commiewithoutorgans [he/him, comrade/them]

“indisputable democratic source of knowledge wikipedia (feel free to edit the page if you it can be improved):”

Read some theory, it kinda sounds like you’re basing this entirely off of YouTube videos you’ve seen (including your understanding of socialism)

Landlords increase rent to make up for it, what does georgism do? Landlords don’t exist as such in socialism, but how they do exist still isn’t really impacted by this shift.

Georgism is a misunderstanding of the causes of issues at the “tax affecting productivity” level. That’s not the cause of our problems.

The lack of massive investment of housing and zoning are, again, results of a problem not the problem itself. These issues don’t exist with good planning, and that’s why georgism is just irrelevant except as a bandage for some of the ills of capitalism temporarily

Land is in common ownership + tax based on land distribution. What does this do? Georgism is only relevant to capitalism and is only a minor improvement to efficiency and distribution that will also just become calculated into costs within the C of the C+V equation from marx. It would only have a minor impact based on the size of your house+yard, nothing more. It’s in no way progressing us towards socialism. It could be useful for a NEP/current China situation of broadly capitalist relations controlled by a socialist state, I guess, and I’m open to that tax dominating, though it doesn’t really consider (or tries to theoretically consider but won’t ever be able to) imperialism/unequal exchange and extraction in other lands where the raw product is immediately exported to a country that will refine it.

Fair enough on the framing, just meant that I ignored it for the first half, otherwise the reply was not engaging with you up to that point, but I wrote sloppily.

But you did not originally say “bigger and smaller IMPERIALIST” you said capitalist empire. It’s a totally different discussion which is where we started speaking past on another. I still don’t think that’s correct, because I don’t think a new analysis like Lenin made of imperialism would find Russia as materially equivalent in form or content of imperialism at all (maybe requiring a new word for the type of imperialism done by the US/NATO like super-imperialism or so. That’s why I still hold the point that it’s not just “bigger v smaller” that matters, but the Qualitative difference that then arose from the quantity of Imperialism performed/exported capital and coerced labour. They should be understood as 2 phenomenon at this point, not a big and small

Ah God, I was wondering (cheering for) when you’d make the turn to “politically only possible with a socialist government” or something along those lines, but now I see you’re one of the famed georgists. First I’ve seen in the wild!

Because its not relevant. It HAPPENS to be the case now, but it’s in no way a defining feature. Sure, I’m absolutely fine with that detail being described so, because it’s true. But you minimized the analysis to that. “Framing” is ambiguous and I’m ignoring that, I guess you could call it framing, but your framing is irrelevant to my analysis

No. Both are bourgeois states and yes I prefer the weaker one winning in this case, but the framing of “big vs small” is very ignorant of any reason to support something critically

I would avoid saying “lesser evil” for critical support cases, because revolutionary defeatism exists for lesser evil situations where nothing is progressing against the primary contradiction. It’s more a recognition that a shitty thing can be progressive/forward moving relative to its opposition. Russia winning/getting a peace deal with Donbas and Crimea out of Ukraine gets us much closer to ending global imperialism than Ukraine getting it’s land back or worse.

A few things to keep in mind in addition to our comrade’s reply:

1. I’ve never met or talked online with any tankie who is happy with the fact that the “authoritarian oppression” is necessary. We often just take the position of Marx’s quote “we won’t make excuses for the terror.” You don’t have to want it, but because it’s necessary according to history and theory, we don’t bother with the whole game of waiting for the perfect excuse, because then it’s often too late for a movement.

2. The goal of tankies is to also reach that world of no necessary oppression and liberation from it for all through dialectical progression, however long and arduous that task is. We just try to be technical, tactical, and strategic about it. It can seem callous, but it’s a mistake to think we can stay on the emotional/values-only plane of thought while attempting large scale socio-economic changes because the enemies of those changes have a system behind them which fulfills all these tasks with low effort.

3. When we say authoritarianism is meaningless, we mean that the dictionary definition you gave is all encompassing at state-level analyses, rendering it meaningless for distinctions. There is no power which doesn’t fulfill all of those conditions (even just a low-level manager performs the contents of that definition, despite the form it takes being small scale. Like “reductions of the rule of law” can be as simple as asking you to do tasks on outside of your contract). The only difference is a vibe created in the mind of the user of the term.

4. The end of this authority at societal scale is communism. Countries sometimes called communist are better called socialist countries led by communists or something. The whole discussion is rendered confusing by mistaking a process/movement for some definitional standard. No socialist country is socialist for meeting definitions/conditions; they are socialist because they recognize and continue the process to progression to communism. See point 2 for the strategy which countries led by communists are doing.

