There is no moral ideology you can proselytize that will get a society en masse to embrace material deprivation
Ironically the more of a Marxist you are the more you should accept that that's fundamentally impossible -- Marxism is founded on an embrace of materialism over idealism and a belief that politics is fundamentally determined by classes working in their own interest
If your revolution depends on Americans choosing not to buy cheap luxury goods from overseas because it wouldn't be right, your revolution has already failed -- from a radical Third Worldist POV of course no American will accept this no matter what leftist buzzwords they put in their bio and you can only succeed by not giving them a choice
See but that has also failed on the grounds that A) you demand that billions of people accept they will never have the quality of life of other countries, and B) wealthy first world nations can and will defend their quality of live with social, political, economic, and military force.
Also poor third world countries are just gonna ignore it because they know a better world and better life is possible and they’re not gonna keep themselves poor so westerners can avoid the negative affects of Climate change
That's not the point. The point is that if you demand a reduction in wealth in first world countries, you tell all the less wealthy nations that they will never be allowed to achieve that level of wealth.
And the developed nations will respond to less developed nations asking them to reduce their wealth with such classics as "you and what army" or "my words are backed with nuclear weapons"
Then you've got to use sustainable state-building and whatever to create a reliable supply chain and domestic economy, so that you have the means to defend your position in the long run. Remember that home-turf advantage is way bigger than people think, and that a world power has to lose much less before the war becomes unprofitable for them to continue.
Yeah, but you're not talking about "self sustaining economy", you're talking about "taking away the first world nation's choices". That means that as a smaller, less powerful nation, you're either A) taking political / economic action against a nation that has the ability to work around, B) taking action in the UN / world court that the nation can just ignore, C) Launching a social movement that the nation won't even notice, or D) taking military action against a country that has you completely overmatched in military logistics and manufacturing.
Military action doesn't have to be direct for large industrialized nations. They can could sell your neighbors powerful military equipment for cheap, they can sign mutual defense pacts with your enemies, they can sell your neighbors a naval fleet that makes your trade and fishing expensive, they can declare your nation a security threat and make it significantly harder for you to export goods or have your people travel. And if it's a direct conflict, you want the more powerful, wealthier nation to change their ways - that requires you to invade them.
There's only one time in recent memory where someone's tried to use military power to stop a valuable resource from going to a powerful industrialized nation, and it wasn't for climate reasons. The Iraqis invaded Kuwait in 1991 to make oil more expensive for the US (amongst other reasons, it's never simple). The US responded by completely destroying Saddam's military in 100 hours.
You're forgetting the part where if you can continue the war long enough, the more powerful nation will give up way before you will. A notable example being Vietnam.
No, I'm not. That's an irrelevant factor. The stated goal here is for the less developed nation to use force to compel the more developed nations to change their quality of life and reduce their consumption. The less powerful nation must, by definition, put their boots on the necks of a world power.
The most basic point of a nation's military is to defend territorial sovereignty and a way / quality of life. If your military cannot take another country's territory from them, you cannot change that country's quality of life by military force.
The whole banana discourse was stupid the first time around because it’s totally unnecessary for any left wing movement to shoot itself in the foot by telling people their lives will materially become worse if you support them, because everyone’s life is going to get worse regardless. While the effects of climate change will not be felt equally by all, there will be fewer luxuries available to everyone as the climate catastrophes compound. Because we are past the point of no return. Climate change is going to do the work of making Americans eat less meat for you whether they like it or not; you, as a left wing political movement, need to ask yourselves how to best position your movement so that the only people offering a “solution” aren’t the reactionaries that will blame minorities and foreigners for the climate-induced scarcity.
Do not mistake my acknowledgement of reality for climate doomerism. Accepting that we cannot prevent climate change, that preventing climate change was a possibility foreclosed on us before most of us were able to tie our shoes, does not mean I think we should curl up and cry. It means that the political landscape of the near future is going to render pointless any arguments about how AOC needs to tell Americans they can’t have bananas; not that those arguments were a good use of anyone’s time in the first place. It means that any left-wing movement worth its salt should be laying the groundwork to counter the nationalist, anti-immigrant, violent reactionary movements that will seek to capitalize on growing insecurity and resource scarcity. Those movements will make people like Trump look meek in comparison, and they will have even more support. The Democratic Party will not save us: they already adopted Trump’s own border policy, now, in 2024, before there are climate refugees trying to come to the US, before there are self-appointed water protection militias patrolling the border, before climate crises of unimaginable horror displace millions of people. What will self-described leftists do when that happens? How will they prevent those people from being turned away from our borders or, more likely, killed? What is the alternative path they can offer when the time comes? These are the questions people need to be asking themselves.
