Another Marxism thread on his

Many working class parties have Marxist beliefs

I think the idea is that the state is one big labor union.

Nothing can go wrong there.

For the most part capable, intelligent people make it to the middle class. The western countries are pretty meritocratic for adults, ad the classes are maintened by child-rearing.

because the middle class is too busy working to participate in retarded political bullshit and muh ideology circlejerks

You'd have a hard time finding a 'Marxist' who wasn't under the age of 24 and still a student.

Funny how left wings ideas only thrive around higher, younger class, eh ?

It's like grown ups or those who have faced the true harshness of having a low paycheck don't support them, amirite ?

this basically

most people are too busy with work and too disillusioned with politics to give anything complex the time of day. though marxism would like nothing more than to lift the all-consuming nature of work from the backs of the working class, they don't have the patience nor the care to have the patience to put valuable escapism time after work towards learning philosophy of what their rational self-interests are.

They used to. There are many socialist labor parties in other countries. McCarthy era attitudes killed socialist labor parties in America.

>There are many socialist labor parties in other countries.
How many of them enjoy mainstream support though?

Because Marxists are mistaken as to what actually is the self-interest of a worker.

Here in Norway an average worker makes probably 50000+ dollars a year, and he makes a lot more if he works over time.

The question is, is it really in the self-interest of a worker to destroy the capitalist system that creates all this wealth that can be redistributed by the State?

I don't think it is.

Because the US working class is in China

Because Marxism is more about power to the intellectuals whose line of expertise doesn't make them wealthy, than it is about power to the workers. Once intellectuals establish themselves as the ruling class, then unions become enemies of Marxism. If you want to get ahead in a Marxist state, you have to be an intellectual, otherwise you might accidentally say something heretical at the wrong time and it will cause your downfall.

>Why doesn't the working class act in their own self-interest?

Because they don't want to starve.

Self-interest is a spook, by the way, at least according to how both liberals and communists use it.

So your saying it's not the working class who is getting their surplus value extracted, its the intellectuals?

It's not even that all the time.

In America, both the political right and left have effectively evangelized such a massively anti-intellectual load of horseshit, that philosophy and learning are the last things that would ever constitute escapism.

But they could. A book is enough.

/thread

The working class gets their value extracted, the intellectual receives the revenue.

Thread.

So I said "that's not your self interest, that's my wallet!"

Not for long

"Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just self-interested to see me?"

Because Marxism is actually not in the working class' self-interest.

It serves the interests of the intelligentsia.

As does any teleological movement since Zoroaster. The intellectuals were just called 'priests' back then and the utopian society was the Kingdom of God

The "intellectuals" of the Church, so to speak, are the monks.

Right. Marxism is basically a cult of academia.

An apocalyptic cult. Its core ideology is a worldview divided between good (the have nots) and evil (the haves), and a final battle between good and evil, resulting in a final victory for good, which will continue on living in a paradise for the workers (the worker's revolution and the classless society).

All of these elements have been part of human thought since Zoroaster first conceptualized them. Judaism, Christianity and Islam are virtually build around them.

Which Zoroastrian text are you referencing, if you don't mind my asking?

Marxism is the opium of the intellectuals.

>Why is Marxism only embraced by young, middle class intellectuals?
It isn't. Young bourgeois, nomenklatura, intelligentsia, "professional-managerial," "new petits-bourgeois," and petits-bourgeous intellectuals tend to embrace all-absorbing metaphysics (cf: Anti-Dühring), and at the same time over-report their own importance, and at the same time are over-reported in scholarly and popular presses.

You've failed to account for the most basic sourcing biases in coming to your conclusion on this point.

>Why doesn't the working class act in their own self-interest?

We do. We have a dual interest as the sellers of alienated labour-power to maximise our wage, and as the alienated producers capable of producing without ownership to abolish the wage system. Don't be rude and call generations of workers stupid for attempting to maximise their wage.

You honestly need to read more union level labour history of the tankie parties.

Most working class people I know don't foremost want to abolish exploitation, they foremost want to get in on it.

>Don't be rude and call generations of workers stupid for attempting to maximise their wage.

But maximising their wage isn't in their self-interest, seizing the means of production is.

>self-interest
Have you read Notes from Underground?

I have not, no. Could you explain what it is?

>young, middle class intellectuals
Dude, WHERE? In Europe? Singapore? Chile? Zambia? The least you could do is make it clear what you're talking about.

