There's plenty of threads by Euros and Third Worlders bashing America, assuming these aren't just shills from one of our many alphabet soup agencies trying to make Socialism more off-putting for the American worker, I figured we could use a thread to discuss the history of Socialism in the United States, American Socialist thinkers, and ideas on how to rebuild the once powerful labor movement we had here.
Moving forward, I believe building true Socialism in the United States is critical. Our country, more than any other on earth, has advanced the bourgeois to the highest halls of power, we were in many regards the most liberal nation on earth after our founding. The downfall of Capitalism in the United States would mean the downfall of Capitalism across the globe, a second American Revolution would call in a global one.
Learning about old school American anarchists and communists makes me sad when I think of how things are now. I wish I could be optimistic but I really think Americans are too retarded for anything to change until it's too late. Climate change and war will probably have killed off millions before this country as a whole begins considering socialism.
Isaac Perez
This would have been true in 1945 when the US comprised 50% of the world's GDP and the SU still existed, not necessarily anymore. The US going communist would not immediately make a place like Saudi Arabia any less of an Islamist bastion of reaction. And there are plenty of other reactionary states like it capable of resisting it's influence.
Alexander Ortiz
The greatest hump to Socialism in America, in my opinion, are Socialists themselves. Before any other action takes place, I think we need to divest ourselves of any remaining liberal/democrat egoism; of course this is a bit silly coming from me, I'm something of an egoist. The problem with the social conditions of our society, and I believe this is especially pronounced on the left, is the adoption of a kind of anti-sentiment, of destruction rather than construction. No one thinks "how can we build Socialism?" But rather they think "How can we destroy the sentiment of reactionaries?" In essence, they've reacted against reaction.
I have to confess that I find myself much more at home in the presence of red-blooded "hicks" and American conservatives than the noxious radical liberals who make up the American "left", and perhaps most surprising of all I've found that most American conservatives whom I have talked to–the voters, the rednecks, the non-politicians–have an impulse towards certain ideals which could easily become communist in nature.
It's wonderful drinking beer at 1:00 in the morning in a garage full of rednecks, watching fight club, and hearing them nod an honestly cheer at the anti-consumerist messages in the movie, and it's heartwarming to hear a supposed "nationalist" confess that they just wish everyone could "get along" and that the world could be "united". The lack of faith in the state, the disgust with soulless corporations, it's all *there*.
So why don't they go left? Well I'm sure that there are some people ready to scream "idealism!" But I think it all boils down to pride. To the white, American, Conservative, the image of going left is one almost of "subservience". Hear a white leftist talk, even a radical one, and you hear this mewling half-apologetic tone, they act as if they inherit a kind of original sin and are fighting not for themselves, but on behalf of groups that are blatantly NOT them!
Why does Christianity, which promotes personal charity, find its strongest adherance among lower class and right wing Americans, but Communism doesn't? You hear many of them say it's because they believe in "personal" charity, but that's a half-truth they themselves may not fully understand: Christian charity comes from the self, it's the willing giving of the self to another not from a position of total moral subservience, but from the position of the self attempting to earn transcendence.
The constant insults towards Americans doesn't earn the left any appeal to them, and among all groups, the idea that they have to be "subservient" to others from some strange moral code is noxious to them. The left fails to "feel" personally empowering because of that.
So what can we do? All we need to, is to tell the truth in plain english! Peoples' attention is short, the left needs to undergo a guerilla propaganda campaign, something "flashy" to get peoples' attention, and it must always direct its attention towards the system that oppresses the individual, and not the "reactionaries" who uphold it unknowingly.
Saudi Arabia relies on U.S. arms shipments and protection to stay afloat. Ditto for Israel. The U.S. has social, cultural, and military hegemony over most of the world. The removal of America from the Capitalist economy would immediately cause upheavals and subsequent revolutions in the rest of the world.
All you need is for America to go communist ,and the rest of the world will join us.
That's precisely why America will never go communist. As long as it is the world's hegemonic power the international bourg will conspire with the local American bourg to oppress internal opposition and support the national capitalist state. If a vanguard took the capital numerous states would secede and would be backed by almost every country in existence.
Luis Kelly
I think you overestimate their intelligence. Even if it's impossible, we should still act–the only sin should be inaction. The Bourg can use every trick in the book, they can use every tool at their disposal, but the fight is only lost when we stop. If the combined effort of the international bourgeois is desperate to keep America from going red, the international proletariat should be determined to make it so.
Imagine believing if you aren't american or european you must be from the third world
Landon Cruz
You're all fucking walnuts. The economy of the world is so connected that a couple industrialized nations seizing the means of production would inspire nearby nations and distant ones. Think yellow vests (A working class movement addressing individual problems everyday, and connecting them to the system) starting in France and going to places like Taiwan except getting out of hand.
Christopher Murphy
Petty attempt at thread derailing.
I would say it would take a lot more than a couple industrialized nations. If we've seen anything, it's that capital is heavily versatile. Though undeniably even two industrial nations going Socialist would be a net-good for a larger socialist movement, America going socialist would undoubtedly be the end of Capitalism.
Josiah Nguyen
America will never go communist because it's a neoliberal decadent reactionary culture where people think consumption gives them happiness and are coddled as children so they lash out emotionally when they feel even slightly threatened or unaccepted.
I'd imagine the U.S would revolt around the middle of the world revolutionary period, Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are inherently socialist ideas if you frame them in a certain fashion, you just have to despook the citizens,
State-Sydicalism was his personal system of choice but he had no problem supporting others (knew plenty of Anarchists / went to Ireland and met up with Connolly and the Left-ProtoIRA Etc)
Lenin said he liked him and called him a good Marxist
Didn't he write that Propaganda piece about the Time Traveller that basically teleports to 21st century luxury space communism?
Charles Fisher
Essentially that. Julian West, the main character, is put into a hypnotic trance in order to sleep and then is woken up in the year two thousand by some people who discover him. A peaceful revolution occurred and the state nationalized nearly everything, eliminated money, wars, crime, scarcity, etc. Everyone works from 24 to 45 in the industrial army and then they don't have to work ever again outside of emergencies. One of my favorite books.
