if I were a socialist state struggling to defend itself against international capital reaction, I would simply not get couped
This seems like an arbitrary reason to dislike him, because the same should count for Angela Davis, but I don't see anyone #cancelling her for it.
Chomsky's not a "baby leftist" though, he's just an anti-communist liberal with some light criticism of American foreign policy
leave what? we aren't providing hot meals here or newfangled tech sector jobs or mainstream pop cultural absolution, we can only provide different ways of thinking & processing information with a larger historical justification
outside of that, liberalism will continue be the order of the day in the American mind palace at least. And it unfortunately remains the primary touchstone for all of those who think more than 3 seconds about politics & political potentialities
Wouldn't really call it "light". At least that's not how it comes off in his books.
Chomsky worked at MIT on the same grants & in the same milieu of State Department/MIC nexus intellectuals & researchers as the ones he's trying to dog on
To hear Chomsky talk about Lenin in the way he does sounds just as Russophobic & ignorant to alternatives as what Noam tries to criticize neocons for
I know he worked with these people, I am talking about the critique of US foreign policy, which is not "light" or whatever.
yes, it is light
Chomsky doesn't want American military reach to contract, he just wants it to be "less" openly & brazenly expansionist
I was neutral on him until he endorsed Biden,
That's kind of a silly thing to get sour on him. He's done and said worse stuff in the past, when he wasn't a billion years old (personally I give a pass for almost anything said by someone after 85). Overall he has kinda shitty politics BUT he has many books that are pretty dope for radicalising people and exposing US imperialism.
Joe Biden is a war criminal and a rapist, so I think it’s valid.
So is Trump. That was the whole point. It's the whole harm reduction thing. It's dumb but it's not evil.
I believe in respecting the elderly,
It's not so much about respect for me. I just know that after a certain age most people lose their marbles to one extent or the other.
If someone over 85 is no longer able to communicate coherently, then they should retire from public life and give up their platform.
That's true but the issue is that due to their age their judgement is no longer good enough to do that.
including support for Pol Pot
I'm pretty sure he did change his stance on that long ago.
I think his work can help introduce concepts to someone and bring them left, but when talking with other leftists I am definitely going to criticize his behavior.
I don't disagree.
Then they should either have someone they trust step in to initiate that or be bullied publicly until they break and lose credibility.
Well if they don't have someone to step in that's not really their fault.
chomsky specifies that voting for him doesnt mean you endorse biden as a person. Basically he believes a biden administration would be better than a trump administration for the american left, for other countries and for the American public at large. I mean cornell west makes the same argument, but i havent seen any chapo radlibs cancelling him.
The main claims of contention with Chomsky seem to be his support for Biden and his views on "AES". I think we all acknowledged that the endorsement doesn't matter, and he probably had the best possible argumentation to go for it (even if a Biden presidency only saves 1 ton of carbon emissions, it's better for the planet). He certainly came of as more convincing to me in the Bad faith interview than Brie and Virgil who didn't seem to offer a real alternative for the moment.
I also don't think it should be surprising that an anarchist view - or any non-Leninist view for that matter - of "actually existing socialism" [citations needed] might not be the best.
Oh and also there's his free speech absolutism, which is really cringe, I give you that. But I don't think that justifies the hate he receives on here, I think it's a mixture of him endorsing Biden and a general need on here to shit on anarchists.
uncritical support for the DPRK in its heroic struggle to liberate occupied Korea from the genocidal American empire
fumbles with mic for 10 minutes before delivering line :party-parenti:
Parenti when he finally figures out who has been showing at his best lectures with his cell phone ringer turned on for the last 30 years :chavez-guns:
"From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." Unless you want good consumer goods prole, haha heavy industry build up go brrrr.
Hot take: I accept that the SU and countries like it were trying to build up to communism and were communist in that sense, but in that sense alone. If anything the SU proves that underdevelopment and communism don't mix. In the eyes of western proles calling that real communism implies that you want to reduce their standard of living and thats a no go. Many things the SU did were heroic and it's failing might be the biggest tragedy in history but any modern communist undertaking will not look like it at all and thats a good thing.
They need it, but can't do it on their own. my point is that Marx statement that a revolution must include the most developed countries or at least a lot of them still stands true.
