Realistically, there are no banned books today, outside of stuff like Turner Diaries and Mein Kampf and terrorist guides. And even those (outside of terrorist guides) are usually just semi-banned, i.e. Amazon and most reasonable booksellers and libraries won't stock them, but you can buy them by other means and it's probably not illegal.
So I have no idea what's your point here. The "liberals" who promote reading "banned books" refer to stuff like small school libraries not stocking whatever the American media and Twitter decided to wreak hysteria about this season.
Libraries buy books based on community interest. That's why they usually have many copies of the latest best-seller, and very few copies of books about, say, getting a ham radio license. When people in a community are interested in Marxist theory--and face it; very, very few people have read Das Kapital in it's entirety, fewer have fully understood it, and all of them have degrees in philosophy--the libraries will buy books on Marxist theory. When people want to read Walter Benjamin or Mikhail Bakunin, the libraries will buy that. When people want to read Ayn Rand (who is even less entertaining than Marx, and she's trying to be entertaining), libraries will buy that.
My library has exactly as many copies of Ulysses as they do Das Kapital, and I'm in a very small town in the deep south. No one cares of banning James Joyce. Space on library shelves and funding is limited, and libraries don't usually see a point in filling up that precious space with, and spending money on books people 'should' read that are never going to get checked out.
I wonder if a supposed lack of interest in Marxism could have anything to do with over a century of rabid and relentless anti-communism from every privately owned media source and position of authority, combined with the awareness that those Americans who publicly express interest in communism will have their careers and possibly even their lives destroyed?
It's probably more because philosophy in general isn't something that lots of people have an interest in, economics are often boring, and Das Kapital combines both into one incredibly dense, challenging to read book.
Personally, I think that Marx and Engels do a great job of describing the problem, but I don't think that their solution takes human nature into effect. Economics assumes that people are fully rational actors that will do the smartest thing all the time, but that's clearly not the case; there are other forces shaping human behavior. Marx and Engels don't seem to account for that.
“Human nature” is a concept that, in your mind, is unchanging and immortal. It possesses infinite power. It acts upon the material world, but the material world cannot act upon it. It is also only brought up when anyone mentions the possibility of actually making the world better. “We can’t have communism because of human nature”—even though the concept of private property itself did not exist before the invention of writing. Communism was the norm for 95% of the time humans have spent on Earth.
If human nature is infinite, immortal, and unstoppable, if the material world has no effect upon it, how is it different from god?
You are caught in quite the bind here. If you admit that human nature can change, that means that communism is possible, and that the entire liberal project is a sham. If you refuse to admit this, you instead admit that human nature is divine, and reduce yourself to the status of a religious lunatic. Which will it be?
Not so at all. Human nature can, and does change, albeit very, very slowly. Evolution exists; humans continue to evolve through natural selection. We have mitigated some of the environmental effects, in that people that would not have survived to reproduce a hundred years ago now survive and thrive, but we are still evolving.
Communism was the norm for 95% of the time humans have spent on Earth.
Yes, this I agree with.
Communism works very, very well when you know everyone. Communes still exist today, and they are wonderful places, because everyone knows everyone else, and is able to work for the common good. Bad actors are quickly recognized and removed. This is what is called a community; community is direct and personal, because each individual knows each other individual, or at least knows someone that knows that individual. You can still find echoes of this with civics clubs, certain churches (not megachurches), and other local chapters of national organizations.
But this is not what we have now. Society has replaced community. Rather than everything being personal, everything has become impersonal and depersonalized. (That this feeling of being disconnected is pervasive in society; it's giving rise to right-wing extremism, as young people--mostly boys--looking for community are finding fascists that welcome them into a community. This is a large part of the reason why cells of groups like the Proud Boys are successful) Society is a largely external force, outside of the individual. In a society, problems are external to the individual; in a community, problems are internal to the individual, because the individual knows every other person.
Human nature can not keep pace with the ways that we are changing out environment. We have evolved to live in tribal groups, but in our development and reproduction as a species we have out paced the size of communities we have evolved to function within. Societies attempt to create a framework that allows individuals to continue to function, despite no longer being directly connected to the other people around them. Society has largely failed, and continues to fail to adapt in modernity; this is true for both capitalism, and so-called communism at a nation-state level.
