• Hey everyone, staff have documented a list of banned content and subject matter that we feel are not consistent with site values, and don't make sense to host discussion of on Famiboards. This list (and the relevant reasoning per item) is viewable here.
  • Do you have audio editing experience and want to help out with the Famiboards Discussion Club Podcast? If so, we're looking for help and would love to have you on the team! Just let us know in the Podcast Thread if you are interested!

Discussion Socialism Discussion Thread

Reader mode
Seacat said:
Not speaking on Hasan specifically either as I have very little awareness of him, but I just wanted to add that with some of these figures there is also a more malicious element of both anti-communist sentiment and/or distortion of anarchist principles (if you are on twitter or reddit you have no doubt run across young "anarchists" essentially arguing for social democracy). There is a tendency to reinforce a false idea of theory as dogma, to discourage viewers from making any effort at engaging with it, to inoculate them against more radical ideas so that they remain in the reformist camp, oblivious to arguments against that position and unwilling to hear them. Which of course also means that these people aren't organizing, at least outside of the bourgeois apparatus.

All that is to say, I just hope that people be careful with such figures and maintain a desire/effort at being properly informed outside of them. It's important to push forward figures who do draw from theory and history, and who do attempt to educate their audience from an informed perspective as well, like the names you mentioned. On Twitch specifically I would add to them TheKultureTV, TheReadArmy and PinkoTheBear as well.
Click to expand...
Yeah the American left is still very anticommunist at its core, it's hard to shake decades of nonstop propaganda. Discussing Chinese politics in "leftist" spaces is almost impossible because of this (that and racism). I have a lot of anarchist tendencies myself but I find it dispiriting how quickly Marxist-Leninists and anarchists will be at each others' throats in leftist spaces. That sort of sentiment is poison to real organizing.
GamerJM said:
I don't really understand why the politics thread on both here and Era/old GAF trended towards this weird neoliberalism with a doomerish tint to it.
Click to expand...
Neoliberalism is the default ideology of the imperial core + the class makeup of the average poster. The older sites were made up of largely upper middle class intelligentsia and wanna be pundits. Also not to put too fine of a point on it but most of the mods/admins in power on those sites leaned that direction as well so they created a forum culture that favors that outlook.
 
GamerJM said:
I don't really understand why the politics thread on both here and Era/old GAF trended towards this weird neoliberalism with a doomerish tint to it.
Click to expand...
Because neoliberals can't think outside the box, the only method of action for them is 'voting', which is stupid.
 
Called already? A UK election wouldn't be done this quick and you guys are hours away from it even being the 3rd there.
 
Gashead said:
Called already? A UK election wouldn't be done this quick and you guys are hours away from it even being the 3rd there.
Click to expand...
The California election a couple of months ago was called relatively quickly. Sometimes the gap is big enough that it can be called.
 
The fact that India Walton is getting cheated out of being mayor of Buffalo. The whole write-in to probably elect the person who lost the primary seems so hypocritical for neoliberals
 
Remember when the Democrats promised $2000 checks and then gave us less while gaslighting us about their promise?

Anyways I wonder why they keep losing races they should win.
 
While the system is always going to favor reactionaries because of the senate, the media, and the electoral college, I really think that economic populism could be the solution to losing all these elections to Republicans race baiting populism
 
Branduil said:
Remember when the Democrats promised $2000 checks and then gave us less while gaslighting us about their promise?

Anyways I wonder why they keep losing races they should win.
Click to expand...

But 1200 + 600 = 2000!

</s>


Legit, I know some people who still are missing part of it or all of it, so it's infuriating they ran on that.
 
It's a shame America only has two parties. Because Democrats have tested my patience at this point and I will never vote Republican. I feel bad that I'm about to give up on voting and I've only ever voted once before...
 
CloverNotes said:
It's a shame America only has two parties. Because Democrats have tested my patience at this point and I will never vote Republican. I feel bad that I'm about to give up on voting and I've only ever voted once before...
Click to expand...
At least you have some semblance of "democracy".

