I'm not so sure what is meant by it. Adherents of Marxism-Leninism utilise the method of dialectical materialism to analyse the past and to provide a model for the structure of the future based on the resolution of dialectical contradictions. The contradictions of feudalism led to capitalism, and the contradictions of capitalism (the value-form in particular, class antagonism) lead to Communism.
It is simple. In the future the Communism will be built, and all the people will be happy. It is absolutely certain. Every current event proves this statement, if you think otherwise, you should educate youself better by consuming mass media.
But the past is not so certain, because the past is under control of the government, and the past undego changes sometimes. The past has its blank spots, there are some unmentionable events in the past that do not make communists proud. So no one really knows what happened.
If you are interested, you might want to read Orwell's 1984, he described extreme case of such a world view.
Communism is not a 'utopia' in the sense that everyone is happy all the time. It aims simply to do away with certain problems, just as public health services don't do away with every problem in your life. Your insinuation that I or any other Communist thinks this way is a strange one, though not unheard of.
>you should educate youself better by consuming mass media.
Is this not precisely the opposite of mass media? Marxist social critic Herbert Marcuse wrote about how, beacuse Communism is a subversive movement, and indeed the Left, it cannot gain mass media time, because of its nature as subversive; it can only be snuck in under capitalism, as capitalism is willing to accept any ideology for the sake of profit. I would recommend One-Dimensional Man on the topic of what problems Communists have with late capitalist media and production, and the hiding of information.
>If you are interested, you might want to read Orwell's 1984
I have; although it's a little funny to see Orwell used to rebut the Communist project, seeing as he was a Socialist himself who fought on the side of anarchists in Spain, there's a deeper point here that you are missing. Orwell wrote about very obvious misdirection - "war is peace", "peace is war". However, you are missing the fact that it is not this easy to see.
Nowadays, as I am sure you know, the contradiction and control is hidden not in the sentence but within the noun. In words such as "freedom", "democracy", "control", etc. the actual meaning can be discerned only by the speaker of the word and the historical time period. Please read Marcuse on this topic. I don't know where you're getting the idea that I'm in favour of rewriting the past from.
> Is this not precisely the opposite of mass media?
Under all existing or existed communist government mass media brings The Truth, the government's interpretation of events. If you live here you should know this interpretation, or you risk to show political illiteracy and to be critisized for that. It can damage your career, or you will be forced to attend to courses of political literacy, or both. I believe it didn't work for blue collars, they had more freedom in this sense, but for white collar political illiteracy was a real threat. It was like now in USA with microagression of white males (as I see it from other side of ocean): if you catched on some sort aggression at female, you could be fired and get a "wolf ticket" (in short, it is markings in papers that does not allow to find white collar job), or attend to some sort of training, bring public apoligies, and so on.
> Nowadays, as I am sure you know, the contradiction and control is hidden not in the sentence...
Are you trying to persuade me that USSR was not as bad as it seems from USA? I know that. And USA is not as bad as it seemed from USSR. But I have no intentions to discuss it here. It is a contraversial topic, and it is like swamp: you step there and cannot get out of it. Moreover I see no point in discussing: there is no USSR now. Was it bad, or not so bad -- it does not matter now.
> I don't know where you're getting the idea that I'm in favour of rewriting the past from.
I agree, however the Communist form is merely a re-telling of the capitalist form, it results from the same contradictions, the same process, and has the same result. Under the states of the past the control is unhidden and in fact presented unashamed by the powers that be. In the present day, the infiltration of the new rationality pervades not only media but all experience within modern society. When you hear Bach in the supermarket or watch the news or go to the voting booth, it is exactly the same domination, but in different forms.
This is why both the USA currently and the USSR formerly deserve the same criticism, and we need to move beyond this rationality of unfreedom, and the answer to this I belive lies firmly within the realm of revolutionary Communist movements, but only after realising exactly what inspired the controlling rationalities of the US and the USSR.
The US (as it continues) and USSR both institute(d) a policy in which the only freedom is that which you are told you are supposed to have, and that any freedom which transcends is called either "Socialist" or "capitalist". These are projected as 'bad' because they appear within their respective societies to reach 'the limits of reason itself'. To the American taken in by his 'freedom', Socialism is not only unreasonable, irrational or unjustifiable but it is impossible itself, because to him what is rational is production, the pervasiveness of technology and relentless consumption. Similar things can be said about the USSR and its descendant Marxist-Leninist states.
