“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.
Liberals keep saying history is written by the winners while simulatenously believing everything Westerners wrote about communism after the Cold War.
You also get libs from ex-socialist countries that go
"You wouldn’t like communism like I lived it in x Warsaw pact country "
Then they follow that with the most racist, fascistic thing possible. Happens everytime
Don’t forget born in 1992
Pfff. More like 2003
Communism is when PiS (or Platforma, depending on who you ask) is in power.
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Nah, I think that those two takes, like many others, just exist in separate, frictionless vacuums for libs; the metaphorical venn diagram has no overlap to them.
History is written by the winners only applies to bad country, and Communism is bad because I was told that in school.
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Look, he may be a member of the Waffen SS, but that doesn’t mean he is a fascist. There were many members of the SS that were principled conservatives that happened to oppose Judeo-Bolshevism.
They were just concerned citizens who wanted to have their fears of Judaism addressed
Even monarchists are more historically literate that liberals because of all the family lines they have to memorize
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Which he didn’t actually read until circa 2020.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It was super funny how before the debate Jorp was all
”I’ve studied communism”, but during the debate he was more like 
”Oh shit oh fuck I haven’t done the reading and the teacher’s asking me questions”
I think the manifesto is based and filled with bangers tbh
Fair.
I think he’s read Solzhenitsyn too haha
I’ve read the Gulag Archipelago that Peterson recommends.
It’s the most propaganda ridden book I’ve read about the USSR, so many factual inaccuracies and lies.
Dude’s own ex wife said in an interview that it’s all nonsense
I’m aware.
Even if you tell libs/conservatives that, they just ignore it and say that her interview is just propaganda. Unreal.
Unfalsifiable orthodoxy
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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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“He could have been simply brave for speaking truth to power, but instead he was braver for speaking untruth for power”
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.
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.
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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.
I’m assuming that you didn’t literally work for
, 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.deleted by creator
It’s not funny. It should be terrifying. Because confidence works. Because that’s how millions of people have been convinced in the holiness of capitalism and will fight you, literally fight you with guns and bombs, to prevent even a ghost of communism from echoing meekly anywhere in their bubble.
And they back it all up with decades upon decades of propaganda, media, shite pushed endlessly since the creation of USSR at least. Which feeds the confidence. “Oh yeah, if gommunism so good why did this random bloke who ran away from Russia in 1992 as his country burned and boiled around him says he lives okay in USA?! Checkmate, tankie!”.
It’s not funny, it’s not fun. It’s horrifying and gutwrenching
I think about if the liberals had the same problems in the 1700s. Of course, capitalist modes of production have already been emerging across the world in form of dual power in places like the Netherlands or England, while feudal government was still prevalent.
In the 19th century, the Reign of Terror was treated much in the same way that “communism killed 100 million people” is used today. It was supposed to be the cautionary tale of what happens if you actually give the people any power. This was used to stop any sort of radical movements but also against liberals getting any more concessions out of the old order. Most narratives of the French Revolution spoke negatively of the Terror, Robespierre, et al until liberals started pushing back on that in the run up to 1848.
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That’s how it is with everything, right? The less you know, the less you don’t know you don’t know.
The truly ignorant are the most confident people in the world.
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the dunning-krueger effect.
hegemony? I hardly know 'e
Finance bros: Hedge a moany? What’s a moany?
divorced youth pastors: heck alimony
“Hey, motherfucker! Get laid! Get fucked!”
Wasn’t Hegemony a character in Harry Potter?
I wish I could be so confidently wrong. Sounds nice. Job interviews would be easier
the way libs talk about communism is on the same level of sophistication as evangelicals explaining how evolution is bunk
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Evolutionary theories have failed every time! Oh, so you’re telling me that the bananas that I see at the grocer “aren’t real evolution”? Real convenient, that!
Liberals coming in here showing their whole ass great work everyone
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I was just reading this thread on r/neoliberal yesterday (ik that sub is basically cheating) that is exactly what you speak of here. An echo chamber of “Marx was wrong about almost everything” with almost no specifics or demonstration of understanding of the actual theory. In the few cases where they happen to mention a real Marxian term like alienation, it’s purely a vibes thing for these libs. They’ll take the alienation stuff, thank you, because Marx was right about workers being depressed and stuff. No no, don’t worry about the content and motivation of Marx’s theory of alienation or the progression of thoughts which led him to it; it is sufficient to take the results based on your gut intuition.
I doubt they’ve read a single word of Marx. They reed the Debooooonking articles but don’t care to read the original source material.
Imagine a prosecutor showing up to court with zero evidence other than “he just looks guilty”. That’s the liberal standard.
Reminds me of a debate I had.
Poster said “Marxists lack nuance”.
I asked which one of these works lacked nuance in his opinion: The German Ideology? The Grundrisse? Anti-Dühring? Or maybe slightly more recent stuff like Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks?
The reply: “Marxists don’t understand human nature: it’s about the stronger monkey having things.”
The irony didn’t even hit him. He was dead seriously try to sell me this “human natooor is strong dogs fuck” as a social theory.
