I've been fortunate enough to have seen my material conditions improve as I've entered my mid-thirties which has let me start a family and buy a home. I've also watched my incredibly talented and hard working friends/acquaintances/neighbours be ground into dust under the cruel rule of capitalism. I got lucky, they didn't, this has radicalized me far more than any naive idealism ever could.
Exactly this. I'm fortunate enough that the skills I'm good at have a lot of demand at the moment, but people I know that are more hard working than I am and very talented, struggle to get by just because their job for some reason is considered less worthy to pay for.
Wanting to maintain this rotten system is the purest form of greed.
Which is weird since conservative politics is all about cutting funds for schools, gutting the department of education completely, no pre k or free lunches for kids, and getting rid of a large portion of our law enforcement. Just doesn't make sense why any one who cares about education or safety would be conservative
getting rid of a large portion of our law enforcement
I'm pretty certain neither party supports this. After 2020, every state and city, including dem-run ones increased police funding.
If you're talking about republicans complaining about the FBI because it went after Trump, they're just as likely to abolish prisons because some jan 6ers got convicted. These people like those institutions too much when they're doing their primary purpose of neutralizing leftist political movements.
Also you're not private property nor do you own significant capital. It's not your law enforcement.
That's an exaggeration. The median price for new construction in 1980 was $64,600. [1] As for existing housing stock, the median home value in 1980 was $47,200. [2] As housing prices are heavily right skewed, the prices of cheap housing is far closer to the median than the price of expensive housing. Based on a cursory overview of some charts, it seems like the bottom 20% of houses are no more that 30% cheaper than the median, putting them in the $30k range.
1975 =/= 1980. Looks like housing went up 64% in those 5 years from the data I already linked.
Curious, as the person who you were originally responding to deleted their comment. Is that per year or a one time expenditure?
Also, 36k is still literally 44-80% higher than your initial claim.
That's a well intentioned sentiment. So don't tske any of this as an attack, just a clarification.
We aren't just all on this journey together, some of us are oppressed by others. Our problems aren't abstract, they are a consequence of the ruling class engaging in warfare on the rest of us, and that's what the person above was getting at.
We know we're people, but we also know that we aren't people to the ruling class.
Okay I'm communist I'm not in one of your parties. I have no idea what you're talking about journey's and different places, that doesn't mean anything. Both of the parties you're refering to serve the ruling class and help facilitate the oppression of the global working class.
There's more to it, but at the end of the day there are two classes, the global ruling class who oppress, and the global working class who are oppressed. These aren't different parts of a "journey", its a global system of production thst is predicated on the exploitation of one class by the other.
You think Marxism is an overly simple take on things, but think your metaphor about journey's means anything at all?
I don't mean to be rude or anything, but it's not like communists have never heard of capitalists who also do some kind of labor. There aren't two classes, but rather, there are two very big classes that have contradictory interests and people will be filtered into one of those two. That's where the fight of capitalism is. Notice how peasantry has almost ceased to exist and most monarchs are ceremonial. Mao Zedong identified 5 classes within Chinese society in 1926: landlords, proletariat, peasantry, urban petite-bourgeoise, and national bourgeoisie. And that's actually what 4 of the stars on the Chinese flag symbolize, with the largest representing the CPC.
You sound like you're what's called petite bourgeois and you identify with the cause and ideology of the bourgeoisie because that's either something you aspire to or it's a structure you're able to take advantage of. Marx identified a transitional faction of capitalists precisely within his essay The Class Struggles in France, 1848–1850, and there's a brief mention within the Communist Manifesto.
Basically, Marx said the capitalist class has separate factions who are not all in concert with one another, since not all capitalists have intrinsically similar goals. Some capitalists have contradictory interests to others and want the other abolished. In comparison, the working class have no such contradictory interests, all workers benefit from the same concerns: higher wages, fewer hours, more control over their workplace.