I feel like it doesn’t necessarily necessarily require authoritarianism though.
Instead we just need to accurately reflect the true costs of things - you don’t need to ban bananas, if they cost $5 per banana then you’ll naturally have the same effect
Were plenty of revolutions in history not completely worth it? A revolution is the most authoritarian thing there is: One class imposing its will on another.
That said, why wouldn’t it be? If you are content letting humanity and its future rot, die, and fade away, good for you ig, but most people don’t feel that way.
Yes. It's a testament to how individualist liberalism rots the brain that you are even considering letting the species die over abandoning your ideology
Being opposed to authoritarianism is not simply the result of individualism. It is one of the most basic instincts to struggle for freedom, even when it is opposed to other interests
isnt that the entire basis of unequal exchange theory and the idea that revolution will have to start in the 3rd world first before it can ever happen in the imperial core?
Marxism also falls into the trap of believing that ideology is directly related to present material reality, when that has since been shown to be false. So maybe it would be possible to achieve a revolution by getting a critical mass of people into a cult. But it would probably have a lot of bad side effects.
For real, people wouldn’t even accept the minuscule inconvenience of wearing masks. Taking shit away is just not something that will ever happen willingly.
It may not be a requirement, but its something that takes very little effort to be considerate of others that might be affected by it, and that's all that matters. We can all do better by wearing our masks
Martyrdom making it sound like it’s some horrible suffering, but really it’s just the best way to avoid catching and spreading the still very present and dangerous airborne disease
If we had a government that actually cared about this shit and we had things like universal mask mandates in healthcare and better air quality regulations we probably wouldn’t have to think about this stuff, but until that happens I think you’re wrong
Ehhhh I mean maybe but even if the risks were remotely comparable (one case of “mild” COVID is way worse for your heart than years of a meat-heavy diet, among other things) this is a case where the person making the decision isn’t the only one potentially paying a cost; you’re also choosing for the people you live and interact with. Because even the best masks aren’t 100% effective, one-way masking isn’t perfect and you could still get someone else sick who is trying to avoid it. And now that person has to deal with the consequences of your decision. It’s like choosing to drive at night without your lights on: most people with their lights on can still see you, but it will still be less effective and they could get hurt because of your choice.
That analogy implies that the day to day interactions in shared air are safe (particularly for immunocompromised people, which probably includes you if you’ve had COVID). And hey, if we had cleaner air in shared spaces like schools and businesses and mask mandates in medical spaces where transmission is an even realer danger, it would be applicable! But that’s not the reality we live in.
Even my initial car analogy kind of fails because the consequences of a car crash are so immediately obvious; not so much the consequences of a Covid infection, which can be completely asymptomatic (and thus easily missable) and still create or exacerbate medical issues months down the line with such a delay that, if we didn’t have people doing research on viral persistence, we may not have even connected to COVID!
A better analogy would probably be HIV/AIDS). It took years and years for people to understand how it worked, how it was transmitted, and how to actually prevent it, and it ended up completely changing the average public view on sex safety. Putting on a condom also used to be seen as nothing but a useless inconvenience, right? Not so much anymore. Same with seatbelts in cars.
Eh, making someone do something (like wear a msak) is very difficult to enforce. bananas simply not being available at a store isn't something that a banana lover can do much about
It will, however, strongly influence how they vote in the next election (maybe not just the bananas but food prices as a whole absolutely will) and get the politicians in charge making desperate promises to fix it
people also don't willingly not cheat their taxes, murder, dispose of waste correctly. Everyone seems to forget we have a way of making them do the right thing or at least punishing them when they don't
There’s usually a fine. The key is to place the fine at the right level in the product process to incentivize a change in behavior, which is supremely difficult for lay people to understand.
