Of course, the big question with the line "I'm tired of being told to hate my fellow man" is whether they're referring to the constant fearmongering being pushed by conservative news and politicians against everyone who isn't in their in-group.
Or are they referring to non-conservatives calling out the bigotry being pushed by conservatives and doing that calling out is "pushing hatred on your fellow man" in this person's eyes?
Since a lot of 4chan is the latter while actively being a part of the former.
Oh new account made 5 minutes ago, please do tell what the "fearmongering" is on the left. Climate change? Needing to actually do the minimal effort to prevent Covid spread?
That’s… strange. I’m on Voyager and it says 24 days when I check their profile. I think you might be looking at the age of the comment instead of the account.
I have said this many times: internet memes only helped with radicalizing people, but offered none of the tools needed to help them see where they might overcome the problems.
Therefore you end up with a whole bunch of radicalized people who are increasingly depressed and pessimistic about the world because they literally don’t have the tools to analyze the current state of affairs, let alone come up with solutions.
Only reading theory can solve that. Read your Marx, Lenin, Gramsci and Mao. That’s the only way forward.
Getting yourself imprisoned or killed while functionally achieving nothing that actually changes the system does absolutely nothing except remove yourself from the next 30+ years of value you could be providing to organising.
We call it fedposting because it’s the kind of shit feds say because it benefits them by removing radicals from society.
Join an org and put the work in. When the appropriate requirements are met they will act, but they will never be met without people putting in the effort. Individual action sounds tempting and exciting, but it’s not going to change anything. It is adventurism.
theory without praxis just gets you the disco elysium quote
0.000% of Communism has been built. Evil child-murdering billionaires still rule the world with a shit-eating grin. All he has managed to do is make himself sad. He is starting to suspect Kras Mazov Karl Marx fucked him over personally with his socio-economic theory.
You hate seeing hexbear users, so you took the considered and well-thought tactic of directly replying to one to whine about them. That’ll stop you from seeing more of them, for sure!
You must be confused, Hexbear is a forum for shitposting not bringing about communism. Real world organizing is for bringing about communism. Hope this clears that up!
Did you know that at it’s peak the USSR gulag system had more than a million citizens imprisoned, which worked for scraps, receiving little to no pay?
Oh wait actually that’s the US current day, my bad.
Also posting isn’t praxis. I hope you don’t think you’re actually doing anything on this website. Organizing is for the real world!
Lmao life expectancy rising goes brr. Women gaining independence goes brr. Advancements in the sciences goes brr. Life quality improvements goes brr. Going from a rural peasant state ruled by a monarchy to a modern country within few decades, while the same process took centuries for the capitalist states goes brr. USSR
I suspect the failure of viable alternatives to capitalism in the 90s resulted in the runaway scenario we see today. That doesn’t make the Soviet union good though.
What would happen if capital succeeded in smashing the Republic of Soviets? There would set in an era of the blackest reaction in all the capitalist and colonial countries, the working class and the oppressed peoples would be seized by the throat, the positions of international communism would be lost.
Damn, really feels like we’ve been seized by the throat
even if it was “bad” (it wasn’t just to be clear) the mere threat of its existence allowed labour unions in the West to win more concession from their bosses.
China does not have the same effect because China does not export the revolution. sicko-wistful
100% agree. I had a much higher opinion of the soviet union before i heard how little it took to be placed in a gulag. It sounded like a toxic environment for voicing concerns at the very least. Although my sources could be biased I suppose.
Generally competition is good for the “consumer” or citizen in this case
Sure I’ll bite, competition is incredibly hard to attain so hard in fact that it doesn’t exist in the real world.
For one I’ll say that when we talk about competition should have the following elements:
No competitor has a large market share (A large marketshare would help them influence prices which they can use to drive out other competitors taking their market share) Almost no barrier to enter and exit the competition Consumers have perfect information
Now ignoring that ‘competitors’ will activly try to destroy perfect competitions to go for higher profits why do even consumers not want competition? Economies of Scale
In order to have perfect competition you need an ‘excess’ of competitors. So think 100 furniture factories when 10 could do that work, every factory needs to figure out their own logistics, sale and management, this means that the state of competition is less efficient than a state that is closer to a monopoly/duopoly/oligopoly with several larger companies, even if those companies suck.
This is also of course ignoring natural monopolies aka utilities.