Come talk with us, we have interesting ideas and people

You replied to someone from hexbear at the top of this chain. Find them then claim they found you. Be serious or PPB

Then what are yours? We can work from there if you’d prefer: I’m familiar with lots of philosophers of lots of traditions who’ve talked about such

Edit to add: something a lot of Marxists understand in relation to 'we have different definitions" as an attempt to avoid the discussion about the real material thing. Even if definitions are different, we both are attempting to articulate about SOMETHING. That thing doesn’t change when the word used for it does. I’m describing very real phenomenon, and I’m sure you have a phenomenon in your head too. We can discuss those, and it doesn’t matter what they’re called. Otherwise, this just ends all discussion with both able to walk away feeling that they’re right while there is still likely a huge contradiction between the phenomenon that needs explored

Sorry may seem like I avoided a lot for what you said, but i more just didn’t actually disagree and realized our only real disagreement was one of the first things I said days ago lol

Ok so I think we just started at different reasons for beginning the analyses, because I’m not in disagreement with anything you said basically anywhere. My point from the beginning (that China has determined that it must strategically act as it is) begins already at the assumption that our Chinese comrades are making the analyses that are needed to reach that conclusion. This assumption is not based in any sort of unpenetrable philosophical claim, as you pointed out well. But I think there is enough evidence for it to be worth assuming for strategic purposes. Going into a deep discussion about whether they are correct at the most basic level of analysis is maybe too far for me to try at the moment as a learner of mandarin also, but reading works of Chinese comrades, I have trust that their analysis of their own conditions is better than mine. I don’t disagree about how we should assess that for our own movements, and honestly think we should be skeptical of the support of Israel for exactly those reasons, I just don’t find it fruitful to use it as a “GOTCHA” to China about universal values, because that is most often based in having a distrust which I find as unfounded as blind trust (the distrust that China is off of the socialist path because it trades with reactionaries/settler colonists).

I was speaking muchhhh more colloquially everywhere than I think you realized, which seems to have added to difficulties. Should do better at that

My point at the beginning about the interests being represented is a sort of philosophical underpinning, though, where we might disagree. I do see the trend of interests of proletarians overtime aligning within a set of conditions and aligning towards socialism. When mistakes are made among the masses, we can be critical, but even those mistakes will be overtaken by advances and fixed by the same process as long as the class’s interests are represented. Here I am making a more philosophical stake in the ground, and I do think that, if the Chinese proles are wanting to trade with everyone and not go to war with anyone, that it might not be the fastest path to communism but it will eventually reach there faster than doing the bidding of the capitalists. (Here I am making an anti-accelerationist claim for places which have already seen a revolution that’s been upheld). Here we may disagree still and I’d enjoy reading your thoughts.

I disagree with this. Not with Engels, but that this is really an answer to the above question. In fact, basically the only mention of anything relevant to this specific question is Engels claiming that they are kinda opposites in that democracy requires the subordination of the minority to the majority in a democratic vote. It is the basis for much understanding of authority in general for Marxists in a tactical sense, but we should legitimately stop using it as the end of all discussion about the concept itself and how it relates to others. Even on hexbear we’ve got anarchists who disagree despite having read Engels.

To add on here, the fact that liberalism is a bankrupt ideology which is fully represented by the US including its worst aspects can really not be shown in a comment in such a thread. Domenico Losurdo, in one of my favorite books ever, spends hundreds of pages detailing this in “Liberalism: A Counter History.”

A much more easily digested but still incomplete essay can be found here: https://redsails.org/between-liberty-and-slavery/

Not really disagreeing with the other comrade there, but more adding for clarity: the word “authoritarianism” seems to attempt to distinguish some state (all of which are entirely defined by the fact that they have authority over the land/people to utilize violence in implementing the state’s dictates/laws) utilizing it’s authority vs not utilizing it, but the claim we make is that this distinction is meaningless and undermines itself always.

The fact that is that we can’t blow up pipelines because of property rights or else we will have violence done to us (put in prison, or killed if resisting that). This is authority over us. Chinese companies are not allowed to escape regulations within China without significant punishments (see the death penalties for CEOs who break environmental, finance, or labor laws). This is authority over them. These 2 examples are only distinct in who has the authority and who is prioritized in the interaction. But 1 is called authoritarianism and the other isn’t. Or compare: in the US, police who hurt journalists, imprisoned them, and saw absolutely no authority punish them vs the USSR, where those who has collaborated with the Nazi’s in WW2 were punished by being placed in a penal colony in Siberia to work in a mine. Again, the only real difference in authority is for whom and against whom.

