accelerated with its subsequent collapse.
i love when "communisms decline" is mentioned as some kind of inevitably like an illness that ran its course and not the actual result of the neoliberal project
I'm gonna be honest with ya chief, even accepting that premise, if your global revolutionary movement can be brought down by Milton Friedman and the Chicago Boys, it might have some underlying weaknesses.
what implications specifically