Because it is unprofitable. Sooner or later competitors will realize cooperation is more profitable overall. That is why unions are strong and big companies are not really competing
and:
-This hits at one of the core flaws of libertarianism. They tend to hold as a core axiom that competitive markets and free markets are one in the same, i.e. that the “natural state” of the markets are highly competitive, and if there is a lack of competition, it must be an “unnatural state”, i.e. there is some sort of top-down interference, government policies, which restrict competition.
-Libertarians thus see cronyism as happening from the top-down, where governments interfere with the markets, create monopolies, and all for the purpose of enriching themselves. Hence, they conclude the problem is government, that you have to get rid of government and then the problems will be solved.
-This is the direct opposite view of Marxists. Marxists instead argue that markets inherently lead to a gradual increase in monopolization over time, what Marx referred to as the “laws of the concentration and centralization of capitals”, and that market economies have a natural tendency to move more and more away from competition over time.
-More than this, Marxists also see political power as not ultimately originating from the superstructure of society (the politics), but instead from the base of society (the economics). Any government policy requires enforcement, but any enforcement inherently presupposes an economic system which can produce tools of enforcement and allocate them appropriately to the enforcers. Politics is inherently derivative of economics. -The reason the political system favors the wealthy is not because of some laws implemented by some evil cabal that if they were just abolished, then capitalism would “work”. No, the reason the political system favors the wealthy is because the wealthy are the ones who control society’s wealth, and so of course the political system will favor them.
-No law you write on a piece of paper will make a billionaire like Jeff Bezos have equal political influence as a minimum wage worker barely making ends meet. Production is the most fundamental basis of human society and those who control production control society’s wealth and will inevitably have more influence. Even if you write laws saying bribery is illegal then they can just bribe those who enforce it.
-Hence, Marxists do not see cronyism as a result of top-down processes implemented by a corrupt superstructure, by some evil cabal within the government that corrupted “true capitalism” and turned it into cronyism. -Rather, Marxists see cronyism as originating from a bottom-up process, that stems from the economic base in and of itself. Markets inevitably lead over time to greater and greater monopolization, creating a larger and larger gap between the working masses and the capitalists, and even if there is a “rising tide” and workers’ wages rise as well, the profits of capital increase disproportionality faster, and capital continues to centralize rapidly, leading to an increasing social chasm between the rich and the poor.
-This is why libertarianism/conservatism has never worked in history and will never work. They can’t get rid of “big government” because the economic base, capitalism, inherently creates an enormous social divide, enormous polarization in the economy. This enormous wealth inequality naturally translates to power inequality, which then allows the capitalists to capture the state for their interests.
-Once the capitalists capture the state, there is no reason for them not to implement “big government” but for their own benefit, i.e. corporate bailouts and subsidies and such. Libertarian policies, hence, in practice, always lead to “big government”. Never in human history have they actually achieved their goals, because their goals are fundamentally impossible and self-contradictory.
-Another separate point is that these people also have a tendency to water down what “capitalism” means. Capitalism is about capital, that’s why it’s called capitalism. This refers to a specific kind of society dominated by capital, i.e. production for profit. Libertarians like water down “capitalism” to refer specifically just to trade or markets, but capitalism is not tradeism or marketism. It’s capitalism. Pre-capitalist economies have had trade and markets and so have socialist economies.
Thanks for providing such detailed responses. I think my biggest problem with marxist ideologies is that I don’t know an example of them working outside of theory. It seems to me like greed is a natural part of human nature and capitalism generally feeds into that nature as terrible as that is. Its not sustainable in the long term, but that also tends to be when revolutions happen to redistribute the wealth
I’m not the other poster, but there’s at least 3 reasons.
Competition doesn’t just happen for consumer goods, it happens for every single commodity traded on the market. Labor is a commodity. Because of the immense supply of labor, and the capitalist class’ deliberate decision to maintain an unemployed section of the population which deflates wages by adding more desperate people willing to work for less. Generally, you can think of a market as a battle between 2 armies who also have internal battles. If the attacking army is better at organizing itself and doesn’t get mired in the internal conflict, while the defending army is divided and has constant mutinies, the attacking army is bound to have a better chance in the battle. The capitalist class is smaller and has a much easier time coordinating, most workers don’t have large enough unions to contend with that.
Competition only goes on for so long, and eventually the whole point of a competition is that someone wins. If you have several companies competing to set the price of a commodity in a market, odds are one of them has enough capital to starve out the other ones. That happens in the real world all the time. What’s worse, the more times you capture parts of the market, the easier it is to capture more. That’s one of the fundamental tendencies in capitalism, the centralization of capital under fewer and fewer hands. Of course, once this process has run its course the result is monopoly, but even if the companies step short of monopolizing the market entirely to avoid anti trust regulations they are still likely to draw agreements between themselves to keep prices at a certain level to maintain profits. Recall the armies analogy above.
