Reading about FOSS philosophy, degoogling, becoming against corporations, and now a full-blown woke communist (like Linus Torvalds)
this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2023
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Yeah, I am a dick, but also the only position you were making me defend was that communist messaging sucks. It's way too easy to defend that communist messaging sucks.
It's because communist messaging sucks.
Let's be honest, you would've been saying that communist messaging sucks when the Soviet revolution happened too. You would've dismissed Lenin with the same smug insults. Yet, that's the kind of messaging that got people organized, educated, and mobilized to carry out a revolution. If ML messaging actually sucked then it wouldn't have resulted in many successful revolutions.
Absolutely not, and the Communist Manifesto was a brilliant piece of writing. These are communists who knew how to speak to people's frustrations and desires.
So I amend my claim, I was wrong. Communists in the past were great at messaging, communists alive today suck at messaging.
Communists today are using all the same materials and asking people to read works like The State and Revolution, the Manifesto, and so on. I'm not sure what you think is so different about messaging today from the messaging in the past. From what I can tell the problem isn't the messaging, but the fact that most people in the west have been generally happy to keep capitalism and ignore its problems.
Notice that the revolutions failed to spread to the west at the start of the 20th century as well, despite the great messaging. Germany came close, but ultimately socdems, libs, and fascists closed ranks to strangle the revolutionary movement. Same happened in France, Italy, Spain, and Greece.
The difference is that we live in the present, not the past, and the present is a lot different than the past.
The communist manifesto was brilliant because Marx and Engels wrote it specifically for the average working class people of their time. It wouldn't have worked if they wrote it for people almost 200 years past.
Let go of the history and tradition. I'm not asking anyone to write a new communist manifesto of the 21st century, but talk to people like you live in 2023, not a cult of tradition. Embrace modernity.
Lol, no. Open your eyes up, Westerners hate capitalism, they mostly just don't know yet that it's capitalism at the source of their problems. People are exhausted at the idea of the iPhone 16 Max Pro Plus X Series, they just want to make a fair living wage to provide for their family, and have time to spend with their family. If you can offer a home, healthy food, medical care, and education at 32 work hours per week, you are sold to almost everyone in the US.
Class relationships have not fundamentally changed in the past century, and much of the writing directly applies to our society today. In fact, it's the clearest and most lucid explanation of what we're seeing around us. Furthermore, there have been plenty of people, such as Parenti, who have been building on these works and modernizing it. You keep talking like modern explanations of ML theory don't exist when they're readily available.
It's true that young people are becoming disillusioned by capitalism because the system is becoming increasingly unbearable. However, that's a very recent phenomenon. Meanwhile, even on Lemmy which is pretty far left from the mainstream there are plenty of people running around defending capitalism. Most people in the west can't even define what capitalism or socialism is, and they take western system for granted.
What's more is that majority of people who are discontent have no idea what to do about it. People vent their anger online and grumble, but they have no idea what to do to actually improve their conditions.
These things aren't possible under the current system because it's designed by capitalist to facilitate exploitation of the workers. The only way to change things is for workers to tear the system down and build a new one from ground up. There are no signs of that happening in the foreseeable future.