Communism..2.0

[Peter_Kropotkin]

Its late and I’ll be quick…
what we need is to rethink, reevaluate what is going on
and what is next… we begin by thinking about the isms
of our time… and we begin with Communism… that
communism has a bad name in America is not a secret…
but I believe, at some point, soon? that communism will make
a comeback and be seriously tried…Soo, how do we
revive communism? we begin, as all things are, at the
beginning… What was the question that drove Marx to
work out communism?

the nature of work… of how we spend our time…
What are we to do? per Kant

Kropotkin

[Ichthus77 (Ichthus77 (formerly She™))]

We are to do nothing else, but stop pressing return at the end of the input window. If we can not manage such a little thing, we will ourselves be managed by others… to our immortal peril.

[Peter_Kropotkin]

the question becomes, how do we evaluate, or
better said, how do we reevaluate communism?

We can better understand the idea behind communism if
we understand the problem that Marx was trying to solve…
By say, 1850, there were immense factories in England
and elsewhere… and here comes Fredrich Engels…
son of a factory owner… all the factory information that Marx
used was from Engels… Men, Women and children worked
for 11, 12, or even 13 hours a day for pennies a day…
6 days a week… often working very hazards jobs, where it
wasn’t uncommon for children to be maimed by in their job…
and those children were simply dismissed… with no
compensation for their injuries…and the slum of England,
were very ugly places… hovels that housed 6 to 12 people
in a small one bedroom apt that has little in the way of
basics… and they faced as Dickens himself wrote about,
they faced disease, poor sanitation, and vermin to name a
few of the problems of the urban poor..

This was the world of Dickens and the world of Marx…
Now I haven’t worked in a factory, but I worked for 18 years
in a ‘‘factory lite’’ which is the grocery business and I spend
years scanning items into the scanner… Factory lite work…
and my job was in a clean, relatively safe environment,
with a few of the hazards of the Factory worker in Dickens times…
The important part here to remember is that Marx wrote as
an economist… and if asked, he would have considered
himself as an economist… He approached this problem
of capitalism from an economic standpoint, and the last book
of his, Das Capital… is a strict economic book… and BTW,
boring as shit… but his approach to the issues of the day,
were from an economic standpoint, not a political standpoint…
and that is why the Soviet Union failed, it, communism is
an economic theory, not a political theory but Lenin and
Stalin treated it as being a political theory, not an economic
one…

Now let us be very clear, Marx was very right on many things,
and he was wrong, seriously wrong on many things…
but his critique of capitalism is still the single best critique
of capitalism ever done… even after 150 years…
he was an economist criticizing an economic theory…
that its…

One of the things Marx wanted, and he says so, is the
change in existence, whereas a person could be a farmer
in the morning and a writer in the afternoon… which is
a pointed reference to the worker who spend 13 hours
of the day doing just one thing on the assembly line…
that was the goal… to free people from spending their lives
within the factory existence… but as Marx clearly saw,
that this change, is not only an economic one, but is
a political one…but it was the economic that drove Marx,
not the political aspect of a person’s existence…

Now much of what Marx wrote about in factories, no longer
exists because of liberals and their drive to make safe factory
work and to reduce the hours a factory worker worked…
8 hour days and anything over 8 is overtime and any
work over 5 days is overtime… those were liberal changes
not conservative changes… remember that…

so, given where we are at today, with factory work being
greatly reduced in America today, we still have the
factory mentality at work in America today…with
a military precision, clock in on time, leave on time,
with lunch at a set hour… any deviation is frowned
indeed, deviations are often the cause of a write up from
the manager…In my factory lite work, I was told what to
wear, the color of my shoes, what I can say or not say,
where I could and couldn’t stand, to what kind of
haircut and the color of my hair… everything was a topic from
corporate…and had to be followed or termination…

and that is one aspect of modern life… the factory lite
conditions that exist within most corporate work today…
if you have no say or choice within this corporate existence,
you are then a slave… for that is someone without any
choices… one might say, but Kropotkin, quitting is a choice,
no, no it isn’t because every single job one wants is run
the exact same way… to make profits, that is the one
and only reason for existence within the corporate world…
and being human… that is no important in the corporate world…
that is the nihilism of our modern world… that human beings
are negated, devalued for profits… where profits matter more
than human beings…so in essence, Marx was fighting
the nihilism of his time, just as clearly as we must fight
the nihilism of our times… and to do that, we must
create, as Marx did, a manifesto…
a new communist manifesto as it were…and why?
because we exist in a different time, within a different
environment, and every generation must work to end
the nihilism in their times, not fight the nihilism of the past…

