I was saying BOOligarchs
@usamemes
Calling for Russians to shoot Putin while condemining “political violins” when Trump got shot will never not be funny.
It must be an election year. Here comes the “both sides” posts
Oh no no no. Not both sides. One side.
I’m not American I don’t know when their elections are. Liberal doesn’t mean “Democrat” it means someone who believes in the capitalist “free market” policies and opposes alternate economic systems. In the US all parties are Liberal. This meme isn’t even just about Americans, it is more about how westerners in general post on Lemmy about what Russia did in Ukraine versus about what they all did in Iraq.
I’m not American I don’t know when their elections are.
Part of the Yankee political system is that “election cycles” are so long it’s basically always close to one at least. “Election year” describes at least one in every two years.
Leftists have been opposing the US Empire every day for years, election season has nothing to do with it.
Libs can’t imagine any “activism” beyond voting for garbage people.
I was in a conversation w one yesterday where we were talking about how the Epstein illuminati had been in control of American politics for the last few decades using mass 4chan to control maga and also using reddit to control vote-blue-no-matter-who.
We got to the last election and how they’ll probably engineer the next one and he said that he would vote for Kamala Harris again despite knowing that the Epstein illuminati will mass social engineer a choice between someone like Harris and JD Vance because Vance is a fascist and Harris isn’t; as if we instantly forgot the conversation we were having.
Then I became completely stupified when he posited that Americans will react once they discover how Russia was using Epstein to collect the kompromat.
He’s the most political informed person I know and unquestionably more so than the American plebiscite and even he is clearly conditioned to accept the Russia narrative and i think it makes it clear that our cultural conditioning will outlast any impact that the Epstein will have on our society.
Yep, and going to brunch.
Hey now! I enjoyed a very nice brunch this morning, right at home. No mimosas though. And my dining companion needs a full body shave.
Brunch isn’t bad itself!
I know. I just wanted to chat you up. 😋
Haha, I appreciate it!
Revisionism! This is where Deng Xiaoping Thought will lead you. /joke
🫠
I’m a liberal, and I support both statements.
“Liberalism is a word that means different things to different people, especially from country to country.”
Liberal values are the basis of Marx’s work. He, rightly in my opinion, thinks the liberal state cannot bring about those values for all people.
Liberalism is all about individual “rights” and “freedoms”. Such as the right of the factory owner to exploit his workers or the freedom of the newspaper owner control the narrative. This is completely at odds with communism.
Marxism is also in favor the individual and their liberty, but not the liberty to dispossess another of those liberties. He doesn’t see the individual as a natural object, but a creation of social and historical conditions. By destroying the class system, it liberates the individual to pursue their aims when they wish.
[I]n communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.
For Marx, the ‘Individual’ is not a finished product to be protected from society, but a potential to be realized through an equitable society.
PS… Dig your username
Liberalism and “liberal values” are not the basis of Marx’s work at all, they are one of his main targets of critique. Marx doesn’t start from liberal individual rights and then argue they’re imperfectly realized. He argues those rights are themselves products of bourgeois society and function to mask class domination. Saying Marx supports “individual liberty” doesn’t make him a supporter of “liberal values”, because liberal liberty is abstract and formal, while Marx’s freedom is material and social. This second response just restates Marx’s view of the individual as socially produced, which is correct, but it is reinforcing Marx rejection of liberalism. Marx was never refining liberal values, he was explaining why they arise under capitalism and why they cannot deliver real human freedom.
When I say liberal values are the ‘basis’ of Marx’s work, I am not suggesting he was a ‘liberal reformer.’ I am arguing that Marx’s work is a dialectical sublation of liberalism. He takes the some of the liberal achievements (rationalism, the end of feudal bondage, and the Labor Theory of Value) and shows that they can only be fully realized by moving beyond the capitalist mode of production. He doesn’t reject the ‘Individual’ out of hand; he rejects the liberal version of the individual (the abstract citizen) to make way for the real individual (the species-being).