I'd really recommend reading the Marxist theorist Althusser on this one too. To summarize, he was one of the theorists who proposed class systems are more of an action one takes and the subsequent ideological formations within it than necessarily a strict divide of class hierarchy.
I'd recommend 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus' as Althusser's foundational text. His essay 'On the Materialist Dialectic' is the one where he talks about what I brought up. It can be tricky to understand if you haven't read much dialectic theory before Althusser, but he basically argues that there's a plurality of economic classes and activities, each with some degree of autonomy, but all of them depend on one another to a degree that they shape the boundaries of the other.
I will point out that in very clear terms that Althusser's own battle with mental illness shaped much of his philosophical work. He was very interested in structure and how various people were slotted into formations completely outside of themselves. He had a lifelong battle with schizophrenia that had him institutionalized at various points and in one very severe episode he accidentally killed his own wife.
He didn't believe in free will, is what I mean.
Nothing about the way everything's going is designed to let me feel like a person. Money's a requirement to simply exist. Everything's a race to get enough money to sustain myself. I'm simply a worker who generates profit so my parasite of a boss and the associated shareholders can hang out on yachts. My job is nonsense too that doesn't help anyone. I'm estranged from my family for gender and lifestyle reasons, can't make friends because I'm always exhausted from work, can't go to therapy except sparingly because it's too expensive.
No matter how much validity my humanity holds, none of it really matters if none of it can be expressed due to a combination of alienation and dead eyed pessimism about climate change.
And no, we all aren't on the same journey together. The economic strata that sits above mine has nothing in common with me.
Thank you. And well that's all fine and good to hope and imagine, but I've been trying to actively change things for the past 20 years through socialist organizing. Goes well sometimes, goes poorly most of the time, gotta keep trying anyway .
Currents of "optimism" or "pessimism" are meaningless. Actions are all that matter. And it's not just you out there.
I am nothing and no one and that will never change
I hope you find some comfort one day.
This kind of talk is so worryingly common on this site. Feels like people insist on being seen as a "drone to serve their boss" even though they're desperate to escape it. They're disgusted by optimism because someone taught them that escapism is dumb and they believed it
I care about schools. I want them to be free and public.
I care about crime. I want to abolish the police and use that money to on social safety net programs including healthcare, social workers, housing, and more which is proven to reduce crime.
I care about children. I want paid parental leave for both parents, guaranteed job return, free childcare, free healthcare for children, and a monthly check for groceries.
Conservatives want none of that, and actively work against every point. Centre/centre-left only want some of that performatively and will undermine any implementation of these programs. The only people working for this are the "hard left." And because of decades of anti-communist propaganda, no one will touch it.
The only reason I can think of to be conservative and "socially liberal" is to protect your own capital at the expense of others while not wanting to feel bad about doing it.
Schools are already free and public
Not Pre-K for most parents, and schools are only "free" and "public" for now, thanks to conservatives and liberals alike. College, tech college, and other educational programs are also not free and need to be. Private schools need to be abolished.
Most people do not want to abolish the police. Crime would soar as there would be nothing to stop the criminals.
First, okay? I said me, not everyone. Second, that's objectively not true. If you care about a data-driven argument that shows how policing increases crime, see Alex Vitale's End of Policing. You can download it for free in a bunch of different formats here.
You get a monthly check for groceries, it's called a job.
Ah, so you truly are a conservative. A person's worth is only equal to their productive in the blood-soaked economy machine. A child can't have a job, jackass, that's why giving new parents a check for groceries helps their income as their total costs rise.
I think this best take away about communism is if it was so great, why were people fleeing from it rather than to it?
You need to do some self-crit and question everything you have been taught. For example, there are more people in prison right now in the USA than there have ever been in a gulag. If you genuinely want to learn more about communism from a communist perspective, there are plenty of places to turn. You can start on the Prole Library with some shorter introductory works. You can watch Parenti's famous yellow lecture for a short introduction, and you can watch Richard Wollf's introduction to Marxian Economics on YouTube. You can read The Jakarta Method, Blacks and Reds, or listen to a few podcasts like Blowback to learn about the propaganda machine at specific times (e.g., Iraq, Cuban Revolution, Korean War, Afghanistan in order of seasons of Blowback).
