Do any of you know about some books written about Capitalism ? The Communists have their Manifesto...

Do any of you know about some books written about Capitalism ? The Communists have their Manifesto, do the capitalists have anything ?

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Capitalists have everything.

What is Wealth of Nations!?

Capitalism isn't really a thing, let alone the capital C "Capitalism". You might be looking for a book on economics.

>Capitalism isn't really a thing
It turns things into merchandise. That's capitalism's thing.

Including books like

What are you even trying to say?

Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations. I'd also check out anything by Rothbard

Capitalism isn't an ideology like Marxism, it's the emergent phenomenon that occurs when people are allowed to control their own labor, income, and purchases in some varying degrees.

Economics is the study of this phenomenon. Pic related is the unofficial official unofficial Veeky Forums economics reading list. Marxism is unempirical garbage and as such wouldn't be included in any serious academic listing, but this is Veeky Forums so we can include it for completeness.

The Wealth of Nations warned about the contradictions of capitalism though. Adam Smith thought capitalism would be heavily regulated or replaced by something else. Capitalism was a weird phenomenon of the time and wasn't supposed to last forever and ever, as modern capitalists seem to think it should.

>Capitalism isn't an ideology
It's a particular economic system, so it has to be based on some ideological component.

>Capitalism isn't an ideology like Marxism, it's the emergent phenomenon

Being so deep in ideology you resort to a term like "emergent phenomenon" to describe a political philosophy

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Can we turn this into an ideology thread?

It already was but suit yourself, user.

Marxism isn't an ideology, it's a social science. Capitalism has many ideologies (liberalism, neoliberalism, conservativism, praxeology, islamism, fascism, nazism, etc.) that reinforce it.

Capitalism didn't just come out of nowhere. It has the remnants of the old feudal society still with it. This isn't people in a state of nature agreeing to things. Capitalism is the domination of the business class. Relative to Feudalism, capitalism was a revolutionary force for good because it got rid of the royal and clerical rule, but in our modern society, it is the capitalists who are the new ruling class over an emerging working class.

Marxism is pure empiricism.
Capitalist ideologies like praxeology are abstract mathematical models of the world and actually are unempirical garbage.

Capitalism isn't a political ideology; it's a mode of production. Das Kapital is a book *about* capitalism by a communist, for example.

>it's a mode of production
Yes, it turns any thing into merchandise. But that doesn't mean capitalism is not a political ideology.

Well, that's true even though Feudalism was much much better than Capitalism.
>Marxism is pure empiricism. Capitalist ideologies like praxeology are abstract mathematical models of the world and actually are unempirical garbage
Right.

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It depends what you mean by "better." Capitalism causes far more ecological damage and is a greater force for moral decadence, propaganda, racism, and imperialist wars.

But in terms of the actual relationship to the workers? I'd rather be a worker under Capitalism than a peasant farmer under Feudalism.

>this entire post

If you're referring to the worker's rights, I get you.
How many hours a day the peasant farmers used to work though?

Marxism is based in philosophical idealism, how is it empirical? It's a method to deal with an empirically understood world, but even then, we aren't entire sure of the world around us, and it's all but mere conjecture. I don't understand how one can honestly propose a proposition claiming Marxism as empirical. Good god I pray for this world.

>Marxism is based in philosophical idealism
Please explain.

My favorite Bartleby meme.

I'm not sure, but I think its been estimated like around 12 to 14?

>Marxism is based on philosophical idealism

Marx denounced and rejected most of Hegel. He was a materialist, not an idealist. However, he saw a small "kernel" of truth in Hegel's writing and thought of his ideas as the upside down and backwards version of Hegel's.

Read Mao's essay "On Contradiction" and you'll understand.

>Good god I pray for this world

You sound like you think you know a lot. You don't.

Rostow's 'The stages of economic growth: A non-communist manifesto'

Not particularly relevant these days though.

I would imagine that the ideology associated with it would be liberalism.

Democracy: The God That Failed by Hans-Hermann Hoppe is what you're looking for.

Okay then I'd rather be a worker under Capitalism as well lol

why isnt Ayn Rand mentioned itt?

