kunimu

I agree, however the Communist form is merely a re-telling of the capitalist form, it results from the same contradictions, the same process, and has the same result. Under the states of the past the control is unhidden and in fact presented unashamed by the powers that be. In the present day, the infiltration of the new rationality pervades not only media but all experience within modern society. When you hear Bach in the supermarket or watch the news or go to the voting booth, it is exactly the same domination, but in different forms.

This is why both the USA currently and the USSR formerly deserve the same criticism, and we need to move beyond this rationality of unfreedom, and the answer to this I belive lies firmly within the realm of revolutionary Communist movements, but only after realising exactly what inspired the controlling rationalities of the US and the USSR.

The US (as it continues) and USSR both institute(d) a policy in which the only freedom is that which you are told you are supposed to have, and that any freedom which transcends is called either "Socialist" or "capitalist". These are projected as 'bad' because they appear within their respective societies to reach 'the limits of reason itself'. To the American taken in by his 'freedom', Socialism is not only unreasonable, irrational or unjustifiable but it is impossible itself, because to him what is rational is production, the pervasiveness of technology and relentless consumption. Similar things can be said about the USSR and its descendant Marxist-Leninist states.

Within the USSR, there was no qualitative change, there was only quantitative change, and indeed due to their rationality, Socialism could only be seen as quantitative change, a sliding axis between capitalism and Socialism. This is because they were fixed by controlling rationality in which Communism has become quantitative, obscuring the fact that it is truly qualitative, Marx said as much all along: Communism is the rejection of all established notions, Communism abolishes all notions of morality, justice, freedom and indeed stands in opposition, contradiction to all previous societies.

Communism is not a 'utopia' in the sense that everyone is happy all the time. It aims simply to do away with certain problems, just as public health services don't do away with every problem in your life. Your insinuation that I or any other Communist thinks this way is a strange one, though not unheard of.

>you should educate youself better by consuming mass media.

Is this not precisely the opposite of mass media? Marxist social critic Herbert Marcuse wrote about how, beacuse Communism is a subversive movement, and indeed the Left, it cannot gain mass media time, because of its nature as subversive; it can only be snuck in under capitalism, as capitalism is willing to accept any ideology for the sake of profit. I would recommend One-Dimensional Man on the topic of what problems Communists have with late capitalist media and production, and the hiding of information.

>If you are interested, you might want to read Orwell's 1984

I have; although it's a little funny to see Orwell used to rebut the Communist project, seeing as he was a Socialist himself who fought on the side of anarchists in Spain, there's a deeper point here that you are missing. Orwell wrote about very obvious misdirection - "war is peace", "peace is war". However, you are missing the fact that it is not this easy to see.

Nowadays, as I am sure you know, the contradiction and control is hidden not in the sentence but within the noun. In words such as "freedom", "democracy", "control", etc. the actual meaning can be discerned only by the speaker of the word and the historical time period. Please read Marcuse on this topic. I don't know where you're getting the idea that I'm in favour of rewriting the past from.

Upon second reading, that makes more sense, however it would be clearer if this were the case. "Chinese Communism" can refer either to the ideology which the CCP claim to adhere themselves to, or it can refer to the actual state-capitalist bureaucracy as practiced in China.

I'm not so sure what is meant by it. Adherents of Marxism-Leninism utilise the method of dialectical materialism to analyse the past and to provide a model for the structure of the future based on the resolution of dialectical contradictions. The contradictions of feudalism led to capitalism, and the contradictions of capitalism (the value-form in particular, class antagonism) lead to Communism.

There is similar problems with the software that runs pacemakers and other such devices, in which the source is not made available. The protection of users against themselves is an easy example of the intrusion of technological rationality and production for the sake of production in capitalism in which the totality of experience, even life itself for such people, is administered living.

The most strange bugs have the strangest solutions. Just an hour ago I was trying to debug a queueConstructor (it returns a malloc'd pointer to a queue data structure), right after I finished implementing the operations for a stack data structure. Malloc was inexplicably causing the program to hang (I don't know if it's a segfault, I was using Windows). printfing around the constructor and inside it didn't work. I had included all the libraries I needed to, syntax was good, no warnings, I even changed the declarations from int var to int var.

It turns out the problem was that in main() just before I called queueConstructor, I added the item 633346 as an integer element in my stack data structure. Whether this overflowed the integer, I don't know. But I don't know why it would stop malloc for a different data structure stored in a different variable from working (perhaps it was occupying some memory that my queue wanted?).

This isn't the first time bugs like this happen, and as a novice programmer I really wish tools were better, or I knew how to use the tools. GDB available via CodeBlocks wasn't helpful.

>For a long time only banking websites and retail checkout pages were encrypted.