We are in a new times, with a new environment, and new
challenges, AI anyone…

One of the things that Marx did and is forgotten is
that he was a newspaper correspondent, he worked for
the New-York Daily Tribune, as an overseas correspondent…
and the vast majority of his ten years as a correspondent,
was writing about worker issues… the 8 hour work day
was a topic of his as was the 5 day work week and
health issues facing workers… the exact same stuff
we still face today… worker rights vs corporate rights…
but there wasn’t the same life vs work problem that we
face today, but still, Marx engaged in worker rights…
today, he would be a union representative…

Perhaps the great divide that Marx picked up on,
was the idea of property… part of what divides people
then and now, is this idea of ownership of property…
On what principle does the ownership of private property
lie on? how do we justify private property ownership?
Locke for example, spends a great deal of time on
this question of ownership of property and the need,
the unquestioned need for the government to
protect owners’ rights over all other rights…
In fact, for Locke, the only real function of government
is to protect property… and since property is only
owned by those who can afford it, the government
basic right is to protect the wealthy person property…
that is the function of government… at least according
to Locke and his followers…and this thought is capture
by the American Declaration of Independence…
where it is written,

‘’…with certain unalienable Rights, that among these
are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’’

this pursuit of happiness in the minds of the founding fathers,
was another way of saying the pursuit of property… for the
founding fathers were great believers in Locke..
and the idea of property being the one great right of
the people… well, wealthy people anyway…and every
single founding father, had wealth enough for property…
that was in fact, the one idea that everyone could
agree upon because the entire Second continental
congress was men who owned property…
That was the one fact that connected every single person
who participate in the Second Continental congress…
property ownership…

So, we need to reevaluate this idea of property rights given
the context of our own times… our own environment…
and what is the exact role of government in modern times
in relation to property rights?

What is needed is a new and updated manifesto for
who and what we are today…

Kropotkin

[Peter_Kropotkin]

Ichthus77:

We are to do nothing else, but stop pressing return at the end of the input window. If we can not manage such a little thing, we will ourselves be managed by others… to our immortal peril.

K: I offer up the word of the day…

Pedantic: is someone overly concerned with minor details,
rules or formalisms, often showing off their knowledge in a
tedious or annoying way…

Kropotkin

[Peter_Kropotkin]

so, let us work out some of the problems in the
modern world…

1. our economic system is a fancy dressed up form of
   slavery… as long as the system is geared towards
   profits instead of people, we shall have a system
   that practices nihilism…

2. The political system we have is also geared toward
   those who own property… a legacy of Locke that we
   never got rid of… the dividing line in the modern world,
   as it was in Marx’s time, is the ownership of property…
   how do we fix the political system not to favor the wealthy
   ownership of property?

3. Because we have never clearly defined what a human
   being is, we don’t have a sense of the problems we face
   and the solutions to those problems… we don’t know what
   it means to be human, and that also entails the question
   of what is the point, meaning of human existence..
   you can’t complete a journey unless you know where you
   are going, and because we don’t know the goal of
   existence, we can’t complete our journey into becoming
   human… today, we define being human in economic terms,
   in terms of capitalism… but I say unto you, that the ism of
   capitalism is not part of the solution, but it is part of
   the problem… and how do we overcome this problem of
   capitalism… which brings us back into the problems
   and answers of Marx… How do we create an economic
   system that actually treats human beings as human beings…
   and how much of those solutions involved political solutions?

there is much to work out in our new modern manifesto…

Kropotkin

[niallm12 (Niall)]

@Peter_Kropotkin

Das Capital… is a strict economic book… and BTW,
boring as shit…

That’s why I couldn’t get through it

@Peter_Kropotkin

that is why the Soviet Union failed, it, communism is
an economic theory, not a political theory but Lenin and
Stalin treated it as being a political theory, not an economic
one…

Isn’t the fact that the Soviet Union failed also attributable to the relentless assault it was subjected to by capitalist forces? I mean, it wasn’t really given much of a chance, was it?