It’s always like this. They refuse to engage with the works themselves, because all they can muster is vague allusions to “human nature” and “debunked”
And I didn’t even really tried to debate them, I just wanted them to admit they haven’t read anything. Because why are they lying when we both know they have not?!
That’s when you take out your pocket knife and tell him that, because you came to this discussion prepared, you own him and everything he used to own because he’s a weaker monkey. And then you demand he takes you to your new house.
I love how their assumption “human nature is homo homini lupus” lies with the underlying assumption of “so we have to let people be bad and not do anything to reign in these tendencies for a better life.”
It even contradicts liberal theory, such as the social contract. “Oh humans are bad, so to try and create a state where it rules over society and keeps peace won’t succeed. It’s against human nature and they’ll rebel”
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lol I just looked back at the same thread and found this amazing take by another Marx Understander
Had he lived to be 200, Karl Marx would almost certainly have become an ardent capitalist.
Liberals don’t even know that some Marxist economists (David Harvey) can be annoying in their dialectical praise of capitalism as an engine of historical progress.
They would simply assume he was a capitalist like how they all say China is capitalist
Had he lived to 200, he’d have become the methuselan overlord of Earth based solely on how messianic that seems
I for one, welcome our new unfathomably ancient overlord. May he live centuries past us all
I’ll just mention it is not even about reading Marx’s actual works; it is not really necessary to read all the volumes of Capital. It is about the method of inquiry and intellectual honesty.
If you want to know Marx, then reading any modern Marxist economic text is sufficient (for example, Michael Roberts’ Marx 200); other texts like the Communist Manifesto are not even that long, and I’m sure Lenin’s Imperialism has already been distilled down by other Marxists somewhere. There are also YT etc…
The point, though, is intellectual honesty, and as you said, you don’t learn a theory by first going to read what the critics have to say. Sure, that may be, and arguably even should be, part of the inquiry, but they make no effort to actually understand the Marxist point of view; they don’t seek Marxist sources. They take the conclusion as granted to them on a silver platter.
The more Marx (or good Marxist theory more generally) that you read, the more you realise how detached from reality liberal discourse about anything even remotely connected to Marxist thought is. This is blindingly obvious in mainstream economics departments, where the average professor or TA normally manages to combine both shocking ignorance of any economic theory beyond their barrenly narrow purview, and depressing naivety when it comes to the apparent self-evidence of their arguments.
That being said, economics is only the most obvious example. Set foot inside the average history, sociology or anthropology department and the epistemic consequences of a lack of Marxist approaches becomes immediately obvious when you see the low quality of alot of the work being produced and ask why that’s the case.
History probably has the best showing, although it’s nothing like it was in the 1960’s or 70’s, and I suspect that that’s because history is an area where the necessity of a materialist analysis makes itself the most immediately obvious, and because the results in this area achieved by Marxist are obviously superior and so more easily form the basis for further productive historical analysis. For example the debates around the origins of capitalism out of late feudalism cannot avoid the Brenner Debate. You see the influence of materialist thought here even in thinkers who are not explicitly Marxist. Historians who are otherwise not rigorously materialist and politically liberal will still sometimes readily recognise the validity, or make use of, class-analysis.
Sociology is interesting because it’s mainstream’s basic methods seem deeply idealistic to me despite the fact that Marx is also one of the key figures in the development of modern sociology, and given that Marx’s political economy, as opposed to modern neoclassical economics, recognises that you cannot really engage in productive economic analysis beyond a very superficial level if you do not recognise that it’s essential to talk about the economic sociology, the economic institutions and social structures that serve differnent socio-economic functions and fit together in certain contexts to distribute the socio-economics functions amongst themselves, including the fundamentally important point of noting how different societies and different modes of production will see different social structures serve as the social relations of production. Otherwise you end up with an idealist theory of economic production.
Honestly though you also see this among self-described leftists or even ‘Marxists’ who do not understand the meaning of the term ‘value’ in Marx, i.e. that it is a technical economic concept, not a moral one (though through its social and political implications we are obviously naturally going to attach normative value to how it functions or affects us).
Another think that both liberals and soc dems do when discussing Marxism is taking quotes completely out of context and radically misunderstanding or misinterpreting what it being claimed or discussed. Which just makes all the more obvious the need for reeducation in the fundamentals of Marxism.
Also pretty funny when liberals see when we criticize them because they think we sound like chuds because they can’t comprehend that chuds are also liberals.
Say what you will about professional philosophy (and there’s a lot of negative stuff to say about it), but my experience has been that people with doctorates in philosophy tend to both understand Marx better and be more receptive to his points than people in most other departments. Maybe I’ve just gotten lucky, though.
I agree.
Actually I’d go further and say that everyone should get the opportunity to study philosophy in school, and that everyone who pursues study in any subject should have to, or be encourage to take at least one or a couple philosophy and history courses on the subject they study, e.g. philosophy of physics, biology, economics, sociology… By contrast I don’t really think there should be formal education in philosophy by itself without study other subjects to keep urself grounded and to do philosophy on. Abstraction and speculation do still need a minimum of grounding in the concrete if they are going to be meaningful or applicable imo.
