#neocommunism

[cristineagoe]

Iliescu judecat pentru sângele vărsat! #mineriada #iliescu #petreroman #neocommunism #violence #crime #miners #beating #fight #theft #drogurilapenețeu #rape #arson #gds #apadorch #humanrights #ant #tattoo #bucharest #romania (at Bulevardul Timisoara,bucuresti.)

[chocolategnorbu]

We can criticize netdragon/jumpstart all we want but what we ARE NOT gonna do is start romanticizing Viacom tvt era neopets. Viacom literally destroyed the site in every fashion and once it bled it's cash cow dry it just....stopped updating the site for like two years and in the process got caught in a massive security breach because of their refusal to update or give a shit about anything that didn't immediately make them money. Remember having to BEG for YEARS to get a ticket looked at?

Just because you have the rage goggles on doesn't mean you have to put the nostalgia goggles on.

[katarafirelady]

Hey neopetters! This year, r/place is coming back to reddit! We at r/neopets have made a plan to create a little kacheek, and we would love if any of you on tumblr would help! 

if the canvas is 2k x 2k pixels, (or bigger) our spot is 1999, 1115 (far right side, nearish the middle between top and bottom)

if the canvas is 1k x 1k pixels, our spot is 311, 652

This is the image we are doing

We will be breaking into three teams : a border team, a words team, and a kacheek team.

If you are on the r/neopets discord, please reply to Jeran's poll to say which team you want to be a part of. if you are not on the discord, please chat me here to choose a team! :)

[yharnamopossum]

art trade with @disco-aisha~✨

flavour text from here and bg is this wearable :o

[hegemonicpolitics-blog]

An Introductory Rant

Part 1

"All I know is that I am not a Marxist." So allegedly said Marx on the topic of a particular French self-proclaimed Marxist party. My own self-application of this idea has come at a mild sense of disappointment, but I think is fundamentally reasonable.

I've attempted to move by thought towards the neo-communism of writers like Alain Baidou and Slavoj Žižek. In understanding Marx I still wish to hold to the idea of the historical dialectic, at this current stage with its worker/capitalist antitheses, is only resolved in communism, that is, the complete abolition of wage labour and private property. However, the 'human nature' argument that I've desired so long to ignore has continued to resurface.

In a situation where the wealth of society is held in common, we understand from game theory and the 'tragedy of the commons' concept, that self-interest threatens a collective-interest when it comes to the commons. As soon as self-interest triumphs, all self-interest becomes necessary because the collective-interest is diminished in its returns.

The necessity then is to impose collective-interest, which fundamentally is what we do in democratic societies a lot of the time. While neoliberalism and the right has continually said that unbridled capitalism shall eventually, through the 'invisible hand' or 'trickle down economics', distribute wealth in a fair fashion, this is simply not the case, and we have observed the impacts of decreasing regulation and control on people and the environment.

Social democracy naturally mediates between pure liberalism and pure communism; we place regulation, restriction, taxation and the other thing upon society in order to reign in the worst excesses. Naturally this is not perfect; if democratic it exists in conflict with power interests, and thus cannot survive indefinitely unlike communism, and on the other hand it keeps intact capitalism as a system, only emulating or simulating a more egalitarian approach artificially. Wage labour relations and the relations of production still exist, they are simply softened.

However communism, in the forms we have witnesses develop in the world, has the same problems. Fundamentally capitalism still exists, simply in another form: state capitalism. The state exploits surplus value and converts workers' output into exchange-value, continuing the same alienation as under capitalism.

The key differences are two-fold: it removes the progressive tendencies of wealth distribution of capitalism (in creating new wealth through investment), thus rendering it considerably less prosperous, and it requires significant energies to enforce. In this way it is less efficient, less free and continues the same fundamental capitalist functions.

In order to de-commodify the labour of humans, it abolishes market mechanism and gives birth to economic planning. In this sense, it becomes even worse, because it replaces liberal democracy with bureaucracy.

It has its advantages. The exploited surplus value can be redistributed or put into building the commons for the collective-interest. But once again this relies on the new bureaucracy to hold as its class-interests the interests of the proletariat.