She was a retard and her "philosophy" is a joke

she never knew what she was talking about

>Capitalism: Mankind creates wealth through voluntary exchanges and homesteading property, which brings about a spontaneous order based on respect for each other's private property - PURE IDEOLOGY
>Communism: The proletariat will inevitably rise to power through a dictatorship because reasons (PURE EMPIRICISM LMAO) and will dissolve the state after destroying private property and bringing about public ownership for everyone - TOTALLY NOT AN IDEOLOGY, JUST PURE EMPIRICAL TRUTH

this is true but Veeky Forums just can't into this kind of thinking, they're all about ideologies

>pseudo-intellectual bullshit - the post

Don't get me wrong, they're both Ideologies. I don't buy any of this "Dialectical Materialism" bs about communism being some natural state.

I don't even see why couching something as "natural", "spontaneous", "emergent", or "scientific" means something isn't an ideology.

An ideology is a means to understand the world. Scientific Materialism/Positivism is an ideology. Maoism is an ideology. Democracy is an Ideology. Christianity is an ideology.

By believing any of these things, you see the world in a certain way.

There is literally no escaping ideology and this isn't a bad thing. It's just a matter of how aware you are of your own ideology, how much you realize that the world could be seen in different ways.

I think the essential problem with this thread is that no one wants their own belief system to be called an ideology. Get over it.

I think the wikipedia article nails it in the first sentence.

"Ideology is a collection of beliefs held by an individual, group or society."

It's nothing scary!

Well, I thought you were referring to the marxian concept of ideology, not the common sense one.

I'm not an expert on Marx, but from what I remember he defined Ideology as "social reproduction". A system of belief which perpetuates itself, a tradition.

He has a lot of theory on how an ideology becomes dominant (ruling class/working class, base/superstructure), but I don't think his concept veers off from the idea of Ideology as a collection of beliefs that shape how you understand the world.

for you

Not to say that capitalism isn't awful though. Third World workers get paid about 38 cents an hour and in horrible conditions, so they're pretty much parallel to the serfs of the feudal era.

Socialism and then communism is the answer, though, like capitalism and feudalism, these aren't the "final" answer. History keeps moving forward, and if someday there is something better than communists, our global communist society would have to move past our communist lifestyle to something else which allows for even more autonomy, equality, justice etc.

This, so hard. It's basically a book that takes capitalism to its logical extreme and applies it to society as a whole.

More like

>capitalism: the merchant class destroys the noble class and removes them from power through revolution and now use private property to retain power and exploit labor but lol this is all voluntary bro

>Communism: History can be best understood through the struggle of classes and changing methods of production. The development of agriculture, industrialization, and now globalization sure have changed the world haven't they? The relationship between the exploiters and the exploited will continue to shape the world and something new will eventually come out of capitalism just as something new came out of feudalism, tribalism, etc.

>doesn't disprove it

Nice rhetorical device, user. You sure showed me. I have been exposed as a pseud.

>It's just a matter of how aware you are of your own ideology, how much you realize that the world could be seen in different ways.
thats the problem. one time you see your "ideology" from outside you can´t enter again with the same believe.
if your beliefs are open to change in any moment is not a belief.

A lot of capitalist development was created by the bourgeois class using state coercion and unfree labor (in the US), it didn't just spontaneously arise through free exchange of goods.

The idea that capitalism is some sort of natural phenomena is pure ideology. Marxism as a mode of analysis is less ideological in some ways than this capitalist mode of taking a lot of these "truths" as being given. That's not to say that the political manifestation of Marxist thought isn't ideological as well

probably alot of books by milton freedman.
he spent his whole career showing how freedom beats slavery

I think it's just about being honest that you (or any philosopher/politician/theologian/scientist) hasn't figured everything out.

In college, my favorite professor who taught poetry and philosophy was a strict formalist but had dedicated an absurd amount of time to learning post-modern theory, just so he could debunk it. And he wasn't obnoxious about it (most of the time). He was able to see those writers as they saw themselves, and could explain their ideas in a way which the writers won't find objectionable. He was better at explaining Derrida or Baudrillard than the teachers who taught that stuff. I didn't take this guy's courses because I agreed with his theories on formalism (fuck no), but because he could teach me the stuff I was interested in (mostly pomo).

I think he had the right idea. Read your enemies and learn them as best you can, and do so in a fair, open minded manner. Ignoring your critics is a terrible idea. Echo chambers are bad.

