Would Marx have been a Leftbook Dengoid if he were alive today?
maybe some of the Utopian socialists Marx and Engels were dunking on? (although Socialism: Utopian and Scientific was Engels, not sure if Marx did his own dunking separately, I'm not really well read on theory)
Some loud guy who started hearing about socialism at the same time that untreated syphilis and mercury based medicines started to get to his mind.
"leftbook dengoid" wtf stop spending time coming up with new dismissive buzzwords and try to talk to people like a person.
it's a reference to the old-timey racial terms (like caucasoid), so I guess it's more racist (although seeing as how that racial classification was also used to denote certain people as mentally inferior, it's also kind of ableist-by-proxy, so it's a double whammy)
I actually kind of like the occasional usage of "westoid", but yeah, it definitely has some problematic implications
we'll all be metroids after the nukes drop and we end up in the Metro 2033 timeline
It 100% is based on m*ngoloid, which is a common ableist slur as well as being race science shit.
wearing my buss down lenin medallion to shows
2 bright ass rubies for eyes lmao
Really curious as to what this posters arguments against the quote are. Cause, y'know, I reckon they're objectively wrong.
Not that poster, but as presented the quote comes off as being overly deterministic. Not all societies before the steam engine relied on slavery, agriculture existed for a long time before serfdom did, etc. I don't think expanding on Marx to say that not all societies followed the European model of development means that he was wrong, however.
Fair, and that's totally a valid thing to say. I just wouldnt expect their analysis to be more than "BUT MARX BAD" and thats it.
Cover me, I'm going in!
serfdom cannot be abolished without improved agriculture
This depends on what is meant by "improved agriculture". The first 3000 years of agriculture had very little to do with any nobility or serfdom. By the time we see archaeological records of stratified civilization, the civilization in question has usually been exclusively farming for over a millennium. Maize and broccoli each go back longer than kings in the lands where they were developed, and each would have taken hundreds of years of selective breeding to develop.
European-style agriculture was far inferior to what else existed around the world, and this was probably always the case. For instance, Europeans were using square/flat plow tines over 500 years after the Chinese developed triangular plow tines. Polyculture systems of First Nations were far more productive and sustainable than the model of farming that European explorers and migrants brought with them, and this was immediately apparent when they were put into practice side-by-side.
It's worth noting that Marx's (and Engels') most prominent source on the equivalent of anthropology was Lewis Henry Morgan, a quack who entirely fabricated his accounts of indigenous societies, and basically wrote the book on cultural appropriation and caricatures.
"Marx wrote" isn't the trump card that many people think it is. And the assertion that we need to develop technology to a modern extent in order to provide for people's needs is rather weak and myopic. For instance, you don't need to burn coal to heat your home if you have thick adobe walls (Neolithic technology) and a good masonry oven that runs on wood (Roman-era technology).
there definitely are legitimate critiques that can be made of the original Marx quote, but a guy calling people "dengoids" is probably not the type to actually make them
Yeah lol.
A whole lot of the limitations and shortcomings of communist parties have actually made me more of an AES apologist. As Yugopnik (I think) said in a recent Deprogram episode, if you shoot someone in the foot and he starts running really fast, you wonder what he could have done if he hadn't been shot in the first place.
yeah :deeper-sadness: ... like, most AES states have probably had occasional excesses with repression, but if I had all the imperial powers pointing their guns (and later nukes) at me, knowing that if I fuck up I'm possibly condemning all my people to suffering under capitalist exploitation, I don't really rank my chances for not becoming a paranoid mess particularly high. The Indonesian socialists tried being nice and peaceful, and they literally got genocided for their trouble
I listened to the Behind The Bastards episode on Trofim Lysenko, and besides how it happened both to the Soviets and then to the Chinese 20 years later, in a way that their state ideologies were very prone to, my takeaway was that the account suggests that all the rest of the famine deaths were few and accidental.
Me 6 years ago: "Marxist states have all failed or been corrupted."
Me today: "Although they run many risks of power structures being easily wiped out or turning into a political class, Marxist states have provided some of the best examples of governments that serve their people."
Yeah, if you actually look at their history objectively, without all the anti-communist brainworms that most of us have gotten fed our entire lives, you just have to be fucking impressed at what they've managed to accomplish.
The end of the Soviet Union is a great example, with the massive decrease in life expectancy that followed - even in its last years, when it was definitely a deeply flawed and troubled state, it was still massively superior to the capitalism that followed. If even "failed" and "corrupted" socialism is still just so much better for the average person than capitalism, then it makes one wonder about what these countries would have been able to achieve if they didn't have to deal with the constant pressure and threats from capitalist states - what would the Soviets have been able to do if they didn't have to spend so much money on the military in order to keep up with the Americans? Or if we go even earlier - what if they hadn't lost such a massive segment of their population in WW2? We had this thread some days ago, where someone brought up how the war completely wrecked the party's younger cadres, which contributed a lot to the later gerontocracy - how would things have been if all these young men (and women) hadn't died at the hands of the Nazis?