It's a short story by Dostoevsky about a recluse who chooses to be a loser as an expression of not being beholden to popular theories of self-interest. The first ten chapters are philosophical discourse

>talks about muh exploitation
>gets his maid pregnant and throws her out on the street
I can't take his work serious because he was a horrible person. Also it has a lot of flaws, like the personal/private property thing? Who decides what is personal and what is private property? If it's something that is used for production then what about my sexual organs? Are you advocating for rape?
>young | middle class | intellectuals
>Marxists

Pick one user.
As a former soviet citizen who got this retarded shit shoved down his throat half his life, I really despise you Marxists. It's incredible.

Hail Capitalism.

I think most Americans associate Marxism with the state and its functions. In which it only takes a trip to the DMV or being forced into jury duty to change their mind about giving such devices an expansion of power. If you work in the government this is exceptionally apparent. With public unions, things get very decadent.

Most Americans don't want more bureaucracy in their lives.

>USA is the only country on Earth

The west

>implying the middle class is not part of the working class

the working class includes everything from NASA engineers to Vietnamese farmers working in their rice paddies.

I think what you meant to ask was: "why lower income people in the western world are not overwhelmingly leftist/Marxist?". There are many reasons for this, but the big ones are these:

1) low income workers in the west still "enjoy" a bit from the exploitation of third world people. they might not be rich, but they can still buy cheap smartphones, have internet connection, clean water, electricity, and a warm house. all of these wouldnt be possible without slaves mining rare metals, coal, or working in sweatshops in third world countries.

2) poor education and vulnerability to capitalist propaganda.

3) western leftist political parties care for minorities more than poor whites. this makes poor whites feel alienated and occasionally they vote for nationalist parties.

More like: working class people hate Marxist shit because it's shit.

1. Because to know more about communism than "USSR be evil and shit" you need to read books which many working class people do not.
2. Many of them do.

Yeah man it's totally in my rational self interest to kill my boss and collectively commandeer my workplace.

Nah. I'd rather just go to school, learn marketable skills, and ignore most of the pseudo-intellectual marxist propaganda that we're force fed in humanities classes.

The truth is that marxism has always been by and for the bourgeois intelligentsia, so much so that marx had to redefine bourgeois because the original definition fit marx and his peers perfectly. Even still, engels fit marx's definition to a T.

>learn marketable skills
You haven't solved anything. You're still just a better paid prole.

Because they realise that they are much better off under capitalism, even if some academics think that them selling their labour is "exploitation".

>They're better off under capitalism.

>being a prole is inherently bad

Typical bourgeois faggot dreaming about power.

>The truth is that marxism has always been by and for the bourgeois intelligentsia, so much so that marx had to redefine bourgeois because the original definition fit marx and his peers perfectly.

This cannot be stressed enough.

Yes, because by virtue of being a prole you're getting less than you're worth.

>Power
It's not about power, it's about being comfy.

>he believes in the Marxian LTV

Into the trash

>LTV
LTV doesn't matter as much as anti-communists think it does.

If you make a thing and sell it naturally you're going to make more money if a portion of the profits don't go to someone who made nothing.

>facebook memes
Indeed they are. Should I remind you that the number one cause of death in America is obesity?

>former soviet citizen
Proofs, mein tovarishch.

>poor Americans can't afford nutritious food
>forced to eat cheeseburgers until they have a heart attack
>people dying of obesity is a good sign!

All of them outside the US.

Yes because starvation and bread lines are obviously preferable.

None of those parties are actually socialist though, because socialism (state ownership of the means of production, central planning) was a massive failure.

Because the working class values their cultural identification over the artificiality of class identification that only vapid intellectuals can contort themselves to see as truth. The folk will always ultimately unite as a unit against all that try to separate it, and when in spite of the Machiavellian tendrils trying to burrow into its cracks and fractures to tear it apart it at length regains its consciousness of itself and of the forces that are arrayed against it, those that acted underhandedly for its destruction will face a day of wrath like no other without mercy or relent.

>capitalism doesn't work for me but for others therefore it is flawed
i fixed it for you

>Starvation
More like eating something normal because McHeartattacks aren't sold like they're going out of fashion.

>Failure
No it wasn't.

Nationalism is absolutely meaningless beyond making it easy for the bourgeois to create a false-solidarity between them and the bourgeoisie against the nebulous "other" of the week.

You forgot the part where 90% of the population starves.

You forgot the part where these places have an actual history and not some rhetorical narrative that can be reduced to a few points.

Do they?

Because I'm quite positive massive famines didn't happen after Stalin died and from what I've heard in the latter half of the USSR no one went hungry. Even if you watch 80's videos of USSR supermarkets there's still lots of food there even if they don't look like bright garish western goods.