I believe Imperialism is the primary global contradiction against the construction of socilism, so im inclined to agree with you here. Until the imperial core starts to crumble, it seems like the options are basically juche vs dengism, which is definately kinda problematic.
Sure it won’t look like that. Productive forces are already developed! Unless of course the state have shipped manufacturing abroad and subsists on vaporware and imperial might to trade for said useful goods 🤔
Edit: ohh nice site, it’s less bad than I thought tbh.
Yes but many people here still stan the asthetics of the SU hard and then call the SU (true) socialism and it's not to difficult to see how that turns people towards the liberal propaganda that says every socialism will look like the SU.
There is no reason why any country should completely pull off of any and all trade instantly, it's not a good idea and neither is it helpful for anyone.
I’m not saying pull off all trade, I’m saying sans military threats and desire for equitable world a lot of shit would get expensive really fast (rare earth materials, clothes, anything with a shitton of labor produced in global south) and a lot of shit conversely would become extremely cheap: software, medical patents, finance industry commissions, things that don’t have constant labor value or maintenance level of it
I’m too afraid to look if that sub is real tbh.
But fr usa can obviously produce enough food and concrete for itself, but can it produce enough clothes, other building materials, steel, nickel, cobalt with factories as they currently are?
I’ll have to refresh my memory on the import/export balances info and employment figures, maybe I was mistaken, but it was quite obscene disbalance without service exports
The means of production can be easily (re)placed in the US, or Europa and since a revolution would cancel all the bullshit jobs there would be plenty of manpower for them. Also stuff like textil or chemical industries can almost be fully automated today. It is perfectly possible. Germany is a country that still exports a lot of high value consumer goods and machinery and otherwise it's a perfectly simple western country.
Textile as in bulk commodity of course, us produces a shitton of cotton, but I’m talking specifically clothes/shoes, shit like that, that have not been automated, labor intensive stuff.
“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”
This comes up in Marx referring to the "higher stage of communism" or simply communism (with socialism being the "lower stage"), which the USSR was never supposed to have reached yet and in general it is something considered to be pretty distant even post revolution.
Marx talks briefly about higher and lower stages, but even the lower stage should in his view include for example the almost immediat abolishment of money. The SU system on the other hand grew more monetary over time. I don't think Marx ever named the stages socialism and communism though, thats seems to come from a Leninist interpretation of Marx. I argue that Marx used the terms scientific socialism and communism for the same thing.
include for example the almost immediat abolishment of money
I'm pretty sure I've never seen something like that in Marx, and it's also pretty obviously very difficult. Money arises from trade and since there will still be trade at first, there will be money. Didn't say he named them socialism and communism, although these terms gained their meaning before Lenin (but after Marx).
He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such-and-such an amount of labor (after deducting his labor for the common funds); and with this certificate, he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labor cost.
Critique of the Gotha program.
He writes this about th ** lower** stage of communism, obviously the certificate is not money. And it makes sense, movement of goods is an economic neccessity in every form of economy, but only in an economy with private property goods will be produced as commodities for the markets and therefore neccessitate trade (=change of ownership).
But this says nothing about abolition of money, which is a different thing and generally a big no no when you still have to deal with imperialism and foreign trade.
If a communist party allows bourgeois to become members is it still a communist party?
Well far as i know these nations dont claim to be communist either.
CIRCLEJERK! CIRCLEJERK! CIRCLEJERK! CIRCLEJERK! CIRCLEJERK!
Parenti posting is cringe. If you're going to defend state capitalism, at least don't hang your hat on a lightweight polemicist whose books are chock full of historical errors. There are plenty of Russian historians out there who have engaged with the primary sources and are willing to make the same arguments about Stalin and Milosevic. It still doesn't convince me, but at least it's a respectable historical project.
Parenti posting is like a reddit neoliberal quoting Guns, Germs and Steel instead of the vast library of much better qualified academic ghouls who exist to justify pretty much every aspect of imperialism without the whole "ornithologist writing academic history" vibe.
You may think so, I haven't forgiven him for his performance in the Iraq war debate.
This is the first I've heard of this debate with Hitchens. Did he do poorly? His arguments sound decent from this summary.
Also lmao at this sentence.
Parenti, an author and Pulitzer Prize nominee, has taken an unwaveringly liberal and generally negative, stance on US foreign policy over the past 25 years.
