Marx: a complete guide to capitalism

[Husseinisdoingfine]

Btw, my family grew up under Communism, and I have not heard a single complaint from them about the system. Actually, to the contrary, the Soviet system had many upsides. So many of the social and economic problems Russians have now did not exist back then.

I don’t like the analysis that Communism just “failed”. It produced a lot of achievements.

 

Edited October 23 by Husseinisdoingfine

[Leo Gura]

1 minute ago, Husseinisdoingfine said:

It produced a lot of achievements.

But why would those achievements not exist under capitalism?

[Alex4]

This debate belongs to the 20th century. Communism failed, we should waste our time discussing how to limit the excesses of capitalism, or better yet, progress to a better system based on its foundations. 

[Nemra]

@Husseinisdoingfine, science, art, etc. were controlled too much. Criticizing the people in positions of power was very dangerous.

[Alex4]

9 minutes ago, Husseinisdoingfine said:

Btw, my family grew up under Communism, and I have not heard a single complaint from them about the system. Actually, to the contrary, the Soviet system had many upsides.

I don’t like the analysis that Communism just “failed”. It produced a lot of achievements.

 

My parents say the same thing about fascism, 

[Leo Gura]

12 minutes ago, Husseinisdoingfine said:

I have not heard a single complaint from them

Cause they know they were lucky enough not to end up in a Gulag 

Edited October 23 by Leo Gura

[Husseinisdoingfine]

1 minute ago, Leo Gura said:

Cause they know they were lucky enough not to end up in a Gulag 

[Bobby_2021]

2 hours ago, Raze said:

Communist China had the Great Leap Forward and cultural revolution, and its economy grew rapidly when it started introducing market reforms 

It's communist China still today.

They actually evolve with reforms like they are supposed to with changing times. 

If you are fixated on silly reductionist notions of communism, then that's what you will see. Communism as conceived by Marx was multifaceted and complex even incorporating developmental stages. 

A society isn't static. It's constantly evolving. Communist china is implementing communism infront of our eyes. 

Modern day China is communism implemented in the real world.

[Ash55]

I love china the best country ever

china is half under developed half developing
the underdeveloped part ranks very low on spiral/ ego development 
on average china rank lower than America in the developed chines part but the under developed part are way worse
and the US on average rank lower than many other western country on spiral dynamic

the CCP is way way more corrupt than the west atm, quality of life for the most part are way better in the west than china

 

46 minutes ago, Bobby_2021 said:

Modern day China is communism implemented in the real world.

Modern day china has so much unchecked/predatory capitalism

This is caught on footage is wild everybody like to talk shit about the middle east and i talk shit too lol, but god damn china is 100 time more wild, i feel sorry for the people i hope they have better situation

you probably gonna label  Serpentza as propaganda but he lived and travel across china documenting life there, and he is not always right he is definitely biased 

[Ash55]

Mao is the best leader ever I love china i love the CCP and i love the messiah prophet karl marx

 

 

 

i bet if marx is alive now he would be terrified of what communism have done LOL

[TheAlchemist]

I think the lesson of Soviet Communism isn't that Marxism doesn't work, it is that any ideology with an absolute ideal that includes any utopistic idea of "salvation" of the individual from its struggle tends to lead to shit.

So the critique of capitalism from Marx is extremely valuable. Yet we shouldn't try to "design" some better system. Even if we fully understand the limitations of capitalism, but then we channel that bubbling uncertainty and unknowing into designing some stupid capitalism 2.0, we will fall into the same traps.

We gotta learn to sit with the discomfort of not knowing what we are supposed to do, without grasping for answers the moment we lose our ideological grounding. That's also why all those annoying people with humanities degrees who complain about the problems, present critiques, develop theories and philosophize, but provide no practical solutions are who we need to embrace and start listening to more. 

Edited October 23 by TheAlchemist

[Ero]

7 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

My parents lived under this system. It's not a good way to live.

Ditto. All the commie liberals need to go live in China or NK to understand what it really means. Tired of idealizations. 

[Novac08]

@Leo Gura

I'm really looking forward to your video on communism, probably because I still feel unresolved about this topic. For much of my youth, I believed the left's failure to succeed globally was due to imperialism and conservatism, both internally and externally.

That belief began to unravel when I participated in Los Angeles County essentially lighting a billion dollars on fire in an attempt to address homelessness. Everyone involved was on the left, and the dysfunction I saw shattered my perspective. The inefficiency was staggering—there was a basic inability to do math, endless paperwork, selfishness, and so many other issues. I felt naive thinking it was simply a matter of resources—because when the resources came, the problem only worsened. Skid Row looks worse than a war-zone refugee camp, and it’s painful to see how an entire industry has formed around servicing and perpetuating extreme poverty with government money.