Even if nobody won in a competition and there was some permanent state of lowering the price of goods, while this is “good” for consumers, it’s still bad for the workers producing the goods, which most consumers are. Capitalists have no problem investing more fixed costs in the process of production if it leads to larger profits in the short term, but the issue comes down to the way profit is made in the first place. In a capitalist system, a cycle of production takes place when a capitalist exchanges money for commodities, pays a wage to workers who improve the commodities through their labor, then sells the commodities for more money than they spent during the cycle. The difference in the selling price and the fixed cost (capital) plus the variable cost (wages) is profit. Since the fixed cost is paid for at the same rate everywhere, i.e. no one should be buying the same commodities for significantly different prices at least locally, the only place where the difference could come from is the wages being smaller than the value added to the commodities through labor. Therefore, profit comes as a result of using labor that the capitalist bought at a discount. That discount we call exploitation. Now consider what happens if more capital is invested: the fixed costs grow in relation to the variable costs, but profit only grows if more labor is exploited. That means that the only way to keep commodities cheaper and cheaper still, while generating more profit relative to investment, is to ramp up exploitation. Practically we see this in reality in the way the production of some goods take place once competition runs its course; factories close down and capital moves abroad to where there are fewer regulations, sweatshops replace the factories and production can keep taking place because exploitation was increased.
Yeah we talk about it all the time! And it’s ok to be skeptical. All this stuff is just a model to see the world through and no model is perfect. Sometimes models are very good at making predictions though, and it’s worth trying to understand the logic behind something different so you spot concepts and functions that you hadn’t considered.
I think competition — actual competition, not “5 megacorps own everything” competition — can be useful in some cases, but keep in mind that competition does not necessarily incentivize good products. With food, for example, competition incentivizes addictive, unhealthy shit. With social media, same thing. With labor, it incentivizes exploitation, because whichever company squeezes the most work out of people for the lowest pay outcompetes everyone else. You can ameliorate these shitty incentive structures by putting workers and communities in charge of production, rather than owners and shareholders who want to maximize profit at the expense of any other metric.
Is this supposed to be a “the world has turned into shit” take, even though it’s been like this for ages (way before the 4chan poster, or anyone alive for that matter, was born)?
Yeah, this is a common fascist recruitment tactic. “The world has gone to shit, things were better before.”
This is the call to return to the golden past, a perfect time before “they” took it away from “us.” In reality, as you point out, that golden past never existed. However, once people have it framed in their minds that their chance at utopia was “taken” from them, there’s almost nothing they don’t feel justified in doing to take it back.
That was a very limited boon made possible off of the backs of the cumulative dead of several modern wars. Prior to that, the notion of “home ownership” wasn’t even a thing for the most part.
Modern life as we know it is relatively recent. Maybe 150 years MAX. Sure things have always had a tinge of bad, but take things in context.
We’re in an age where our grandparents or great grandparents, people we had exposure to and spoke to, experienced the start of monumental technological advancement in a relatively short period of time. Cars, planes, phones, movies, photos. Consider how much of your life is centered around these advancements.
We live in an extremely different and short lived period of humanity, where people we end up putting in charge of important societal tasks speak as if things like the economy are laws of nature, despite existing in its current form for maybe 2-3 generations at most.
This poster is experiencing the culmination of these advancements. The alienation, the over stimulation, the speed at which life takes place. It’s starting to show itself as a bit of a dead end as the ice caps melt away.
We’re in an age where our grandparents or great grandparents, people we had exposure to and spoke to, experienced the start of monumental technological advancement in a relatively short period of time. Cars, planes, phones, movies, photos. Consider how much of your life is centered around these advancements.
hell, when i was a kid a mobile phone was the size of a housebrick, could only make calls, and only if you happened to be in one of the few places that had decent service
now it’s a tiny computer that fits in your pocket with more processing power than the best consumer PCs from 15 years ago
Seriously, I’m under thirty and already I feel old due to how much rapid change I’ve seen in my lifetime.
On the flip side, there’s a lot of old stuff that is still super serviceable and useful and even nice. Like maybe we should go back in certain ways, and move forward in others.
About 300,000 years ago, when the first humans were born.
The problems being described in this post are the result of the greed of the wealthy, and that has been menacing humanity for as long as there’s been humanity.
