The unpublished preface to Orwell’s Animal Farm
mindmatters.ai
mindmatters.ai
And after all, your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore the best qualified to run the farm—in fact, there couldn’t have been an Animal Farm at all without them: so that what was needed, (someone might argue), was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs.
https://www.openculture.com/2013/11/t-s-eliot-rejects-george...
Eliot was surely wrong to call Animal Farm "Trotskyite" but that was probably his way of noting that Orwell's critique of communism was coming from the left, not the right. This fits with another fun fact: the most famous fan of Orwell's unpublished preface is Chomsky, who has been championing it for decades.
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/noam-chomsky-90th-...
(Search the text of the article for the word preface to directly find the reference).
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/noam-chomsky-90th-....
edit: Unless you link to The Nation, I guess, which bungles the scroll for no reason if you're instantly focusing the page (i.e. not middle clicking).
https://winstonchurchill.org/publications/finest-hour/finest...
In the context of things like
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/winston-churchill/11370727/...
it seems like he was more of an all-round animal lover who once delivered an amusing pig quip.
> The truth is that Dickens's criticism of society is almost exclusively moral. Hence the utter lack of any constructive suggestion anywhere in his work. He attacks the law, parliamentary government, the educational system and so forth, without ever clearly suggesting what he would put in their places. Of course it is not necessarily the business of a novelist, or a satirist, to make constructive suggestions, but the point is that Dickens's attitude is at bottom not even destructive. There is no clear sign that he wants the existing order to be overthrown, or that he believes it would make very much difference if it were overthrown. For in reality his target is not so much society as ‘human nature’. It would be difficult to point anywhere in his books to a passage suggesting that the economic system is wrong as a system. Nowhere, for instance, does he make any attack on private enterprise or private property ... His whole ‘message’ is one that at first glance looks like an enormous platitude: If men would behave decently the world would be decent.
I can't help but feel like Eliot's "public-spirited pigs" are the same thing as Dickens' "good rich men".
Sounds to me like an argument towards an argument exactly for focusing on "public-spirited pigs" and how to get them into power, rather than how to overthrow the existing order with something you don't know will work out or revert to something worse.
The key is, then, to set up a system that improves the chances of having them in charge, rather than selfish ones.
Democratic socialism. Humanism. Anti-fascism.
In his early years, anarchism. But I think not so much in his later writings (correct me if I'm wrong).
(asserting my own beliefs now) The fact that most of a century has passed during which we've seen those pitfalls repeated many times since, and no effective mechanism for protecting against them has surfaced, I think that the project of socialism must be abandoned.
According to Cambridge dictionary, Capitalism is,
“an economic and political system in which property, business, and industry are controlled by private owners rather than by the state, with the purpose of making a profit”
So the alternative is state control and history tells us that only works with certain endeavours - e.g. military - and can be catastrophic when applied to things like agriculture (see collectivization).
The key element of capitalism is not so much private vs. state ownership, it's ownership (and thus profit extraction) based on capital.
And the effect of is allowing control to be arbitrarily skewed towards wealthy individuals who don't need to work, while leaving others with no control at all, even over the work they do, while still needing to work to sustain themselves. Additionally, this skew tends to increase over time as capital accumulates profits exponentially.
The alternative is basing control on something other than capital. But that actually leaves a lot of different options, not just state ownership. What if the only legal form of corporation were the cooperative, with companies being collectively owned by, and profits distributed to, their employees, equally?
And in the past century we've also seen the harmful influence of extreme capitalism on democracy, including social democracy. Clearly the power of money on politics needs to be limited.
But tue hardest problem is how to ensure that the voters are well informed. They need reliable news media, but the two obvious ways to finance that are through capitalism and the state, both of which are suspect.
The thing is, in the "government controls the means of production", you necessarily cede to the government sufficient control of everything - news media and everything else: that is, by definition, totalitarianism. The government can easily use this to prevent "bad views" from being aired. It doesn't even require evil intent. The gov't can think it's doing the right thing by protecting people from "misinformation" - you can see this debate today in America, and I understand there's a debate today in Germany about actually banning an overly-right-wing political party. And when a government comes to view itself as being truly good, the only legitimate defender of the people, it'll be very tempting for them to stomp on media and even voting freedom even with those good intentions.
There are also other ways to have workers control the means of production to varying degrees. Labour unions, workers councils, etc share control between the workers and the owners. A democracy in which workers vote for a government that controls regulations is another. Co-ops are a great one.
And of course according to the communist ideal, there isn't even a central government to control the means of production.
The big questions are whether it's possible to reach that ideal, how, and whether it's even stable. Countries calling themselves "communist" in our world certainly failed dramatically. But social democracy has been fairly effective in giving at least some degree of control to the workers. Their big problem is that in a still fundamentally capitalist system, money still rules, and powerful corporations can often either control or ignore the government and take away the power of the workers. That has definitely happened in the US, and to a lesser extent in parts of Europe, over the past half century.
- Enforcing worker regulations (min wages, max hours etc) - Provision of essential utilities (water, fuel, education, transport, healthcare etc) - Fiscal policies (corporation taxes, infrastructure spending, customs duties etc)
It's the structure of the political and legal systems that really determine how well and fairly those resources are distributed. If you have a political system without checks and balances writing laws, and/or a legal system that does not apply the law equally to all its citizens, then you're going to have a bad time, no matter the economic system you use.
All are a from of argument that some people should be be placed in a position of irrevocable power over others (by accident of birth into a privileged race or class) ... and that's all OK if they treat their underlings well. Not that "well" should ever be as well as those on top treat themselves ...
The argument is that that you cannot organize a society without having some people in positions of power of some sort. And if you explicitly try to avoid that, you'll end up with someone grabbing it anyway.
So it's better to instead think of how you can set up your society to explicitly give the greatest power only for a limited time, with transparency and accountability, and ideally find a way to give it only to competent and well-meaning people.
Sure, if we're thinking in a vacuum. Even if we go religious, what's the difference between modern prison and the Garden of Eden? It's part of why we call tech environments with a lot of amenities a "walled garden".
Digression aside, we have millenia of knowledge to know that never ends well and millenia of knowledge to know that slavery is never about trying to treat people well to begin with.
>All are a from of argument that some people should be be placed in a position of irrevocable power over others (by accident of birth into a privileged race or class) ... and that's all OK if they treat their underlings well
In theory, yes. And like slavery we have millenia of knowledge on how NOT to run a country.
But unlike Slavery we have seen that the alternative to no government ends worse. So it's an unfortuante compromise needed for a society in that someone needs to make widespread decisions. The more modern (but not necessarily best) methods to prevent corruption is simply to make sure a person is never in that seat of power for too long.
'Intentionally they create two different for a lack of better'?
P-:
He also wrote quite a lot about his political views, which were sharpened after visiting anarchist Catalonia and fighting in the Spanish civil war. See e.g. https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
> The Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.
I personally share the same philosophy that morality swings above its weight in the grand scheme of society. It's fully within our control as individuals and therefore a worthy target for literary influence.
Which in turn reminds me of Federalist No. 51:
"If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. "
The work of democracy is to continuously resist capture. There is no end of history. There is no state of rest for democracy. Democracy is the work of resisting capture by powerful interests and restoring power-sharing just over and over and over again.
-- Danielle Allen, on the Ezra Klein podcast <https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/14/podcasts/ezra-klein-podca...>
There's a reason why I chafe greatly with viewpoints which focus exclusively or even significantly, on, say, corporate vs. government power as the greater evil or risk. I'll note that within the past century, religious power was a frequently-cited risk even amongst great power states (it's largely a factor in less-powerful states, though not entirely absent from today's stage).
The true concern is actually power itself, however that is manifested. That might be political, it might be commercial, it might be religious, it might be cultural or social, it might be technological. I'm informed here by the "four estates" (church, nobility, burghers, commoners), sometimes a fifth (press), as well as Lawrence Lessig's Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace: Law, Norms, Market, Architecture.
Ultimately, power devolves from some control nexus from which a lesser effort need be asserted than the benefit or result which comes from it.
-- Anonymous
Without men, there would be neither wars or skyscrapers; neither destruction or creation; neither hate nor love. We are not angels but we need not be devils, but without the devils as examples, how to choose right from wrong?
There is also: https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/97379851-without-the-m...
But these concepts are absolutely critical to ensuring the real world functions.
In this way lord of the flies is another take worth reading
The second thing that ended reformism amongst Western communists was World War 1, which was used as a cudgel against any kind socialism and allowed the state to essentially use wars as a pretext to destroy communist movements and expel antiwar radicals from popular leftwing parties.
And the rest of people didn't want nothing to do with it. The SPD, when it was an explicitly Marxist and revolutionary part in Germany for example, got up to 35% of the vote.
It's after the expulsion from the SPD and the bans on various communist activities that Western European communists were decided on revolution. It wasn't because they were cartoonish bloodlusting villains.
The statement that "the rest of the people wanted absolutely nothing to do with it" is true in that most European countries never had majority support for revolutionary socialism. But in many countries (Germany, France, Italy, Spain) it was a substantial block, in many places on par with support for more moderate socialists/social democrats.