I for one would prefer a world where oil company’s property rights were not protected by any authority until astonishingly large changes were to be made for the protection of our environment, and I see the interests of ONLY the capitalist class represented in that authority. Most cases where authority is utilized can be easily tied to the direct interests of a group of people. When a group of people have shared interests based in the basic structure of our economy (private property rights and the ability to profit being the basis here mostly, as well as the ability to sell your labor power as a worker), we call that a class. This is why we say that authority is always performed in the interests of a class (because all actions and decisions of the state either align with or against those interests, even if mostly tangentially or aligned with multiple at once).

This all just has very little to do with any understanding of democracy. The initial term of democracy was basically where everyone votes, but this term is not really used in the contexts we are talking about anymore and is restricted to small groups. We now usually understand democracy as either the sort of chauvinist version westerners use (where being a republic with votes where American observers are allowed is really the only criteria) or just a system which is able to take input from its people and perform in a way which the people approve. Whether this is direct voting, voting for a representative, or public caucuses and discussions is less material than the fact that the information is utilized and the outcomes desired are reached. (Edit addition here, something I thought of while responding elsewhere that fits here well: when authority is used to dictate a majority vote onto a minority, its precisely democratic in a simple sense and authoritarian in every sense. It’s why I support a democracy which first has intense debate about what interests and results will arise from policy before it’s ever up to vote and implementing it once there’s a lot of consensus among parties. Cuba is the best example of this, but Vietnam, China and the USSR are also fine examples)

On these standards, both the USSR and China (as well as most other major socialist countries commonly called undemocratic) are much more democratic than the US or any western state. The approval ratings (even by western polls within these nations) are much higher than western nations. This is because both the authority and democracy is oriented towards workers as opposed to the owners (meaning that private property and owners/management profits is not prioritized over the workers/people who work for wages).

Like this one maybe, with the lead up to it (idk how to link the whole thread tbh): https://hexbear.net/comment/3738759

I think you should likely expand more on this. Your replies are kinda low effort dunks, and we should be clearer about the why’s in such a thread where we are defending ourselves.

Don’t just describe a contradiction but how the world can be understood through that contradiction and its various aspects. Linking on authority is, of course, always relevant to these claims, but try just a bit harder or don’t post onto such a thread, imo. Or just link to another comrade talking about the exact thing, because I’ve read like 50 better explanations/replies in the past week from hexbear comrades.

You brought up the military and it’s emblematic of how you misunderstand the way exploitation and expropriation work by individualizing everything and lacking knowledge about the concepts of rent-seeking and exploitation generally. That’s why it was quoted.

I agree it’s a tangent at this point and that’s why I would like to stop discussing it here, but I think it’d be fruitful to understand how these concepts are related in a thread dedicated to such. It wasn’t a tangent when you used it as an example for “getting ahead” because it’s genuinely how you understand people could get ahead or avoid pitfalls of poverty. That’s why you used it.

It is a genuine way to avoid poverty for some (for others they end up homeless anyways because war is traumatic, even for the oppressors), but this getting ahead (usually by having some capital built up to let your “money work for you”) is always done by profiting off of others through rent-seeking, exploitation (paying less than the value produced), or expropriation (plain theft or contribution to global theft from imperialism). Working hard is something we love and encourage people to do to help their countries and themselves as much as they want or can, but that’s not what you’re really describing here, or you’re discounting the labor which is terrible and hard which doesn’t get the priveleges we got (think of any country in the Global South where miners work at least 10 times as hard as us and get almost nothing for it, or even the cleaners who are almost always POC in America who get underpaid under the table but work harder than us).

I assume much of this rubs you the wrong way because these seem unrelated and terrible mischaracterizations. to you. But I assure you, these ideas are founded in hundreds of years of theories, data, and experiences which we’ve read about to conclude this. Maybe you disagree even after understanding it completely, fine, but it’s fairly obvious to those of us who’ve read both liberal philosophers and economists and Marxists that you don’t understand what us leftists are saying.

I also did not say that everyone has to see combat, I actually disagree with that as well as the original poster. The point is that an active military which isn’t doing that is still the threat at all those places. Threats of violence are violence in themselves, and it helps a lot in the expropriation to have 90% not active while *the military as a whole is still killing lots. (Edited to specify that it’s the military as a whole, not the 90% outside of any active fighting because it was unclear for readers)

Now I’ll leave the discussion and disengage because you don’t want me here. You can reply if you want and I’ll stay quiet or start a thread where I’ll contribute.