MoreLikeTen posted:

Half the communists I meet are people who would have been on the first train to Siberia (trans, gay, rich, etc.). Why don't these people worship a broken system that wouldn't have casually murdered them?

Zeroisanumber posted:

Lenin's whole "kill all intellectuals" thing could be counted as a dumb idea.

dethkon posted:

You can't call it because I already called it. Baronjutter, FreudianSlippers, and I are already in it. Join or be purged.

But let me be serious (gay) for a moment. I get what you guys mean when you're talking about ineffectual leftist shut-ins running the show, I really do. My suggestion is just to go outside, in the street, where the real people are, and listen to what's going on. American people/workers are getting hosed in the year 2015. Most of the working people I know know it and are getting desperate. Like I registered on this forum 10 years ago, start of high school. Since then I've never been paid more than $11 per hour at any legal job. I've been laid off four times just counting major corporations, three of those being because the entire company went bankrupt (A national video rental chain, a national electronics retailer, etc). I live in an at-will state where Unions are practically illegal, I've never had the opportunity to join one.. I've literally posted on these forums from libraries while I was homeless or living in my car, getting my meals at the soup kitchen or maybe a food bank. I've seen some truly horrendous things that I never would've thought happened in America, because of poverty. You don't hear about it much, but I know for a fact that there are a lot of Goons who've been through similar poo poo, they just don't post about it.

It seems to me like Socialism ought to be the easiest thing in the world to "convert" people to- in fact, why not just steal the model that most Churches already use? Just start a clothes drive, give out some free food, or Boot vouchers, or Bicycle vouchers, blankets, whatever. Give them a pamphlet or something on the way out that explains your ideas, something to give them hope. People in your community WILL listen.

These are just some ideas I've had floating around in my head. I truly hope that the far-left starts gaining ground again like it was 1910, and soon. And I hope it will be in the name... of Techno-communism

Tom Collins posted:

After this many decades, shouldn't it be pretty clear this isn't going to happen?

Leftism makes implicit assumptions about the world in order to bend it to fit within certain prescribed parameters. The very worst and most obviously wrong assumption is that it would or could ever be possible to get a high enough percentage of people to think consciously and hold informed opinions that they apply to actively improve the world around them. It assumes a degree of faith and hopefulness in individual industry that is just naive on its face; the Tragedy of the Commons is never truly addressed.

In fact, instead of addressing the fact that most people are objectively pretty selfish and useless to the advancement of any particular ideology, Leftists of all stripes usually find some mitigating reason to shift the blame for one subgroup's issues onto another, ad infinitum, as necessary to keep the populist vote. Everything, in the view of a Leftist, is a calculated plan to oppress some underclass; nothing could possibly just be an emergent effect in a complicated, stratified world permanently besot by entropic scarcity.

Now, I don't deny that it would be possible to make a modern and marketable Marxist-compatible doctrine and shop it around. I just don't think it's possible to make one that's actually got the substance underneath it to back up the claims. Any modern manifesto usually consists of such high-level language as to be entirely useless in execution; nobody can describe what their communist state apparatus looks like, or how it pays for itself. They forget that all the millions of things they wish to have people do for each other for free require a massive amount of logistics and planning to actually deliver, and that such requires business processes and project managers and policy analysts and all that poo poo. In the end, it's not going to be particularly different in a Communist system compared to the modern Western government of today, except in the scope of services it aims to provide with all the trappings.

Forgive me for not having an especially positive view of the cost-effectiveness of most existing Western bureaucracy...


Sometimes I wonder whether most social-justice types have ever truly internalized what evolution means and necessarily results in. Stratification of every possibly divergent factor is implicit in a genetic environment; this inevitably gives an advantage to some groups over others, and this will manifest in any environment no matter the strictures placed upon it - unless you were so strict as to remove any possibly way that a person could succeed over others. Classes will necessarily arise in any environment as long as there is any mechanism by which a group of people can excel to the exclusion of their peers.

Now, that's not to say I totally disbelieve in the struggle. The argument that the top 1% have too much money relative to everyone else has some merit. However, that's a very different level of privilege differential compared to what the average Tumblrina is complaining about on a daily basis as being Privilege. As Marxism evolves into Cultural Marxism, the struggle becomes more inwardly focused and so hipster-oppression-olympics obsessed that it is damaging itself.

No amount of rebranded Marxism can fix a problem that started with applying Marxism in the first place.

hemophilia posted:

Lol if you don't take as many transferrable classes as you can at a decent community college on small grants and out of pocket before even seriously thinking about loans or university

Bro Dad posted:

Lichy posted:

all political systems stemming from Russia are bad OP