The only thing that’s set in stone is the past and that’s only because it has already happened. Predictions can be useful if applied alongside action (ex: “the weather prediction says it will rain on Thursday, so I will go the baseball game on Tuesday instead”). Without the action, they mean little. Things can reach a tipping point in one area or another, unforeseen crises can arise, and throughout it all, there are multiple factions vying for power, whether for selfish reasons, such as fascism, or humanitarian ones, such as anti-imperialism, decolonization, and liberation of the working class. Aid in the humanitarian struggle where you can; that’s where dire predictions are transformed into optimistic ones.

Oh ok, that would explain not being able to find it then. Thanks for the info.

How do you directly/privately message the mods of a community? Or do you have to DM a specific mod? I know of the report feature for specific posts, but thinking of broader message than that.

Interesting, I like that analogy.

Others covered details well. I just wanted to add a reminder on the perspective of being the one trying to do it, to remember that none of us are above mistakes or hold all of the correct knowledge and experience in our singular hands, and that trying to do it piecemeal, without a program, is always going to be harder and especially in the context of individualism, is going to be more susceptible to falling into traps of arrogance that others should be listening because “we know better.” To attempt an analogy, you could imagine it’s something like that people in our circles are teachers and/or experienced in the field, but the institutions of the status quo (assuming living under a dictatorship of capital, etc.) do not recognize that knowledge and experience as meaning anything and don’t give credentials for it, and so most people don’t take it seriously at the offset. Instead, they will tend to view you as being an equal in the subject matter, if not lesser depending on if they start to hear you say certain things they have been conditioned to associate with crackpots and extremists. So it’s important to remember that not only is your personal knowledge and experience limited, and vulnerable to mistakes, but that other people often won’t even be viewing you as having knowledge and experience in the subject that has more relevance, importance, or academic authority than their own.

And to be fair, why should they? If you have not struggled with them, seen what they deal with in the day to day and worked to make improvements with them, built some level of trust that you have their best interests at heart and vice-versa. Without that, it may look like you are asking for them to question and reject a lot of pre-existing notions for no apparent gain, introducing more chaos into their life rather than stability. Individualism and its consequences in general has done a lot of damage, and I think it’s very easy to lose track of what it’s doing if immersed in it. This part kinda goes beyond the topic alone, but individualism is something I think needs being more broadly understood in the western “left”, as its own form of consciousness to have. So far, it is something where either I’m missing important perspectives people are already regularly sharing on it, or it would seem it’s under-represented in the part it plays in how difficult it can be to organize and move people ideologically.

Quit making up shit that I never endorsed doing, so you can pretend like you “won”. This feels like an argument with an ego-centric liberal at this point.

“people have been propagandized to conflate things like invention with capitalism, as if they are one and the same”

Yeah, they have. Trying to twist “historical materialism” as a buzzword to defend the lens that has been pushed on you by a predominantly capitalist world doesn’t change this fact.

The overlap of capitalism and the rise in living standards etc. are historically intertwined and you cant undo that.

K, tell that to someone who is being exploited for cheap prison labor in the US. Or any number of other examples of exploitation, especially in some of the more exploited (by imperialism/capitalism) countries in the world. It’s not idealism to push back on poor attempts to universalize concepts that do more harm in messaging than good.

If capitalism was fundamentally a rise in living standards, we would not be talking about it as so fundamentally exploitative! Many people don’t benefit from it, that’s like kind of one of the most important points of criticizing it in the first place. You know who is usually the one going to people and giving them some insistent spiel about how capitalism is actually an improvement somehow and ya know, it could be worse? Capitalists. So forgive me for wondering where your priorities are at here.

Capitalism was a step forward, in the right direction even. But we didn’t move on from it yet. We need to move forward and asking whether we are worse off now than before capitalism is not how to encourage people to move forward that encourages them to go back.

No, no, no. History is not linear and things are not automatically universal just cause some people with the predominant status quo lens say that they are. This is not how anything works. Aspects of things in the past can actually be better and be something to model after. The whole notion of communism itself is in part based on communal societal structures of the past. Marx, Lenin, and others like them did not pull the concept out of thin air and “invent” organizing communally. What they did was observe the systems they were dealing with in a scientific manner, as well as historically, and then try to work out through a mixture of theory and practice what would get the outcome they wanted to be. The modern notions of communism are meant to be a kind of merging of the benefits of industrialization and technology, and the political/social/economic structure of something communal. They just don’t idealize it as something you will achieve by being nice to the dominant power structure and hoping it allows you to do your thing. The notion that the past is inherently worse overall I’m certain has some ties not just to capitalism, but also to colonialism and its lens of civil and savage, its lens of “primitive” indigenous societies that were doing a lot better off than they were portrayed.