Not at all. For the vast majority of our time as a species we lived in small hunting and gathering bands wherein the accumulation of personal wealth and property wasn’t really possible and one’s status instead depended on merit. It’s only with the dawn of agriculture, about 10k years ago, that the accumulation of personal wealth and private property becomes a thing. For better or worse, for reasons I don’t have the time to go into here, agriculture is a kind of ratcheting trap, and once we embraced it we could never go back and never will.
The thing now is to recreate the small-scale egalitarianism that we evolved to live in, but how we do that in the material world we’ve created is far beyond me.
No, we don’t see any evidence of this at all in the ethnographic literature. To the contrary, what we tend to see is antisocial actors being socially ostracized or killed by the larger group. This is evidently a very old behavior since we absolutely see it in chimp bands as well which means that it goes all the way back to our most recent common ancestor which existed 6 million years ago.
Then what’s stopping post-agricultural people from being disloyal to the rich and killing them in their sleep? What makes you think the same tactics could not be used by pre-agriculture tribal chiefs to ensure loyalty among the tribesmen they abused?
How is that going to work when you live in a group of around 30 to 50 people, all of whom are closely related either through blood or marriage, and all of whom have known you for your entire life?
What we see in all of the ethnographic literature on small-scale hunting and gathering societies is that you absolutely cannot rise to a position of power and influence simply on the basis of strength. To the contrary, the way you gain power and influence is by being a good and wise and generous provider for the group, not by beating your fellow tribe-mates down.
If you know of an example that demonstrates your idea, please do tell, since I am unaware of any such case in the existing anthropological literature.
Generally, no. Hierarchy is not the natural order, it’s an ideological virus that has been shoved down our throats.
No human is so strong they can face a group, and everyone can be killed with a knife while they sleep. The group can kick someone out or even kill them, but the leader can’t just go around like a dictator (if they even had a leader, generally power was not in the hands of just one person). A tribe is like an extended family, you’d have a lifelong personal relationship with everyone - you’d have to be a real asshole to even have to worry about that
Bad stuff happened obviously, but generally people lived like animals - they had territory and would fight other groups over it, but people didn’t live in fear and chaos
It takes agriculture and specialization to do the truly terrible stuff. If you don’t have people dedicated to being soldiers or guards, you can’t wage war (bloodfeuds just aren’t in the same ballpark) or impose your will by force. If you don’t have agriculture, you don’t have much stuff, so it’s probably not worth raiding you.
And yeah, people might be stolen or enslaved, but generally there’s a path to integration - again, no dedicated guards, so how long can they really keep you in line through force before it gets old?
you just assumed he voted for trump couse he is on 4chan ? . usa is democracy if people is supporting trump and anyone think he is autoritarian than give people reasons to not support /vote him . you guys have free speech. if after all that american people still support him than accept him as leader becouse thats how democracy works .
Making yourself feel good enough to ignore the shithole our society has become doesn’t fix anything. Denying reality is foolish as fuck and actively makes it worse.
No one is denying anything. It’s just a question of whether you get up to fight or give up and die. That’s the part that’s in your power, and taking care of your body is the first step toward getting up to fight.
It really is, but i only understood after i started taking care of my body.
As stupid as “taking care of the body” sounds, our body is an organic machine. It only works correctly, if properly maintained. Learning how to listen to the body and giving it what it needs, releases lots of dopamine. You end up learning to enjoy more single moments, moments without anxiety, stress or fear.
But the clearness of mind also lets you see that the situation is actually worse than perceived before, the world is fucked and as the years pass by, it seems that there’s a global effort to fuck of it as fast as possible.
Start out with small steps, like 20 minutes a day, 20 minutes is nothing. But 20 minutes being conscious of your movements, breathing and focusing, means a lot for your health and mind.
The important thing is to shake that booty until the spirit is high.
When literally every expert and every shred of credible evidence agrees that it’s hopeless, pretending it isn’t hopeless is just going to leave you unprepared, and you’ll end among the first of the dead when the collapse happens and leads to long term global famine.
It takes an incredibly childish and naive view of the world to believe that the entire world is going to suddenly come together to meaningfully reduce emissions in the forseeable future. That’s very literally the only possible solution, and it cannot possibly happen.
Prepare for the worst and hope for the best are not mutually exclusive.
Even if they were, I’d rather live with hope for a shorter time than “live” without hope for a longer time.
Also, since the whole issue of emissions comes from production of resources, how do you think gathering resources to outlast a global famine is going to affect that?
This is when you get off social media and live life with your family. It’s so easy to fall into that mindset when you’re going to areas where people crowd together since it ends up with large scope views and ideas.
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