In Europe you have 1001 parties. 49% will vote for 1 party and something like 5.6% will vote for 9 other parties and guess who wins? The coalition of nobodies that hardly anyone voted for because they banded together to go against the larger block. Then you get years of fuck all happening because they argue and then it's time for another election. It took Belgium 16 months to sort out their last government.

Here in the UK having more choice also doesn't help. You have the Tories who are deranged scum out for their mates, Labour who are war criminal, child rape enablers out for anyone but their mates, the Lib Dems who are lying, flip flopping policy breakers and the Greens who you'd think were an environmental party but care more about bringing the 3rd world to the 1st world than the planet. I've no idea how causing more people to be more polluting helps the environment but you have to vote for them because the others are worse.
 
Gashead said:
At least you have some semblance of "democracy".

In Europe you have 1001 parties. 49% will vote for 1 party and something like 5.6% will vote for 9 other parties and guess who wins? The coalition of nobodies that hardly anyone voted for because they banded together to go against the larger block. Then you get years of fuck all happening because they argue and then it's time for another election. It took Belgium 16 months to sort out their last government.

Here in the UK having more choice also doesn't help. You have the Tories who are deranged scum out for their mates, Labour who are war criminal, child rape enablers out for anyone but their mates, the Lib Dems who are lying, flip flopping policy breakers and the Greens who you'd think were an environmental party but care more about bringing the 3rd world to the 1st world than the planet. I've no idea how causing more people to be more polluting helps the environment but you have to vote for them because the others are worse.
Click to expand...
Yikes... I wonder what the best solution is? If having only two parties makes it so that sub groups aren't heard and having too many parties also makes it that sub groups aren't heard. Is there a balance? Do we even need parties?
 
Gashead said:
At least you have some semblance of "democracy".

In Europe you have 1001 parties. 49% will vote for 1 party and something like 5.6% will vote for 9 other parties and guess who wins? The coalition of nobodies that hardly anyone voted for because they banded together to go against the larger block. Then you get years of fuck all happening because they argue and then it's time for another election. It took Belgium 16 months to sort out their last government.

Here in the UK having more choice also doesn't help. You have the Tories who are deranged scum out for their mates, Labour who are war criminal, child rape enablers out for anyone but their mates, the Lib Dems who are lying, flip flopping policy breakers and the Greens who you'd think were an environmental party but care more about bringing the 3rd world to the 1st world than the planet. I've no idea how causing more people to be more polluting helps the environment but you have to vote for them because the others are worse.
Click to expand...
7phm5nm49qm01.jpg
 
CloverNotes said:
Yikes... I wonder what the best solution is? If having only two parties makes it so that sub groups aren't heard and having too many parties also makes it that sub groups aren't heard. Is there a balance? Do we even need parties?
Click to expand...
I was exaggerating but no one is really heard on a national level, plenty of Mp's get involved in local issues, even lots of the ruling Tories still do. It's how one of them got murdered the other week, because they'd decided to go meet the community and someone from outside it killed them.

Power sharing is always weird though. We had the Tories and the DUP, a Northern Irish anti same sex marriage, anti abortion party join forces to make a majority even though same sex marriage and abortion are legal in the remaining UK. And even then they voted against each other over Brexit.
 
Finished the book I was reading, it was kind of surprising that it wasn´t a book from Spain and that it was written in the 80s.

The conclusions of the author are incredibly interesting, it even does a little analysis of some articles of the Soviet Union Constitution, which actually explained a question I had about how property would work on a socialist/communist system, in summary property still exists but its relegated to only "consumable" goods and private property of non-agriculture terrain.

It also kind of gave perspective of why the "red scare" happened in the US, the author gives a little of his views on the political climate at that time and he pretty much concludes that the Soviet Union was not showing any weakness, that it seemed that they were on the way to become the first economic power in the world, while the US seemed to be on decline because of JFK, MLK assassinations and the Watergate scandal, though he casts doubts on his own preditcions since the Soviet Union didn´t really have much public data (while the US did have it) and food scarcity was a known problem they had.

