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Is Che Guevara or Soviet-style Communism trendy for the left?

dudalb said:
If you have said the GOP tires to portray everybody who has liberal opinions of being an extremist I would have agreed.
You implication the there are no extremist on the left is wrong,wrong.wrong.
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There may be are probably extremists on the Berkeley City Council. But I'm not aware of any on the national stage.
 
dudalb said:
Ah, the lost tribe school of politics. There is a vast tribe of left wing voters just waiting for the right candidate to call the home.

And I note your hatred of anybody not as far to the left as you are.
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Aaah! But what is extreme left?

Is supporting unions and collective bargaining left?

How about cheaper secondary education?

Or progressive taxation?

Or single payer healthcare?

How about greater infrastructure spending?

All of these positions were mainstream Democratic values in the 1970s
 
varwoche said:
There may be are probably extremists on the Berkeley City Council. But I'm not aware of any on the national stage.
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Agreed.
The right is by far the greater danger.
But I am cocnerned by, on line, I ma seing quite afew on the left go authorarian, in that they want to shut down the oppositiom in the interest of the common good.
There is a sort of mantra about "Lies and misinformation are not protected by the first amendment" among some on the left, problem being, of course, who the hell decided who decides what are lies and mininformation. Sounds to me like a left version of "Fake News".
 
dudalb said:
Agreed.
The right is by far the greater danger.
But I am cocnerned by, on line, I ma seing quite afew on the left go authorarian, in that they want to shut down the oppositiom in the interest of the common good.
There is a sort of mantra about "Lies and misinformation are not protected by the first amendment" among some on the left, problem being, of course, who the hell decided who decides what are lies and mininformation. Sounds to me like a left version of "Fake News".
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Authoritarian governments can and do derive from either left or right wing ideology.

But I'm not sure that clear lies and deliberate misinformation shouldn't be illegal. While you may be correct that deciding 'what the truth is' may be problematic. I don't believe it is unsolvable. If a jury can decide what the truth is in defamation cases, why can't they in others?

I've had a strong belief that any media that calls itself 'news' has a responsibility of presenting actual facts. Ever since Fox News won a case where they knowingly lied. (I think it was about hormones for cows). Fox argued that 'freedom of the press" guarantees that they have a right to lie. The right wing courts agreed with them.

Something has to stop this non-stop gish-gallop. More and more of the country thinks the truth is subjective. I know lots of people these days that go around believing incredibly stupid and sometimes dangerous things.
 
dudalb said:
Ah, the lost tribe school of politics. There is a vast tribe of left wing voters just waiting for the right candidate to call the home.

And I note your hatred of anybody not as far to the left as you are.
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That's fine, everyone has their pet theories about politics and it's often quite difficult to really test any of them.

But if you feel this way I hope I don't hear any crying about faithless lefty voters who didn't turn out should the Dems lose. Either we're an irrelevant fringe that can be a safely ignored or we're an important part of the coalition that needs to turn out on election day, you have to pick and be consistent. Seems the only time these centrist ghouls care about the progressive wing of the party is when they're moaning about spoilers in lost elections.
 
acbytesla said:
Authoritarian governments can and do derive from either left or right wing ideology.

But I'm not sure that clear lies and deliberate misinformation shouldn't be illegal. While you may be correct that deciding 'what the truth is' may be problematic. I don't believe it is unsolvable. If a jury can decide what the truth is in defamation cases, why can't they in others?

I've had a strong belief that any media that calls itself 'news' has a responsibility of presenting actual facts. Ever since Fox News won a case where they knowingly lied. (I think it was about hormones for cows). Fox argued that 'freedom of the press" guarantees that they have a right to lie. The right wing courts agreed with them.

Something has to stop this non-stop gish-gallop. More and more of the country thinks the truth is subjective. I know lots of people these days that go around believing incredibly stupid and sometimes dangerous things.
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The damage from misinformation is unmistakable. There is a corresponding severe risk in having the government be the arbiter of truth as a general function. I feel best leaning against intervention except in cases of immediate massively high stakes. As an example, COVID misinformation was deadly. I think it was entirely appropriate during a worldwide public health crisis for the government to take an interest.

