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On January 31 2026 02:23 Uldridge wrote:
I don't care about theorists.
They tried to adopt an economic model. They swiftly fell to authoritarians. If you want everyone to be equal, you squash anyone who makes a hierarchy. It's going to be a genocidal event, because your system can not allow this to happen.
Their naivité was that they did not do so. Thus they failed.
@JJR Thanks for proving my point, LOL
what? that you don't know what Individualism is and you vastly oversimplify it. Hey, np.
anyhow, now you know.
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On January 31 2026 02:16 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On January 31 2026 02:00 LightSpectra wrote:On January 31 2026 01:51 GreenHorizons wrote:On January 31 2026 01:28 LightSpectra wrote:On January 31 2026 01:26 GreenHorizons wrote:On January 31 2026 00:19 LightSpectra wrote:
GH going around quoting MLK Jr. is an embarrassing farce when you realize the latter's life mission was fighting voter suppression so black people could fairly participate in the electoral system, and GH is utterly condemning electoralism and saying voting is futile in most cases.
The reasoning being that voting doesn't matter because Democrats are so right-wing that bOtH sIdEs are the same, but if you think either Democrats or Republicans were less conservative in MLK Jr.'s time than even moderate Democrats are now, you should try reading a history book. Both parties in the 1960s straight up assassinated people like Mamdani; look up what happened to Fred Hampton. Now I know you haven't read my posting from before you started posting around here lol. We've talked about Fred Hampton. Mamdani is amazing compared to most Democrats, but definitely no Fred Hampton. Without education, people will accept anything. Without education, what you’ll have is neo-colonialism instead of colonialism like you have now. Without education, people don’t know why they’re doing what they’re doing, you know what I mean? You might get people caught up in an emotionalist movement, might get them because they’re poor and they want something and then if they’re not educated, they’ll want more and before you know it, we’ll have Obama Negro imperialism. Luckily we've pretty well covered that you're describing the whitewashed version of MLK Jr. The US government conspired to assassinate MLK Jr. when he came out as strongly against the war in Vietnam and shifted towards a "Poor People's Campaign" for developing class consciousness in the US. Do you think MLK Jr., if he found out about the FBI surveillance on him, would've immediately renounced his life's work against voter suppression and become an anti-electoralist? MLK Jr. already knew they were surveilling him when they conspired to assassinate him for shifting towards being anti-Vietnam war and raising class consciousness? I recognize that the proposition of finally (after fighting in several wars and raising generations of white kids) being integrated into the electoral system was a (arguably plausible but) different proposition than remaining blindly loyal to Democrats despite their complete and utter failure over the years since. The US government conspired to assassinate MLK Jr. for fighting to raise class consciousness. No one is renouncing his work against voter suppression (cool strawman though <3). I can't say what MLK Jr. might do, but I am extremely confident libs/Dems/ilk would fuckin hate him like they did when he was alive. On January 31 2026 01:51 GreenHorizons wrote:
No one is renouncing his work against voter suppression (cool strawman though <3). That is literally exactly what you're doing when you tell people that voting for Democrats is futile or wrong because they're too right-wing. Voter suppression doesn't matter if voting doesn't change anything. Unless you have a realistic plan for a third party to displace Democrats and still win elections, which you don't and have never had. I can't say what MLK Jr. might do, but I am extremely confident libs/Dems/ilk would fuckin hate him like they did when he was alive. Maybe, but that's not much different from how you flipped against Mamdani because he wouldn't validate your terrible takes. That's not renouncing his work, it's recognizing it has fulfilled its purpose. In part, to demonstrate that integrating Black people into the US electoral system had basically 0 impact on things like shrinking the wealth gap between Black and white people. Because he recognized then, like I recognize now, that people like you would insist that the reason why things like the wealth gap haven't closed since radical direct actions stopped being a primary political tool for change, is because Black people don't vote hard enough for Democrats. Instead, Black people relentlessly voted for Democrats. Their support unmatched by any other demographic. The results? The wealth gap has gotten worse/stayed the same.
So, if MLK Jr.'s work "has fulfilled its purpose", why are you going around saying Democrats are "ilk" and would've hated him?
"Democrats have failed to close the wealth gap" lacks context. You're failing to mention that Republicans have held legislative power for over half the time since then. The failure is that not enough people vote for Democrats (not sure why you would specifically blame black people when Republican victory has always been on the back of white votes), not that voting is inherently futile.
Voting and radical direct actions aren't mutually exclusive.
