My point was that the point of view you were contrasting with in the part I quoted represent the beliefs of no Marxist project, and the difference in needs and consumption are a basic element of Marxist theory. I was saying nothing at all about the article or the question of China's ideology (I personally view them as revisionist, so I have no place in Dengists arguing with liberals).
GarbageShootAlt2
joined 2 years ago
That's true, so I guess it would need to be having the military intervene to extract him, so that you don't need to worry about what a state court says.
You can believe that people have different needs and that we don’t all need to be absolutely 1:1 equal in terms of our material possessions etc.
Wonder how this relates to Marxism . . .
The kind of socialism under which everybody would get the same pay, an equal quantity of meat and an equal quantity of bread, would wear the same clothes and receive the same goods in the same quantities — such a socialism is unknown to Marxism.
All that Marxism says is that until classes have been finally abolished and until labor has been transformed from a means of subsistence into the prime want of man, into voluntary labor for society, people will be paid for their labor according to the work performed. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his work.” Such is the Marxist formula of socialism, i.e., the formula of the first stage of communism, the first stage of communist society.
Only at the higher stage of communism, only in its higher phase, will each one, working according to his ability, be recompensed for his work according to his needs. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”
It is quite clear that people’s needs vary and will continue to vary under socialism. Socialism has never denied that people differ in their tastes, and in the quantity and quality of their needs. Read how Marx criticized Stirner for his leaning towards equalitarianism; read Marx’s criticism of the Gotha Programme of 1875; read the subsequent works of Marx, Engels and Lenin, and you will see how sharply they attack equalitarianism. Equalitarianism owes its origin to the individual peasant type of mentality, the psychology of share and share alike, the psychology of primitive peasant “communism.” Equalitarianism has nothing in common with Marxist socialism. Only people who are unacquainted with Marxism can have the primitive notion that the Russian Bolsheviks want to pool all wealth and then share it out equally. That is the notion of people who have nothing in common with Marxism. That is how such people as the primitive “communists” of the time of Cromwell and the French Revolution pictured communism to themselves. But Marxism and the Russian Bolsheviks have nothing in common with such equalitarian “communists.”
-- some guy, I guess
OP said leftist
Instead of engaging with sources, you're trying to pigeonhole this into a ridiculous Holocaust comparison like every atrocity propagandist does.
There were four broad categories of people: The PLA, violent insurgents, civilian protestors (who were there for many different reasons), and also uninvolved bystanders (it's still the capitol of the country after all). There were something like 300 deaths in the area, consisting of members of each of these groups, though I don't know the relative numbers offhand.
No one is denying that civilians died. No one is arguing that those civilians should have died. This is very clear and you're the one being slippery by hinting vaguely at "inching closer" and "plausible deniability" and so on. It's shameful behavior.
You insinuated that there was violence between the two. Like, if I talk about "the poor IDF soldier who was terrorized by children with stones" everyone knows that the irony behind the statement is that the IDF soldier inflicted incomparable violence on the children in that situation. What is not suggested by your remark is that the tanks behaved appropriately by stopping and not threatening the man.
You're just being obtuse in the fashion of a vulgar debatebro.
What is "it" there? I'm failing to understand your meaning
Hey, I hate the Democrats as much as the next communist, but this specific congresswoman is good on this specific issue. You'd have a much easier time attacking AOC for fervently supporting the Harris campaign and attacking Stein (who is anti-genocide).
I sure wish the Democrats had the same awareness.
The Democrats know, they just don't give a shit, and their alliance just leans more towards the international bourgeoisie than Republicans, who favor the national bourgeoisie. They would only be a "threat" if they represented a distinct force that would overtake them, which would imply Democrats are on a different side. Whose side could the Democrats possibly be on except the American and to some extent international bourgeoisie? They certainly are not on the side of the people, and you need only look at voting discourse for a fraction of an instant to see that the Dems don't give a shit about popular sentiments and are happy to tell their otherwise-supporters who want the genocide in Gaza to end that they are Iranian assets or otherwise "Pro-terrorist".
You argue both that there was no massacre and that violent force against the protesters was justified if it did happen.
Seems like one is meant to excuse the other if disproven (Edie is also innocently mistaken in its reading)
He is plainly saying that the violence that happened was not a massacre.
But I shall play the smallest violin for those poor unarmed tanks killed by violent protesters and their terrifying grocery bags.
It's wild that you do the tank man meme after you get linked footage showing that tank man a) did not get run over and b) was blocking tanks from leaving the square.
But davel wasn't talking about that conflict when he was talking about state actors being slaughtered, he was talking about unarmed soldiers being burned to death by petrol bombs and then having their corpses strung up for display as the first shots fired in the conflict between the violent insurrectionists hiding among the protestors and the military.
I realized after reading the very long (and mostly very good) response you got from anarcho-blinkenist that I completely misread your original comment. Now I see that you were trying to use her as a shield for the Democratic Party despite the dems and dem-aligned media attacking her on a regular basis for being an "anti-semite" and so on. Your subsequent comments still don't really make sense to me, but I don't think following who you are accusing of being what would really help me anyway.
Somewhat like what a.b. said, opposing genocide and being a communist for me are not separate things. I don't want people to live in squalor and be subject to arbitrary violence in either the streets of Gaza or New York City, and in both cases it has been made abundantly clear over the decades that neoliberals don't want to help those people, the only range of opinions they have are between perpetual brutalization and full-on extermination.