(11 hours ago)killamajig wrote: This is what ended my high school "Communist" phase. The more Marx and Co. I read, the more I realized they weren't the oppressed working-class heroes I thought they were. They seemed more like rich trust fund kids who blame everyone else when they don't get what they want. (ResetEra, anyone?)Marx didn't, Engels (who came from a wealthy family) paid his way and even wrote his articles for him since he had a tendency to take jobs and then refuse to do them. Marx was also a deatbeat dad a lot of the time. (I do want to edit to note that Engels does seem to be a pretty good manager as he did a lot of the heavy lifting for keeping the movement in existence and getting everything published. It's maybe not a "real job" or "activism" and he started with wealth but he essentially was running a company. Marx was a rock star and Engels was the manager who made sure the tours and concerts and albums happened.)
I'm sure Benji knows but I wouldnt be suprised if most of them never worked a day in their life.
None of the historical Communists have been proletariat, Lenin solved this by creating the Vanguard concept. It backwards explains how Marx could come to know the divine truth that's exclusive to the proletariat without being one, the intellectual vanguard doesn't have to be part of the class, they simply operate on behalf of it. (Even though this essentially falsifies all of Marxist class theory.) Marx's explanation to everything was always "shutting the fuck up is free."
You can go back further to Rosseau, who infamously wrote an autobiography exposing that he was an anti-social grifter who shacked up with rich women to gain access to their wealth and then treated them like shit. And treated his friends even worse.
As much as I prefer pointing out that their theory is bad, I suspect this does have something to do with why Marx never actually came up with an explanation of how capitalism works or what capital even is. He claimed he had a definition of it and also for class but it wasn't in any of the first three parts of Kapital that he wrote before he died, nor in any other of his works that Marxists spend all their time pouring over. It seems like the simplest explanation is that he simply could not conceive of how it worked in a way that fit what he had already mandated is how it works. You see this with Nepenthe and others, her descriptions of how "things should work" sound more like capitalism than her complaints. Marx similarly describes a capitalist system that makes no sense, and very shortly proved all his predictions wrong, and especially does not differ from how he describes communism except that communism eliminates all but one class and so the "problems" of capitalism simply cease to exist. It really does sound like a theory built backwards from the conclusion he wants.
From the first time I read the explanations of exchange value I was baffled by it and ever since I've had this fear that I just don't understand it. But I've read all kinds of explainers, even ones written for kids and I really should just conclude that it doesn't make sense. It's an entirely backwards theory. Marx noticed, correctly, that prices don't match the cost of goods, but to this he concluded that there must be a "real value" of the good hidden somewhere that could be extracted from the price. He thinks the labor theory of value solves this, except it doesn't, because labor's price also fluctuates. There's no stable price for an hour of labor throughout all of human history across all fields and industries. Marxist economics is premised on this not only being true but that the "true price" can be discovered. (Even though it's irrelevant as communism eliminates the dilemma.)
Most of Era doesn't even bother with this, because their heroes like Hasan don't. They think socialism is some system where everyone is paid what they're worth on some objective scale in which each individual determines their value. But this is not what any socialist ever has written it would be. It's supposed to be all of society treated as a single factory and with every member an interchangeable laborer. There's no "wages" because economics is "solved", there's only distribution which matches what the factory intended to produce in the first place. You can see why it appeals to the narcissists of Era though, nobody's different, nobody has to deal with others being different, things are just done as they are supposed to be which matches what I want done, nothing I don't want done happens, etc. It's a comforting total system that eliminates what they hate about the real world. "Scientific socialism" is literally beyond utopian in that it's not imagining utopia it's saying it is already possible.
I think the reactionary nature of it is clear if you read any of the writers. Rousseau, Marx, etc. can't help but talk about some mythical Eden they believed existed before and that the use of enough violence by the state could bring back and end all our modern complaints that we never needed to suffer if that bitch hadn't taken the apple. Nepenthe writes about this endlessly and it animates her fantasies of the "simple life" of being an artist in Bahia or wherever. Most of Era doesn't realize how backwards this is because they aren't imaging some subsistence pastoral life, they're imagining when they were kids. They want that back. TransEra especially, but many of the rest constantly harp on about the impositions that growing out of childhood have done to them irredeemably. It's the same complaint as humanity advancing out of constant poverty into all the awesome stuff we have now is somehow bad because it adds responsibilities to us all.
The other thing Marxist, and reactionary in general, thought does is it exempts you personally from any responsibility for your actions. It's always bad luck or systemic issues. This allows Era to tell themselves that the problem is just all of society and if they could have just corrected it they'd be living the life they imagine they deserve but didn't want to do anything to have. TransEra imagines this is as simple as making everyone treat them like women because of how they treat women they imagine this will just relieve them of all responsibility. But it's endemic across the forum, the problem is always that there wasn't a cop staff member around to beat ban the bad actors until everyone just did as they should.
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