On January 31 2026 02:16 GreenHorizons wrote:
I didn't "flip against Mamdani"
Might not be the best idea to say this when your comment history is not only public but it's easy to scroll through.
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He never liked Mamdani, he does not like progressives. They are just barriers in the way to communism. Sure they are "better" than fascists, but they all end up there anyway. He is not for the better of the options, he is for perfection only.
Except when it comes to self declared communists. Then everything they do is to fight capitalists or capitalist propaganda.
You are never going to "catch" him, because he works very hard to not ever actually say anything apart from Dems bad and this is why.
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On January 31 2026 02:27 JimmyJRaynor wrote:
what? that you don't know what Individualism is and you vastly oversimplify it. Hey, np.
anyhow, now you know.
I didn't oversimplify it. Well, if you say that me thinking individualism is "acting from the individual" instead of "acting as part of a system", an oversimplification when your overview are just points that can be derived from that, then I guess " I didn'tknow what it was".
On January 31 2026 02:25 LightSpectra wrote:
The anarchists in the Paris Commune or Catalonia or Rojava didn't have to resort to genocide. When you say "they swiftly fell to authoritarians" you're only talking about Leninist movements.
Allow me to shift the goalposts a little bit: how long did these movement last before they fell and to what did they fall?
You need a leaderless society and you're open to dissent and secession pressure from the outside. It's an incredibly frail system that relies on goodwill from everyone, in and outside.
But I'll be honest here, I haven't looked deeply (i.e. at all) into communist or anarchist history, so I'm out of my depths quite quickly.
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On January 31 2026 02:56 Billyboy wrote:
He never liked Mamdani, he does not like progressives.
cough
On January 31 2026 02:59 Uldridge wrote:
Allow me to shift the goalposts a little bit: how long did these movement last before they fell and to what did they fall?
You need a leaderless society and you're open to dissent and secession pressure from the outside. It's an incredibly frail system that relies on goodwill from everyone, in and outside.
But I'll be honest here, I haven't looked deeply (i.e. at all) into communist or anarchist history, so I'm out of my depths quite quickly.
Rojava is still standing, although it looks like the transitional Syrian government is going to dismantle their democratic confederalism system. The other two were destroyed by the French Third Republic and Spanish Nationalists respectively.
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On January 31 2026 03:07 LightSpectra wrote:Show nested quote +On January 31 2026 02:56 Billyboy wrote:
He never liked Mamdani, he does not like progressives. coughShow nested quote +On January 31 2026 02:59 Uldridge wrote:
Allow me to shift the goalposts a little bit: how long did these movement last before they fell and to what did they fall?
You need a leaderless society and you're open to dissent and secession pressure from the outside. It's an incredibly frail system that relies on goodwill from everyone, in and outside.
But I'll be honest here, I haven't looked deeply (i.e. at all) into communist or anarchist history, so I'm out of my depths quite quickly. Rojava is still standing, although it looks like the transitional Syrian government is going to dismantle their democratic confederalism system. The other two were destroyed by the French Third Republic and Spanish Nationalists respectively.
Better sure. But that is just lesser evilism and that's the worst.
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"Lesser evilism" is "vote for X even though they'll make everything worse because Y will make everything even more worse", not "vote for X because they would genuinely make the world a better place". That's literally just an endorsement.
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Everything is worse or worst when it's not best.
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Canada11409 Posts
On January 31 2026 00:57 Legan wrote:
I don't see how psychopaths are not just a problem in every system, especially in capitalism.
To me, individualism easily makes greed and selfishness virtues, because being the best in any form of competition is an easy way to claim uniqueness. For example, being a billionaire clearly distinguishes you from others. A culture that focuses on those aspects becomes easily destructive, as it rewards disregarding other members of society. For psychopaths, this is great as they already have problems with associating with others.
On January 31 2026 00:35 LightSpectra wrote:Show nested quote +On January 31 2026 00:31 Uldridge wrote:
Communism has one irreconcilable component: people in its population will be born on the antisocial personality spectrum (or, more bluntly - psychopaths).
These people covet places of power. They will make sure the system serves them. Communism is far too naive an ideology for psychopaths to be its jurors.
In essence, the thesis of the socialist purist is another genocide - of those who can't play nice with everyone. There are plenty of psychopaths in power and genocide under capitalism. What you're against is authoritarianism, not a particular economic mode of production.