Revolutionary socialism is a highly fringe political viewpoint today, but it was much more popular in the inter-war years. It took a long time for people to learn of (and start to believe!) the atrocities that occurred in the revolution in Russia.
What were those conditions in Germany that were so different from every other Western European country?
This is different from ideal communism or let's just call it fantasy communism. Because the ideal form of communism where everyone is equal and nice never happened and will probably never happen
Cold War era anti-communism did not draw distinctions between Soviet "socialism" and democratic socialism although the Soviets explicitly purged democratic socialist movements and organizations and preferred leaving Spain to the fascists rather than allowing them to come out on top.
Soviet "socialism" also isn't communism -- heck, the term "actually existing socialism" was coined to ridicule "utopian" leftists who wanted to achieve communism in Soviet-affiliated countries. Communism, a stateless society without private ownership, was always only considered the stated end goal of these countries, even when they actively took steps to prevent any progression towards that goal.
If Orwell's detractors have been right on one thing about Animal Farm it's that people on the right are too ignorant to treat it as anything other than a condemnation of all forms of socialism although he specifically wrote it to condemn the Soviet Union's corrupt bureaucracy and the exploitation perpetuated by all forms of statism, whether under the guise of fascism, Soviet "socialism" or capitalism. The actual morale is fairly straightforward: the pigs get corrupted because they try to replace the humans but the oppression stems from the system affording the humans (and pigs) their position, not their species. You can't replace one state power with another and hope this will result in the abolition of the state because the state exists to perpetuate itself.
The closest we are to real “communism” I would say is in Switzerland, where people vote together on any issue in a direct democratic way. They seem to reject economical communism, where the means of production are owned together.
Most swiss people would probably disagree with this statement.
Isn't the whole point of communism to give power to the people?
Arguably a reform stating something along the lines like, say, "non-publicly traded corporations above $1MM annual revenue for three years or employing at least 20 people must transfer ownership to a worker's council all employees automatically are members of for the duration of their employment" (this could be extended to take into consideration repayment of the initial investments of the founders as for any other loan) and similarly limiting publicly traded corporations while also offering government grants for founding employee-owned corporations (before hitting the revenue or employment cap) would pretty much tick that checkbox and I don't think that would really be "communism" in a meaningful way, even if I think it's an overall improvement for society.
I see communism as equivalent with anarchism so my definition isn't shared by all "communists" but the point isn't to "give power to the people" but to abolish the systems which give individuals power over other. That includes a lot of "SJW"/"woke" topics like white supremacism, cis-heteronormativity, ageism/gerontocracy (i.e. treating children as lesser beings rather than persons with intellectual and physical limitations), ableism (i.e. treating people with intellectual and physical limitations as lesser beings) and "the patriarchy", as well as capitalism. That's quite the laundry list so I'm fine with incrementalism.
Of course some communists like Engels conflate(d) hierarchy with the vague nation of "authority" to create a strawman against this notion of communism, i.e. that anarchists not wanting individuals to have power over others means they can't do violence in order to help bring about communism or defend it -- which of course is nonsensical because opposing systems of power does not contradict using power (i.e. violence) in opposition of those systems. There are other ideological disagreements too but it boils down to anarchism being "communism but more so" and Marxist-Leninists being of the opinion that that is worse and that therefore not being able to achieve that with their means (e.g. vanguardism) is not an issue.
Most anarchists however tend to focus on prefiguration: creating environments in which communism can take hold when the superstructure collapses or goes away. This can take the form of mutual aid programs, weapons and first aid trainings, farming/housing cooperatives and so on just to name some of the more overt examples. Arguably the Black Panthers came closer to communism than the Soviet Union.
Think Walter, if anarchism and dem socialism is really doomed to fail, why would you the government need to assassinate leaders and perform regime changes :) surely it would be cheaper (and more effective) to let them crumble?
The usual cause for failure is people get disenchanted with living in a commune and leave. It usually takes 1 to 2 years for their communist zeal to be ground down by reality.
It's quite a distinction.
If you want to join a commune in the US, google for one and join it. Nobody is going to stop you or punish you for it. You can start one yourself with some like minded friends.
He is right that the Soviets said that communism was the end goal they would inevitably achieve. But communism in that sense was never real. The real communism was being ruled by the people selling that aspirational fantasy.
If people didn't fall for people "selling an aspirational fantasy", we wouldn't have made it out of feudalism. Early anti-capitalists just severely underestimated how resilient capitalism is (i.e. most of them did not anticipate Disney selling you anti-capitalist messages as a product, or "late-stage capitalist recuperation"). Given how long Europe was stuck in feudalism it's not at all unreasonable to expect capitalism to be replaced by something better -- as long as you don't expect it to happen in your lifetime.
America has, since its inception, spawned over 10,000 communes. None were successful.
Communism was supposed to be a stateless utopia, and Lenin definitely did not get rid of the state. His wasn't even a dictatorship of the proletariat, it's a dictatorship by a small elite.
Social democracy is much closer to a "dictatorship" of the proletariat, because there workers actually have a voice.
It's important to realise that when Marx wrote his thing, many "democracies" still didn't allow poor people to vote. Marx would have been much happier about western capitalist denocracies than about Soviet communism. Although obviously the next step has to be to get money out of politics. And out of news media. Giving the people a voice doesn't help much if they're easily manipulated by the rich and powerful.
The novel is a thinly disguised morality play about aristocracy -- "humans" who own and govern 'their farms' ! -- with various types of humanity depicted as "animals".
The moral of the story is that regardless of the intelligence and abilities of the common man ("pigs"), the natural order of things is for 'Farmers' to own and run the 'Farm' and its 'Animals'.
Pigs joining Farmers actually occurred a couple of centuries earlier in England. It was called a "Corporation".
I think if you read more of Orwell's writing besides just Animal Farm, you'd see that he didn't think this was the only possibility. He was a democratic socialist and humanist.
If he was saying it's the natural order of things under monarchy and under communism, that doesn't mean he was claiming it to be the natural order of things under all possible political systems. His political views had a wider scope than just this one short story.
At the time there was a sizable movement not on political lines but one of emergent sociology that people could be conditioned en masses by (it seemed largely assumed) by conditioning. Take the book Walden Two written by B.F. Skinner during WWII years, (or Living Walden Two documenting places where it was tried and failed) of conditioning altruistic and intelligent societies, the not working out due to the positivist view of social truth, rather than social 'truth' being a much more dynamic, and endogenously generated, concept, perhaps, is it really ontologically 'is'. And to circle back on learning/reflection in technology, much effort being applied in AI to assist in grasping such 'truths' as repeating mistakes of the past (especially LLMs missing verticals of specialist knowledge), however I diverge.
Book recommendation:
Walden Two, B.F.Skinner
Living Walden Two, Hilke Khulman
It's more specific than that. Eliot has in mind the exile of Snowball (obviously Trotsky), and the betrayal of his ideals by Napoleon. One might, or might not, expect a Snowball-led farm to ultimately disintegrate into the same totalitarianism that Napoleon's farm (and all Communist societies in history), but we don't get to see that outcome, so Snowball remains the pure, unimpugned ideal. Basically, it's "We've never seen true Communism in action"; whether that statement is said seriously (as actually has been done elsewhere in this discussion (!)), or sarcastically as is more often done nowadays, is up to the speaker.
We’ve seen capitalism done better and worse in various countries, many times dissolving into dictatorship or fascism, and usually built on the backs of a downtrodden group (a racial minority, a migrant population, outsourced indentured labour, etc.). The idea the handful of attempts at communism (all while being besieged by the capitalist nations around them) shows that communism is a bad idea, is just as laughable as the idea that capitalism always succeeds.
So, not sure that’s exactly what you’re (!)-ing about here, but the truly intellectually curious position is not to oppose communism, but to wonder if there is a way to achieve its noble goals while avoiding the pitfalls that that the ussr fell into.
That's no reason not to print it, of course.
Why did the English intellectuals want to avoid criticizing Stalin? Was it because it would be by extension criticizing Communism which at the time was a popular idea among intellectuals? Was this the progress being referred to?
Cold War era middle schoolers in the US had that book as required reading in some parts of the country. At least it got us out of reading Shakespeare for a few months.
You don’t assign complex reading to middle schoolers.
Therefore one should trust no system that depends on a few people being trustworthy, the system itself should have self defense mechanisms and limits both in scope and in time, for wielding power.
Communism or at least the soviet flavor failed completely on this last count, and I'm generally not aware of how to make it work without significant centralized power. Social democracies seem to have a nice balance but in online discussion it's like people are either Milton Friedman or Marx apologists and nobody in the middle.
I think it was more that a system will abused by the extent to which abuse is possible. Someone benevolent (in the book snowball who was a stand in for Trotsky) will get out maneuvered by someone willing to weaponize all available power (Napolean in the book, Stalin). It’s possible to have someone good for a time (there are occasionally successful monarchs), but the system is not resilient to bad actors.
Norms or good intentions are not enough, you have to look at incentives and what abuse is possible within the system.
The US is a more resilient system (trump failed to hold onto power despite best efforts), but even so it has weaknesses in places governed primarily by norms. A political system needs to be evaluated by its outcomes in practice, not hypothetical “best case” implementations that ignore incentives.