Within the USSR, there was no qualitative change, there was only quantitative change, and indeed due to their rationality, Socialism could only be seen as quantitative change, a sliding axis between capitalism and Socialism. This is because they were fixed by controlling rationality in which Communism has become quantitative, obscuring the fact that it is truly qualitative, Marx said as much all along: Communism is the rejection of all established notions, Communism abolishes all notions of morality, justice, freedom and indeed stands in opposition, contradiction to all previous societies.
'ordu answered as a person who has lived under communism. By "mass media" 'ordu meant "pravda". 'ordu is 100% correct about the communism as it was practiced in the 20th century. You are a theoretical marxist who has never seen what communism is like in practice. You would just say about every attempt to build communism that failed (which is all of them) that it was not real communism.
> But the past is not so certain, because the past is under control of the government, and the past undego changes sometimes. The past has its blank spots, there are some unmentionable events in the past that do not make communists proud. So no one really knows what happened.
Communists don't have anything resembling a monopoly on this.
When the author describes "communism" or "capitalism" he appears to be writing about his experience with them as he has seem them actually practiced, rather than the theory of how they are supposed to work according to their adherents.
Upon second reading, that makes more sense, however it would be clearer if this were the case. "Chinese Communism" can refer either to the ideology which the CCP claim to adhere themselves to, or it can refer to the actual state-capitalist bureaucracy as practiced in China.
He’s talking about actual communist political systems, not theoretical communism. Look at how China censored mention of tienanmen square, or how Stalin disappeared people from books and photographs.
There is similar problems with the software that runs pacemakers and other such devices, in which the source is not made available. The protection of users against themselves is an easy example of the intrusion of technological rationality and production for the sake of production in capitalism in which the totality of experience, even life itself for such people, is administered living.
The most strange bugs have the strangest solutions. Just an hour ago I was trying to debug a queueConstructor (it returns a malloc'd pointer to a queue data structure), right after I finished implementing the operations for a stack data structure. Malloc was inexplicably causing the program to hang (I don't know if it's a segfault, I was using Windows). printfing around the constructor and inside it didn't work. I had included all the libraries I needed to, syntax was good, no warnings, I even changed the declarations from int var to int var.
It turns out the problem was that in main() just before I called queueConstructor, I added the item 633346 as an integer element in my stack data structure. Whether this overflowed the integer, I don't know. But I don't know why it would stop malloc for a different data structure stored in a different variable from working (perhaps it was occupying some memory that my queue wanted?).
This isn't the first time bugs like this happen, and as a novice programmer I really wish tools were better, or I knew how to use the tools. GDB available via CodeBlocks wasn't helpful.
That sort of magic isn't right and if you don't find the source then you'll probably end up with more and more weird bugs down the line, to the point that nothing will work and you won't know why.
My first suggestion would be to familiarize yourself with valgrind to make sure that you aren't accessing memory that you shouldn't be. Next would be writing tests so you can isolate problems like this.
When you've got 58 different systems interacting you'll occasionally come across some weird problems that you can't replicate, but they should be few and far between.
Anecdotal evidence, but for Japan that seems to be changing. Popular Japanese art site Pixiv rolled out TLS to the entire site in the past year or so, before that it was only used during login.
As far as Korea goes, they've got a whole different bag of worms going on, at least for a couple more years. Look up "South Korea Internet Explorer" for some astounding stuff if you've not heard of this before.
This is precisely where the criticism that the USSR was "state capitalist" came from; it operated as a corporation owning its own means of production, not a dictatorship of the proletariat. "All power to the soviets" faded rather quickly even under Lenin.
>Every single time, over dozens of times, it resulted in bloody dictatorships.
It is very much worth studying why this has happened and what kind of methods can be used to avert it. Not only is Marxism-Leninism not the only form of Socialist praxis (neither is Marxism the only Socialist theory for that matter), but it's unwise to dismiss "failures" for the reason that they were authoritarian. Allende, Sankara's Burkina Faso, the Paris Commune, revolutionary Catalonia, and most recently Rojava are examples of the Socialist project experiencing some faults but not nearly as uncharitably as you are painting them here.
> Not only is Marxism-Leninism not the only form of Socialist praxis (neither is Marxism the only Socialist theory for that matter), but it's unwise to dismiss "failures" for the reason that they were authoritarian.
I'm dismissing failures because every single time it ended in bloody dictatorships, but no, This Time It Will Be Different®.