Short of that level of compelling interest, and typical remedies for individual defamation, I don't want government stepping in to enforce truth-telling. It's all too possible for purveyors of "alternative facts" to be handed those reins.
 
gnome said:
The damage from misinformation is unmistakable. There is a corresponding severe risk in having the government be the arbiter of truth as a general function. I feel best leaning against intervention except in cases of immediate massively high stakes. As an example, COVID misinformation was deadly. I think it was entirely appropriate during a worldwide public health crisis for the government to take an interest.

Short of that level of compelling interest, and typical remedies for individual defamation, I don't want government stepping in to enforce truth-telling. It's all too possible for purveyors of "alternative facts" to be handed those reins.
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Covid is a pretty good example of what its a bad idea to have a arbiter of truth. Truth was necessarily a moving target as we got more information. You start labeling masks being useful as misinformation. Then find out a few weeks later that actually they help. Naturally folks start to think you don't know what you are talking about.

ETA:

Recently heard and interview with two brothers, Hyrum and Verlan Lewis, who have written a boook, the Myth of Left and Right. Basic claim is that there really isn't a consistant ideology that can be named either left or right and thinking so is bad for various reason.

I have a hard time disagreeing. Commies are on the Left and Fascists are on the Right but some how Easter Germany and NAZI Germany don't look that different. They aren't the first people to point at there are lots of policies and beliefs that seem to held by a lot of folks on the Right that don't seem to be logically connected, same for the left.
 
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gnome said:
The damage from misinformation is unmistakable. There is a corresponding severe risk in having the government be the arbiter of truth as a general function. I feel best leaning against intervention except in cases of immediate massively high stakes. As an example, COVID misinformation was deadly. I think it was entirely appropriate during a worldwide public health crisis for the government to take an interest.

Short of that level of compelling interest, and typical remedies for individual defamation, I don't want government stepping in to enforce truth-telling. It's all too possible for purveyors of "alternative facts" to be handed those reins.
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I think stating on News shows that elections were stolen without credible evidence endangers democracy.
 
ahhell said:
Recently heard and interview with two brothers, Hyrum and Verlan Lewis,
who have written a boook, the Myth of Left and Right. Basic claim is that
there really isn't a consistant ideology that can be named either left or right
and thinking so is bad for various reason.

I have a hard time disagreeing. Commies are on the Left and Fascists
are on the Right but some how Easter Germany and NAZI Germany don't
look that different. They aren't the first people to point at there are lots
of policies and beliefs that seem to held by a lot of folks on the Right that
don't seem to be logically connected, same for the left.
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I believe it's this program, The Open Mind: The Nonexistent Left And Right.
Pretty good description of the problem, I think.

P. S. The book, How The Political Spectrum Harms America, is out now.
 
Maybe I had it all wrong.

Massachusetts says "eat the rich" in smashing success of left populism

Massachusetts passed a 4% tax on people's income above $1 million a year.

Revenue from the new income tax is earmarked for public school meals.

Massachusetts is the eighth state to expand their free school lunch program since a pandemic-era federal program ended.

Public-school students in Massachusetts are set to get free lunch and breakfast thanks to a new 4% tax on people's earnings above $1 million.

Massachusetts in 2022 voted for a constitutional amendment to tax high earners. It went into effect at the beginning of 2023.
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https://news.yahoo.com/massachusetts-passed-4-millionaires-tax-172447869.html

Our well nourished, hearty children are coming to take the rich to the gulag.
 
gnome said:
The damage from misinformation is unmistakable. There is a corresponding severe risk in having the government be the arbiter of truth as a general function. I feel best leaning against intervention except in cases of immediate massively high stakes. As an example, COVID misinformation was deadly. I think it was entirely appropriate during a worldwide public health crisis for the government to take an interest.

