Why We Don't Like You Anymore

For all the ills of communism, at least they used to, to some percentage, hold to this saying: “a revolution without dance is a revolution not worth having.” That’s why, despite everything, we liked them.

Not anymore. It took the generation that came up with emo and tattoos as fashion statements to deprive communism of any vestige of love for life. So now you are all just cranky old ladies. We can blame this on Obama. He took it “mainstream,” which apparently was too much for young commies to take.

Cranky old ladies, that’s what you all sound like now.

Sorry, tattoos as fashion statements was the generation just before. We did tattoos as self expression.

“This one, like, represents my” whateverthefuck.

This generation Z looks promising though. If it doesn’t become irrelevant before then, ilp should see an influx of some pretty cool people in the coming decade. From what I’ve seen, they pretty much all listen to rap and it isn’t easy to get their panties up in a bunch. They are astonishingly considering and level-headed.

They don’t seem angry enough for real communism.

But we’ll see, we’ll see…

for me - and i’m an anarchist who just does mercenary work for the communists - it’s about tastes. i feel a special kind of disgust with bourgeois culture… and i won’t get into why as that would be too long winded. i could say, though, that if you had to ask, you’ll never know. it’s like a special sense. remember that kid from sixth sense? he could see dead people. well i have a special sense too, except mine gives me power to see through people.

lemme try to give an example of what i’d like to do. we have a man (bezos) who’s worth 137 billion dollars. i ask myself, what is great about this guy? then i find out he plays tennis, let’s say. so now i’m thinking: if i distributed that 137 billion dollars back to those who’s work created that wealth, how many of those people might become more interesting than a tennis player? remember, i’m in the business of making exceptional people… you know the whole ubermensch thing or whatever. so i’m thinking that if they had more money and more free time, very many of them would be able to develop themselves into something more exciting than a tennis player. that’s my basic premise; what ought to justify a person capitalizing off someone else’s labor is a definitive difference between character and capacity, such that if the roles are reversed (capitalist as a laborer and laborer as capitalist), we’d be able to say 'hey wait a minute, the other guy ought to be doing all the work because he isn’t a good tennis player (if we’re using a talent for tennis as our criteria).

i suppose you could say my approach is hyper-meritocratic. if i am not able to find excuse for the exploitation of one class by another because those classes aren’t qualitatively different in any profound and noticeable way, i’d rather just converge them into one class so that one doesn’t exploit the other. in other words, if you have 137 billion dollars, you better be so awesome you sweep me off my feet, or i’m giving you a 9 to 5 and an apartment like everyone else. i confess this is the residual echo of the old fascist in me… the old architect who looked at the earth as if it were a sims or age of empires game.

anyway, this is really the only reason i fight for the communists, when i do. that, and i’m involved in very real conflicts in both my legal and economic circumstances… circumstances which can be traced directly back to the corrupt, incompetent and deceptive nature of various aspects of the present system. this kinda puts me right there ‘in the shit’, as the saying goes, so i recognize with the communists a mutual enemy. an enemy of my enemy isn’t necessarily a friend, but he’s certainly not my enemy, either.

but it’s all just for shits and giggles. these forums are filled with fruit-loops so there’s nothing to take seriously anyway… that, and the fact that if there were any seriously minded ‘philosophy’ going on, it would have no way to become effective beyond the local interactions and conversations between the people involved.

marx once said the philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it. i think he was being generous. most ‘philosophers’ haven’t even gotten the interpretation part right, so they sure as hell aren’t going to be able to change anything even if they wanted to.

but as far as the ‘world consciousness’ goes, the ruling idea today is the ever increasing suspicion against capitalism. anybody who’s still today fiddling over locke’s primary and secondary properties or kant’s a priori synthetic propositions, aren’t even in the game. the only legitimate philosophy in the world today, right now, is that growing intellectual awareness of the systemic, internal conflicts created by the capitalist economy. because this is a REAL problem, not some theoretical jibber jabber in your favorite philosophy book, it tends to turn the most heads.

so we’re experiencing an intellectual war on planet earth right now. the old ‘tried and failed’ team that consists of conservative romantics who are still living in the history books, and the new ‘let’s try it and see’ team that no longer trusts the people in charge who made everything FUBAR (fucked up beyond all recognition). the people of the world are sick and tired of hearing their governments say ‘we’re gonna make country X great again, yada yada yada.’ na fuck that. they want actual proof now.

and btw, that whole emo and tattoo thing was your mess… right out of the the multi-faceted subjectivities of the capitalist/consumerist discourse catalog. you take the heat for that one. don’t try to put that one on the commies.