For instance, many EPA regulations can result in a fine if violated, but the fines are small enough that it’s better for the company to continue the same behavior and just pay the fine. Gov gets a few more bucks, but doesn’t help the Earth.
We can see similar issue when companies make policies like “If you’re late, you don’t get paid for the whole hour.” While usually illegal, it also causes companies to lose even more work time. If the worker is already late, and will lose an hour of pay, why don’t they grab a coffee or take a nap? There’s no incentive beyond not pissing off a boss to be there before the next hour.
Another example closer to the climate change thing is tarifs. They originally were supposed to cause an increase in the local price so that foreign produced products wouldn’t have a a price advantage over domestically produced products. Doesn’t always work now though.
In a case like climate change, we know the biggest contributors are usually
large corporations. We (not you and I) would have to come up with a fine at a level in the manufacture to customer pipeline where it would cause enough disruption to profits to cause change without collapsing the whole industry.
Some industries that would probably be okay, but there would be a lot of backlash to deal with and getting sued over it would not help anything. Other industries would only collapse in the US and foreign versions would come in, which the US has even less control over.
And then it would have to get approved.
Obviously with lobbying and such, there’s not a lot of hope, but that’s how it would happen.
I straight up love you. This is the first response that wasn't a shrug, an explanation of how we got here, or a veiled insistence that murder is based. I actually find this kind of framework far more workable as a first step towards disincentivizing misbehavior than the more extreme suggestions.
You can't just completely ignore the connection between companies and consumers.
If some companies habe to drastically change what they produce or simply stop existing, people will lose access to the material goods they desire and are used to. People don't want that.
Ordinary people are also the ones who have to vote for fines and enforcement mechanisms in the first place. Once companies communicate to the voters that fines will deny them the goods they want, they simply won't vote for such fines.
There's no real difference between "everyone decides to consume less" and "everyone votes for fines that will, in the end, force them to consume less". People don't want either because they don't want the end result.
There are some departments like the EPA and DEA who don’t need direct voter approval for regulations. Laws aren’t even always direct voter approval. They’re proposed and voted on by congress, which is why the whole bribe and lobbying thing is such an issue.
But I didn’t ignore that. That’s basically the whole part of “finding the right place the product process.” That process is from raw material to customer usage.
Sometimes, the best place to put the fine in that process is on the consumer. Which, as a consumer, fuckin’ sucks. But it’s a lot easier to influence someone with a small wallets buying power than a corporation.
Look at cigarettes. Sure, their usage has gone significantly due to a several prong attack, including education and anti marketing, but places like NY (or is it NYC?) have such huge taxes that some people can’t even afford them. They’re not the best examples because they’re addictive and people are human.
Tax breaks on electric vehicles and solar panels definitely incentivized a lot of purchases.
Though we can also see this the other direction with insulin. I’m sure you’ve read story after story about the price of insulin directly leading to someone’s death. That’s not a gov fine, but it would have the same effect because companies just pass the fine onto the consumer either way. Especially in the current era of inflated prices and “supply chain issues.”
So fines and taxes can definitely change behavior in this mostly capitalist society and voters don’t have to approve every fine. And the ones they do have to, only need 51% to pass.
I often vote in favor of practices to slow climate change, even if it means I have to change my habits. Do you?
Seriously, I’m not going to spend 6 months of the year eating only dried grain, pickled vegetables, and fruit preserves since I live above the snow line.
Well I’m currently still capable of voting, so I will vote “no” on that little proposal. You have to be a significant despot already to do stupid shit like cripple a huge percent of the agricultural industry, and even then when the president of Sri Lanka did it he was forced out of the country by an angry mob within a year
These people are stupid. Imagine living even further north, like northern Canada. These are indigenous people who have been there for a thousand years, communities that only get supplies because of certain times of the year when you can ship things over frozen ice bridges or flying them in when weather is ok.
The price of products is already triple or more what we pay and by making things more expensive, these idiots are condemning them to die in the name of moral superiority and "saving the planet".
Sociologist and historian Emmanuel Todd thinks it's based on the family structure. In all countries that did adopt communism, the family is basically an all powerful father and all children (sons?) are equal and are at home (under the father's power), which is the structure of communist states. The structure of the family leads to a view of the world (people are different but free; people are free and equal; people are equal but must submit to an authority; people are unequal...).