So this is my opposition to neocommunism. It is utopian in a sense, in that it fits in with an old fashioned Hegelian concept; that of the ideal, which is somehow achieved through the resolution of the dialectic. It is fundamentally unscientific, and also seems to rely too heavily on the Hegelian concept of the Geist.

Even in Marxism's anti-humanist materialism, there is fundamentally some sort of Geist at conflict with itself who discovers its alienated parts are in fact part of its whole. It is obfuscated by cries of 'materialism!' and 'science!', but the former doesn't resolve the inherent idealism in Marxism Hegelian roots, and the latter only works in the context of the 19th century German notion of 'science', which is thoroughly rejected by scientists today who adhere to genuine rigour and genuine physical phenomena.

Neo-communism understands the Soviet experience, but it shrinks back into its shell and proclaims the vaguest of all possible concepts of communism in order to justify its righteousness. It proclaims that we cannot allow ourselves to throw in the towel to capitalism and accept wage labour as necessary. But it provides absolutely nothing except a fetishisation of the word that indicates not political, economic and philosophic thoroughness, but the sad musings of ex-communists pining for the Soviet era with their own petty devolved Leninism.

Žižek is a sad old curmudgeon who can't quite accept being called a social democrat, and so gives into to old fashioned Leninism hidden behind a 21st century democratic mask. Communism is dead, wake up.

PS: Communism can survive, so long as it asserts itself as fundamentally utopian, rather than making claims to scientific truth.

Part 2

Hegemony is the perfect launchpad for those departing Marxism for social democracy, or, as Laclau and Mouffe refer to it, radical democracy. While the two terms are not the same, they are similar in philosophy if not in modern application. I would attach myself to the socialist strains of social democracy, not those deliberative and technocratic ones that have developed since the 1990s.

But why hegemony? For this we must return to Marx. Many aspects of Marx have been rejected by an array of thinkers. His economics requires serious refinement and tries to distill it down the fundamental scientific laws that do not necessarily materialise. Aspects of his critique are certainly useful; his explanation of the labour theory of value and how that gives way to surplus-value are innovative concepts that need to be integrated into any critique of capitalism. But the tendency for profits to fall, for wages to fall, and crises of overproduction have not surfaced to the degree that he believed they would.

His dialectics have been problematic as well, due to the issue of the collective-interest that is supposedly completed by the synthesis of the capitalist/workers antitheses. I discuss this in my rant on neo-communism in more detail.

But his conception of capitalism in the sense of the base-superstructural relationship, integral to the creation of sociology, is important. While the crude economic determinist explanation of this phenomena has been discounted, that of the Second International, we can nonetheless understand it as a great model for interpreting society.

We cannot, as will be demonstrated by putting even the slightest amount of thought to it, assert the 'primacy of the base'. The base-superstructural relationship is the totality of human experience; neither part spontaneously generates new conditions or relations, they solely feed into each other. Thus, the only distinction between the two is perhaps which exists first. There can be no primary role that is anything but a human distinction.

Alternatively a distinction can be made; the base is the only 'real' element, while the superstructure is fundamentally unreal. But this ten effectively becomes a reductionist philosophy, which undermines sexual, gender, racial and environmental struggles down to anti-capitalism. This we cannot do once again, as the economic determinism of old fashioned Marxism does not provide any ability to make scientific predictions, and is thus we cannot assert this reductionism as truth. If we could determine in which ways scientifically that capitalism enshrines the gendered, sexual, racial and environmental issues that we come up against, certainly those could be integrated, but understanding them as coming solely from the base is disingenuous and beyond what we can prove, and in the end undermines many aspects of these struggles.

But a nuanced, reciprocal base-superstructural relationship does help us understand one thing: hegemony.

To be continued...

[slawek1963]

Les jolies colonies de vacances ... en Vatican

[journalgen]

Journal of the Aden Neocommunism and Wicked Science Society

[flyingbizdeals]

The West Reckons With Beijing's Neocommunism The West Reckons With Beijing's Neocommunism Source link

[thegleampt2fromtheglowpt22001]

I read "neocommunism" as "necrocommunism" and I can't describe my reaction properly but I think my brain had to reboot after that

[011011100011000101110100011010]

Looks like November is going to be a real show down: socialism or fascism. If you think this is only the year of Trump and euro-Nazis, you haven’t been paying attention to what’s been happening on the ground. From the vantage point of the Future, this looks like baby steps, but even Neo-Communism has its birth pangs by ironclad laws of history. The prols bite back.

