#Why is it so good at talking about social and capitalistic ideals?

[lilybug-02]

Watched a wonderful presentation my friend gave about his worldbuilding project and he mentioned parkour civilization, and I could not be more proud.

[metamatar]

i have a question and sorry if it sounds incoherent. why is it so important to marxists to distinguish that marxism is not “moral” or “ideological”? i understand that marxism is grounded in historical materialism and that it aims to understand how existing structures and institutions function with the specific goal of abolishing them in favour of a marxist state, but when it comes to understanding how to move forward past capitalism, how can MLs claim that it’s entirely objective and scientific? isnt the fundamental purpose of marxism (abolishing the oppressor class and putting the proletariat in power) a subjective one, given that it to support that you need to believe that abolishing the oppressor class is desirable in the first place? how would ML “scientifically” help people decide where the line is drawn on subjects like the death penalty and incarceration if its committed by a communist party (given that the decision that the cost of killing/imprisoning people is worth the boon it would give in establishing a communist state is still based on subjective goals?)

i don't think modern marxists should claim they're not ideological. im sure some do, but imo the correct claim is marxism is not idealist. i think some of this confusion comes from a popperian view of science as "neutral" or "objective" outside of time. how the political economy affects the propagation of ideology and the process of science as practiced in reality is very standard marxist analysis now. some of the claim to objectivity is something that most people claim belongs to their favourite philosophical project see the rawlsian veil of ignorance in liberalism. marx is also writing in a world where theological and religious reasoning have a lot of primacy in philosophy and he is drawing a clean break from that by hewing to scientific characterisation of his methods.

idealism, in the kantian sense is a philosophy that argues that our ideals (about say, fairness, justice etc) inform how we organise society. marxism, as philosophical project develops in response to kant and hegel to argue that the political economic base, ie the productive relations of society actually inform superstructure of ideals. to quote marx in the preface to critique of political economy: "it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness."

for clarity's sake the idea that changes in the mode of production (mostly due to technology) transform the relations of production which is the main driving force of history is historical materialism. the analysis of why existing structures and institutions must be abolished therefore has to be grounded in analysis where such structures are considered variously – unstable, internally contradictory etc. if you view historical materialism as true, your theory of change cannot be that you'll change the world because it is unfair (an idea.) you can view the world as unfair as a marxist and talk about it to propagate the necessity of your project but that doesn't actually give you a blueprint on how to change it.

capitalists are oppressors, but marxism doesn't view the problem in their oppressive or evil natures. capitalist economies demand even the most moral capitalist to exploit the proletariat. but! it is desirable to abolish there class relations not merely because they are unfair and exploitative but because these class relationships cause workers to develop class consciousness, recognise their power and abolish capitalism.

on your specific example, i don't think marxism can or should claim their are no moral dilemmas. historical materialism doesn't assert that there are no conflicting understandings of history. walter benjamin's theses on the philosophy of history is imo good reading here.

so i dont think your concern about why it's important for marxists to believe this makes sense, because this is what marxism is. if you don't find this convincing, you're not a marxist. you could be an anarchist, or a social democrat or a radical liberal.

[paragonrobits]

i don't see accelerationist rhetoric on my dashboard too much, and mostly see people arguing against it, but that is still enough to gather a few notes and I've noticed that a lot of the people making the arguments of 'we should let everyone crash and burn so we can rebuild from the ashes' or outright advocate for a Glorious Revolution when we execute all the bad people and everything will be magically good forever (because I guess these people ignore the general historical trends that happen after those revolutions in most cases, or they really want to believe that capitalist evil is a unique demon that popped up on its own and is not a reflection of basic human evils that happened before and will again)... well they got this notably distant attitude whenever they address the consequences of this kind of disruption to systems

namely that a lot of people will die, most explicitly those most vulnerable or in need of systems at all; the poor who live on food stamps that won't be coming in such a big disruption, those who survive off of government benefits and social security income, the sickly who will die without medicine or medical care that will be lost during this disruption, and people in desperate circumstances

and the accelerationists and Glorious Revolutionists (in my experience, not people who actually intend to do anything for these things but really love talking about it and violently decrying anything less extreme) either talk around these or they imply that their deaths doesn't matter as long as their ideal world comes about. Either way they generally don't address it directly, and i think there might be SOME self awareness here, which is probably a good thing if the people making these points realize that pretending to care about human life is kind of meaningless if you're willing to dismiss a lot of people dying in the service of the Greater Good

and if you get people genuinely willing to cause complete collapse and millions of deaths of the vulnerable and say it with a cold and callous indifference, well, I think that explains why so many revolutions that start out as leftist ambitions wind up becoming authoritarian and extremely militaristic in nature; if you get your position through killing lots of people without hesitation, it doesn't give you much incentive to take alternative solutions

and also, if you're willing to let lots of people die, often in horrible ways, to achieve a political goals that kind of hard-bakes callous indifference into your new government.

[transmutationisms]

i feel like one thing i didn’t like this ep was the implicit belief of kendall/shiv that jimenez was better than mencken for the american republic or whatever. like yes on some superficial level sure. but the critique of democrats as equally involved in violence and empire was not there to me, unless i’m missing something. i know that’s probably just the politics of the writers room but it feels like any allusion to how democrats are bad in this show is like, oh, they’re bad bc they’re involved with the far right a la gil and logan or nate and kendall. but there doesn’t seem to be an acknowledgment that dems would be bad even in their own right, even if they weren’t sitting at the table with the fascists. i know that sort of critique is a lot to ask of mainstream tv but i’m not sure if there’s something i’m not picking up on in the writing that is making those claims about liberal democrats, bc i do think the show in general is interested in the perils of neoliberal capitalism. but like, is it really, or only when said neoliberal capitalism interacts directly with fascistic ideology?

the show isn't saying that liberalism is bad because it interacts with fascism. it's saying that liberalism, because it is capitalist, inherently leads to and becomes fascism. so, there is no 'pure' liberalism untainted by fascism; the fascistic thinking is always already present in the democratic party and in other expressions of liberal ideology. this is why, for example, the episode ended with mencken using the language of hygiene, directly echoing the siblings calling each other "a piece of dirt" and "filthy" this episode, but even moreso echoing shiv's ongoing hygiene fixation (the hand sanitiser incident, refusing to drink from the taps in 4x02, etc). like, i get where you're coming from, but the suggestion here is that there simply is no such thing as liberalism that doesn't already contain the seeds of fascist thinking and eventually become fascist. historically speaking this is because fascism and liberalism are both essentially capitalist, and because fascist ideology developed as a capitalist solution to the internal contradictions of liberal democracies.

we know pretty much nothing about jimenez save for his potential amenability to large tech mergers, which is its own kind of damning (like, shiv doesn't even pretend to make arguments about his actual politics this episode; her position is Establishment Dems Good). however, we can see hints of the liberalism -> fascism argument with gil, not just because he made a deal with logan but because the very first glimpse we get of him is in that campaign ad where he talks about a "war on poverty", framing his democratic socialism as echoing both lbj's "war on poverty" rhetoric but also the straightforwardly imperialist "war on terror" framing.

the argument also comes through in comparing shiv to matsson: both believe in hierarchy, specifically in meritocratic achievement that is really just a way of identifying those they see as biologically fittest on the grounds of athleticism, 'intelligence' defined with its inherent class and racial baggage, etc. these beliefs are tenets of shiv's progressivism as much as they are of matsson's fascistic thinking. fundamentally capitalism relies on this type of competition, social-economic hierarchy, and designation of certain people and groups as 'better' or more 'worthy.' shiv and matsson are in no way ideologically opposed, nor are liberalism and fascism; it is capitalism that forms the link and that causes the rhetorical shift from lofty liberal ideals to openly exclusionary fascist rhetoric, though this transition does not entail an actual change between modes of production & if anything fascism is simply more nakedly capitalist in certain ways.

the satire of democrats comes in most heavily with the pierces. kendall's not any kind of liberal (like, he has basically no political beliefs; he's just a capitalist) and although shiv is, she's always been able to operate in conservative contexts in a way the pierces mostly don't deign to. yet pgm produces élitist cultural products, the pierces also rely on housestaff they condescend to and see as lesser in a particularly patronising way, and pgn is operating the same way as atn ("the business synergies are there"), just like, more boringly. nan even has that line about believing the berlin wall fell because of pierce news cameras or whatever---clearly echoing logan's known use of foreign political meddling, only nan frames it as a moral good because it's exporting american democracy, yadda yadda. this goes to the way liberal and fascist rhetoric can appear to have a huge ideological gulf between them but are in fact operating off much of the same logic already, with fascism simply embracing certain inequities, including racial thinking and racism, that liberalism prefers to pretend it's going to 'overcome' despite those being necessary elements of capitalism.

fundamentally liberal or neoliberal capitalism already tends toward fascistic thinking and certainly toward the economic and material conditions that allow for outright fascism to take hold. logan himself is a good demonstration of this. his beliefs in hierarchy, rule of force, brute competition, &c are not just coeval with him being a capitalist; they are the ideology that directly results from, naturalises, and justifies capitalism. the entire spectrum of political ideology espoused by characters on this show is constrained within the in fact very narrow window of being capitalist; all defences of the american republic are capitalist; and it is capitalist economics that manifests as liberalism's ideology. this is true as much of neoliberalism like what kendall was born into as it is of 19th-century liberalism like the social darwinism logan espouses.