Justin Cox
Honestly why are amerifats so afraid of revolution? Seems pretty counter intuitive given their history.
Josiah Martinez
Isn't work what gives our lives meaning though? if life's just constant pleasure you'd get bored o f it pretty fast. It also kinda seems like it may have partially originated the whole lmao dum dum commies don't wan do work
I wouldn't expect much else from utopian literature. I love the book but still think what happened to achieve the society depicted in the book is a bit silly. The capitalists, according to Bellamy, recognized what was coming as inevitable and the national party won over the population, allowing the state to take control of industry, eliminate all competition and capitalism, etc. The composition of early Bellamy Clubs (aka Nationalist Clubs) was mainly petty bourgeois, the type of people who would be attracted to the idea of peaceful revolution. Pic related was Engels' thoughts from a letter to Adolph Sorge in 1890. I agree with him
English will remain a major language for the foreseeable future but it has competitors in many regions. Our economy is still the leading one, but it's share of the global market has declined. The US does have a very sharp lead in air and especially naval power but there are countless possible scenarios where our land forces could be defeated and many dozens of countries we could not feasibly occupy.
Source: your ass. Mass movements are notoriously impossible to predict with any certainty. I have no doubt in my mind the energy of a revolution in the US would spill over to many other nations, especially our neighbors, but to claim the outcome is predetermined to be some massive global communist revolution is utter absurdity.
Jeremiah Ramirez
I sometimes question the sanity of you fucktards so blinded by pure ideology that you can barely string a rational sentence together. As long as it is the world's hegemonic power the international bourg will conspire with the local American bourg to oppress internal opposition and support the national capitalist state. If a vanguard took the capital numerous states would secede and would be backed by almost every country in existence Nice fanfic man you have a great imagination. Yeah dude as we all know almost every government on the planet sees itself as having a strategic interest in maintaining the US as a leading economic power and would never lift a finger against it.
Anthony Lewis
Yo has anyone got that IWW poster about racial unity against the bourgeoisie?
Benjamin Hernandez
Capitalism is going to collapse no matter what, the labor theory of value stipulates that. Fascist governments are surely arise in some nation, but contradictions and alienation will eventually become unbearable even in those shitholes due to capitalism/neo feudalism tendency to eat itself (also found the poster fren).
I'm a government worker and I can't buy food because if I do I won't be able to pay rent, I won't get paid until the friday after this shutdown ends (if I'm lucky) Anyone know any place for free food in Lexington Kentucky? I'd dumpster dive, but they put rat poison in the food they throw out.
I don't live in Kentucky but bumping for this user.
Lincoln Ross
maybe, but maybe not.. it does & this is programmed - watch 'century of the self' and read Bernays' Propaganda - this sentiment was created by propagandists using manipulation techniques to get people to buy shit. maybe we need our own version of COINTELPRO against prevailing ideology and use the techniques employed on us every day
Honestly America needs to be punished if is to ever accept socialism. Pain is the only way to dispel the idealist narcissism that so many of them engage in on a daily basis. Pic very much related. There are millions of people like this in the US. They have forsaken community and live in a wold of filth, exploitation, and oppression (which they unironically enjoy and prefer to all other arrangements.)
I agree completely with you, but also think you're being somewhat idealistic here. Most of the conservatives and reactionaries I know, good company as they may be, would without any hesitation take the side of cops and the state, and generally are fine with any atrocities and exploitation as long as they're half justified behind snakeoil rhetoric of liberty and nationalism. "I wish we could all just get along" normally just means I wish annoying liberals would stop bringing up the fact that I'm white, and while their issues with that aren't entirely unfounded, wanting the military to stop bombing hospitals or cops to stop imprisoning people for life for petty crime almost never fits into their demands for "everyone just getting along." I see the discontentment you're talking about and in the past it has inspired me as well, and I'm very sympathetic to poor conservatives, but they're caught in a culture that overwhelmingly encourages their worst reactionary tendancies, and the populist right and growing fascist sentiments already have a firm grasp on this population while the left is still struggling to even get our foot in the door. I am not hopeful.
You have to have heart, and if your appeals to Americans aren't working, analyze your appeals and figure out what isn't working. Most leftists, I think, could stand to read the 48 laws of power, take your post for example: you talk a big game about hospitals being bombed, cops imprisoning people, and so on. These are purely moral/emotional appeals.
The 13th rule is fairly simple: when asking for help, never appeal to peoples' mercy or gratitude, just their self-interest, such a thing works when trying to recruit people as well.
Morality, my friend, is dead. The world is so awash in sin these days and there is such a lack of coherent or dominant moral codes, that trying to appeal to peoples' morality is an exercise in futility at best, or makes them inherently hostile at worst. I cannot blame these people at all, however, for their hostility to morality imposed by external forces, for years the liberals in our country have been trying to play tragedies such as the occasional school shooting to disarm the workers. Vegans and Vegetarians have been using images of inhumane slaughter houses to try and guilt normal people into giving up their consumption of meat.
Guilt or morality based appeals, in my opinion, have pushed more people right than anything Zig Forums has done. Because when you try to force someone into changing their deeply held beliefs and you use an argument that you think they can't POSSIBLY deny in good conscience, then it's a very sad and very real human trait that they're likely to attack the root of your argument than change what they believe. Far from making people more sympathetic to minorities and natives, the constant bashing of "soft" patriotism and the founders of America has turned people into the worst sorts of nationalists. It isn't that they "don't know" about the native genocide, but after some thoroughly arrogant and insulting liberal screeched that the founders were "just a bunch of white male slave owners who murdered indians", they take a moral view that society is ruled by the strong and that the indians are just whining because "they were too weak to do it to us."
To make your appeal to people, you have to drop the past like a dead weight. You must be willing to tolerate the occasional hypocrisy and moral failing with the understanding that when immersed in an environment of liberty and equality, these failings will disappear, and the sins of the past stemming from material conditions will be washed away.
Thus when dealing with Americans, take an orthodox marxist line, and try to appeal to their rationalism and self-interest, with maybe a touch of "idealistic" but stirring arguments. Far better for the American Left would things have been if they decided to adopt the founders and previous great American presidents as "proto-socialists" than simply bourgeois revolutionaries.