No, it won't. Funny how you talk about learning with the failures of history, but you keep insisting in trying again a system that again and again has proven itself to be horrible.
And again, that's when the world has been the best that it has ever been. In 60 years, extreme poverty went from ~60% to <10% of the global population because of free trade and globalization. Free trade was the largest income distribution process in history, shifting value from developed countries to developing countries.
Sure, there is still a lot to be done, but the current system has worked miracles. It can be improved, but proposing a dramatic change to a system that ALWAYS results in bloody dictatorships makes no sense.
Keep your disastrous social and economic experiments to yourself. Socialism has done harm enough.
Why do you think strawman thought-terminating cliches are an acceptable level of discourse? At best they serve to be distracting and needlessly hostile.
>but you keep insisting in trying again a system that again and again has proven itself to be horrible.
Not really; have you heard of Badiou's concept of the Communist Hypothesis? His argument is that Socialism, well, Communism has existed as an Idea for centuries, it is always the force to break down the "present state of things", it is the first element of society, the subversive one, to oppose the action of the State. To dismiss thirty years of research into Communism, creating branches such as anarchist Communism, communalism, feminist anarchism, Socialist technocracy and others with faux-empiricism is a little heavy handed in my view.
As for your support of the wonders of capitalism, neither I, nor Marx, Engels or any contemporary Communist denies its push to reduce poverty.
>shifting value from developed countries to developing countries.
"Shifting value" is a very strange way of saying that developing countries are being systematically exploited due to the low cost of labour because they have almost no training.
>but the current system has worked miracles
So did the feudal system, and in fact so did the Soviet system (which I do not by any means support).
>It can be improved
So can Socialism.
>but proposing a dramatic change to a system that ALWAYS results in bloody dictatorships makes no sense.
Capitalism itself was extremely dramatic, it came "soaked from head to toe in blood" as Marx put it. In fact, he dedicates two chapters of his magnum opus to detailing the bloody history of capitalism and the laws passed in Western Europe that allowed it to flourish.
> Why do you think strawman thought-terminating cliches are an acceptable level of discourse? At best they serve to be distracting and needlessly hostile.
But that's the essence of your argument. You are proposing to try again something that 100% of the times led to bloody dictatorships, claiming that this time it will be different due to some vague, hand-wavy reason.
> "Shifting value" is a very strange way of saying that developing countries are being systematically exploited due to the low cost of labour because they have almost no training.
Yeah, millions being moved out of poverty is the same as "exploited".
> So did the feudal system, and in fact so did the Soviet system (which I do not by any means support).
No. Unless one of those systems did something like removing 50% of the world population from extreme poverty in half a century. Neither did. Not only that, the Soviet system purposefully murdered millions. And the key word here is "purposefully". Every system results in deaths, the Soviet (and all socialists) fall into a special category where death is part of the governing process. See Holodomor. Killing Fields. Etc.
> So can Socialism.
I'll say "maybe" to give you the benefit of the doubt, but do we need to kill millions again to find out based on your "hunch"? No, thank you very much.
> as Marx put it
And you keep citing Marx as if he is a reasonable source, that puzzles me. He's long dead, just as his economic theories. Keep them dead.
The criticism is that it leads to "bloody dictatorships", not necessarily that authoritarian systems are bad. Before the 20th century there were many authoritarian systems (empires and monarchies) that oversaw some of the best governed periods of human history.
I'm sure you believe if you controlled a country, you would do a much better job and not make the same mistakes that lead to a bloody dictatorship and worse outcomes for the poor. Excuse us if most of the rest here don't believe that.
So sure, there are a few benevolent dictators here and there... but what's the ratio of benevolent to malevolent dictators/authoritarians? Is there such a a stat?
Do you count Kings as dictators? I don't really (the middle eastern monarchies have weathered the chaos in the region, if Kings were no different from dictators you would expect at least some of them to fall too...) but there is of course such a thing as a 'bad king'. I recalled this simplified analysis of Polish monarchs: https://archive.is/QEY1n tldr 250 out of 835 years of bad monarchs, or a 30% failure ratio by time. 18 individual monarchs out of 48, or a 37.5% failure rate by person. Very few 20th century dictatorships have even survived into the 21st century.
I've seen similar ratings for Roman emperors as well but confess I don't remember the details, I wouldn't be surprised if someone has further compiled information to address exactly this question for other European lines of monarchs, the various Chinese dynasties, Japan's weird history, etc. (https://archive.is/I42xd is a good reminder of the excesses, no form of government is innocent.)
