This sounds a lot scarier when you don't realize that, among the same set, there is all but ubiquitous contempt for "tankies", i.e. the very same Stalinist-style sort of thing you're worried about. Newsmax won't tell you that, because why would they? Keeping you frightened keeps you doomscrolling their ads.
I know about the tankie hate because I know a bunch of the people you're scared of. They're not going to burn your house down or kill you. But they do understand that they're getting a raw deal, and they have a pretty good idea of why and from whom, and they're not willing to take it lying down. Good for them, in my opinion, and seeing as they are getting a raw deal - worse than my own generation did, which is saying a lot - it's with them that my sympathies lie.
Especially in a time when the US federal government is violating its own laws at will, up to and including illegal arrests carried out Gestapo-style with no probable cause and no due process - if you can't tell the difference between a generation of young people defending their interests and the potential collapse of civilization, you really do need to read less Newsmax, because it's making you paranoid.
Mostly the kids are just looking to roll back as much as they can of Reaganism, and they're quite right to want to do so. This forty-year experiment with totally unchecked capitalism has gone on too long. It's past time to curtail and start repairing the damage.
> slavery was capitalist
Well, what else would you call it? Considered in purely economic and thus amoral terms, a chattel slave literally is capital, in the same sense that a mule or, later, a tractor, would be. That's quite literally what I was taught as a child in public grade school, growing up in Mississippi thirty years ago, and if you want to argue that the rural Mississippi school boards of the 1980s had been subverted by communists, that's fine, but you need to know up front that if you do I'm going to start calling you Joe McCarthy and I'm just never going to stop.
In any case, I have a very hard time conceiving of a world in which "slavery is capitalist" is in any way a controversial thought. Are you perhaps confusing it with "capitalism is slavery"? Because you're citing the former, but it's the latter you seem to be arguing against, in the sense that you can be said to be making any argument here at all.
You're right that ranting, on HN and elsewhere, rarely fixes anything. Have you thought about why you're impelled to do so anyway, and whether the impetus is a wholly rational one?
> McCarthy, as his subsequent history would show, knew little about communism, on this side of the ocean or the other. This loutish, duplicitous bully, who carried, not the names of Reds but bottles of hootch in his briefcase died in disgrace and of alcoholism. Yet, in a global sense McCarthy was on to something. McCarthy may have exaggerated the scope of the problem but not by much. The government was the workplace of perhaps 100 communist agents in 1943-45. He just didn't know their names.
(Note that this was written by a prominent left leaning journalist based on declassified intelligence information.)
It's hardly Marxist to note that slavery and capitalism are compatible, although he may have been the first to explicitly do so. Capitalism isn't special in that regard; slavery can exist, and in various forms has existed, under every economic system known to man. Chattel slavery appears to work especially well with capitalism, as indeed has been amply demonstrated in US history, so that was what I talked about.
Granted, any such discussion omits the moral enormity inherent in any form of slavery. Economic discussions are like that. I'll grant you that the moral and economic dimensions of the slavery-and-capitalism question tend not to be too clearly separated in the public discourse of the moment, but that neither surprises nor concerns me. As I mentioned earlier, what you misidentify as "resurgent Marxism" is in fact a reaction to the totally untrammeled capitalism I called by the name "Reaganism". Considering the myriad and grievous harms that system has produced in four short decades, and considering also that that system's own proponents happily describe it just as "capitalism" without the courtesy of such qualifiers as I use, whatever misidentification or misblame it may receive seems to me well earned. Besides, it's not as if counting slavery among the crimes of Reaganism is in any way erroneous. Have you seen the US prison system?
To the rest, it should be hardly a surprise to anyone that there were Soviet agents in the US government at any point from about the early 1930s through the late 80s. Just like there were US agents in the Soviet government. And Chinese agents in both, and vice versa, and so on. The existence of espionage, and the existence of a vast Red conspiracy of subversion on a national and generational scale, are in no way the same thing, and to argue from
one to the other requires a good deal more substantiation than either you or Tailgunner Joe appear inclined or indeed able to provide.
Granted, one can sometimes use the former to frighten uninformed people into believing in the latter, despite a total inability to demonstrate that the latter actually exists. You seem to want to talk about gaslighting. Has it occurred to you that, unlike merely having people argue that you're wrong about something, this sort of specious, fear-based deception may in fact qualify as such?
Btw, I just spent a little while poking around Newsmax, something I hadn't previously done since the Bush administration. I don't know whether you really do read a lot of that stuff, but if you do, maybe seriously consider cutting back, and replacing at least some of it with something from outside the filter bubble it appears strongly designed to create and enforce. Or, I don't know, use an ad blocker at least? If you're going to let that stuff monopolize your brain and your political philosophy, I'd at least like to think you're doing it for its own sake, rather than so that somebody can make money off of you.