Thanks user, sums up how I feel as well. Yeah, burgers, even supposed leftists ignore the material historical legacy of the US' genocidal history and low key push the liberal narrative that were all roughly equal in the eyes of the state and other proles. Liberal SJWs absolutely co opt this dialectic and push bigotry against mostly poor whites and if I ever found the gene's lamp my first wish would be to give every single one of those assholes a kick in the nuts. But this is used by a lot of white leftists to ignore the gross reactionary bigotry of proles, particularly white proles. Can't tell you how many Chapo Trap House/ Jimmy Core fans have said people voted for Trump because they were frustrated when he was clearly using racist "Southern Strategy" to get elected.
Brody Allen
Trump was by no means using a "southern strategy", the southern strategy is a mostly mythological (in the sense that it's success is largely overplayed) attempt by Nixon to appeal to bigoted southern whites in order to flip the south from the democrats, it is certainly, by no extent, materialist and it didn't even succeed in getting Nixon the south.
The south was already a safe bet for Trump, if anything he was using a "Northern Strategy" or "Great Lakes Strategy" by trying to appeal to the rust belt with protectionist and nationalist economic policies. The "racism" only served to highlight a rejection of establishment enforced morality/politeness, it was a nihilistic "fuck you" to the established political order.
Finally, in regards to that "genocidal U.S. History", trying to force Americans to reject their nation's history because of genocide not only wont work, but it will encourage people if anything to be pro-genocide–that's how trying to present them with two diametrically opposed narratives, one of which they have sympathy for, usually works.
You are not required, as a Socialist, to despise and work to undermine the sentiment of Americans, and the sad truth is that patriotism, if anything, serves as a bulwark against nationalism.
Socialism is for everyone, not the white man nor the black man nor the gay man nor the straight man, but for all people who can find hope in its ideals.
So stop attacking sentiment, it's pointless and it's only used by the worst kind of zealots to make enemies, not friends. One need not be convinced that the U.S. is an "evil" country to oppose it's government.
Lol triggered burger pushing the "white crypto fash burgers are really just misguided sheep". Must have imagined the " Mexicans are racists" thing Objectively wrong Because he was the only candidate using naked appeals to white surpermacy Lol the old woketard dirt bag left reddit chapo trap house defense of crypto fash Republican voters. His protectionist policies almost entirely consist of ineffectual anti immigration policies like "The Wall". Notice he never says or does much about all those employers HIRING those immigrants. He rightfully pounded Hilary on her dubious record of helping the working class but some how his supporters missed his own long history of screwing workers over. Lol no, socialism is not for reactionaries that would seek to kill revolution in its crib. Weasel words, I'm attacking the superstructure.
Nolan Cook
Bait.
Then congratulations, you aren't a materialist. Just an idiot.
Charles Parker
Acceptance of America (including historical America) as a mostly destructive and evil force is a very important prerequisite for building socialist political consciousness in the US. Without it one cannot hope to properly refute and reject American civil religion and American exceptionalism. Pretending that America's founders were crypto socialists (as Noam Chomsky and countless other radlibs have been doing for decades) is pointless and simply reinforces the notion that America is some kind of ideal to be strived towards rather than as an obstacle that needs to be annihilated.
Mexican here, i know it wasn't your point or denying it but mexicans are kind of racist or so i've heard from México city, not nationalistic tho.
Btw this reminded me of a post, i don't know if i saw it here but it was how a democrat candidate in the future may appeal to anti-immigration by saying immigrants aren't "woke" enough and i thought it was both funny as fuck and a possibility.
Luis Baker
Nixon used the Southern Strategy and won. This is pretty widely accepted by everyone but fringe right wing historical revisionist like you. The problem with the Republican party is that they can't get away from the Southern Strategy. Trump DESTROYED everyone in the primary using makes appeals to racism. The fucking government is shut down right fucking now over the border wall, which again will do jack shit against illegal immigrants because most illegals are here on expired visas. And the border was was AN INTEGRAL part of his "Southern Strategy" election campaign.
Nolan Myers
I'm not sure what you're even trying to imply anymore. I guess this board has just dropped communism altogether now and has just reverted to petty nationalist squabbling.
Cooper Campbell
Why are their so many retards trying to secularize the notion of original sin? It’s feels > reals nonsense that has no material basis. No one is born sinful because sin doesn’t exist.
It is true though. Go to a rural county that voted over 80% Trump. Most of the people their will have an income per capita far below Burger average.
No because the South always votes Republican for the past thirty years.
If it wasn’t for the Porky reactionaries you wouldn’t have prol reactionaries. Attacking reactionary prols does nothing, but make them more reactionary.
Do you even know how the base and superstructure work? Marx explained that the Base controls the superstructure, the only way to change the superstructure is to change the base. Attacking the superstructure is useless.
All your doing is attacking the superstructure and secularizing the notion of original sin. Your materialist understand is shit and idealist.
Saying their grave should be pissed on doesn’t get you anywhere. Unless you want burger workers to remain reactionary stop complaining about the past and some random spooks they have, and start talking about material economic reality.
No, in fact, it's not. It's great for making fascists out of people, as folks tend to double down the more their ideas are attacked. It's great at making *enemies* because you're accomplishing nothing but attacking the sentiment of people who may not agree with you. But it's not, in fact, necessary for building socialist consciousness. Any party that shows itself to be openly hostile to the interest of the country it seeks to shape is as good as a dead party.
Hell, these are basic marketing principles here. You never "sell" anyone on anything by attacking the competition, you just give them better exposure.
And those are pointless towards the building of actual socialism. Not only will you *not* get people to reject "American Exceptionalism", but instead you'll turn it from a relatively benign idea into something far more toxic and openly violent. We're already seeing the trend of people adopting violent nationalism precisely because of these attacks on what holds sentimental value to them. Stop trying to moralize to them, stop wasting time trying to "deconstruct" their ideals, the entire focus should be on educating people–and no, that isn't a free pass to "educate people on America's historical injustices". You can criticize the government, you can criticize its institutions, but once you start trying to paint a whole country as "Evil" then you've lost.