Only when the real, individual man re-absorbs in himself the abstract citizen, and as an individual human being has become a species-being in his everyday life, in his particular work, and in his particular situation, only when man has recognized and organized his “own powers” as social powers, and, consequently, no longer separates social power from himself in the shape of political power, only then will human emancipation have been accomplished.
– On The Jewish Question
I wrote a full reply but realized none of it really matters until we get clarity on terms. What do you actually mean by liberal values, and which of those do you think are foundational to Marxism?
When I say liberal values, I mean things like: the primacy of private property; formal equality before the law regardless of material conditions; individual rights abstracted from real social relations; freedom of contract between unequal classes; the liberal state as a supposedly neutral arbiter standing above society; and “freedoms” of speech, press, and association that in practice follow ownership and class power, up to and including a legal system that treats rich and poor “equally” such as criminalizing both for sleeping under bridges. These are not accidental features of liberalism or it’s values but flow directly from its idealist foundations.
Liberalism begins from abstract ideas (rights, the individual, the citizen) and treats them as primary, as if they exist independently of history and material conditions. Marxism begins from the opposite direction: dialectical and historical materialism, which treats those liberal categories as historically specific social products tied to a particular mode of production. That is a fundamental theoretical clash.
Because of this, Marxism does not aim to complete or realize liberal values, but to explain why they arise under capitalism and why they cannot deliver real human emancipation. So before talking about “sublation” or continuity, we need to be clear whether liberalism is being treated as an ideal to be fulfilled, or as an ideological form to be scientifically analyzed and superseded.
Marx rejected liberal values of individualism and the free reign of private property, I’m not sure exactly what you’re including in “liberal values.”
By ‘liberal values,’ I’m referring to the core Enlightenment goals of individual autonomy (Descartes), secularism and rationalism (Spinoza), labor theory of value (Locke/Smith/Ricardo) and universal human rights (Kant). Marx rejected the liberal state, private property, and the capitalist mode of production. But I’d argue he did so because he believed they were obstacles to those very values. Who is an individual when you’ve been commodified?
By socializing production, the individual doesn’t dissolve into the collective; but the material security is created for the individual to freely development themselves and provide to a social order.
You’re looking more at what the capitalists used to overthrow the aristocracy while entrenching their own rule here. Marx was an atheist, and built on the labor theory of value, for example. However, these liberal values were made with a mechanistic materialist outlook, not a dialectical materialist outlook, and as such could not actually stand for proletarian liberation.
Marxism is secular, has the labor theory of value, etc, but not because Marx was a staunch liberal and believed capitalism to not be capable of fulfilling these. Rather, he built upon what was already created to build new ideology.
I don’t disagree with any of this and I’m not sure what I said that would have made you think I did.
Ye, fuck them both. United states of Russia.
The double standard is real but also fuck both the US and Russia for invading.
Both based takes
How people see the US as “the good guys” is beyond me. The only thing they had going was defending the rules based global order but that is now becoming less relevant in favor of power politics.
Like objectively, as an American, America has(more like had) great PR but has but an horribly violent imperialist nation for ages. The horrors they’ve exported have destabilized several nations for baseless power grabs and war profiteering.
I’m not saying Americans as a whole but the US government and the forces that actually drive it. Money and power has corrupted this nation and it is evil at its core. The tenuous peace that has existed for the past few decades is propped up but fraud and military excess. It’s not good for this planet as a whole. The genocidal history of America has been white washed and glossed over. What’s they’ve don’t to south America, the middle east, and south east Asia is unforgivable kind of shit man.
They aren’t the good guys, they’re the “victors” who have written history in their favor.
The “rules based global order” was always a bullshit farce: just a term meant to invoke the legitimacy of actual international law without any implication that the US and it’s allies would stop acting like lawless thugs.
Yeah, the global hegemon can always do a “rules for thee, not for me” thing. It’s like trying to fine a king for a parking violation.
From their inception the “rules based” global order and international “law” were simply shields for the imperial cores worst excesses and sticks to beat states that refused to submit. There was no good in defending them they were simply more tools of imperialism.
