4/pol/ on Communism

What does Holla Forums think of this?

I'm still pretty new to socialism but I can see how this lecture is persuasive, although it appears to rely heavily on arguments derived from human nature (although I'd like to see some commentary on what the poster says exactly). I give the poster credit, he seems to understand leftist ideas better than the average Holla Forumsack, but I don't know if I'd be able to provide a hard refutation of this post, especially on the first point since I'm not exactly a USSR/PRC history buff.

The cultural marxism rant is also interesting. He understands that the frankfurt school was more about abolishing the cultural hegemony of capitalist society, attempting to protect culture, yet still spins this as destroying our culture ie western civilization.

What about his view of dialectics? Did he get those right?

Thoughts?

Ironic he cites WW1 as proof yet this was part of what started up the bolshevik revolution did it not?

Does he?

He's basically saying things without really saying anything at all. 1. is muh human nature again. 2. is a misunderstanding of dialectics based of memes and thesis-antithesis-synthesis also "dialectics were also applied to their legal system, agriculture and to our culture" lol. 3. Isn't an argument and cites WW1 without explaining how cultural factors are more motivating than being starved to death or payed next to nothing in a Bangladesh factory and is also just more muh hooman nature. 4. this is wrong because we all think certain parts of it can fail (if we did we wouldn't all disagree on how to get to socialism and what socialism will look like) also their is no system of morality in Marxism. So its not "wrong" for the proletariat not to revolt. otherwise this is just a "YOU THINK YOU'RE RIGHT OMG IDEOLOGUE!"
5. isn't an argument and could be slung at neo-classical economics.

Was it?

Yeah upon a second reading I don't think he actually does lol

Come on guys

I love when Holla Forums tries to sound smart

So in part one it almost seems like he's conflating leadership and management with class. This simply isn't the case. Society will always have leaders and managers, and so these people will have power, sure. Power structures are integral to human society, yet marx never denied this. In fact, this doesn't follow the definition of class at all. Power indeed might have been centralized in the USSR as far as I'm aware, but this was mostly due to historical circumstance and necessity. Russia had few people fit for leadership at its inception, as most were uneducated. Tsar officials slipped into the ranks because they simply needed them. This wouldn't be an issue in a fully developed capitalist society in the event of revolution, however. But yes, they held power that could be arguably equivalent to capitalist power, however I'd wager that these positions were temporary, although elected through democratic centralism, so connections would obviously play a big part. My point being, yes, it was somewhat exploitative, we should strive to avoid that in the future, but to claim that they were worse or somehow more powerful than tsars or capitalists is completely false. Most government officials lived in apartments like everyone else, for instance

And again, this is a generous interpretation, yet he's still fucking wrong

Yeah I don't think he understands that the frankfurt school was actually about saving the "high culture" from capitalist influence, not about corrupting it into "degeneracy". Thus the whole "jazz is fascist" thing from Adorno.

To add, as for the chinese stuff, the poster is lying, partly. People were relocated, and this was a bad move as far as I can tell, since as a result they stayed poor. The misinformation begins with the part where he tries to say that the relocated people quickly rose back into the ranks again. He seems to be implying that this was because they were naturally superior, or something, but in reality most of them, well, stayed poor. And those that did move up and got out of the countryside generally did so out of personal connections or education, but mostly the former.

1. "appeal to nature" fallacy
2. Simply a lot of false claims. Like none of his claims here are actually true. Should I go over them one by one? Google should be enough. Also picture related, capitalism is so far the biggest disaster of a system.
3. He somehow now assumes that class identity is supposed to be some kind of driving power in communism, when he just himself noted that communism's goal is to ABOLISH classes, not make them some kind of important part of identity. What the fuck?
4. A complete strawman, and very generic at that. Again so many errors that I just freeze when I try to explain them all. Cultural marxism is literal nazi propaganda.
5. this is just an ad hominem. something someone would say when they were to read a book but were too lazy/stupid to really read it

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Read it again. Communists did use class identity. Stalins regime used national identity to empower the class identity. To be a good Russian was to be a good proletarian. This is using something to arrive at an end. An analogy could be: you become a student to become an engineer or something, you cultivate the things that make you a good student. Not for the sake of being a good student but for the sake of arriving at your goal.

This is the one that’s primarily the human nature one. He says communism is impossible, which is a subjective. Also saying class is inevitable is somewhat false, as it hadn’t always existed, and natural is very false for the same reason.
Dialectical materialism first off, not Hegelian dialectics. It is an evolution of hegels work. 2nd it has nothing to do with constitutions, it is simply a philosophical framework by which we arrive at communist theory. Look at the policies passed by the early USSR, they pertained to organization and social emancipation, resource allocation, ect. Irrelevant argument in regard to constitutions
Arguably his worst argument. Says humans are motivated by national identity, yet this is historically inaccurate. Nations are a new phenomenon, not all that long ago people simply identified with language, culture, and locality. He then conflates these things with national identity, even though these things predate the genesis of the nation state. Furthermore language and culture transcend national borders, evidenced by various diasporas of immigrants. See the Farsi people of India as an ancient and still relevant example.
No socialist has ever said it’s perfect, it’s a step in human evolution and advancement from capitalism for sure tho. In this light, it must be tinkered with, the details hammered out. The mistake really is our fault, it’s not that “real” socialism has never been tried, it’s just that no revolution has successfully achieved it. People are willing to discount it even though only a handful of revolutions have occurred in the past 100 years out of the 200,000 year history of the human race, so IMO it’s still worth trying to get right.
Shit argument. As if capitalism is effective. We waste 2/3 of all food produced while people go hungry. We have banks kicking families out of their homes, millions of homeless people staring at empty houses. Our medical/pharmaceutical industry is redundant and derives all of its knowledge from taxpayer supported public research then pulls those ideas to fill its own bank account by bankrupting the sick. All the while it hides its progress from other companies as proprietary secrets, instead of cooperating, all to protect its profits. And our system can’t maintain itself with rhythmic and regular depressions, booms and busts. But yea let’s talk abut the inefficiencies of Marxism

