Memory-tagging for myself; I keep looking for this post for quoting/rephrasing purposes, but I can never remember the thread title.
What Akala does in his spare time:
Yup, yup.
It’s not just about net wealth, though. Ownership of the Means of Production is still important, although both “ownership” and the MoP are a lot more abstract these days.
It gets a bit easier if you ditch English and use classical Marxist terminology. Unfortunately, doing that on BB tends to make people assume that you’re a Communist.
The modern distribution is somewhat different from Europe in Marx’s time. Back then, it was almost entirely made up of peasants and urban proletariat, with a relatively small bourgeosie above them, and a ruling class that could fit in a single room. The bourgeoisie were the capitalists who controlled the MoP, the ruling class were the royalty.
The USA is still mostly proles, but to nowhere near the same degree as Tsarist Russia. Most of the “missing” proles became petit bourgeoisie; they have token ownership in the MoP via small-scale investments, but they’re not the real power. The 1% are the real haute bourgeosie, and the 0.0001% are the ruling class.
Approximately. I’m still in the process of getting my head around this Marxist stuff myself.
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…all that French left me earwormed:
…although this perspective is an interesting angle on the ruling class:
It’s a matter of judgement and cynicism as to exactly how one sees the power divided between the nominal ruling class (Congress), the obvious ruling class (1%er CEOs, bankers, top law firms, lobbyists, Hollywood, senior military and intelligence leadership, etc.) and the background ruling class (the 0.0001%).
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This just sounds like No True Scotsman to me. It wasn’t True Communism because…
Also, she specifically calls out State Communism (i.e. Marxism) as a type of communism without distancing herself from it, so I don’t think you can dodge the criticism that way, either.
Edit
Just realized I missed the whataboutism of the Gestapo comment
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I’m a British Liberal of a wishy-washy centrist variety leaning left on social issues and right on economics. The left seem to reserve far more bile for people like me than the right wing Tories fucking everything up with Brexit.
All of which is part of why I’m not a Communist; I was presenting the counterarguments that folks like Grace tend to use. I’m too much of a misanthropic cynic to be comfortable without some structural limits on power, even when that power is held by the working class.
I’m a democratic socialist, which is a redundant term. See this thread:
https://twitter.com/elenthemellon/status/911321825182920705
…which, yes, could also be painted as “No True Scotsman”. But not all people are Scottish.
OTOH, I do think that holding up Stalin as the go-to representative of socialism is akin to using Hitler as representative of capitalism. Stalin was Soviet communism’s second-worst-case [1] failure mode, born in the trauma of fifty years of constant war.
Whatever Stalinist Russia was, it wasn’t controlled by the working class. It was controlled by Stalin.
.
[1] Worst case would’ve been a Stalin who didn’t allow the Red Army to defeat Hitler.
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Stalin was a bastard, but he didn’t just appear from nowhere. His rise and his rule are intricately connected to Russian history. The political and historical context of Russia profoundly influenced what the Soviet Union became.
Same story goes for Napoleon and the French Revolution. Winning the Revolution is just the beginning; you have to win the Reconstruction as well. The more oppression there was prior to the revolution, and the more foreign interference afterwards, the harder that is to achieve.
The Bolshevik uprising was not the first Russian Revolution. It was just the first one that wasn’t crushed by the Tsars.
Tsarist oppression:
Cossack/peasant uprisings:
(insert countless other failed uprisings here)
…and then we have all the fun of WWI. Trauma like this changes a society, and not for the better.
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That’s a consequence of the structure of politics, unfortunately.
On one side, the socialists (mostly working class). On the other, the reactionaries (upper class, middle class bigots and the working stupid). In between, holding the balance of power, the liberals and SocDems (mostly middle class, mostly educated).
In most places, and in the USA in particular (thanks to the functional disenfranchisement of the working class there), the deciding question is “which way will the middle class liberals jump?”. The liberals have the resources that working class resistance requires in order to succeed, but they also have a long and diverse history of collaboration with the upper classes.
Hitler would never have gotten anywhere if the liberals had joined the working class left in resistance from the beginning.
OTOH, the middle class aren’t totally unreasonable in their fear that working class revolution will reduce their wealth and safety. It usually does, in some ways. When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.
For leftists, there ain’t no point in talking to the right; they’re the enemy. There is a point in talking to the liberals, because they are the swing vote.
But, as you’ve observed, the history and ideological differences strain the diplomacy at times. In part, it’s due to the contrast in perspective: the liberals tend to see politics as a difference of opinion, the left as a difference of class identity.
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Now there’s a contentious sentence…
Well, there’s the mundane stuff such as frequently joining with the bosses to oppose rises in wages, public services and union rights. That’s what I’m mainly talking about; just that the class interests of the middle class often coincide with the upper class in a way that the working class does not.
But, on the more dramatic historical side, there’s things like this:
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@Wanderfound, it’s contentious because ‘collaborating’ is what ‘traitors’ do with the ‘enemy’.
There’s the reason the Left fail to win support in the centre.
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That is what the US left is afraid the liberals will do, though; side with the fascists against the people. The Spartacist thing was just one of many examples.
The US Red Scares were a bipartisan effort; both parties collaborated in crushing (literally; people were killed) the American left.
—
Again, though:
From the worker’s perspective, the upper class are the enemy, and this is a life-and-death struggle. And it isn’t a struggle that poor people can avoid just by changing their opinions.
That’s America
This Britain
Some things are similar
Some different
In this country the first enslaved were the working class
What’s changed?
Worst jobs, worst conditions
Worst taxed, look where you’re livin’
You go to the pub, Friday night
You will fight with a guy, don’t know what for
But won’t fight with a guy, suit and a tie
Who sends your kids to die in a war
They don’t send the kids of the rich or politicians
It’s your kids, the poor British
That they send to go die in a foreign land
For these wars you don’t understand
Yeah they say that you’re British
And that lovely patriotism they feed ya
But in reality you have more in common with immigrants
Than with your leaders
I know, both side of my family
Black and white are fed ghetto mentality
Reality in this system
Poor people are dirt regardless of shade
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Having listened to that ML episode: nope, no thanks. Still not a fan of Lenin (and their brief foray into the philosophy of science was utter bullshit).
But it was good to hear it, to get a better handle on why I disagree with 'em.
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But I’m not in the US and the example you’re using is almost 100 years old.
And you’ve just demonstrated again the problem with thinking on the hard left. Just because we’re not on the hard left does not make us fascist lackeys. There seems to be some difficulty in understanding that either flavour of authoritarianism is unwanted.
Let’s not forget that Tankie is a term for apologists of Stalin crushing the popular revolutions in Hungary and Czechoslovakia
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