For decentralized, anti-authoritarian communism to work, it must be personal and individual. You would need to evolve--or devolve--to tribal groups, or very small village-states. You could not have countries as we currently understand them, and we would certainly have a hard time e.g. coming to agreements about combating climate change (esp. when you consider that there are certain religious communities that are personally invested in denying that climate change is even real). Moreover, we have seen that there have been no successful transitions from communist revolutions to true communist societies yet. Is it possible in the future? Sure. But that's not the way that evidence is pointing.
I don't believe that capitalism is the answer; that's failed to meet the needs of everyone economically, and has often failed to meet social needs. I don't believe that communism can work the way that it was conceived; it may meet the bare economic necessities of most people (baring famines caused by hubristic governments or intentional genocides), but has failed the social needs. I don't think that communism should be accepted or permitted in the way that it's been implemented by Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, or any of the other communist dictators due to the way that it removes the individual, personal autonomies and liberties of the people in those systems. (And yes, I'm aware that "dictatorship" is a loose term, and that even an absolute monarch doesn't have unlimited power, but the USSR, China, Cuba, and others, have been effectively dictatorships.)
This isn't a problem that can be solved through black and white, reductionist thinking--capitalism -OR- communism--and I don't think it can't be solved through pure theory. I tend to have a lot of respect for people that will admit that they don't know what the solution looks like, while decrying both the communism that has existed as well as capitalism as it now exists. I have much less respect for people that insist that they know for certainty that this or thatwill work.
Good. I'm glad we agree that communism is possible and liberalism is a sham.
Communism works very, very well when you know everyone.
China, Vietnam, Laos, the DPRK, Cuba—these aren't communist countries? If China, for example, isn't actually communist, I assume you would have no issue then with the CPC taking control of the USA, since the result would be the same as the Democrats or the Republicans currently running the show? I know you would probably say: "oh, that would be horrifying, because according to the Nazis in the CIA, the Chinese are genociding Uyghurs, it's not as though the USA has been slaughtering millions of Muslims around the planet for decades. The millionaires-paid-by-billionaires on CNN and in The New York Times repeatedly assert without presenting any evidence that there's also no freedom of speech in China (they also lied about Iraq's WMDs but I still trust them for some reason). I, for instance, have no issues at all when I openly discuss unionizing my workplace in front of my boss in the USA. I can also publicly threaten violence against government officials in the USA without any consequences. It's not as though the USA locks up more people per capita than any other country on Earth, including China. This is freedom."
Further strong hints that China is communist: the country has not fought any wars in decades (because it is not controlled by the military industrial complex, unlike the USA). Universal health care and the construction of ten thousand kilometers of bullet train tracks both strongly undermine private capital in China (as does the regular execution or expropriation of billionaires who get out of line. The USA loves executing people, but for some odd reason none of them are rich?). More than 90% of Chinese people own their own homes, strongly undermining the existence of landlords (compare with 65% of Americans owning their homes—though roughly half of those homes are actually owned by banks). Inflation, for all intents and purposes, does not exist in China; inflation strongly favors the owners of capital versus the proletariat, i.e., people who own no capital. Chinese people are also highly educated—far more so than Americans—and all of them learn about Marxism-Leninism in school, unlike Americans, who are forced to learn about these subjects on their own (since any teacher who brings it up will lose their job and possibly even their life in our precious democracy). Don't you think that people who actually read Marxist texts are better qualified to judge whether a country is communist or not, compared with people who have never picked up a Marxist text in their lives? Why is China compelling its people to study Marxism if it is not in fact a communist country? Isn't that a remarkably and even pointlessly dangerous policy for a country that is only supposedly masquerading as communist to undertake?
The reality is that these are communist countries. You say, without presenting evidence, that human nature changes slowly. If you knew about dialectical materialism, you would be aware that quantitative buildup produces sudden qualitative change. Heat is applied to a pot of water for several minutes until bubbles suddenly appear, effecting a sudden change from liquid to gas. Human society is no different. Months before the February Revolution took place, Lenin himself said it would be years, maybe decades before there was a revolution in Russia. Yet a revolution took place. In a historical heartbeat, Russia changed from backward feudal hellhole to the world's first workers' democracy. Sometimes even the sharpest people, the ones best in touch with the masses, don't see it coming.