My father was from Argentina, and I used to sympathize with the common Latin American view that the region’s problems were primarily caused by the U.S. Without dismissing that entirely, I now think that in most cases, the issues are self-inflicted—nowhere more clearly than in Cuba and Venezuela. I also find myself sympathizing with the doctrine of containment. These ideas are powerful, and there’s something intuitive about the appeal of fairness and equality that communism speaks to. But ultimately, it's a wrong turn—and the world would be a much worse place if communism had been allowed to spread unchecked.

[Leo Gura]

My Dad was put in Soviet prison for starting his own business.

He wasn't even around when I was born, because he was in a Soviet prison in the Arctic circle.

I grew up in the Arctic circle to be near him.

That's Marxism in a nutshell.

Edited October 24 by Leo Gura

[Raze]

14 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

My Dad was put in Soviet prison for starting his own business.

He wasn't even around when I was born, because he was in a Soviet prison in the Arctic circle.

I grew up in the Arctic circle to be near him.

That's Marxism in a nutshell.

The Soviet Union didn’t give control of the means of production to the working class, it was controlled by state actors. 

[Novac08]

1 hour ago, Raze said:

The Soviet Union didn’t give control of the means of production to the working class, it was controlled by state actors. 

After communist revolutions, the genuine believers are often the first to go, as their ideals clash with the new leadership's need for control. (See Stalin's purges, Castro's sidelining of Che, and the Cultural Revolution)

[Leo Gura]

1 hour ago, Raze said:

The Soviet Union didn’t give control of the means of production to the working class, it was controlled by state actors. 

That's the difference between theory and practice.

The fundamental contradiction of Marxism is that it tries to give weak, incompetent, and unambitious people control over the powerful, competent, and ambitious. That's impossible. Marxism fundamentally misunderstands what power is and how it works. More fundamental than economics is power.

Power means I beat your skull in with a baseball bat.

If you are not willing to do what it takes to wield power, you cannot have power. Lenin and Stalin understood this. Today's Marxists do not.

Edited October 24 by Leo Gura

[RightHand]

1 hour ago, Leo Gura said:

 

 

Why are you giving us lame motivational speeches when you could teach us the art of baseball? 😒

 

[PhilGR]

Most of the arguments here lack nuance and attention to fundamentals. 

For start, Marx was writing in mid 19th cent., different types of material conditions then and now. And that is important in Marx, defining the material conditions and as Lenin added we need a concrete analysis of a concrete situation. 

If we are talking about the past we can see that Lenin did the start of creating the revolutionary conditions that were already based on a concrete situation, the high dissatisfaction to the Tsar. Russia was very behind in the industrial revolution and needed to over through the status quo in order to move forward. An element that an 21st cent. american cannot even comprehend is the participation of the people to this overthrow, the mobilization of the masses, the working class, the simple people, a notion that has disappeared today.

Left in US and most of the West today is a joke, we all live under the bourgeois parliamentary democracy with neo-liberal economics. Which is going to deplete our resources, leads us to climate change and the destruction of the collective psyche.

Capitalism today, which is basically a Techno-feudalism (borrowing Varoufakis definition) can be critiqued buy different angles on what Marx was talking about. I believe a new critique needs to be made of the system today.

Alienation is a thing, homelessness, lack of healthcare, the quantification of self, mental health epidemic, burnout, precarious workers, are all issues of today's capitalism. We have moved from the Fordian model where Marx was basing his critique, and now we are talking about a different mutated system that is on medical support with the shrinkage of middle class and accumulation of wealth in big pockets, and the Cayman Islands.

Perhaps implementation of socialism failed, from the inside and the outside, millions died, but that's how dialectics of the history works, to refer to Hegel here, which was marx's main influence. History shows us that internal dynamics and contradictions are always going to exist and move us forward. For now we shouldn't discard marx but learn from him, take his main ideas and create new systems with the knowledge we have. 

Of course people that made money in this system are going to tell you that everything is great, and its your personal responsibility to create your own wealth, but it does not work like that for everyone.

This cure that is provided from the modern day neoliberal gurus is a fraud, getting out of the "matrix" and the rat race, is not going to be achieved by collectively engaging and changing things but by becoming yourself both the slave and the master and hustle your way into success. Perhaps this dream sells a lot in America today which is in the verge of collapse. But true success for the  people, communities and achieving anything good for the public, has been done in the struggle, in the street, with solidarity, by being here for each other. Nowadays everyone is so alienated in their bubble, in their couch, in their screens and the lack of alternatives has let people imagine easier the end of the world than the end of capitalism. 

 

Read the One-Dimensional Man from Marcuse

Psychopolitics by Byung-Chul Han

and Capitalism Realism by Mark Fischer

 

p.s the success of capitalism have been build in a lot of blood as well, with colonialism, with wars that still ongoing, with a lot delivery, nothing is build without blood, and dozens of states were capitalism is implemented today there a big failure as soviet union was. Is always some people that pay the price so you can drive your suv sayin how good the system is.

[Raze]

@Leo Gura based on the description of Hegel’s beliefs near the beginning of the vide, do you think he had god realization?