@Peter_Kropotkin

One of the things Marx wanted, and he says so, is the
change in existence, whereas a person could be a farmer
in the morning and a writer in the afternoon… which is
a pointed reference to the worker who spend 13 hours
of the day doing just one thing on the assembly line…
that was the goal… to free people from spending their lives
within the factory existence… but as Marx clearly saw,
that this change, is not only an economic one, but is
a political one…but it was the economic that drove Marx,
not the political aspect of a person’s existence…

This has a lot of merit in my view. We are thinking animals that need mental stimulation from many sources, performing the same repetitive tasks all the time is simply not natural, especially if they have no personal benefit beyond feeding the accumulation of capital.

@Peter_Kropotkin

a new communist manifesto as it were…and why?
because we exist in a different time, within a different
environment, and every generation must work to end
the nihilism in their times, not fight the nihilism of the past…

It’s worth a try.

@Peter_Kropotkin

Perhaps the great divide that Marx picked up on,
was the idea of property… part of what divides people
then and now, is this idea of ownership of property…
On what principle does the ownership of private property
lie on? how do we justify private property ownership?

I don’t think it’s wrong for my Mother to own her house. But for Blackrock to own 10,000? I think we need a better definition of what private property ownership should entail, because right now it’s crazy.

@Peter_Kropotkin

What is needed is a new and updated manifesto for
who and what we are today…

Get writing

[niallm12 (Niall)]

@Peter_Kropotkin

Because we have never clearly defined what a human
being is, we don’t have a sense of the problems we face
and the solutions to those problems… we don’t know what
it means to be human, and that also entails the question
of what is the point, meaning of human existence..
you can’t complete a journey unless you know where you
are going, and because we don’t know the goal of
existence, we can’t complete our journey into becoming
human… today, we define being human in economic terms,
in terms of capitalism… but I say unto you, that the ism of
capitalism is not part of the solution, but it is part of
the problem… and how do we overcome this problem of
capitalism… which brings us back into the problems
and answers of Marx… How do we create an economic
system that actually treats human beings as human beings…
and how much of those solutions involved political solutions?

For me it’s belonging to a specific species, that of humans. It’s obviously in my interest that the species flourishes and does well, as it is for all members of the species. I really don’t understand why it has to be more involved or complicated than that.

[futureone]

@Peter_Kropotkin

8 hour days and anything over 8 is overtime and any
work over 5 days is overtime… those were liberal changes
not conservative changes… remember that…

Charlie Kirk wanted people to work 20 hr work days.

Perhaps the great divide that Marx picked up on,
was the idea of property… part of what divides people
then and now, is this idea of ownership of property…
On what principle does the ownership of private property
lie on? how do we justify private property ownership?
Locke for example, spends a great deal of time on
this question of ownership of property and the need,
the unquestioned need for the government to
protect owners’ rights over all other rights…
In fact, for Locke, the only real function of government
is to protect property… and since property is only
owned by those who can afford it, the government
basic right is to protect the wealthy person property…
that is the function of government… at least according
to Locke and his followers…and this thought is capture
by the American Declaration of Independence…
where it is written,

‘’…with certain unalienable Rights, that among these
are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’’

this pursuit of happiness in the minds of the founding fathers,
was another way of saying the pursuit of property… for the
founding fathers were great believers in Locke..
and the idea of property being the one great right of
the people… well, wealthy people anyway…and every
single founding father, had wealth enough for property…
that was in fact, the one idea that everyone could
agree upon because the entire Second continental
congress was men who owned property…
That was the one fact that connected every single person
who participate in the Second Continental congress…
property ownership…

No old-skool Capitalist would support modern Capitalism. They were all in favor of wealth limits on the order of 10 million today’s-money dollars. And they were anti-monopoly as well.

When someone has 2 billion dollars you have to ask yourself, what does that say about a person… Do modern capitalists really believe that the person worked 2 billion times harder than say, someone in a third-world country with no savings? Do they have 2 billion times higher IQ, 2 billion times better genetics… what justifies the vast difference between them and someone with nothing?