This is true in reverse too: for example, Italians have been tinkering with their electoral system for 30 years now, but one way or the other they continue to change their rulers almost every year. Systems can make some mechanisms more or less awkward, but in the end it's the shared political norms that make the real difference.
I think it’s been working ok, but there are issues (issues they often explicitly predicted), see: https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Washington%27s_Farewell_Add...
There is also an element of culture required among the population too that’s necessary.
> “I have already intimated to you the danger of parties in the state, with particular reference to the founding of them on geographical discriminations. Let me now take a more comprehensive view, and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party, generally.
“This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind. It exists under different shapes in all governments, more or less stifled, controlled, or repressed; but, in those of the popular form, it is seen in its greatest rankness, and is truly their worst enemy.
“The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries, which result, gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty.”
Even if no individual retains power, you could still have a particular interest (a corporation, a guild, an industry body, an ethnicity) corrupting the legislative, executive or judicial functions of government in their favour.
The idea that an organization can corrupt a government is just expressing the same issue: the system gets exploited to the extent that exploitation is possible.
At the macroscopic level I think it's fair to analogize humanity as a system searching for equilibrium. But we can also do work on ourselves through technical and cultural revolutions. My foray into the past, watching the present, and my projections of the future all paint the classic "monkeypaw" trope. We cure childhood disease and population booms, increases the breadth of the economy, consumes masses of fuel and component elements while jointly polluting everything... We destabilize the system, creating novel problems of various sclae, and it just repeats ad nauseum. It doesn't matter what system you use, as long as we're complicating things as such none of them will ever "succeed" because they require some ideal state approximation that we will never let arise. In engineering everything is a compromise, you can't have your cake and eat it too, etc...
Neither Marx nor Friedman are really wrong, per se, but they can't be right, either. From there it's just a matter of moral convictions, at least in my opinion, which paints everything with an even less discernible gray.
Yesterday, i saw people disputing at the internet. I'd not read nor join their conflict, but made my jokes about. For today i intended to read, how and what they said.
Quoting (another Topic on HN) some Posts more: "Further: progress will occur on real-world problems that can be solved by those methods, making those applications dominant throughout society." (especialy everything looks like its natural to someone)
Jesssus! They need a pulling-horse, that dies... (-;
"Taste was bitter at the time, but it was never going to be forever. In 2018 models had 100e6 parameters, and in 2013 GPT4 has (wild guess) 2e12 parameters [0]. Conservatively that's 500% per year. At it's peak, hardware never improved at that rate and has since slowed down dramatically. So it was always going to end, and further advancement was always going to revert being driven by a neural net of some sort." The interesting question when neural net will end up driving it.
"Posits that making a huge model won't be a competitive strategy for long because it gets to expensive in terms of heavy quantization."
# ...you may also like to read about: "KYBERNETIK", "Prozessablaufmaschinen", Bottleneck... (calms)
regards...
You get rid of the need for power entirely. Communism, by definition, is free of state. That hinges on achieving post-scarcity.
The Communist Party’s primary tenant is achieving post-scarcity to one day usher in communism. The Soviet model failed, really, because they never got there. Probably not because of a poor power dynamic, but because post-scarcity was, and still is, beyond our grasp. It may not even be possible.
When you think about it, the Soviet model is fundamentally designed to fail! If everything went according to plan, it would have fallen to communism. It was never meant to be sustainable.
Perhaps you are referring to actionable ideas we have come up with over the years to try and push us towards post-scarcity?
While Communists sometimes proclaimed that as a utopian future, it is hard to see how it could have come to pass. Firstly because communism would need some kind of perpetual enforcement apparatus for its ancillary goals like ensuring an end to religion and belief in the supernatural.
Secondly, that political philosophy put so much emphasis on the working masses as the class to support and identify with, that one doubts it would permit a future where there were no longer any working masses. I’m reminded of some Maoist literature I once found in a Chinatown bookshop: in discussing the Peking Man fossil, the book claimed that what separated Man from the apes was his ability to labor, and if a person did not work hard, he was not a true human being.
That was also the principal criticism against both Marx and later the Bolsheviks from the left: That rather than "need some kind of perpetual enforcement apparatus", given Marx own criticism of the state as a tool for class oppression you could not hope to reform or take over the state without risking a recreation of the same problems as the state tries to maintain its authority, but need to destroy the state immediately. A criticism that precipitated the anarchists leaving the First International, but also many later splits.
With respect to religion, the notion tend to be that ancillary goals like an end to religion would come simply from removing poverty and providing education, from the thinking that people flock to religion to seek comfort when their lives are hard, and so it's not necessary to do anything about it per se.
> that one doubts it would permit a future where there were no longer any working masses.
The very basis for the rise of socialist thought was the notion that the rise of capitalism made a level of productivity possible where the amount of labour necessary to sustain society would drop.
Marx spends the first half of the first chapter of the Communist Manifesto fanboying over the productivity increases made possible by capitalism and describes its downfall as coming from crises of simultaneous over-production and under-employment - in other words a sharp reduction in the need for labour, but without the social structure to allow the labour and its proceeds to be shared.
So in that sense, maybe still "working masses" but masses no longer limited by a need to maximise hours of work to earn a living.
So I don't think ending religion would be a specific goal, not for me anyway. Of course, if someone starts some cult somewhere or starts telling people some god said they should be in charge well then that's a problem, but I think that goes beyond the specifics of religion.
It always comes back to hierarchies in my opinion. Whether it's racism, sexism, organised religion, capitalism, or whatever–the root of the problem is one group of people having power over others.
The practical problem (of course apart from the moral for the rest of us who are not Marxists) is, how do you exterminate a group of people without a state?
That's why anarcho-Communism/Marxism is an oxymoron, collectivism needs someone to dictate and organize the collective action, it cannot be stateless.
Communism, and thus the state being left behind, cannot happen until post-scarcity is achieved. Once post-scarcity is realized, why would you care if some still hold that mentality? They are only considered to be a hinderance in the days leading up to post-scarcity becoming a reality and during that time there is still a state.
Citation? Multiple searches turned up nothing like this for me.
> That's why anarcho-Communism/Marxism is an oxymoron, collectivism needs someone to dictate and organize the collective action, it cannot be stateless.
This presumes "collectivism", but many forms of socialism sees enabling extreme individualism as the goal. E.g libertarianism was founded by the anarcho-communist Joseph Dejacque
"Far from opposing the so-called excesses – instances of popular vengeance against hated individuals or against public buildings with which hateful memories are associated – the workers’ party must not only tolerate these actions but must even give them direction."
I believe Robert Caro was more insightful than Lord Acton:
Power doesn't corrupt; it reveals.
That's true, but it's easy to misrepresent if you don't include another important insight:
"I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are the good people and the bad people. You're wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides." -- Lord Vetinari (by way of Terry Pratchett)
Because otherwise all bosses would be equally shitty and you would not be able to foresee with uttermost certainty how bad people will become shitty bosses when promoted to power.
It is equally obvious in the military how you know who will turn out to be really bad people once promoted to sergeants.
It's "always bad", not "always equally bad".
The upshot is that "Okay, we just need to find someone who power will reveal is not shitty." does not and cannot work in the general case (of amounts of power sufficently large to be worth abusing - your 'good' sergeants are still sergeants, not generals or absolute autocrats).
You could argue that with more power people will mess up more in absolute terms. If you are powerfully enough small misteps could crush people.
“Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.”
https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-abrahamlincoln-pow...
> Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
>The Guardian on 24 August 1945 called Animal Farm "a delightfully humorous and caustic satire on the rule of the many by the few". Tosco Fyvel, writing in Tribune on the same day, called the book "a gentle satire on a certain State and on the illusions of an age which may already be behind us". Julian Symons responded, on 7 September, "Should we not expect, in Tribune at least, acknowledgement of the fact that it is a satire not at all gentle upon a particular State – Soviet Russia? It seems to me that a reviewer should have the courage to identify Napoleon with Stalin, and Snowball with Trotsky, and express an opinion favourable or unfavourable to the author, upon a political ground. In a hundred years perhaps, Animal Farm may be simply a fairy story; today it is a political satire with a good deal of point".
Symons's point is that The Guardian and Fyvel called Animal Farm "delightfully humorous" and "gentle satire" because that was the only way they could blunt the sharp attack aimed directly at the USSR, by insinuating that it was not actually serious.
The book was published in 1945, perhaps it was to do with the fact that USSR was an ally at the time?
UPD. From Wikipedia:
>Orwell wrote the book between November 1943 and February 1944, when the United Kingdom was in its wartime alliance with the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany, and the British intelligentsia held Stalin in high esteem, a phenomenon Orwell hated.
However, again, it was wartime. And not one of these wars where your professional army fights far from home against an asymmetrically weaker foe. People tend have fairly negative views of dissenters in that circumstance. Look at what happened in America after 9/11.
In many of the recent wars. Afghanistan/Iraq, or even others like Ukraine.
The US 'group think' is to not criticize the 'people' of the country.
The population is separated from the government. Most media is very pro - "The wonderful people of the country whom surely had nothing to do with the evil government we'd like to see defeated". Criticizing the population is not allowed. Even thought they must have had some influence on their government. Hence how it is very much not allowed to criticize Muslims.
