But that’s all you have, theory. It’s literally impossible in practice because of the ‘prisoners dilemma’ of working, living, and labor. This is why I’m convinced all communists who smear the leftmost american politicians are delusional and not worth collaborating with. No one is far left enough. No one is pure enough. Not AoC, not Mamdani, not Sanders, it’s impossible to actually present a candidate who would be accepted by ya’ll.
No one on the far left can put together a tent of any number of people, and therefore participate meaningfully in political society, because Full Communism is so ideologically pure as to be impossible to implement. You reject the “perfect is the enemy of good” argument and instead propose accelerationist revolution, which nearly always results in a Junta instead of your ideal political system.
It makes me believe you have no desire to actual productive results, and instead would rather lob critisims without ever participating in meaningful change. That you actually prefer if we all destroy ourselves rather than build a coalition of the willing.
We’ll be arguing about who was unelectable all the way up to the gallows.
But that’s all you have, theory. It’s literally impossible in practice
At the moment you’re not even a leftist because you believe a better world oriented towards proletarian dictatorship is “impossible in practice”. Why should anyone here care about anything you have to say about “leftmost american politicians” or “muh actual productive results”? You’ve explicitly identified yourself as someone with an irreconcilably different ideology and thus have fundamentally different goals to the left. Thinking that your opinions should be taken seriously here in any capacity as an ally or someone worth listening to just does not make sense at all. It is a testament to the patience and goodwill of the other users here who took you seriously and provided educational responses.
No one is far left enough. No one is pure enough. Not AoC, not Mamdani, not Sanders
What an insane thing to say. It is moreso a fundamental humanitarian issue of being a normal person with a working moral compass and refusing to allow genocidal ethnonationalist fascist filth in your administration as your country currently helps the zionist entity commit a genocide against the people of Palestine that they aid and abet.
Its about not being complicit in a genocide, a basic, bare minimum requirement for every human being on earth, let alone some supposedly leftist mayoral candidate.
Painting “not helping your country commit genocide” as some petty esoteric sectarian squabble in effect distracts from this fact and minimizes the evils of zionism, a fascist ethnonationalist cult, and the genocide the zionist entity, america, and the west are committing against the Palestinians. Disgusting, fucked up behaviour.
does nobody know what prisoners dilemma means anymore? what are you talking about?
You subscribe to the “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” communism Marx put forward, right? That model is a post-scarcity, Star Trek style communism system. The issue is there will always be a stratification of work. Statesman and Janitors. Artists and Engineers. Some individuals will be compelled to drive the trash truck. Will we have enough people that just love dirty jobs to do every dirty job out there? Will we be able to automate every undesirable task? No. Someone makes the post-scarcity world run on time, and Patriotism + Civic Duty sadly only takes us so far. Your model assumes that humans will let themselves fall into a system were some people get ground down as cogs, and others get to spend their day painting by the sea, and everyone will subscribe to the model because of the needs of the many.
I argue that you end up with a Prisoners Dilemma where individuals will subvert that system and avoid contributions to their ability, while continuing to take according to their need. That enforcement of the political system will push you out of it. It’s not attainable because of the inherent nature of humans to eventually betray each other in the Prisoner’s dilemma. Someone will claim “I can only paint. I cannot harvest grain” and when others in the fields see the painter, your model disintegrates.
yes because the point is not to present a candidate, the point is to build a workers party.
Your party is unable to recruit membership of any significant slice of the population because of purity tests, so this isn’t going to happen with your current outlook. I personally believe the Far Left has no actual desire to organize because that would require a real defense of their platform, vs. lobbing purity tests at others.
Don’t get me wrong. I want to live in the Star Trek society. I just accept we will never get there. So I want to get as close as possible. I think a key difference is my willingness to iterate over the flawed system rather than attempt a full re-creation of our society from whole cloth. Because I can read a history book and see the risk level with power vacuums. Maybe that’s cowardice. Maybe it’s pragmatism. I guess that’s why I’m not a hexbear or .ml user :)
It’s not attainable because of the inherent nature of humans to eventually betray each other in the Prisoner’s dilemma.
If you had any idea about dialectical materialism, you would know that humans have no inherent nature. This is a reactionary talking point.
I personally believe the Far Left has no actual desire to organize because that would require a real defense of their platform
You have not seen communist organising. I recommend you look into it. Outside of the US would be good too (not to mention countries with communist parties in power).