[futureone]

@Peter_Kropotkin

Because we have never clearly defined what a human
being is, we don’t have a sense of the problems we face
and the solutions to those problems… we don’t know what
it means to be human, and that also entails the question
of what is the point, meaning of human existence..
you can’t complete a journey unless you know where you
are going, and because we don’t know the goal of
existence, we can’t complete our journey into becoming
human… today, we define being human in economic terms,
in terms of capitalism… but I say unto you, that the ism of
capitalism is not part of the solution, but it is part of
the problem… and how do we overcome this problem of
capitalism… which brings us back into the problems
and answers of Marx… How do we create an economic
system that actually treats human beings as human beings…
and how much of those solutions involved political solutions?

The need is not to define what is human, but what is humanoid.

There will be humanoid lifeforms, robots and aliens. Perhaps there might not be aliens, but definitely there will be bots, lots of the bots…

.

Therefore a Class 1 humanoid is: Any being which has consciousness, self-awareness and knows at least 1 humanoid language. Most animals lack self-awareness: they do not pass the mirror test, and only know a very basic language at most, not a humanoid language.

.

A Class 2 humanoid is: A humanoid humanoid. A being which walks upright and does not look buttugly. For example, pretty aliens or robots. A Class 2 humanoid must fill all Class 1 humanoid pre-requisites.

.

A Class 3 humanoid is: A humanoid humanoid humanoid. A being which is able to suffer or feel pain. Requires special rights and protections. A Class 3 humanoid must fill all Class 2 humanoid pre-requisites.

[MrAuthoritarian]

@Peter_Kropotkin

1.) American late stage economic capitalism collapses making American socialist or communist revolution inevitable domestically. Civil war ensues tearing the nation apart for several decades.

2.) Crazy psychopathic oligarchy that controls the United States initiates World War III. Human civilization collapses globally afterward assuming human survivors exist at all. Economics and money becomes the least of people’s worries anymore for concerns of more immediate day to day survival.

Global Dark Age ensues and the usual human primitive barbarism that follows.

Sorry, best I can supply this thread with.

Abandon ye all hope.

[MrAuthoritarian]

@Peter_Kropotkin

I have a question for you, what will the democratic liberals do when western democracies collapse one by one?

I don’t think liberals understand quite the precarious situation they find themselves in, although they will soon find out eventually.

At some point liberals are going to have to stop living in fantasyland and rejoin reality with the rest of us.

Do democratic liberals have a plan at all for the collapse of democracy and their precious ballot voting system?

[Ichthus77 (Ichthus77 (formerly She™))]

@Peter_Kropotkin

K: I offer up the word of the day…

Pedantic: is someone overly concerned with minor details,
rules or formalisms, often showing off their knowledge in a
tedious or annoying way…

Kropotkin

The word of the day is actually arsehole: Someone who doesn’t care if reading them is all chopped up and might as well just bury you in confetti.

[Ichthus77 (Ichthus77 (formerly She™))]

@niallm12

Get writing

He would write “We represent ourselves as a pile of confetti”.

[niallm12 (Niall)]

@Peter_Kropotkin

a new communist manifesto as it were…and why?
because we exist in a different time, within a different
environment, and every generation must work to end
the nihilism in their times, not fight the nihilism of the past…

I would suggest that it has to be based on decentralisation. I don’t subscribe to what the traditional definition of Communism prescribes, because it has an obvious single point of failure, the state, which is required under the circumstances to be very bloated and have control over literally everything.

Capitalism always results in extreme levels of centralisation, due to the inevitable concentrated accumulation of capital and its control over the means of production, big agribusiness being a perfect example. If one of the few highly concentrated means of production is somehow disrupted, then the entire supply chain is too, and it essentially affects everybody and has a huge negative effect on the entire economy. Single points of failure.

Decentralised systems, for example the internet, open source software, certain types of cryptocurrency, bit-torrent technology, or in nature, mycelium, are highly resilient and have no single point of failure. I would suggest there is something to learn there.