The last paragraph was the author warning about climate change with the author concluding that "world leaders seem to be taking fatalistic suicidal stance" on that topic, which gave me a little bit of dread not gonna lie, seeing as the book was written in the 80s.

Though I understand that the book was a summary of each ideology, so inevitably some nuance of each ideology would be lost, the author kind of foreshadowed through the whole book communism (to give a bit of context, this is the first time I was reading a political book to try to understand political ideology in general, so I was completely spoiler free [the idea of using the term "spoiler free" referring to being ignorant of history is really funny to me] on the history of most political ideologies), and couldn´t understand how a "dictactorship of the proletariat" could be a good idea of transition of power, like first what would guarantee a dictatorship to actually follow through on that, and second I was perplexed at unironically using a ditatorship as a "good" thing for the transition of power.

So, when the communist chapter arrived (it was the fourth to last chapter of the book), the history of it kind of showed my suspitions on that (using dictatorship for transition), being sadly mostly right, while the author mentioned the positive aspects of that regime (Erradication of analphabetism, education) the negative aspects were cruel, the author implies that company bosses were given a quota and that if they didn´t accomplish them they were "liquidated", that since the one party system was the representation of the proletariat, people that didn´t agree with it were put in asylums since "if you didn´t agree with them you must must have something wrong in the head".

Though honestly the history of capitalism and liberalism was incredibly disturbing, the author explained how some people literally lived in mines, didn´t see the sun for most of their lives to the point that if they saw the sun the damaged their eyes badly, and how the "law" of "offer and demand" is incredibly flawed, to the point that the author explains that the Adam Smith book was mostly a criticism of capitalism, but it seems it was used to make things worse.

Since I studied law, I can´t help but see all of this through that lense, and honestly the discovery that democracy is a political ideology by itself (I honestly didn´t see that because as the book also explains, liberalism was introduced using democracy, so I have always had the confusion between those two), was kind of a revelation, for most of the book I honestly couldn´t see how any of the ideologies could actually work from a law perspective.

It wasn´t until the third to last chapter that critical socialism / reformist socialism / democratic socialism, was introduced that an ideology kind of made sense, though it also has a lot of flaws.

Demo-socialism is kind of a middle ground, according to the book it doesn´t see itself as a mid-state between capitalism and communism, but as its own thing, it rejects the conclusions of marxism (economic determinism) and pretty much says that people can change stuff because (this quote made me laugh a lot) "after all, mankind has a head" ("despues de todo, los hombres tienen cabeza"), though because of its flaws it also kind of led to the rise of nazism in Germany, so yeah that is also rough.

History as shown by this book was really depressing.

So yeah, I have been looking for more books that study political ideology, I am novice on this stuff.

TLDR: sorry for the long post.
 


This is a good example of what I'm talking about earlier with these internet celebrity socialists - Hasan is clearly just shadowboxing against a leftist strawman to reinforce voting for neoliberal Democrats. I don't take any socialist seriously who thinks not voting for center-right politicians is some sort of moral failure.
 
Gashead said:
At least you have some semblance of "democracy".

In Europe you have 1001 parties. 49% will vote for 1 party and something like 5.6% will vote for 9 other parties and guess who wins? The coalition of nobodies that hardly anyone voted for because they banded together to go against the larger block. Then you get years of fuck all happening because they argue and then it's time for another election. It took Belgium 16 months to sort out their last government.

Here in the UK having more choice also doesn't help. You have the Tories who are deranged scum out for their mates, Labour who are war criminal, child rape enablers out for anyone but their mates, the Lib Dems who are lying, flip flopping policy breakers and the Greens who you'd think were an environmental party but care more about bringing the 3rd world to the 1st world than the planet. I've no idea how causing more people to be more polluting helps the environment but you have to vote for them because the others are worse.
Click to expand...
The problem with the election system in the UK is, that it's entirely FPTP, where you just have a bunch of local elections and the one candidate with the most votes, not the majority, wins that constituency. It doesn't resemble a national popular vote at all and that is why one big party can win so easily.

