No worries, I didn’t take it that way. I was brought up Catholic myself (though I am atheist for a long time now) and it’s probably one of the reasons my mind went in the direction of the original post in the first place. And knowing how empty religious piousness can be at times, I genuinely like reading a passage of someone chastising that stuff. Even if I don’t personally believe in it anymore, I’d still like religious people to follow through on what they preach.

Thank you!

Love it. Reminds me of the importance of both theory and practice in the communist context, rather than only one or the other.

Is there a good source on “land acknowledgement” as used by liberals? Have not heard of that before, at least not in those words, I don’t think. Curious to know what’s going on there.

Damn, that video goes over it so well. I didn’t even know that about Germany, more so had USian context in mind as it’s what I’m more familiar with. But makes me more confident in what I wrote, like scientists observing the same type of thing independently. Thanks for sharing it.

It sounds like individualism brain. People who want others to be a particular thing, live a particular way, but express no interest in helping to build a world where that is actually the case.

So this is the “manufacturing consent” setup for legislating against China-originating LLMs, right? Or have they already been doing that?

It is useful to have the concept of a winner when you are trying to promote excellence of a capability that inheres in the individual.

Yes and no. The problem is that what “winner” means in modern capitalist society is not proven to be anything at all universal and so we can’t rely on it as a word that is accurate and consistent in describing “competition” throughout history (“competition” being another word that has the same problems).

In trying to come up with a more universalized way it can be described, I would say: it is useful to have the concept of success and fail states (partial or total), of quantifiably better and quantifiably worse, and these things showing up in outcomes, in behavior, in skill levels, which are relative to specific contexts and goals.

But I don’t think this is intrinsically the same as the modern capitalist concept of winner and loser, which carries with it extra baggage of the valuation of a human life through the lens of capital.

A good example of the difference, even within capitalist society, is within the context of video games.

Some games are designed in a more “punishing” way; that is, failures come with overt penalties or require redoing a long stretch of the game just to get to the part you failed at. Instead of honing in on where and why you failed, with the focus being on fixing that problem, those games are more about proving some kind of mindless persistence in the face of adversity and can cause great frustration in players, some of whom will just quit and give up.

On the other hand, some games are designed to be more “forgiving”; they might have difficult challenges, but trying again at the part you failed at is easy. This makes it more feasible to hone in on where you are making mistakes and how to fix them.

The first one is closer to how capitalist society functions; you “lost” and it’s not necessarily clear why and you might just be significantly worse off now and have to “grind” just to get back to where you were before.

The second is more like what I’d expect from a healthy use of challenge directed toward improvement (albeit without mentorship in the picture in the case of a video game); the purpose is to hone your skill for a specific use and so the framework of it is centered around that, not around anything else.

Play is even broader and doesn’t necessarily need to be about success or fail states, or about challenge at all. It can simply be about engaging with the creative parts of the mind and entering a more open and relaxed state for a time, which can help with connection and rejuvenation and so on. Play can include friendly challenges, but doesn’t have to.

So we can probably say that play and challenges with success and fail states (partial or total) are universal concepts, but “winner and loser” is much more shaky ground, as is “competition” alongside it. An example to try to get at why this is not just semantics: If I were to play you in chess and you checkmated me, it would have a different connotation if we said “due to the way our differing strategies and choices collided, your side of the board reached the agreed upon success state and mine the agreed upon fail state; let’s examine why that happened and try different strategies this time” vs. “you won, I lost, which means you’re a better player and I need to suck less.” Setting aside how stiffly academic the first way sounds, the point is that it’s more impersonal and focused on the mechanics of it in context, and actively trying to learn from the experience together. The second one is making a whole assumption from one game, that you’re an overall better player and being so vague with its language that it could imply I suck as a person, not just as a chess player, and this has contributed to my “losing”. The second also puts the focus on the individual and their responsibility to work through challenges on their own, in isolation, and receive credit (for “win or loss”) in isolation.

Even in a team-based game, we could look at it similarly. The first version could be a statement that implies both teams contributed to the outcomes and can learn from each other. The second would more likely imply the “winning” team is superior, through almost metaphysical characteristics (such as the often lofty term that gets bandied about “talent”).

I am curious now to what extent there is historical evidence of such things in earlier communal societies in history and what form it would take. Because it’s one thing to think people will always test themselves and each other. It’s another thing to think they will always cling to the value of winner/loser dynamics in make-believe.

