lib friend sent it to me
1st paragraph calling US proxies that received billions in aid "natural experiments" is pretty rich. 2nd paragraph has absolutely zero scientific evidence and is definitely wrong w/ regards to China 3rd paragraph is black book bullshit
lmao how the fuck to people have more kids if there isn't a surplus? You can't make something (such as a child) from nothing meaning there has to be product in excess of what one needs to survive. Then there's two people who can work twice as much and could theoretically produce twice as much food.
Human societies thus remained within the social dynamics originally analysed by the Rev. Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) of population tending to increase to consume the food available.
LITERALLY A FUCKING SURPLUS
Yes there was division of labor (more human niches) this made life easier and more productive and was only possible BECAUSE THERE WAS A SURPLUS OF FOOD! The carpenter does not grow grain, and yet he eats BECAUSE THERE IS A SURPLUS
Technological and commercial surges in available resources provide complications that need not detain us.
I wonder if a division of labor might impact such resources somehow? Literally just handwaving division of labor
The whole rest of it is anti-dialectical metaphysical gibberish.
States are typically not creations of class structures. Typically, they have been the dominant creators of class structures.
What would give rise to a state that creates a class structure, but a class structure? Does the state emerge from thin air?
In each case, the ruling regime seized the state, atomised society and restructured society to serve its own power and purposes, thereby creating the class structure of its society. Marx’s theory of class proved to be self-refuting by Marxism.
This is exactly what Lenin says to do, based off of analysis of Marx, Engels, and the Paris commune
Marx’s theory of value claimed that surplus came from exploitation of labour by landlords and capitalists. So, if you abolished such exploitation, you abolished class. Marxist regimes abolished such designated exploitation by concentrating all social power in the hands of the ruling regime via the state: the actual historically dominant extractor of surplus and creator of class structures. So, of course Marxism-in-power created murderous tyrannies run by elites who extracted the surplus from society for their own ends.
Only an idealist imbecile thinks this transition happens overnight and Marx is very clear on the distinction between lower and higher stage communism. Read Critique of the Gotha Program
Literally doesn't even engage with the first chapter of Capital distinguishing use and exchange value. This dumbass is critiquing Marx without reading his magnum opus. Did fucking Peterson write this?
So, moving to an exchange economy, you put land, labour and capital together in the hope of creating more value than was consumed. Suppose you fail. That is, you make a loss. Who covers the loss? Who is in the best position to cover the loss?
If you produce anything from this equation you have produced something, that is to say you have not lost. Land does not produce value on its own. Again they pretend to acknowledge the difference between exchange and use value but fundamentally do not understand it.
If all the value of production is returned to the workers in an enterprise, how do you pay for upkeep of land, acquiring and maintaining capital, managing risk, discovery processes? No enterprise can operate for any length of time by returning all the value it produces to labour. So, burbling on about “return to labour that labour does not receive” is nonsense on stilts.
This is specifically why we talk about the surplus reaped by the capitalist, workers owning and maintaining the means of production, and Marx even calls for taxation. This dumbass read the Wikipedia page and thinks he's disproving one of history's greatest political economists.
Chimpanzees conform much more to the predictions of game theory in strategic games than do humans
Lmao humans don't actually behave how they should according to game theory, but monkeys do and that's why game theory is correct.
When Western states gave up their territorial colonies, they switched from colonising other people’s societies to colonising their own. (We call this process of internal colonisation “the welfare state”.)
You need to find this person and put them out of their misery. They're too stupid to survive. I'm not doing the rest of this atrocity but I'm sure there are other gems in this heap of shit.
This is one of those articles that is hard to debunk because of the sheer amount of things it gets wrong about Marxism.
The historical takes are nonsense. The 100 million deaths thing has been debunked a thousand times elsewhere, the main points being that it includes ridiculous things like nazis killed in the invasion of the Soviet Union, and that it is never compared to the same metric under capitalism, where 10 million people die each year due to food insecurity, adding up to that 100 million number each decade, while being a lot more direct consequence of capitalism than those deaths were of communism. The "natural experiments" all compare a historically richer country to a historically poorer one, or one that was bombed to shit by the USA.
The article claims that the Marxist class is a consequence of LTV, which demonstrates that it has no understanding of marxism. If anything, LTV is a tool used to examine the contradiction between classes, which is the opposite of what is claimed by the article. For example, it seems to claim that Marxist think state arises from "surplus", instead of class contradictions. I bet it's easy to argue against a position when you can just invent what they believe with no regard to reality. They also repeatedly confuse surplus with surplus value.
The article then goes on to demonstrate its complete misunderstanding of Marx's Value, just read the first three chapters of Capital, anyone, please.
Self proclaimed Marxism debunkers and never reading anything Marx wrote, name a more iconic duo.
Capitalists, particular in the US, love to dunk on Revolutions which had purges of any kind (even the very inoffensive purge of Batista-loyalists in the early years of the Cuban Revolution). Or state censorship of any variety.
They're deliberately missing the point, by avoiding any meaningful discussion of what rights to autonomy a Communist state has. Ignoring the historical context in which the US invests billions upon billions of dollars in anti-Communist, pro-capital propaganda in these countries to the point where it's necessary for the state to clamp down. Absent massive amounts of buying power/capital, what mechanism does a state have to fight incredibly well-financed, insidiously crafted and emotionally exploitative foreign propaganda? The only option is force, which the capitalists then decry as inhumane... I have a background in developing anti-censorship software, so I usually surprised people when I'm very neutral on Chinese state censorship (even today, in the very much not-Communist PRC).
Naturally, I make similar concessions for removing those financed by foreign capital. And I understand the deep paranoia that this stuff breeds. It's hard to allow a "marketplace of ideas" the closer in time you are to the Revolution, because it's impossible for the Revolutionaries to tell if you're just a harmless thinker misled by capitalist propaganda, someone who is genuinely worse off under communism because you were part of an oppressive class or just because you were a skilled labourer, or if you're an asset of foreign capital. It breeds deep paranoia which I think persists in the policies of states which shouldn't really be considered communist any longer. It has a lasting effect essentially, PRC and Russia are good examples of post-Communist states with lasting censorship regimes.
Things are reasonably going to be unstable post-Revolution, capital will immediately seize on that uncertainty to propagandize a population with the best outcomes of capitalism, and the state very naturally lacks the tools to combat that with 0 use of force. But the truth is much harder for most people to accept: Those capitalist states are naturally unsustainable and do as much as possible to obfuscate the human suffering inherent both domestically and within insidious neocolonial if not outright colonial systems of enslavement.
Thanks comrade, excellent writeup.
I would Love to hear more of your perspective on censorship (internet/social media) in the PRC. I personally agree that it is quite justifiable and understandable. But all the time western "leftist" types will bring it up and compare it to the US and say some bullshit "at least we’re free". obviously that is very easy to say when your government isn’t meaningfully threatened at all.