I don't think the situation in the USA is as advanced as it was in Russia toward the end of WW1. But class consciousness is definitely growing here, despite the best efforts of the American ruling class to beat it out of us. Those of us who have survived the pandemic thus far are absolutely furious with the pieces of shit running the country. Workers are unionizing, radicalizing, and growing ever more hostile to bosses, bourgeois customers, and their running dogs in the government. Communism has not been this popular in the USA since the 1930s. The biggest protests in American history took place in 2020; American protestors did amazing things (burning down police stations) few if any communists here thought they were capable of doing. Rifts among the bourgeoisie are growing—with liberals and conservatives repeatedly arresting one another and accusing the other side of treachery—which presents opportunities for workers. The US Proxy War in Ukraine likewise presents opportunities for workers around the world to throw off the yoke of imperialism, as they are currently doing in places like Niger, Burkina Faso, and Mali. The growth of BRICS and dedollarization could rapidly intensify the contradictions of life in the USA, as the government is forced to pay for its activities with taxes on Americans rather than taxes on the rest of the planet.
but the USSR, China, Cuba, and others, have been effectively dictatorships.
Indeed, they were and are dictatorships of the proletariat, as opposed to the USA, which is a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. The famines you mentioned were consequences of the catastrophic feudal orders the workers overthrew in these countries. You cannot simply press the communism button and make everything instantly perfect; capitalism itself was also not built in a day. Famines in places like Russia and China were a regular issue before workers took power; they ceased to be a problem within decades of workers taking control. (Today, Chinese people eat better and healthier than Americans, ten percent of whom are "experiencing food insecurity," i.e., starving.) No evidence has ever been presented that any communist country has ever purposefully committed genocide (although communist countries are laser-focused on eliminating Nazism and depriving the bourgeoisie of power—which liberals in the USA mistake for genocide). The USA, which has committed more genocides than any country that has ever existed, including Nazi Germany (a fact disputed by no one), also has no right of any kind to criticize any communist country.
I tend to have a lot of respect for people that will admit that they don't know what the solution looks like, while decrying both the communism that has existed as well as capitalism as it now exists. I have much less respect for people that insist that they know for certainty that this or that will work.
Imagine saying this about a concept like gravity. Human societies are part of the natural world and can be understood scientifically. But you do have to do your homework, and that means reading theory and history and doing praxis. And to read liberal history and theory is like reading Aristotle instead of Einstein. To do liberal praxis is the equivalent of praying to an idol in a temple rather than performing experiments in a laboratory.
Keep moving those goalposts, daddy. 🥵 First you claim marxist literature is never purchased by the libraries, which could be easily disproved just by clicking the link I gave you. Then you imply they don't stock enough, even though according to the catalogue, as I've already said, they "hold 168 book by or about Karl Marx", including multiple copies of the same book (the abovementioned CotGP has 4 copies, an abridged edition of Capital has 49 copies, etc., not even getting into counting the marxist literature not written by Marx).
But it appears you expect the American public library system to lead the communist revolution, so discussing even banal data such as how many books are stocked by a library is probably pointless.
The New York Public library system has less than a hundred copies of The Communist Manifesto, one of the most popular and important books ever written, while it has thousands of copies of various books associated with JK Rowling, a notoriously transphobic writer. I wonder what the priorities of the system are?
I get your gripes. For the longest time The Devil and Karl Marx was one of only a handful of Communist related books in my local library system (and by far the most checked out). The city council and board of trustees even made successful efforts to censor Black History and Pride Month events and displays this past year.
That being said, we do have allies and even comrades working within the system as librarians and aides. The ones in my city managed to help me get Blackshirts and Reds and The Jakarta Method onto the shelves.
Libraries being one of the last remaining third spaces of public life will definitely be a zone of struggle as market interests seek to hollow out and privatize the ever diminishing Commons, but there's solidarity to be found despite how bleak the situation seems.
