Reading about FOSS philosophy, degoogling, becoming against corporations, and now a full-blown woke communist (like Linus Torvalds)
this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2023
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Wrong about what, in particular? I think communism is the only chance our species has at a future. I think China does a lot of good things, particular in the spirit of communism, and has communism to thank for many of its particular successes. I believe in global labor solidarity, US laborers and Chinese laborers, together against the capitalist classes. I think your brand of messaging is working against that goal.
Many US politicians come from working class, are almost always found on the front lines of disasters, and frequently engage with communities in town halls. This is not impressive stuff, it's like baseline politician duty.
I love the shifting rhetoric where sometimes communism is stronger and better than capitalism, and sometimes it's weaker. And don't pretend the USSR and China weren't/aren't also imperialist.
100% true, the only way to real communism is global communism. Which means if you want real communism, you have to begrudgingly shift your focus from "West bad", to "how do we liberate the laborers of the West to overthrow their capitalist overlords", which means better pro-communism messaging.
People can't read your mind and it never comes across that you believe any of these things. What you come across as a defender of the current capitalist system. So, perhaps you too could think about better messaging. Frankly, you just come across as a total dick, and that naturally brings out the worst in people. When you do your trolling and make smug jabs you get the same in return, and then you end up making people who might actually agree with you on a lot of things develop a dislike for you.
None of US top politicians do any of that, and none of them worked a day in their lives. For example, let's look at how Xi started out. Guy literally lived in cave in a small village. How has he advanced and got where he is? By doing actual work and demonstrating results to his community, by getting increasingly bigger responsibilities and demonstrating competence. And he still visits the poorest villages today, he sees how people live, what their problems are. And that's how it works for the rest of the party as well. If you look at the structure of the party, it is in no way comparable to what you have in US https://news.cgtn.com/event/2021/who-runs-the-cpc/index.html
I'm not shifting any rhetoric, I just love how you make an art of misinterpreting everything I say in the worst way possible.
In case you weren't aware, US was the only major country that didn't get razed by WW2. While USSR along with the rest of Europe and Asia were being destroyed, US ramped up its military industrial complex. After the war, US created NATO and turned Europe into its vassal. That's how it became the dominant global power. The fact that USSR was able to stand up to that while rebuilding essentially on its own is a testament to the strength of communism.
The point I was actually making was that the cold war obviously had a huge negative impact on both economic and social development of USSR. This is the same problem DPRK and Cuba have today, and your regime spends a lot of time scaring people regarding dangers of communism using them as examples.
Accepting that the western system is bad and recognizing that systems like China, while imperfect, are a path in the right direction is the correct messaging. Most of western propaganda relies on the red scare. When people are afraid of real world examples of communism, then they naturally end up preferring keeping the system they have. If people learn to accept that China does a lot of things right, and that real world communism isn't scary, then it can be used an example of how things can improve.
Finally, if communism ever did end up developing in the west then it would necessarily be rooted in western values. Every communist project is necessarily rooted in history, culture, and the material conditions of the place it develops in. USSR, China, Cuba, and so on are all different approaches that people can learn from.
So, if you think that the only way forward is global communism, then you have to ask yourself why people in the west are so afraid of communism and whether your own messaging is feeding into that fear.
Yeah, I am a dick, but also the only position you were making me defend was that communist messaging sucks. It's way too easy to defend that communist messaging sucks.
It's because communist messaging sucks.
Let's be honest, you would've been saying that communist messaging sucks when the Soviet revolution happened too. You would've dismissed Lenin with the same smug insults. Yet, that's the kind of messaging that got people organized, educated, and mobilized to carry out a revolution. If ML messaging actually sucked then it wouldn't have resulted in many successful revolutions.
Absolutely not, and the Communist Manifesto was a brilliant piece of writing. These are communists who knew how to speak to people's frustrations and desires.
So I amend my claim, I was wrong. Communists in the past were great at messaging, communists alive today suck at messaging.
Communists today are using all the same materials and asking people to read works like The State and Revolution, the Manifesto, and so on. I'm not sure what you think is so different about messaging today from the messaging in the past. From what I can tell the problem isn't the messaging, but the fact that most people in the west have been generally happy to keep capitalism and ignore its problems.
Notice that the revolutions failed to spread to the west at the start of the 20th century as well, despite the great messaging. Germany came close, but ultimately socdems, libs, and fascists closed ranks to strangle the revolutionary movement. Same happened in France, Italy, Spain, and Greece.
The difference is that we live in the present, not the past, and the present is a lot different than the past.
The communist manifesto was brilliant because Marx and Engels wrote it specifically for the average working class people of their time. It wouldn't have worked if they wrote it for people almost 200 years past.
Let go of the history and tradition. I'm not asking anyone to write a new communist manifesto of the 21st century, but talk to people like you live in 2023, not a cult of tradition. Embrace modernity.
Lol, no. Open your eyes up, Westerners hate capitalism, they mostly just don't know yet that it's capitalism at the source of their problems. People are exhausted at the idea of the iPhone 16 Max Pro Plus X Series, they just want to make a fair living wage to provide for their family, and have time to spend with their family. If you can offer a home, healthy food, medical care, and education at 32 work hours per week, you are sold to almost everyone in the US.
Class relationships have not fundamentally changed in the past century, and much of the writing directly applies to our society today. In fact, it's the clearest and most lucid explanation of what we're seeing around us. Furthermore, there have been plenty of people, such as Parenti, who have been building on these works and modernizing it. You keep talking like modern explanations of ML theory don't exist when they're readily available.
It's true that young people are becoming disillusioned by capitalism because the system is becoming increasingly unbearable. However, that's a very recent phenomenon. Meanwhile, even on Lemmy which is pretty far left from the mainstream there are plenty of people running around defending capitalism. Most people in the west can't even define what capitalism or socialism is, and they take western system for granted.
What's more is that majority of people who are discontent have no idea what to do about it. People vent their anger online and grumble, but they have no idea what to do to actually improve their conditions.
These things aren't possible under the current system because it's designed by capitalist to facilitate exploitation of the workers. The only way to change things is for workers to tear the system down and build a new one from ground up. There are no signs of that happening in the foreseeable future.