Sometimes this means you're going to read something that's totally retarded, but that's how it goes.

this right here is ideology SO FUCKING PURE its actually making me mad

Why should I care about anyone but myself? "Because it's the right thing to do" is not a valid answer because morality doesn't exist.

The only time I should care for others is either when a)I want to for my own selfish reasons, like showing love for family members and loved ones simply because I love them or b) because caring for others will work to my benefit later, such as having a mutual understanding that if we work on something together we can split the profits

a) cannot really be applied to anyone aside from family and friends. I don't give a shit about random strangers and neither does anyone else. That's why I think communism is blatantly illogical, as it basically assumes you must care about random people you don't know.

you can entertain an idea without assenting to it, there I just escaped ideology.
>inb4 you define pragmatism as ideology

>The only time I should care
if morality doesnt exist that means there arent things you "should"

also for the love of god please go back to r/atheism

>morality doesn't exist
stopped reading

>work all day
>receive a small fraction of the value of what you create (just enough to keep you fed and housed so you can continue to work)
>not slavery

I think it should be totally evident that Pragmatism is an ideology, but that's not how I'd respond to this.

I mean, the idea that "reading is good" or "learning is good" is ideological. In times past, being able to read and write was seen with suspicion. Socrates was illiterate and argued that writing had harmful impacts on memory. That reading a book was letting someone else do the thinking for you.

So yeah, my notion that I should "read the enemy" and "learn about views I don't agree with" is totally ideological. It puts value onto knowledge, in general, when that is not at all a certain thing.

>That's why I think communism is blatantly illogical
Except if everyone in the world adopted your philosophy and pursued their rational self-interest at all costs we would be communist within a day because it's to the advantage of the overwhelming majority of people.

Well, we wouldn't be communist so much as tribalist, with many small tribes and communities having their own communism.

We certainly would not have any kind of "world communism". It would rather be a very tribalist, nationalist world, because communism works better with homogenous tribes.

not me ill be a millionaire within a year xd

>was a strict formalist but had dedicated an absurd amount of time to learning post-modern theory, just so he could debunk it.
this is what i refer. you are only open to the other "ideology" because you want to debunk it. you never realize that the world have different views with the ideology thing because is more a ideological war if you are in one and you are aware that other people are in another.

> It would rather be a very tribalist, nationalist world
Key word "rational" self interest.

Nationalism is not rational.

So, "understanding the enemy" is only part of it for me. Personally, I've undergone a few substantial changes in how I view the world. I raised a christian and later lost that faith. I went hard fedora atheist for awhile and then discovered a wider world of philosophical thought that redeemed things I had turned away from.

I don't want to bore you with a history of my ideological revelations and conversions, but I think most people have had a revelatory experience of one kind or another. You believed one thing, experienced something and as a consequence your beliefs were changed.

Isn't this the whole "redpill" narative? The idea that you can be exposed to some new thought that will reveal a new world? I think the mistake is assuming that you discarded delusion for truth. There is always a chance you discarded a delusion for another delusion.

I do live in a very "open" state. I appreciate a number of different ideologies, some contradictory. And of course all of this is permitted by a comfortable life within 21st century capitalist consumerism.

>There is always a chance you discarded a delusion for another delusion.
how can you name in form of ideology this if ideology is a collection of beliefs?
what i want to say is simply that ideology is too much conceptual to attain the relation of us with the world. to put it in the simpler way. and that is the reason, i think, the people dont want to be reduced to that. all his beliefs systems in a Word.

I never said rational. But most people, acting in their self-interest (that is, doing what they want), would form nationalist entities.

Is it not? In times of war or conflict, nations have to be as homogeneous and organized as possible. Maybe in times of peace, it would be different. But in a fight for resources there is hardly any room for multicultural tolerance.

I'm sorry, I'm not sure what your asking?

Are you saying: "How can you hold the belief that your beliefs might be wrong?"

Its difficult position. You view everything you think and feel with skepticism.

For instance, right now I've been reading Nick Land's "Fanged Noumena" and in the back of my head I have this nagging feeling that, despite the fact I enjoy Land's book, I might just be an edge lord faggot that should stop looking for such bizarre answers and settle for simpler ones.

You doubt your own interests, you doubt your own feelings. It doesn't feel good, but I think it's honest at least.