[uwusillygirl]

i could read 10k words from you about gender and performance and/or being a pervert with contradictions!!!!!!!!!!

if only i trusted the internet enough, i could give y'all my published Real Girl work on this matter that probably far surpasses 10k at this point!!! this is my bread and butter!!! it's why they pay me the very small bucks!!!

i will talk about any facet of this literally whenever, though, it's my favorite. my overarching thesis for all gender performance, sex, and perversion is that we're given two general political takes which are 1. a sort of like militancy/demand that any person in a marginalized group be a monolith and not do the shit they like if it isn't for "the cause" -- no kink, no femininity, no even playing at subjugation/power dynamic within a relationship or sexual structure and then 2. capitalistic "choice feminism" goo of like "you can do whatever without any interrogation into your choice! you just really like spending four and a half hours a day on your look and love having your hair pulled in bed, girlboss! don't think about it too hard! don't let 'em get you down!"

and i think that neither are true or possible for a person living pleasurably! i think that i am a woman who owes my fellow women (and everyone, but we're talking gender here) time, focus, sacrifice, commitment to liberating what womanhood "looks like". i also think that if we lived in a social structure genuinely made fully equal i wouldn't be shaving my legs and spending an hour at the nail tech twice a month getting plastic put on; that is not inherently liberating. but it feels superficially, erotically good to me, just like when someone i find sexy buys me things to wear that they think i'll look sexy in, or if i do something in bed that isn't perfectly aligned with my value system. but this is me being a human person, not the idea of an "ideal woman".

and that's not even talking about how i got into all this in a midst of a ptsd diagnosis! life is so weird!

anyways my dream world is my inbox filling up with thoughts on sex and performance and gender and perversion and kink so... whenever anyone wants!

[quillquiver]

And the thing is! It’s not even about ���being boring”! It is so not about that! With a humanities degree, the only thing you really learn is how to process information, and generally, these degrees are designed to give it to you via various different perspectives and frameworks: you receive it, contextualize it, and then you’re encouraged to make an argument about it. That’s literally it, for years. 

...And when people are no longer in uni (no matter their degree), a lot of them enter the work force and are too tired to do any outside learning--like, say, consuming nonfiction about politics, the environment, social sciences or racism, or fiction that heavily features those themes (or, featured enough that the person spends a not significant amount of time thinking/talking them through). This makes sense: we live in a late-capitalist hellscape and everyone is tired. Sitting down to read Audre Lord at the end of my workday is a tough call when Good Omens is literally right there. It’s not that I don’t want to do it, it’s that I have to force myself, because I spent the whole day not having fun, and I have 5 hours before I have to go to bed and not have fun again tomorrow. 

So most people don’t make this effort in their own time--which, again, fair. Ideally, then, you’d want to at least train yourself to think this way while in school, right? My ability to incorporate multiple perspectives into my critiques of even stupid shit, like reality TV, far outstrips my STEM, MBA and CompSci friends who don’t do a lot of self-directed learning--not because I’m smarter by any means, but because I was literally trained to question every piece of information I was given and then told to make an argument about it, and I was given a lot of texts with themes of facism, racism, classicism, sexism, religion, colonization, het- and amatonormativity, etc etc the list goes on. When you consume enough of this shit, it becomes easier to spot--and if you don’t practice, you get rusty as fuck. 

This whole “university is a business and teaches employable skills” thing is pretty recent; people used to go to trade schools for that. If you were at university, you were there to learn how to think. And theoretically, humanities degrees are poised to make humans who are much harder to fool with things like propaganda and mob mentality. Question anyone who is celebrating the decline of this kind of learning, degrading it, or making fun of it. Why? What are their motivations, and what do they gain from a generation of young people unprepared to do the kind of thinking a humanities degree offers? 

Pretty sure it’s nothing good. 

[foolish-moods]

capitalism fears AI

ok yeah we all got our anxiety about it it ain't unreason able to shake in yer wee booties when something new and ACtUALLY able to change the world is sprinting at us at mach 5 (maybe 6)

im no artist maybe i write a bit, but like i get it, seeing the soulless machines rip you and your friend shit off these promptbros passing their PROMPT SKILLS off as legit like we aint one step away from bashing them in the head with a rock yeah it sucks and its bad feels that make other bad feels feel badder and not in the good way

BUT ok here me out AI taking your jobs is....... a good thing (eventually) some time in the future))

lemme explain:

The creation and improvement upon tools has been and continues to be the greatest driving force behind human progress throughout our entire history. I'm not just speaking of technology and science either, I'm talking about everything, social and cultural advances included. A good example is the Polynesians whose ways of life, traditions, knowledge, and beliefs are heavily influenced by their early discovery and use of ships to sail an ocean that other people believed to be impossible to navigate. This is true, to an extent, for just about everyone and everything else.

The industrial revolution happened fast, faster than anything before it, because the breakthroughs that occurred compounded upon themselves. When a new discovery and subsequent tool was made, this in turn allowed for another discovery and subsequent tool. It became a cycle of development that grew exponentially, we went from horse drawn carriages to landing on the moon in 60 years. Obviously I'm heavily simplifying things, but you get the gist.

It was a wild time that necessitated change within society. Old ways just weren't compatible with the new ones and to not adjust would lead to instability and falling behind. It's no coincidence that radical new ideologies formed during this era because the possibilities of these ideologies coming to fruition were now truer than ever. New tools meant new opportunities, new ways of life, and sticking with the old not only started to make less and less sense but it became difficult to do so.

When capitalism first started it was unchecked and ruthless, far worse than what we have today. The working conditions were appalling even if you weren't an indentured slave and there was truly zero concerns outside of making a profit. Adjusted for inflation, the net worth of those early capitalists like Rockefeller and Ford make our current billionaires look like chumps and that's when money represented tangible gold.

As new tools were made this bolstered capitalists, it allowed them to keep up profits despite increasing regulations, yet it also had a side effect for the common people. For example, mass use of physical labor became less and less efficient as factories and machines became more and more numerous. Why hire (or enslave) workers to attend a field when you could buy a fleet tractors and do the same work in a quarter of the time for a fraction of the cost? This wasn't just an obvious business decision, it was also a shift pushed by the changing ideals. I'm not saying slavery was abolished because of tractors (partially because one occurred much earlier than the other) but I am saying new tools opened up the opportunity for social considerations that were previously thought of as being out of reach. Which is to say I don't think Marx would have been nearly as influential as he was and is if he were born before the widespread use of the printing press.

Then came computers. I don't think I have to state how massive of a change this introduced to the world. Even if you were born into this digital era you only have to read up and watch some things from 30 to 40 years ago to see the stark difference. When I was a kid less than half of the people in the US had internet access, not computers, just plain internet access (as in a local library), now it's more than 90% and it's in their pocket. I'm sure you've likely heard this spiel before, but it's important to understand how tools affect the world. It's also important to know that computers used to be a job that people were hired to do.

So, back to my original point, why does capitalism (or more accurately: capitalists) fear AI? Because of automation. Take the tractor example from before, there is an issue there that has been a point of contention with all new and powerful tools: the reduction in necessary labor and skill to achieve the same or better result. Historically this has been mostly a concern for the workers, not the capitalists, who are stripped of a source of income by automation and forced to find work elsewhere, however the capitalists themselves aren't immune to it. We all know about Blockbuster and how it was dealt a quick and sudden deathblow by online streaming. In just a few clicks anyone with access could watch a movie without ever leaving their home, a complete automation of the entire renting process including what goes on behind the scenes that the customer never sees. Blockbuster couldn't adapt like other companies (Netflix) since they had too much invested into their physical locations, product procurement, work force, and a desperate hope that streaming was just a fad. The company died, miserably, because of automation, and everyone who worked there had to pack up and leave. They're far from the only business to be killed or severely diminished in a similar way, I mean travel agents can tell you all about that, but they're a very clear example of what can happen.

Yet as a whole automation has readily been welcomed by capitalists. The production output of the modern world is only possible because of it and major companies almost entirely owe their profits to it. Even smaller companies that don't produce goods rely upon automation in one way or another. I mean what is google if not an automated librarian for a library that no human workforce could ever properly manage? Would a family owned business for pressure washing have the same success without google to help them be discovered by people looking for their service?

But AI is different, we can feel it in the air. Anxiety over new tech has always happened, yet something about AI really kicks up the dust in a way comparable to nukes. I mean literally, some people think it's going to lead to the destruction of humanity, that's a pretty big deal. Maybe they're right, maybe Skynet will kill us all, I really doubt it but just like I how doubt nuclear war will ever happen I still acknowledge it's certainly possible.

No, I think the reason why people like Elon Musk and AI developers are so scared of it is because of the existential threat it posses - not to humanity - but to capitalism and the society that clings to it. Where automation before was on a scale small enough that the displacement of workers wasn't a major issue, AI flips that on its head and claims the very real potential of replacing millions upon millions of jobs worldwide in a figurative snap of the finger. Imagine what would happen if just one major job was entirely replaced by AI within a few years like accounting, that would be over a million unemployed people in just the US. Now imagine the same for managers, consultants, clerks, security, engineers, doctors, and so on. It might sound ridiculous, but if you think AI can destroy humanity then how is this anymore absurd? You may think there's no way people would let that happen, to which I ask: would the capitalist whose main concern with profits let it? If you've paid attention at all to how they operate, then you know the answer is yes. In their pursuit of endless profits, there is only one way forward, to embrace AI. You don't have to pay AI wages, you don't have to give them benefits, you don't have build and manage offices, you don't have to deal with human error and inefficiencies. Every company will be forced to adopt AI or fail, and by doing so they create more and more unemployed people with no source of income.