Even in Ukraine, it is not allowed to criticize the "Russian People", who surely are with us against their evil government.
Trotsky, for his part (as well as Lenin) was authoritarian himself. But all of the revolutionaries, including Stalin, were true believers in Communism, and acted accordingly. Orwell likes to present things as a few bad actors that just happened to betray the revolution, which suits his purpose, but that isn't an accurate portrayal.
A blindness towards the realities of the USSR was common amongst the highly educated at that time. There's a reason the west had such huge problems with westerners becoming Soviet double agents, to the extent that in the UK some of the people responsible for catching Soviet spies were themselves Soviet spies. The issue was the intelligence agencies recruited exclusively from Oxbridge. The actual working classes in Britain had no time for the USSR, but graduates did.
This is still a problem! There are still a lot of academics publishing today who take Marx completely seriously and attempt to build on his ideas. You can just search journal articles for mention of him to find them:
https://journals.sagepub.com/action/doSearch?AllField=marx&S...
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00380385211037...
This article continues the conceptual work of developing a process-oriented perspective on belonging by taking up the active engagement of affiliation (and disaffiliation) as an undertheorised yet necessary aspect of accomplishing belonging. In developing the concept we draw on Marx’s notion of work as material activity in forms of life and the sociological concepts of face-work and emotion work.
I don't think dismissing (all of) Marx because of Stalin makes much more sense than dismissing the idea of democracy because of the size of the US prison population or it's history of war crimes?
The reason myself and others are so dismissive of Marx's ideas is because time and time again, any time those ideas have been forcibly implemented amongst a population, the result is bloodshed and subjugation. Every. Single. Time.
Many of us have grown weary of tankie types trying to shoehorn pro-Marxist viewpoints into these conversations and are pretty quick to identify the dog whistles ("But, but, America!") when we hear them.
Which is that the "revolution was ultimately forced down people's throat whenever they liked it or not.
And due to your vaguely defining "Marxs ideas" thar would then include the Nordic model or any state intervention/run enterprise if we were to stretch it.
And talkies in the modern age is defined as similar to those of the alt right where they either overtly or covertly support every aspect of the Ussr and in particular Stalin shamelessly.
Hence not every Marxist.
"The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution."
If the man himself agrees that his ideas can only be implemented through a "forcible overthrow", isn't it safe to say that those who follow his teachings today are either purposely ignoring a big part of his message, or are merely biding their time for the next revolution?
It all reads the same to me. In the same way I consider every Nazi a Nazi, I consider every Marxist a Marxist.
They're not some loonie ideas about the size of skulls or a master race.
Your quote without context does indeed proclaim "forcible overthrow"... of all existing social conditions.
If you read it with context in mind it becomes clear that the notion or idea of the revolution is multifaceted as the communist manifesto refers to different means as to how the revolution is spreading (france, germany and Switzerland) and said quote is meant to represent the unrelenting resolution to not conceded to the "bourgeoisie" terms of the social condition upon the working class/proletarian, hence forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions that primarily the working class had to suffer through.
Out of all the things you could pick to critic the communist manifesto this has to be the weakest one, you could bring up the flimsy and quite frankly speaking terrible argument for the abolishing of private property.
Or the assumption that capital is only defined by materialistic definitions.
And now you change your point. Yes all Marxists are Marxists, tankies are not Marxists however, which is what you originally said.
They invented a democracy. Their democracy is of their own design, based on the historical work of philosophers. The constitution is not a plagiarized document stolen from the greeks. Marx was decades dead when 1917 happened.
Your point falls flat on its face.
> any time those ideas have been forcibly implemented amongst a population, the result is bloodshed and subjugation
You are one of today's lucky 10,000. Allow me to inform you of the genocide of native Americans, manifest destiny, the slavery of Africans, the toppling of the kingdom of Hawaii, the contras, operation condor, US Imperialism, etc..
Text book example of special pleading.
> But, but, America!
IDK, maybe you shouldn't make such weak fallacious arguments that don't pass even the lightest of scrutiny?
People living in glass Native American burial grounds shouldn't throw stones?
Maybe these """tankies""" are tired of all these first world dronies or diet white supremacists (IDK what you're suppose to be) spewing colonizer propaganda everywhere?
I don't think the notion of fair and equal representation is colonizer propaganda, but based off your previous comments, you're far enough down the rabbit-hole that it's not worth trying to lift you out. I'm not a "diet white supremacist" whatever that is, just someone whose family was murdered in the Holodomor and as a result has done a lot of reading on the USSR and its atrocities.
Be well, I hope someday you can put this hate behind you.
What's hateful about wanting to expand the benefits of democracy to the working class?
Multiple worse real genocides have happened to my people than your historically cyclical-until-1947 famine that's only talked about for the sole purpose of excluding the working class from a better form of democracy.
For instance if you were to read Das kapital, its very much a dry economy book and not some crackpot ranting about capitalism bad.
It was even worse than that. Both the British governments under Chamberlain and Churchill and the US government under FDR sympathized with the USSR. There were continuous sub rosa contacts going on (for example, FDR regularly sent emissaries like Harry Hopkins over to Moscow to confer with Stalin) that were, while not publicly known, officially sanctioned. This was why the USSR was able to end up in control of all of Eastern Europe after WWII--which to any objective observer meant that WWII failed to achieve its primary goal in Europe, which was to liberate Eastern Europe from tyranny. But nobody made any such criticism at the time; the USSR was praised as an ally even while they were shipping millions of Germans and Eastern Europeans to labor camps.
Yes. The reason Britain and France declared war on Germany was that Germany invaded Poland and Britain and France had treaty commitments to defend Poland. (They also had treaty commitments to defend other Eastern European countries, which they decided not to honor when Germany invaded those countries before it invaded Poland, but that was because their governments erroneously believed that Hitler would stop invading countries if they appeased him.)
> I thought the primary goal (of the Allies) was to defeat the Axis powers because they were directly attacking the UK and USA.
Germany never directly attacked the US. (Japan did later on, but that was on their own initiative; they never discussed any overall war plans with Germany.) And when Britain and France declared war on Germany, Germany had not attacked Britain or France either. As I said above, they declared war when Germany invaded Poland.
I think though, that the average Brit did not care so much about Poland. It was clear by that point that Hitler intended to take all of Europe and the exact event that triggered it was maybe not so important. After all it's not like France was wrong to declare war - it was obvious that they were going to be next.
After the Nazis invaded France, I expect that's true, yes. But before that the only reason for Britain to be fighting was over Poland.
> it's not like France was wrong to declare war - it was obvious that they were going to be next
No, it wasn't at all obvious. Hitler's stated purpose, going as far back as Mein Kampf, was that Germany should expand to the east. His decision to move west instead was rather sudden and surprised a lot of his own advisors. And didn't happen until eight months after Britain and France declared war (the intervening period was called the "Phoney War" even at the time).
I think it started before the war. Orwell wrote in 1938 that "today it is almost impossible to get anything printed in favour of Anarchism or 'Trotskyism',"
While this may be so — although I am sure there were enough intellectuals in both camps — it cannot explain the atmosphere that Orwell is describing:
> At this moment what is demanded by the prevailing orthodoxy is an uncritical admiration of Soviet Russia. Everyone knows this, nearly everyone acts on it. Any serious criticism of the Soviet régime, any disclosure of facts which the Soviet government would prefer to keep hidden, is next door to unprintable.
What is this prevailing orthodoxy? How has it been reached and maintained? What happens to dissenters? What enforces the unprintability of the criticism? To achieve such a level of control, full government and media support is necessary.
It's not difficult to see that the early Soviet Union was actually better on a number of dimensions over both the Tsars and the West on basic equality and humanity when comparing against the life of an Indian or an African American. It had decriminalized homosexuality and was arguably less anti-Semitic than the West. The trajectory was utopian... but it nosedived into Stalinism which was, well..., a nightmare.
The history of Russia is one of an endless parade of terrible leadership which invariably decides that a quick round of death squads will solve all the problems.
Their biggest effect was external: most welfare systems were started in the West in response to the observation that it was a bad look for capitalism if people were starving in the streets, whereas ultimately the USSR liked to pretend they fixed that while just doing it to the Ukrainians, Polish and other Baltic states.
No. Claiming this underplays how appalling Stalin was. Lenin purging Mensheviks AFAIK, meant losing party membership and maybe emigrating to continue your political project, whereas Stalin's Great Purge killed a million people. This isn't a defence of Lenin, it's just that Stalin was on a different level entirely.
> Their biggest effect was external: most welfare systems were started in the West in response to the observation that it was a bad look for capitalism
What? That's nonsense.
Forced labour camps and secret police organisations were pretty ubiquitous. The Tsars had The Okhrana, forced labour camps and political repression (Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin had all been exiled to Siberia). The Checka and Gulag were the Bolshevik versions of the same thing. Russia had the White Terror... and then the Red Terror. It all fucking sucks but the point remains, Stalin took things to new levels of psychopathic insanity where we start hitting 10s of millions of excess deaths.
If you don't like Gulags, then bear in mind they were created at roughly the same time the US setup forced labour camps in Haiti that led to 1000s of deaths and extra-judicial killings. Not something Americans talk about much. Should Woodrow Wilson be compared to Stalin too?