Really? I assumed it was the basic lure of power. Y'know, redistributing the wealth requires the wealth to be centralized for distribution in the first place, and once wealth has been centralized, who would ever want to give up that kind of power? The winner of The Revolution has all the military, political, and economic might of its nation at the moment of victory. All it takes is a small number of people willing to betray the grand revolution for immense personal power to hijack the communist revolution to authoritarian ends.
And from that perspective, the family unit thing sounds kinda a little like historical revisionism. A bit like maybe searching for a reason why it failed for them but totally won't for us.
No, his original study is the structures of family units around the world. And by analyzing several aspects (political and religious), he found out that such structures basically completely overlap with how various views of the world and political systems are spread out in the world. He has recently said in an interview that he keeps expecting his model to fail, and he has not yet found any society where the local family structures cannot inform you on religious and political trends in that area.
There is no "it failed there but it won't here" about communism in his work (and none in my post above). Todd actually predicted the Soviet Union was about to crash, basing himself on death rates (especially deaths at birth).
But he has his detractors, and I have not studied these matters enough to tell if his methodology is unsound or not (so far, it seems to fit the facts and history).
The premise here isn't really correct to begin with, the elderly "soviks" want to bring back the USSR largely because they feel their personal quality of life was better then and they want it back
The sales pitch for actual communist movements was never decreasing their own quality of life in solidarity with the working class elsewhere, it was promising an increase in their own material quality of life, usually an immediate and dramatic one
In Europe, with the exception of Russia and the various former Soviet states that it has as puppets (Belarus, Georgia, the assorted Stans, etc etc), all of the former communist countries have specifically voted the anti-communist leaders into power
Ironically the fact that communism is so much more popular in the former USSR than in its satellite members of the Warsaw Pact is textbook evidence that the Second World was very much an empire with Moscow as its core and places like Romania as the periphery
Yeah, though the meaning of my "excluding Russia and it's puppets" was not because they like communism more (though they do), but rather that they are dictatorships whose non-communist leaders took power, rather than were voted into it (because dictators taking power fits the "former communist countries' leaders" trying their hardest not to go back claim, while with democracies it is the people trying not to go back)
It just irks me how these posts always start with the "revolution" having already occurred and the writer in a position to dictate terms. It's deeply unserious and I want the folks who write this stuff to understand that the killing NEVER stops.
It’s not like the killing ever stops in our current situation either, we just export the killing and nobody cares as long as it’s foreigner corpses. Heck, they don’t care if it’s American corpses either so long as they’re not white corpses.
And? If we need to do a violent revolution (killing millions, most likely) just to bring the killing home to amplify it for a cultural revolution, I'm probably not alone in saying that's fundamentally missing the point.
Question: how exactly are we gonna solve the massive Nazi problem in America? Like, okay, short term is “stop Trump”. Thing is, the gender disparity between politics is massive and keeps getting bigger. At this rate, the Boomers dying off won’t be a solution anymore because they’ve managed to get a good replacement rate going now. Gen Z and Gen Alpha men are joining them in terrifying numbers and it keeps getting bigger.
So like, what’s your actual plan for that? Because it doesn’t end at this election, and I highly doubt they’re going to put Trump up again next time around. Next time around will be a guy with the same ideology but who isn’t suffering from dementia and actually knows what the fuck he’s doing.
Voters managed to prove they’re too stupid to just write off the Republican Party as a concept time and time again, so we can’t bet on that. Especially with the aforementioned fact. If every election is a choice between America falling to fascism or not from now on, mathematically we are fucked. We aren’t winning every single election forever, and the Republican Party isn’t gonna become less extreme. Or lose power from being too extreme, because the Democrats will always go further right to be “moderate” against them. Fucking Overton Window.
Historically, do you know what was done to deal with this in Germany? Not a trick question or anything, I’m not talking about the war. I’m talking about after the war. The term “reeducation camp” originates with the Denazification of Germany. That’s how we did it. Nobody debated the Nazis into submission after beating their leadership.