I want to live in the Star Trek society.
I don’t particularly care what US tv show you want to live in. Go to a cosplay event I guess.
As funkystuff said, you are just projecting what you think communism is (based on you watching Star Trek apparently), dismiss it with reactionary opinions, then say that organising doesn’t work. If you stepped outside (the US) for two seconds you would see the contrary.
It’s very arrogant to impose your misunderstanding of socialism and communism on us, then because that misunderstood version doesn’t work you assume we aren’t serious people.
It’s very arrogant to start from the position that your platform is correct and sensible, and then be completely unable to dismantle arguments to the contrary.
Again, I support the ideal of communism as a model government. However I simultaneously believe that Full Communism is not workable. So I remain hopeful of seeing pragmatic plans to adopt the closest achievable, stable system.
But you just don’t understand our position, you’re not in a place to call us incorrect when you are literally shadowboxing. The only people who want the current society to transform into a classless, moneyless, stateless society are anarcho communists. I like them, but I think they’re the minority on Hexbear. Among Marxists (and some ancoms consider themselves Marxists which I don’t seek to invalidate but I think their position is heterodox) the view is very different. Marxists and other “state” socialists don’t want to do your version of communism, they want to first transfer the currently existing means of production into a different form of administering them called socialism. Under socialism, workers would control the state (i.e. instead of the current dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, a dictatorship of the proletariat) and direct the state to defend their revolution against the inevitable backlash from capitalists. If you go to texts from Marx and Engels (e.g. in Socialism: Utopian vs Scientific) it’s clear that what they view to be the final point of that class struggle isn’t really a utopia as you describe it, but a distinct mode of social organization where the current contradictions that give rise to the national states, money, capitalist exploitation of workers, and other contradictions (IMO the biggest ones being related to imperialism, which Hobson and Lenin would later identify) would be transformed into a new way for society to be.
You can argue against that. I’m personally not even a Marxist myself and I’m skeptical that communism as Marx describes it could come to pass. But I’m a socialist and I believe the only way capitalism can be replaced by something different is revolution, that’s what history bears out and it’s what materialist analysis lands at. If you want to say that it’s wrong, I’m all ears, but at least base your understanding of Marxist positions on Marxist texts, not Star Trek.
Edit: Also, reading through your comment again, with a better understanding of what communism actually is (not this weird version where everyone is still working regular jobs in a society that would look fairly similar to ours), you could’ve just said you think communism won’t work because of the tragedy of the commons. Maybe for service work it’s a little tortured, but the idea is that in communism all the goods that are produced would just be owned collectively, most being produced automatically, then what can’t be produced automatically wouldn’t need to be produced by people working 40 hours a week at the mud factory, instead it would be a small enough quantity of labor that with just some people pitching in out of boredom you’d be fine. That seems ridiculously utopian now, hence the tragedy of the commons criticism (why work for stuff if you can just get it for free? why use resources mindfully if there’s always more?), but this would be what happens after a long time with socialism developing the means of production to drive down the amount of socially necessary labor. If 95% of the things people consumed were just automated away, and only about 5% required some human input to make, I think the criticism holds less weight because we only expect people to be producing stuff for a couple of hours each week. For service work, especially what you describe as dirty work, I think it’s necessary to think in terms of what a society that goes through a hundred years of socialist construction looks like; especially in the late stages of socialism where their sight is set on carrying out a plan to reform society into one that completely minimizes the amount of labor input necessary. Is it possible that they reduce the amount of professional plumbing, garbage handling, healthcare, and other difficult jobs to absolute 0? Almost definitely not. Nevertheless, I think if society was organized in a way that is radically different, it’s possible that those services could be handled in a way that doesn’t require coercion the way socialism does. Is there a reason to think that no amount of re-organizing society would reduce the amount of necessary labor to a point that no longer requires coercion?
The fact that you’re trying to find an electoral candidate that would please us, when we couldn’t be clearer about how we think the electoralist strategy is a trap, shows you either aren’t listening or you think we’re little babies who can be convinced by someone jingling keys in front of our face. Yes, we aren’t satisfied by any candidate, that’s the point. That doesn’t mean we hope they lose because they are insufficient, it means we are working to make other people can see that even if you win with a “good enough” candidate capitalism is still capitalism. The July 26th movement wasn’t voted into office. Ho Chi Minh didn’t beat the various imperialists at the ballot box. To dismantle imperialism you need a military strategy, not just throwing your time and energy away supporting electoral campaigns.