Realistically, there are no banned books today, outside of stuff like Turner Diaries and Mein Kampf and terrorist guides. And even those (outside of terrorist guides) are usually just semi-banned, i.e. Amazon and most reasonable booksellers and libraries won't stock them, but you can buy them by other means and it's probably not illegal.
So I have no idea what's your point here. The "liberals" who promote reading "banned books" refer to stuff like small school libraries not stocking whatever the American media and Twitter decided to wreak hysteria about this season.
Either way, in reality New York Public Library holds 168 book by or about Karl Marx.
Marxist books are usually difficult to find in public libraries. They aren’t banned, they’re just mysteriously never purchased and never displayed!
Categorically false, and delusional.
Libraries buy books based on community interest. That's why they usually have many copies of the latest best-seller, and very few copies of books about, say, getting a ham radio license. When people in a community are interested in Marxist theory--and face it; very, very few people have read Das Kapital in it's entirety, fewer have fully understood it, and all of them have degrees in philosophy--the libraries will buy books on Marxist theory. When people want to read Walter Benjamin or Mikhail Bakunin, the libraries will buy that. When people want to read Ayn Rand (who is even less entertaining than Marx, and she's trying to be entertaining), libraries will buy that.
My library has exactly as many copies of Ulysses as they do Das Kapital, and I'm in a very small town in the deep south. No one cares of banning James Joyce. Space on library shelves and funding is limited, and libraries don't usually see a point in filling up that precious space with, and spending money on books people 'should' read that are never going to get checked out.
I wonder if a supposed lack of interest in Marxism could have anything to do with over a century of rabid and relentless anti-communism from every privately owned media source and position of authority, combined with the awareness that those Americans who publicly express interest in communism will have their careers and possibly even their lives destroyed?
It's probably more because philosophy in general isn't something that lots of people have an interest in, economics are often boring, and Das Kapital combines both into one incredibly dense, challenging to read book.
Personally, I think that Marx and Engels do a great job of describing the problem, but I don't think that their solution takes human nature into effect. Economics assumes that people are fully rational actors that will do the smartest thing all the time, but that's clearly not the case; there are other forces shaping human behavior. Marx and Engels don't seem to account for that.
What is the difference between “human nature” and god?
God (probably) doesn't exist. Humans do.
“Human nature” is a concept that, in your mind, is unchanging and immortal. It possesses infinite power. It acts upon the material world, but the material world cannot act upon it. It is also only brought up when anyone mentions the possibility of actually making the world better. “We can’t have communism because of human nature”—even though the concept of private property itself did not exist before the invention of writing. Communism was the norm for 95% of the time humans have spent on Earth.
If human nature is infinite, immortal, and unstoppable, if the material world has no effect upon it, how is it different from god?
You are caught in quite the bind here. If you admit that human nature can change, that means that communism is possible, and that the entire liberal project is a sham. If you refuse to admit this, you instead admit that human nature is divine, and reduce yourself to the status of a religious lunatic. Which will it be?
Not so at all. Human nature can, and does change, albeit very, very slowly. Evolution exists; humans continue to evolve through natural selection. We have mitigated some of the environmental effects, in that people that would not have survived to reproduce a hundred years ago now survive and thrive, but we are still evolving.
Yes, this I agree with.
Communism works very, very well when you know everyone. Communes still exist today, and they are wonderful places, because everyone knows everyone else, and is able to work for the common good. Bad actors are quickly recognized and removed. This is what is called a community; community is direct and personal, because each individual knows each other individual, or at least knows someone that knows that individual. You can still find echoes of this with civics clubs, certain churches (not megachurches), and other local chapters of national organizations.
But this is not what we have now. Society has replaced community. Rather than everything being personal, everything has become impersonal and depersonalized. (That this feeling of being disconnected is pervasive in society; it's giving rise to right-wing extremism, as young people--mostly boys--looking for community are finding fascists that welcome them into a community. This is a large part of the reason why cells of groups like the Proud Boys are successful) Society is a largely external force, outside of the individual. In a society, problems are external to the individual; in a community, problems are internal to the individual, because the individual knows every other person.