Nono, I don’t put that one on the commies. It’s just a generational thing, the why would be too complex for me to figure out.

" then i find out he plays tennis, let’s say. so now i’m thinking: if i distributed that 137 billion dollars back to those who’s work created that wealth, how many of those people might become more interesting than a tennis player? remember, i’m in the business of making exceptional people… you know the whole ubermensch thing or whatever. so i’m thinking that if they had more money and more free time, very many of them would be able to develop themselves into something more exciting than a tennis player."

Let’s get to the wealth creation thing later. You say you want to keep these ultrarich down a bit so that everybody sort of has an equal base to either become great or not from. But-um, well the system you would need would effectively guarantee that nobody would be able to develop their inner genious or whatever and sweep you off your feet. Everybody would be forced down there, in the 9-5, genious or not.

Only, as we see in China, Cuba, the defunct USSR, the defunct Third Reich, the defunct Italian whatever nobody cares enough to remember what they called themselves, and Spanish thing, psychophants and people that excell at burocracy rise above the 9-5 to any noticeable level. No feet sweeping genious when you have to regulate everything and body so much that you can guarantee nobody gets rich just because they figure out how to get other people to amass great wealth for them.

Let’s get to the wealth creation now. So a bunch of people that would have worked for whogivesafuck or the US post service or something, Bezos tells those guys no, do this and do it this way, and they do, and get paied slightly more than whogivesafuck corp maybe, and Bezos gets rich. It’s not like Amazon would have happened anyway and Bezos coopted it. People like that, if lacking in guaranteed philosophical insight, are the ones who figure out how to even get the wealth created by those unimaginative, complascent workers of his.

I relate to your situation somewhat. Minus the legal troubles, I have been in a sort of state of semi-to-full poverty for the last decade and suffered my own kinds of persecution. But this is the question that matters:

In communism or any kind of regulatory redistributive governmental scheme, nobody gets ahead but the brown noses. No hope for philosophers or otherwise interesting people. In capitalism, only people with no required qualitative difference in terms of interestingness get rich, but some anyway get rich. A philosopher or interesting somehow person is not a priori equipped to become rich, but he can at least learn it and become rich (interesting how the case is almost 100% the opposite these days, they are convinced by commies to remain poor and irrelevant as a matter of pride). The possibility exists.

Take your beloved Frank Zappa. Rich motherfucker, I would imagine.

Also, it took me a while that anarchists are just as Utoipian as commies, and essentially the same beast. They are the rebels of the communist world.

In the sense that Nietzsche advocated for the end of the state, I guess I am one too. But I have no illusions of it happening within the following 5 lifetimes or so.

“but as far as the ‘world consciousness’ goes, the ruling idea today is the ever increasing suspicion against capitalism. anybody who’s still today fiddling over locke’s primary and secondary properties or kant’s a priori synthetic propositions, aren’t even in the game. the only legitimate philosophy in the world today, right now, is that growing intellectual awareness of the systemic, internal conflicts created by the capitalist economy. because this is a REAL problem, not some theoretical jibber jabber in your favorite philosophy book, it tends to turn the most heads.”

Today and 100 years ago man, this isn’t new. And guess who stands with you against capitalism. That is the only serious reason to realize you are a republican at bottom.

Iran and shit. China. Get real dog.

You know what finally turned me off of anarchism?

I met up with one once, desperately looking for serious people that wanted to get shit done. Conversation was going nowhere, so I ask him: if you found yourself suddenly with $100,000,000, what would you do with it?