In my experience with the modern day capitalist framework, it’s very much based on individualist win/loss, in the sense that “my win is your loss” and this tends to pervade forms of play too (board games, video games, sports, etc.). The idea that we could both win or both lose is often not even allowed for. The closest equivalent is considered a “tie”, which essentially means limbo, undefined, it was never resolved who is “better”. But this way of thinking would be strange in a basic communal society and incompatible with its framework of viewing problems as a shared responsibility. I will caveat the following by saying I’m not the biggest fan of Kropotnik because he can sometimes get pointed to to prop up anarchist arguments about not needing a socialist transition state, but I recall him going into observations of nature (I think in Mutual Aid) and how much and often animals actually work together on things as opposed to the prevailing capitalist narrative that nature is a constant dynamic of predator and prey. I bring this up as a point against the implication that competition in the “win/loss” sense of things is some kind of inevitability of humanity or of nature.

Consider a thing like debate, for example. Here CriticalResist talks about the Aristotlean dialectic that precedes what we call dialectical materialism today: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/9510488

in aristotle’s dialectic the synthesis is the third new thing, something new emerges which did not exist before. Therefore it cannot be the thesis because the thesis existed prior to the ‘debate’. it cannot be the antithesis for the same reason.

And you can perhaps see that the concept of debate as described in that cultural context is not one of “win/loss”, but rather one of synthesizing to discover new. The process that both participate in yields something that neither had before, which can then be to the benefit of both.

In the modern capitalist context (in my experience anyway) debate tends to take a much more demeaning turn. The implication is that there is a winner and loser of a debate and the loser “sucks” somehow compared to the winner. So people tend to get very defensive in debates, fearing damage to reputation or more.

So there is the combining of “yours and mine” process, which can take on different kinds of character. It can be more friendly and calm, or more lively and intense, but either way, the broader societal context influences what the end goal is and how one should feel about it. In capitalist sports, for example, part of the goal is to nurture/discover the most skilled players, who can then be offered lucrative contracts to play for an audience for even more lucrative payouts for the capitalist; this aim is not intrinsically about “improving society” or some such, as is commonly thought of as the “value” of competition, but is more just about making money and further validating the concept of society being based on one group beating another down and then reaping the benefits.

Awesome, thank you, bookmarking this to look into more when I have time.

Thanks for the followup. While we’re on the subject, what is your best experience with reading material on understanding dialectal and historical materialism? It’s something I want to improve my understanding of. I’ve read Mao’s On Contradiction (https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_17.htm) before and Stalin’s Dialectical and Historical Materialism (https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1938/09.htm). But there are times it seems to me like I’m talking more in layperson terms than in the science of it without meaning to; which isn’t to say it’s necessarily a bad thing to be able to communicate in layperson terms, but I would rather be able to do that translation consciously. Otherwise it seems I risk missing when I’m straying from the science of it. Hope that makes sense.

What does your picture of a valuable communist party look like?

Thanks for the comment! That is an interesting flip side, I hadn’t thought of it that way, but it does make a kind of sense. Though I do have one caveat, is I think in practice, it’s probably closer to, “it doesn’t matter what or who you are as long as you don’t interfere with our developing socialism.” And even then, based on information I’ve come across about socialist projects in history, my impression is they often treat even overt political enemies more humanely than their counterparts. For example, the reeducation efforts that China has done at various points in its history. This is not to deny they also have times they may execute someone who does an egregious enough offense against the interests of the public, but to emphasize that it’s not like they’re doing the capitalist thing of leaving people in the streets; their exercising of power as vanguard is fundamentally different in character than capitalist exercising of power for the interests of the expansion of capital.

But if we were looking at it only from the standpoint of behavior and rewarding behavior (without taking into account what happens if you don’t do the behavior), then I may agree your framing of it is solid as is. Cause then it’d basically be like: “capitalist: we reward you for supporting the interests of capital; socialist: we reward you for supporting the interests of socialism.” I just wouldn’t want it to be taken as implying that the overall picture of it is as simple as that.

Feel free to let me know if I’m misunderstanding your meaning at all.