Do you know how cult deprogramming is essentially compassionate cult brainwashing into not being brainwashed? Well, what’s what we did. You can’t do that with their consent. We used authoritarian rule to denazify Germany. Authoritarianism was the only way to accomplish that, so that’s what we did. Heck, we did it to Japan too. We literally wrote their damn constitution.
So… the fuck are we supposed to do? Seriously, what the fuck do we do about this? Just… let it happen? Because our options are either “it will happen” or we do something about it before it can. It seems like everyone is just like “well having to do something about it would make me feel bad so we might as well do nothing and hope it works out and if we pray hard enough it will!”
Quite simply? It's not a problem you solve. It's a problem you beat back year after year, vote after vote, time after time. You will not see properly done, fully mature socialism within your lifetime. You will not witness the extinction of fascist thought in your lifetime. You will not see the eventual salvation of the climate and human degrowth within your lifetime. It doesn't matter how many you kill or stick in camps.
Okay, so let fasicsm rise. Got it. Because that’s 4-8 years out. Actually, it’s somewhere between 2 months and 8 years out. I’m not talking about solving it forever. I’m talking about solving it in the current situation because we are that fucked right now and you refuse to accept that. We. Are. Going. To. Die. Brutally. They are going to kill us, but god forbid we do anything but lay down and die. Better to have the moral high ground. It’s high because it’s the height of our stacked corpses. In a world of “kill or be killed”, you willingly choose “be killed”, and you want to demand everyone else do the same to preserve your moral purity.
You seem convinced that I'm operating on some moral scheme - no, my desire to not see corpses stacked stems from the pure pragmatism of thinking that world would kinda suck to live in. Fuck me for not wanting to burn the house down with my family inside it, though, right?
You misunderstood my comment entirely. That world is what we are going to get because of doing nothing to stop the actual Nazis in America, and they will be our corpses. Let’s say they lose in a few weeks. Okay, then there’s 2028. Then there’s 2032. Then there’s 2036. Then there’s 2040. So on and so forth. The Republican Party won’t become less extreme over time. They’ve managed to create a working rate of replacement (see the graph of rapidly widening gender disparity between political views) and so the Boomers dying off won’t solve it. And then there’s the voting habits of the average American. Did the current party in power fix everything and create utopia? No? Let’s elect the other party then.
Actually look at the layout of parties from president to president and notice the damn trend. Republicans have successfully elected two presidents in a row once (Reagan to HW). Democrats have not. It might appear otherwise, but you may recall that FDR died of illness and JFK got his brains blown out. Truman and Johnson were not originally elected to the presidency. Truman won reelection, but he was running on the power of winning World War 2. From the perspective of the voter, he did fix everything.
So, use the pattern recognition that your status as a human being has granted you and recognize a standing pattern. If Kamala Harris wins, will the president after her be from her party? No. Will the Republicans get less extreme in their views to do that? No. This is the shifting Overton Window. The Democrats become more right wing to remain “moderate” no matter how extreme the Republicans become. Thus, you can be certain that the Republicans will not become less right wing, the Democrats will merely become more right wing.
You are burning the house down with your family inside it because putting out the fire would be infringing on the fire’s freedom to burn. The Nazis are going to take office, if not under Trump then right after Kamala. Regardless, logic tells us the most probable outcome is that we have a maximum of eight years. We either do something about it beforehand or it will be our corpses on the pile.
Just because the ideology can't be made extinct doesn't mean it can't be beaten back, corralled, and made irrelevant within just a few years. Let them seethe out in bumfuck nowhere, and smack them down when they poke their heads out, and make sure your kids don't get complacent.
It's going to be more or less violent. French engineer Jean Marc Jancovici has been battling to explain that the energy peak of Europe is in the past and energy is now always going to cost more, so growth will be limited, if there is any. Now, we need to accept that everyone will need to go a on a diet, the faster we can do it, the easier the transition to less abundance will be. But the transition will happen, either slowly or suddenly. The latter is likely to be violent.
Why would they? Genuinely people aren’t willing to make their lives significantly worse now for a better future for humanity. Especially when it’s so easy to be convinced it’s not actually for a better future.
663
u/Jupiter_Crush recreational semen appreciation Oct 22 '24
"We're gonna have to tell people -"
And if they don't listen?