the_dunk_tank
It's the dunk tank.
This is where you come to post big-brained hot takes by chuds, libs, or even fellow leftists, and tear them to itty-bitty pieces with precision dunkstrikes.
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The part that infuriates me the most when libs talk about history is how little research they do. "Oh I watched a documentary" dude I have studied history at the "college level" or whatever you call it for 2 decades. I'm still learning new things. Go back to putting an Einstein book on your shelf instead of reading it. I'm a dumbass sometimes but I'm still putting in the work and I ain't proud of a lot of things I've done but I am proud of that.
Communism isn't a thing we can achieve. It's a goal. We strive to make it real. But it's elusive. You just try to make life better for others. It's all we got. You'd think with the west's fascination with establishing "christendom" they'd fucking understand that you don't judge an ideal because it failed to be real. You keep working for it. If it makes lives better that is a success. Even if it is limited it still happened!
Contrast that with fascism where the whole goal is to continually drag the human race through hell. Communism "failed" because it wasn't a utopia - but libs are sure willing to give fascism another turn at the wheel.
Communism in the Bolshevik sense really only "failed" because it existed in a context of warring capitalist nation-states with massive monopolies on imposing international violence, which strangled it from without. There were internal factors too, to be sure, but Communism in it's purest abstracted sense has existed successfully for centuries in societies all over the world, either before the age of the great capitalist empires or in isolation from those empires. Graeber/Wengrow detail in the Dawn of Everything that many of the native american tribes we genocided, to name a single example, lived in a state that we could only call communistic.
It's almost like as soon as the entire world is subjugated to the idea that profit for its own sake is immutable and good, and then that imperative is enforced upon the world by violence, ideologies that place the health of societies over profit can't exist??
But the fact that the capitalist death machine was able to successfully genocide all those people trying different ways of living proves that capitalism is the best possible economic system! This is just straightforward Darwin!
it is fucking astounding the number of "intellectuals" who still think Darwinism is a moral framework. READ DARWIN YOU FUCKING FUCKS!!! THE WHOLE POINT IS THAT IT'S A WASTEFUL, AMORAL SYSTEM, and imposing it deliberately IS FUCKING EVIL!
one of my favorite lectures of all time is this lecture by Stephen J Gould on Darwin's revolution in thought
guy writes about how natural selection, and nature as a whole, is an unending arms race of infinite brutality, cruelty, and exploitation
Libs: We should strive to emulate this
Oh shit oh fuck...
Wait I think I have a rebuttal to that
Well said, comrade. Also it's anecdotal but learning about my own indigenous background probably started my path down the left or at least made me aware that an alternative way of living could be achieved.
I dont really like describing tribal economies as communist, I mean I get the value of saying it is, but just describing a collective body in a primitive economy doesn't communism make.
To be fair to the Davids, as far as I remember they don't explicity call pre-contact ways of life communist.
I don't think the claim is necessarily that tribal economies are inherently communist, rather that certain groups certainly were. Societies marked by an organizing ethos of "from each according to means, to each according to needs," no class hierarchies, robust social structures and welfare programs, and quite literal communal ownership of means of production -- if we are not going to call that communism, I think we're denuding the term of all meaningful content. I also think we should seriously scrutinize our reasoning for saying, "this was communism over here, but this small tribe or social state can't reallllly be communist." Not impugning your motives in any way, as I wholly agree with your critique as it was stated. I just think we should be careful here.
Personally, I think the most pragmatic thing to do is go case-by-case and distinguish between communism that proceeded capitalism (whatever you'd like to call it) vs Marxist communism, characterized by a transition away from a capitalist state, which is obviously an inherently modern phenomenon.
Think he means we can't ever fully complete communism, thats all - though we can never achieve a "perfect" society, we can always work a little closer towards it.
Marxist communism is neither perfect, nor unachievable, nor properly a goal in the teleological sense, as that is textbook utopianism