[QUOTE=proboardslol;52976937]I wasn't aware that communism was still a thing that ANYBODY took seriously except like North Korea. I thought that communist parties today were just fronts for heroin cartels[/QUOTE]
What like the FARC? They took up drug smuggling and gun running because they were quite literally at war, surrounded by USG backed enemies with no allies left, they have no way of funding themselves otherwise.
Meanwhile USG trained and funded anti-communist death squads in latin america became the forerunners of what are now actual most powerful drug cartels in the world.
Anyway, [url]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_left-wing_rebel_groups[/url]
Yes, it is very much something that is taken seriously. The only way you could think otherwise is if you dont think a world outside of the anglosphere exists.
[QUOTE=ZombieWaffle;52976969]Communism is still rather relevant and important as an ideology even today.[/QUOTE]
Maybe in third world countries but it's rightfully not taken seriously in modern countries
Nepal isn't ready for communism.
[QUOTE=proboardslol;52985333]Maybe in third world countries but it's rightfully not taken seriously in modern countries[/QUOTE]
almost as if material conditions influence peoples politics greatly hmmm I'm sure some kind of famous fella wrote a lot about this.....
[QUOTE=Gmod4ever;52979169]
Long post
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This is very well thought out. Just try telling that to some of the internet communists - the ones that proclaim capitalism has never been anything other than a scam designed for the sole purpose of keeping the common man enslaved, and it's "inevitable" fall in the near future is what is going to bring true communism to fruition. It would appear that according to your explanation, they've misread Marx just as much as all the post-war revolutionaries did.
[QUOTE=CyclonatorZ;52985546]This is very well thought out. Just try telling that to some of the internet communists - the ones that proclaim capitalism has never been anything other than a scam designed for the sole purpose of keeping the common man enslaved, and it's "inevitable" fall in the near future is what is going to bring true communism to fruition. It would appear that according to your explanation, they've misread Marx just as much as all the post-war revolutionaries did.[/QUOTE]
I'll be the first to admit that my interpretation of true Communism isn't a literal interpretation of Marx's writings. It takes a lot of inspiration from Marx's ideas, but also takes into account the circumstances around which he wrote them down - while doing some of my creative interpretation regarding how those circumstances have changed.
Marx wrote a good chunk of his ideas in the space between the industrial revolution's maturation, and the dawn of the Spring of Nations. Specifically, the Communist Manifesto was released in 1848; the industrial revolution is generally slated as occurring between 1760 and 1840, and the Spring of Nations (also known as the Revolution of 1848) happened, unsurprisingly enough, in 1848.
These two atmospheres greatly influenced his ideas. The Spring of Nations was a time when a lot of Europe's classical feudal systems were being overthrown for new governments, and the end of the industrial revolution saw a massive surge in production-to-labor, with a given amount of production requiring less labor to accomplish than in decades prior.
It is the maturation of the industrial revolution which lead Marx to his projection that one day human labor won't be necessary at all. He saw how much labor machines can save, and he projected that we would continue to build and refine machines that further increase the amount of labor saved.
And it is the Spring of Nations that inspired his ideas of a systemic evolution. As feudal governments were toppled and replaced with (mostly) democratic ones, serfdoms similarly fell and were replaced with (mostly) capitalist models. This led Marx to conclude that as governments and economies (which he concluded had a strong relationship with one another) mature, they outgrow their old models and develop new ones. Feudal-serfdoms give way to democratic-capitalist states, which themselves give way to socialist states, before finally evolving into a communist society (I don't use the term "communist state" because the ideal communist is stateless).
[b]However[/b], recall that Marx wrote down these ideas in the maturing years of the industrial revolution, where particularly ruthless individuals were leaping ahead to take full advantage of the fledgling capitalist systems, transforming the marketplace into a cutthroat industrial complex of do-or-die work-till-you-drop mentalities (Marx would later, in 1875, reference [b][url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_wages]"the iron law of wages"[/url][/b] in a critique of capitalism). And he also wrote these ideas in the swelling political climate of the Spring of Nations, where people all across Europe revolted against their governments, and often employed violence to topple them and establish new governments.
It is from these two elements that Marx derived an idea of his I disagree with: that the evolution to communism will, with necessity, be violent. This is where ideas such as the "war of the proletariat" and "seize the means of production" come from: Marx believed that the capitalists would be unwilling to give up their financial power, and would rather die than relinquish it. And he believed that the existing governments would similarly refuse to change, and so the people would have to take up arms and violently kill the capitalists and the government alike in order to bring about change.
This is a point in Marx's original writings I disagree with. I can absolutely understand why he thought that, given the environment in which his ideas spawned. But I believe that this war is an unnecessary step: Marx believed that communism is an inevitable and natural evolution in a world of perpetually increasing automation, and that is an idea I can get behind. You don't need a war for that evolution to take place, though - by the simple fact that automation will extinguish scarcity, that will force the change to occur naturally. Even if the capitalists would rather die than give up their power, the fact that the source of their power - scarcity - is extinguished means that they [b]will[/b] die if they refuse to change.
To make an analogy, Marx would consider capitalism to be fire, and communism to be a flameless firepit. This violent revolution is water, being thrown onto the fire to put it out, leaving the flameless firepit that is communism behind. But water isn't the only way to put out fire - deprive this capitalist fire from its wood called scarcity, and it will burn itself out quietly and bloodlessly.
What Isak said about my interpretation is true by a large degree - Marx's original ideas never explicitly mentioned scarcity or post-scarcity, and Marx believed that communism had to be revolutionary. My interpretation is a modernist reinterpretation, but I don't believe it's a baseless one: the ideas of scarcity and evolution were evident in Marx's writings and ideas, but they were not focused on. And I attribute that to the times in which Marx wrote his ideas. I would argue he didn't ignore these ideas, but rather saw them through a lens: in his time, "scarcity" [b]was[/b] serfdoms giving way to capitalism, and "evolution" [b]was[/b] the revolutions in the Spring of Nations.
So while I will openly admit my interpretation is not the one Marx put to paper, I would argue that it is very likely that if Marx were to write his ideas afresh today, my interpretation is not that far off from what he would likely write, without that particular political climate bearing over him.
Of course, people are more than welcome to disagree with that assertion, or to argue any points of this analysis.
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