1. human nature lmao, humans have always had classes and been capitalist.
historically inaccurate
2. wikipedia article summary on dialectics: and the a priori truths that marxism is destroying everything is never backed up.
3.doesnt understand spooks, and uses wwi, which is when THE FUCKING RUSSIAN REVOLUTION TOOK PLACE, to say that nationalism takes a bigger role than class. also tries to apply all of dialectical materialism onto the thinkings of a man a lot of us disagree with.
4.one huge strawman, where he falls for a nazi propaganda technique (cultural marxism) and he makes claims that all leftists think the exact same way because he saw a couple on reddit or whatever. doesnt understand lumpenproles either.
5. how exactly can a philosophy be ineffective? then he says its complex so he doesnt really need to understand (as he demonstrated in the past 4 points) to criticize it.

this is a big sum of "things have always been like this, we cant change now!" for the first 2 points and a complete strawmanning and misinterpretation of marx;cleaely fained from watching some right wing echo chamber's 15 minute youtube video on it.

Holla Forums likes things simple (humans vs orcs, Autism Level = all intelligence, race is split up and in perfect boxes based on muh aesthetics, etc.); if its not simple, they reject it.

On top of the other criticisms pointed out here, he just regurgitates common points about the Marxist-Leninist countries as if they’re an accurate representation of what Marx wanted, while also not understanding that Marx did not invent socialism nor is his school the only one in the left.

Blatant lie. The reason the USSR reverted to capitalism was exactly that the elites felt they did not have nearly enough wealth, privilege and so on. Their standard of living was that of people making maybe 250.000 $ in today's money.

If the post opens with such an enormity of a propagandist falsehood, I'm not even going to bother with the rest.

Evolution is something that bacteria and sometimes insects do.

It's a new phenomenon that has accompanied global travel.

Nazi meme

Under communism only workers get to eat. Everyone else has to beg.

Yet a priori assumptions that capitalism destroys everything are perfectly OK.

We can't observe any other examples of socialism scaling to large populations. Dialectics amirite?

That’s not a proper Marxist stance on capitalism.

1) Only a very small few of the many tendencies have ever been attempted or supported by revolutionaries.
2) The ones that have besides M-L were put down militarily.

please jump of a building and fly away, don't worry about gravity pulling you down, that's just the naturalistic fallacy
i see, the fallacy of someone not assessing your ideology in the way you do

Are idiots a blessing or a curse?
1.)Can't abolish class distinctions.
But you can when you define class as definite relations to the means of production.
2.)Marx wrote a book about how he disagreed with Hegel, and dialectics doesn't require synthesis, antithesis, etc…
Dialectics are about how things are constantly being affected by material forces.
3.)lol. Literally the October revolution. Muh national identity is bullshit and Unmaterialist. He almost had a point with false consciousness, but shows he doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground when he deems spooks as false consciousness. I think it mostly shows that he doesn't understand that multiple, often antagonistic socialists came up with the different ideas he is triggered by/conflating.
4.)If Marxism is perfect why does Holla Forums have 100 different ideologies that would all sacrifice each other for free Healthcare????
But seriously this isn't an argument, it's an insult.
Real socialism has never been tried? I mean a socialist revolution has never been let to run its course, and there areant different ways of achieving socialism that different socialist reject or accept? Also I would like to point out the country of Cuba, much success was had.
5.)Another not an argument. It really isn't complex brainlet, I mean maybe Capital is kind of hard to understand but dialectical materialism and the main critiques of Capitalism are easier to understand than times tables.

This guy is saying what I was talking about in relation to class. Marx never denied that if you have a government, government has authority.

You are really fucking stupid my dude.

Only Holla Forumsyps say this because they're too stupid to understand what words mean, and they can't seem to wrap their tiny brains around the differences between
and
and apparently trying to explain that while the Russian government might have been made of communists trying to create communism, the means in which they attempted to do so are not in themselves communism, and this hurts their thinkwads so bad that they can only express the fact of modern communism never having been achieved as "HURRRR COMMONIZNIMS NEBBER BEN DRIED"

What the fuck are you talking about? And who are you replying to?

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this is what happens when you never actually read the material. not only is that an insufficient and pathetic example of Hegelian dialectics, it's flat out false. dialectics is a robust method of investigation and not something that can be reduced to three stages in a triadic operation. laughable, Wikipedia-tier nonsense. in fact, if you actually read the Wikipedia article (which they didn't) you'd find that Hegel never used the triad. their entire comments are littered with this nonsense. Hegel was concerned with the universal just as much as the particulars, and to reduce history down to three particulars is typical polyp brainlet drivel. what they are describing is literally dialogue between two parties, not a historical account seeking to incorporate the material conditions that give rise to current conditions.

the rest can be discarded then, as it's a superficial reading of Western, neo-Marxism without having actually explained anything, unless there's more you haven't posted. as it is, there's no discussion of actual theory here, only what they think that theory is, and a damage control "inb4 cultural Bolshevism is a literal Nazi conspiracy theory which mean I'm right because I brought it up first."

you don't 'apply' dialectics to something and make it happen… the dialectical relationship arises from the material situation. also he misunderstands that the thesis is capitalism itself, antithesis is the internal contradictions, and synthesis is a new mode of production/worker organization/ or something

if "I'm not being payed the full exchange-value of my labor" then…