Short of that level of compelling interest, and typical remedies for individual defamation, I don't want government stepping in to enforce truth-telling. It's all too possible for purveyors of "alternative facts" to be handed those reins.
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Considering that this weird thread is in the USA Politics subforum, I find it astonishing that you don't seem to be aware that this is not only possible, it is actual reality:

Florida says it doesn’t want indoctrination in schools — but look at the materials it just approved (WP, Aug 10, 2023)

Florida wants to let a rightwing group teach history to children (TheGuardian, Aug 10, 2023)

Gov. Ron DeSantis has repeatedly said Florida stands for "education, not indoctrination," while PragerU's founder admits the videos are meant to indoctrinate youths with Judeo-Christian values.
Florida is first state to approve PragerU Kids 'history and blessings' videos for schools (WUSF, Aug 11, 2023)
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Ron DeSantis says Florida schools should be about “education over indoctrination.” So why is his state now bringing in lessons on race and social justice from a right-wing group whose leader brags about indoctrinating kids? Mehdi breaks down the hypocrisy behind DeSantis’ war on ‘woke’ schools.
Indoctrination by cartoon? DeSantis’ latest attack on ‘woke schools.’ (MSNBC on YouTube, Aug 10, 2023 - 10:49 min.)
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It is obvious that when the GOP talks about the freedom of speech, what they mean is the freedom to lie, the freedom to indoctrinate children, and the freedom to forbid any and all attempts to counter the lies and the indoctrination.

It's all too possible for purveyors of "alternative facts" to be handed those reins.
:rolleyes:

Someone to claim us, someone to follow
Someone to shame us, some brave Apollo
Someone to fool, someone like you
We want you, Big Brother
 
Bikewer said:
More recently, an enthusiastic young lad set up a table on the sidewalk with a big sign… “Ask me about Marxism”. As far as I could tell… No one did.
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Threads with this theme - or threads that end up being about this theme - tend to be train wrecks, which is why I usually avoid them. Participating in them is useless because nobody knows what they are talking about. It's much like TBD's old thread about The Atheist Bible, i.e. Das Kapital. Without ever having read a single page of it, he seemed to believe that what he had been told about it just had to be true.
I have read it a couple of times and in three different languages, so I not only know that TBD's idea was a misconception. I also know that another misconception also isn't true: that it's an elaborate description (or any kind of description) of communism.

It's named the way it is for a reason: Its title is not clickbait. It's WYSiWYG: It's about Das Kapital, it's about the economy of capitalism. It's not about religion, atheism or communism. It's the communist analysis of capital.
Nowadays, with digitalization, it was so much easier to counter TBD's idea because you can do a word search of the whole text in seconds, so you aren't left with that lingering feeling of doubt: 'Is it possible that Marx may have had a footnote somewhere on one of the thousands of pages where he talks about atheism, and I just forgot about it?'

Kindle and/or Google makes it fairly easy to answer questions like that.
You can also search for the words communism or communist/communists.
I just did. I got two hits. Both of them footnotes:
[378] Robert Owen, soon after 1810, not only maintained the necessity of limitation of the working day in theory, but actually introduced the 10 hours' day into his factory at New Lanark. This was laughed at as a communistic Utopia; so were his "Combination of children's education with productive labour and the Co-operative Societies of Workingmen", first called into being by him. To-day, the first Utopia is a Factory Act, the second figures as an official phrase in all Factory Acts, the third is already being used as a cloak for reactionary humbug.
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[521] Hence in a communistic society there would be a very different scope for the employment of machinery than there can be in a bourgeois society.
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So footnote 378 isn't about communism at all but about any restriction of the exploitation of workers being described as Utopian communism by its critics. And 521 is a footnote to a paragraph in chapter 15, Machinery and Modern Industry, about the effects of machines used as capital; for instance how the introduction of new machines results in unemployment when fewer workers are needed to make the same number of products and many are laid off.