So what about these these people with no income, what happens with them? It's rather simple, they don't participate in the system, because they cant, and the more jobs automated the less participants there are. Less participants means less money flowing, less products being sold, less profits being made. This obviously can't work, it would be like driving a car straight into a concrete wall. It would be a level of unemployment and unrest far beyond anything before it, the Great Depression would pale in comparison, extreme unrest would sweep the world if something isn't quickly done to counterbalance it. I don't exactly how it'd be handled, it could go many ways, but in this new environment of widescale automation I'm certain the very concept of money and wealth will be called into question and with it the billionaires who cling to these concepts for power.

That's the beautiful irony of it all. In the end, the only thing to kill capitalism is capitalism itself. Total ideological suicide.

This right here is why there is so much fear around AI. It's why propaganda is being created to sow distrust of it, to fill our heads with ideas of misuse and the potential for annihilation or dystopia. It's why the default assumption is that AI will be malevolent. It's why considering the benefits is seen as naïve. It's why they want to pause the experiment and to carefully tailor it so they can give the crippled bureaucracies the time they need to regulate and ban it. That's the capitalist's only hope to cling onto their empires of greed, to turn everyone against it so they don't have to use it. It's a paradox they desperately want to escape. It's too late though, the writing is on the wall, it can't be stopped, someone will inevitably push it through and force them to follow suit and march right off the cliffs edge, lest they dare lose out on potential revenue.

Of course, it will be a very bumpy road for all of us, society as whole will have to adjust faster than it ever has before and a lot innocent people are going to get hurt. Ultimately though, I believe AI is the key to a utopia where people can finally just enjoy life how they want without the constant stress of manmade obligations, pursing things for the sake of the experience and not to pay bills. If you've watched Star Trek then you know what the possibility looks like.

[bitd]

PERCEPTION [Sight] [Easy: Success] - As you skim the shelves, a familiar title catches your eye.

ENCYCLOPEDIA [Medium: Success] - Fisticuffs Convention, by Charles Plucky. Often stigmatized as revolutionary literature, it tells the story of a young man whose anti-capitalist and masculine urges lead him to an amnesiac double life, hallucinating an idealized alter ego.

INLAND EMPIRE - A handsome, emotionally regulated, cigarette-smoking parallel of yourself appearing alongside an amnesic episode?

LOGIC [Easy: Fail] - Come to think of it, have you seen anyone else acknowledge Kim directly? I mean, you haven't been paying close attention, but maybe…

YOU - "Kim, I think you're a hallucination of my idealized self, emerged from my subconscious to guide me in my time of need."

KIM KITSURAGI - The lieutenant, already impatient with your leisurely browsing, does not seem to agree with your theory. "Doubtful. Plucky's novel was driven by the protagonist's estrangement from his mundane and meaningless life. By contrast, you seem rather… emotionally invested."

YOU - "Hold on, emotionally invested in what?"

KIM KITSURAGI - "Most things, from what I've seen."

-1 MORALE

INLAND EMPIRE [Challenging: Fail] - Don't give up on this yet, you know that there's SOMETHING about the novel that resonated with you.

LOGIC [Easy: Success] - If Kim isn't your alter ego projection, that leaves only one option.

LOGIC - You must be his.

VOLITION - Are you guys fucking serious?

- [Rhetoric: Godly 16] Convince Kim you're his alter ego.

- No, that can't be right, my identity is too complex to be anyone else's.

⚅⚅

CHECK SUCCESS

YOU - "Kim, I've figured it all out. Why I can't remember anything before you got here, why we make such a good duo."

KIM KITSURAGI - "Oh? It had nothing to do with your activities prior, after all?" He sounds sceptical, and he hasn't even heard your genius theory yet!

YOU - "That's the thing, there were no activities prior. I'm not real."

KIM KITSURAGI - He raises an eyebrow at you, imperceptibly.

PERCEPTION [Trivial: Success] - Bullshit. It's perceptible. I'm perceiving it. It's not all of us who are completely socially incompetent and can't read facial expressions - just you.

KIM KITSURAGI - "Detective," he starts, in a tone even the most socially competent would find unreadable, "Our acquaintances at the Whirling-In-Rags would likely disagree."

YOU - "Look at yourself, Kim. Calm. Reserved. Repressed. You wear glasses. Now look at me. Cool. Wild. Unrestrained. I wear sunglasses. I'm a superstar. Would you agree that I am, more or less, everything you're not?"

EMPATHY [Trivial: Success] - He realizes where this is going moments before you get there, defeat etched into his face.

YOU - "Maybe even everything you wish you could be?"

KIM KITSURAGI - "Hm."

YOU - "Come on, Kim, it's obvious. It was you who trashed the Whirling-In-Rags, and you're projecting me while you clean up your mess!"

KIM KITSURAGI - Despite everything, he keeps his patience. "That is an... intriguing theory, detective, but there are multiple witnesses who can attest for our separate physical embodiments before and after my arrival. I also haven't lost any time, so it seems unlikely I would be experiencing some sort of latent dissociative disorder."

ESPRIT DU CORPS [Legendary: Success] But that might actually explain some things, now that it occurs to him. A previous inquiry on 'talking thoughts' flashes through his mind.

KIM KITSURAGI - He acquiesces, almost too easily, "I suppose there's no proving it either way. Perhaps tonight after we've finished our work for the day you could do some more research into the matter. I'm sure this store must have some psychological texts you could consult."

📒

TASK GAINED:

READ ABOUT "DISSOCIATIVE DISORDERS"

[inqilabi]

Hey I’m the anon who asked about that thread. I guess I’m interested in what you think about his points that weren’t directly applicable to trans activism, like prison abolitionists and those calling for indigenous land sovereignty. Again, I’m sympathetic to their ideals and believe things need to change from how they are now, especially in countries like USA but also all countries with incredibly cruel penal systems. But I do get what he means in that many of these ideologies that leftists are rallying behind are very anarchist and unlikely to ever become majorly popular, and also the question of why western leftists are so focused on them at the expense of other topics more conducive to organising.

Oh lol sorry I answered the question for another thread he made that went viral on transactivism 💀💀💀. I just assumed the question was about that lolol cos no one ever talked about this guy till that thread

Ok regarding this thread on abolishing institutions, it is correct that the communist position is not one of abolition. Abolition is an anarchist or, now it is also, a liberal position as well. I disagree on the landback position. Other socialist countries, China, Cuba etc are not setter colonial states but America is. And so in america, the communist cause would include landback imo.

however the rest of the stuff is standard ML position. The state institutions will remain, but will be under the "dictator of the proletariat" meaning the qualitative aspect of these institutions would be different. Prisons are a method of ruling class state control. Under capitalism, that state control is to protect private property of the capitalist. However under communism, the purpose would be to protect the property of the peoples from any reactionary forces such as the recently overthrown capitalists who obviously will want to return to capitalist as per interests of their class. As Fred explains, the structure of these institutions will be more humane. I am not sure I would call it “prison” tbh. It should be more about unlearning capitalist socialization. They're qualitative different. In Cuba, a lot of the prostitutes were running back to their pimps. So this model of rehabilitation was used to help them heal. The end goal is a classless stateless society which will not need any of these state apparatuses in the final form, communism.

Lenin's State and Revolution and, Engels' On Authority is good for this topic.

[titleknown]

The reason why I, and many more artist hate AI art genereters is capitalism. When most people who are into those AIs find out that the good part of art is creating it, and they get board, it's too late already. Because corperetions are heard about it from them, and now everything is AI genereted art. And puf one of the oldest form of comunication, that we were able to convay our dreams, passion, love, fears, and sad ess is gone. And I don't think making capitalism go away would help. I'm from a country that suffer a lot because of the opressiv communist rule of the Soviet Union. Here people starvd, and suferd because of it. I don't like capitalism eather, but it's eather capitalism, or the sistem that we had a faild revilotuon against. Okey playing around with AI could be fun, but defending it as something harmless is the worst chose.

...Firstly, there's more forms of socialism/leftism than just Stalinist/state-capitalist authoritarianism.

Like, I understand and sympathize with your experiences, but there very much are more than just a choice between Stalinist and Capitalist oppression, we have other options.

Secondly... beyond the usual vague easily-disproven emotional talking points (AI art has a surprising amount of process to it I will say), I think this ask demonstrates how a lot of the animus of the hatred of AI art comes from a deep pessimism.

Like, I think a lot of artists do think the ideal solution would be to expand arts programs and Guaranteed Basic Income so that everyone could have a chance to make art and displacement via automation wouldn't be a death sentence.

But they don't think it's possible, so better to defend what you have with circling the wagons to defend the status-quo even if it has horrifying long-term results than trying to imagine better.

But that's because they've never seen better. Like how OP hasn't seen a form of socialism in practice that isn't... well, Soviet enforced imperialism.

And I think that, well, we all need to dream a little bit bigger. Tho god knows I find it hard to after the burnout of the past decade, as do all of y'all probably...

[volcanokids]

Hey idk who needs to hear this but the shit going on with Robinhood and Gamestop right now should make you really fucking angry and I’ll tell you why

If you’re not up to speed on the situation, here’s some good posts explaining it. The gist is that using completely legal means, a bunch of individual retail investors (fancy words for normal ass people who, like the rest of us, have very little money) who invest on online brokerage apps (like Robinhood) bought stock in Gamestop after hedge funds worked hard to manipulate the market for their own gains. These average people interrupted the plans of these much larger hedge funds to essentially drive Gamestop’s stock price into the ground by buying all of the stock these companies had and holding onto it, which has now costed these hedge funds BILLIONS of dollars, and for once has disrupted their long standing practice of market manipulation to fuck people over and maintain the wealth of the 1%.