Even thinking that the system in the US, where single states can fuck around with voting rights, where the supreme court is another political arm, where you also have this FPTP system, that invtes for gerrymandering, where seats per states are proportional-ish and not proportional, over time just lead to a two party system where just a few people in a close senate/house dictate what can and can not be done. That is not a proper democracy.

I for example like that system we have inb Germany, but it needs to be reworked so that the parliament doesn't grow even more and I would welcome to lower the electoral threshold to 2%
 
Hello all - I wouldn't say I'm the most well versed in theory, but I do know that the capitalistic system that we have does not work for the people on many levels and we need change. I appreciate this thread's existence for its discussion, but I originally didn't plan on participating in this thread so soon beyond following and learning. However, I ended up up having a thought and I was curious to see what people in here thought about it.

I am not a supporter of cryptocurrency, NFTs, etc. But corporations are quickly trying to jump onto to it like it's some trend. It's frustrating, for sure, but almost predictable. But then there are things like this - Alessandra Biaggi, progressive New York State senator (and my former representative in state congress, just moved out of her district) posting this in regards to the newly elected NYC mayor taking his first three paychecks in bitcoin:


You ask me if crypto is a good thing, particularly outside of the capitalistic system, and I emphatically say no - I can vaguely understand an argument about a decentralized currency taking power away from a specific organization/government and putting it in the hands of individuals, but the environmental impacts of blockchain technology due to their massive energy consumption are well known. Worsening an already declining environment has drastic repercussions, especially for the most vulnerable global populations. For something like an NFT, I think it's a super cut and dry case, but even for just crypto itself and ignoring the obvious environmental issue...pivoting to crypto just feels like people accruing and hoarding another form of capital? Survive in the system we got, I kinda get it, but it feels like it just maintains the bad system we already got.

So I see a statement like Biaggi's and I get immensely frustrated. People vote individuals like her into positions of power in an attempt to enact change (not to say voting is the only thing we can do, but still). But if even the supposed champions of progressive politics are jumping onto this, then that's further signs that something is immensely wrong with how we handle things. But does anyone else have any thoughts?
 
VolcanicDynamo said:
Hello all - I wouldn't say I'm the most well versed in theory, but I do know that the capitalistic system that we have does not work for the people on many levels and we need change. I appreciate this thread's existence for its discussion, but I originally didn't plan on participating in this thread so soon beyond following and learning. However, I ended up up having a thought and I was curious to see what people in here thought about it.

I am not a supporter of cryptocurrency, NFTs, etc. But corporations are quickly trying to jump onto to it like it's some trend. It's frustrating, for sure, but almost predictable. But then there are things like this - Alessandra Biaggi, progressive New York State senator (and my former representative in state congress, just moved out of her district) posting this in regards to the newly elected NYC mayor taking his first three paychecks in bitcoin:


You ask me if crypto is a good thing, particularly outside of the capitalistic system, and I emphatically say no - I can vaguely understand an argument about a decentralized currency taking power away from a specific organization/government and putting it in the hands of individuals, but the environmental impacts of blockchain technology due to their massive energy consumption are well known. Worsening an already declining environment has drastic repercussions, especially for the most vulnerable global populations. For something like an NFT, I think it's a super cut and dry case, but even for just crypto itself and ignoring the obvious environmental issue...pivoting to crypto just feels like people accruing and hoarding another form of capital? Survive in the system we got, I kinda get it, but it feels like it just maintains the bad system we already got.

So I see a statement like Biaggi's and I get immensely frustrated. People vote individuals like her into positions of power in an attempt to enact change (not to say voting is the only thing we can do, but still). But if even the supposed champions of progressive politics are jumping onto this, then that's further signs that something is immensely wrong with how we handle things. But does anyone else have any thoughts?
Click to expand...

It's frustrating when you see so-called progressives enforcing some of the worst aspects of modern society. I understand why they do it and a part of me doesn't want to dislike them for it, but it's hard not to do so because they keep bring those things to the forefront without mentioning the fundamental issues with their existence.

One thing that people rarely mention about crytpo is how is another disgusting way to transfer wealth from the poor to the rich. The rich never lose out in the end no matter how much they invest while someone poor may lose everything in one day because people keep telling them to invest, invest, invest even when they barely have any savings but they of course FOMO because the media and personalities only scream about the positives. And when someone loses everything they just shrug their shoulders and scream that's how the game goes sometimes.

