No, they just do this to Palestinian civilians, but since they don’t have blue eyes and blond hair racists such as yourself don’t consider them to be people.
Yet, what you said earlier struck me as incredibly “buzzwordy” so to say. You hinted at the choice being Marxism (we’ll come back to that one) and capitalism with the “Nordic Model” (reductive US-centric naming schemes at work) being sold as a (for you not satisfactory I assume) middle ground.
What I actually said was that the Nordic model is used as an example of a viable alternative to Marxism. Nowhere did I say Marxism was the only possible option, simply that capitalism with the Nordic model is not a viable alternative.
You seem to reject this middle ground because (and correct me if I’m wrong, I’m reading between the lines here) it will not solve the huge discrepancy in wealth between our richest and our poorest countries in earth.
I’m not really sure what you mean by middle ground here. Either the working class owns the means of production, or you have a capital owning class in charge.
So far, so good. Now: when you talk about “Marxism”, what do you mean by that exactly?
What I mean by that is workers owning the means of production such as factories, schools, farms, and so on. I mean a society where labour is done for collective benefit, and the decisions of what work is done and to what purpose are done democratically.
Isn’t any call for such a thing another manifestation of the same air of superiority we 1sr worlders tend to fall victim to?
Not at all, a call for workers to overthrow the ruling class and be in charge of their own work is in no way a manifestation of 1st world superiority. That’s frankly a bizarre argument to try and make.
Even if we in the west decided that Marxism (again, whatever that means) is the Bee’s Knees right now, isn’t it just the same kind of patronizing if we just assume that the people in poorer countries think the same and expect them to (again) follow our lead into what we tell them is a better future? What if they want capitalism or whatever else?
They wouldn’t be following western lead though would they. They would be following China’s Vietnam’s, Laos’s and Cuba’s lead. These are the existing Marxist states today. The west is not leading anybody here. Furthermore, the original argument here was against western colonialism and subjugation of countries. Countries having sovereignty and the right to self determination is a prerequisite for any sort of liberation.
Now regarding the “Nordic Model” or all other forms of social economy: I think it’s safe to assume that the US and Europe have a comparable amount of “oppression per person” regarding foreign industry, yet the amount of exploitation of domestic workers will vary greatly.
There is no great mystery here. US is simply further along the path to late stage capitalism than Europe is. However, direction of travel is very much the same. Sweden is a great case study for this jacobin.com/…/sweden-1970s-democratic-socialism-o…
So, if there was a way to ease this up while the rest of the world is not up for revolution stuff, why wouldn’t it be worthwhile to take that route?
Where do I argue that if such a route was actually available that it should not be taken? It’s a bit of an fallacious argument to claim that Marxists want to a violent revolution.
The very concept of “revolutionary violence” is a false framing of the situation, since most of the violence comes from those who attempt to prevent reform as opposed to those struggling for reform. Focusing on the violent rebellions of the downtrodden overlooks the much greater repressive force and violence utilized by the ruling oligarchs to maintain the status quo, such as attacks against peaceful demonstrations, mass arrests, torture, destruction of opposition organizations, suppression of dissident publications, death squads, so so on.
Most social revolutions begin peaceably. Why would it be otherwise? Who would not prefer to assemble and demonstrate rather than engage in mortal combat against pitiless forces that enjoy everyadvantage in mobility and firepower? Revolutions in Russia, China, Vietnam, and El Salvador all began peacefully, with crowds of peasants and workers launching nonviolent protests only to be met with violent oppression from the authorities. Peaceful protest and reform are exactly what the people are denied by the ruling oligarchs. The dissidents who continue to fight back, who try to defend themselves from the oligarchs’ repressive fury, are then called “violent revolutionaries” and “terrorists”.
Class gets its significance from the process of surplus extraction. The relationship between worker and owner is essentially an exploitative one, involving the constant transfer of wealth from those who labor (but do not own) to those who own (but do not labor). This is how some people get richer and richer without working, or with doing only a fraction of the work that enriches them, while others toil hard for an entire lifetime only to end up with little or nothing.
