Just crystallized for me that I have a tendency to retreat into myself when I’m stressed and it makes it harder to be friends with people because 1) it means time that I’m less interested in spending with them / getting to know them / etc. for no apparent reason and 2) I miss out on bonding that I could be doing by telling them what my stresses are. Probably made worse, too, by the fact that my beliefs aren’t exactly mainstream in the US / western sphere, so when the stress is induced by things relating to that, even if I did try to share my stresses, a lot of people would probably just not really get quite what it is that I’m stressed about.

Even in the context of Trump being in charge of the US right now, I still feel somewhat alone when talking to liberal-resistance-minded people about it because it’s like they’re approaching it from another universe of belief about how things work. Like with USAID, trying to explain my not exactly being shock and horror that it’s facing problems. Some of the stuff I think is funny or borderline funny, they think is super serious and some of the stuff they think is funny I think is missing the mark. But that’s just an example of where it’s worse, I think. My problems with it go beyond politics.

The only thing that’s set in stone is the past and that’s only because it has already happened. Predictions can be useful if applied alongside action (ex: “the weather prediction says it will rain on Thursday, so I will go the baseball game on Tuesday instead”). Without the action, they mean little. Things can reach a tipping point in one area or another, unforeseen crises can arise, and throughout it all, there are multiple factions vying for power, whether for selfish reasons, such as fascism, or humanitarian ones, such as anti-imperialism, decolonization, and liberation of the working class. Aid in the humanitarian struggle where you can; that’s where dire predictions are transformed into optimistic ones.

Oh ok, that would explain not being able to find it then. Thanks for the info.

How do you directly/privately message the mods of a community? Or do you have to DM a specific mod? I know of the report feature for specific posts, but thinking of broader message than that.

Interesting, I like that analogy.

Others covered details well. I just wanted to add a reminder on the perspective of being the one trying to do it, to remember that none of us are above mistakes or hold all of the correct knowledge and experience in our singular hands, and that trying to do it piecemeal, without a program, is always going to be harder and especially in the context of individualism, is going to be more susceptible to falling into traps of arrogance that others should be listening because “we know better.” To attempt an analogy, you could imagine it’s something like that people in our circles are teachers and/or experienced in the field, but the institutions of the status quo (assuming living under a dictatorship of capital, etc.) do not recognize that knowledge and experience as meaning anything and don’t give credentials for it, and so most people don’t take it seriously at the offset. Instead, they will tend to view you as being an equal in the subject matter, if not lesser depending on if they start to hear you say certain things they have been conditioned to associate with crackpots and extremists. So it’s important to remember that not only is your personal knowledge and experience limited, and vulnerable to mistakes, but that other people often won’t even be viewing you as having knowledge and experience in the subject that has more relevance, importance, or academic authority than their own.

And to be fair, why should they? If you have not struggled with them, seen what they deal with in the day to day and worked to make improvements with them, built some level of trust that you have their best interests at heart and vice-versa. Without that, it may look like you are asking for them to question and reject a lot of pre-existing notions for no apparent gain, introducing more chaos into their life rather than stability. Individualism and its consequences in general has done a lot of damage, and I think it’s very easy to lose track of what it’s doing if immersed in it. This part kinda goes beyond the topic alone, but individualism is something I think needs being more broadly understood in the western “left”, as its own form of consciousness to have. So far, it is something where either I’m missing important perspectives people are already regularly sharing on it, or it would seem it’s under-represented in the part it plays in how difficult it can be to organize and move people ideologically.

Quit making up shit that I never endorsed doing, so you can pretend like you “won”. This feels like an argument with an ego-centric liberal at this point.

“people have been propagandized to conflate things like invention with capitalism, as if they are one and the same”

Yeah, they have. Trying to twist “historical materialism” as a buzzword to defend the lens that has been pushed on you by a predominantly capitalist world doesn’t change this fact.

The overlap of capitalism and the rise in living standards etc. are historically intertwined and you cant undo that.

K, tell that to someone who is being exploited for cheap prison labor in the US. Or any number of other examples of exploitation, especially in some of the more exploited (by imperialism/capitalism) countries in the world. It’s not idealism to push back on poor attempts to universalize concepts that do more harm in messaging than good.

If capitalism was fundamentally a rise in living standards, we would not be talking about it as so fundamentally exploitative! Many people don’t benefit from it, that’s like kind of one of the most important points of criticizing it in the first place. You know who is usually the one going to people and giving them some insistent spiel about how capitalism is actually an improvement somehow and ya know, it could be worse? Capitalists. So forgive me for wondering where your priorities are at here.

Capitalism was a step forward, in the right direction even. But we didn’t move on from it yet. We need to move forward and asking whether we are worse off now than before capitalism is not how to encourage people to move forward that encourages them to go back.

