Comment on Hexbear federation megathread
commiewithoutorgans@hexbear.net 1 year agoYou brought up the military and it’s emblematic of how you misunderstand the way exploitation and expropriation work by individualizing everything and lacking knowledge about the concepts of rent-seeking and exploitation generally. That’s why it was quoted.
I agree it’s a tangent at this point and that’s why I would like to stop discussing it here, but I think it’d be fruitful to understand how these concepts are related in a thread dedicated to such. It wasn’t a tangent when you used it as an example for “getting ahead” because it’s genuinely how you understand people could get ahead or avoid pitfalls of poverty. That’s why you used it.
It is a genuine way to avoid poverty for some (for others they end up homeless anyways because war is traumatic, even for the oppressors), but this getting ahead (usually by having some capital built up to let your “money work for you”) is always done by profiting off of others through rent-seeking, exploitation (paying less than the value produced), or expropriation (plain theft or contribution to global theft from imperialism). Working hard is something we love and encourage people to do to help their countries and themselves as much as they want or can, but that’s not what you’re really describing here, or you’re discounting the labor which is terrible and hard which doesn’t get the priveleges we got (think of any country in the Global South where miners work at least 10 times as hard as us and get almost nothing for it, or even the cleaners who are almost always POC in America who get underpaid under the table but work harder than us).
I assume much of this rubs you the wrong way because these seem unrelated and terrible mischaracterizations. to you. But I assure you, these ideas are founded in hundreds of years of theories, data, and experiences which we’ve read about to conclude this. Maybe you disagree even after understanding it completely, fine, but it’s fairly obvious to those of us who’ve read both liberal philosophers and economists and Marxists that you don’t understand what us leftists are saying.
Now I’ll leave the discussion and disengage because you don’t want me here. You can reply if you want and I’ll stay quiet or start a thread where I’ll contribute.
Firemyth@lemm.ee 1 year ago
See there’s a few actually relevant points there. You are right that I disagree with the ideal and tenants of communism/marxism at a base level- those are great ideas that never can be realized as people aren’t going to abide by the concepts in reality. Someone will always attempt to manipulate the system through avarice, laziness, whatever. So working for the appropriate value won’t ever actually work. On top of that - people are going to always disagree on what a particular unit of work is valued at. There is no way to make a unit of work equal a particular value- doing so results in experts in their craft being paid the same as novices in their craft. This also results in no one being able to own anything unless you built it yourself from the materials you produced yourself.
Going your route will simply result in mediocrity everywhere and everyone not getting enough of what they need. You ultimately wind up right back in the same situation with some slob running things and taking more than his fair share and simply writing a tenet or law up to cover his butt.
as to the last half of your comment. what you said is absolutely saying everyone has to go kill civilians for their free education. Did you mean to say that? maybe not- but it’s what you said. So to that i’ll just say you should probably say what you mean rather than relying on the insane rhetoric that it actually is. We don’t all live in lemmygrad/hexbear/comradeship and we don’t know the inner talking points you guys have spun up. Nor do we want to. Because traditionally you aren’t in here for real discussion but for the lulz and memes and to own the west/imperials/bourgeoise