I pray for the sweet release of death.
Yeah I'm a centrist, Maoists and anarchists both make some good points.
Jokes aside, this dude might just need a couple stats about people living paycheck to paycheck, homeless rates, starvation, etc to give in
I propose a "we can do this the easy way or the hard way" routine.
You could force him to read Piketty's Capital at gunpoint and I doubt he'd sincerely budge on his position.
"Marx would have been neoliberal because the future is so great right now!" is a product of bullshit hard wired into people's brains. Brazil Good, Venezuela Bad, because Gomunism. Japan Good, China Bad, because Gomunism. Florida Good, Cuba Bad, because Gomunism. No, nothing you say will never change my mind.
Marx: "I call it "Scientific Socialism" it's grounded in a material analysis of the parasitic nature of capitalism, this has nothing to do with "doing what's right" or moralism, I turned Hegel upside down, no more God business."
This asshole: "I bet if Marx were alive today, he'd be dazzled by consumerism and the trinkets late capitalism provides."
Literally everyone is richer than he could ever have imagined.
This motherfucker thinks this would make Marx a "centrist".
Aaaaaaahhhh
Everyone is richer. Lets not think about complicated stuff like inflation, or the rising cost of living, or stagnant wages. EVERYONE HAS MORE MONEY NOW!
housing does not follow Moore’s Law
It does for billionaires.
"The number of rooms in my mansion doubles every 2 years"
Or that how people in the global north are better off due to exploitation of the global south. And for folks in the global south, other than medical advances I'm not sure you can say their lives are better now than they were in 1867.
If Marx was alive today he'd probably opt for a suit of Terminator Armour
Their argument looks like it's probably based on the riches provided by modern technology. If so, Kropotkin might be a better way to get through to them.
The whole intro to The Conquest Of Bread is about how much we can achieve with the wonders of modern technology... in 1892. If we can't even match the world Kropotkin envisioned over 100 years ago with the even more wondrous technology of today, maybe he was right about there being something wrong about the system we're using to employ it.
I've never been able to get my head around the "riches of modern technology" argument.
Like yeah sure smartphones are fucking amazing, but that doesn't suddenly make a difference to the fact that there are people who work full time jobs that have to pick between paying rent and feeding their kids does it?
I just can't ever see it as anything other than a bad faith argument.
People who make that sort of argument are thinking something like:
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Past - people work full time jobs just to feed and shelter themselves
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Now - people work full time jobs just to feed and shelter themselves, but now they have smart phones, refrigerators, a wider variety of foods, etc
So the now is strictly better.
Now personally I think that if anyone is struggling to feed themselves then that is a full scale moral crisis that must be dealt with. But someone who's comfortable enough to have never experienced that might not understand the gravity of the situation. And even if they have, people as a whole are just loaded with ways to accept and gloss over huge bad things in our world.
...But also, while the person supporting the progress of the modern world might be talking about smartphones and trinkets, I want to point out that Kropotkin wrote before the Green Revolution and we still don't have the free bread he was talking about.
"Now is strictly better" is, I guess, TECHNICALLY true... But yeah man talk about totally missing the point...
Thanks for phrasing it like that though - I can definitely see how it could be someone who just is unaware of the situations of others instead of strictly being something used by trolls.
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It’s such bullshit too. That’s just referring to people in imperial core countries. People in the GS still have it as shitty as we did over here in the 19th century.
Totally blanking on the exact quote and can't seem to find it right now, but there's a section in Capital where Marx explains that even if the workers get higher wages and living standards they're still getting exploited and it still sucks. We're definitely not richer than he could ever imagine, and he'd be surprised that we're still working 40 hour weeks.
EDIT: Not the exact passage I'm thinking of but here's a similar point he makes in his 1844 Manuscripts:
Even in the condition of society most favorable to the worker, the inevitable result for the worker is overwork and premature death, decline to a mere machine, a bond servant of capital, which piles up dangerously over and against him, more competition, and starvation or beggary for a section of the workers.
The raising of wages excites in the worker the capitalist’s mania to get rich, which he, however, can only satisfy by the sacrifice of his mind and body. The raising of wages presupposes and entails the accumulation of capital, and thus sets the product of labour against the worker as something ever more alien to him. Similarly, the division of labour renders him ever more one-sided and dependent, bringing with it the competition not only of men but also of machines.
J.M. Keynes - not a Marxist and writing like 50+ years after Marx - figured we'd be working 15-20 hour work weeks by now. And based on productivity gains, he was right, we could work that little. It's just the capitalists have taken all the gains from productivity for themselves.
I agree. Democratic centrism - as in once the party reaches a decision it has to act in one will...