He said throw it all away, money don’t mean shit.

not as complex as you’d think. it’s a structural thing in capitalism that has taken advantage of a vulnerability in humans, accentuated that vulnerability by creating social contexts in which it is greatly amplified, and then created ways to passify such anxieties through various modes of consumerism. okay sure, you’ll say ‘but what about those emo kids in japan?’ for those kids, it’s just an artistic trend… they don’t really feel like our emos. our emos wake up every morning and have to decide whether or not they’re gonna go ahead and shoot up the school down the street.

there are torrents of alienation and social anxiety running rampant in our culture making basket cases out of many people. and these are normal people who aren’t supposed to be psycho (like me; a certified psycho)… or i should say, shouldn’t be able to become psycho simply because they aren’t smart enough to. our psycho’s are not deep, philosophical de sade types; ours are regular folks made crazy by forces in society, both public and private. on the streets, in the schools, in the homes, in the prisons, at the work place, etc. capitalism engenders a competitive element in society that doesn’t just manifest in the market and sports, but in the peer groups and other social institutions. this super-structure is immense and made up of subtle inter-working parts, which, examined individually, don’t raise any cause for much alarm. but when combined they form a terribe creature that secretly eats away at the mind and soul of the peeps. now if there’s any hint of philanthropy in your heart, young man, you’d not find this fact agreeable. in fact, i want you to go out today and find an emo kid somewhere, buy him a coffee, and have a chat with him.

i don’t buy into that tired old argument: without incentive for improvement, people aren’t creative or motivated. a socialist/communist economy would not eliminate the competitive wage system. instead, it would place in the hands of everyone- instead of a hand full of company owners and stock holders that don’t do shit- the decision about the value of a specific skill. and there is a lot involved in making this determination, or course. the demand (popularity) of it, the amount of resources put into training (doctor takes 8 years… garbage man takes two days), and so forth. but what is not a determining factor in the ‘value’ of a worker anymore is his willingness to work for a lower wage than the other guy. in this system, there are no incentives to produce private profits, so workers are not evaluated by single individuals who decide their value according to how effectively they can be exploited to generate private profit, compared to that other available worker. there is no more force pushing wages down, here, either. that’s two birds with one stone.

now i want you to tell me how something like this might be workable: anti-dialectics.co.uk/AAA_Socialist_Economy.htm

is this a utopian pipe dream? yeah? why and how? if everyone is equally involved with and committed to improving production so that more is accomplished in less time and with less resources, how could you possibly go wrong? it’s simple; the guy who comes up with the next best thing is recognized by everyone as an asset and is rewarded accordingly. this means that when you figure out a way to produce electricity out of cold fusion, you get a HUGE raise with which you’ll be able to buy 100 rap CDs and a whole QP of weed at once (marijuana will be legal, btw).

now what’s the fucking difference whether you do this in a capitalist system or a communist system? you’re still doing the same thing, either way. in fact, unless someone told you you were living in a communist society, you wouldn’t know the difference. only, you’d not be able to accumulate 137 billion dollars… but who the fuck needs 137 billion dollars when their life is great? you work half the time you would in a capitalist society because everyone is working and sharing the labor load, and everything you buy and own is cheaper because there aren’t any parasite owners jacking the price up to pocket more profit.

like, what am i missing here? some bullshit about social darwinism? this is the nonsense the ruling classes have been peddling philosophically to rationalize their ‘right’ to power for the last 2000 years. wait, darwinism is only a few centuries old. you know what i mean; same shit, different name. it’s been part of the philosophical furniture since thrasymachus spit that shit in the republic. yeah no shit, einstein. might is right. but the moment the working classes rise up and take power, it’s suddenly ‘reactionary’ or ‘resentful’, not ‘mighty’. bollocks. and first of fucking all, the only reason the arstocratic classes gained power over the worker/soldier type was because they were able to brainwash them ‘philosophically’; ‘you need us, we represent god’s kingdom and order, socrates and plato and aquinas and the gang said so… so we’ll do the legislating over here in the castle and you guys go work in the field, mmkay?’

my ass. you ain’t bout to get this nigga like dat. i know better.

so you look that short paper over, dude, and tell me with a straight face you don’t think it’s workable.

very wealthy, indeed. the quintessential capitalist of the music industry. hey man, when in rome, etc., so he told warner brothers to eat his shorts and went independent. and he paid his guys very well for what they did, but his musicians were in it for the love of the art more than the money. if you wanted to get paid, you bought a leather coat and went to work for AC/DC… but you’d never reach the level of potential, as a musician, that you’d reach playing frank’s stuff. frank hired real musicians, not a bunch of power chord playing clowns looking for publicity on the cover of some magazine.