Pre-WW2, the answer was WASPs convinced of their own greatness. After WW2 it was because the US did a good thing and let it get to their heads. To this day, I’ll see Americans online see the US get criticized and pull out the old “if it wasn’t for us, you’d all be talking German” line. Like dude, you’re taking credit for something you didn’t do, probably wouldn’t do, and it doesn’t justify the shitty things that ARE happening.
And the rules based global order was a good idea that some Americans had but too many other Americans decided that the US got to have constant exceptions to the rules which makes the whole thing ultimately not work.
IDK how you were so ignorant on what the rules based order was despite its obvious misuse for decades but you should look at what Carney said recently.
Spilling the beans because he is upset with his masters.The “rules based global order” has really just been the institution by which the US Empire solidified their hegemony, that’s the only reason they “defended” it.
You know what’s even more fucked up? Europe, Australia and even Ukraine sent troops also to murder Iraqis and Afghans then bragged how they did things for the US
That certainly sounds like Europe, Australia, and Ukraine.
Ukraine is in Europe… Also, Europe is not a monolith, i. e. France was strongly against the invasion of Iraq to the point some crazy amis renamed fries as freedom fries. Jesus, that’s the equivalent to confusing arabs with Ottomans… That’s some double standards right there.
I’m aware that Ukraine is in Europe, I was responding to their comment in the format they made it in.
I really do think that liberals should take a hard look at themselves. They don’t flinch to call Russian soldiers orcs, and ascribe to their foreign policy a mindless bloodthirst. Do they think of US soldiers the same way? Or US foreign policy (even under someone like darling Obama)? Seriously: who is more “evil” Putin or Obama? By what measure?
what? no one reasonable is saying all russians are bad or all americans are bad. being born in a country does not automatically make you a fan of what their military does, that’s just racist
I don’t think you know what racist means.
Fine, it’s discriminating against people based on national origin. Whatever you call it it’s stupid
I think destroying my family is worse. Death to America.
Do you think every Russian or every American is just able to leave the country as soon as they realize the awful things their government is doing? People don’t choose where to be born. Whether I was going to be Swiss or American was a decision made before I was born that if I had any say in would probably have gone the other way
I am really not interested in your excuses, when you are indiscriminately killing millions of people with economic warfare. I hate you because of these excuses. Do something about it.
Right. Not wishing death to you personally or your community or etc etc. But your country has no right to exist in its current form, and people projecting their extremely valid grievances on all of you will continue to be a problem until you all organize and change or replace the government. We constantly meet people from your country defending our nations being butchered in the name of democracy™, most people still defend the army and veterans, we have the right to be really angry, and not all of us have the patience to treat you all with silk gloves.
Sounds like they deserved it.
Sounds like you deserve worse
Splitting hairs. If you think a group of people are intrinsically worse than others, you are effectively racist.
We can come up with new names, like islamophobia, antisemitism or whatever but ultimately it’s all the same.
If you prefer, we can use the term bigoted.
I think that Americans, as a group of people, are intrinsically worse than all other people yes. Americans, as a group of people, paid for and enacted a campaign that overthrew the democracy in the country where my dad and invaded the country my mom is from and killed a million people including my extended relatives.
So yeah, fuck Americans. Death to America. Cry more about it. Maybe if you as a group did fuck all about it I’d feel different but you don’t you just sit here judging others as if you aren’t the worst people on earth and the global villains.
When a country does war crimes, the entirety of its populace is not to blame, the systems, power structures and people in charge are.
Most people in a country are not for wars or other attacking other countries. This is true for America and Russia alike, to the best of my knowledge (which granted, is anecdotal).
More people should be engaged in activism and should push back against the inhumane actions of their state, and people should be less gullible to the promises of their leaders.
Both America and Russia are overdue for major reform. Their systems are broken and many of their people brainwashed. Wishing harm on them does not help and imo is not a constructive approach. If anything, hate just begets more hate, making things worse.