Human nature can not keep pace with the ways that we are changing out environment. We have evolved to live in tribal groups, but in our development and reproduction as a species we have out paced the size of communities we have evolved to function within. Societies attempt to create a framework that allows individuals to continue to function, despite no longer being directly connected to the other people around them. Society has largely failed, and continues to fail to adapt in modernity; this is true for both capitalism, and so-called communism at a nation-state level.
For decentralized, anti-authoritarian communism to work, it must be personal and individual. You would need to evolve--or devolve--to tribal groups, or very small village-states. You could not have countries as we currently understand them, and we would certainly have a hard time e.g. coming to agreements about combating climate change (esp. when you consider that there are certain religious communities that are personally invested in denying that climate change is even real). Moreover, we have seen that there have been no successful transitions from communist revolutions to true communist societies yet. Is it possible in the future? Sure. But that's not the way that evidence is pointing.
I don't believe that capitalism is the answer; that's failed to meet the needs of everyone economically, and has often failed to meet social needs. I don't believe that communism can work the way that it was conceived; it may meet the bare economic necessities of most people (baring famines caused by hubristic governments or intentional genocides), but has failed the social needs. I don't think that communism should be accepted or permitted in the way that it's been implemented by Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, or any of the other communist dictators due to the way that it removes the individual, personal autonomies and liberties of the people in those systems. (And yes, I'm aware that "dictatorship" is a loose term, and that even an absolute monarch doesn't have unlimited power, but the USSR, China, Cuba, and others, have been effectively dictatorships.)
This isn't a problem that can be solved through black and white, reductionist thinking--capitalism -OR- communism--and I don't think it can't be solved through pure theory. I tend to have a lot of respect for people that will admit that they don't know what the solution looks like, while decrying both the communism that has existed as well as capitalism as it now exists. I have much less respect for people that insist that they know for certainty that this or that will work.
Good. I'm glad we agree that communism is possible and liberalism is a sham.
China, Vietnam, Laos, the DPRK, Cuba—these aren't communist countries? If China, for example, isn't actually communist, I assume you would have no issue then with the CPC taking control of the USA, since the result would be the same as the Democrats or the Republicans currently running the show? I know you would probably say: "oh, that would be horrifying, because according to the Nazis in the CIA, the Chinese are genociding Uyghurs, it's not as though the USA has been slaughtering millions of Muslims around the planet for decades. The millionaires-paid-by-billionaires on CNN and in The New York Times repeatedly assert without presenting any evidence that there's also no freedom of speech in China (they also lied about Iraq's WMDs but I still trust them for some reason). I, for instance, have no issues at all when I openly discuss unionizing my workplace in front of my boss in the USA. I can also publicly threaten violence against government officials in the USA without any consequences. It's not as though the USA locks up more people per capita than any other country on Earth, including China. This is freedom."
Further strong hints that China is communist: the country has not fought any wars in decades (because it is not controlled by the military industrial complex, unlike the USA). Universal health care and the construction of ten thousand kilometers of bullet train tracks both strongly undermine private capital in China (as does the regular execution or expropriation of billionaires who get out of line. The USA loves executing people, but for some odd reason none of them are rich?). More than 90% of Chinese people own their own homes, strongly undermining the existence of landlords (compare with 65% of Americans owning their homes—though roughly half of those homes are actually owned by banks). Inflation, for all intents and purposes, does not exist in China; inflation strongly favors the owners of capital versus the proletariat, i.e., people who own no capital. Chinese people are also highly educated—far more so than Americans—and all of them learn about Marxism-Leninism in school, unlike Americans, who are forced to learn about these subjects on their own (since any teacher who brings it up will lose their job and possibly even their life in our precious democracy). Don't you think that people who actually read Marxist texts are better qualified to judge whether a country is communist or not, compared with people who have never picked up a Marxist text in their lives? Why is China compelling its people to study Marxism if it is not in fact a communist country? Isn't that a remarkably and even pointlessly dangerous policy for a country that is only supposedly masquerading as communist to undertake?
