41–50 of 112 posts
False equivalence, since rightwing populists don't advocate wealth redistribution and preach egalitarianism.
If you haven’t already read The Communist Manifesto I highly recommend that you do, it’s super short and easy to understand. Even if you’re an anti-communist you should read it to get a better understanding of what communism is. There has been so much anti-communist and anti-socialist propaganda for decades in the US that many people don’t even know the first thing about communism and socialism and will just shut the…
If you haven’t already read The Communist Manifesto I highly recommend that you do, it’s super short and easy to understand. Even if you’re an anti-communist you should read it to get a better understanding of what communism is. There has been so much anti-communist and anti-socialist propaganda for decades in the US that many people don’t even know the first thing about communism and socialism and will just shut the…
I come from a culture that is comparatively pro-comunism, but my personal reaction to people promoting comunism is the same as when a religious person claims that their religion is based on love, understanding, and inclusion. In the case of religion (whether or not I believe it is positive or negative) I know that there are many many dark corners that the "it is all about love" person is not talking about. Same thing…
Having spent much of my early twenties embedded with some of today's more prominent socialist activists in the US, I can tell you that behind closed doors the only subject that ever crossed their lips was "power".
It was enough to terrify me off of such thoughts and ideals. All these years later and I still wake up in a cold sweat at night having nightmares about the people I knew getting what they wanted.
Currently reading his biography (he's the most famous person of my hometown :), good timing to see an article about him on HN! Since Engels always was "the second Violine" (behind Marx), he could get away with a hedonistic lifestyle without endangering the communistic movement too much. While many may describe him as a typical "Champagnersozialist", IMO in Manchester he realised that the right action of an individual…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I come from a culture that is comparatively pro-comunism, but my personal reaction to people promoting comunism is the same as when a religious person claims that their religion is based on love, understanding, and inclusion. In the case of religion (whether or not I believe it is positive or negative) I know that there are many many dark corners that the "it is all about love" person is not talking about. Same thing…
> Same thing with comunism, I have known in my life people I would be slightly afraid to see holding power flying that banner and we all know what happened many times in history, and while this can be said of many ideology in my opinion the comunism cluster looks like it is trying to sweep the dust under the rug. Having spent much of my early twenties embedded with some of today's more prominent socialist activists i…
Also, would you mind to be a bit more specific about who these people are? In my experience Americans aren't particularly good at identifying what constitutes a socialist to the rest of the world.
> "It is unpractical, and it goes against human nature. That is why it is worth carrying out." This citation of Oscar Wilde made me curious. It's from his essay The Soul of Man under Communism[1], which turns out to be a really good counterview to the article itself. [1] https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/wilde-oscar/soul-...
What a weird piece. The heart of the argument seems to be that if one is to be a Marxist that one must be 1) poor, and 2) chaste and to be otherwise is hypocritical. Just state the point and be done with it.
How is it not hypocritical to argue for equality and wealth redistribution and at the same time hoard wealth for yourself ?
> Of course, Engels is far from the only example of the leftist firebrand whose inherited wealth insulated him from the struggles of ordinary working people Yeah, it's kind of to be expected: theorists (firebrand or not) are for obvious reasons disproportionately of the intelligentsia, and under capitalism (or the modern mixed economy) even the proletarian intelligentsia (much less the petit and, even moreso, haut bo…
> "It is unpractical, and it goes against human nature. That is why it is worth carrying out." This citation of Oscar Wilde made me curious. It's from his essay The Soul of Man under Communism[1], which turns out to be a really good counterview to the article itself. [1] https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/wilde-oscar/soul-...
I love Wilde but that sounds like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credo_quia_absurdum .
He casually reflects on absurdities, contradiction, and their prerequisites rather than burying them. What Wilde is doing in this essay is giving credence to counterarguments, either between socialism and individualism or between socialism and his own, famously hedonistic character.
The tendency in his period was to argue for hermetically sealed worldviews. Marx's famously, and later Ayn Rand's are like type examples. These worldviews internally saw themselves as a complete and absolute understanding of history, sociology, economics... the Truth about people and society. They conceded nothing and admitted no external influences.
Wilde's essay is still read because it's one of the few which actually captures the real political/philosophical debate of his era. The ideals behind the ideology, the dangers of these going wrong.
He was a mighty intellectual, and if you want to understand why 19th socialism was what it was I think he's indispensable.
Communism is an abstraction, which "works" only for abstract Socratic and Platonic ideal societies. In 2020 it should be understood that abstractions (and models) are fundamentally different from what we call real world.
The entire world was communist from the time cave paintings were drawn in France tens of thousands of years ago, to about 10000 years ago. Whereas capitalism has only existed as the predominant economic system anywhere for a few centuries. In the US, with two economic crises in the past decade, Covid at a peak, global warming, racial strife, riots on streets etc., I am not sure what is working in the real world with…
No, it wasn't.
Some of it was vaguely communitarian in non-communist ways.
> Whereas capitalism has only existed as the predominant economic system anywhere for a few centuries
Capitalism has been displaced by modern mixed economies as the dominant economic system of the developed world for close to a century. How long it was dominant is debatable because it's not really clear where to draw the line between pre-capitalist systems and emergent capitalist systems. I tend to say early capitalist systems were around 16th C,