If you are going to have hate, it should be more focused on the people in power.
The funny thing about “hate begets more hate” is that the user you’re replying to has a good reason to feel hate, and the racist Americans on the other side of that equation don’t. And yet, between those two groups, whose hate results in millions of people dying through sanctions and warfare?
The problem with the idea of “racism” against Americans, or even hatred against Americans being problematic, is that there’s no power structure behind it that makes it real. You’re essentially policing the tone of victims here and acting like their anger at what was done to them is equivalent to the very real wrongdoing they are reacting to.
Thank you for expressing that so eloquently
Thanks. This type of thing is something I see a lot on the fediverse and it bothers me.
If they were anything like you, they probably deserved it.
You’re really proving him wrong there. /s
If they were anything like you, they probably deserved it.
- Locate your avatar in the top right of the screen and select “Settings”
- Select “Delete Account”
- Enter your password and select “Delete”
I have seen like two dozen outspoken liberals on this very site refer to Russian people writ large as orcs, and the Russian language as orcish
no one reasonable
I also have yet to see a single reasonable person call this behavior out without immediately being accused of being a paid Russian actor tankie chinese bot. The “orcs” shit has mainstream acceptance in liberal instances. Only leftists object to it, while liberals defend it.
Or literally call for collective punishment https://lemmy.ml/comment/23813202
“Racist” what the fuck man. World’s smartest american just dropped.
It isn’t “fuck the [imperialist/authoritarian nation] government and its enforcers” for most people?
Russia isn’t imperialist. Imperialism isn’t when invasion or when big country is bad
Authoritarian is a useless pejorative as every nation that has been or currently is is “authoritarian”.
That’s a laugh. Putin and his political machine have expressed a desire to return to the days of the Russian Empire and has engaged in acts of conquest to that effect.
Russia is a mirror image of the US. While Anglo-Saxons were pushing west across North America, conquering indigenous peoples, Russians were pushing east out of Europe into Asia conquering indigenous peoples. They’re both dysfunctional countries with dysfunctional world views.
expressed a desire to return to the days of the Russian Empire
Show me. Pull up a shred of evidence for this obvious propaganda. Show me Vladmir Putin expressing the desire to reform the pre-1917 Russian Empire.
I never claimed that modern Russia is progressive, socialist, or something to be defended. I am a communist; Russia today is a capitalist oligarchy. Russia being imperialist and if I support them are separate questions.
Imperialism is not “when a country invades” or “when a big country has bad politics.” Imperialism refers to a specific stage of capitalism characterized by monopoly capital, finance capital dominance, export of capital, and systemic exploitation of dependent nations. By that definition, Russia today does not function as an imperialist power in the same way the US or the rest of the imperial core does. This is a simple statement of facts, not an endorsement.
Pointing to the Russian Empire’s historical expansion is irrelevant to whether the Russian Federation in the 21st century is imperialist. History alone does not determine a country’s position in the current global capitalist system. By that logic, nearly every existing state would be “imperialist” forever and the term would be rendered useless for meaningful analysis.
Likewise, saying Russia “mirrors” the US ignores material reality. The US sits at the core of global finance, enforces dollar hegemony, maintains hundreds of overseas bases, and systematically dominates entire regions. Russia does not occupy that structural position (even if they may wish to). You can criticize Russian nationalism or militarism without flattening all distinctions or redefining imperialism into a catch all for when big countries do bad things or when invasions.
Imperialism refers to a specific stage of capitalism
Then you’ve redefined the term Imperialism.
The term imperialism was coined by Lenin, and it’s definition has remained constant for over a century. It’s actually liberals who have tried to flatten and bastardize it’s definition to hide the inevitable systemic nature of their crimes against humanity. The fact that you were introduced to the wrong definition first doesn’t make it the right one.
Imperalism wasn’t coined by Lenin, he built off of Hobson and used Marxist analysis. Just a minor correction.
👈👈
By that logic, nearly every existing state would be “imperialist” forever and the term would be rendered useless for meaningful analysis.