Those who occupy the higher circles of wealth and power are keenly aware of their own interests. While they sometimes seriously differ among themselves on specific issues, they exhibit an impressive cohesion when it comes to protecting the existing class system of corporate power, property, privilege, and profit. At the same time, they are careful to discourage public awareness of the class power they wield. They avoid the C-word, especially when used in reference to themselves as in "owning class;’ "upper class;’ or “moneyed class.” And they like it least when the politically active elements of the owning class are called the “ruling class.” The ruling class in this country has labored long to leave the impression that it does not exist, does not own the lion’s share of just about everything, and does not exercise a vastly disproportionate influence over the affairs of the nation. Such precautions are themselves symptomatic of an acute awareness of class interests.
Yet ruling class members are far from invisible. Their command positions in the corporate world, their control of international finance and industry, their ownership of the major media, and their influence over state power and the political process are all matters of public record- to some limited degree. While it would seem a simple matter to apply the C-word to those who occupy the highest reaches of the C-world, the dominant class ideology dismisses any such application as a lapse into “conspiracy theory.” The C-word is also taboo when applied to the millions who do the work of society for what are usually niggardly wages, the “working class,” a term that is dismissed as Marxist jargon. And it is verboten to refer to the "exploiting and exploited classes;’ for then one is talking about the very essence of the capitalist system, the accumulation of corporate wealth at the expense of labor.
The C-word is an acceptable term when prefaced with the soothing adjective “middle.” Every politician, publicist, and pundit will rhapsodize about the middle class, the object of their heartfelt concern. The much admired and much pitied middle class is supposedly inhabited by virtuously self-sufficient people, free from the presumed profligacy of those who inhabit the lower rungs of society. By including almost everyone, “middle class” serves as a conveniently amorphous concept that masks the exploitation and inequality of social relations. It is a class label that denies the actuality of class power.
The C-word is allowable when applied to one other group, the desperate lot who live on the lowest rung of society, who get the least of everything while being regularly blamed for their own victimization: the “underclass.” References to the presumed deficiencies of underclass people are acceptable because they reinforce the existing social hierarchy and justify the unjust treatment accorded society’s most vulnerable elements.
Seizing upon anything but class, leftists today have developed an array of identity groups centering around ethnic, gender, cultural, and life-style issues. These groups treat their respective grievances as something apart from class struggle, and have almost nothing to say about the increasingly harsh politico-economic class injustices perpetrated against us all. Identity groups tend to emphasize their distinctiveness and their separateness from each other, thus fractionalizing the protest movement. To be sure, they have important contributions to make around issues that are particularly salient to them, issues often overlooked by others. But they also should not downplay their common interests, nor overlook the common class enemy they face. The forces that impose class injustice and economic exploitation are the same ones that propagate racism, sexism, militarism, ecological devastation, homophobia, xenophobia, and the like.
I find it funny how the only problem people see with Twitter is that the wrong oligarch owns it. The real issue is with reliance on privately owned social spaces. Corporations shouldn’t be in charge of how people communicate with each other.
This is precisely why I’ve never found Chromium based browsers to be of much relevance. These are just skins on top of the rendering engine which is the core of the browser and that’s entirely controlled by Google. People kept ignoring this and now we’re in a situation where Chrome and its derivatives dominate the market to the point where sites no longer care whether they follow W3C specs as long as Chrome renders them. We’re now back in pretty much the same situation we were in the days of IE.
It’s depressing that people were unable to understand where things were going until Google started doing blatantly evil things. The only thing that was keeping Google in check before was the fact that it was lack of market dominance. Google is an ads company, and there is a huge conflict of interest with them being the gatekeepers to the internet.
I’m not saying we’re just going to abolish work, but we absolutely could be working far less if we structured our society differently. We’ve had an explosion of automation since the industrial revolution, yet people still work just as much as they ever did. A lot of the jobs we have are just make work jobs. There’s a whole book on the subject even.
Also, the way we do things under capitalism is dreadfully inefficient. Nearly half of the food produced is just thrown out, lots of new goods are sent directly to landfills to keep pries up, there’s shit like planned obsolescence. All to keep the consumerist society going so that a handful of oligarchs can keep raking it in. Not only does this create shitty living conditions for the majority, it’s also fundamentally unsustainable and what’s driving the current climate crisis.
The focus of a socialist government should be to ensure that the purpose of work is to produce things that we need collectively such as infrastructure, food, housing, healthcare, and so on. Producing things should be seen as a cost to society, and we should focus on making things that last and can be repaired. Consumerism needs to be abolished.