I would have called bs, but you used LaTeX so it must be true.
Could you throw this back in the fryer? I think I see a few uncompressed pixels.
LaTeX spitting out an immaculate pdf with carefully calculated text distribution and vectorized fonts just to have it printed and scanned by the camera on a razr flip phone:
The Liberal in question:
The New York Times will pick this up with a title "academic definitively disproves communism".
Humans learn and change their behaviour based on the culture they are raised in. Capitalism enforces greed by threat of violence, starvation, and homelessness.
Idiots: “gReEd Is HuMaN nAtUrE”
References
[1] Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Eher Verlag 1st edition, 1925
Idk, communism worked him pretty hard
He never got a chance to write a sequel. No idea why.
A critique of communism based on "human nature" is just a self-own by the West.
"Communism has yet to be achieved" "doesn't work"
I'm not a communist, but this is weak af.
Rabbits are completely incapable of surviving!, see every time we drop a rabbit into an enclosed space filled with wolves, they get eaten, it just proves that only carnivores are able to survive.
Oh hang on we need to drop more herbavores into our carnivore cages because we have to keep propping up these carnivores.
Socialist societies run by communist parties do exist, and as such we can look to their struggles and successes as representative of achieving socialism and communism.
I'm not a communist
I just think the reality of our social fabric reflects the need for a more socially-democratic approach for the time being. I'm a dummy though, and I'm always open to hearing other people's thoughts on the subject if you'd like to share.
Assuming you mean preserving capitalism but increasing social safety nets, I disagree. The "nicer" social democracies all rely on imperialism to fund their safety nets, and are subject to the same dictatorial control capital has in capitalist systems. Moving beyond systems dominated by capital into ones where we collectively plan and direct production for the satisfaction of need is a historic necessity, and one economically compelled by the centralization and monopolization of capitalism over time.
Idk how far left you currently are, but reading State and Revolution by Lenin is what kind of opened my eyes to the whole “the state exists solely to protect capital and the rich”
It’s relatively short (though Lenin writes like he’s ADHD and angry lol) and you can find free translated versions in a bunch of different formats online because well it’s not like marxist-leninists are going to charge you lol
I’m not a communist btw, but the book is still interesting
I absolutely love Lenin's writing, and how he always takes any chance he can to shit on Kautsky lmao
Not always, early on he respected Kautsky greatly, only when Kautsky sided with mensheviks he started to criticize him, and around 1915 when the attempts at reconciliation of socialdemocrats failed and Kautsky proven to be lead figure of the socialchauvinists Lenin goes full bag of bricks on him.
Fair! That's of course why Lenin's later works are so anti-Kautsky, but these are also some of his most important works so they seemed outsized in my head.
Yeah reading it without knowing basically any historical context or people is fun because you hear him mention names repeatedly and eventually you start going “yeah you tell him Lenin!” when you still have basically no idea who they are lol
Also just wanting to pack so much information into a single sentence to the point sentences are occasionally the size of paragraphs is very relatable.
Lenin's great, both theoretically and from an entertainment perspective. His hate is pure!
Fair enough! For me I think it came down to a perspective shift on the design of liberal democracies. I would love it if the owning class was forward-thinking enough to allow social democracies to function well longitudinally. It seems that the dynamic is that workers fight for protections and social safety nets and then owners slowly gut those programs and push austerity. On a long enough time scale, social democracy decays.
I used to think we could essentially protest and activism our way out of this because I viewed liberal democracy as something which was fundamentally designed to serve the people and was corrupted to serve the owning class. Now I view liberal democracies as something which was designed to serve the owning class from the start. There was a big reason land ownership was originally required to vote in the United States. Lenin says in State and Revolution:
A democratic republic is the best possible political shell for capitalism, and, therefore, once capital has gained possession of this very best shell … it establishes its power so securely, so firmly, that no change of persons, institutions or parties in the bourgeois-democratic republic can shake it.
I think this naturally leads to questions about how to deal with the entrenchment of capitalists at a fundamental level and the answers lie in historical examples of societies which were able to do so. And all of this is made significantly more urgent by climate change.
