axont [any, they/them]

I’d recommend ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus’ as Althusser’s foundational text. His essay ‘On the Materialist Dialectic’ is the one where he talks about what I brought up. It can be tricky to understand if you haven’t read much dialectic theory before Althusser, but he basically argues that there’s a plurality of economic classes and activities, each with some degree of autonomy, but all of them depend on one another to a degree that they shape the boundaries of the other.

I will point out that in very clear terms that Althusser’s own battle with mental illness shaped much of his philosophical work. He was very interested in structure and how various people were slotted into formations completely outside of themselves. He had a lifelong battle with schizophrenia that had him institutionalized at various points and in one very severe episode he accidentally killed his own wife.

He didn’t believe in free will, is what I mean.

Thank you. And well that’s all fine and good to hope and imagine, but I’ve been trying to actively change things for the past 20 years through socialist organizing. Goes well sometimes, goes poorly most of the time, gotta keep trying anyway .

I don’t mean to be rude or anything, but it’s not like communists have never heard of capitalists who also do some kind of labor. There aren’t two classes, but rather, there are two very big classes that have contradictory interests and people will be filtered into one of those two. That’s where the fight of capitalism is. Notice how peasantry has almost ceased to exist and most monarchs are ceremonial. Mao Zedong identified 5 classes within Chinese society in 1926: landlords, proletariat, peasantry, urban petite-bourgeoise, and national bourgeoisie. And that’s actually what 4 of the stars on the Chinese flag symbolize, with the largest representing the CPC.

You sound like you’re what’s called petite bourgeois and you identify with the cause and ideology of the bourgeoisie because that’s either something you aspire to or it’s a structure you’re able to take advantage of. Marx identified a transitional faction of capitalists precisely within his essay The Class Struggles in France, 1848–1850, and there’s a brief mention within the Communist Manifesto.

Basically, Marx said the capitalist class has separate factions who are not all in concert with one another, since not all capitalists have intrinsically similar goals. Some capitalists have contradictory interests to others and want the other abolished. In comparison, the working class have no such contradictory interests, all workers benefit from the same concerns: higher wages, fewer hours, more control over their workplace.

I’d really recommend reading the Marxist theorist Althusser on this one too. To summarize, he was one of the theorists who proposed class systems are more of an action one takes and the subsequent ideological formations within it than necessarily a strict divide of class hierarchy.

Nothing about the way everything’s going is designed to let me feel like a person. Money’s a requirement to simply exist. Everything’s a race to get enough money to sustain myself. I’m simply a worker who generates profit so my parasite of a boss and the associated shareholders can hang out on yachts. My job is nonsense too that doesn’t help anyone. I’m estranged from my family for gender and lifestyle reasons, can’t make friends because I’m always exhausted from work, can’t go to therapy except sparingly because it’s too expensive.

No matter how much validity my humanity holds, none of it really matters if none of it can be expressed due to a combination of alienation and dead eyed pessimism about climate change.

And no, we all aren’t on the same journey together. The economic strata that sits above mine has nothing in common with me.

at first I thought you said elders of Zeon and I imagined accidentally dating Char Aznable in disguise

but yeah I’m gonna have to start asking basic questions about the moon landing, validity of trans people, and even if humans evolved from earlier primates

I don’t have a lot of experience with dating and I’m kind of a loner, so I’ve had a problem over the past decade of jumping at whoever expresses interest in me. It’s a bad habit. The last two people I dated ended up being deep transphobes, both laughed when I told them I’m non-binary. With the last one, we had already been on like 3 dates or so and had gotten a little intimate, so that really made me ashamed of myself.

The last person revealed themselves to be a Raëlian too, the UFO cult. A lot of other conspiracy theory junk bouncing around their brain too. They must have known all of this stuff would turn me away, because none of it came out until I had known them for two months and we’d already considered ourselves close. Advice for the future: Ask anyone you’re gonna date important questions about their view of the world before doing anything further, it’ll save time. Figure out their religion, politics, stance on trans/gay people, everything, because for me it was a little devastating. I thought I had finally found someone. Oh well.

All of these dorks are just auditioning for jobs in the Trump administration. They refuse to say anything bad about Trump even though they’re running in a race against him.