For me it's just another grift that extracts wealth from the desperate poor to the pockets of the rich.
 
Brawlz said:
What're people's opinions on democratic socialism vs socialistic democracy?
Click to expand...
You mean social democracy?

Social democracy is a nice thing for people who live in the imperial core, but it's still just capitalism, just a nicer flavor of it that exports its suffering and exploitation to the global south, and it still reproduces the material conditions that cause alienation of labor even within those social democracies.

Democratic socialism is a nice idea but there's no real means to implement it, at least in America. I'm a communist, meaning I want to see a global society that embraces communism as the next phase of society beyond capitalism. I have no problem working with demsoc people and think it would be a nice thing to achieve, but it's by no means an endpoint for me.
 
How would we get to global communism? I can't figure it out. Like an Austrian sheep farmer and an Australian sheep farmer are both doing the same role but the Aussie could do it on such a larger scale that they wouldn't be comparable or rewarded the same, so you'd have the same "rich/poor" mechanic but under a different name.
 
Gashead said:
How would we get to global communism? I can't figure it out. Like an Austrian sheep farmer and an Australian sheep farmer are both doing the same role but the Aussie could do it on such a larger scale that they wouldn't be comparable or rewarded the same, so you'd have the same "rich/poor" mechanic but under a different name.
Click to expand...
There are multiple schools of thought on it. A Marxist-Leninist might say revolution, an anarcho-syndicalist might say through democratizing labor industries. If you want the former POV, State And Revolution goes into it pretty thoroughly.

The example you’re describing is one where it would be expected that the two farmers are expected to have the same output. “From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.”

The amount of labor necessary to keep s global society functional is a fraction of what is being done today. You wouldn’t need redundant sheep farmers selling wool that will go to products that sit in warehouses indefinitely.
 
Mekanos said:


This is a good example of what I'm talking about earlier with these internet celebrity socialists - Hasan is clearly just shadowboxing against a leftist strawman to reinforce voting for neoliberal Democrats. I don't take any socialist seriously who thinks not voting for center-right politicians is some sort of moral failure.
Click to expand...

Well i think he's just shitposting but get an alt if you wanna shitpost cause you sound like lib and no one has time for your lib takes
 
Last edited:
Brawlz said:
What're people's opinions on democratic socialism vs socialistic democracy?
Click to expand...
Social Democracy = If your a socdem your still an imperialist and a capitalist and i am neither of those. I also find that soc dems will side with liberals over socialists every time so.

Democratic Socialism = Preferable to capitalism but i am a communist so i would prefer communism personally.
 
Last edited:
Brock Reiher said:

🥴
Click to expand...

I'm sorry if it's for a Democratic Party that's not the US one but I always found the bi-party system and delegate voting kinda... Stupid? Even if we consider softer democracies like here in Brazil, we have multiple parties. We actually had a two polar system... During the military dictatorship 🥴.
And that wasn't even actually done as the only party in charge of national decisions was the military one.
It's awkwardly similar to the Dem/Rep as the only actual options were for democratic liberal right or flat out fascist far right.
 
gogosox82 said:
Social Democracy = If your a socdem your still an imperialist and a capitalist and i am neither of those. I also find that soc dems will side with liberals over socialists every time so.

Democratic Socialism = Preferable to capitalism but i am a communist so i would prefer communism personally.
Click to expand...
Pretty much this... Not trying to bring any polemics here but exactly what better living, human rights and social justice the working class of the world gets of being exploited by gigantic imperialistic states like USA and Israel???
I'm kinda off some trendy lib left stuff of glorifying some minor social advance in rich countries or some welfare state thing that they do to the population after doing it years and keeping doing it moreso with the rich, and even worse with it coming at the cost of exploring the poor.
I mean every now and then we might see articles of how the economy got affected by something and how "interesting" it is that there are like 100 new billionaires despite global pandemic and everyone receiving less, or global warming, starving, extinctions and so on... But the name of the ox was always there: capitalism. Is not just that capitalism is not good to the ones being explored, is that capitalism is incompatible with life on earth. There's no way we can fix this system without taking away the roots of the very system. There's no way we can save our forests and animals from extinction without taking away the fabled freedom over "property" of big farmers. There's no way we end starving, save children and poor countries and end slavery-analogue exploitation without taxing the rich, offering base global salary, universal healthcare and reforme and redistribute land.

