“Communism bad”
“Why?”
200 year old tropes so ancient they were debunked by Marx himself
Of course, you go through the motions of explaining the most basic political concepts that could be grasped by skimming the cliff notes for literally any Marxist works
“Friedrich Engels? Is he like the president of Germany or something?”
It’s like a kindergartener trying to teach you calculus.
Communism in the Bolshevik sense really only "failed" because it existed in a context of warring capitalist nation-states with massive monopolies on imposing international violence, which strangled it from without. There were internal factors too, to be sure, but Communism in it's purest abstracted sense has existed successfully for centuries in societies all over the world, either before the age of the great capitalist empires or in isolation from those empires. Graeber/Wengrow detail in the Dawn of Everything that many of the native american tribes we genocided, to name a single example, lived in a state that we could only call communistic.
It's almost like as soon as the entire world is subjugated to the idea that profit for its own sake is immutable and good, and then that imperative is enforced upon the world by violence, ideologies that place the health of societies over profit can't exist??
But the fact that the capitalist death machine was able to successfully genocide all those people trying different ways of living proves that capitalism is the best possible economic system! This is just straightforward Darwin!
it is fucking astounding the number of "intellectuals" who still think Darwinism is a moral framework. READ DARWIN YOU FUCKING FUCKS!!! THE WHOLE POINT IS THAT IT'S A WASTEFUL, AMORAL SYSTEM, and imposing it deliberately IS FUCKING EVIL!
one of my favorite lectures of all time is this lecture by Stephen J Gould on Darwin's revolution in thought
guy writes about how natural selection, and nature as a whole, is an unending arms race of infinite brutality, cruelty, and exploitation
Libs: We should strive to emulate this
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Oh shit oh fuck...
Wait I think I have a rebuttal to that
Well said, comrade. Also it's anecdotal but learning about my own indigenous background probably started my path down the left or at least made me aware that an alternative way of living could be achieved.
I dont really like describing tribal economies as communist, I mean I get the value of saying it is, but just describing a collective body in a primitive economy doesn't communism make.
To be fair to the Davids, as far as I remember they don't explicity call pre-contact ways of life communist.
I don't think the claim is necessarily that tribal economies are inherently communist, rather that certain groups certainly were. Societies marked by an organizing ethos of "from each according to means, to each according to needs," no class hierarchies, robust social structures and welfare programs, and quite literal communal ownership of means of production -- if we are not going to call that communism, I think we're denuding the term of all meaningful content. I also think we should seriously scrutinize our reasoning for saying, "this was communism over here, but this small tribe or social state can't reallllly be communist." Not impugning your motives in any way, as I wholly agree with your critique as it was stated. I just think we should be careful here.
Personally, I think the most pragmatic thing to do is go case-by-case and distinguish between communism that proceeded capitalism (whatever you'd like to call it) vs Marxist communism, characterized by a transition away from a capitalist state, which is obviously an inherently modern phenomenon.