No, no, no. History is not linear and things are not automatically universal just cause some people with the predominant status quo lens say that they are. This is not how anything works. Aspects of things in the past can actually be better and be something to model after. The whole notion of communism itself is in part based on communal societal structures of the past. Marx, Lenin, and others like them did not pull the concept out of thin air and “invent” organizing communally. What they did was observe the systems they were dealing with in a scientific manner, as well as historically, and then try to work out through a mixture of theory and practice what would get the outcome they wanted to be. The modern notions of communism are meant to be a kind of merging of the benefits of industrialization and technology, and the political/social/economic structure of something communal. They just don’t idealize it as something you will achieve by being nice to the dominant power structure and hoping it allows you to do your thing. The notion that the past is inherently worse overall I’m certain has some ties not just to capitalism, but also to colonialism and its lens of civil and savage, its lens of “primitive” indigenous societies that were doing a lot better off than they were portrayed.

None of this is saying “return to the past, romanticize it, think only in binary terms!” It’s saying something is not inherently worse in all aspects because it came before. It’s saying if you find yourself using talking points that sound way too close to what the capitalists are using, maybe that should give you pause. I cannot with the audacity of telling me I’m being idealist in this situation, while talking about history like it’s an RPG skill progression ladder.

I don’t know what in the world is going on with the train of thought that thinks historical materialism means saying capitalism was good for the world. That is effectively what you are arguing when you say “the rise in living standards etc. are historically intertwined and you cant undo that”. Meanwhile, climate change is threatening to upend the entire species. But sure, let’s have the priority be that nobody dare ever think any pullback on industrial excess could ever be necessary. Who needs the Amazon rainforest, right, as long as we have Amazon the service. Everything is linear progress overall, even if it threatens to make the planet unlivable for humans. History is over, right. Never mind the ecosystem. We’ll push our way through it with sheer force of rugged individualist linear history will.

Utterly exhausting.

I never said demonising capitalism was bad (I said “do it all you like”). I am saying that romanticising feudalism is worse.

A strange way to word it then, is all I can say. In my experience, that kind of wording would imply being bothered by the so-called demonization, as in, being defensive, which matched with your defensiveness of capitalism and innovation. In any case, nothing in what I have said anywhere in this thread romanticizes feudalism and you are welcome to quote my own words at me if you believe otherwise. But it is a reality that the capitalist narrative has a tendency to portray history as linear, with capitalism as inherently an improvement. And it is not inherently so, and it would be contradictory and confusing, especially to people who have no understanding of communism, if there were some communist push that it inherently is (one does not need to hand it to capitalism, even if indirectly). What is, I think safe to say, well understood among marxist-leninist and similar is that having a working class, or socialist, state to transition away from non-communist systems toward communism is valuable and important, and that these states cannot afford to be idealized projects that skip over the constraints of current conditions at home and abroad. So China, for example, has a system that has some characteristics of capitalism, but it is heavily controlled by the dictatorship of the working class. It is this controlled communist vanguard system that is behind lifting 800 million people out of poverty, out of a feudalist system, and propelled into significant global influence through mutually beneficial ties with other countries—not capitalism. I choose to use them as an example because it is one that is at times labeled “state capitalism”, as if it’s just “capitalism with regulation” and not something distinctly different; and if viewed as a form of capitalism, it could be confused with an example of capitalism being “better than what came before.”

Frankly I’m confused that someone calling themselves a communist hasn’t read the manifesto.

This feels like the rough equivalent of quoting the bible at some to win a religious argument. I’m not sure what that passage is supposed to even have to do with what we’re talking about. I see no value judgment in it about quality of life and invention’s relationship to it. I can only take a guess you’re going for the line about “constantly revolutionising the instruments of production”, but this is not a god speaking, for one, and again, it is not clear that it is talking about the kind of thing I’m talking about.

Beyond what I’ve already said, I’m not sure how to proceed here because the most good faith interpretation I can come to with the information I have on hand is that I see the kind of position you’re taking in your replies to me as essentially romanticizing capitalism, if not worse. And you’re viewing it as some kind of denial of how bad feudalism was, which has nothing to do with what I’m trying to accomplish here in messaging; if that’s misrepresenting you, feel free to tell me. I’m just trying to make sense of what page we are on vs. think we are on and am having to do a fair amount of guesswork in responding to what I think might be relevant. The forum format makes it hard to do a simpler back and forth.

Capitalists are constantly looking for an edge to use because they are always in competition. They are never secure in their position because there is always a threat right there.

This part is just about word for word pro-capitalist propaganda. If capitalists are looking for an “edge”, it’s in the meaning of looking for more power to smite their enemies with. The US reaction to Deepseek is a good example of how capitalism reacts to real competition; panic, racism, market instability, etc. It doesn’t motivate them to “innovate” in the meaning of invention that betters the human experience—that part is largely incidental. It motivates them to consolidate power and stifle actual competitors, so that they can continue to accrue more capital and thus more power. Capitalism’s relationship with competition, in other words, is a power struggle, not anything resembling an inherent interest in what would be called invention or innovation that can help people in their day to day lives. The closest thing it has to an arguable relationship with innovation, is innovating on new ways to go about struggling for power, but even that I’m not sure is true in practice because the stuff they’re doing isn’t particularly new across time, as far as I can tell. Much of it is the same general concepts with the help of new technology.