You spend a lot of time "trying on hats". You spend a lot of time trying to understand what others believe, instead of figuring out what you should believe. You live in other people's heads.

I think most of our difference in argument is superficial. While I don't necessarily believe your assessment is wrong, I do think your definition of ideology is a little too broad.

When some of your beliefs that you hold to be fallible coincide with the society you live within, that does not make you an ideologue. What I mean to say is that you still have active (concious) control over the system of belief, rather than the inverse.

To you this seems to mean that this is my ideology but if I were to explain what that system is nested in and so on, we would eventually arrive at biological imperatives. Of course I don't have the that level of understanding, not every human decision is quantifiable at that level either. In you broad definition you would categorize essential and inescapable actions one takes to perpetuate their existence as ideologically possessed? It's not something I agree with or even think is relevant at that level of micro interpretation.

precisely for all you are saying, the ideology is only for the "truths" not for the doubt of truths.

Yeah, how exactly would you define ideology?

Because I would define ideology as a somewhat biological function, the brain trying to make sense of the world around it. I don't think I'd describe a baby as free of ideology, even as they grapple with basic discoveries like differentiating figure from ground, understanding that objects persist when they leave your view, recongizing one's own reflection in a mirror, etc.

I think the only subject without ideology is a comatose person. But maybe they aren't a subject anymore. And there are probably arguments to be made that ideology persists outside of the mind, in the form of physical systems. But in that case we aren't talking about 'having' ideology as much as 'living within it.'

Your use of the term "ideologue" indicates to me the way you're seeing this differently. That ideology is something bad, some clouding of vision, a misreading of reality.

Oh yeah, what I'm describing is absolutely an ideology, one you could call Skepticism probably.

The nice thing is that it keeps you open though. It keeps you honest about what you can and can't be certain of. What you think it Truth, and what you know is merely subjective opinion.


Anyway, this convo went off the rails and we really aren't talking about OPs post anymore, but that was probably just bait anyway.

Classically Ideology is defined by the view of the majority or those ideas that wish to breach and replace the normative view of the society, group, or individual.

At this point we are arguing semantics and I'm willing to accept that my original comment was just a misinterpretation of your interpretation.

Being anonymous this isn't that difficult to understand considering I can't attach a system to a particular poster, so there will always be a misreading of the individual (reality), clouded by the rest of the of the posts on this board/thread.

then your visión of "ideology" like something bad is an ideology too. dont you think?. how Deep does the rabbit hole go?

You mean will I spend time asking a question like "Were the aztecs wrong to sacrifice humans?" or "Did the Unabomber have a point?"

Because yeah, I spend a lot of time considering very negative, destructive things, instead of just outright dismissing them.

Aztecs are a constant in my head. I know a lot of people like to see the Holocaust as the most extreme event in human history, but personally I find the Aztec empire, and it's hundreds of years of ritual murder and ritual warfare to be extremely perplexing and disturbing.

in your visión of ideology you can have various ideologies at the same time?. because in this point, what exactly differences you see between idea or ideology like a concept?.

no, i only mean that if everything you think is an ideology your own visión of what is an ideology is an ideology. (something not true, something clouding of visión)

Capitalism is the crazy ideology that people should be left alone and be allowed to participate in mutually consensual exchanges of goods and labor.

>Nationalism is not rational
This is where communists lose me. You take the idea of communism as the natural state of human organization for gratend. Tribalism is perfectly natural, as being part of a group is more beneficial than being alone. However, sharing your resources with neighboring groups of people can be irrational for an egoist unless he sees some direct net benefit from such an exchange, such as fair trade or a military alliance. Having a giant tribal alliance in the form of a nation is one of the best ways of guaranteeing that your tribe is big and strong enough to defend itself against most attackers, yet not so big that it is overextended and fractioned with constant risk of secession after any sort of internal or external crysis.

You assume that in a world where everyone only thinks about their self interst would be a international communist one because that would benefit most people in every single group. That's irrational. What would benefit you the most would be living in a tribe big enough to defend itself and maybe even to bully others into submission, having to share resources with the least ammount of people outside of your tribe and keeping most of it to yourself. Rome was essentially a nation that practiced imperialism, because it benefited them. Their biggest mistake was overextension.