None of this is saying “return to the past, romanticize it, think only in binary terms!” It’s saying something is not inherently worse in all aspects because it came before. It’s saying if you find yourself using talking points that sound way too close to what the capitalists are using, maybe that should give you pause. I cannot with the audacity of telling me I’m being idealist in this situation, while talking about history like it’s an RPG skill progression ladder.

I don’t know what in the world is going on with the train of thought that thinks historical materialism means saying capitalism was good for the world. That is effectively what you are arguing when you say “the rise in living standards etc. are historically intertwined and you cant undo that”. Meanwhile, climate change is threatening to upend the entire species. But sure, let’s have the priority be that nobody dare ever think any pullback on industrial excess could ever be necessary. Who needs the Amazon rainforest, right, as long as we have Amazon the service. Everything is linear progress overall, even if it threatens to make the planet unlivable for humans. History is over, right. Never mind the ecosystem. We’ll push our way through it with sheer force of rugged individualist linear history will.

Utterly exhausting.

I never said demonising capitalism was bad (I said “do it all you like”). I am saying that romanticising feudalism is worse.

A strange way to word it then, is all I can say. In my experience, that kind of wording would imply being bothered by the so-called demonization, as in, being defensive, which matched with your defensiveness of capitalism and innovation. In any case, nothing in what I have said anywhere in this thread romanticizes feudalism and you are welcome to quote my own words at me if you believe otherwise. But it is a reality that the capitalist narrative has a tendency to portray history as linear, with capitalism as inherently an improvement. And it is not inherently so, and it would be contradictory and confusing, especially to people who have no understanding of communism, if there were some communist push that it inherently is (one does not need to hand it to capitalism, even if indirectly). What is, I think safe to say, well understood among marxist-leninist and similar is that having a working class, or socialist, state to transition away from non-communist systems toward communism is valuable and important, and that these states cannot afford to be idealized projects that skip over the constraints of current conditions at home and abroad. So China, for example, has a system that has some characteristics of capitalism, but it is heavily controlled by the dictatorship of the working class. It is this controlled communist vanguard system that is behind lifting 800 million people out of poverty, out of a feudalist system, and propelled into significant global influence through mutually beneficial ties with other countries—not capitalism. I choose to use them as an example because it is one that is at times labeled “state capitalism”, as if it’s just “capitalism with regulation” and not something distinctly different; and if viewed as a form of capitalism, it could be confused with an example of capitalism being “better than what came before.”

Frankly I’m confused that someone calling themselves a communist hasn’t read the manifesto.

This feels like the rough equivalent of quoting the bible at some to win a religious argument. I’m not sure what that passage is supposed to even have to do with what we’re talking about. I see no value judgment in it about quality of life and invention’s relationship to it. I can only take a guess you’re going for the line about “constantly revolutionising the instruments of production”, but this is not a god speaking, for one, and again, it is not clear that it is talking about the kind of thing I’m talking about.

Beyond what I’ve already said, I’m not sure how to proceed here because the most good faith interpretation I can come to with the information I have on hand is that I see the kind of position you’re taking in your replies to me as essentially romanticizing capitalism, if not worse. And you’re viewing it as some kind of denial of how bad feudalism was, which has nothing to do with what I’m trying to accomplish here in messaging; if that’s misrepresenting you, feel free to tell me. I’m just trying to make sense of what page we are on vs. think we are on and am having to do a fair amount of guesswork in responding to what I think might be relevant. The forum format makes it hard to do a simpler back and forth.

Capitalists are constantly looking for an edge to use because they are always in competition. They are never secure in their position because there is always a threat right there.

This part is just about word for word pro-capitalist propaganda. If capitalists are looking for an “edge”, it’s in the meaning of looking for more power to smite their enemies with. The US reaction to Deepseek is a good example of how capitalism reacts to real competition; panic, racism, market instability, etc. It doesn’t motivate them to “innovate” in the meaning of invention that betters the human experience—that part is largely incidental. It motivates them to consolidate power and stifle actual competitors, so that they can continue to accrue more capital and thus more power. Capitalism’s relationship with competition, in other words, is a power struggle, not anything resembling an inherent interest in what would be called invention or innovation that can help people in their day to day lives. The closest thing it has to an arguable relationship with innovation, is innovating on new ways to go about struggling for power, but even that I’m not sure is true in practice because the stuff they’re doing isn’t particularly new across time, as far as I can tell. Much of it is the same general concepts with the help of new technology.

The reality of capitalists is much closer to how you described monarchs and lords.

Frankly, I’m confused that someone calling themself a communist is telling me I am “demonizing” capitalism, as if that’s a bad thing. Real head scratcher, that is.

It serves nothing but fuel the primitivist bullshit and its derivations from anarcho-whatever and chuds retvrn-to-tradition.

