I’m obsessed with these lol.

Another great one:

capitalism is only another name of feudalism,

There are fundamental differences between different production systems that we Marxists think are important enough to warrant distinction, even if they’re both instances of class societies.

I have a feeling you’d digest something better in video:

Paul Cockshott - Feudal economics

Watch that and them get back to me.

more carefully and generously than in the meme

So we’re not doing that up to your standards?

Also just thought of this pertinent quote by William Casey, the CIA director during the 1980s:

We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.

Swiss Policy Research Institute - The propaganda multiplier

I don’t see anyone here discouraging communication, and we’ve provided links that should help ppl get past the misdefinitions.

Control of language and ideas is a critical part of cultural hegemony:

In Marxist philosophy, cultural hegemony is the domination of a culturally diverse society by the ruling class, who manipulate the culture of that society (the beliefs, explanations, perceptions, values, and mores) so that their imposed, ruling-class world view becomes the accepted cultural norm; the universally valid dominant ideology, which justifies the social, political, and economic status quo as natural and inevitable, perpetual and beneficial for everyone, rather than as artificial social constructs that benefit only the ruling class.

If you live in the USA, you’ve probably already seen this a dozen times in your lifetime: Anti-unionism becomes “Right to work”, colonized peoples become “terrorists”, social support becomes “Welfare mothers”, immigrants become “illegal aliens”, petit bourgeiosie and the working class gets confused into “middle class”.

You can call these campaigns to miseducate conspiracies if you like, but they enter the public lexicon via mass inundation from capitalist media and educational institutions.

Do you believe that the average person saying “capitalism is human nature” uses your definition of capitalism? Or that they are just vaguely reference something that they don’t really want to argue?

If they’re mis-using terms why should they not be corrected? Capitalism isn’t “trade” by any acceptable definition. Ppl should be educated and enlightened, not dumbed down to.

Absolutely, and thanks for your work in this thread. o7

Indigenous societies have largely industrialized in nearly all the world. Take nearly any country (except the USA, Canada, and Australia, western colonial projects), and you’ll find ethnic peoples from those areas with an industrial mode of production.

From what I can tell, they’re doing the anarchist nostalgic idealization / fetishization of the past. Usually goes along with idealizing poverty, defeat, and religious “self-sacrifice”, on the terms that this is more “pure” and moral than the modern day with its modern production methods, science, technology, and gasp ability to feed millions of people with labor-saving technology.

When indigenous peoples do start taking up the mantle and uplifting themselves out of poverty by industrializing (Vietnam, China, DPRK, etc), then these same anarchists denounce them for the “betrayal”.

For most of human history (tribal / pre-agricultural societies), markets were rare and mostly unecessary. Small groups of people survived by foraging / hunting for food and sharing it among themselves. Usually elders, or some type of communal decision-making process was how food was distributed. Sharing, not trade, was the distribution system.

You can have some trade in tribal / feudal societies, but it isn’t the most common way that goods are distributed.

Feudalism also employed some industrial machinery (water wheels for milling grain is one example). But the primary energy source was still muscle power, the primary product was agricultural produce, and the workers were peasants tied to the land, not mobile wage workers producing consumer goods.

Marxists consider these important distinctions that define entire historical periods, even if they’re still both examples of class society.

Imperialism can occur in any class society. In its most general definition, it means the theft of land, labor, and resources of a weaker country to feed a stronger one. So we do call it “Roman imperialism”:

The surplus here is an agricultural one.

Imperialism takes a different shape under capitalism, where instead of a landed aristocracy / slave-owning class doing the colonizing, its finance capitalists in the imperial core exporting production to low-wage / underdeveloped countries to produce commodities cheaply.

Also, the surplus in nearly all the periods of ancient Rome, was still largely an agrarian surplus, extracted either from slaves, or from feudal workers / colonates in the territories outside the city.

The city / empire survived not by its own products and a commodity-producing economy, but by feeding an agrarian surplus off its many colonies.

Western supremacists tend to use “Authoritarian” only to demonize the countries that stood up and fought back against colonialism / imperialism.

And it usually is never directed against the actually non-democratic / oligarchical countries like the US, who’ve bombed and meddled with nearly every government on the planet.

You should question your preconceived notions about China, Vietnam, Cuba, and the USSR, because you likely grew up in a country that has spent the entire historical period of the cold war, trying to strangle those countries and many others out of existence.

https://forward.com/news/462916/nazi-collaborator-monuments-in-ukraine/

Electoral reform not only doesn’t address root causes, it doesn’t even treat the symptoms. It hasn’t prevented australia or japan from having far right governments, hasn’t returned land to indigenous peoples, hasn’t done anything against inequality, hasn’t empowered poorer peoples. All it does is make the political bribery slightly more expensive.

At a deeper level, representative elections always result in an oligarchy. The wealthy / economically dominant classes are the only ones who have enough money / prestige to finance their campaigns and win the popularity contest. It makes any political system based on elections nothing more than political theatre.

This is basic stuff even the ancient greeks knew, and communists learned through trial and error, yet liberals in the 21st century can’t wrap their heads around it.

Alternative voting systems have in practice been proven useless, whether in South Korea, Japan, Australia, and many other capitalist dictatorship countries that use it. It might make bribery a bit more expensive, since there are more candidates to buy off, and more political advertising necessary, but it hasn’t fixed anything.

The root problem is capital standing above political power. And that can’t be undone using it’s own platform.

Read the issue above for why. Vote manipulation is a real problem, but making all votes public is not the solution anyone wants. Limiting vote viewing to admins and mods is decided on as the best of both worlds.

Also that tool can only be used by specifically malicious instances whose goal it is to snoop and expose all votes. Those instances can and should be blocked.