Multiple time you omitted or avoided to respond to the obvious fact that what you call "Marxist" (which you use to evoke a negative red-scare emotion) is in fact Democratic Socialism - the attempt to extend democracy - not a Stalinist dictatorship.
The issue is that extended democracy implies an extension to the economic sphere, and thus an overhaul of private property relations. This is the actual threat that is attacked by capitalists, and the Stalinist regime is used to paint all threats to these undemocratic institutions in a totalitarian light.
I'm using Marxism in exactly the same sense you are: people advocating for "an overhaul of private property relations." That is, as a I understand it, what "democratic socialism" really means. I don't use the term "democratic socialism" because its proponents in America have co-opted that term to mean Nordic-style "capitalism with a robust welfare state" (which I think would be fine). As far as I can tell, though, those economies do not embody the "overhaul of private property relations" you're talking about. After all, Article 73 of the Danish Constitution declares: "The right of property shall be inviolable." (Heritage Foundation ranks Denmark one of the 10 freest economies in the world, ahead of the U.S.) The concept is likewise enshrined in Article 17 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights. The "overhaul" you're talking about is in and of itself a totalitarian violation of human rights.
I think your reply proves my point that it's not really about democracy at all. It's just about a fervent defense of the current undemocratic and unjust private property relations.
What do you expect to find in constitutions written by free market economies?
> The concept is likewise enshrined in Article 17 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights
False, it was left intentionally vague to not explicitly endorse private property in the capitalist sense.
> The "overhaul" you're talking about is in and of itself a totalitarian violation of human rights.
That's also on point for Propertarianism. Where private property has been sacralized and to argue against it is against the law of nature, even if it's wrong and unjust. "The King declared that absolute monarchy is a divine right and any resistance is thus blasphemy and shall be dealt with accordingly".
> I think your reply proves my point that it's not really about democracy at all.
I never said it was about democracy!
> It's just about a fervent defense of the current undemocratic and unjust private property relations.
I would characterize it as a fervent defense of British constitutionalism, tracing back to the Magna Carta, but yes, the current system of property relations is a part of that.
But it seems like we're not in any disagreement about my original post: I expressed worry that Marxist ideas were resurgent. We seem to be on the same page about what I mean by "Marxism." And you don't appear to disagree that those ideas are resurgent--and therefore my originally stated worry was not baseless after all.
Well, I certainly hope they are, but I doubt that they are as institutionalized as you seem to suggest.
I also think that using "Marxism" for a democratic movement and ideas is done to intentionally associate them with the authoritarian regimes of the 20th century.
This sounds a lot scarier when you don't realize that, among the same set, there is all but ubiquitous contempt for "tankies", i.e. the very same Stalinist-style sort of thing you're worried about. Newsmax won't tell you that, because why would they? Keeping you frightened keeps you doomscrolling their ads.
I know about the tankie hate because I know a bunch of the people you're scared of. They're not going to burn your house down or kill you. But they do understand that they're getting a raw deal, and they have a pretty good idea of why and from whom, and they're not willing to take it lying down. Good for them, in my opinion, and seeing as they are getting a raw deal - worse than my own generation did, which is saying a lot - it's with them that my sympathies lie.
Especially in a time when the US federal government is violating its own laws at will, up to and including illegal arrests carried out Gestapo-style with no probable cause and no due process - if you can't tell the difference between a generation of young people defending their interests and the potential collapse of civilization, you really do need to read less Newsmax, because it's making you paranoid.
Mostly the kids are just looking to roll back as much as they can of Reaganism, and they're quite right to want to do so. This forty-year experiment with totally unchecked capitalism has gone on too long. It's past time to curtail and start repairing the damage.
> slavery was capitalist
Well, what else would you call it? Considered in purely economic and thus amoral terms, a chattel slave literally is capital, in the same sense that a mule or, later, a tractor, would be. That's quite literally what I was taught as a child in public grade school, growing up in Mississippi thirty years ago, and if you want to argue that the rural Mississippi school boards of the 1980s had been subverted by communists, that's fine, but you need to know up front that if you do I'm going to start calling you Joe McCarthy and I'm just never going to stop.
In any case, I have a very hard time conceiving of a world in which "slavery is capitalist" is in any way a controversial thought. Are you perhaps confusing it with "capitalism is slavery"? Because you're citing the former, but it's the latter you seem to be arguing against, in the sense that you can be said to be making any argument here at all.
You're right that ranting, on HN and elsewhere, rarely fixes anything. Have you thought about why you're impelled to do so anyway, and whether the impetus is a wholly rational one?