It's telling that you only mention "building socialist political consciousness" once in this post and even then that's in the context of attacking America. The drive of your argument doesn't seem to be "building socialism" but rather "attacking America," and such a thing is both futile and the exact kind of nonsense that got the American left in these poor straits to begin with.
The whining against Americans and the soviet fetishism on here reminds me a lot of Orwell's idea of transnationalism in a lot of ways, people have transferred nationalist sentiment from their own nation to something else, potentially even another nation.
Elijah Jackson
America is unlikely to become socialist, not because it’s workers are privileged (they aren’t) but because socialists refuse to organize the. The left here is incredibly idealist and whole hardily rejects dialectical materialism, instead preferring to demonize workers for having a few spooks, but refusing to do anything constructive to deal with it like Union organizing. To many people just prefer to just sit on their couch and do nothing, instead of organize.They only way to remove spooks is to organize people on the basis of class, but to many “leftists” would just prefer to do no organizing and just yell at people for being spooked. To many burger “leftists” also try to secularize the notion of original sin, that everyone was born wrong, and that if only people would whip themselves to ask for forgiveness. That’s not how people are. People simply put, don’t swallow their pride, when you attack it they take it personal, and embrace nationalism. This is partly why Burgers are so reactionary. The solution. Stop telling people to swallow their pride, just ignore it and talk about their material economic reality.
Posts like these are why I find Nietzsche pairs well with Marx. Marx is great at examining the material, structural imperfections of our society, Nietzsche provides some decent analysis of the psychological imperfections of individuals within our present society. In this case, I feel it's best to apply some of the lessons in Thus Spoke Zarathustra to the kinds of people you're replying to:
If the primary concern of these people is punishment, then it's clear they have deep rooted problems that they try to hide behind a veneer of "action" or working towards some noble "cause"
I'd say that trying to ascribe "fake" or "real" to anything is asking for trouble. It may be that they aren't so much fake as they are deeply troubled individuals. The nihilism of society is unbearable and some people want to believe in something, anything even. That's why I feel it's best for people to spend a year exploring all perspectives of the political spectrum, I know I certainly took some time to arrive at communism, and not before exploring most of the right's thought fully.
Wyatt Rivera
Would you prefer if we used the term "purging reactionaries/counter-revolutionaries" instead?
Charles King
Spooked prols aren’t the people you should be targeting though. The average Russian in 1900 supported the Tzar and was supper reactionary. The Bolsheviks didn’t advocate removing them, but they advocated purging the Porkies and Kulaks, which is what they actually did. Not random prols who had reactionary tendencies.
Jaxson Howard
So we should just leave them to their devices? Maybe even let them into the party? Like Serbian nationalists in Yugoslavia, or liberals into the CPSU? Yeltsin and Milosevic are great, aren't they?
There isn't even a party to let them into. The reason there isn't a party is because of this idiotic emphasis on "purity"; it seems a strange trait among zealots of both sides of the aisle, that failures of past systems aren't analyzed through any "complex" lens such as materialism, but because they lacked a certain "purity" or "moral fiber".
Nathan Cooper
Milosevic did what he did because he was literally fucking fighting actual literal Fascists you fucking retard. The people who were in charge of Croatia and Bosnia were actual literal Nazis who played the heartstrings of stupid Westerns and now there are literal Fascists in Croatia's Government, literal Nazis in Bosina, and Kosovo is a German Nazi colony.
The government has the power to control, change and shape the material conditions. The base as setup by communists empowers the workers, and we should just recklessly empower everyone without regard for who the fuck we're empowering? And then wonder exactly how all revisionists, reactionaries and opportunists are in control of our government and hijacking it for their own ends?
Yeah, and where did those fascists come from? Did they grow in a forest after a rain like mushrooms?
Fixed.
Ayden Cox
Okay Contrapoints. Next time put a trip on.
Jonathan Roberts
One must remember that this was a Pre-1917 mindset Even Marx himself didn't entirely support Violence and Revolt over Parliamentary election or vice versa
Michael Gutierrez
Lol nobody cares, nerd. Drumpf created a perception of being an economic nationalist, and that was enough. He was smart to do so and Chilldog was the perfect target for it.
Daniel Martinez
They're ethical appeals, ones that I make in comparison to claims of the superiority of capitalism and the US as compared to "shithole 3rd world countries" and evil Russia/North Korea/Cuba. The entire communist project is ultimately based in an ethical assessment of how conducive material conditions are to human flourishing. How could I possibly avoid coming to a discussion of the atrocities in America's past when invariably the first thing conservatives bring up in regards to socialism is gulags and suppression of free speech? I'm not saying you're a liar but your portrayal of American reactionaries as misled based on a certain set of assumptions that can be rationally challenged and refuted totally disagrees with my experience being immersed in these groups all my life. The majority of poor Americans' reactionary politics is piecemeal aesthetizations and libidinally appealing bits of unmoored narrative. There's some that have a decent understanding of basic capitalist economics, some that have a good grasp on military histories, etc., but these are all contained within an ideological plane that violently insists that contemporary American liberals and American conservatives are the universal horizon of political possibility, and when anything outside of the country fails to fall within those boundaries the reaction is rage, racism, citing exceptionalism of the US and irrelevance of the rest, etc.
Believe me, what you're saying is basically erotica to me and I sincerely want to believe it, but based on my own experience I am going to need a lot of convincing. To be clear, my argument was never that American reactionaries "dont deserve" liberation or that Americans are born with the original sin of American empire, I also sincerely hate that sort of rhetoric. I am willing to contextually support the bourgeois liberalism of the "Founding Fathers" to a certain extent but draw a hard line at any historical comtextualization of slavery, indentured servitude, native genocide etc being okay because that was just the time it was. I really doubt this strategy of apologetics towards American empire will win you any real support, more likely it'll just save you from some conflict. You claim it's only abstaining from moralist condemnation, but, seriously asking, how do you respond when someone says the United States is and has always been a bastion of freedom and opportunity, especially compared to the oppressive communist regimes? Because that is, 9 times out of 10, the first "point" that will be made when you try to argue about how the working class controlling production and distribution is the logical conclusion of economic social arrangement while trying to sidestep contentious historical issues.