>No it wasn't.
Yeah man, Venezuela and North Korea are just doing great.

>more facebook memes

>nationalism is absolutely meaningless
Cultural identification always has and always will trump economic identification. Your false reductionism of construing material economics as being behind all separate and higher aesthetics and idealisms that in reality transcend its base materialism is your downfall.

>Why doesn't the working class act in their own self-interest?

They do.
The problem is that Marxists don't realize the interests of one region's working class do not automatically coincide with those of another. So why should a worker put the interests of "international labor" over his own?

Since Marxists are upper class intellectuals first and foremost they see the working class as a homogeneous blob of simpletons who must be guided for their own good, and they honestly believe the lie that a working class man from the first world has more in common with his third world equivalent than he does with the bourgeois classes of his own country.

Which should be obvious nonsense because it expects us to believe that there's no difference between a Chinese steelworker and an Islamic fundamentalist bricklayer in the Islamic State, yet ivory tower Marxist "intellectuals" still insist this is the case to the detriment of us all.

> Cultural identification always has and always will trump economic identification.
Just look at any revolution where people from the same culture kill each other because of reasons. People can see themselves as oppressed class, while hating people from the same culture. So it isn't always that straightforward as you implying.

>North Korea
Don't even pretend to be communist.
>Venezuela
1. Under Chavez poverty and hunger actually decreased.
2. It's not a communist single-party dictatorship, if people hate the socialist party so much they can just not vote for them.

It does in the third world in in earlier European history where and when people were very uneducated.

Nowadays however it's basically been proven that with economic advancement nationalism goes into the bin where it belongs.

The fact that people from the same culture kill each other does not magically mean they will feel more in common with people from another culture simply because they are both broke.

What about if they are both rich? I remember that aristocracy was more closer to aristocracy from other countries than to peasants.

Only on a superficial level. Rich people being rich has never stopped rich people from hating and killing other rich people.

All you are saying is that with affluence people get brainwashed by materialism and forget their values. Don't pretend to be an enemy of the culture of greed that Communism is only tenable within. Also, I love how you denigrate the proletarians you claim to act in the name of and their value systems for their incongruity with the bourgeois values Communism necessarily derives from.

You cannot brainwashed by materialism because materialism unlike nationalism isn't a simple idea. It's just recognizing the facts of reality.

>Also, I love how you denigrate the proletarians you claim to act in the name of and their value systems for their incongruity with the bourgeois values Communism necessarily derives from.
I'm not talking about the proletariat at large. I'm talking about the uneducated portions of the proletariat (on the global scale this means almost all of them) that are liable to be seduced by nationalist rhetoric. The crux of my argument is that the proletariat in the first world care less about nationalism than ever.

Not to mention nothing I said is even an insult.

>nationalism
>a simple idea

>first world
>proletariat
HA!

> because materialism unlike nationalism isn't a simple idea
How do you know which idea is simple one and which is complex? Both ideas are simple in their cores but got more complicated if you study them deeply i.e. laws of physics or history of the nation, etc.

>The crux of my argument is that the proletariat in the first world care less about nationalism than ever.
Tell that to the majority of working-class white Americans that vote Republican every single election. I'll give you a hint: they're not doing it for economic reasons. The less bourgeois-ified the proletariat is the more they conform to their natural, instinctual values. I thought you Marxists were all about how the bourgeois deluded and led astray the proletariat with their false values.

I suppose the hypocrisy of what I said is unless you consider things from a materialist perspective things like nationalism seem just as real as the food you eat.

But I'm not singling out nationalism as "simple" as opposed to complicated I'm calling a simple idea because from my perspective it is made up - that is it is nothing more than an idea.

>cultural, ethnic, and historical differences are made up

On the contrary Democrats are more popular among the working class than with the middle class.

You also ought to notice that a key point of communism is the more advanced capitalism becomes the closer it is to transitioning to socialism.

Yes they are.

They only matter because people ideologically decide that they matter.

It's actually Heart Disease.

No one went hungry? Hahaha let me guess you are a privileged American! Ask any ex-Soviet alive during the stagnation that occurred! They'll tell you how "eating" went.

>the fact that your grandfather murdered my grandfather doesn't matter
>the fact that your people beat your women and mine don't doesn't matter
>the fact you speak an entirely different language from me doesn't matter
>these points of contention are all in my head
>The only thing that matters is that I work in a shipyard building ships and you work in a coalmine mining coal and that means we are the same and should automatically get along with each other

Marxism.

...

Marxists should be dragged out into the street and shot.