Might need to reread that
No. You just don’t know what the word means.
How do you define imperialism if invading other countries with the same explicit intent to annex them isn’t it?
One of the reasons for this war was that the Russian Federation did not want NATO weapons and forces on their permanent border. If they were to annex Ukraine, they would have NATO weapons and forces on their permanent border. I understand why this narrative that they want to has spread, because it’s an easy to understand “bad guy” thing that makes it simple to frame this war as some kind of random medieval war of conquest, but when you think about it for five minutes, annexing Ukraine would go completely against their goal, which is to either dissuade the coup government from it’s NATO ambitions (now irrelevant) or, if they wont agree to a peace treaty, establish a buffer zone in the form of a Ukranian rump state. In no scenario does a full annexation serve their interests, and the pragmatic thing from their perspective is to let the basket case that Ukraine has become be Europe’s peoblem.
imperialism is when war
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/ch01.htm
Russia has no colonies nor neocolonies, and doesn’t run their economy based on export of capital and plundering the surplus value of the global south, like the US and EU do.
Imperialism is characterized by the following:
-The presence of monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life.
-The merging of bank capital with industrial capital into finance capital controlled by a financial oligarchy.
-The export of capital as distinguished from the simple export of commodities.
-The formation of international monopolist capitalist associations (cartels) and multinational corporations.
-The domination and exploitation of other countries by militaristic imperialist powers, now through neocolonialism.
-The territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist powers.
The global north, the US and Europe included, uses this export of capital to super-exploit foreign labor for super-profits. It also engages in unequal exchange, where the global south is prevented from moving up the value chain in production, allowing the global north to charge monopoly prices for commodities produced in the same labor hours. Russia does not do this, it has a paltry sum of the world’s finance capital, and this is proven by just how low their nominal GDP is compared to it’s GDP adjusted to PPP.
Imperialism is characterized by one political entity conquering or annexing thru coercion other political entities to bring new land, population, wealth, and natural resources under their control. No need to muck up or stretch out the definition.
Did you just make that up
In this case, the Statesian North imperialized the Statesian South, the Soviet Union imperialized Nazi Germany, etc. The definition you’re using is absurd and reductionist, the one I’m using is consistent, explains why it exists, how it functions, and how to end it.
If you’re truly using “annexation” as a definition of imperialism, then communists don’t have a problem with this “annexationist imperialism,” as it can absolutely be a good thing. Communists oppose the definition I explained, let’s call it “economic imperialism,” because it’s always bad and is the biggest obstacle to socialism globally.
Changing the name of the process doesn’t change the nature of it. Why are you getting so tripped up on what we call it, rather than the process itself?
If you pay attention to what Russia does internally and externally, Russia fulfills every one of those requirements except the last one (because they can’t, but they would be very happy too)
Nope, not really. Let’s see:
-The presence of monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life.
Somewhat true domestically, Russia has many monopolies as a holdover from the socialist system. However, internationally, this isn’t true at all, only 4 of the top 100 companies in the world are Russian. Considering having monopolies on the world stage is necessary for imperialism, this is false for Russia.
-The merging of bank capital with industrial capital into finance capital controlled by a financial oligarchy.
Similar to the first one, somewhat true domestically, but internationally Russia only has one of the top 100 banks. Same as the first, this is therefore false.
-The export of capital as distinguished from the simple export of commodities.
Russia primarily exports raw materials and resources, so no, not at a significant scale. There’s more capital flight than export.
-The formation of international monopolist capitalist associations (cartels) and multinational corporations.
Again, Russia has no international monopolies, the closest is that they can make a lot of nuclear reactors. No.
-The domination and exploitation of other countries by militaristic imperialist powers, now through neocolonialism.
No neocolonialism is going on. Russia is annexing the 4 oblasts, but these are not colonies for Russia.
-The territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist powers.
Russia has no colonies nor neocolonies, no “territory” to claim.
Overall, Russia likely would be imperialist if it was financially more developed and capable of imperialism, but it can’t because it isn’t.