If by philosophy we mean the most general study of the must general, asbtract or fundamental properties of the world, including as applied to specific key topics or areas of knowledge, then even aside from philosophical questions of ontology, epistemology, aesthetics and ethics, the reason I think that having access to engaging in philosophy proper is worthwhile is that seriously studying philosophy really can help you work on your ability of critical and conceptual analysis and logical argument. This aids our own understanding of topics and makes more convincing as Marxists. Again, the different between Marxism and utopian socialism is that it is scientific. Even on this site I think you see quite a few discussions which drift into the territory of philosophy but which seem to contain alot of confusion because people are using terms with very different meanings but then talking simultaneously as if they were debating about the same topic. This obviously doesn’t mean that every convo is like this or that any really is in it’s entirety, but it does highlight how necessary it is to try make as clear as reasonable possible from the onset what we mean when we suddenly start using abstract or technical terms, in order to avoid needless confusion.
There are of course many often-correct negative stereotypes about philosophy students and academic philosophy, which I agree are valid. One consequence of this is that, frankly, I’m not always convinced that the students in there class on, like, Baudrillard are really working on their critical and analytical skills in the ways they would if they studied other thinkers, schools or topics.
That being said, no one needs to deeply study philosophy or it’s history to understand the essential core of Marxism, Marxist politics or to engage as an effective militant. On the other hand, I really resent when people imply that we prols are slack-jawed meat sacks without the ability to think theoretically, abstractly or philosophically ourselves and on our own terms. I’ve met many brilliant organic working class intellectuals who could have pursued careers in respectable academia - and in fact blow the liberal professors who hold those spots out of the water - but are not as interested or would never have been given a place there if they were going to try and do anything remotely hinting of Marxist-influenced work.
I disagree. They talk about it in a way that looks different, but philosophy academics tend to functionally be very liberal and just have more sophisticated ways of defending roughly the same stupid positions
You’re correct that the big majority of philosophy academics are liberal. It’s good to bear in mind tho imo that philosophy professors are not the only people employed as philosophy educators or teachers and are far from the only people who have seriously studied philosophy, formally or informally. There are a decent number of Marxist philosophy PhD’s, not least from the combination of their experience of the labor market and the fact that they’ve had the time or priviledge to think critically about and ‘deconstruct’ certain key concepts that are essential parts of capitalist/liberal ideology.
The issue is not so much, imo, in areas of philosophy like philosophy of science, mathematics, language, logic or even epistemology and metaphysics. The more immediate issue is when it comes to areas like moral or political philosophy, or philosophy of economics. The biases in these latter cases are really evident and you are correct imo that when considering that social function they are largely serving as more sophicated mechanisms of ideological legitimation of liberalism or reformism. E.g. any western political philosophy department is going to be dominated by Rawlsians, i.e. the least politically relevant and most mind-numbingly boring political theory that was ever shat over the face of the earth. The most recent wave of Rawlsian thought is soc-dem in nature, looking at his late texts on ‘property-owning democracy’, meaning accepts to have soc-dem societies which ‘socialism’ has been reached by reform but in which there is still private property. Obviously even a slight understanding of Marxist theory dispells this idea as obviously incoherent. The reason it is still present is because it acts as a moral paliative that petit-bourgeois soc-dem intellectuals - who are intelligent enough to realise that contemporary capitalism is completely fucked up but are neither intellectually sophicated enough nor morally strong enough to correctly diagnose it or offer genuine solutions - can use to sooth their consciences.
That being said, you do often see a correlation with how deeply or seriously people are interested in philosophy and their interest in Marxism. The danger is that these people are often simply intellectual Marxists or Marxians with an abstract idea of politics. This is generally far from being entirely their fault, but it is a danger. In practice they are often interested more in abstract argument about certain ideas as opposed to the empirical and historical adequacy of Marxism as a theory of social reality.
the meaning of the term ‘value’ in Marx, i.e. that it is a technical economic concept, not a moral one
We’re so used to thinking of our fiscal debts to financial institutions and creditors as an extension of our social obligation to one another. It’s perverse. Liberals especially love thinking along these lines - it appeals to their love of politics as a vessel for virtuous self flagellation (austerity politics, bootstrapping, individual choice/responsibility, etc, all the shit that exemplifies how liberals are in fact right-wing), as well as their sycophantic and undiscerning adulation for institutions. You’ll probably never get any of these people to pick up Capital, let alone give you a rebuttal to something like the labor theory of value (as you mention, these people are not serious), but you might be able to make inroads by pointing them to David Graeber. The first chapter of Debt, “On the issue of moral confusion,” addresses this topic directly.
Side note, Trillbillies just had a guest author on whose work dealt with this concept, and I could not believe they didn’t mention Graeber even once.
:graeber:
It’s like a kindergartener trying to teach you calculus.
Did that plenty of times, not that hard. Kids are great with concepts.
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Thanks that was a typical ESL mixup for me.
well i’m pretty sure if the kindergartner already knows calculus, they’ll probably be able to explain it to me as well
usians are the most propangandized people on earth
The most common experience I’ve seen new leftists talk about is how overwhelmingly large the left is and how much there is to learn. The average switched off liberal has missed out on decades of political education.