That’s not what were saying, what were saying is don’t tell the people your suppose to be organizing to fuck off and die. that isn’t organizing. America is no different that the British and German Empires before it.
I seriously fucking wish more people read Jack London's stories about Socialism. He had a Nazi like viewpoint IRL on race but he was 100% God-tier on Labor and wanted Revolutions
Angel Bell
It pains me how the USA had such a wonderful labor movement in the early 1900's and it got killed.
I wanna cry.
Wyatt Lopez
The Iron Heel is real and his book was frightenly prescient. I’m very surprised that I don’t here this work talked about more often on here
Dylan Ortiz
Just read his wikipedia article, if it is accurate then might i say he didn't seem like a nazi at all?, outside of the chinese "yellow peril" thing he seemed pretty normally racist for his time.
If you read his letters he was into how mutts can't produce civilizations and all that.
Adrian Moore
See from my own personal experience, I find convincing people can rarely be done with a purely rational argument. In many ways we believe what we believe because we want to believe it, and even the most misanthropic nihilist who may think that the decision to see the world for its meaninglessness is a hard one, can get some satisfaction out of a brief sense of "power" that comes with acknowledging the reality of their own position. Even if something is ultimately better for them, if people don't want it they wont embrace it. In my own case I've spent some years, fairly recently, in the far right and even after I'd understood Marxist arguments pretty thoroughly, even as I became convinced that most of them were correct, even as I acknowledged they were right, I still openly refused to agree with them or work towards Marxism in any way.
Why was that? Well to be perfectly frank, it was because of the Marxists themselves. I've had far too many threats of "If I ever see you I'll kill you" to actually find most of them sympathetic, and when I showed a certain degree of reasonableness or anti-capitalist sentiment that put me a step above a lot of others on the right, but rather than build sympathy between myself and the Marxist that I was arguing with, I found to my surprise that it only made them and myself angrier. There were quite a few times where I'd hear some variation of "Either throw yourself at my feet and beg for redemption or you'll suffer the consequences", see to them the sin I committed, I think, was blurring the lines–I couldn't completely be categorized as friend or foe, and I needed to go through them for some kind of false "redemption" to be "purified". In my case, I suppose the anger I felt was cognitive dissonance. After a while I realized it was less that I wanted to be right, so much as I wanted those noxious Marxists to be wrong.
In my own case, I changed because I found Nietzsche, and in a sense I decided to adopt a moral code that is relatively alien to the lingering sentiment of Christianity that motivates these guilt-based modern presbyters.
I know quite a bit about marketing, I went to school for it, and one of the chief rules of marketing, which I think can explain the whole subject matter, is this: never waste time explaining a product when you could be selling it. The myth of man as a purely rational animal has, ironically enough, been dispelled by modern business practices.
Human psychology is fascinating, but also misanthropic. We've seen in many cases, that humans are herd creatures, conformists to some extent. Prior studies have shown that if you prove someone's argument wrong, rather than convincing them of a different one, you instead strengthen the previous argument, in fact the more wrong you prove them, the stronger their belief to compensate.
So if you want to win people over, you have to both appeal to their self interest, as well as change your image. You don't accomplish this by hating your host country, or trying to prove that it isn't all its cracked up to be, but by morphing it to your ideals.
I would respond to such a person with this: the ideals that the United States founded itself upon are fundamentally good things; that we were blessed to have founders who could see clearly the tyranny of institutional powers, and undertake a heroic effort in the creation of an independent, strong, and prosperous nation of self-determinant individuals is one of the many blessings we can count for ourselves as Americans.
Yet, through no fault of the founders, the American revolution remains incomplete. No strangers to institutional tyranny, our own government has failed to uphold the ideals of our country, and has become hostile to the American people. Thus the patriotic duty of every American is to preserve our independence from insidious tyrants within our own government, to preserve the rights our forefathers set aside for us: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It's necessary that the Second American Revolution be a Marxist one, to both preserve the liberty of the American people from their government, and to lead the world into a new age of freedom. The failure of the communist project in Russia is a tragedy, but it is no more a condemnation of Communism than the French Revolution was of Democracy.
Pick one. He's not wrong about America needing it's metaphorical fingers broken.
Ethan Russell
...
Jonathan Martinez
31 uses of "I". Fuck off we don't care about your self-obsessed ass.
Mason Harris
I only speak for I, I'm not going to subvert my own will or self-interest for absurd group virtue signalling, I owe nothing to any great "we".
He *is* wrong, just because some here want Americans to suffer does not, in fact, mean it will be of any practical benefit. Hell, they're part of the problem when it comes to building Socialism.
Carter Foster
America's one defining trait is narcissism. Even the left there is packed with idealists and wreckers just because it's the easiest route to build their personal brand.
Jayden Robinson
If you think America's defining trait is "narcissism", then you either haven't been in America long or get all your opinions of the country from television. I find this to be an exceptionally absurd statement given the obsession of Euros with America bashing.
Competitive and boastful, sure. Narcissistic? No.
Kevin Sanders
His argument is idealist in nature, if a materialist argument was presented for why America needs to be punished then I might except it. However idealist arguments have no place in Marxist theory.
Joshua Bennett
based and cubapilled
Hunter Perez
Any good books about the history of The American labour movement?
Colton Rodriguez
Wouldn’t that just be a people’s history?
Jaxon Lee
How is pain not material?
Christian Sullivan
So, what you’re saying is your a Proudhonian idealist and not a Marxist. Against Proudhon’s moralist criticism of the US Marx pointed out that the US, which he considered the most progressive society in the world at the time, was based on slavery. Engels rebuted Duhring for his moralist criticism of the Greeks over slavery and said he may have well have chided them for not having steam engines and telegraphs. He went even further and said that slavery in Ancient Greece and Rome was progressive in its context and that without slavery there would never have been Greco-Roman thought or the ancient histories of class struggle and hence no socialism.