For my experience, this still holds in Japan, and I've heard in Korea.

>I'm sure the people in Eastern Europe who were conquered and enslaved by the Soviets wished that the Allies had kept rolling east.

Do you have a citation that this was the general feeling in those countries, or only among those people mistreated by the Soviets?

This is precisely where the criticism that the USSR was "state capitalist" came from; it operated as a corporation owning its own means of production, not a dictatorship of the proletariat. "All power to the soviets" faded rather quickly even under Lenin.

>but no, This Time It Will Be Different®.

Why do you think strawman thought-terminating cliches are an acceptable level of discourse? At best they serve to be distracting and needlessly hostile.

>but you keep insisting in trying again a system that again and again has proven itself to be horrible.

Not really; have you heard of Badiou's concept of the Communist Hypothesis? His argument is that Socialism, well, Communism has existed as an Idea for centuries, it is always the force to break down the "present state of things", it is the first element of society, the subversive one, to oppose the action of the State. To dismiss thirty years of research into Communism, creating branches such as anarchist Communism, communalism, feminist anarchism, Socialist technocracy and others with faux-empiricism is a little heavy handed in my view.

As for your support of the wonders of capitalism, neither I, nor Marx, Engels or any contemporary Communist denies its push to reduce poverty.

>shifting value from developed countries to developing countries.

"Shifting value" is a very strange way of saying that developing countries are being systematically exploited due to the low cost of labour because they have almost no training.

>but the current system has worked miracles

So did the feudal system, and in fact so did the Soviet system (which I do not by any means support).

>It can be improved

So can Socialism.

>but proposing a dramatic change to a system that ALWAYS results in bloody dictatorships makes no sense.

Capitalism itself was extremely dramatic, it came "soaked from head to toe in blood" as Marx put it. In fact, he dedicates two chapters of his magnum opus to detailing the bloody history of capitalism and the laws passed in Western Europe that allowed it to flourish.

>Every single time, over dozens of times, it resulted in bloody dictatorships.

It is very much worth studying why this has happened and what kind of methods can be used to avert it. Not only is Marxism-Leninism not the only form of Socialist praxis (neither is Marxism the only Socialist theory for that matter), but it's unwise to dismiss "failures" for the reason that they were authoritarian. Allende, Sankara's Burkina Faso, the Paris Commune, revolutionary Catalonia, and most recently Rojava are examples of the Socialist project experiencing some faults but not nearly as uncharitably as you are painting them here.

This kind of attitude from your parent commenter is extremely common, it is an artifact of ideology and the working of technological rationality into the consciousness. While the parent commenter probably believes he or she lives in a post-ideological world in which rationality has been obtained and found to be forever placed somewhere between right and left, a compromise of two extremes in which domination cannot be acknowledged because as Marx put it, Bentham reins, J.S Mill makes a strange comeback in the denial of structural effects and seeing totality. The kind of ignorance or blindness to the totality of society is well captured by P.W Bridman quoted by Marcuse:

>"We evidently know what we mean by length if we can tell what the length of any and every object is, and for the physicist nothing more is required. To find the length of an object, we have to perform certain physical operations. The concept of length is therefore fixed when the operations by which length is measured are fixed: that is, the concept of length involves as much and nothing more than the set of operations by which length is determined. In general, we mean by any concept nothing more than a set of operations; the concept is synonymous with the corresponding set of operations."

>Bridgman has seen the wide implications of this mode of thought for the society at large:

"To adopt the operational point of view involves much more than a mere restriction of the sense in which we understand 'concept,' but means a far-reaching change in all our habits of thought, in that we shall no longer permit ourselves to use as tools in our thinking concepts of which we cannot give an adequate account in terms of operations."

This is precisely correct. I think the replies to you are missing a very central point (speaking as if the accusation of advocating Marxian Communism was a serious charge, too). Perhaps the important authors about the relationship between media and capitalism are the Frankfurt School, in particular Herbert Marcuse's works. I'm reading his book One-Dimensional Man at the moment.

He's advocating exactly what you are: democratic deployment of technology. How this relates to media is very interesting, and the idea that these problems exist merely quantitatively different in a possible Socialist society is a fundamental lack of imagination for qualitative change.

The other people replying to you forget a key component of history - that rationality is not fixed. Technology has the capability to change what humans consider rational, rationality is a process, a movement in which different societies have different views. The current rationality of late capitalism is what Marcuse terms technological rationality. That is, the rationality of production. This kind of rationality is the production for the sake of production, for the sake of profit. After all, what is more rational than developing machinery, streamlining it, making it more efficient, increasing the role of mechanization in society? Hardly anyone would disagree that these are wonderful advancements - however with them, they have brought rationality of production which pervades society everywhere. This rationality is actually irrational, but few see this. Advertising, planned obsolescence, extreme marketing, the working of the market into the education systems are all simply parts of the production process. Just more costs.

