The Swedish activist Greta Thunberg has been detained by Israel and reportedly maltreated by her Israeli captors after she was kidnapped, along with hundreds of other activists, from Gaza’s territorial waters on Friday.
“Personal liberty” is what allows capitalists to exploit us. They have all the “liberty” you think you have. The “liberty” to put lies in the media, to pay you less than the value of your labor in order to extract a profit, to charge extortionist prices for insurance healthcare and basic needs, to influence politics and to crush competing public industries. These are all the things that “liberty” gets you under capitalism. “Personal liberty above all” != working class liberation.
Communism operates under what was referred to by Marx as a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, which we regard as complete liberation of the working class, because it allows the public to have control which is simply not possible under the liberal framework of “personal liberty for all”. Under the liberal framework, even the smallest most democratic intervention is decried as “government overreach”; that is, if it is even made democratically possible in the first place.
Which isn’t totally incorrect, because what you’re talking about isn’t “personal liberty for all”. You exclude billionaires. Us socialists/communists exclude capitalists as a whole, because the sole interest of a capitalist is to enrich themselves at the direct expense of the working class and our liberty. Billionaires are certainly the worst and most visible offenders, but a materialist lens allows one to see that each and every capitalist serves interests that are fundamentally in conflict with those of the working class. To operate any other way would be to betray their own interests, and wouldn’t make for a very effective result.
Liberation will only come when the working class has the power to decide collectively how our resources will be used, which will only come when we have majority control over the means of production, which will eventually lead to the capitalist class becoming completely obsolete. Liberation means being able to provide for our needs above anything else; for the sake of our humanity alone, and from the work that we are already doing; rather than our labor power being extracted for private gains and our needs provided only to the extent that it serves capitalists’ profit motives.
Why is that? Have you ever spent time thinking about how that would be any more or less possible under the current system than, say, seizing the wealth of billionaires and socializing it back to the working class? How would the latter ever be possible by any means short of revolution, especially now if Trump gets his way? What will you do when the ruling class doesn’t put that kind of relief on the table? How much oppression and destruction will you consent to, if you believe liberation is not possible and things can only get worse from here?
If you don’t believe in it, you won’t fight for it. It’s a self fulfilling prophecy. That’s exactly why our system does everything in its power; both to obscure revolutionary working class history, and to inflate the state’s ability to repress dissent. So I’ll repeat this until the day I die: it’s been done before under worse circumstances.
Russians and Cubans were under brutal dictatorship. Haitians were completely enslaved by one of the most powerful colonial forces in their time. Vietnamese guerillas successfully fought off invasion by the single most militaristic nation in the world, and they aren’t alone in having done so (see North Korea, Afghanistan, Iraq, so on). If I could speculate, I’d say China’s political and economic situation in 1950 is a pretty reasonable outcome for the direction we’re heading now in the US. Regardless of how you feel about what came after each of these struggles, the factual reality is that these weren’t armies sponsored by any state. These were working class people fighting directly against the states that profited from their exploitation.
All of those people got organized and won liberation from their domestic oppressors, doing their part to weaken the empire, despite what would seem as insurmountable odds to a disorganized worker. It’s on us now to organize ourselves against our own oppressors, to get them off both our backs and theirs, and we can’t do that without maintaining optimism about our ability to win should we fight. We know that Fascism can only exist for so long until it cannibalizes itself. As a collective we are capable of beating it long before that comes to pass. If we allow the state to beat that optimism out of us then we are only greatly delaying our liberation and doing the ultimate disservice to our people.
“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.” - Ursula K. Le Guin
Coward
Coward? I’m saying you need friends not enemies
Fascists and their enablers are not our friends.
I’m not a fascist enabler. I believe in personal liberty above all
“Personal liberty” is what allows capitalists to exploit us. They have all the “liberty” you think you have. The “liberty” to put lies in the media, to pay you less than the value of your labor in order to extract a profit, to charge extortionist prices for insurance healthcare and basic needs, to influence politics and to crush competing public industries. These are all the things that “liberty” gets you under capitalism. “Personal liberty above all” != working class liberation.
So there’s no liberty under communism? I’d say class freedom is extreme liberty
Communism operates under what was referred to by Marx as a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, which we regard as complete liberation of the working class, because it allows the public to have control which is simply not possible under the liberal framework of “personal liberty for all”. Under the liberal framework, even the smallest most democratic intervention is decried as “government overreach”; that is, if it is even made democratically possible in the first place.
Which isn’t totally incorrect, because what you’re talking about isn’t “personal liberty for all”. You exclude billionaires. Us socialists/communists exclude capitalists as a whole, because the sole interest of a capitalist is to enrich themselves at the direct expense of the working class and our liberty. Billionaires are certainly the worst and most visible offenders, but a materialist lens allows one to see that each and every capitalist serves interests that are fundamentally in conflict with those of the working class. To operate any other way would be to betray their own interests, and wouldn’t make for a very effective result.
Liberation will only come when the working class has the power to decide collectively how our resources will be used, which will only come when we have majority control over the means of production, which will eventually lead to the capitalist class becoming completely obsolete. Liberation means being able to provide for our needs above anything else; for the sake of our humanity alone, and from the work that we are already doing; rather than our labor power being extracted for private gains and our needs provided only to the extent that it serves capitalists’ profit motives.
I understand that. I just don’t think it’s possible
Why is that? Have you ever spent time thinking about how that would be any more or less possible under the current system than, say, seizing the wealth of billionaires and socializing it back to the working class? How would the latter ever be possible by any means short of revolution, especially now if Trump gets his way? What will you do when the ruling class doesn’t put that kind of relief on the table? How much oppression and destruction will you consent to, if you believe liberation is not possible and things can only get worse from here?
If you don’t believe in it, you won’t fight for it. It’s a self fulfilling prophecy. That’s exactly why our system does everything in its power; both to obscure revolutionary working class history, and to inflate the state’s ability to repress dissent. So I’ll repeat this until the day I die: it’s been done before under worse circumstances.
Russians and Cubans were under brutal dictatorship. Haitians were completely enslaved by one of the most powerful colonial forces in their time. Vietnamese guerillas successfully fought off invasion by the single most militaristic nation in the world, and they aren’t alone in having done so (see North Korea, Afghanistan, Iraq, so on). If I could speculate, I’d say China’s political and economic situation in 1950 is a pretty reasonable outcome for the direction we’re heading now in the US. Regardless of how you feel about what came after each of these struggles, the factual reality is that these weren’t armies sponsored by any state. These were working class people fighting directly against the states that profited from their exploitation.
All of those people got organized and won liberation from their domestic oppressors, doing their part to weaken the empire, despite what would seem as insurmountable odds to a disorganized worker. It’s on us now to organize ourselves against our own oppressors, to get them off both our backs and theirs, and we can’t do that without maintaining optimism about our ability to win should we fight. We know that Fascism can only exist for so long until it cannibalizes itself. As a collective we are capable of beating it long before that comes to pass. If we allow the state to beat that optimism out of us then we are only greatly delaying our liberation and doing the ultimate disservice to our people.
Lol k