It’s really strange to me that most Marxists are Proudhonians when it comes to the issue of how to interpret something like colonialism and slavery and not Marxist materialists
Nicholas Murphy
Pain is an instinctive sensory response to negative physical sensation. You're talking about a vague, abstract pain. Your "pain" can be boiled down to just "bad shit happening to Americans to make them upset", that you hope will cause them to magically become communist rather than jump on board Fascism or whatever other radical right wing ideology that can provide a simple answer to a complex problem. It's clear just from your original post, that your explanation that it's necessary to cause pain to build communism is, in my opinion, an excuse to justify and rationalize that you just want to cause pain. I hear a lot of people talk about "necessary evils", but all to often they seem to say it's necessary for their own sake, to convince themselves that the people they want to hurt deserve it, because they have abstracted these people into certain ideals that act as a stand-in for real, tangible reasons one might be upset. Take your picture for example, there are millions of people "like this" in America? What the hell are you trying to imply that person is like? You don't know their age, their gender, whether they're working class or bourgeois, but you posted an image of a bumper sticker and expect me to make a bunch of abstract inferences from it.
I think I know exactly the kind of person you are, because I used to be like you in a lot of ways, you aren't as complex as you might think you are. You posted that picture ( ) because you have an abstract people you hate, a stereotype you built up in your mind and channeled everything you hate into: a fat, white, walmart shopping, idiotic, christian, the kind of "patriot" who wears the flag on some sweaty tanktop and ignores any and all criticisms of the cops or the military industrial complex because of "muh America".
You wear that cross as your flag here, not because of a serious faith in Christianity, because you wanted a signal to symbolize you're a part of something, you want a moral framework to give you the appearance of having morals, and because the idea of hating people for no reason terrifies you, because confronting the fact that deep down you want to hate and hurt and kill people just because you don't like them is something you can't accept. You've adopted ideas you don't really believe in, because you have a strong compulsion to hate, and you want to give it the appearance of directed hate, controlled hate, and meaningful hate.
I know exactly what kind of person you are, and I know that at the end of the day the contradictions of your own beliefs will break you. The sooner you accept that you don't have a reason to hate the kind of people you do, that you're just angry and want to lash out at something with that anger, the sooner you can heal yourself and adopt a more mature view of the world.
I was watching Fox News and this guy, Tucker Carlson, was just ranting on about socialism, how dangerous it is, and how we "desperately" need to fight against it. Shit like this pisses me the fuck off because I KNOW that people are eating it right up. Fucking morons.
So what can happen in America? As much as I love the idea of an American revolution… we can't rush it. It is extremely unlikely that a true socialist revolution would happen in America any time soon, and it would be nearly impossible for it to succeed. There aren't many people willing to fight, and the world wouldn't just sit by as one of the largest economies would be threatened to turn socialist and bring about the worldwide revolution. A bunch of LARP'ers with guns wouldn't defeat a well-trained army, let alone multiple well-trained armies & volunteers. It would miserably fail and tarnish our reputation even more than it already is.
Hell, it might fail so bad that we may as well never return. If we fuck that up, it's gone forever. It'll never come back in America ever again. So I say don't rush it.
Can America democratically turn socialist? It's… sort of possible, but it'll be painful and again, we can't fuck that up either. As much as I hate the DNC, I think that neolibs and closet-capitalists are quickly falling out of popularity among its voters. Even if it's not, succdems are better than reactionaries & libertarians, and that's all we're gonna get for a while. American politics has always been: Which is less shit? Would you rather eat human shit or dog shit?
It would be Allende 2.0. I have no doubt in my mind
Luke Long
That is a reductive reading of Marx from a few early texts like German Ideology and the Manifesto. Marx may have believed the United States was the most progressive society in the world at the time because of its fundamental revolutionary break from old world feudal economies, but that never led him to apologize for slavery. The other poster has a point in arguing whether or not it is anti-Marxist to condemn the US as-such on the basis of slavery, and we can (and I will) argue that point with him, but you just calling me a Proudhonian idealist is hardly justified since Marx himself oscillated between defending the United States as progressive along a historical tract and critiquing it as the nest of especially powerful capitalist developments, which of course he saw as factors that were aligned exactly in their contradiction, but that doesn't make his particular writings regarding certain evils of the US any less opaque.
Thank you for the thoughtful response, sorry it took me a while to get back to you, wanted to give a reply the time it deserved.
I absolutely agree with this, and it's why, despite the sad state of this board, I'm willing to spend time discussing theory on Zig Forums in a way that is impossible on any other leftist forum. I also agree with your fondness for Nietzsche and assessment of the new western leftist milieu as heavily derived from protestant progressive activism, guilt and sin based evangelizing, a hierarchy of legitimacy you can enter into only through suffering clearly aligned with approved categories. But I do come to a different (maybe more cynical) conclusion regarding the Nietzschean contingency of morality. In the same way that Nietzsche's polemics positioned beasts-of-prey and Christians as opposed but not fundamentally separate (both are based on the discharging of ressentiment, the former immediately through pure violence and action, the latter systematically through the production of art and theory), I don't think the left needs (or is even able to) completely seperate itself from this kind of moralism, and that we would be better off insisting on certain fundamentals that ensure the moral culture is aligned with our basic material ends.
I understand you wanting to prioritize selling socialism to people, and I agree in particular with the idea that we need to appeal to their self interest. But I think that the aesthetic mythology you're trying to align with socialism is too alienated from the "American ideals" as you would like to present them, and is now deeply tied to the American ideals as they have been materially realized – the American flag refers to this particular country with this particular notion of liberty that, in the national conscious and unconscious, refers to "what's mine is mine", i.e. property is liberty, there is no fundamental difference between owning a toothbrush and owning a military production plant, so an empire of private property is an empire of liberty. I'm not saying that we should mock or berate people who are fond of national symbols, and I agree that we should try and insist that the American revolution as an anti-imperial securing of liberty was a good thing, that many of the ideals laid on in the Constitution and Declaration were good, but
it seems ridiculous to me to position ourselves so unconditionally on the side of early American government. Besides the odd remark, they made no real effort at all to dismantle or discourage slavery, and erased native nations with truly genocidal intent. I don't see how this can be justified in a way that is consistent with a properly anti-imperialist socialism. Even the crude dialectical teleology is referring to would require we understand Marx himself as unapologetically supporting imperialism against national liberation movements to spread capitalist institutions and bring primitive societies closer to socialism, and this is a crude teleology Marx himself recounted and developed beyond after realizing its severe limitations. He was one of the few European socialists to vocally and completely criticize American slavery and praise John Brown, and in word and action ended up supporting national liberation movements in general. It is very funny this other poster brings up Proudhon and accuses me of being a Proudhonian, because it is exactly in this issue of national-liberation that Marx often denounced Proudhonian's for their idealism.
