- 7 months
Upper right is similar to lower left - inconsistent values and inconsistent ideology. Pure hypocrisy. Dogs of US vs Dogs of Russia.
- 7 months
Do you actually believe it’s inconsistent? Because it’s really quite straightforward: The US-centered capitalist empire must be stopped, and it’s genocidal proxies need to be eliminated, for the survival of the human race.
- 6 months
Imperialist capitalist oligarchic country must be stopped so I should support another imperialist capitalist oligarchic country. Brilliant logic.
- 6 months
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only one of these countries is imperialist.
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only one of these countries is a waning world hegemon with it’s boot on the neck of the planet and 900 military bases worldwide.
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the other has been forced into a position of fighting and weakening the hegemon, and therefore warrants critical support. This is why Africa, China and and most of the middle east support Russia in this war: every NATO tank and drone destroyed in Ukraine is one less to menace people elsewhere, one less to enforce murderous sanctions and austerity. The logic is very simple if you understand cause, effect and scale.
- 6 months
- Of course, because Belarus, Wagner group in Africa, Caucasus, are all humanitarian efforts
- True, but Spain was still imperialistic despite England being more successful. Success doesn’t excuse actions and ideology.
- Now who doesn’t really understand world politics?
You guys sound like liberals defending the invasion of Iraq.
- 6 months
I don’t think you know what imperialism means. Russia can and is bad without being imperialist. They may have imperial ambitions but that’s irrelevant to the now where they do not have the capacity to be imperialist. I wish people would stop trying to dilute the meaning of imperialism to just mean country doing war or big country doing thing I don’t like.
- 6 months
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What are Wagner doing in Africa? Guarding mines and shit. What was Azov doing in Eastern Uktaine before Russia stopped them? Slaughtering 8,000 people with the blessing of the nazi coup government.
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Spain being imperialist (imperialistic is not a word) doesn’t make, for example, Morocco imperialist. You seem to think I’m saying Russia is a lesser imperial power. You are wrong: Russia is not an imperial power at all.
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You, emphatically
You guys sound like liberals defending the invasion of Iraq.
Oh, the US/NATO military venture designed to sieze control of a country’s resources by manufacturing a conflict with a government headed by a guy we put there in the first place?
Yeah, imagine defending something like that. If this was 2002 your gullible ass would be calling me a Saddam Lover. But of course, now that we’ve already fucked up Iraq, that war can join the list of US crimes that liberals were definitely, totally for realsies always against from the beginning. You people are as craven as you are predictable. Always opposing every war after it’s too late and supporting every war when it actually matters.
In 5 years or so when we get 9/11 2: This Time it’s Ukranian, you’ll say"Everyone knew that starting the Ukraine War was a bad and criminal idea, but this time it’s different! This time we need to support (a puppet government in the Philippines doing ethnic cleansing against Chinese people or something) against big, evil, fascist Gyna, who attacked for no reason! Democracy itself is on the line!" Over and over every few years, never learning, until we’re all dead.
- 6 months
My gullible ass is old enough to actually have been out in the street protesting against US/NATO and the invasion of Iraq back in 2002. You’re defending Putin’s war as if it’s justifiable by Azov or by Euromaidan. And arresting and making Tymoshenko a political prisoner or breaking the Budapest Memorandum is of course all reasonable, right?
Btw, imperialistic: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/imperialistic
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- MrMetaKopos@slrpnk.netEnglish7 months
“Liberalism is a word that means different things to different people, especially from country to country.”
Liberal values are the basis of Marx’s work. He, rightly in my opinion, thinks the liberal state cannot bring about those values for all people.
- 7 months
Liberalism is all about individual “rights” and “freedoms”. Such as the right of the factory owner to exploit his workers or the freedom of the newspaper owner control the narrative. This is completely at odds with communism.
- MrMetaKopos@slrpnk.netEnglish7 months
Marxism is also in favor the individual and their liberty, but not the liberty to dispossess another of those liberties. He doesn’t see the individual as a natural object, but a creation of social and historical conditions. By destroying the class system, it liberates the individual to pursue their aims when they wish.
[I]n communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.
For Marx, the ‘Individual’ is not a finished product to be protected from society, but a potential to be realized through an equitable society.
PS… Dig your username
- 7 months
Liberalism and “liberal values” are not the basis of Marx’s work at all, they are one of his main targets of critique. Marx doesn’t start from liberal individual rights and then argue they’re imperfectly realized. He argues those rights are themselves products of bourgeois society and function to mask class domination. Saying Marx supports “individual liberty” doesn’t make him a supporter of “liberal values”, because liberal liberty is abstract and formal, while Marx’s freedom is material and social. This second response just restates Marx’s view of the individual as socially produced, which is correct, but it is reinforcing Marx rejection of liberalism. Marx was never refining liberal values, he was explaining why they arise under capitalism and why they cannot deliver real human freedom.
- MrMetaKopos@slrpnk.netEnglish7 months
When I say liberal values are the ‘basis’ of Marx’s work, I am not suggesting he was a ‘liberal reformer.’ I am arguing that Marx’s work is a dialectical sublation of liberalism. He takes the some of the liberal achievements (rationalism, the end of feudal bondage, and the Labor Theory of Value) and shows that they can only be fully realized by moving beyond the capitalist mode of production. He doesn’t reject the ‘Individual’ out of hand; he rejects the liberal version of the individual (the abstract citizen) to make way for the real individual (the species-being).
Only when the real, individual man re-absorbs in himself the abstract citizen, and as an individual human being has become a species-being in his everyday life, in his particular work, and in his particular situation, only when man has recognized and organized his “own powers” as social powers, and, consequently, no longer separates social power from himself in the shape of political power, only then will human emancipation have been accomplished.
– On The Jewish Question
- 7 months
I wrote a full reply but realized none of it really matters until we get clarity on terms. What do you actually mean by liberal values, and which of those do you think are foundational to Marxism?
When I say liberal values, I mean things like: the primacy of private property; formal equality before the law regardless of material conditions; individual rights abstracted from real social relations; freedom of contract between unequal classes; the liberal state as a supposedly neutral arbiter standing above society; and “freedoms” of speech, press, and association that in practice follow ownership and class power, up to and including a legal system that treats rich and poor “equally” such as criminalizing both for sleeping under bridges. These are not accidental features of liberalism or it’s values but flow directly from its idealist foundations.
Liberalism begins from abstract ideas (rights, the individual, the citizen) and treats them as primary, as if they exist independently of history and material conditions. Marxism begins from the opposite direction: dialectical and historical materialism, which treats those liberal categories as historically specific social products tied to a particular mode of production. That is a fundamental theoretical clash.
Because of this, Marxism does not aim to complete or realize liberal values, but to explain why they arise under capitalism and why they cannot deliver real human emancipation. So before talking about “sublation” or continuity, we need to be clear whether liberalism is being treated as an ideal to be fulfilled, or as an ideological form to be scientifically analyzed and superseded.