Artwork is affected by technological rationality. The old pieces of art often had an alienating component, that is to say, they displayed a clear break from the state of things, and a hope for a different kind of future, the outcast, the mastermind thief, the unemployed person, etc. all fulfilled a role that was outside of the system of rationality, acting against it; even when these roles were not glorified, they existed as an opposition to the system. Marcuse notes that in modern artwork, this notion has largely disappeared; the villains and outcasts are no longer outcasts, they are within the system but in the bottom rungs, and their opposition cannot be seen as clever, but it is only misguided. Their opposition to the bourgeois system from within is always shown as a false opposition, a threat to our notions of freedom conferred by technological rationality.

When you hear Bach, Freud, Marx etc. in the supermarket, he is stripped of his alienating or any kind of critical dimension. An element of his truth has been taken away by the new consideration in the light of technological rationality, reduced and sublimated into the totality.

Socialism, what you are advocating, carries with it a very different set of rationality in which man is liberated from the freedom of being a free economic subject, free from the bounded freedom of the welfare state. The welfare state, which many proponents of "soft capitasm" advocate is another form of repression of the individual, but in different forms. It is administered living, the restriction and control of the free time made available by technological advancement and control over the intelligence necessary to comprehend self-determination.

When we advocate Socialism, we do not mean a central party committee deciding what to read, we mean the liberation of people from the restrictions of the new rationality which insists in its own mode of living through our leisure time, our work time, our sexual enjoyment and artistic pursuit.

It is entirely possible to be a skeptic of capitalism, its application and its effects while engaging in a market in which capitalists provide goods and services. It is also possible to do so and sell your own labour-power (which is what workers do). To say that one's skepticism or criticism is invalid because of participation is equivalent to saying that the feudal serf may not complain about his position: after all, his pick and clothes were provided by his lord. He ought to be grateful!

>Then there is the political criticism along the lines of George Orwell and some Luddites: technology is a tool for control and domination either by governments or evil capitalists.

I would not describe it like this. Proponents of technology but critics of the rationality it has created exist, most notably Marcuse. He criticises the development both in the capitaliat countries abd the USSR from a Marxist perspective in One-Dimensional Man, a widely acclaimed analysis of the rationality of creating false needs. Please read it, you may like it given your viewpoint. He very well integrates the last paragraph of your comment. Man is one-dimensional due to the rise of technological rationality in all expression, sexual, artistic and leisure. Nothing remains undominated, not even the great unknowns of nature and the human mind. Everything is integrated and rational through paradoxical irrationality of overproduction and false manufactured needs through advertisement.

Not only that, but popular stations have barriers which are erected between the platform and the track. Whether these are there to prevent suicide or merely stop someone from falling onto the track, I don't know.

This is precisely true. The ideological currents within bourgeois economy and politics do so much to promote false consciousness. On the other hand, most people do not view themselves as ideological, but is that not the paradox? To accept ideology, it must first be presented as non-ideological. The reader of the bourgeois papers, the person who is apathetic to his society's material conditions, the voter, the buyer of Starbucks because for each cup they give a few pennys to some improvished farmers. Their ideology is in fact simple: that they live in a post-ideological world.

When I say "company" I mean such an organisation as which employs wage labour to further the accumulation of capital; such an organisation could not exist under a Socialist mode of production, at least in my understanding. This is because it is firstly not wholly the "property" of the workers in general, because accumulation of capital requires exploitation and value added through M-C-M'; a cooperative still sells produce, so in my view this makes it inadequate for Socialism. Perhaps something like mutualism would better describe such an arrangement at the scale of a society.

It is entirely possible for people to create a super-capitalist, an image reflecting bourgeois nature, within a cooperative establishment.

Rubbish. The status of being a proletarian has nothing to do with in what form the labour is expended. Neither Marx nor pre-Marxist Socialists make any specific mention of manual labour. But if you really want to go this way, a growing number of the student population in Europe are turning to manual labour (Uber and Deliveroo).

Proletarians are and since their emergence the vast majority of the working population.

A democratically run company is still an owner of private property, the fact that citizens have a say is irrelevant to the idea that property is privately owned. This is evident in the case in which the State is an actor on the global stage and defends its private property from other nations; whether that be land or means of production.

You are correct. For this reason, if the bar for "Socialism" is "seizing property" then the US also qualifies for "Socialism". Few would call the US "Socialist". For this reason, I do not think that the main point being argued (that Venezuela is Socialist because it does not "respect private property) holds in this case.