In the case of Poland, for example, the Proudhonians in the International were of the "view that labor should not involve itself with political issues, but stick to economic and social ones. They opposed singling out Poland for strong and specific support, and wished to concentrate on labor issues." They also suggested that Marx and other pro-Polish independence members were allowing the International to "degenerate into a committee of nationalities." And Marx didn't just support Polish liberation, he held resentment and regret towards Germany itself for its prior injustices to Poland, most importantly for the sake of my argument holding the current democratic German assembly responsible as a continuation of the older German monarchy: "[Frederick the Great was] the inventor of patriarchal despotism…it is well known that he allied himself with Russia and Austria to carry out the rape of Poland, an act which still today, after the revolution of 1848, remains a permanent blot on German history."
(source: letters and writings from Marx at the Margins, chapter "The Relationship of National Emancipation to Revolution")
The implications of this are clear, and clearer still when Marx acknowledges that Poland has no proletarian class and is made up of peasants. So Marx very clearly thought that the invasion of destruction of a non-industrial, feudal power by an industrial, progressive power was not only a bad thing at the time, but even in retrospect, under a formally new government, could not be forgiven as the simple progression of history.
I am not claiming that clarifying Marx's position means that I am right, only that imperial expansion and exploitation was never excusable to Marx, not as a path forward or as an occurrence of the past. The fact that his life's work was dedicated to stressing the material origins of historical development does not mean that he was unconcerned with the ethical implications of historical events, and if he had not been it is unlikely he would have seen the liberation of mankind as the end goal of history if he was so unconcerned. This justification of slavery and colonial genocides as necessary historical expansion always confuses me – both ancient Greek and 19th century American forms of slavery were simply facts of history that need to be understood contextually? There is nearly 2000 years separating them, and a massive amount of social and technological development happened in that interim. If the US needed to progress through the social stages of the old world, necessitating a period of autocratic Greek republics with slavery, how was it able to simultaneously adopt mercantile capitalism and the form of ancient republics while ignoring feudalism entirely? This reference to materialist dialectics as a justification for historical atrocities makes no sense to me, it seems to immediately collapse under any analysis, including more than a cursory glance at the Marxist source material it is supposedly derived from. If I had to guess I would assume this misunderstanding comes from an extrapolation of the first chapter of the Manifesto, which is only laying out the bare basics of historical progression in a crypto-polemical format – not to mention how early of a text it is in both Marx and Engels repertoire anyway.
(fucked up the order, this follows immediately after this post, that's okay because it was basically tangential anyway)
For example, I can imagine that the contemporary left's struggle to differentiate itself from flippant liberal identity politics without ignoring or tacitly permitting the issues surrounding people grouped into such identities will result in a sort of new politesse that is repressive in some of its own ways but is not fundamentally any better or worse than what has come before. Pagan institutions were supported by an often irrational moralism of honor and sacrifice, Christian institutions supported by an often irrational moralism of modesty and chastity, secular liberal institutions by ambition and individualism – it's easy to imagine a socialist morality as a pathological preoccupation with contextual power relations formalized into a code of manners and politesse. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try and stamp out the worst redundant and reactionaries tendencies creeping into this developing culture (usually tentacles of identitarian essentialism that insist your right to liberation, organization, speech, etc are dependent on your race or gender.) But I think the worst liberalism in the modern left is not the demand that we should ask peoples' pronouns or avoid using obscene language (I think this is a petty annoyance that I don't even ultimately disagree with), it's the basic idealism that usually accompanies these demands, that knowledge of what is wrong and what group was historically associated with what is a step towards liberation, and as soon as everyone really knows about the bad things white people do to black people, then we will be free. This is the overwhelming, insidious problem with western leftism at the moment. And this is the legacy of protestantism that needs to be rooted out – the fundamental misunderstanding that knowledge and faith will bring us to liberation. In protestantism, empty ritual without faith or personal knowledge of God is not enough, it is heretical. This needs to be reversed for the standards of a socialist morality. Cleetus can hate black people and Jamal can hate gay people, they just need to understand that they can't act on that or they will be endangering the benefits they themselves derive from a socialist economy. Me and you can be annoyed at a pretentious queer trying to direct everything to their identity before a political meeting, but as long as the actual political meeting is administered in such a way that it prioritizes our material interests as much as theirs, who cares if we need to be polite and pretend to like them for a couple hours, we can get a drink afterwards and laugh at them for being obnoxious and self-centered. Right now the opposite happens – we are expected to love every particular identity out of the goodness of our hearts, and as long as we do that, it doesn't matter if we actually get anything done, we only need to theatrically revoke our stake in the importance of our own liberation, and knowledge that that is right is enough. The way I see it, a strict code of permissability surrounding sexual conduct, insistence on appropriate personal titles, etc., is far less important (and many of them admirable, if nonessential and sometimes comically overbearing, cultural developments) than this fundamental misunderstanding.
Jayden Campbell
While Marx was by no means a confederate, and I am by no means implying that he was, I think it should be kept in mind that both Marx and Engels supported the Mexican-American War.
Maybe, you're aware of what was at stake there in that conflict? A country without a ban on black chattel slavery attacked and annexed a country that had a ban on black chattel slavery. This was known to contemporaries and yet Marx and Engels supported the American side in this conflict. Why? It can only be that they held that the material progress the US conquest would bring to world history of greater significance than the fact that it would spread black chattel slavery.