Otherwise average people with accounts on Robinhood, Fidelity, Webull, etc., have now taken and held a ridiculously huge amount of control over GME stock and the rich corporations invested into it and caused it’s growth to absolutely explode. I’ve seen COUNTLESS stories in which many of them turned hundreds of dollars into thousands, made enough much needed money to pay off debts, medical bills, or just to put into savings that they wouldn’t have gotten under other circumstances. They accumulated small fortunes and gave power back to the people, and best of all took that money directly out of the hands of greedy and corrupt billion dollar hedge funds.

But of course, there had to be backlash for this.

Last night (1/27), Robinhood took away its investors’ ability to buy any more stock in Gamestop than they already owned, and today has made its user base fully unable to trade Gamestop stock AT ALL unless it is to sell their already owned shares, like literally fully took away the button that lets you purchase GME stock, period. Straight up preventing trade like this to any degree in the free market, much less to favor billion dollar corporations, is incredibly blatant market manipulation which is very illegal, hence the class-action lawsuit that has already been filed against Robinhood. Hedge funds have lost literally BILLIONS of dollars to normal people trading stock legally, and Robinhood halting trade and making selling the ONLY option for Gamestop, AMC, and similar companies is their attempt at helping the hedge funds gain back their fortune after they failed to manipulate the market in their favor, and fucking over the average people who are invested on their platform in the process. 

Retail investors—regular people—when this happened, lost THEIR ability to buy, and therefore continue taking back the wealth held by the hedge funds, but this restriction on Robinhood has NO effect on hedge funds, who have now been able to buy and sell all day today (1/28) freely. They used the opportunity to drive the price of Gamestop down again, essentially trying to bail themselves out after they manipulated the market and fucked themselves over in the first place. So, Robinhood, several other trading brokers, CNBC, and any other large corporation who has pissed on Reddit for “manipulating the market” have also now revealed their alignment with these companies, who are the reason the wealth in America is as disparaged as it is. They’re complaining, shifting the blame, even making up straight up lies about retail investors being involved in the alt-right to defame the people who have beat them at their shitty game.  

People on Reddit saw the manipulation, played the game fairly, and hedge funds are STILL trying to fuck them over for daring to touch the fortunes that they have gained by their shady as hell practices and fucked up the economy by hoarding. Reddit saw an opportunity to actually literally redistribute wealth, and these companies are trying to put us all in our place and keep that from happening by extremely corrupt means.

Market manipulation has been going on for a very long time with very little pushback from the people who actually take the blow when the market tanks—i.e. lower to middle class people who can’t afford bailouts and end up broke and out of jobs when the market crashes. The crash of ‘08 was caused by big brokers doing illegal shit and fucking around with people’s money with absolutely no personal repercussions. No lawsuits (or at least no lawsuits that did fuck all about it) no jail time for anyone responsible, nothing. Not only has this Gamestop movement taken back some of the wealth, we are beginning to finally hold these companies accountable. Again, as of right now, a class-action lawsuit has been filed against Robinhood for their blatant market manipulation, and hedge funds invested in GME have lost over 5 billion dollars.

We always talk about eat the rich, fuck the 1%, redistribute the wealth. I know the stock market is confusing—it’s made that way on purpose—and I understand anyone’s personal reluctance to participate in the stock market directly because of the hatred for it’s capitalistic nature and everything it’s done wrong and every way it’s failed so many people. But, if you want to actually be a part of a movement that is literally taking billionaire’s wealth and redistributing it right now, show support on social media for the people putting in time and money to make this happen.

I am not qualified at all to give financial advice, and I can’t in good faith tell anyone to buy stocks, ESPECIALLY knowing many, many people do not have the disposable income to be able to do so. Do not spend money you don’t have. But the media is going to and has been altering the narrative, making the small investors look like they’re being corrupt. Do not believe them. They’re often paid out or owned by these big corporations in the first place, they do not give a shit about any of us, about ruining our lives, about taking everything we’re worth. They’ve done it forever. But the HUGE number of people buying GME, supporting, and cooperating with each other with the solitary goal of fucking over these hedge funds, fighting them and beating them at their own game is scaring the absolute shit out of them. It’s becoming a movement that’s being compared to another occupy wall street. It’s showing people they have the power to instigate change and could legitimately lead to an entire restructuring of the system if we play our cards right. Of course changing one capitalist system into another capitalist system is not ideal nor is it the goal, but this whole thing has very quickly become a movement backed by A LOT of people who have knowledge about the system, have seen it work and seen it get corrupted in real time, acknowledged exactly where it fucks us all over, and are beginning to break it down by exposing a huge and obvious instance of corruption at the hands of billionaires.

If you can do nothing else, educate yourself about all the fuck shit these companies are doing, rally support on whatever social media you use, keep posting diamond-hands-we-like-the-stock-gme-to-the-moon-memes, put pressure on the brokerage apps like Robinhood who are manipulating the market and let them know there will be hell to pay. Robinhood is sitting at a well deserved one star review on the google play store for their shitty actions and has gotten burned over and over on twitter, lots of investors are planning a mass exodus and closing their Robinhood accounts when all this shit is over, as WELL as the lawsuit, and all of it has garnered the attention of some very influential figures who now have our backs. All of the repercussions they’re facing is the direct result of our outrage and backlash. Be outraged with us and let’s make real fucking change.

GME to the fucking moon everyone 🚀

[thefudge]

What are your thoughts on media always pushing marriage and having children as the final step in romantic relationships? The idea that its all just prelude to this same milestone that makes you an adult officially. Personally, I have always been into romance novels as a teenager, up until they get to the point where they start settling down and then I lose interest lol.

tldr: it's whack and limiting, but very understandable, given the last two-three centuries of history, why they do it lol

(sorry, i just started typing this and couldn't stop/summarize effectively)

that element you mentioned about marriage & having children being the milestone of adulthood is relatively recent, and i think it had something to do with the rise of the middle-class and modern capitalism in the 18th century. before this, becoming an "adult" had to do with biological & social rites of passage, for both men and women. marriage could be one of such rites, but not THE rite.

with the rise of a profit-focused society, adulthood became intrinsically connected to money, upward mobility and "independence". basically, the point of growing up was growing "UP", aka improving your lot, socially & financially, and distinguishing yourself from your parents and others. you weren't a real adult unless you could secure connections to build your own mini-empire, aka your family/company/successful enterprise. marriage & children were tied in with a certain kind of capitalist success for both men and women. now, sure, throughout history, marriage was often regarded as a transaction, but that's the thing; the reality of it was unvarnished. now, with the advent of capitalism, it became the most moral, legitimate transaction. it got a new, pretty coat of paint. you weren't someone (good) until you married and produced your own "adulthood " within the family and society. it didn't matter if a woman was, say, 38 and living with relatives but occupying her time usefully, having a rich inner life, no, she was still basically treated like a child because she hadn't married (and she was seen as a disobedient child who had failed in life). so, marriage was connected with goodness, but also with "good" sex. sexual relations, which had often been a component in rites of adulthood, now became strictly the domain of marriage (you could and should only have sex within marriage), so you couldn't be a sexually mature individual unless you were married. sex was codified and legislated etc etc.

that's why so many 18th and 19th century books in European lit (cuz we're talking here about the western and mostly white perspective on marriage) were obsessed with the "marriage plot", because so much of adult & sexual life had become dependent on this institution (especially for women, for obvious reasons at the time). the shift that happened sometime in the 19th century was that marriage was turned into an adventure/romance. note here that i'm not talking about love. love and love affairs had been rich topics for world literature since the beginning, and often times, marriage was seen as an impediment to that love (see the trope of unrequited courtly love in the medieval ages where a knight yearns for a married lady, see the elizabethan view of most marriages being hell, and real love existing outside of it, see ancient greek and roman literature praising so many other bonds over marriage, see mythologies across the world and consecrated folk tales that depict forbidden lovers as heroic, and the marriage union as often despotic. even when the marriage is good & loving, it is not the main focus and tends not to last etc.). but sometime at the end of the 18th century/beginning of the 19th century, probably also due to the rise of Romanticism, marriage became an embodiment of the ideal, and the shakespearean "marriage of true minds" became literal. this is the period when, btw, a lot of emphasis was placed on romeo and juliet being "married" lovers, even though the play frames them as legitimate lovers before their religious union and their marriage within the play would've been considered invalid in that society. i mentioned earlier that marriage had become a moral and legitimate transaction, so now it was further elevated so as to erase the element of transaction altogether and decree it as the only form of valid mature love (and it made sense, since this was also the only form of relationship where you were "allowed" to have sex). any other kind of relationship would be immature and immoral, and it wouldn't be a proof of true love. so many of shakespearean productions in the 19th century focused on the couple at hand having found mature and ideal love in marriage, even though the plays, even the comedies, are very ambivalent on that.

and so, given the past two/three centuries, we have had little choice but to internalize all that. we don't consider it true, deep, mature, worthy love unless it is sanctioned by state and church, unless it lasts forever and is an unbreakable, abstract bond between two people. and look, i get why we internalized it. i'm a sucker for it too, we all understand the appeal. we read the shit out of those tropes. and we also know that marriage can be rewarding and fulfilling. but i also feel what u feel when a (romance) novel ends this way or progresses towards this, because it sort of narrows the human experience. like, i understand so well why we are drawn to this concept of eternal loyalty and love, but is it feasible for us as people? to expect so much from others and ourselves, and to place so much pressure on this ideal? it's fine to strive towards it, and it's fine to portray it in fiction, but we have to acknowledge that it's never going to be a stable concept when put into practice, while ALSO realizing that a lot of it is underpinned by systems that have nothing to do with romance/love. what i really, really want to see disappear is this notion that you're not an adult unless you have married or had children, because what they really mean is, you're not an ideal consumer unless you have other people whose conspicuous consumption is your responsibility and care.