But that’s all you have, theory. It’s literally impossible in practice because of the ‘prisoners dilemma’ of working, living, and labor. This is why I’m convinced all communists who smear the leftmost american politicians are delusional and not worth collaborating with. No one is far left enough. No one is pure enough. Not AoC, not Mamdani, not Sanders, it’s impossible to actually present a candidate who would be accepted by ya’ll.
No one on the far left can put together a tent of any number of people, and therefore participate meaningfully in political society, because Full Communism is so ideologically pure as to be impossible to implement. You reject the “perfect is the enemy of good” argument and instead propose accelerationist revolution, which nearly always results in a Junta instead of your ideal political system.
It makes me believe you have no desire to actual productive results, and instead would rather lob critisims without ever participating in meaningful change. That you actually prefer if we all destroy ourselves rather than build a coalition of the willing.
We’ll be arguing about who was unelectable all the way up to the gallows.
At the moment you’re not even a leftist because you believe a better world oriented towards proletarian dictatorship is “impossible in practice”. Why should anyone here care about anything you have to say about “leftmost american politicians” or “muh actual productive results”? You’ve explicitly identified yourself as someone with an irreconcilably different ideology and thus have fundamentally different goals to the left. Thinking that your opinions should be taken seriously here in any capacity as an ally or someone worth listening to just does not make sense at all. It is a testament to the patience and goodwill of the other users here who took you seriously and provided educational responses.
What an insane thing to say. It is moreso a fundamental humanitarian issue of being a normal person with a working moral compass and refusing to allow genocidal ethnonationalist fascist filth in your administration as your country currently helps the zionist entity commit a genocide against the people of Palestine that they aid and abet.
Its about not being complicit in a genocide, a basic, bare minimum requirement for every human being on earth, let alone some supposedly leftist mayoral candidate.
Painting “not helping your country commit genocide” as some petty esoteric sectarian squabble in effect distracts from this fact and minimizes the evils of zionism, a fascist ethnonationalist cult, and the genocide the zionist entity, america, and the west are committing against the Palestinians. Disgusting, fucked up behaviour.
does nobody know what prisoners dilemma means anymore? what are you talking about?
yes because the point is not to present a candidate, the point is to build a workers party.
You subscribe to the “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” communism Marx put forward, right? That model is a post-scarcity, Star Trek style communism system. The issue is there will always be a stratification of work. Statesman and Janitors. Artists and Engineers. Some individuals will be compelled to drive the trash truck. Will we have enough people that just love dirty jobs to do every dirty job out there? Will we be able to automate every undesirable task? No. Someone makes the post-scarcity world run on time, and Patriotism + Civic Duty sadly only takes us so far. Your model assumes that humans will let themselves fall into a system were some people get ground down as cogs, and others get to spend their day painting by the sea, and everyone will subscribe to the model because of the needs of the many.
I argue that you end up with a Prisoners Dilemma where individuals will subvert that system and avoid contributions to their ability, while continuing to take according to their need. That enforcement of the political system will push you out of it. It’s not attainable because of the inherent nature of humans to eventually betray each other in the Prisoner’s dilemma. Someone will claim “I can only paint. I cannot harvest grain” and when others in the fields see the painter, your model disintegrates.
Your party is unable to recruit membership of any significant slice of the population because of purity tests, so this isn’t going to happen with your current outlook. I personally believe the Far Left has no actual desire to organize because that would require a real defense of their platform, vs. lobbing purity tests at others.
Don’t get me wrong. I want to live in the Star Trek society. I just accept we will never get there. So I want to get as close as possible. I think a key difference is my willingness to iterate over the flawed system rather than attempt a full re-creation of our society from whole cloth. Because I can read a history book and see the risk level with power vacuums. Maybe that’s cowardice. Maybe it’s pragmatism. I guess that’s why I’m not a hexbear or .ml user :)
If you had any idea about dialectical materialism, you would know that humans have no inherent nature. This is a reactionary talking point.
You have not seen communist organising. I recommend you look into it. Outside of the US would be good too (not to mention countries with communist parties in power).
I don’t particularly care what US tv show you want to live in. Go to a cosplay event I guess.