I'll be honest that I think Marx's Poland fetishism was ultimately, as history showed, wrong-headed. But, it is true that he had good reasons for thinking it, and let's review why that was.
In Marx's view, the main threat to the European revolution was Tsarist Russia whose massive military and autocracy threatened to drown the Revolution in blood (as it did in some-places). But, the key-thing is that Marx saw Poland as more advanced than Russia and so, for Marx, Tsarist rule created the peculiar situation where a backwards nation ruled over an advanced one. For Marx, especially in his younger years, Russia was not just a threat to the working class movement but even to the bourgeoisie of Western Europe. Marx clearly held the belief that a republican Europe that would destroy what was left of feudalism could be brought about by revolution and that result would accelerate European development bringing the workers revolution ever-closer.
When capitalist development began in Russia and material conditions in the two countries became similar, many, like Rosa Luxemburg began to see Polish nationalism as a revanchist reactionary movement looking to separate the working class of the German and Russian Empires. Ironically, Kautsky was probably more radical on the nat-lib question in Poland than Luxemburg herself who was Polish. As it actually turned out, Poland formed itself into a fascist state with violent exclusionary colonialist policies towards its minorities in the 20s, whereas Germany and the Russian Empire veered to the Left. Stalin, who was a full-throated defender of national revolution, used the Polish example for why every national liberation movement had to be evaluated on its own merits and that the communist revolution could never put national liberation above the needs of the proletariat. Today, Poland is perhaps the most militantly reactionary power in Europe with the exception of Ukraine.
Correctly or incorrectly, Marx viewed Germany in the 1840s as being subject to absolutist Prussian feudal despotism and extraordinarily backwards in comparison with the West. That is why the quote mentions that Frederick the Great was "an inventor of patriarchal despotism" and doesn't emphasize the (overblown imo) "Enlightened" aspect of his rule.
As Bill Warren notes, Marx and Engels, whatever their criticisms (and they were many) preferred Bismarckian development to none at all.
Marx didn't support imperialism against something that didn't even exist yet. There were anti-imperial movements in Europe but many, perhaps most, Third World nations are constructions of European colonialism and hence, they needed to go through colonialism to have a nationalist revolutionary movement in the first place. I don't think its an accident that Marx and Engels made sparse comment on the great expansion of European colonialism at the tail-end of their lives. Ireland, at least partially aligned with Marx's schema, although more backwards then Britain he saw Ireland as backbone of the British aristocracy and the British monarchy. Hence, home-rule for Ireland if possible under a socialist government but also an independent Ireland was not inimical to their purposes.
I don't think its a coincidence that the first and second internationals just didn't focus very much at all on colonial/national oppression outside Europe. Anti-imperialist Marxism, while having a fair basis in the text, is still largely an ad hoc project responding to a change in the international situation.
I'm going to leave aside your points about the US in particular for the moment. I mean to re-emphasize a point I made in my reply first post: (>>2776758)
How, pray-tell, was capitalism to expand without colonialism? And, isn't colonialism, by definition, a form of imposed (which implies violent) external rule? Everyone acknowledges that the discovery of the New World gave the impetus to the rise of capitalism in Europe and Engels argues this very beautifully in a speech given on Columbus Day worth reading in-full thecharnelhouse.org/2012/09/19/soviet-avant-garde-submissions-for-the-1929-international-competition-to-design-a-memorial-to-christopher-columbus-in-santo-domingo/ Indeed, its very difficult, though not impossible, to imagine take-off of the feudal and barely post-feudal European economies in the succeeding centuries without the flood of American gold and silver expanding demand on the domestic and international markets. In addition to this, the American colonies allowed exotic and new products to be produced for the first time that captured the minds of European imagination and produced new incentives to work longer hours or economically rationalize things to attain new use-values. The subsumption of the Americas by European colonialism provides the most rapid acceleration towards a true world market.
While European colonizers sometimes employed in the early period of European colonialism, such as at Potosí and certain mines in Mexico–slavery, forced labor (of varying kinds including feudal), theft, and violence were always in the background. But, how could it have been otherwise? Even in the most populous regions of the Americas, labor was scarce primarily due to the ravages that disease inflicted on the population. How would this new region be developed peacefully and economically without any type of coerced labor when the vast majority of Europeans were subject to coercive and extractive tributary systems? How would the resources of the continents be developed peacefully and efficiently with respect to Indian property rights?
Imagine if the European colonists had said through some weird historical foresight: The only thing that would have happened is a European aristocracy would be replaced by an indigenous aristocracy siphoning off its financial resources. And, of course, there still would have been conflicts in our counter-factual. Even in 1776 it is quite likely that American settlers outnumbered native Americans–like that wouldn't have created conflict under even the most peaceful conditions?
One of the major benefits of the Americas and settler-colonies in general is that colonial conquest meant that the price of land low and rents cheap allowing capitalism to thrive more easily in these environments than, often, even Europe itself. It seems difficult to imagine how the highly underpopulated and undeveloped regions of Australia and Northern America could have developed capitalism in a sufficient period of time even in a pure counter-factual scenario.
If we're looking at history, Hawaii and New Zealand perhaps offer the best examples of peaceful European settlement and development of an underdeveloped indigenous region. But neither was particularly peaceful or conflict-free. Even with the horrors of colonialism and legacies of racism not unique to European civ or modern times btw the poor in Latin America are still better off than the poor in Africa or the poorer parts of Asia. If you hold that capitalism was a progressive force in history I think its also inevitable that you must hold that colonialism was, to some degree, progressive. That does not mean that it wasn't harsh or that at some point it would become outmoded.
The US actually had some semblance of a feudal system on the East coast. The early system combined elements of mercantile capitalism with feudal norms and slave-holding. It was an odd mix but not necessarily unique as other early mercantile powers/colonies seemed to blur the line. That the US broke its feudal system during the revolution and later broke the slave system possibly explains much of its rapid-development and divergence from the Latin American world.
The only alternative to slavery in the early colonial American world was pushing more European peasants off their land and forcing them to work as wage-workers while displacing more Indians. Presumably, moralist critics would also have found this to be an outrage as well, maybe even more so; though I admit it was probably more desirable.
