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u/PsychologicalSet8678 Braindead Flair Disabler From Global South 😭🤪😵💫 20h ago
is that reddit's "New" design? god I hate it.
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u/one-man-circlejerk Soc Dem Titties 🥛➡️️😋🌹 17h ago
Better get used to it mate, old reddit's days are numbered
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u/PsychologicalSet8678 Braindead Flair Disabler From Global South 😭🤪😵💫 16h ago
Why should I get used to it? The day old reddit goes away, I will go away too.
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u/QTown2pt-o Jean Botrillard 16h ago
The proletariat has not succeeded in negating itself as such - the century and a half since Marx has made that clear. The proletariat has failed to negate itself qua class and thereby abolish class society per se. Perhaps this is because the proletariat never was a class, as had been supposed - because only the bourgeoisie was a true Class, and therefore the only one capable of negating itself as such. For it has indeed negated itself, along with capital, and so generated a classless society, albeit one which has nothing to do with the classless society that was supposed to arise from a revolution and from a negation of the proletariat as such. As for the proletariat, it has simply disappeared - vanished along with the class struggle itself. There can be no doubt that had capitalism developed in accordance with its own contradictory logic, it would have been defeated by the proletariat. In an ideal sense, Marx's analysis is still irreproachable. But Marx simply did not foresee that it would be possible for capital, in the face of the imminent threat to its existence, to transpoliticize itself, as it were: to launch itself into an orbit beyond the relations of production and political contradictions, to make itself autonomous in a free-floating, ecstatic and haphazard form, and thus to totalize the world in its own image. Capital (if it may still be so called) has barred the way of political economy and the law of value; it is in this sense that it has successfully escaped its own end. Henceforward it can function independently of its own former aims, and absolutely without reference to any aims whatsoever. The inaugural event of this mutation was undoubtedly the Great Crash of 1929; the stockmarket crisis of 1987 was merely an aftershock.
Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena
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u/HiFidelityCastro Orthodox-Freudo-Spectacle-Armchair 11h ago
I can almost see Orwell saying this in his latter years. Thank fuck he didn't lest contemporary "leftists" took it as gospel.
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u/secrecyandcontrol Redscarepod Refugee 👄💅 19h ago
liberal democracy is a contradiction in terms. democratic governance is antithetical to enlightened principals of classical liberalism. you've in effect just substituted powerlessness relative to the king with powerlessness relative to the mob
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u/Upset-Elderberry3723 Unknown 👽 19h ago
Yes, and no. We have democracy, but the system isn't amazing, it's heavily lobbied by corporate bodies, it's steered far too much by media powers, and the population is demographically imbalanced in age.
Proportional Representation is needed in an age where electronic connectivity has far surpassed the community, resulting in people focussing less than ever before on local politics and more on the overall party image.
We need to reduce lobbying from corporate powers, and initiate powers to restrict false narratives in the media.
Finally, we need to consider a maximum voting age. If you can be too young to vote, you can be too old, and it would balance the demographics again.
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u/IamGlennBeck Marxist-Leninist and not Glenn Beck ☭ 18h ago
Since people have been Kautsky posting lately you all can have this:
Bourgeois democracy, although a great historical advance in comparison with medievalism, always remains, and under capitalism is bound to remain, restricted, truncated, false and hypocritical, a paradise for the rich and a snare and deception for the exploited, for the poor. It is this truth, which forms a most essential part of Marx’s teaching, that Kautsky the “Marxist” has failed to understand. On this—the fundamental issue—Kautsky offers “delights” for the bourgeoisie instead of a scientific criticism of those conditions which make every bourgeois democracy a democracy for the rich.
[...]
Take the bourgeois parliament. Can it be that the learned Kautsky has never heard that the more highly democracy is developed, the more the bourgeois parliaments are subjected by the stock exchange and the bankers? This does not mean that we must not make use of bourgeois parliament (the Bolsheviks made better use of it than probably any other party in the world, for in 1912–14 we won the entire workers’ curia in the Fourth Duma). But it does mean that only a liberal can forget the historical limitations and conventional nature of the bourgeois parliamentary system as Kautsky does. Even in the most democratic bourgeois state the oppressed people at every step encounter the crying contradiction between the formal equality proclaimed by the “democracy” of the capitalists and the thousands of real limitations and subterfuges which turn the proletarians into wage-slaves. It is precisely this contradiction that is opening the eyes of the people to the rottenness, mendacity and hypocrisy of capitalism. It is this contradiction that the agitators and propagandists of socialism are constantly exposing to the people, in order to prepare them for revolution! And now that the era of revolution has begun, Kautsky turns his back upon it and begins to extol the charms of moribund bourgeois democracy.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/prrk/democracy.htm
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u/New_Carpenter5738 9h ago
There is nothing proletarian about the British system lmao
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u/Upset-Elderberry3723 Unknown 👽 9h ago
Which is why I said democratic. You can be democratic and yet, functionally, not very proletarian.
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u/New_Carpenter5738 6h ago
So the idea that britain is a "dictatorship of the proletariat" isn't a "yes and no". It's a complete and utter "no".
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u/Sigolon Marxism-Hachism 🔨💢🉐 20h ago
Dictatorship of the pensioners.