[valntinamanjarrez]

NeoCommunications

La historia del hombre cambió drásticamente desde que la comunicación entre ellos se estableció. Después llegó la escritura y paso a paso se construyeron las sociedades. Aunque existan tantos lenguajes, posturas, y creencias en el mundo los humanos se hacen entender y a veces las palabras sobran, muchas veces las palabras sobran. El amor es un elemento en el cuál no siempre se necesitan expresar ideas sino sentirlas y lograr que la persona a quien amas las sienta igual. Desde el boom de los Smartphones hemos visto como las relaciones interpersonales han ido cambiando con ellos, más letras menos voces, menos compañías más mensajes en espera. El contacto físico se ha enfriado es más efusivo que antes y las situaciones como las personas, efímeras. Pero esto no es un escrito para deprimir a nadie sólo planeo resaltar los elementos que fortalecen las débiles relaciones con las que lidiamos. Tengo buenos amigos que viven en el exterior y usualmente no hay tiempo para hablar con todos y a la vez tener una vida productiva. Sin embargo gracias al internet hoy existen unos mensajes más condensados que están acompañados de una imagen y que aunque no dicen mucho, logran sacar una sonrisa en las personas, estas imágenes son los memes. Cada vez que un amigo taggea a su mejor amigo en una imagen de estas es una forma corta de saludar y hacerlo reir a distancia. “Si no puedes contra algo, únetele”, no? Personalmente pienso que es una linda forma de recordarle a alguien que tiene un chiste interno que solo comparten entre sí por vivencias pasadas y darle a entender que aunque no hablen seguido lo estás pensando. En un mundo donde las relaciones son cada vez más frágiles este nuevo tipo de comunicaciones, que ni siquiera requiere palabras, fortalece ese cariño que a causa de la distancia a veces se ausenta.

[ayeun]

in the past two weeks i’ve had three people approach me for art trades and i feel overjoyed because these people told me they saw my art from someone else’s page and decided to mail me directly asking for trades and hHHHHH i am just happy that my art is getting noticed around the community,, neocommunity is prob the kindest out there ;UU ; 

[neiver1-blog]

Gender ideology

#lgbt #neocommunism #education #arte #neiver #art #artforlife #prolife #provida

[hegemonicpolitics-blog]

Radical social democracy is the way forward for the left. We can rehash time and time again our criticisms of communism; the critiques offered by the Post-Marxists, the vagueness and misplaced nostalgia in the world of neocommunism, the irrelevancy of all the 20th century variations of it from Luxemburg's to Stalin's to Trotsky's. What we do understand is that social democracy has been hijacked. Centrist consensus-based politicking has led to the victories of demagogues on the right. The left needs to respond to this anger by constructing its own antagonisms to win popularity and then manifesting these antagonisms in real policy. This involves using the language of the 1% versus the 99%, laying bare tax avoidance and emphasising that the population is being robbed. Creating the same populist anger at the establishment is possible, except this time our critiques are genuine, for the establishment isn't a system that enshrines the rights of minorities of all sections, it is in fact the capitalist machine. The left must make use of this kind of propaganda, attacking real and concrete issues and building antagonistic, Jacobin-friend-foe-style attitudes, if it wishes to push through a real egalitarian agenda. Centrism will not win, it neither inspires nor mediates between the left and right; it simply is a punching bag for both sides. So why not centrism? Because turning to centrism forgets what left and right mean. The right, in its most distilled fashion, fights for the interests of the already privileged and powerful. The left fights for those without power or privilege. That is the fundamental distinction, the aim of 'sensible moderates' is to try make small concessions for the weak while sucking up to those in power. Being left is the only morally right course.

[journalgen]

Bulletin of Structural Neocommunism

[e1-links]

Как так вышло, что даже самая успешная экономика мира страдает от кошмаров капитализма и чем это грозит России?