but frank wasn’t a philosopher like us. sure, he could go round for round if he had to, but he’s more scientifically minded. frank wants to see the data, not the rhetoric. he’s not gonna accept the basic premise of communism because like everyone else who’s been brainwashed, he also thinks such a system doesn’t permit private property. he’s excused for his ignorance because political philosophy isn’t his department. he’s a composer… the best the twentieth century had ever seen across all genres equally.

so, given the circumstances and environment in which zappa thought, lived and worked, we’d not say his extraordinary wealth was something that was ‘unfair to the rest’. if there ever was a case where we could justify that hyper-meritocratic formula i mentioned above, zappa would be that case. he was quite literally unlike anything else in the music industry for three decades. an entirely different animal than anything you heard on the radio or watched on MTV. these guys aren’t a ‘garage band’, dude. zappa was to modern music was einstein, bohr, and heisenberg were to physics.

the zappa business lesson:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWXUatVuxQg[/youtube]

"not as complex as you’d think. it’s a structural thing in capitalism that has taken advantage of a vulnerability in humans, accentuated that vulnerability by creating social contexts in which it is greatly amplified, and then created ways to passify such anxieties through various modes of consumerism. okay sure, you’ll say ‘but what about those emo kids in japan?’ for those kids, it’s just an artistic trend… they don’t really feel like our emos. our emos wake up every morning and have to decide whether or not they’re gonna go ahead and shoot up the school down the street. "

I think they’re all just pussies.

“i don’t buy into that tired old argument: without incentive for improvement, people aren’t creative or motivated.”

I didn’t make that argument.

“if everyone is equally involved with and committed to improving production so that more is accomplished in less time and with less resources,”

Production isn’t just a thing that happens. Somebody comes up with the idea, and it takes a lot of sacrifice and ressources to get it happening, ain’t cheap. In US, it’s billionaire entrepreneurs, in China it’s a beaurocrat. But somebody’s gotta do it, or you’re Cuba.

“like, what am i missing here? some bullshit about social darwinism? this is the nonsense the ruling classes have been peddling philosophically to rationalize their ‘right’ to power for the last 2000 years. wait, darwinism is only a few centuries old. you know what i mean; same shit, different name. it’s been part of the philosophical furniture since thrasymachus spit that shit in the republic. yeah no shit, einstein. might is right. but the moment the working classes rise up and take power, it’s suddenly ‘reactionary’ or ‘resentful’, not ‘mighty’. bollocks. and first of fucking all, the only reason the arstocratic classes gained power over the worker/soldier type was because they were able to brainwash them ‘philosophically’; ‘you need us, we represent god’s kingdom and order, socrates and plato and aquinas and the gang said so… so we’ll do the legislating over here in the castle and you guys go work in the field, mmkay?’”

I addressed all this elsewhere. In a nutshell, as a famous Venezuelan dictator once said, not one or the other but the complete opposite.

“hey man, when in rome, etc.”

Ok, so what’s the fucking problem with THAT?

Do you truly think Zappa woulda made any of that shit under a communist regime?

Here

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=194737

I’m sure you didn’t read any of it considering the lame ass video you posted as a response. Go ahead and give that a try now.

i think that’s rather dismissive. i knew an emo kid once in the mental hospital who’s childhood was so fucked up, the fact that he hadn’t already killed somebody, was a miracle. kid’s dad hammered a 16 penny nail into his left ear, and that was the least of his problems. this was the kind of kid you looked at and said ‘this is no pussy… this kid has the internal strength and resolve of a fucking stoic monk.’

we can’t always judge a person by only what they do, but also what they don’t do. some people are pushed to such limits by things beyond their control that, had they really been ‘pussies’, they’da already snapped. but we don’t see that. one would have to ‘walk in my shoes’, so to speak, to get a feel for the measure of strength one really has.

but yeah i get it. lotta the shit that depresses kids today is trivial and many of those emos are a joke. but there are some who really are on the precipice. i knew several in my youth when i was in the cuckoos nest.