I don't know why I keep hoping mgmt will see that one day and decide not to have pretty bad things now that some later nutjob can turn into really especially bad things. It's not much of an up-side that the people who built the tools are often consumed by them.
The advantage for Orwell was that he went to Spain to fight for the left, but as a Trotskist, and he and his friend were violently prosecuted, some killed, by the comunist party. You can read about it in his book "Homage to Catalonia".
I've always found it curious that given both what he experienced in Catalonia, and his firm rejection of Stalinism in particular, but really the Bolsheviks as a whole, that he did not move further towards the libertarian socialist side out of fear of the power of the state. Instead he seems to think that the problem brought by the Bolsheviks was mainly the notion of the "dictatorship of the proletariat", rather than the notion of a more powerful state in general.
As much as I love Orwell's writing, I don't tend to find him a very deep thinker. Animal Farm and 1984 are fantastic at ripping apart the surface problems, but juxtaposed against The Lion and the Unicorn, it feels like he just stopped delving deeper than the persons involved and the notion of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" and control of the press, and didn't think more about what e.g. allowed Lenin and Stalin to gain control of the Bolsheviks (e.g. he didn't delve into the split that created the Bolshevik faction itself, nor much into the effects of Lenins "democratic" centralism), as if he thought he had sufficiently solved the problem of what made them possible.
[1] https://www.fadedpage.com/books/20180531/html.php
[2] "What is needed is that the ownership of all major industry shall be formally vested in the State, representing the common people. Once that is done it becomes possible to eliminate the class of mere owners who live not by virtue of anything they produce but by the possession of title-deeds and share certificates." -- George Orwell, Lion and the Unicorn, part 3, section II
It’s also one of the more horrifying things I’ve read and his accounts of trench warfare and hand to hand combat are vicious and grim.
Still pretty popular in philosophy classes when I was in college (class of 2009). Big fan of Castro too, our coursework included at least one picture of him checking out a Cuban collective farm.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/oct/11/revealed-sovie...
Animal Farm is a great and easy read, but for something much less metaphorical, Homage to Catalunia is a wonderful (and sad) book about Orwell's experience in the war, where both western powers and stalinists had tried to eliminate the smaller and more idealistic faction he fought alongside.
>Looking back, I think I erred more as a publisher than as a writer or speaker, and more by omission than commission. I accepted manuscripts about Russia, good or not so good, because they were "orthodox"; I rejected others, by bona fide socialists and honest men, because they were not. It was in the matter of the Trials that the inner conflict was greatest. I well remember a Christmas in Paris when I read the thousand-page verbatim report of one of them : it was like living in some urwelt of intellectual terror, where men had lost, or had never had, the pride of free and independent humanity. But every Tycoon in Britain was using that trial to stir up hatred of Russia, because, twenty-three years ago, she had abolished the exploitation of man by money. So I remembered Bolshevo, and the Red Corner in the Soviet ship, and the Prophylacterium, and the singing of the children when we went, in Moscow, to the Palace of Pioneers ; and I published only books that justified the trials, and sent the socialist criticisms of them elsewhere.
>I am glad to remember that, when directly challenged by questioners at public meetings, I always spoke my mind, giving the pros and cons as honestly as I could ; but I did not strive officiously to speak it, preferring to avoid awkward topics when the choice rested with me alone.
>I am as sure as a man can be — I was sure at the time in my heart — that all this was wrong : wrong in the harm it did to people from whom one was keeping some part of the truth as one saw it ; wrong in the harm it did to oneself (which was important, not because it was oneself, but because oneself was part of humanity) ; wrong in the harm it did to Russia, because that country, in which there is so much greatness and still more hope, can only be injured by a sycophancy that treats her as a spoilt child instead of as an adult with errors and crimes as grievous as our own ; and wrong above all in the harm it did to the sum total of truth and honest thinking, by an increase of which we can alone find the way forward.
The best source for getting the picture of this is Malcolm Muggeridge's book Chronicles of Wasted Time; he was a reporter tasked with going to the USSR and telling the Brits about what it was like there, years before WWII. Having believed, like his friends, that it was paradise on earth, it was a shock to discover how terrible it was, and even more of a shock to see his honest reporting junked and to be told to make it out to be more of a paradise on earth.
You can also get the key points from Scott Alexander's review of it. https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/11/book-review-chronicles...
A mix of denial and ignorance, really - the atrocities were not known as clearly as they are today.
It’s easy to forget just how closed off the USSR was under Stalin. Respected western journalists were fully complicit in the denial of the Holodomor, and Stalin’s purges were not well publicised. The few people who escaped the USSR and tried to spread the word of Stalin’s atrocities were easy to dismiss as either angry capitalists, or as socialists who were just upset that they didn’t win the power struggle themselves (eg Trotsky).
It was only in the 50s under Khrushchev that what were previously rumours were confirmed as facts. The revelations devastated western communism - the Communist Party of the United States lost 30,000 members in the weeks after Khrushchev's secret speech was published in 1956. A year later it had 10,000 members, 1,500 of which were FBI informants.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07CQ9T198
I noticed my dad had "Animal Farm" and it seemed to be about a pig, so I read it. I took it at face value as a good story about animals running a farm.
Many, many years later I realized it was an allegory about the Soviet Revolution.
I think adult 'socialists' ( as opposed to capitalists ) are in that league.
A quote come to mind: “If at age 20 you are not a Communist then you have no heart. If at age 30 you are not a Capitalist then you have no brains.”
> when the average material wealth of a 30 year old is in steep decline
Thanks to the leftward turn of the economy.
Ha! That's exactly when everyone should care the most about censorship, it's when the stakes are highest for "both" sides. I assume he realized the error in his ways by the time he realized that we've always been at war with...
Sounds eerily appropriate for most issues today
It gets more confusing when you talk about a company censoring (as opposed to a government). HN gets schizophrenic here. Companies should not be forced to carry content they don't want to carry, but companies shouldn't be able to censor people because of company ideology or politics or whatever. HN is very conflicted on this issue.
But I don't think it's fair to be surprised that HN is not in favor of censorship, even the closed-minded groupthink self-censorship that Orwell was dealing with.
Moveover, a couple of years of go, it was a good thing "dangerous" ideas were censored, in the name of the greater good. Certain elections and viruses come to mind.
https://www.racket.news/p/f-bomb-this-the-biden-administrati...
Missouri v. Biden, 3:22-CV-01213
Asimov's critiques of his work, for example.
Back in WWI, the UK had experienced 2X or so the number of deaths that it did in WWII. The UK's leaders were extremely aware of how bad a massive war, with a massive death toll, could be for a country.
Regardless of Orwell's fuming about freedom of the press, pro-Soviet English intellectual fashions, and such - for the WWII-era British government, not "rocking the boat" with Stalin, when "his" USSR was still critical to winning the war with a less-horrific British body count, would be a "d'oh, obviously" policy.
Somebody had to defeat the Germans, the Soviet Union had the main burden in the end.
Fiasco: The Anglo-Franco-Soviet Alliance That Never Was and the Unpublished British White Paper, 1939–1940 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07075332.2018.14...
German–Polish declaration of non-aggression
"The new constellation made the Soviet Union fear a joint German-Polish attack."
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsch-polnischer_Nichtangrif...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German%E2%80%93Polish_declarat...
On the other hand, we shouldn't forget that Stalin's USSR was also critical to starting the war as well.
What does this sentence even mean, did they mean to write “was just not something you (ever) did”?
> It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness.
It means 'don't do it' but with the passive voice, so as not to imply that the speaker is the one who should defend the instruction.
This "adjectivizing" technique is a common way that colloquialisms are created. (Maybe it's a bit weirder in this case because an adjective form of the word already exists, but has a different meaning.)
Or another question would be, how do you have a revolution to overthrow the state and not just replace it with another state setup by whoever ends up leading the revolution?
A lot of people don't like liberalism anymore and because they think the only alternative on the left was Marxist-Leninism they slowly go in the direction of fascism. Anarchism is another direction.
Anarchist revolution wouldn't have leaders and it in theory wouldn't have to be violent - anarcho-syndycalists postulate that a general strike would be enough. Probably some violence would happen, especially from the state or fascist paramilitary groups but who knows.
Anarchist main strategy is prefiguration, so create spaces that are anarchist in nature and grow them from there, show as many people they don't need a state or private property or if you are a communist a money too.
If they practice anarchism, it is of a kind where everyone must work and they do seem to have clear power structures as far as I understand.
So they sound more socialist than anarchist to me with authoritian tendencies in reality. But it is hard to tell, as they are very closed up and not very open to outsiders. But for context, they do fight for survival in a hostile environment and that probably does not help with nice and clean solutions. Still, there seems to me a big discrepancy between their writings and their actions, so I would be careful with choosing them as a role model. But their slogan I very much like "The world we want is one where many worlds fit".
And it has been a while that I tried to find out more about them, but I mainly found it hard to get neutral sources at all. They are very closed up and you cannot just visit them. Or in some ways you can, but you won't get to see the inside structures. How they actually make decisions. At least that's what the people I read reported.
(But there is a study I just stumbled on, I will read later, maybe there is sonething more concrete inside:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S073805931...)