Some AI laziness:

Fungi, particularly through their underground mycelial networks, exhibit a highly decentralized structure that enables resilience, adaptability, and collective problem-solving without a central authority. This decentralized nature is exemplified by the mycelium, which functions as a distributed intelligence network capable of bi-directional communication, environmental feedback processing, and coordinated responses across vast areas.

• Mycelium operates as a decentralized organism with no central control, allowing the network to survive even if parts are compromised.

• The network communicates through molecular signals, enabling collective decision-making regarding resource use, reproduction, and defense against competitors.

• This decentralized system is compared to human-made decentralized networks such as the internet, neural networks, and Bitcoin, all of which rely on distributed authority for resilience and evolution.

• Paul Stamets describes mycelium as “earth’s natural internet” and “the wood wide web,” highlighting its role in information and nutrient exchange across ecosystems.

• The decentralized nature of fungi has inspired applications in sustainable technology, including bioremediation, carbon sequestration, and biodegradable materials.

[MrAuthoritarian]

@niallm12

Decentralized communism would never work, the moment you allow any privatization whatsoever wealthy individuals will try to hijack the government for their own purposes over everybody else.

The only tool we have in disposal against oligarchy is state centralization. We have learned this by leaps and bounds with the failed American political experiment.

People can like it or hate it, we need more political centralization not less.

[MrAuthoritarian]

@niallm12

The only strong tool against the monopoly of wealth is a central government body, without that the working class has nothing at all.

[niallm12 (Niall)]

@MrAuthoritarian

Decentralized communism would never work, the moment you allow any privatization whatsoever wealthy individuals will try to hijack the government for their own purposes over everybody else.

Replace the word “privatisation” with “reasonable ownership”. I mentioned this further up in the comments:

@niallm12

I don’t think it’s wrong for my Mother to own her house. But for Blackrock to own 10,000? I think we need a better definition of what private property ownership should entail, because right now it’s crazy.

@MrAuthoritarian

The only tool we have in disposal against oligarchy is state centralization. We have learned this by leaps and bounds with the failed American political experiment.

You live in a highly centralised state already, on which has been completely tainted by the overwhelming force of concentration of capital and the inevitable power that gives over practically everything. Now you are proposing an equally, or even more centralised state, which would be just as prone to corruption, and the outcome of that wouldn’t just affect a small part of the population, it would negatively affect everybody.

How would you shield and insulate that giant government from such potential corruption (or infiltration)? Please answer that.

[MrAuthoritarian]

@niallm12

Capitalist propagandists like to say that socialists or communists are against all forms of private property. Note, Karl Marx never spoke about anything against having personal private property but rather only articulated limits on it.

Of course the wealthy who constantly conspire against everybody else for their own self interests despise that because imposed limits would stop their ability to capture entire government institutions for themselves.

A government is supposed to represent all economic classes of people in a fair just manner as a centralized mediator, capitalists think to themselves that the government is suppose to represent their own interests only as a hammer against everybody else under total subjugation.

This is why we need more centralization, decentralization only favors the wealthy and powerful giving them free reign to abuse everybody else under them.

[MrAuthoritarian]

@niallm12

There’s nothing centralized about the United States government. It is completely decentralized across the board which has allowed easy capture for wealthy individuals to take over it completely.

The only centralized power structure inside the United States is the consortium of Wallstreet which controls virtually everything inside of our nation including the federal government itself.

Go to the senate or even congress they’re surrounded by individual corporate lobbying firms.

[niallm12 (Niall)]

Your idea of centralisation implies that the government controls practically everything, which is doomed to fail, but what you quote as “decentralisation” isn’t in effect in the current system, so is not a valid counter-argument. Everything is now centralised, agriculture, production, finance, energy, pharma, and on and on. All those things, how many hands are they really in at the end of the day? And don’t those people cooperate highly with one another, even so-called competitors?

Someone might say “but what about smaller businesses?” - they fill a niche. They are allowed to survive without being swallowed by the machine because there is probably not enough potential profit in what they are doing, and the level of demand is too low to attract interest.

It’s all centralised, MrA, and it doesn’t work on any longer timeline, especially when power is concentrated to such astounding levels, and distributed among people who have no interest in the well-being of society.