“Communism bad”

“Why?”

200 year old tropes so ancient they were debunked by Marx himself

Of course, you go through the motions of explaining the most basic political concepts that could be grasped by skimming the cliff notes for literally any Marxist works

“Friedrich Engels? Is he like the president of Germany or something?”

It’s like a kindergartener trying to teach you calculus.

      • ReadFanon [any, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
        5·
        1 year ago

        I believe he said he read it once in his earlier days.

        (Maybe his youth? I feel like it was in his livestream where he responded to a question asking what he’s doing to prepare for the debate and he told on himself because he said “well, there’s a lot you can do in 24 hours” and proceeded to say that he’s going to do a “close re-reading” of the manifesto, which he reported to have read many years prior, but I could be getting confused here.)

        Bruh.

        You don’t read The Communist Manifesto because you’re a fraud and a charlatan.

        I don’t read The Communist Manifesto because it’s a rushed pamphlet drafted with the intent to inform the demands of the European masses during the revolutions of 1848 and as such it holds very little value as theory.

        We are not the same.

        • axont [she/her, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
          3·
          1 year ago

          It’s clear he didn’t particularly understand it either. He took the manifesto as a call to make paradise on Earth. His opening statement was saying that paradise cannot exist on earth, because living as a human means existing within brutal, uncaring nature.

          He brought up that the manifesto doesn’t mention nature like this, which is true, it’s a political manifesto for organizing factory workers. If he had read Capital he’d know Marx defines labor as transformation of natural resources through human ingenuity.

          I don’t think Peterson ever cared about history or theory as much as vibes. I don’t think he even regards facts as important. He likes little anecdotes that signal things with metaphorical truths.

          • ReadFanon [any, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
            0·
            1 year ago

            100% agree.

            I don’t think he actually read the whole Manifesto through tbh and if he did, he was too busy coming up with his own personal objections to each sentence that he was clearly unable to see the forest for the trees.

            I’m not saying that he would have come out of the reading as a freshly-minted Marxist but he was really grandiose and slimy about his refuting of the communist manifesto in a way that was obvious he thought he had this list of epic gotchas but it just showed that he didn’t go into reading it with the intent of understanding it or refuting it from its own internal logic.

            I’d tolerate his approach to the manifesto better if he made asides to how it didn’t address this or that issue before proceeding to critique the actual content and arguments of the manifesto itself but to expect that someone would provide an account of human nature in a 30 page pamphlet while expounding upon their entire political philosophy is, frankly, ridiculous (and even moreso when you’re expecting Marx of all people to do that.)

            Peterson is such a pseud.

            • axont [she/her, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
              1·
              1 year ago

              I bring this up a lot and I’m sorry if people here have to read it over and over, but I’m always gonna bring it up since it’s central to who Peterson is. During that debate Zizek asked Peterson to specifically name any alleged Marxist professors. Peterson had no names, probably because he wanted to say Foucault or Marcuse, guys who’ve been dead for decades. Zizek offered the name David Harvey, the British scholar who’s an expert on Marx’s Capital. Peterson didn’t recognize the name.

              • ReadFanon [any, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
                2·
                1 year ago

                I still can’t believe that this wasn’t the big “Emperor has no clothes” moment that, by rights, it should have been to the Peterson fanboys.

              • BelieveRevolt [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
                2·
                1 year ago

                It was super funny how before the debate Jorp was all smuglord ”I’ve studied communism”, but during the debate he was more like cri ”Oh shit oh fuck I haven’t done the reading and the teacher’s asking me questions”

                • Parenti Bot@lemmygrad.mlBEnglish
                  2·
                  1 year ago
                  The quote

                  In the United States, for over a hundred years, the ruling interests tirelessly propagated anticommunism among the populace, until it became more like a religious orthodoxy than a political analysis. During the Cold War, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime’s atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn’t go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them. If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.

                  – Michael Parenti, Blackshirts And Reds

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            • ReadFanon [any, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
              1·
              1 year ago

              This is gonna sound like it’s a bit and that I’m just parodying Peterson’s way of speaking in vague hand-wavey style but I promise you that it’s not and I’m legitimately making an argument here…

              To Peterson, the historicity of The Gulag Archipelago is irrelevant to him because it represents a higher order, metaphorical truth.

              When you grasp this about what is important to Peterson’s approach to truth then it becomes very obvious that he plays fast and loose with facts because he’s not concerned with mundane truths that are the domain of historians and scientists, in fact he holds them in contempt especially when they run counter to his understanding, because he sees his purpose in uncovering and elucidating the metaphorical truths that structure our existence.

              If this sounds like a bunch of nonsense woo then you’re right. If this sounds like the attitude of an aspiring prophet then you’re right.

              But if you want to really understand how Peterson’s brain works and why his avid followers seem largely immune to facts then this is the mentality that you need to wrap your head around. Pretty much everything that Peterson does is a sort of exegesis on this higher order, metaphorical truth that he’s both attempting to understand himself while attempting to articulate it to his audience at the same time.

              There’s a quote from him that really illuminates his belief about his “mission”. I’ll try to find it and if I do I’ll edit it into this comment.

              • ShimmeringKoi [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
                0·
                1 year ago

                I’m totally picking up what you’re putting down here, yeah these people love subjectivr metaphorical truths, it gives them a spiritual charge. Its like they live in a world of pure signifiers, like they exist in a fog of metaphor and allegory and symbolism (they fuckin love their numerology too). It’s like they’re hoping to reach some kind of existential truth by tunneling through nonsense. It’s ironic that theyre the ones who bang on and on about “facts and logic” because they have neither. They use the concepts as ritual fetishes, invoke their strange bile and wave around an ornate little doll called Facts and Logic. They present themselves as unassailable, because they have the doll on their side, but as soon as you assail them it crumples.

    • VILenin [he/him]@hexbear.netOPMEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Western “communism studies” invariably consists of undergrad classes taught by either cold warrior professors or miserable academics, and the “study” consists entirely of regurgitating passages from whatever pseudointellectual anticommunist steaming drivel Anne Applebaum shat out this year.

    • Philosoraptor [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      I’m assuming that you didn’t literally work for jordan-eboy-peterson , but (from what I can tell) this is exactly what he means by “studied communism” also: he collects the propaganda artwork and gets mad at Marx as he’s concocted him in his head.