All in all it sounds more like tribalism. A indigenous culture that is trying to survive with some autonomy in a world of nation states.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebel_Zapatista_Autonomous_Mun...
They strive to reach consensus, if they cannot find it they make decisions through majority and they are federation composed of popular assemblies of around 300 families each.
Zapatistas are indigenous Americans whose culture was almost completely destroyed, but calling them tribalist is unfair I would say, given that e.g they promote sexual equality.
Tribalism is a vague term, that describes societies that live in tribe like structures. Modern or ancient. But does not say much about how that tribe is structured.
Also about consensus: I think allmost all states and societies claim they try to find a consensus.
And as far as I understand, their "assemblies" are pretty much reserved to members of their ethnicity/tribe. Thats why it is more tribalist to me, than anarchist, which is usually rather internationalist.
Also, this does not explain how that significant majority is supposed to come into existence. Some sympathy for those ideas in intellectual circles more than 100 years ago are not exactly a good indicator for current trends.
Soviet-style command economies are already notorious for being unable to match capitalist economies in terms of efficiency, due to the simple fact that it's far easier to use natural pricing (maybe with some interventionism) to reach equilibrium than equations and top-down production quotas. You can make an argument this could change with help from modern data science and machine learning but that's beside the point. With anarchism, you are taking all of the issues of soviet-style economies and making them even worse in that now each individual commune is responsible for coordinating with every other one it relies on. Even if you don't prevent natural currency systems from developing you still lose massive amounts of efficiency and still end up with inequality (due to resource, skill, etc. distributions being inherently different), though this time maybe you get lucky and the ienquality is between communes as opposed to being within them, between classes.
Also, there are practically no cases of lasting nonviolent anarchist revolutions. The haves tend to really not like giving up belongings and lifestyles to the have-nots when forced to. That's obviously not an argument against anarchism, though.
we're talking humans here, right ? there's always a jerk who takes over
The problem with communism has always been accountability. This is why in the 1860s Bakunin was arguing that Marxist regimes would be one-party dictatorships unrepresentative of the actual proletariat, and that it would lead to the worst tyranny the world had ever known. He was saying this before Lenin was even born. Marx eventually kicked him out of the International for it. IMHO it's one of the most stunningly prescient political predictions of all time.
Of course communitarianism can absolutely work at the community level, I discussed that above, the problem always comes when you try to scale that up to more 'lumpy' and specialised economic activities. As soon as some economic and social activities have dramatically more economic and social consequence, or are dramatically more resource intensive than others, the problems start setting in.
The Marxist view is that communism can only work in industrial settings because Marx viewed it as about the control of capital. The actual evidence in reality is that it only works in culturally and economically homogenous societies, which mostly means rural ones.
It's good to remember that in Russia (and most? other countries that were/are communist) there was never any real democracy. Not before communism, not under communism, and not now. I think the outcome could be different (less authoritarian) if communists were chosen by people who actually lived under democracy before.
Communism is a specific historic movement. As Nietzsche famously said, “all ideas, in which a whole process is promiscuously comprehended, elude definition; it is only that which has no history, which can be defined.” It also rhymes nicely with what Marx said, “Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.”
> What you call Communism is actually ideology called Marxism-Leninism
Well, why what you call it is how it’s actually called and what someone else calls it is wrong? Language is arbitrary. I think it is a purely political question. Just like deciding whether to define racism as racial prejudice or as racial prejudice with power. It’s all about rhetoric, not about what’s something “actually called”.
Well, it is simply a fact that in public discourse both left and right mainly associate communism with Marx and Lenin because of the early influence of Marx on communist movements and of later Bolshevization of the Comintern in 1920s. I don’t see what is newspeak-y about it, it is a natural linguistic and cultural development.
> Imprecise vocabulary is great tool for authoritarian, that's why I write about these other meanings and ideologies.
Yeah, that’s why I always look at “anarchists” with suspicion. They seem to consistently support measures that empower the government.
2. The USSR was definitely founded by Bolsheviks, the leaders of the 3rd "Communist" International. They even went so far as to put the word "communist" in the party's name, and kill dissidents.
3. Anarchism leads to a lawless society in which the strongest will rule. It leads to Dark Ages, as it has done before. It may be moneyless, but it will have very clear class and ownership concepts.
4. "It wasn't true communism". Just like China, North-Korea, the GDR, etc. Sure. If it wasn't true communism, you can draw the historical dialectic conclusion that we cannot reach true communism.
Why? Because of one sentence quote from a book published in 1651? Or maybe you have no idea what you are talking about?
I'm confused why you don't want to define it. You seem passionate about advocating for it. If you won't define it, how can you respond to a challenge like in the GGP comment? Why should anyone be convinced by your argumentation if you won't tell them what you're arguing for?
Keep in mind, you don't have to provide a complete definition, only a definition for what you mean by it and what you are advocating for. You can make it clear that others might disagree.
I certainly am not suggesting you write a monologue, but snapping at them isn't a dialogue either.
Sounds pointlessly idealist to me. If you’re allowed to just assume large scale cooperative society then any system of governance is fine.
> while in current system I would be probably get legally murdered by such entity.
“X has problems therefore not X is better”
It sucks that someone got murderer by police arresting the culprit and putting them into a publicly funded prison seems largely ideal plus or minus your view of the death penalty?
Governance is hard. And has problems. That doesn’t mean the opposite of governance is the answer.
Discussions of political theory in a general audience, where you can't assume everyone is on the same page about what terminology means (and the term anarchism most especially), usually go better if you explain what you mean in long form rather than using the jargon term.
If you tell someone you're an anarchist and don't elaborate on what you mean, they're gunnuh think of Gavrilo Princip.
>But at least let us have no more nonsense about defending liberty against Fascism. If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
The author of the article's commentary says it all:
>Many of us might also find key points of comparison between his situation and the shrill calls for censorship that we hear so often today.
Because it seems to me that the propagandistic exploitative value of 'finding' and publishing a preface supposedly from Orwell would be very high and that this preface could well be a fraud.
Sadly I cannot find it online.
"Hardly anyone will print an attack on Stalin, but it is quite safe to attack Churchill"
Bertrand Russel wrote "The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism" in 1920, but maybe nobody read it.
https://books.google.de/books/about/The_Practice_and_Theory_...
As for avoiding British criticism of Stalin during WWII, we have Churchill's remark: "If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons."
Here, I'll mention some for you: eugenics, Holocaust, incest.
So please, if I don't get censored for these, please tell me what these secret topics hidden from me are!
I strongly disagree with Graham's view that disagreement is a good reason for downvoting.
>facts which the Soviet government would prefer to keep hidden, is next door to unprintable.
All topics mentioned so far as "censored" have enjoyed enough publication and even being successful political platforms.
What people here mistake as censorship is usually regurgitated bad arguments being unpopular
Are you saying that if enough people get angry at your words, your freedom of speech doesn't matter anymore?
Obviously you can say anything you like on unmoderated places like 4chan, but what does that prove?
---
I'll reply for completeness anyway:
> I can see why a forum would want to control what topics are on and off topic.
There's a difference between banning flamewars and banning any kind of discussion. I am talking about the latter, not the former, which did indeed happen during Covid.
> Obviously you can say anything you like on unmoderated places like 4chan, but what does that prove?
Indeed, 4chan was the place where you could see discussion about the Covid policies and the media claims, from masks to lockdowns and mandatory vaccines - in fact, it was the one of the only places you could talk about it. Many of the things discussed there turned out to be true.
"Covid fiasco" is not a monolith.
On one side, there are people with a position "Covid is much less severe than we though, we should have just let it spread through population, and go on with out lives as normal, like we do with flu. The fiasco is that we tried to control it at all."
On another side there is a position "Covid is a more severe disease than we realize. It affects multiple organs, and after repeated infections some people will get long covid for years, or permanently. We should still aim to restrict the spread of the virus, not anymore with lockdowns, but with clean indoors air, and keeping using masks is crowded situations and in healthcare. The fiasco is that we gave up on trying to control the infections."
[1]https://theintercept.com/2023/07/12/covid-documents-house-re...
> Transexuals are not women
As an aside, I've noticed a pattern that people fret endlessly over trans women and don't really take notice of trans men. I don't know why that is, but there must be a reason why it's so remarkably consistent.
I read a bunch of right-wing comments on HN (including ones making good arguments), the reports of left bias on HN are greatly overstated.
Any slogan yelling should get downvoted by HN standards regardless of partisan bias.
An Eat the Rich comment that includes a quality recipe, however, should be rewarded with tolerance if not upvotes.
Are you assuming it's a call to kill them rather than a plea to not waste the protein?
The thing many people fail to realise about the Fore people in PNG was that their cannibalism was a mortuary rite of reverance for highly valued in group members that weren't killed for sustenance.
I can quote a paper: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2581657/ or simply say I learnt that first hand 40+ years back as child tagging along on supply runs with Mike Alpers (see Author list).
Now .. given you might have gained a snippet of new infomation, how do you feel about upvoting this comment about eating high value members of society?
That's a poor comment from yourself- I'd hoped for better.
I'm completely serious about the facts here:
* You don't have to kill people in order to eat them,
* I've had cannibals as babysitters in PNG as a child,
* I'm much the same age as Mike Alpers own children who I know from my days in university.
etc.