There's nothing wiser than nationalism for the common man, unless said man is from an extremely poor nation, in that case he will want to be absorved by some other stronger nation as long as they promise to treat him like they would their own citizens.

Iván Szelényi gives a pretty good rundown on Marx in his Yale lectures

youtube.com/watch?v=kIlEkbU4rx0&list=PLDF7B08FF8564D1FE&index=9

Blood and soil nationalism is kind of retarded, nationalism is the idea that that the nation you were born in is the best because you were born there. Where communist lose me is extending that to culture, and the whole hating of private property.

Some cultures are better than others, period. It's not subjective like a work of art.

>Blood and soil nationalism is kind of retarded
Both blood and soil defined humanity. Your clan is your family, your king is your elder patriarch, your home is your land. Waving these off as "kind of retarded" is denying the origins of human civilization and the fact that we have barely gotten away from any of these concepts in the last 100k years of our history.

The Communist Manifesto is produced in factories, binded by workers who work the machines, who are then paid by the publisher to continue working. There is irony in it all.

Wanting your nation to prosper ≠ Nationalism
Nationalism implies a lot of other concepts in it's practical meaning, such as state property for the defense of the nation, or the idea that everyone must work together to protect the land. Just wanting your big family to be the best is common to every group. I don't see anything rational (from the individual point of view) about giving up life for the good of the nation.
Also consider that according to marxist theory capitalism is a necessary state in the progress to communism. The tribalist economic system is barely proto-communism, reduced to small comunities, and just because there's not enough people to support state or private property. Authentic communism is not the natural state of the world, at least according to the original writings of Marx.
Besides, and this is my personal input, I think the thing is that communism is the most rational way from the point of view of the community, not the individual. For each person, the wisest thing to do is protect his own cow. But for the colective, it's best to have common property. It's still rational, I think, but aiming to improve the grouo rather than the individual.

>Some cultures are better than others, period. It's not subjective like a work of art.

Believing one culture to be superior to another is absolutely subjective. If you ask a Maoist what culture is best and you ask a Nazi what culture is best you get different answers. There is no objective viewpoint on which culture is best.

If culture superiority was objective, then there would be no dispute on the topic. The fact the argument exists, and has existed for thousands of years, is evidence of the subjective nature of valuing cultures.

>last 100k years of our history.

pedantic, but we only have roughly 6-8 thousand years of history. Anything before that point is prehistory. I don't mean this to refute any point your making, I just can't stand people saying history when they mean prehistory or history+prehistory.

> I don't see anything rational (from the individual point of view) about giving up life for the good of the nation.
You don't see what's rational about giving up some individuality to have a functioning army? Because that's basically is what a nation is. The roman republic was one of the better examples of this, as soldiers were basically volunteers that served in an organized army that was subsidized by the state. Yet the wealthier families bought better equipments to arm themselves and their children, to make sure they do the best duty to protect the state and were also qualified for public office.

There's always self-interest in what's supposedly self-sacrifice, as greater cooperation grants your nation power over your neighbors but there are also direct encouragements for the individual to accept such self-sacrifice.

>The tribalist economic system is barely proto-communism
The "tribalistic" economic system can be anything. It can even be "proto-capitalist", as it can be rather proto-feudal as individuals could own more property (land, slaves, etc) than others and even have special status or hierarchical titles, and direct family inheritance was common.

>pedantic, but we only have roughly 6-8 thousand years of history. Anything before that point is prehistory.
Theres plenty of evidence of our pre-history in archeology. Are you dismissing it? Humans were very much tied to blood relations and waged wars since as far back in our species existence as our bones can be found and studied.

what, no? I don't give a shit about any of that. I'm just correcting you when you say 100k years of history, that isn't true. History is defined as humanity recording itself. At best we have 8 thousand years of history.

nationalism yada yada, I'm not even paying attention to that part of the convo

>Believing one culture to be superior to another is absolutely subjective. If you ask a Maoist what culture is best and you ask a Nazi what culture is best you get different answers. There is no objective viewpoint on which culture is best.
>If culture superiority was objective, then there would be no dispute on the topic. The fact the argument exists, and has existed for thousands of years, is evidence of the subjective nature of valuing cultures.