(there's a whole other post that could be written here about how modern marriage as a capitalist institution was denied to certain races and classes as a way to control them and strip them of their rights, but once certain milestones of liberty were achieved and they were allowed to enter this institution, these marginalized groups discovered new challenges and limitations within marriage that have to do with race, class, gender, sexual orientation etc. marriage is the carrot dangled as a path towards autonomy and recognition, while also denying bodily autonomy and individual recognition)

[antiloreolympus]

10 Anti LO Asks

1. I find it funny that america's court of justice looks more greek that LO's court that literally takes place in greece

2. ya know if rachel cant stand seeing critiques and even admits social media is ruining her mental health the like ... idk ... get a social media manager? im sure a webtoons intern would be happy to take over her accounts and only post when LO updates and retweet fanart. a lot of webtoon creators dont have social media accounts either, so it's not unheard of her to be anonymous outside of her work, she seriously needs to get offline if its this negative of an experience for her IMHO.

3. the animated series excuse is bullshit. Other webtoons have also been picked up for tv while being produced, but they actually WRAPPED UP before their shows started, because they got the fire under their butts to make sure the story was complete so the tv writers knew what to do with them. LO getting picked up and dragging it out actually makes it harder for it to be adapted, not the other way around, especially when RS writes the week of. LO fans, please, you can call her out for this, it's ok.

(Same tv anon) also there are a lot of webtoons that were super popular and still ended when they wanted bc the writers said so, even though WT themselves would love to keep them going as long as possible. other WT creators are also very open to the fact they have a lot of creative freedom with no pushback, so the excuse WT is "forcing" Rachel to drag out LO is false. The reason LO is getting worse is on her, not webtoons, not henson, but rachel herself. sorry to be harsh it but its true.

4. Idk if this has been said, BUT the night P goes over to the shades and hades saves her, they kiss, and then the next day P asks Minthe for help with the computer and of course Minthe is gonna bring up Hades and give her a crash course on what’s it like dating hades and P is like “I honestly have no clue what you’re talking about” GIRL WHAT! You turned into butterflies, you’ve talked about being horny, YOU KISSED. P is hardly a character 

5. i feel like theres a big difference between a webtoonist being defensive over their characters who get hated for awful reasons (misogyny, racism, homophobia, etc) versus rachel being like "ugh! why are you guys not letting persephone and hades get away with literal murder, slavery, corruption, nepotism, and classism, etcetera, etcetera?" like we know she's a privileged cishet white lady, but she's in a fantasy land if she seriously think theres nothing to critique her version of hxp for. like???

6. honestly thats the thing that annoys me so much. yes the greek gods arent as widely worshipped (and no, i dont expect a kiwi to be worshipping them either) but greece still exist, the greek people still exist, and their culture still exists, which includes still having a cultural reverence to the gods. the fact rachel and her fans claim ownership over it while speaking over actual greeks and while butchering it so much for their own capitalist, western ideals is just insulting, not "empowering".

7. I think good character growth for P for how the story was going would have been her acting more like herself (the bad parts where she’s frustrated and angry) but isn’t rewarded. The closest we got to this was when she had rumors spreading around her at school and no one wanted to be her friend even if she did try to defend herself. When she got mad at hades for stealing someone’s eye, she was prioritized even tho it was an important day for Underworld Corp. she sees no repercussion what she did to Leto (I know it was suppose to be funny but it makes Leto less of a serious antagonist that she was built to be). Like all I really take from her character is “why didn’t I go apeshit earlier I have no consequences expect that one time I murdered a bunch of village people but even then I wasn’t truly vengeful.” Even with the trial drama going in Hades is preventing any repercussions. Like everything “bad” that happens to Persphone, it’s “not her fault”

8. Hades: why didn’t you tell me my gf/ex sent you to tower 4

Persphone: I didn’t want to get her in trouble (aka I wanted to have someone I could black mail instead of just asking Hectate for help or ask for proper training can’t ruin my perfect girl image)

9. Like many readers and critics have pointed out, Lore Olympus (and admittedly a lot of cartoons and comics nowadays) is most certainly written with a fanfiction-like mindset: with twists and turns that complicate the story for no other reason than the author thinking that it looks “cool”. This has resulted in a ramping up of epicness within the general story. Stakes get higher, the antagonists become more and more threatening, and then suddenly a tale of ancient Greek deities that started out as a casual soap opera is now being mashed together with long-standing prophecies and major political conflicts. It’s not enough for Lore Olympus to just talk about issues like abuse, gaslighting, sexual assault, self-hatred, and healing from traumatic experiences. We’ve got to do it in the most epic way possible! Stuff like this is the only reason why LO goes to the weird extremes that it does, with more and more crap getting piled on as a misguided attempt to be more “exciting”. The decision to add the coming of Kronos, Apollo’s theorized usurping of Zeus’ throne, and Persephone’s legendary fertility goddess powers to the slice-of-life environment came entirely from a desire to be super epic because that’s the only way RS knows how to create tension. It often seems like a lot of creators and viewers are unaware that personal stories with low stakes can be just as, if not more, enriching and this sentiment is usually shared between fans and is why most others seem to enjoy the earlier chapters of the webcomic far more than the current episodes. The comic’s former relatability that dealt with interpersonal relationships and conflicts is now having to share a runtime with massive wars, violence, death, and booming action because RS really wants people to take LO seriously and this is the only way she knows how to do it. 

-----FP Spoilers/Mention-----

10. FP talk: what i also dont get is why would the jury and crowd suddenly be on hades and persephone's side? like i thought the whole story kepy saying how despised hades is and how persephone is some unknown that only has bad stories around her. why would they all of a sudden now want to defend them off of nothing? rachel both wants them to be the underdogs but also cant deal with them not getting everything they want, so she immediately undercuts any stakes. i really dont get that logic at all.

[myimaginarywonderland]

So, for anyone wondering what is happening with Germany, here's a quick summary.

Yesterday we had to elect a new chancellor since Angela Merkel has been in that position for 16 years.

Now, the German parliament might be different than some other countries. We basically have 6 big parties there but from those 2 or three always form a Koalition. Koalitionen are formed so that a chancellor can be elected since we only vote for a party who chooses someone of them as that person. Since a party never has a big enough majority to elect them, multiple parties go together to make that majority.

However, there were basically only three parties who were likely to form a Koalition like this. One party was the CDU, a Christian conservative party that has basically been in a Koalition for as long as I can remember. They were also the party Angela Merkel is from. To replace her they choose Armin Lachet. Now, he is one of the worst choices they could have done because he a.) failed to fold his ballot correctly so that everyone could see who he has voted for which technically is seen as voting fraud since he might influence others with his choice but we just looked over that. B.) He literally can't form a sentence that makes sense or not contradict himself. There have been multiple talks or interviews where he downright was rude and interrupted others and denied statements that he had mad prior to this year.

Another party was the SPD, a social democratic union who wanted to elect Olaf Scholz. Now, he was involved in a financial scandal but other than that, he also just seemed a bit disrespectful or lacking in manners.

The third one was the Green Party with Annalena Baerbock. This party is mainly focused on climate change, making a green future and making it digital. She has been the best choice out of these three since she had clear ambition and was always able to answer questions.

Now, we have three other main parties who are in our parliament.

We have the AfD which has been questioned many times for being extremely right but they somehow always passed. They are homophobic, racist, anti maskers who basically were formed a few years ago and got popular because a lot of people where unhappy with Merkel during the immigrant crisis and voted this party out of protest.

We also have the FDP which claims to be liberal, yet is the textbook example of rich capitalist who just don't really do anything? Sure, they have never really been in power but they also just make empty promises.

And lastly we have Die Linke which is basically the party that is always seen as extremely left because they talk about topics like Gender etc. Many people don't vote for them as they see them as "too progressive."

Now, we have many other smaller parties but sadly none of them have really been able to reach 5% so they don't get a seat in our parliament. However there's great options here and much more fleshed out ones then the people 6 ones but since the main 6 are so established, especially with elder people, we won't see them change anytime soon.

So, yesterday's results showed that the SPD had the most votes overall, very closely followed by the CDU.

Now, both parties wouldn't have enough votes for a majority so they would need to get 1 or two other parties for a Koalition.

The SPD has made it quiet clear that their ideals are too different from the CDU to form one with them, so that leaves them out of the equation.

The AfD is disliked by every party and all have refused to cooperate with them which also means they aren't an option.

Die Linke sadly didn't reach the 5% mark. However they still got in since you need 3 Direktmandate or 5%. For anyone wondering what a Direktmandat is, this basically means that a Candidate of that party won in a certain region (they got the most votes and would be elected as a representative of that region.) Since they scored so low and barely got in, they also aren't an option which you guessed it only leaves the FDP and the Green party.

Now, before I continue I want to explain a bit more and what I touched upon in the last paragraph. When we have a federal election, you get two votes. The first is directly for a representative of a party from your region and doesn't influence the general vote as much. However this vote can secure certain people of parties a place in the parliament. The second vote is the important one since with that you vote for a party which will then elect the chancellor. So, there will be different vote results because there's two votes.

Going back to the original point, we know now that only 4 parties could form a Koalition. And it needs three of those to form a majority.