I am not redefining the term. The common understanding of "Socialism" is far divorced from what Marx and Engels were talking about, or even their predecessors such as Owen or Ricardo. The confusion over the term is evident, especially in the United States, in which several people, even in this thread, claim that capitalism with a social democratic model is "Socialism". It is in my opinion very important to maintain purity in terminology for risk of losing something greater by society deciding that certain ideas are "too Utopian" without speaking it.

I also encourage you to use the original definition of the term.

Private property is not determined by its owner, but rather its function. Ordinary people can own private property, such as land which is taxed or rented out, means of production upon which people are employed etc. It is a fact that the Venezuelan state owns private property, and also that they employ people in exchange for wages. This is no different at all to what Apple or GM does in the United States.

It is also possible for society in general to act as a capitalist. The way Marx and other Socialists use the term "private property" is perhaps different to its modern meaning. Proudhon writes,

>There are different kinds of property: 1. Property pure and simple, the dominant and seigniorial power over a thing; or, as they term it, naked property. 2. Possession. “Possession,” says Duranton, “is a matter of fact, not of right.” Toullier: “Property is a right, a legal power; possession is a fact.” The tenant, the farmer, the commandité, the usufructuary, are possessors; the owner who lets and lends for use, the heir who is to come into possession on the death of a usufructuary, are proprietors. If I may venture the comparison: a lover is a possessor, a husband is a proprietor.

Naming an example of a seizure of private property does little to show against the idea that the State respects and protects private property. I do not deny that is has seized private property, however private property in many cases continues unimpeded and protected by the police and the State in general (and yes, it is possible for the State to own private property too).

It is possible to name examples of other countries seizing property or stealing from innocent people. Neither of these examples disprove the idea that these states respect and defend private property, or that they respect and defend personal property. The US has seized the personal property of many people. Does this mean that the US police do not act to punish people who steal?

It's also important to note that the definition of Socialism as being merely state ownership of most or all production and "complete management of the economy" is a vulgar definition, sometimes even expounded by Socialists themselves. On its own, this would simply be an economy with all the features of capitalism, including but not limited to:

* wage labour being the dominant mode of sustenance

* a class structure still visible (in fact, is seems as though such a "Socialist" mode of production would have even more well defined classes than our current mode)

* private property, but rather than being owned by capitalists it is owned by the state

So "workers owning" means of production is not adequate for Socialism. Rather, there must be some kind of shift in terms of how society functions in general. There should be no trade, as trade is a side-effect of the operation of the law of value and exchange value, a dialectical contradiction only found in capitalism. There should be no state, as the state is what exists to defend private property and prop up class interests. Production should be entirely for useful qualities. All productive power of society should be owned by workers (this is your "owning the means of production") either by representation of a government (which is not a state, the distinction is important) or via some other apparatus.

For these reasons I am extremely skeptical when people describe countries such as Venezuela, which operate as capitalists, owners of property, on a global scale as "Socialist". If it is Socialism then it is certainly no Marxian Socialism.

Venezuela also respects private property, just to a somewhat lesser extent than other countries. It's important to note that the state's protection of such property is to be expected in this case, in which it is the government which acts as a capitalist itself on the global scale and on the internal scale (such as by employing wage labour).

There are numerous examples of people and businesses which own private property and employ people in exchange for wages in Venezuela. The fact that such activity is highly taxed or limited is irrelevant to the point about private property being defended and respected. For it is private property which can ensure the cycle of M-C-M' which we see respected and the functioning of money as the general equivalent form of Value.

On their own they don't mean anything, however the first four may appear and indeed do as multiple words on their own, or as part of other words. Japanese has many homophones.

This is partially true. Economics originated in the field of political economy, which was at the time for lack of a better word, bourgeois. The political economists existed in a sense only to advise the government and monarchies on economic policy. When Marx set out to critique this field in his magnum opus which took thirty years of study to complete, Capital, he criticised them of obsessing over superficialities and only observing appearance rather than to drop down to the essences of capitalism.

In this sense, economics is inherently political and ideological, its anathema is Marxism which is a critique of this political and ideological field, but not a substitute of its own. It is not an economic theory, nor a political economic theory, it is a method of critique which is anti-ideological.

The GPL license does not support that notion either.

Nobody is denying the freedom for commercial use is a core part of open source software. However no developer has to make a certain business model easy for you, and I think it is well within the correct view to discourage such a business practice which restricts the freedom of users by making that impossible but allowing a "competitor" (if we really must think of it this way) to generate "economic value" (i.e selling open source software, which the GPL does allow you to do).

The freedom debate is unending. Personally I am very skeptical of all forms of economic freedom, as frequently they have the result of pidgeonholing people and their freedom is restricted.