It's really like the title of Rosa Luxemburg's book that I've yet to read:
It's socialism or barbarism.
 
gogosox82 said:
Social Democracy = If your a socdem your still an imperialist and a capitalist and i am neither of those. I also find that soc dems will side with liberals over socialists every time so.

Democratic Socialism = Preferable to capitalism but i am a communist so i would prefer communism personally.
Click to expand...
I dunno if I see democratic socialism as an obstacle to communism, just a less efficient stepping stone to a... dare I say it... democratic communism.
 
I would say as a communist I have solidarity with democratic socialists such as Evo Morales. As I mentioned earlier, factional in-fighting is mostly counter productive at this stage. The goal isn't to build communism by Christmas, it's to build a movement that can grow from generation to generation.
 
Mekanos said:
I would say as a communist I have solidarity with democratic socialists such as Evo Morales. As I mentioned earlier, factional in-fighting is mostly counter productive at this stage. The goal isn't to build communism by Christmas, it's to build a movement that can grow from generation to generation.
Click to expand...
I tend to agree. And much of the fighting is not something that will ever go away. No ONE socialist ideal is likely to win out over any other and sweep the globe. Much like nearly every part of the world struggles over the preferred form of liberalism, there will be similar struggles with the variations of socialism/communism/anarchism/etc.
But to get there, to the point where that's possible and that struggle isn’t pointless, the goal has to be making socialism into the default fundamental economic principle instead of capitalist liberalism, and you can never get there through preaching global mono-economics; liberals learned that truth a long time ago and it helps keep it as the status quo, making disparate ideas of capitalist liberalism into mere interoperable differences in structure.
 
Last edited:
Terrell said:
I dunno if I see democratic socialism as an obstacle to communism, just a less efficient stepping stone to a... dare I say it... democratic communism.
Click to expand...
I agree with that honestly. I just was stating that i wouldn't be satisfied with democratic socialism.
 
Well this thread has been more active than I expected. Nice to see some new faces here.
 
The October Revolution began 104 years ago today btw. Russia was still using the outdated Julian calendar, and they would not officially transition into the Gregorian one we frame our reference of time around until February 1918.

You cannot deny the impact Lenin, Trotsky, and the rest of the Bolsheviks had on the world no matter what you think of them. Don't idolize them, don't demonize them, just study them.

fd6afef6263a8c816e57b409fcbb0c82.jpg
 
GamerJM said:
I don't really understand why the politics thread on both here and Era/old GAF trended towards this weird neoliberalism with a doomerish tint to it.
Click to expand...
Neoliberalism has very little to offer and those threads are full of regular posters who have extremely myopic world views and who are very privileged
 
GamerJM said:
I don't really understand why the politics thread on both here and Era/old GAF trended towards this weird neoliberalism with a doomerish tint to it.
Click to expand...

Gaming enthusiast boards are primarily going to be populated by nerds who have enough money to toss around for an expensive hobby and who get locked into a mindset of rooting for companies. They like capitalism. It works for them. It gives them what they want, and they believe socialism would take away their games and entertainment.

Within the liberal bourgeois reality, however, it is increasingly apparent that the world is falling to shit and that it can't be solved with liberal bourgeois methods. You can only VOOT so much while getting so little in return, while the fascist-adjacent enemy does what it wants and gets away with it continually.
 
Ostia said:
Neoliberalism has very little to offer and those threads are full of regular posters who have extremely myopic world views and who are very privileged
Click to expand...
also capitalist realism just working as intended. "its easier to envision the end of the world before the end of capitalism"
 
Reader mode
You must log in or register to reply here.


Back
Top Bottom