User talk:Picaresquieu

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Communism +1 — Dysk (contribs) 21:10, 20 February 2019 (UTC)

non-wackjob communists

Nominally, when an ideological perspective about what should be differs radically from the status quo, it demands either massive reforms that "normal people" would find repellent, or at the very least radically strong truth claims about what is possible. To that end, the "wackjob" nature of communists comes from either pushing for radical change which is incredibly disruptive, potentially violent, and completely unseen in history; OR it requires asserting things that cannot be proven because they are not tested.

This is not just a fact of communism. This was a fact of democratic ideologies when there were no democratic nations. It stood in the face of a long history of the "proven" validity of the right of kings, and pursuing it resulted in not just the bloody and violent American revolution, but the much darker history associated with the french revolution. The Jacobins were absolutely radical wackjobs about it. This raises the question of, when you distance yourself from being a wackjob, what do think you're separating yourself from? Revolutionaries who demand blood? Maoists who seek the destruction of the american empire? Anarchists who believe that government is evil? I don't know why I'm babbling on your talk page, but your self-description raised questions.

Also, hi and welcome. ikanreed ^{🐐Bleat at me} 22:18, 20 February 2019 (UTC)

That's all fair. Specifically, I intended to separate myself from the more spittle-and-dreck breed of tankies and "anti-imperialists." I've lurked RationalWiki for a long time and I assume that the consensus view here is a more or less cynically liberal-democratic one. There is a fair enough summary of the left-communist current, which would describe my perspective adequately.

I don't deny that the theses of Marxian communism, even where they are rigorous and non-normative, "cannot be proven because they are not tested"; and certainly the changes I would like to see – definitively "radical" – are all "incredibly disruptive, potentially violent, and completely unseen in history." Bordiga wrote in 1951, polemicizing against the Stalinist forms as "not a subjugation of capitalism to the state, but a firmer subjugation of the state to capital":

The fact that capitalism decreasingly adopts for its conservation, just as for its development and enlargement, liberal chit-chat and ever increasingly uses police methods and bureaucratic suffocation, when the historical line is clearly seen, does not cause the slightest hesitation over the certainty that the same means must serve in the proletarian revolution. It will make use of this violence, power, state and bureaucracy, despotism as the Manifesto called it with a yet more dreadful term 103 years ago. Then it will know how to get rid of all of them.

This is not necessarily to endorse Bordiga's peculiarly illiberal and anti-democratic politics, not from a perspective of 2019 at any rate. The point is that strategic-programmatic questions are my priority, over the tactical considerations of "improving living standards" in the immediate term and the "gate-receipt notion" of party recruitment numbers (Loren Goldner). Picaresquieu (talk) 15:49, 21 February 2019 (UTC)

I think I follow you, but isn't improving living standards through increased equity a fundamental tenet of communism, irrespective of its value for populist appeal? ikanreed ^{🐐Bleat at me} 16:23, 21 February 2019 (UTC)

It would be a likely effect, but it is not a driving telos. I am not here to tell you what the revolution may look like, but the dissolution of class society would certainly change up a lot of our metrics for evaluating "living standards." If by equity you mean equality, Marx was not a liberal egalitarian either. Picaresquieu (talk) 16:40, 21 February 2019 (UTC)

Equity, in context, meaning having fair investiture in the material outcomes of society at large. ikanreed ^{🐐Bleat at me} 17:04, 21 February 2019 (UTC)