Marx might as well have used a more down-to-earth example as his contrast to capitalism. For instance, how people don't usually start firing family members when they get new dishwashers, potato-peelers or vacuum cleaners: 'Sorry Honey, sorry kids! It was nice knowing you, but I'm afraid I don't need you anymore. This new blender has made you redundant, and I just can't afford your services anymore.' (Well, Marx mightn't, actually, since they are all more recent inventions, but you get my drift.)


So feel free, ask me about Marxism and/or communism, but notice that communism as "communistic society" never actually existed. The title's "Soviet-style Communism never did. You may see countries run by communists - Cuba is an example of that - but they themselves are well aware that they are not even close to realizing communistic society, and they are up against powerful enemies hoping to prevent them from ever doing so.

But feel free to ask me about Cuba, too. I don't know if I am the only one here who has noticed, but for some reason Cuban elections are no longer of any interest to the mainstream media.
Anyway, it is a theme that would probably be more suited to the thread, Protests Erupt in Cuba, and nobody seeme to interested.
 
Darat said:
When I was politically active, I was on the left, but sadly I've always been a pragmatist so never gel neatly with any kind of extremist. Back then - 40 years ago - it was still just about possible for a reasonable person to be in denial about how terrible the USSR was and blame its woes on "the west" or claim it was all western propaganda. Today there can be no excuse for anyone to not recognise and know what a terrible regime the USSR was. Anyone harking back to that as the "good old days" is an idiot (albeit a lot of people who lived under it do hark back to it being the good old days).
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I recently read Mark Steel's What's Going On?: The Meanderings of a Comic Mind in Confusion (2009) about his time in the SWP and the reason why he dropped out:
Comedian Mark Steel has spent most of his life a committed, signed-up member of the Socialist Workers Party. The Labour Party coming to power in 1997 could have been the start of a new political dawn for Mark and for Britain. But instead, big business and war-mongering thrived under New Labour, and in many ways the working class seemed to become more marginalised. Petty bickering and in-fighting racked the SWP, numbers dwindled horribly, socialism became a dirty word and Mark Steel began to think the unthinkable . . . do I really want to belong to this rabble anymore?
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On the one hand, his description corresponds pretty well to what I've seen and heard about similar political groups, but I've never participated in any of them. The groupthink was always to obvious for me to want to join. On the other hand, I have observed and heard about groupthink in liberal and conservative political organizations as well, so it isn't really the thing that distinguishes left-wing from liberal, centrist, conservative or far-right groups. (In my 'school' of political thinking, we refer to it as Stalinism, whether it's left-wing or not: the willingness to adapt one's thinking to whatever one perceives to be the party line instead of basing it on facts and analysis.)

Darat said:
I do have sympathy for those people who first come across communism - as the theory - and decide it is a good idea, it is after all the epitome of fairness and just rewards for your own work. The issue of course is that it is a fantasy that wasn't based on anything factual, like all the ideologies of the time it was based on "just so" stories. So, since like all ideologies it does not accurately describe nor model the real world it can never be implemented as the theory describes it in the real world.
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What you describe isn't communism. It appears to be a kind of socialist utopianism. What you call "communism - as the theory" has nothing to do with Marxist communism (sometimes called dialectics or scientific socialism), i.e. the theory Marx presented in Das Kapital, which is not a theory of communism. It is the analysis and criticism of capitalism.

You may not have noticed, but much like the people who embraced the idea of Russia as the homeland of communism, the idea of capitalism as the economic system that accommodates everything that is truly human and good is as much "a fantasy that wasn't based on anything factual"[/url] as the fantasy of Russian communism (or Chinese, if anybody still thinks their branch of capitalism is communism). And the people who adhere to the fantasy of benign capitalism usually find it just as difficult to let the fantasy go as Western CP fans did when the Eastern Bloc collapsed. And this in spite of being confronted with the reality of capitalism on a daily basis.

But I am curious to hear what you mean when you talk about communism "as the theory describes it." Which theory are you referring to?
 
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