Sure the culture of the unwashed illiterate barbarians living in mud huts is just as good as the culture of the Greeks and Roman Empire. Nonsense!

There are cultures long dead with more merits than the aboriginal peoples of Australia. The culture that produces the most amount of civility with the least amount of crime is better, objectively, these are measurable statistics. Culture also has huge impact on language, and language is empirically linked to behavior. People that live in cultures where the language's present and future tenses are the same are more likely to save money and be proactive in their children's education.

There is a reason why Jewish people do better in school, there is a reason why Japanese are better at saving money than most westerners, there is a reason America is overweight, there is a reason why African American are 50% of the prison population. CULTURE.

You do bring up an interesting point, everyone believes their culture is better than every other culture, that is simply pure human tribalism, and tribalism is bad.

>History is defined as humanity recording itself
Now who's being pedantic, user? Yes, that's the literal definition of history, I guess I could have used the term "existence" instead.

>If x was objective, then there would be no dispute on the topic

Do you really believe that?

yeah, that's what I meant when I said pedantic. I was saying my point about the definition of history is pedantic, but I really can't stand people misusing the term.

People should really learn the term prehistory.

Yes. This is the common sense definition of "objective." No one disputes that carrots are orange. No one disputes that drinking arsenic will kill you. No one disputes that Orson Welles was the voice of Unicron in Transformers the Movie. These are objective.

Whether one culture is better than another is a matter of point of view.

like this guy is arguing. He sets up criteria that cultures can be better or worse based on crime rates, verb conjugation of languages or the building materials of houses.

This displays a bias. He decides the criteria by which one culture is better and measures cultures against his criteria.

Well what about human sacririce? I say the that the culture with the biggest pyramid and highest annual rates of human sacrifice on the giant pyramid is now the best culture. The Aztecs win, with the Maya and Olmecs as runners up. The USA doesn't have any giant pyramids or state sponsored human sacrifice, so it's at the bottom of the list.

I say that the best culture is the one who builds the biggest sports stadium. That means that North Korea is the best culture, as the Rungrado is the largest sports stadium in the world!

See, how we decide which culture is "better" is determined by what the individual judge deems is "best".

I don't actually want to convince any of you that one culture is better than another one. What I do want to convince you of is the definitions of Objective and Subjective.

If you can't understand that ideas of cultural supremacy are subjective, you lack a basic understanding of the definition of the word subjective.

There's nothing wrong with it being subjective! It's not a scary thing! It's important that we are able to make subjective valuations about the world.

But again, the very fact that other people will disagree on "which culture is best" is enough to tell you that it is a subjective valuation.

If you are someone of a left wing persuasion, then you could never really agree with capitalism, because it's goal is totally different. Unlike socialism or communism, the goal of capitalism is not to make humanity more equal or fair, it's to encourage achievement and innovation, a kind of technological transcendence. So there is no way you will really go "huh, I guess they have a point" because their goal is completely different from yours.

Well-adjusted, learnèd men don't "believe" in capitalism because they can't. Capitalism isn't a "theory" (in the truest sense of the word) like Communism; it is more akin to not believing in evolution. It is a form of faith in the markets, and like any good hoax, some benefit from it but the majority of the people who believe in it are overweight, uneducated, greedy, and poor for a reason.

Just start with Marx or go back to your safespace at /pol/

If we can't agree on what is objectively good and objectively bad for humanity as a whole then we can have no discussion and we fall into the trappings deconstruction. Low crime rates are good, high education scores are good, murder is bad. If you can't agree with me there then there is no discussion to be had. I will even agree with you that morality can be subjective, the belief in god maybe good or bad, but some thing are objectively good for all mankind and somethings are objectively bad for all mankind.

I think the 20th century put a bit of a dent to the theory that capitalism was a hoax and marxist doctrine would inevitably provide a much better recipy for a superior society.

But you can always deny history, worship marx and read nothing but socialist theory and always go backto your safespace at /leftypol/ or some other goony board if you feel too stressed out by people arguing against it. By the way, dedicated lefty boards are all actual safespaces and most will permaban anyone who disagrees with baic left-wing prerogatives of thought so you'll be extra safe in a perfectly insulated echochamber!

right-wing: using practical applications to achieve some kind of greater purpose or innovation
left-wing: using theoretical applications to achieve human equality/fairness

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