Cowbee means economic imperialism - using the resources / wealth of another country for yourself. So invading another country would not, by itself, be imperialism.
I think this definition is a bit reductionist, but it’s a good starting point to ask ‘is this war for profit or some other reason?’.
but it’s a good starting point to ask ‘is this war for profit or some other reason?’.
Always an important question to ask but if Cowbee does mean that, then they should use the modifier to signify that they are talking about economic imperialism and not about Imperialism Imperialism.
All imperialism is economically motivated.
I am talking about what most leftists understand to be imperialism, which is why I called it as such, and explained it so there’s no room for doubt. The vauge concept of influence along international lines popular among apologists for imperialism as I describe it isn’t inherently a bad thing, while imperialism as I describe it is, and is the biggest obstacle to socialism globally.
If you want to rename imperialism to something else, and call imperialism “economic imperialism” then we can do that, I’d rather talk about the actual process itself than argue about nomenclature.
I do think your wording is causing some confusion. Of course, the aim of most imperialists is economic exploitation, but there historically there have been other drivers of conquest such as religion and racism.
I think it’s not too much to expect to know basic terminology in a leftist space. In Argentina I’ve met plenty of social democrats who understand imperialism in its leftist sense, because being in the periphery means you see the consequences of imperialism, and this is a country where like 99% of the media is owned by the comprador class or international capital making propaganda for austerity, meritocracy and other bullshit.
If somebody doesn’t understand why their definition of imperialism doesn’t seem to be the one we use, maybe they can ask questions rather than interpret us in bad faith and so on.
Religion and racism were more justifications for the same base economic motivations, to be clear.
Also works for them saying bomb them.
fuck those dirty Russians Ukraine should bomb all the cities
So you want them to hit civilians?
no I meant only places without people but still they need to retaliate
Then why say bomb the cities?
stop twisting my words when I want they’re the evil bad ones
It’s incredibly interesting how, according to western media, all the ukrainian attacks on russian infrastructure never cause any deaths but russian attacks always cause deaths every time.
Who’s out here saying Ukraine should bomb “all the cities”? Most people from the first frame of OP would also be saying stop the bombing, not bomb more. E.g. stop the bombing of Palestine etc.
To echo divas post where the user could not comprehend how them saying Ukraine should bomb Russian cities because it’s the only way Russians will understand was frowned upon.
https://lemmy.ml/post/42340425/23621958
Then what asked to clarify said stop putting words in my mouth
here’s one I ran into just last week, someone claiming to have been unfairly modded on .ml, when they had received a temp ban because they were actually advocating for collective punishment of russian civilians “because it’s the only thing that Russia will understand”:
Stop knocking over their straw man! They worked so hard to prop it up.
Usually they just say there are no civilians in Russia and Ukraine killing ANY Russian is completely justified. Not the other way around though.
Also parallels their thoughts on Israel vs Palestine. Israel can kill any Palestinian and be “self defense” but when it comes to Israelis suddenly they care about the civilian distinction.
https://lemmy.world/comment/21824437
They don’t even go that far to distinguish the difference from my experience. Just go I didn’t mean that but I’m just gonna blame you for reading the words I used
(paraphrased) Murdering civilians is what Russia does. Why are you suggesting Ukraine do it?
It’s the only thing Russia will understand.
Later: “Noooo, I never said that Ukraine should murder civilians!”
Later: "Noooo, I never said that Ukraine should murder civilians
how dare you put words in my mouth dirty mler. I totally meant they should ignore civilians when saying it was the only thing Russia would understand
Amazing the overlap with the ones saying usa just needs more dems in congress to fix everything
One of my favorite kind of lemmitors on the fediverse is the “how dare you read the things I wrote” kind, where they start backpedaling only after getting massive backlash and then expect people to automatically believe their “clarifications” are sincere.
Even better when it’s also about something they do that with AND have no idea what they are talking about, cough that banjo guy and minimum wage|ACA being Romneycare|anything political
Both, both is good