I think it's the combination of liberal democracy with capitalism that is better equipped to restrain the psychopaths. The power is sufficiently dispersed that it takes a great many psychopath to gain control at so many levels of society which is one of the great defences. And so true, that is a political system rather than a comparison of economic systems.
But one of the troubles with Marxism as an economic system is no-one has figured out how to transition into it at a national level without violent revolution. At the local level you can convince a hippy commune or a kibbutz to voluntarily hold property in common, but no one has figured out how to convince a nation of peoples to give up their private property except to forcibly seize it. And the problem with a Marxist revolution is it has to strike so deep that it destroys or undermines any institutional guard rails. The more I read about what happened in Russia where as innocents are hauled off to Gulags and the administrators picked out the best of the women for sex slaves (and backstab each other to get ahead)- it was like, oh this is what happens when all restraints are removed and the monsters of our society can roam free and rise to the top.
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Clement Attlee nationalized over 20% of the economy of Brtain through entirely lawful, democratic means. It was successful and dramatically increased the quality of life for the working class. They could've gone even further but the Labour Party lost control of Parliament in the election of 1951, despite winning more votes than the Tories.
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Canada11409 Posts
In the 1900s, most liberal democracies have increased public services, and many of them shed some of it around the 1980s. None of these were/are Marxist economic systems. None of them abolished private property for instance. And maybe more specifically none of them were attempting to end the so-called worker alienation from the surplus value that goes to the capitalist.
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I don't see why it's not at least theoretically possible to abolish private property through democratic means.
Just to make sure we're on the same page: when communists say "private property," this doesn't include "personal property" like your house and toothbrush, they're talking about things like factories whose private ownership guarantees that the wealth they generate goes to private owners/shareholders, as opposed to the workers themselves. A worker co-op is something people can and do create right now despite society at large being capitalism.
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On January 31 2026 06:15 LightSpectra wrote:
I don't see why it's not at least theoretically possible to abolish private property through democratic means.
Just to make sure we're on the same page: when communists say "private property," this doesn't include "personal property" like your house and toothbrush, they're talking about things like factories whose private ownership guarantees that the wealth they generate goes to private owners/shareholders, as opposed to the workers themselves. A worker co-op is something people can and do create right now despite society at large being capitalism. Because those who own the private businesses will not give up that wealth/control just because the other, lets say 96%, said they should.
And you sure don't have the money to buy all of them out.
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The private owners of steel, railways, coal, and hospitals seemed to give up their ownership without a fight to the Labour government of the UK c. 1945-1951.
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96% is a lot more than 4%. Shouldn't be that hard to coerce them off of their ownership if we really really wanted to. Somehow it's not happening though, even though many of these 96% would like to have more, or live on equal footing with the rest. Strange.
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On January 31 2026 06:38 Uldridge wrote:
96% is a lot more than 4%. Shouldn't be that hard to coerce them off of their ownership if we really really wanted to. Somehow it's not happening though, even though many of these 96% would like to have more, or live on equal footing with the rest. Strange.
People have no faith that it would be done fairly and worry (rightfully given history) that it would be given to just friends and family of those in power.
Then there is the thought, in North America at least , that it will be less efficient and agile. I think if it is worker owned instead of government owned that would be a much easier sell.
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Canada11409 Posts
Anything is possible in theory, but in practice? How many kicks at the can does Marxism get? Infinite tries for the Marxist, but for me not one more if I care about the well being of the people of that country. Not only has it only produced tyranny, it is also a demonstrably less productive system that equally spreads the poverty but doesn't produce wealth for the average citizen.
You can even look at the early colonies (Jamestown is the one I recall) which predated Marxism but early on the colony held the product of their labour in common... and was on the brink of starvation with governors writing about the constant complaints of how people were not doing their fair share so what was the point of working hard for another to lazily receive the benefits. Once they stopped the common storehouses the colony had surplus enough to trade and the women saying they couldn't work because of their children were out in the fields. (I've lost the pdf of the journals so I can't pull the direct quotes right now but the paraphrase is close enough.)
The individual profit motive is far more powerful then the more abstract working together for the common storehouse. (Even if due to job specialization, the individual profit motive does create a form of cooperation for the benefit of many.) With the common storehouse, some of the people will work really hard but a great many will not which will build resentment or apathy in the hard workers. At which point do you introduce coercion if the internal motivation is insufficient to work for the common good?
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It's hilarious (and insane) that the DOJ stance is epstein only trafficked women to himself and nobody else is guilty of any wrongdoing
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EPT