The options for that Koalition would be the SPD, the Green Party and the FDP (which is also known as Ampel Koalition which basically means traffic light Koalition since the SPD is red, the Green Party green and the FDP yellow.) This would not be ideal however it would be what the majority of votes represent and would want (this is more left than the last Koalition and would mean that the people who voted based on climate change would hopefully be listened to.) When forming a Koalition it is important to note that certain goals of the parties will be compromised since they all tend to aim for different things which means you should form a Koalition with the parties that least make you compromise your goals. This coalition would mean that Olaf Scholz becomes chancellor which would not be ideal but the Green and SPD would mean that climate politics might actually become serious and they also have more similarities. We would still have the FDP which sucks but at least two other better/good parties.

The second option would be the CDU, the Green Party and the FDP, also known as Jamaica Koalition because the CDU is black. Now, this is what a lot of us don't want because a.) We dislike the CDU and know they won't do shit and b.) We know the FDP also won't do shit. Furthermore this would mean that Armin Lachet becomes chancellor which is bad. Additionally, the Green Party would completely lose credibility since they only gained so many votes because of their climate ideals which would all not be meet should this happen (the CDU doesn't care and the FDP is capitalist, so they wouldn't do some of the major changes the Green Party wants to do.)

For now, we don't know who will be chancellor or which of these options will happen since the FDP and the Green Party want to talk with each other first and then approach the SPD/CDU. Since they are smaller but still know that there decision is the decided, they want to first look which party most likely fits them. However, Christian Lindner, who is the head of the FDP had already said that they think the SPD is too far left which is why a lot of us are worried. (I would also like to point out that that statement is complete bullshit but you probably already got that from my tone. The SPD is left but in reality probably more centre than anything else. The only actual left parties of the big 6 are Die Linke and Die Grünen in my eyes and even the last one is more leaning for me. Might also be because I am very heavily left but yeah.)

We are currently just waiting for the decision and disaster to happen.

[shadowfae]

We’re all pretty aware that the tumblr otherkin community is at a huge decline; I was wondering if you have any theories as to why that is?

American Protestantism, the decline of queer oppression in North America and the AIDS crisis, helicopter parenting, web 3.0, morality politics, and  Tumblr’s porn ban; roughly in that order and rolled up into one bombshell that was a few years in the coming but nobody really saw it and understood it until it was far too late.

That was a mouthful and probably only made sense if you follow current cyberpolitical theory. For some of you reading this, as with every other hot take I have this has a chance of being passed around, that alone is enough. But for others who had no idea what I just said and need the ELI5 version, let me explain that. Buckle up, this’ll be a long one, and will go into fandom history a bit as well because it is actually relevant.

As we know, tumblr is a very American-centric platform. Twitter is also this way, but less so, but tumblr has it bad. Now, I’m ‘lucky’ in the fact that I’m Canadian and a twenty minute drive from the American border, so that puts me in the ‘privileged’ majority. (I say privileged because I’m not really sure what else to call it. Most of the information going around about politics either directly affects me or indirectly affects me approximately one or two links of contact away. Someone who’s only influenced by American politics because it makes their sister’s online friends sad is not going to be privileged in that way.)

This means that American politics and their social climate overwhelmingly affects tumblr’s social climate. This also bleeds through into other fandom spaces, on twitter, instagram, and Pixiv to name a few places; but here’s where I spend the majority of my time so here’s what I’ve witnessed.

America’s main religion, as far as I understand (from the raised agnostic and currently neopagan view I have), is some weirdass capitalistic-Protestantism that is so many miles from what the actual Bible says that if I were a betting man and knew more about cults than I did, I’d say it’s some weird fucking cult and never set foot in the country again for any reason that isn’t gaming free shipping through a PO box. If you have no idea what I just said but are at least vaguely familiar with Christianity, this graphic explains it pretty well. So we can see there’s some glaring issues with that ideal.

The decline of queer oppression and the rise of queer rights in North America, which is to tenderly include my own country but we all know when people say ‘in NA’ they mean ‘America, and Canada where it applies because the right-wing Republicans are really good in the propaganda department to convince everyone that Mexico is a drug-lords-and-anarchy wasteland to the point where even I don’t actually know what’s down there other than bad drivers and heat’; means two things. One, it’s a good thing by a long shot and do not mistake this as me thinking queer oppression being lessened is a bad thing. But two, it means that thanks to the AIDS crisis, queer folks lost a lot of first-person sources as history.

The queer elders in NA who survived are typically either a) bitter anarchists who are often POC, probably still dirt poor and do recreational drugs or b) university-tenured TERFs (trans exclusionary radical feminists). Category A are the people who Republicans have deemed worthless in every way, because racism, queerphobia, ableism, and all the other ways to be wrong and different and Evil that they can’t handle, because Jeezus would never want them to actually learn to love someone who wasn’t just like them, and they don’t have the compassion to do better. Category B are the people who want to be different in just a teensie little bit, typically with TERFs they want to be lesbians, but they don’t want to challenge the status quo. They’re fine with the way things work, they just want to be on top oppressing others over ripping the whole damn thing down and building a more forgiving system.

Now, due to all those ‘isms and the cheerfully malicious aid of the Republicans, pun not intended but drives home the cruelty of it all, we also see the rise of helicopter parenting. The invention of the internet did not really help this. Basically what you’ve got is a whole bunch of parents who saw the civil rights movement, just got access to the internet and things going viral, know the world is changing, and like all parents, they’re scared for their children. Now instead of parents knowing one or two people in their classes who just went missing one day and everyone assumed they ran away, they hear about eight homicides in the city of kids going to parks at night and dying. The Satanic Panic was another event around this time that contributed to that, but I’ll let you research that one.

This means that all of these parents, instead of doing what their parents typically did and let their kids wander off for the day so long as they’re back by sundown, they can’t let their children out of their sight. There might be a freak accident where their child is decapitated on the playground swing! Their baby might get murdered by an evil Satanist walking home from school! Their dearest darling might go online and tell their address to someone who’s got a 100% chance of being a pedophile who will show up and kidnap them in the night!

…You get the idea. 

Combine those three things I just established, what we’ve got is a lot of queer kids who have a lot of internalized shame for being different and wrong, because they’re queer, and they can’t find spaces offline to be themselves, because all of the elders who would do that are dead and/or inaccessible and their parents won’t let them go to any clubs that aren’t school-related, which they’ll never find a GSA or queer club because Republicans, ‘isms, propaganda, and the war on Category A queer adults have all done their best to ensure that those spaces don’t exist.

So you have a generation of kids who I am the youngest of. The first generation on the internet. The late Web 1.0 (usenets and Geocities) and early Web 2.0 (livejournal was the big one, ff.net too, also 4chan but fuck those guys) generation. What we were taught was: trust nobody on the internet with your real info no matter how much you like them, this is a wilderness and any crimes that happen won’t be punished or seen so don’t put yourself in a position where you’re going to be the victim of one, and everything you put online is never getting taken down so don’t put anything up that you’re not willing to have on the front page of your local newspaper.

This worked out pretty well, actually! You had kids who knew that if they got in trouble, there was no backup coming to save them. Because the form that backup might take - parents and police - wasn’t going to help. Best case, they’d be banned from their friends and online support groups for being queer. Worst case, they’d be jailed and put in juvie and conversion therapy and turn to drugs and become evil Satanists just like everyone says they secretly are already. So they learned very quickly to take care of themselves. Nobody was going to save them, so they learned to not need saving.

And then, well, Web 2.0 shifted to Web 3.0. Livejournal died because parents - the Warriors for Innocence was the big name - went “gasp how horrible my children are being exposed to the evil pedos and homosexuals they’re going to do drugs and die of AIDS!”. Which is uh. It’s filled with a lot of bigotry, and I’m not excusing them - absolutely I am not - but you can kind of see where they’re coming from, if you tilt your head and squint.

Either way, LJ died, tumblr took its place, Facebook was fast taking off, and the fandom folks who had seen mailing lists go inactive, web admins take their fanfic sites down due to copyright, entire fandoms burnt to the ground in flame wars, said ‘fuck that we’re making our own place’ and that’s how AO3 got made.

That’s important. A lot of folks move to AO3, because well, the rules let them. The rules say ‘you can throw literally anything up here so long as it’s fan content and is not literally illegal, so we don’t get taken down’. It’s a swing for the first generation internet users, those kids who know this place is a wilderness and are carving out our own sanctuary.

But. The children under us. The children for whom AIDS is a nightmarish fairy tale, for whom the ghost stories are conversion therapy, for whom know they can’t really talk to their parents about being queer but can trust they probably won’t get kicked out over it. The children who haven’t spent ten seconds without supervision except online, and their reaction isn’t ‘oh thank god I’m finally free to express myself’ but ‘if I get in trouble, who will protect me?’.

And there’s nobody there. Because we went in knowing there was no backup. And that was fine. But now, the actual adults have figured out that hey uh, maybe we should make cyber laws? Maybe we should make revenge porn and grooming children over the internet crimes? And they grew up with that. They grew up learning that no, even if your parents are suffocating and controlling, they’re always be there for you! Some adult will always be there to protect you!

That isn’t the case. It’s not. But they expect it, because it’s always been done for them. They don’t really want to change the status quo, because that means doing it themselves. They can’t do that, because they don’t know how, they’ve been controlled for every single part of their lives thanks to helicopter parenting and without that control, they don’t know how to keep their lives together, and they demand someone come and control it for them, without restraining them.