The reality is that these are communist countries. You say, without presenting evidence, that human nature changes slowly. If you knew about dialectical materialism, you would be aware that quantitative buildup produces sudden qualitative change. Heat is applied to a pot of water for several minutes until bubbles suddenly appear, effecting a sudden change from liquid to gas. Human society is no different. Months before the February Revolution took place, Lenin himself said it would be years, maybe decades before there was a revolution in Russia. Yet a revolution took place. In a historical heartbeat, Russia changed from backward feudal hellhole to the world's first workers' democracy. Sometimes even the sharpest people, the ones best in touch with the masses, don't see it coming.
I don't think the situation in the USA is as advanced as it was in Russia toward the end of WW1. But class consciousness is definitely growing here, despite the best efforts of the American ruling class to beat it out of us. Those of us who have survived the pandemic thus far are absolutely furious with the pieces of shit running the country. Workers are unionizing, radicalizing, and growing ever more hostile to bosses, bourgeois customers, and their running dogs in the government. Communism has not been this popular in the USA since the 1930s. The biggest protests in American history took place in 2020; American protestors did amazing things (burning down police stations) few if any communists here thought they were capable of doing. Rifts among the bourgeoisie are growing—with liberals and conservatives repeatedly arresting one another and accusing the other side of treachery—which presents opportunities for workers. The US Proxy War in Ukraine likewise presents opportunities for workers around the world to throw off the yoke of imperialism, as they are currently doing in places like Niger, Burkina Faso, and Mali. The growth of BRICS and dedollarization could rapidly intensify the contradictions of life in the USA, as the government is forced to pay for its activities with taxes on Americans rather than taxes on the rest of the planet.
Indeed, they were and are dictatorships of the proletariat, as opposed to the USA, which is a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. The famines you mentioned were consequences of the catastrophic feudal orders the workers overthrew in these countries. You cannot simply press the communism button and make everything instantly perfect; capitalism itself was also not built in a day. Famines in places like Russia and China were a regular issue before workers took power; they ceased to be a problem within decades of workers taking control. (Today, Chinese people eat better and healthier than Americans, ten percent of whom are "experiencing food insecurity," i.e., starving.) No evidence has ever been presented that any communist country has ever purposefully committed genocide (although communist countries are laser-focused on eliminating Nazism and depriving the bourgeoisie of power—which liberals in the USA mistake for genocide). The USA, which has committed more genocides than any country that has ever existed, including Nazi Germany (a fact disputed by no one), also has no right of any kind to criticize any communist country.
Imagine saying this about a concept like gravity. Human societies are part of the natural world and can be understood scientifically. But you do have to do your homework, and that means reading theory and history and doing praxis. And to read liberal history and theory is like reading Aristotle instead of Einstein. To do liberal praxis is the equivalent of praying to an idol in a temple rather than performing experiments in a laboratory.
The catalogue I linked literally shows they have a 2023 edition of "Critique of the Gotha Program", in the very first row of the results.
Nice, how many people live in New York state again?
Keep moving those goalposts, daddy. 🥵 First you claim marxist literature is never purchased by the libraries, which could be easily disproved just by clicking the link I gave you. Then you imply they don't stock enough, even though according to the catalogue, as I've already said, they "hold 168 book by or about Karl Marx", including multiple copies of the same book (the abovementioned CotGP has 4 copies, an abridged edition of Capital has 49 copies, etc., not even getting into counting the marxist literature not written by Marx).
But it appears you expect the American public library system to lead the communist revolution, so discussing even banal data such as how many books are stocked by a library is probably pointless.
The New York Public library system has less than a hundred copies of The Communist Manifesto, one of the most popular and important books ever written, while it has thousands of copies of various books associated with JK Rowling, a notoriously transphobic writer. I wonder what the priorities of the system are?
I get your gripes. For the longest time The Devil and Karl Marx was one of only a handful of Communist related books in my local library system (and by far the most checked out). The city council and board of trustees even made successful efforts to censor Black History and Pride Month events and displays this past year.
That being said, we do have allies and even comrades working within the system as librarians and aides. The ones in my city managed to help me get Blackshirts and Reds and The Jakarta Method onto the shelves.
Libraries being one of the last remaining third spaces of public life will definitely be a zone of struggle as market interests seek to hollow out and privatize the ever diminishing Commons, but there's solidarity to be found despite how bleak the situation seems.