That kid’s emo sounds circumstantial.

I grew up in the age of emo. Don’t try to tell me what the kind of kid that listened to my chemical romance was like.

Btw, notwithstanding their ability to perfect any production process, give me ONE innovation that came out of China?

one common running theme throughout these ill advised critiques of communism i see everywhere, is a misunderstanding of what ‘wealth’ is, and where it comes from. i seem to remember a short exchange between me and your old kung-fu master, fixed cross, at POD about this.

anything that has ‘economic value’ in a system of modern property relations is appropriated in some way. i’m talking about a system in which people harvest, produce, and trade material goods either through equal exchange or through a monetary medium (with credit or not). we’re not talking about a group of scattered, isolated villages in which people lay claim to a patch of land or a river or a bush.

in this modern system, you total gains either equal exactly what you produce yourself, or the profit you’ve made from exchanging something somebody else made. so all these investors and entrepreneurs you’re talking about fit into one or the other of these options; if one such person involves only his own gains in financing his venture, he’s not a capitalist. if he uses money he’s made from some exchange involving the products of someone else’s labor to finance his venture, he’s lost nothing, and is therefore taking no risk, if he fails. why not? because he’s not putting his own gains, the wealth generated from his own labor, into the venture. the money he’s risking isn’t his because he didn’t produce it… he merely appropriated it. that is, he followed and acted out a privilege given to him by the specific laws of property relations he is involved in.

all this bullshit about ‘omg the responsibility and risk the capitalist has to take, blah blah,’ is just that; bullshit. of course, he might lose money… but nothing he did in the first place generated that money, so he cannot be said to ‘lose’ something that wasn’t his to begin with.

you got me. i didn’t read it. i ‘skimmed’ it though. anyway, i thought it was another one of these ‘omg marxism preaches equality and that’s just crazy!’ posts.

man i’m telling you the number of misunderstandings of marxist theory is so extensive in these forums it’s like walking through a mine field. you can’t even be sure it’s safe to click on a post because the fucking thing might blow your computer up, it’s such nonsense. that’s why i only skimmed it. i was afraid to keep it up for longer than a few seconds. didn’t want my computer to crash.

To the first thing, I gotta say it seems like a jargon heavy way to avoid addressing what I done said, which is that somebody COMES UP with the idea for the production or production process. Not risk or responsibility or anything.

Regarding all the rest, you seem to have me all figured out. But if you ever feel like addressing me instead of preexisting positions you already have formed in your mzzind, I always thought you were a pretty smart dude and not a pussy, so I’ll be waiting.

how about i don’t go googling for shit like this and instead just say a few things that’ll wrap this argument up pretty quickly.

first, all hitherto ‘revolutions’ fell victim to two factors that significantly effected their stability and growth. most, if not all, were incredibly premature. successful revolutions must occur within a technologically, moderately advanced society. china’s was a disaster for this reason. a botched peasant revolt that backfired because of mao’s rush to modernize the country without sufficient resources and technology in place. so we don’t count china. russia; an industrial proletariat revolution and therefore better conditioned for a possible success… and we saw that in russia’s rapid growth in the cold year wars to come. the little satellite communist countries seized up for the same reasons; lack of development and industry. i could go on, but the important has been made. communist revolution requires very delicate circumstances to work, and it is nearly impossible for a single country to develop substantially while in isolation. trotsky and lenin knew this… that it must be international or it’ll tank.

one of the biggest reasons why the west got the jump was not because of it’s totally fabulous ideology, but because it’s enemies were relatively underdeveloped by comparison, and they left the gate prematurely.

but look. what drives innovative ideas is not what can be gained from them. if i have an idea - let’s say that little plastic cap on the ends of your shoe laces - it doesn’t enter my brain because i know i could get rich from inventing it. rather, i have the idea independently of what i might gain from it, and then i say ‘hey, i could make mad bank from this idea.’

ah, then it isn’t the social or political circumstances that encourage or prohibit innovative thinking. it can’t be. you’re not going to not picture in your head a cooking utensil that dices onions because you live in a high-rise apartment in moscow in 1982. where you are has nothing to do with the generation of ideas as such. you either have the idea or you don’t, and what you can get from that idea is irrelevant until later.