Effectively, they want someone to ensure they never face the consequences of their actions. Helicopter parents will rescue you from whatever you did, because you’re their precious baby and it doesn’t matter if you punched a kid, you can do no wrong and the other kid clearly started it.

But being queer is doing wrong. Being queer is something Jeezus doesn’t approve of. So they want to make it something he could approve of! But if it’s too off what they consider to be okay, if it’s too different and weird and wrong and evil, that can’t do, that’s still bad, and they’re precious angels, and children, and minors, why are we the adults not protecting them and letting them see it? Why aren’t we being just like their parents  but queer-friendly, why aren’t we protecting the children?

The adults who taught us were the children of those who died as a result of AIDS. The eldest of my generation knew some of them personally. My therapist’s younger brother died at 20 of AIDS, and she told me what it was like. But they don’t have that. These kids of web 3.0, they don’t have that. What they have is over-controlling parents, and the expectation that someone will always be there to protect them but hopefully in ways that don’t hurt them this time, no real understanding of why Category A queer elders are the way they are, and so much internalized shame that they have to do some pretty fancy logic-leaping to keep them from collapsing entirely.

They can’t turn into Category A queer youngsters, because they don’t know how to unravel the system around them, because they’ve never had to actually make choices in their lives and live with the consequences, because they don’t have the example of how to do it. They can’t unravel their internalized shame because again, that’s hard and they don’t have their parents to take away the consequences and pain. It doesn’t come easy to them, so it may as well not come at all.

But, you ask, if Category A queer elders aren’t around to teach the kids, then how are they learning anything positive at all? Well, Category B, our university-tenured TERFs, who don’t want to change the status quo but want to just be at the top of it instead.

For a lot of kids who don’t know how to make hard choices but want to be queer, this is an extremely attractive option. But when they go online to queer spaces, a lot of them say fuck terfs, we don’t support your hate, and they go ‘yeah okay that makes sense’. They can say fuck terfs without ever actually questioning why terfs are bad. They’re Bad and Evil, just like drug addicts, just like fairytale nazis, just like the evil homophobes.

And we saw them say ‘yeah fuck terfs’ and we were like, ‘aight you got it’ and we never questioned if they actually understood us. They didn’t. They didn’t, and we didn’t do enough to fix it, because not enough of us realized the problem. So terfs got a little sneaky. They hid behind dogwhistles and easy little comments, hiding their rhetoric in queer theory that you’ll absolutely miss if you just memorize it and never actually question it and understand why that point is being made.

This goes back to America sucking, because their school system is far more focused on rote memorization over actual logic and understanding of the text. They’re engaging with queer theory the way they’ve been taught, which is memorize and don’t think, don’t question. Besides, questioning and understanding is hard. Being shown different points of view and asked what they think is not only hard but requires them to go against all of the conditioning that says to just listen and agree and never question it, which goes back to tearing the system and internalized shame down, and we’ve established they can’t do that so naturally they don’t do that.

This begets, then, the rise of exclusionary politics. They’re turning into Category B queer youngsters, because we told them ‘hey that’s a terf talking point what are you doing’ and they never questioned why. They learned you can do all sorts of things, just don’t say X, Y, or Z, because they never thought deeply about it.

The children who have grown on Web 3.0 do not want to do any heavy lifting to make things easier for themselves long-run. They want to do as little as possible and have things get better for them. There isn’t enough of us left in Category A, because Category B terfs are very good at recruiting young folks and Cat. A is overwhelming poor, dead, and easily dismissed in the system as evil and bad, so we can’t exactly convince the young folks to listen. If all of the young kids could agree to tear down the system, a lot more older folks might listen. Change always starts with the young, and there’s a reason for that.

But Republicans have figured out, if you get people fighting, they never put together a force that can actually stop you. TERFs, who want the exact same thing as Republicans but with themselves on top, are doing this to queer youth, and Cat. A elders can’t fight back because there isn’t enough of them and the odds are against them, and the young folk like me who follow their lead.

People can kinda handle gay people. It’s not so far from the acceptable normal that it’s impassable. But you want them to handle kinky people? Gay people of colour? Kinky gay people of colour? Trans people? Those are bridges too far to step across. The original idea was to get the foot in the door with marriage equality and inch our way through with racial equality, sex positivity, dismantling ableism and perisexism (forgive me if that isn’t the word for anti-intersex ‘ism), and see if we can’t patch up the system instead of inciting a civil war over this and have to tear down the system entirely.

Well, we might’ve managed that if not for AIDS being the perfect ‘Jeezus is killing all the evil gay people for being sinners’ propaganda machine. As it stands now, not a chance in hell. So long as Republicans and terfs keep everyone fighting, nobody has the power to dismantle their empire, and they stay in power.

So then, you ask me, “Lu what the fuck does that have to do with the decline of otherkinity on tumblr???” and now that you’ve got all that background knowledge, here is your answer.

Those children who want their experiences curated for them and the evil icky content they don’t like to be gone because it disgusts them and anything that disgusts them is clearly sinful problematic and should be destroyed, are what we call ‘antishippers’, or anti for short.

They like being progressive. Sort of. They learned what Republicans and terfs have honed to a fine talent: keep people fighting, hold them to a bar they have to constantly make or risk being ostracized, and harass the people who don’t play along into getting out of your sight forever. Sound familiar?

They learned of otherkinity, and particularly fictionkind, because web 3.0 means if something goes viral on one site, it doesn’t just go viral on that site, it makes it to worldwide newspapers and twitter and nobody ever, ever fucking forgets it. They realized the following: “Hey wait, if I’m this character for realsies, not only does it help me deal with the internalized shame I’ve done nothing to actually fix because that takes work, I can also tell these people who draw gross content I don’t like they’re hurting me personally, and that actually sounds credible, and I can shame them into stopping”.

If this is your first time here and that sounds sickening, it damn well should, and I am so, so sorry that any of us had to witness this, and I am more sorry I and everyone else who personally witnessed this didn’t realize what was going on and put a stop to it. I answer asks and browse the tags and clear up misinformation and it isn’t just a genuine desire to help. It’s damage control, and my own way of trying to deal with the guilt of not stopping this. I’m well aware I couldn’t have seen it coming, I was a teenager myself still learning and no one person has that much power. I still feel like I should have done more, and I’ll do what I can to fix what’s within my power to fix.

So back to the story. This all culminates around 2016 or so. Trump wins the election, and every queer person ever knows they’re fucked, and the younger generation’s only ever heard horror stories, never seen actual oppression that this could bring. We’re all scared. We all don’t know what to do. Nobody has any answers or any control over the situation.

So they lash out. They attack others for drawing things they don’t like, for challenging them in literally any way, for asking them to reconsider the vile shit they just said, for so much as defending themselves from the harassment they just got. And when challenged, they yell “But I’m a minor! A literal child! How dare you attack me, clearly you get off on this, you evil pedophile!” and they sling around every insult in the book until one sticks. Pedophile is a pretty good one, so is abuser, and sometimes zoophile works out too. Freak is great, everyone gets right pissed off about it.

The fact that Category A queer elders were called pedophiles and freaks is not a fact they know or care about. The fact that they are quickly making every fandom community super toxic is also not a fact they care about. The fact that the ‘kin community has words and terminology and they actually mean shit, and the fact that they’re spreading misinformation faster than we can keep up with, are not facts they care about.

So they come in, take our terms, make it impossible for us to find new folks. They realize our anger is easily a power trip, because we’re already made fun of, so they get off on the little power they can find and make fun of us too, and then when we get rightfully annoyed and pissed off, they can hide behind being minors.

Then tumblr implements their porn ban, because nobody’s stopping them, because it isn’t profitable to have porn on here. Considering most of the otherkin community, and most fandom communities, are full of adults who do occasionally talk about NSFW things, and the fact that they’re just banning everyone who so much as breathes wrong, this begins the start of a mass exodus, scattering already fragile communities to twitter, pillowfort, dreamwidth, and a few other places. Largely, twitter, where you can’t make a post longer than a snappy comeback and where the algorithm is literally designed to piss you off as much as possible.

So community elders have largely left, because they can’t stand the drama and the pain of what’s happened, and that’s if they didn’t get banned for being kinky furries who do talk about how their kintypes merge with their sexuality. Most community members have also left or stopped talking about being ‘kin, because they get associated with antishippers and toxicity and it’s just not worth it. Those of us who are left get drowned out by misinformation and trolls and wishkin and antishippers who appropriate our terminology because it supports them getting a power trip, and whenever we argue, we get called pedophiles and freaks and worse.

And now there isn’t much left. I hope we get to find a better place. Othercon was a good place to talk about it, I did a whole panel (it’s on Youtube!) about what we want to do about it. But I don’t really have any answers. 

But to sum it all up... America’s political climate ultimately culminated in destroying queer spaces, and we survived, and then people who wanted to destroy smaller communities to get on top showed up and we were all but defenseless against something we had never, ever dealt with before on this scale.

One of my twitter mutuals mentioned how kinning and otherkin are now completely separate communities. It’s really the best I can do to keep hoping that continues, until nobody realizes the words are at all connected to each other. It’s the best anyone can hope for, now. I hate it. I hate every part of this. But maybe we can salvage what’s left.

[seewetter]

I just want some clarifications. Thanks for answering!

the criticism being made here is that since it's inception and throughout it's long history democracy has been exclusionary and has not being about some sort of 100% people power.

So maybe this comes down to what you later say (that this is how the subject is taught in US classrooms?) but it seems to me that you are arguing with a particular definition of democracy... one I'm not familiar with.

So to me, democracy is a word people use for different purposes.