Except none of them will get jobs because Trump thinks they’re all dorks.

I’ll put it like this:

The external imperialism of western countries far outweighs the danger, threat, and damage to human life than even the most cartoonish and absurd claims about the alleged internal authoritarianism in countries like Cuba, China, and the DPRK. It’s such a massive disconnect and it’s also not even a dialectical comparison.

The external imperialism of western nations is precisely what generates the security apparatuses that are developed within modern socialist countries. Most of the time what you regard as gross and needless authoritarianism is in fact socialist states defending themselves from external aggression. Go listen to Parenti talking about the measures Nicaragua had to take in regards to capitalist encirclement.

And furthermore, the decision to not use the term authoritarian to describe western nations constantly confuses me. Is it because the term imperialism is more accurate? If you want my gut feeling on this: authoritarian, totalitarian, and related terms were all cooked up by liberal historians like Hannah Arendt to make the USSR sound like the same type of thing as Nazi Germany, which is frankly Holocaust trivialization.

Yeah they do fit the definition, because the distinction between external and international policy you’re making is arbitrary and meaningless. I’m a communist. My nation is the working class.

If invasions, sanctions, assassinations, and complete immiseration of other nations isn’t authoritarian then what is it? Why are we arbitrarily deciding there’s a distinction with how a country’s internal and external policies? These things inform one another. If a nation like America is doing far worse things than authoritarianism, except externally, why can’t we say that’s what it is?

Obviously killing people externally or internally is bad, but it’s more shocking in the same way that a parent murders their own child.

That makes no sense. Joseph Biden is not my dad and my shared nationality with him means nothing because he represents an economic class at war with my own. Was Hitler the father of German Jews? What the fuck are you talking about

Socialism isn’t an intellectual idea though. It’s not an idea we put on the world, it’s a real movement that abolishes the present state of things.

You are however disregarding how a nation conducts itself internationally, instead focusing entirely on domestic policy. Should we not consider how a nation acts towards people outside of its own borders as this authoritarianism? If we include a country’s imperialism, you’ll find the overwhelmingly most violent, brutal and authoritarian nations are the USA, the EU, and the west in general.

Ok, but if that’s the case, why are we drawing a line at a nation’s internal population and disregarding their external policies? The USA killed three million people in the War in Iraq, including Iraqis who were very critical of the American presence. The USA has assassinated Latin American presidents for speaking out against the USA and replaced them with more America-friendly dictators. And yet everyone who talks about authoritarianism doesn’t include western nations in their discussion, they instead make up a cartoon idea of what countries outside the west are like. Your definition of what is or isn’t tankie/authoritarian has some kind of nationalist bias built into it.

Every time someone describes what authoritarianism is, it makes me think that America and the EU are the worst perpetrators of this behavior, but they mainly export all their violence rather than use the worst of it domestically. Domestically they use private sector means to distribute violence, such as poverty, prisons, and the facilitation of ambient racism.

This reminds me of the dividing line that liberals use, which is when they say things like “that dictator killed HIS OWN PEOPLE.” As if killing people externally is more excusable crime?

Yeah, you’re right. It’s also important to read Lenin’s works on imperialism to understand modern socialism. It’s important to study Mao as well.

Something like half of Chinese people use a VPN and the state censoring western sites Facebook and Twitter is a good thing

Yeah you got it. American white bourgeois society is a virus. And you’re right, all the unique music that came out of the USA is a product of oppressed minorities. Even pasty white conservative country music is a perverse mockery of southern/appalachian folk music that has roots in African and Celtic traditions. The banjo is an African instrument for instance.

White suburbs are a genuine blight and their expansion is cooking the planet.

Trip could squeeze an extra warp speed out of an engine by wrapping the coils in baling wire then spitting on it

At-will worker here. One time I got fired for not remembering my boss’s son’s birthday (a son who I had never met and was also 6 years old)

I neither love America nor the government. Our culture is a disease, our cities need to be razed or entirely redesigned, and our land needs to be returned to natives, to Mexico, and to the descendants of slaves.

Our entire society is a covenant with death and an agreement with hell.

They can taste protein in a different way than we can though.