You claim to not be engaged with such topics because <<violence>> and I've quite accurately pointed out that violence isn't a neccesity here.
Why, exactly, are you having a little tantrum here?
If you want to convince me that you're earnestly trying to have a real conversation, being insulting isn't going to help.
You advocated for raising that as a thread topic.
I'm familar with several dictionares, nothing I have said has been false.
Be explicit - what exactly do you consider to be sophistry here?
We can talk about prion disease and its relation to eating brain matter (the Fore and mad cow disease), the history of funerary practices, the European fad for eating ground up mummies, the UK practice of eating parts of executed criminals, etc.
All of these relate to the topic that you suggested .. and the topic you apparently wish to tap out on when faced with someone happy to take it on.
What bait?
> I wasn't born yesterday.
It appears to my eye that you bought the attitude to what was a good faith discussion from my side.
It was a missed opportunity to discuss an unpopular subject.
I suggest you return to this sometime later and reread this entire exchange.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eat_the_rich
> "Eat the rich" is a political slogan associated with anti-capitalism and left-wing politics. It may variously be used as a metaphor for class conflict, a demand for wealth redistribution, or a literal call to violence. The phrase is commonly attributed to political philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, from a quote first popularized during the French Revolution: "When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich".
Eat the Poor: A Modest Proposal for Donald Trump to be President of the United States:
https://www.amazon.nl/-/en/Mistress-Harley/dp/1535229845
Remember, you're the one who introduced the brilliant idea of eating the rich into this conversation, and you're the one who replied even after you said you wouldn't, so you not only took the bait, you baited the hook with deliciously irresistible rich human flesh! Now that's some fine anthropophagic trolling!
This book looks like satire. I have never met or heard of anyone who discusses "political cannibalism" literally. I think it's vanishingly rare.
> You're the one who introduced the brilliant idea of eating the rich into this conversation
I will not relitigate this. See above.
> You're the one who replied even after you said you wouldn't
Tend to your own knitting.
I'm a little confused why you took the time to respond to an old thread during the course of what looks like digging up receipts on a troll (which I have no complaint with, I agree with what you said about them). This is ancient history in my book.
Is there something specific you'd like me to take away from this? Did you just not like the cut off my jib? I honestly can't tell, I'm getting a chaotic neutral vibe.
ETA: I see, you feel that I am a troll, and you want to call me out for trolling. Well, noted. I disagree but it's not my proudest set of comments, I can't fault you for thinking ill of me because of them.
...I just can't eat a whole one.
It could possibly be such a plea if the implication is that their death is already imminent. Which means it's still advocating their downfall.
This isn't about cannibalism and your comments here are a waste of everyone's time.
The Cannibal Cookbook: Human meat recipes from around the world
https://www.amazon.nl/-/en/Nico-Claux/dp/B08SGR2W6M
[1] Paraphrased from The Reluctant Cannibal:
Also there is no left bias. There is a progressive bias. Not exactly the same
When I see political comments get flagged, it's usually because they said something explicitly offensive or insulting. They'll sign of with an edit attacking downvoters, say something insulting about their political opponents, or reference a conspiracy theory. That will reliably get you flagged regardless of the position you are advocating.
Accessibility tip: Hit the “X minutes days ago” link if this has gone too grey to read.
And throughout five years of war, during two or three of which we were fighting for national survival, countless books, pamphlets and articles advocating a compromise peace have been published without interference. More, they have been published without exciting much disapproval. So long as the prestige of the USSR is not involved, the principle of free speech has been reasonably well upheld.
Despite the existence of people like this, it's generally not a good stance to consider those who disagree with you as lacking introspection. It's just a crutch to further validate your beliefs without any effort.
How much more developed would your thoughts be if you pretend that every opinion you encounter was thought through, and included as much life experiences and research as your own opinions do?
1. I'm genuine but I haven't thought this through
2. I'm genuine and I have thought this through (regardless if I'm right or wrong)
3. I'm adversarial and weaponise my opinion in order to advance some other agenda or push the overton window
My proposition is that if you assume everyone is in bucket 1, you never rethink your opinions and just think "poorly" of others which doesn't allow you to advance your thinking as fast as if you classify them as bucket 2. For people in bucket 3, you just have to trust that you'll spot a bad actor from their actions and inconsistent rhetoric over time so that you're not fooled over the long run. But similarly to people that choose to never find love for fear of having their heart broken, I wouldn't want to assume everyone is in bucket 3 because that's a shitty life to live.
This is HN, we can discuss all sorts of deep insights. For that discussion to be able to take place please give examples and explain what you see based on your unique experiences.
That way you can win people over and slowly transform views of people, communities etc.
I think this is one place where tolerance paradox arises.
Some that come to mind:
1) The illusion of authority. The idea that some people have the moral right to do violence to enforce arbitrary rules written on paper.
2) The root cause of suffering, which is a lack of true knowledge of self and the nature of reality.
3) The fiat money system, or the idea of money at all.
4) The inherent ability (and maybe desire) to do harm and commit violence to existing in every being.
5) The idea of self ownership, when it comes to choices such as what we consume, whether it be food, “drugs”, or media.
6) Anything deemed a “conspiracy theory”.
7) Objective morality and natural law.
I could go on. All of these stem from a lack of knowledge of the self, morality, and the nature of consciousness and morality.
Of course these can be discussed in small groups, but widespread discussion of these, by “public figures” or “the media” is all but completely lacking.
Edit: I forgot to add a "citation" to my post.
[1]: I always wonder what people mean when they say society. Do they mean the current structure and way of doing things? Do they mean all people?
Would you care to enlighten us what exactly is the "knowledge of self, morality, and the nature of consciousness and morality" that you speak of?
Because to me personally it sounds like a bunch of grandiose-sounding poppycock.
I consider all three (self, morality, consciousness) inherently subjective topics with no objective foundation on which we can build any kind of "knowledge" of them. So when someone comes around and casually says "oh, these people just don't know [self, morality, consciousness]", I feel that they don't really aknowledge the inherent subjectivity of it, but instead hold their opinion on it as absolute and objective truth to which others are supposed to strive.
Which makes me angry, for some reason. That kind of attitude just rubs me the wrong way.
So if I'm wrong (and I would like to be wrong in this case), and the described attitude is not the one you have, please explain what you mean by "knowledge of self, morality, and the nature of consciousness and morality" - I will gladly read your answer and have it change my mind.
I totally agree that my attitude may be off putting. I have a lot of trouble listening to people that speak with such certainty. How could anyone possibly know? What gives them the right to say such things? But what if some people really do know something? Should they couch every phrase with "I believe" or "it seems" or other words weakening their message? I'm sick and tired of that as well.
I am not really sure what is genuinely objective anyway. We as humans seek certainty and build models of reality, like the law of gravity, or model of the atom, so we can take actions with some certainty that that our actions will have the desired effects. In some fields, like physics, when confined to certain well defined "envelopes", the predictive power of our models appear to be about as objective as we can get. So far, gravity seems pretty darn solid. Of course, the boundary conditions are wild, once you start moving relativistically, or look at a sub-atomic scale. Let's not even start with quantum physics.
The only thing I know "objectively" is that I am conscious. I can observe, and I am experiencing something that we call reality. I appear to have senses, a body, thoughts, emotions, etc. However, this is also the most subjective possible claim, as it comes from me, the subject.
Now if I take this a bit further, can anything ever really be objective, when viewed from the position of a subject? I don't know. I observe and take in information and I believe this information changes my neurology, or perhaps something beyond (quantum interactions to a "beyond"), and I can use this information and the mental models to live my life and make decisions. If a lot of people use the same mental model, and show that with high probability it holds true (within an envelope of parameters of course), then we can considered it objective, but again viewed through our individual subjective points of view.
I can also say, I don't know if you, or anyone else I've interacted with is "real" or conscious. How could I? I only experience life through my own lens.
Spiritual teachers and books and knowledge passed on through the ages claim things like "We are all one consciousness", and all beings are in fact one. Maybe. I can't prove it, and I have not experienced it, even through lots of spiritual work such as meditation, plant medicines, other "energetic" practices.
Where does that leave me (or us), and the desire for "objective truth"? The way I approach it is that we must be extremely rigorous with our thinking and aware of the limits of rational thought. We must know what assumptions we are making and then use logic to slowly eat away at the foundations until perhaps truth will become self evident, as self evident as the undeniable (to me) knowledge that I am conscious.
I claim that morality is objectively true, because I do not wish to be harmed. You can't argue with me and claim that this isn't true. It is just true, within the bounds of my own experience. If I take that truth, and project it outwards, and make the assumption that you, and any other human is conscious, and make the assumption that they do not wish to be harmed, then I claim that that is the basis for morality. Anything is "right" as long as it does not go against the will of any other conscious being that has the ability to set boundaries. This can only be known but looking inward, and asking what morality means to you. I certainly hope this is true for everyone. It would be a good place to start.