This kind of attitude from your parent commenter is extremely common, it is an artifact of ideology and the working of technological rationality into the consciousness. While the parent commenter probably believes he or she lives in a post-ideological world in which rationality has been obtained and found to be forever placed somewhere between right and left, a compromise of two extremes in which domination cannot be acknowledged because as Marx put it, Bentham reins, J.S Mill makes a strange comeback in the denial of structural effects and seeing totality. The kind of ignorance or blindness to the totality of society is well captured by P.W Bridman quoted by Marcuse:
>"We evidently know what we mean by length if we can tell what the length of any and every object is, and for the physicist nothing more is required. To find the length of an object, we have to perform certain physical operations. The concept of length is therefore fixed when the operations by which length is measured are fixed: that is, the concept of length involves as much and nothing more than the set of operations by which length is determined. In general, we mean by any concept nothing more than a set of operations; the concept is synonymous with the corresponding set of operations."
>Bridgman has seen the wide implications of this mode of thought for the society at large:
"To adopt the operational point of view involves much more than a mere restriction of the sense in which we understand 'concept,' but means a far-reaching change in all our habits of thought, in that we shall no longer permit ourselves to use as tools in our thinking concepts of which we cannot give an adequate account in terms of operations."
This is precisely correct. I think the replies to you are missing a very central point (speaking as if the accusation of advocating Marxian Communism was a serious charge, too). Perhaps the important authors about the relationship between media and capitalism are the Frankfurt School, in particular Herbert Marcuse's works. I'm reading his book One-Dimensional Man at the moment.
He's advocating exactly what you are: democratic deployment of technology. How this relates to media is very interesting, and the idea that these problems exist merely quantitatively different in a possible Socialist society is a fundamental lack of imagination for qualitative change.
The other people replying to you forget a key component of history - that rationality is not fixed. Technology has the capability to change what humans consider rational, rationality is a process, a movement in which different societies have different views. The current rationality of late capitalism is what Marcuse terms technological rationality. That is, the rationality of production. This kind of rationality is the production for the sake of production, for the sake of profit. After all, what is more rational than developing machinery, streamlining it, making it more efficient, increasing the role of mechanization in society? Hardly anyone would disagree that these are wonderful advancements - however with them, they have brought rationality of production which pervades society everywhere. This rationality is actually irrational, but few see this. Advertising, planned obsolescence, extreme marketing, the working of the market into the education systems are all simply parts of the production process. Just more costs.
Artwork is affected by technological rationality. The old pieces of art often had an alienating component, that is to say, they displayed a clear break from the state of things, and a hope for a different kind of future, the outcast, the mastermind thief, the unemployed person, etc. all fulfilled a role that was outside of the system of rationality, acting against it; even when these roles were not glorified, they existed as an opposition to the system. Marcuse notes that in modern artwork, this notion has largely disappeared; the villains and outcasts are no longer outcasts, they are within the system but in the bottom rungs, and their opposition cannot be seen as clever, but it is only misguided. Their opposition to the bourgeois system from within is always shown as a false opposition, a threat to our notions of freedom conferred by technological rationality.
When you hear Bach, Freud, Marx etc. in the supermarket, he is stripped of his alienating or any kind of critical dimension. An element of his truth has been taken away by the new consideration in the light of technological rationality, reduced and sublimated into the totality.
Socialism, what you are advocating, carries with it a very different set of rationality in which man is liberated from the freedom of being a free economic subject, free from the bounded freedom of the welfare state. The welfare state, which many proponents of "soft capitasm" advocate is another form of repression of the individual, but in different forms. It is administered living, the restriction and control of the free time made available by technological advancement and control over the intelligence necessary to comprehend self-determination.
When we advocate Socialism, we do not mean a central party committee deciding what to read, we mean the liberation of people from the restrictions of the new rationality which insists in its own mode of living through our leisure time, our work time, our sexual enjoyment and artistic pursuit.
It is entirely possible to be a skeptic of capitalism, its application and its effects while engaging in a market in which capitalists provide goods and services. It is also possible to do so and sell your own labour-power (which is what workers do). To say that one's skepticism or criticism is invalid because of participation is equivalent to saying that the feudal serf may not complain about his position: after all, his pick and clothes were provided by his lord. He ought to be grateful!