But you're going to have to stop trying to win internet arguments by being a smarmy ass and put in the effort if you really want to learn how a better world is possible.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=eAbHJn4WIz8
https://piped.video/watch?v=ljgRSIUxrCo
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Pre-K isn't necessary.
"Fuck them kids" - You
Consistent with other studies that find preschool has a huge effect on kids, Walters, Gray-Lobe and Pathak find that the kids lucky enough to get accepted into preschools in Boston saw meaningful changes to their lives. These kids were less likely to get suspended from school, less likely to skip class, and less likely to get in trouble and be placed in a juvenile detention facility. They were more likely to take the SATs and prepare for college. The most eye-popping effects the researchers find are on high school graduation and college enrollment rates. The kids who got accepted into preschool ended up having a high-school graduation rate of 70% — six percentage points higher than the kids who were denied preschool, who saw a graduation rate of only 64%. And 54% of the preschoolers ended up going to college after they graduated — eight percentage points higher than their counterparts who didn't go to preschool. These effects were bigger for boys than for girls. And they're all the more remarkable because the researchers only looked at the effects of a single year of preschool, as opposed to two years of preschool. Moreover, in many cases, the classes were only half a day.
College should not be free
Scratch a liberal and...
It doesn't make sense for a garbage man to for someone else's gender studies degree
There it is folks. Mask off in three replies.
"I will read anything suggested."
Direct links to books, articles, videos, and a podcast
"I have talked to people who lived during communism and I have visited a communist country."
Your only interest is yourself and your capital. You only want to protect yourself and, by doing so, you actively harm others. You are not only incredibly selfish as a conservative but want people to applaud you for being "socially liberal." I hope your pile of gold is worth it.
I only have one further question: have your children cut off communications with you or is that something you have to look forward to?
I get you may not able to teach a child to read, but most people can.
No they can't, and neither can the american education system. 21% of americans are illiterate.
Not in my case. I grew up pretty conservative she moved right libertarian until learning economics in college which moved me left. I bought a home and have two kids and am squarely on the left. I care about schools and crime which is why I want more funding for education and programs that actually decrease crime.
Healthcare is the big one for me. We should not be forking over 20% of our paychecks for healthcare. People on the right are fucking nuts to believe that the cost is because of too much regulation considering we have the least regulation and pay twice as much with now limited options. We need Medicare for All.
Been forever since I've got to bust this one out
Show
But also, obligatory Plane Picture
Show
It’s a famous example of survivorship bias. The idea is, adding armor to planes make them heavier, so you want to minimize where you put armor. After some flights, you take note of where the bullet holes are in the planes that come back.
Where do you put more armor? Do you put it where there are the most bullet holes? That seems to be where the planes are being shot the most.
The problem is, your sample isn’t representative of your underlying population. These are the planes that came back. If they get shot it the cockpit, they die.
So, where should you put the armor? Well if they can get shot and come back, it’s not all that important, so put it everywhere else.
During WW2, the Allies wanted to armor their planes better so more would survive missions. But armor is expensive and heavy so you'd have to prioritize where to put it.
So they go out and collect data on the returning planes to see where they'd been hit. That picture is basically the data collected: where returning planes had sustained the most damage.
So most of the engineers looked at that and went "Aha, the points with the most damage should be armored, since they get shredded up pretty good."
And one engineer went "Um actually, if they got shot there and came back, armor doesn't matter. We need to armor the spots with no bullet holes, since a plane shot there wasn't able to return."
And so it was, and they called it Survivor Bias.
In this case, it's survivor bias about becoming more conservative as you age
The older I get the more injustice I see the angrier I get. The only difference between now and my twenties is I know who to direct my rage at and it burns hotter then ever.