The three words I used "morality", "consciousness" and "self" really describe the same phenomenon or experience I have, and have observed unambiguously within myself. I know I am conscious. It may be an "illusion", but even so it is 100% real to me, more real than any peer reviewed study or external knowledge. Even if a million or billion people say that morality is "doing the greatest good for the greatest number of people", I know that if that harms me, the harm is real. I experience it is real, and the only thing that would convince me otherwise would be direct experience of "the interconnectedness of all being", and through this experience realizing that I am not in fact harmed, and some "greater good" is in fact a greater good. Hoping, praying, doing scientific studies, measuring "happiness" or coming up with "objective metrics" of "the greater good" will never replace that inner knowing.
I'd feel remiss if I didn't mention taxes. As Thomas Sowell said, “What exactly is your ‘fair share’ of what ‘someone else’ has worked for?” For me this again is an undeniable truth. It is immoral to take from someone else what they paid for with their attention and effort. Imagine two men (or women) living on an island. Both are peacefully living isolated lives, eating coconuts. One of them gets hurt, and is no longer able to climb the coconut tree to get food. If the injured one does not get more coconuts, he will die. Is it okay for him to steal from the other? If you say yes, then I'm not sure we'll get much further :)
What if there are three? Or a hundred? What if by stealing one coconut, he can save 100% children from dying? Is it okay for him to steal?
I'd say it's perfectly moral to go to the other guy and say "Hey, I need a coconut. If you give it to me, we'll save a hundred children." At this point, it's up to the man with the coconuts to make his own moral decision. I'd hope he'd save the children, but it's wrong for anyone else to make that decision.
Even if I am wrong with all of this, I feel "in my heart" that if all people connected with this knowing within themselves, we'd collectively experiencing a very different eternal and internal world.
The chains of external government would become unnecessary and fall away if everyone governed themselves. I don't know what this world looks like exactly. I don't know specifically how people would organize and cooperate to do things that cannot be done as an individual, but I do know that taking the first step to not initiate force against any other being would go a long way.
What about the roads? What about the gangs of not enlightened people that wish to do violence? What about the weak/sick/poor people that cannot or will not take care of themselves?
A bunch of morally healthy happy people with all their needs met now have the opportunity and perspective to chose to help build roads, or protect the weak from the violent, and take care of the sick. They will not be forced to do so, but do so out of a place of compassion, strength and love.
We can try to coerce, force, and beat the world into submission externally, but how can we hope to achieve peace externally if we don't find it within first?
I hope that if nothing else, this is interesting to read. I don't expect, or even wish to "change you", just share my experience and my dream. I very much do wish to see a peaceful world, where humans collaborate on great works of art, travel to the stars, into the quantum realm, experience the fullness of reality, and cease to suffer. If any of this resonates, it's because a part of you has these same visions, same thoughts and same "conscious" experience as I do. Or put another way, you speak enough of the same language that a part of you recognizes a part of, and we realize we're not all alone, separate and different, but do share something fundamental and good.
Words are limiting, and I've done my best to share. If you want to read more of my writing, check out https://iamthatiam.org, or reach out on Matrix (see my website).
It's hard for me to think of any reasonable definitions of "suffering" and "root cause" where this isn't obviously wrong.
> Anything deemed a “conspiracy theory”.
Conspiracy theories have largely merged into a horrible tangle that is legitimately harmful, not just to society but to the people that believe them.
Your implication that they shouldn't be called conspiracy theories is... strange.
People who do engage with some wilder ideas do in fact take some actions that are harmful. It’s not the ideas that are harmful, but the actions taken without more complete knowledge that is.
> People who do engage with some wilder ideas do in fact take some actions that are harmful. It’s not the ideas that are harmful, but the actions taken without more complete knowledge that is.
If indirect consequences like that don't count then it's not "“harmful” to the current paradigm of power" either, so I thought we were including those.
Of course people are not mature enough to self govern yet. There would be chaos if all people playing the roles of police, military, etc stopped. That’s the primal terror and darkness we need to face individually, to confront the part of self that can do violence, and learn to govern it internally, and be the ruler of the kingdom of self.
When people are ready, these institutions will simply cease to exist, and be as absurd and illusionary any other superstition.
I don't see how half of your bullet points lead to that, but in particular here I don't see how conspiracy theories lead to that. Especially with the wording of "Anything deemed a “conspiracy theory”", which would mean all conspiracy theories do this plus or minus rounding error.
Some things never change - this could have been written verbatim in 2021, and would still have been accurate.
If only I had a dollar for every time some apologist said "This is not censorship because it's not the government's Thought Police", or "Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences" whenever a large minority was silenced.
I always wonder why there is such a large and vocal support for thought police in these enlightened times. Do these supporters believe that they are exempt?
I upvoted you because you make a good point with that question.
However, my point is that "Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences" is a meaningful expression used primarily by people who want to police the thoughts of everyone.
My point is not that everyone should be forced to associate with everyone else.
IOW, that expression is useful as an indicator that an individual is in a mob.
(Unless the speech is completely illegal such as a credible threat or encouragement of violence).
If it has to be all the way to illegal then I can't refuse business to KKK members? Or even KKK leadership?
Whenever you think of something, ask yourself this "Would I be in favor of the KKK being able to do this to black people?" If the answer is no, then you shouldn't be in favor of doing it to the KKK.
Replace either of those groups with whichever groups are relevant and emotionally impactful to you.
People aren't born KKK. This is tolerance 101.
Either way, yes, if you actually care for freedom of speech you ought to respect that which you find abhorrent. You are supposed to trust that worthwhile ideas prevail while the rest don't. That in this scenario, since the KKK has terrible ideas and yours are better, you benefit from both being out in the open, since yours should surely win over.
"discrimination" in the literal sense isn't bad, it's just making choices. The amusement stems from the very different things people mean when they say "discrimination". And being clear about what people mean with these terms is part of the 101.
But more relevantly, I didn't use that word, which is a very easy way to avoid any possible doublethink related to it!
> That in this scenario, since the KKK has terrible ideas and yours are better, you benefit from both being out in the open, since yours should surely win over.
I didn't say I want them to hide their ideas. I don't.
> Either way, yes, if you actually care for freedom of speech you ought to respect that which you find abhorrent.
Respect what, specifically? I respect their ability to speak. Do I need to go beyond that?
Anyway in this scenario do I have to allow customers to personally insult me too if I want to maintain free speech, or is that different from saying that groups deserve nothing and stole everything they have?
Ideally, yes.
Imagine a world in which anyone saying bad things about Amazon or Jeff Bezos was unable to use any of their services.
And it would go beyond free speech. Companies can ban people on a whim and I don't think that's appropriate either for very big entities.
Even in the most repressive state you can definitely say anything, it's the consequences for saying it that make the difference. The first amendment of the US protects citizens from consequences from the state.
There is a related discussion to be had about social media and reach, but it pales in comparison to how easily people tend to dismiss freedom of speech. It's rather fitting that the expression "Freedom of speech is not freedom of consequences" is so Orwellian.
As the old Soviet joke goes: people in the USSR had freedom of speech too, but they could only use it once.
"For example, he offers us a significant insight in the passage above. The censorship he had to address was not a conspiracy or even a campaign; it was spontaneous. Every right-thinking intellectual somehow knew that a candid assessment of Soviet rule was, well, just not the done thing!…"
If you people still don't believe you're all under deep surveillance, after Assange and Snowden leaks, then you all are mentally ill.
We now know that this government is willing to subvert the first amendment by forcing shadowbans. Orwell's books doesn't come anywhere near what the current government does. Just because you all aren't in interment camps now doesn't mean they won't use the data they gather to be used against you in the future.
So now people that want to speak their minds are either censored by the sheep that downvote or the government that forces censorship.
1) do you believe we can stop it? 2) Do you believe we want to stop it? 3) What is the root cause?
3) Look in the early/mid seventies around the oil embargo - this is when the cost disease really took off and I wouldn't be surprised if there was some subtle change in mentality that enabled a lot of the things we see now.
2) I think that the majority of people that are not profiting want to stop them, but the boiling frog effect is so slow that few do - and the brave new world is quite good at subduing the fighting spiring and inquisitiveness - think of it that way BG3 that is moving to become one of the highest rated PC games ever is just a basic very good game from the late 90s/early 2000s
1) I think we are in a really bad Nash equilibrium right now - so to change we need a really big external push. Never let a crisis go to waste. And there will be crisis. But it will require the right kinds of people to be near the power levers.
And with that, are you (and by extension), all people ready to do the inner work to self govern, and make right choices in the absence of an external motivation?
I think that communism real world performance destroyed in a lot of people the idea of greater good existing at all. So after it's fall we kinda lost the ability to unite for but mostly retaining the ability to unite against. On a larger scale the only thing that unites people is common enemy.
And 'establishment' is not a proxy for class or anything of the sort, but for a bucket of various "values" like: coercion vs persuasion, censorship, geopolitics > all, forever wars, ideological conformity, and so on. And it seems to me that anti-establishment is growing rapidly. And it's not just an America thing, but happening all over the world at the same time.
I don't think anybody can predict where this will lead, other than somewhere different. And given the way things are currently headed, it's hard to imagine that being a bad idea.
This really is an easy ( but not popular) answer. It's collective stupidity or more formally low IQ.
A quote come to mind: “If at age 20 you are not a Communist then you have no heart. If at age 30 you are not a Capitalist then you have no brains.”
So I wouldn't call it funny, it's expected. It's what keeps those works of fiction alive, not the other way around.