For many anarchists, the only true democracy is by definition one with 100% people power (if by that you mean 100% universally consented to exercise of power).

For me, telling a "long history" of democracy is possible only by stringing together a variety of related but nonetheless separate phenomena. I don't think the Ancient Greek ostracizations would sound familiar to the Iroquois Confederation, for example.

that marxists who cling to the idealized conception of democracy, the sort that gets taught in grade school civics lessons as a means of state mythologization (at least in the us, anyway), are being idealists by not facing these facts

Again, I would really need to understand what the "idealized conception of democracy" is. Is it when people talk about democracy abstractly as a good thing for any reason in any context? Is it a specific set of defenses of democracy that quietly omit exclusionary realities and glorify real historical abuses of power?

Because I can think of contexts (like the French Revolution or the Haiti Slave Revolution) where "democracy" was not only the pipe dream turned nightmare that the revolutionaries fought for...but where some of the pie-in-the-sky hopes for how society might improve actually materialized.

If what you are talking about is a definition of democracy that allows us to downplay genuinely bad things, then I am not sure those are so entertwined with any definition of democracy known to me that I would wholeheartedly subscribe to your criticism.

I am familiar with Alain Badiou's expression "the true enemy of the Left today is democracy" though and can appreciate what he means...but Badiou is making more of a critique of how liberals use electoralism and blind faith in democratic institutions to lie to themselves about how bad things can and will get, while you seem to be making a critique of not liberals, but of the Left (of Marxists). So it might be helpful if you explained that a bit more.

and that those among them who defend eg china as Actually Existing Socialism are being hypocritical by not being willing to consider Actually Existing Democracies.

I know you are saying that, but I was more curious about what you conclude from observing this hypocrisy.

Is the hypocrisy: some Marxists are hypocritically endorsing human rights abuses in China, while attacking America for every problem there?

Is the hypocrisy: some Marxists defend actual China but not actual democracy? Why are they being so manipulative or dishonest with themselves?

Is the hypocrisy something else? Something I'm missing?

I tend to think of the people who defend China (and other such countries) as usually being quite misguided. Some of them are falling for state propaganda, others are orthodox Marxist-Leninists with an out-sized trust that the Chinese Communist Party must know what it is doing. I tend to think (since there is a global free market with lots of goods "Made in China" circulating in it) that China tends to not have much of a choice in what it does. That is to say: the Chinese government, as a rule of thumb, always has to remain competitive on the global market, which means following capitalistic rules (push workers to be hyper-productive, etc.). I don't really think it's plausible to call China's actions a model for socialism or an example of socialism.

But also your argument comes across a little bit like you are saying "why defend socialist China based on a real example but not democratic Europe (or America) based on a real example". And maybe the China-fans don't live in China and kind of see it from a distance, hoping that this powerful country will make things better somehow and offer a counter-example to where they live.

you can read further critiques of democracy here

I'll check that out, thanks!

i believe the case for socialism is different, due to its much more recent history, and that it wasn't an idea developed to describe an existing society, but rather an ideal to which socialists wanted to push society towards.

I don't think democracy is much different. When French Revolutionaries like St. Juste and Robespierre thought of democracy, the only examples they knew were examples implemented on a small scale (cities like Venice and Athens) and the failed Roman Republic (maybe? not even sure they knew about that).

Writers like Voltaire and Rousseau had to invent most of the democratic ideas from scratch: separation of church and state did not exist in Athens, where Socrates drank poison for the crime of "insulting the gods" (aseby). Nor did separation of legislative, judicative or executive arms of government previously exist. Rousseau had to invent pluralism and the idea of forming a consensus and ruling based on that consensus...it's not an idea that existed in, say, Venice.

Democracy as an ideal inspired people like Olympe de Gauges to make the case that women should have formal, legal freedoms to fully participate in public life. (And she probably would have loved the anarchist idea of "capacity", to mentally separate between what government says is your freedom and what you actually are able to do).

The main problem with democracy at that stage is that it argued "free markets are free and its a citizens right to build any company they desire weeeeee" and that allowed power to simply switch hands from kings, guilds, nobles and church to entrepreneurs and the politicians they bribe (sorry, I meant "politicians they lobby"). That's not really a problem with democracy though, that's a problem with freedom (the liberal idea of it).

the argument that 'words have meaning' holds more weight for socialism given the much shorter history of AES compared to AED, and that there has been vocal criticism from within the socialist movement since the earliest days of AES.

AES (actually existing socialism), AED (actually existing democracy)

I think this might be comparing apples to oranges.

Representative democracy realized itself in the form of the bourgeois state. There is vocal criticism of it by anarchists, but everyone else doesn't view the problems of the bourgeois state as problems of "democracy" as an ideal, but rather as problems with, for example, the bourgeois state. Does that make sense?

To me the problem with Ancient Athens isn't that it's democratic...but that its democracy conceived of the "demos" as only being specific "citizens", which to the Athenian establishment only included free men, not women or slaves. To argue that I need to attack democracy because Athenians had a limited form of it and it was bad, means to argue that there's something about the democratic character of Athenian society that we need to get rid of. And I don't think there is. If there is, I would like to know what it is.

And this applies to this whole conversation.

China isn't a problem because it is socialist. It isn't. China is trying to grow its economy by maximizing profits on the global free market. Their government's model is a pseudo-Confucian "harmonious society" (a father is a good father, a mother is a good mother) which we in the West would call "corporate fascism". Them using the word socialist to describe themselves doesn't make it so. Censors have banned the Communist Manifesto and Capital and large parts of Chinese Labour history are hidden and restricted.

the argument that some system has improved lives can just as easily be used to defend capitalism or even feudalism, so im not really moved by it.

But why?

That's the whole point! Capitalism and feudalism did improve lives.

If you want to critique them, you have to do so from the position of something that will be better than them! You have to make arguments along the lines of "capitalism has changed the world such that we have much less famine" followed by "and my proposal will improve upon capitalism by ending famine completely".

Otherwise what are you advocating? That we NOT recognize the improvements made historically by social change?

and yeah im asking marxists to just use a more appropriate term. the discussions brought up by this post point to democracy being more nebulous than many might realize or wish to admit.

But almost any political term is nebulous. I don't mean to be rude...but you can end up basically getting rid of "nebulous" words like freedom because libertarians exist or "nebulous" words like "revolution" because car commercials advertise "a revolutionary new design".

I agree that often we might run into problems from how many possible meanings there are for democracy. But that's a reason to ask clarifying questions and state our positions.

and if anything i think freedom is less nebulous, and therefore a better term to be struggling under the banner of.

Freedom is infinitely more important than democracy. And it is infinitely more relevant today. But that fact can be abused.

People can undermine institutions that to some degree protect those freedoms in the name of "freedom".

(TERFs try to enable a genocide in the name of women's rights, "Free Speech Absolutists" invoke freedom to normalize verbal abuse, puritanical opponents of slurs invoke the "free speech absolutists" in attempts to protect freedom that result in increased state surveillance and restricted freedoms)

Not to mention that democratic institutions are currently under assault by political forces like postmodern conservatism and fascism. Since the 2014-2016 period (from refugee crisis to Brexit to Trump), dictatorships loom or already exist in places like Brazil or the Philippines and political volatility leads to the election of leaders like Milei in Argentina or the new far-right government in New Zealand that is undermining democratic agreements with the Maori people. Not to mention the current ongoing imperialist interventions in Yemen, Sudan and Palestine.

In that context what exactly does being an opponent to democracy mean? And before you write me an essay about it: I am asking "in that context", because those are all examples of countries where the undermining of freedom is first felt as an exploitation of or undermining of democracy. In the case of Brexit, as an exploitation of a direct democratic vote! In the case of New Zealand, as an exploitation of the limits of representative democracy (though it should be noted: as a violation of the democratic principle of the protection of the minority). But in the other cases, as a series of explicitly non-democratic acts or of acts exploiting constitutional loopholes in actually existing institutions.

What is happening with the U.S.-British airstrikes in Yemen if not acts of terror committed without democratic mandate? What is happening in Palestine if not a genocide that can cost Biden his presidency due to democratic possibilities? What is Trump if not someone who when asked if he will respect electoral results should he lose, says "no", point blank. What is Milei's election if not the expression of people who are formally a democracy but live under the constant threat (and at times reality) of American non-democratic intervention and thus vote accordingly?

These are examples of democratic societies crumbling under the weight of their own contradictions, so I can't fault you for thinking there might be a problem here. I just disagree with the conclusion that this is a singular problem with a simple solution like "let's ditch democracy". I think we need to learn how to save what was good in society, to save the institutional protection of freedom (which is how I view democracy), from facing these many problems again.

but i believe marxists are a smart bunch and could figure some other name. maybe a name that relates to ideas like community, the commons, communes... i wonder what sort of term could be used to describe that...

Look, people still care about democracy. The word mobilizes people, politically. I would be a fool not to win people over for a more free society by advocating for things that are perhaps somewhat empty in their meaning but have positive connotations.

I don't see why that would be such a grave political error. I'll give those reading recommendations a look though and thanks for your answer. :)

why are there marxists who get super into defending democracy as a concept, even from itself? like, fair enough to look at american 'democracy' and say it's not real democracy (altho it is a bit funny when you contrast it with the frequent marxist defense of Actually Existing Socialism). but to also look at ancient greek democracy and still be like, 'no, real democracy is about people power. that ancient greek democracies had slaves is just proof they weren't real'. i'd think at some point that famous materialism of theirs would kick in and they'd give up holding on to an ideal democracy which is in contrast to all known democracy thus far.