As funkystuff said, you are just projecting what you think communism is (based on you watching Star Trek apparently), dismiss it with reactionary opinions, then say that organising doesn’t work. If you stepped outside (the US) for two seconds you would see the contrary.
It’s very arrogant to impose your misunderstanding of socialism and communism on us, then because that misunderstood version doesn’t work you assume we aren’t serious people.
It’s very arrogant to start from the position that your platform is correct and sensible, and then be completely unable to dismantle arguments to the contrary.
Again, I support the ideal of communism as a model government. However I simultaneously believe that Full Communism is not workable. So I remain hopeful of seeing pragmatic plans to adopt the closest achievable, stable system.
But you just don’t understand our position, you’re not in a place to call us incorrect when you are literally shadowboxing. The only people who want the current society to transform into a classless, moneyless, stateless society are anarcho communists. I like them, but I think they’re the minority on Hexbear. Among Marxists (and some ancoms consider themselves Marxists which I don’t seek to invalidate but I think their position is heterodox) the view is very different. Marxists and other “state” socialists don’t want to do your version of communism, they want to first transfer the currently existing means of production into a different form of administering them called socialism. Under socialism, workers would control the state (i.e. instead of the current dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, a dictatorship of the proletariat) and direct the state to defend their revolution against the inevitable backlash from capitalists. If you go to texts from Marx and Engels (e.g. in Socialism: Utopian vs Scientific) it’s clear that what they view to be the final point of that class struggle isn’t really a utopia as you describe it, but a distinct mode of social organization where the current contradictions that give rise to the national states, money, capitalist exploitation of workers, and other contradictions (IMO the biggest ones being related to imperialism, which Hobson and Lenin would later identify) would be transformed into a new way for society to be.
You can argue against that. I’m personally not even a Marxist myself and I’m skeptical that communism as Marx describes it could come to pass. But I’m a socialist and I believe the only way capitalism can be replaced by something different is revolution, that’s what history bears out and it’s what materialist analysis lands at. If you want to say that it’s wrong, I’m all ears, but at least base your understanding of Marxist positions on Marxist texts, not Star Trek.
Edit: Also, reading through your comment again, with a better understanding of what communism actually is (not this weird version where everyone is still working regular jobs in a society that would look fairly similar to ours), you could’ve just said you think communism won’t work because of the tragedy of the commons. Maybe for service work it’s a little tortured, but the idea is that in communism all the goods that are produced would just be owned collectively, most being produced automatically, then what can’t be produced automatically wouldn’t need to be produced by people working 40 hours a week at the mud factory, instead it would be a small enough quantity of labor that with just some people pitching in out of boredom you’d be fine. That seems ridiculously utopian now, hence the tragedy of the commons criticism (why work for stuff if you can just get it for free? why use resources mindfully if there’s always more?), but this would be what happens after a long time with socialism developing the means of production to drive down the amount of socially necessary labor. If 95% of the things people consumed were just automated away, and only about 5% required some human input to make, I think the criticism holds less weight because we only expect people to be producing stuff for a couple of hours each week. For service work, especially what you describe as dirty work, I think it’s necessary to think in terms of what a society that goes through a hundred years of socialist construction looks like; especially in the late stages of socialism where their sight is set on carrying out a plan to reform society into one that completely minimizes the amount of labor input necessary. Is it possible that they reduce the amount of professional plumbing, garbage handling, healthcare, and other difficult jobs to absolute 0? Almost definitely not. Nevertheless, I think if society was organized in a way that is radically different, it’s possible that those services could be handled in a way that doesn’t require coercion the way socialism does. Is there a reason to think that no amount of re-organizing society would reduce the amount of necessary labor to a point that no longer requires coercion?
The fact that you’re trying to find an electoral candidate that would please us, when we couldn’t be clearer about how we think the electoralist strategy is a trap, shows you either aren’t listening or you think we’re little babies who can be convinced by someone jingling keys in front of our face. Yes, we aren’t satisfied by any candidate, that’s the point. That doesn’t mean we hope they lose because they are insufficient, it means we are working to make other people can see that even if you win with a “good enough” candidate capitalism is still capitalism. The July 26th movement wasn’t voted into office. Ho Chi Minh didn’t beat the various imperialists at the ballot box. To dismantle imperialism you need a military strategy, not just throwing your time and energy away supporting electoral campaigns.
So… What do you have? Did you win?