Was talking to a classmate about Cuba and told him how embargoes and meddling is one of the main reasons that Cuba is so isolated and behind in many fields compared to other countries.

He snarkily asks why Cuba cares about sanctions since they're communist and shouldn't care about capitalist trade. I reply with something like "because they're marxist, and marxists don't believe in utopia." He gives me a blank stare so I continued talking about how the post cold war system is capitalist, so regardless of what you truly believe in, you have to play according to their rules. If the the system was socialist, then any remaining capitalist country will have to play by the socialists' rules or be left out.

He then says that's proof that Cuba is a failed state because they can't produce everything domestically and need to rely on other countries and that capitalists wouldn't need to play by anyone's rules. I told him that if Taiwan became communist or was reunited with China, the US would be on its knees begging to have access to its technology (okay, I didn't say those exact words because I was trying to stay away from snark). He had no idea what I was talking about regarding Taiwan's tech, so I then brought up how there are more failing capitalist countries in Africa and the Middle East and Latin America than there are existing socialist countries - which for the most part, are doing much better.

He then went on about how religious people are stupid and how Islam is the cause of most of the major conflicts of the modern world without any sort of outside influence. At this point I just chuckled and he ended the conversation. :wall-talk: He's a self proclaimed liberal, though I believe it.

Guess his major

  • nmsl [none/use name]
    ·
    3 years ago

    what is your point? I can say something ridiculous like Hitler was the choice of the German proletariat and that national socialism is the inevitable result of imperialist capitalism and is the final mode of production. Is this now more historically materialist? You will use evidence to refute this claim, as you do with all ridiculous claims like "cuba is a communist shithole“, but "I am materialist and you are not" is not a valid evidence nor conclusion.

    • Ideology [she/her]
      ·
      3 years ago

      Marx and Engels just threw historical facts out there and called them materialist all the time? The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon is just a description of the conditions leading to the rise of Napoleon, is the work itself more materialist than a summary of it? Are you saying we have to have a thesis and an editor to use the word?

      At this point the word itself has evolved, as language does, to refer to history viewed through a marxist lens such that the facts are not distorted to liberal ideology. This has necessarily been in response to a political climate that increasingly lost itself in Baudrillard-style breakdowns of reality and propaganda through cybernetics. Making prescriptive claims about word usage are about as useful here as Spain trying to enforce standard Spanish in Latin America.

      • nmsl [none/use name]
        ·
        3 years ago

        Marx and Engels was creating original work that disrupted mainstream consensus. They have wrote hundreds of pages on what materialism is/isnt and that is why when they used it, it actually meant something. There is no point in bringing up materialism when you are on a website for entertainment, neither is knowing history beyond propaganda particularly materialist. I am arguing this because I view this as a case of marxism being turned into a spectacle on the internet and diluted to the point of being useless and harmless. Whatever I agree with is materialist and marxist, what I percieve as reality is material conditions, everyone around me is a brainwashed liberal and only I am smart enough to be marxist. I then go on the internet to post about how I dunked on delusional liberals and lament at how stupid people are and how humanity is done for. Marxism is not for this.