The reality of capitalists is much closer to how you described monarchs and lords.

Frankly, I’m confused that someone calling themself a communist is telling me I am “demonizing” capitalism, as if that’s a bad thing. Real head scratcher, that is.

It serves nothing but fuel the primitivist bullshit and its derivations from anarcho-whatever and chuds retvrn-to-tradition.

One of the things it serves that is helpful is challenging the pro-capitalist narrative that capitalism has been a force for good in the world. If someone’s immediate conclusion from the belief that pre-capitalist peoples were not all worse off is “destroy factories”, that’s a problem of binary thinking and not being presented with enough context of where problems derive from, not a problem with looking at quality of life before capitalism. Industrialization and capitalism, for example, are not inherently the same thing, even if they have developed alongside a lot. Trade and capitalism are not the same thing; capitalism is just a particular form of relation there.

I would say it’s a pretty important distinction to address at times because some people have been propagandized to conflate things like invention with capitalism, as if they are one and the same. The takeaway of the argument in my view isn’t “go backwards in technological development”, it’s “better understand just how badly capitalism is hurting people and how much better life could be if it was gone and all the development we have was put to use in a humane, communal system.”

Ah yes, being born in a country makes you an expert on it and you are magically imbued with everything about its history with total accuracy. That’s why everyone born in the US is famous for being in total agreement on everything.

Thanks for this. I’ve long been suspicious of the notion capitalism is some kind of inherent improvement from what came before, especially on the point of loss of community under capitalism, and this lays things out well.

I can’t speak for the intended point by cfgaussian. However, in context, I think an underlying point here is that, at least for westerners, most of their distrust of Russia comes from US imperialist lies, so it is an important contrast to bring up the lies of the US empire. In other words, if it were the case that most things the west has said about Russia are false, what is there left as far as automatically distrusting their word goes? There are undoubtedly fair and reasonable ideological disagreements with modern day Russia from a communist standpoint, considering they are a far cry from USSR days now (thus “critical support” for them insofar as they are anti-imperialist). But in terms of speaking truthfully, I’ve not come across major reasons to think they have a habit of spinning elaborate lies. This isn’t to say they aren’t biased (all sources are to an extent) but there’s a distinction between that and going to great lengths to fabricate entire narratives in great detail. So whether they are de facto trustworthy is sort of beside the point. The point is that (again, at least for westerners, can’t speak for elsewhere) it would seem most of the reason to assume dishonesty from them comes from western imperialist lies about them. Westerners would not tend to make the same assumptions about, for example, a French documentary, in spite of its colonial history and part in imperialism.

Fun train of thought, though I think if aliens were that advanced and interested in cooperation, they’d do some observing and evaluating first, work out that a prominent socialist state who is doing cooperative stuff would be the best one to work with, and pay China a visit as quietly as possible (so as not to alarm the earthlings). The US would probably be considered too paranoid and unpredictable to go near without careful consideration.

Widen your mind: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-2/mswv2_03.htm

In addition, he seems to have a scandal following him around about DMs with minors.

Do you have any sources on this?

Exactly and I would say, both of the following can be true at the same time and the second part is maybe where some people get caught up in believing the “blame the voters” narrative:

• The US is not a people’s democracy. If it is democracy in any meaning, it’s “democracy for the rich.”

• The US contains a not-insignificant number of people who hold little to no power over the direction of the country as a whole, but are still deeply racist and/or colonial in their thinking, whether they exercise that in the day to day or not. These are dangerous people who those in power no doubt try to pull from for the footsoldiers of continuing the status quo, but it does not mean that a car mechanic who’s a bit reactionary or whatever, is deciding the fate of the country.

And if we look at how people act when they have accurate information (such as in the case of Palestine), there’s quite a lot of sincere sympathy and will for a humanitarian cause. Which is something the empire historically tries to take advantage of, such as in branding its agenda as “spreading democracy” and trying to repress accurate information about the goings on in the world. There’s sincere care to be found, in other words, that doesn’t even have to be nurtured much, but sometimes the challenge is getting lies out of the way, so that people can see the US for what it is as an entity and understand how their care gets used to manufacture consent for atrocities.

I’m sorry. I hope I don’t come across like I’m trying to tell people how they should feel about it. People’s feelings are their own. And FWIW, as USian culture goes, I don’t see it as something that can survive if the region is to be decolonized. Some form of mass cultural reformation would probably need to happen alongside a new system of power that is in partnership with (not dominion over) fully sovereign indigenous nations, in order to get past all the deeply embedded colonizer thinking and behavior, including all the racism and so on. It’s a really messy situation and sometimes I wish I had been born somewhere I had an actual ethnic heritage and culture, instead of “blend of european whose ancestors came over to join in the colonization at some point.” :/

Also, these are the kind of people who suffer most at the hands of the empire, both at its height and in its decline, not the ones the most petty feelings would wish will suffer most: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/7011701

Once again, it is the most marginalized who bear the brunt of the suffering. You have to create consequences for the colonizers, not sit around and hope some votes that are part of their own machine will boomerang consequences back on them.