To add to this point, China also developed their own sovereign internet tech/base. So although the western empire can to an extent try to block China out of participation in the western internet sphere of influence, they can’t block China’s use of the internet within its own sphere of influence and the impact that has for proliferation of internet services among its own people (which is a considerable portion of the world’s population). Even in a scenario of extreme efforts to “contain” China on the internet, China made sure it has sovereign power there. And if the western empire tries very hard to prevent other countries using Chinese technology when it advances beyond that of the western influence, all they do is make it so the rest of the world is increasingly technologically behind while China is doing widespread adoption of more advanced tools among it and its closest allies.

One way I read this in the broader sense:

Capitalists panicking: “Is socialism overtaking capitalism in both invention speed and integration to market the new normal?”

I recall from Blackshirts and Shirts (I believe that was the one) Parenti talking about how one of the issues the USSR had was that although it tended to outpace the west in invention, it had trouble at times getting that invention to a stage of mass production and distribution in a market to the same degree that capitalist-run markets would.

I get the impression CPC China has become a lot better on this than the USSR was and as a result, it enables them to both outpace in invention and integration to market. And the contrast is not only helping show how “house of cards” capitalism’s way of doing things is, it’s also genuinely threatening its ability to hold together because the capitalists no longer have hegemony in the market to be able to manipulate it as needed. With Deepseek, they seem to have treated it like an anomaly that they could contain. Now they are coming to understand that Deepseek wasn’t an anomaly. It was a tip of the iceberg representation of a shifting world order and AI is just one of the most visible areas being impacted because it’s the current prominent area of investment bubble hype that western capital is funneling its money into.

Am open to correction if this is too naively optimistic or simplistic a take on it, but that’s how it strikes me in the moment.

Here is a definition of fascism by the way: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Fascism

I was realizing mine from recall is not that great and then I remembered ProleWiki exists!

But one aspect I was thinking of more or less reflects what ProleWiki says. That it is a form of “capitalism in decay”:

Fascism abolishes bourgeois democracy without abolishing bourgeois rule itself. In contrast, socialism abolishes both in order to create a more substantive form of democracy.[6]

So, a socialist state’s use of authority is toward abolishing capitalist/imperial/colonial rule, repressing their further interference, and creating something actually representative of the people and their interests. Fascism’s use of authority is toward consolidating and expanding capitalist power:

Fascism usually promotes policies that favor the ever-expanding domination of capital. Its political aspect is marked by pervasive anti-communism, a profound aversion towards democracy, the justification and glorification of class society through class collaboration, and chauvinistic tendencies, namely reactionary nationalism, racism, sexism, xenophobia, transphobia and ableism. Fascist ideologues usually promote conspiracy theories, irrational myths and manipulative distortions of truth to gather support of their popular base.

Great read. Feels like the culmination of a lot of the stuff you’ve been posting about and watching in recent years.

Well said! I find that one of the few universal principles of scientific socialism is that things are rarely an easily applied universal principle. Which is a somewhat cheeky way of saying, there’s no “cheat code” for working out what’s going on in the world. Properly applied dialectical and historical materialism might at times feel like a cheat code in contrast to the wishy washy nature of metaphysics and idealism, but it’s still just contrast. There is no getting past the need to investigate conditions and context. Doesn’t mean we all have to each investigate the same stuff, but somebody’s gotta do the investigating. It is rare that a situation is so simplistic that it can be understood only by applying principles, without digging into the detail of it.

The US is allowed to have two jockeying parties vying for dominance to give the impression that fundamental change is possible through electoralism. But both are thoroughly controlled by bourgeoisie interests. It’s largely inconsequential if the occasional reformist slips through because the overall process and quantity of those who aren’t reformists will crowd out their influence into meaninglessness. And in the unlikely scenario that’s not enough to stop reformists from overwhelming the status quo, they can just call upon the police and military.

So yes, the democrat party is right-wing. But more than that, the system ensures it cannot get any further than mild reforms and that its policies will most represent the capitalist class.

It’s very P. T. Barnum? Something like that. Very much putting on a show, both parties. I think it’s part of why some USians have such a cynical view of politics and politicians. Their only experience with it is seeing a bunch of circus clowns pretend like they’re authentic tooth-and-nail fighters for the people. And no offense to actual circus clowns who are sincerely trying to entertain, rather than grift the populace.

Don’t know a lot about him. But one time I researched a quote that often gets attributed to him out of context. The result of that was here: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/7835686