I was actually more right wing as a kid. Now that I've learned some things about the world that's when I became a left leaning liberal.
I feel that. I was raised in a religious household and had some weird beliefs, but time and education has made me a communist.
If you make sure that you never ever stop learning and that there is never an end to the process you will eventually go further.
Don't stop.
I will never stop learning. This is actually something I admire my parents in. They never stop learning new things
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/2mI_RMQEulw
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Subtext here is that white boomers became more conservative because the civil rights movement made them miss Jim Crow
My afternoons at 18: sips tea reading Noam Chomsky’s Failed State
My afternoons at 30: sips vodka reading Unabomber’s Manifesto
Ted started off as a smart guy, but the MKULTRA abuse he experienced left him with a broken ideology.
Many parts of his manifesto are problematic, and I hope people don't think it's good theory.
Some excerpts:
The leftist is antagonistic to the concept of competition because, deep inside, he feels like a loser.
The leftist seeks to satisfy his feeling of inferiority by cultivating attitudes of superiority. He is not the only one to do this, but he is the one who goes furthest in this direction.
Leftists tend to hate anything that has an image of being strong, good, and successful.
The leftist is not typically the kind of person whose feelings of inferiority make him a braggart, an egotist, a bully, a self-promoter, a ruthless competitor. This kind of person is too eager to seize the initiative and too insensitive to feel guilty for his aggression. The leftist is as prone to manipulating others as the more right-wing person, but his main goal is to avoid straining his own conscience.
Ted also has some jabs at reactionaries, but he's not a leftist for sure. There's better literature out there, from an actual leftist perspective that people could be reading instead.
I think he committed the error of giving a political attribute to a certain cathegory of people.
In those excerpt, if you switch "leftist" with "twitter social justice warrior" you can feel who really he is mad at.Honestly it just feels like he projects a lot of stuff that overlaps with fascist ideology as well as having a horrid concept of actual leftism, then again Ted having a fried brain makes sense given he decided to just randomly send out bombs to harm workers.
So far score wise I feel the kid that did in Abe via the
had the best consciousness not to turn into a reactionary bent on harming innocents and instead applied his suffering to a target that has materially contributed to that situation (Abe family and the moonies). i.e. Ted is an example of a mfer with no class consciousness deciding to "solve the problem".
If YoU aRe NoT a LiBeRaL wHeN yOu ArE 30 yOu HaVe No HeArT, aNd If YoU aRe NoT a CoNsErVaTiVe WhEn YoU aRe 40 YoU hAvE nO bRaInIronically, then they turn around and call us condescending.....despite our beliefs boiling down to "you're not special. No one is."
If you're not an Anarchist in your 20's you have no heart.
If you're not a Tankie in your 30's you have no brain.
based. People usually become more conservative as they gain wealth. But anyone born after like 1970 has never had that happen because neoliberalism has concentrated all the wealth
Again, this is not a boomer issue. I was told the same thing by Silents. I've only moved left-er.
The difference between you and others your age that didn't move left is likely material conditions. Those that got it reasonably good likely feel like capitalism worked for them so it should work for everyone. Property inheritance also plays a significant role.
The older phrase used to be "You become more right wing when you get older", whereas it's quite likely it was missing the specific cause, which was "You become more right wing when you stop learning". [Edit] Typo
I don't think I have seen this but the reason we see this effect is murder. The richer you are the older you you manage to live. Either you are too poor and misadventures get your. Or the things that you have progressive beliefs about will get you oppressed and maybe murdered by society. I don't think it is intended. It could easily be so however, it is just a slow oppression and crushing of everyone in society.
Yeah there is hardcore survivor's bias.
Also the statement is at best only partially true for the older bougie and middle class fucks who lived through the 80s-90s as neoliberalism did it's best to delegitimize socialism, and who dominate todays discourse about that period, due to wealth and survivor bias.