One of the things it serves that is helpful is challenging the pro-capitalist narrative that capitalism has been a force for good in the world. If someone’s immediate conclusion from the belief that pre-capitalist peoples were not all worse off is “destroy factories”, that’s a problem of binary thinking and not being presented with enough context of where problems derive from, not a problem with looking at quality of life before capitalism. Industrialization and capitalism, for example, are not inherently the same thing, even if they have developed alongside a lot. Trade and capitalism are not the same thing; capitalism is just a particular form of relation there.

I would say it’s a pretty important distinction to address at times because some people have been propagandized to conflate things like invention with capitalism, as if they are one and the same. The takeaway of the argument in my view isn’t “go backwards in technological development”, it’s “better understand just how badly capitalism is hurting people and how much better life could be if it was gone and all the development we have was put to use in a humane, communal system.”

Ah yes, being born in a country makes you an expert on it and you are magically imbued with everything about its history with total accuracy. That’s why everyone born in the US is famous for being in total agreement on everything.

Thanks for this. I’ve long been suspicious of the notion capitalism is some kind of inherent improvement from what came before, especially on the point of loss of community under capitalism, and this lays things out well.

And I don’t trust Russia or Putin enough that I’m convinced they couldn’t be bribed with reintegration with Europe to look the other way and whistle while the US attacks the DPRK/China.

My question there would be, what would the US bribe them with? Temporarily not vilifying, dehumanizing, and trying to undermine them for decades? I don’t see what benefit “reintegration with Europe” would even be, especially that would be worth discarding China or trying to play some kind of Pontius Pilate thing. The US is becoming behind technologically with no prospects of improving on that front, it and its European “allies” are in a sad state of affairs in terms of producing their own goods, their internal contradictions keep getting worse, and their image on the world stage keeps taking hits. If I were trying to put myself in the head of a person thinking only in terms of cynical long-term benefit, China would make far more sense as the one to bet on. Russia throwing China under the bus in order to ally with the US after everything it has done to Russia not only doesn’t make much strategic sense, I would think it would be extremely humiliating for Russia to do, to being throwing away such a powerful ally just to please the chronically abusive and terrorizing US that has caused them so much grief. Russia, like China, would probably prefer that the warmongering ends, even if they are not quite the same political systems, which is where openness to talks comes in. Lest we forget that Russia didn’t want to war with Ukraine and western influences sabotaged at least one attempt at peace between Ukraine and Russia already.

Stranger things have happened, but the idea of it is odd to me. The empire has made a mockery of itself in Ukraine and I can’t see how it would be anything but immensely foolish for Russia to view talks as the US being in a position to set terms. They can demand all they want, but the situation on the ground is another thing.

Tbh, I think the only reason I got into 6 at all is because of the price going down enough over time. The DRM thing, Denuvo, based on what I’m finding about it is hot garbage (hurt the honest buyer so that you can try to stop some piracy, wheee capitalism and its obsession with punishment and control). The pricing and DLC scheme is straight out of Ubisoft/EA playbook, you could fool me into thinking it was being published by them. That alone is enough reason to give it a pass. But based on the steam reviews, it sounds like they failed even on the gameplay. Capitalism strikes again.

Good reason to enjoy older games for what they are while they are and avoid the major western publishers outside of that.

But yeah, my sympathies about the sorry state of it. There’s a reason I almost never buy new games anymore.

I can’t speak for the intended point by cfgaussian. However, in context, I think an underlying point here is that, at least for westerners, most of their distrust of Russia comes from US imperialist lies, so it is an important contrast to bring up the lies of the US empire. In other words, if it were the case that most things the west has said about Russia are false, what is there left as far as automatically distrusting their word goes? There are undoubtedly fair and reasonable ideological disagreements with modern day Russia from a communist standpoint, considering they are a far cry from USSR days now (thus “critical support” for them insofar as they are anti-imperialist). But in terms of speaking truthfully, I’ve not come across major reasons to think they have a habit of spinning elaborate lies. This isn’t to say they aren’t biased (all sources are to an extent) but there’s a distinction between that and going to great lengths to fabricate entire narratives in great detail. So whether they are de facto trustworthy is sort of beside the point. The point is that (again, at least for westerners, can’t speak for elsewhere) it would seem most of the reason to assume dishonesty from them comes from western imperialist lies about them. Westerners would not tend to make the same assumptions about, for example, a French documentary, in spite of its colonial history and part in imperialism.

Nah, other reasons.

Fun train of thought, though I think if aliens were that advanced and interested in cooperation, they’d do some observing and evaluating first, work out that a prominent socialist state who is doing cooperative stuff would be the best one to work with, and pay China a visit as quietly as possible (so as not to alarm the earthlings). The US would probably be considered too paranoid and unpredictable to go near without careful consideration.

This feels like bait.

Widen your mind: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-2/mswv2_03.htm

In addition, he seems to have a scandal following him around about DMs with minors.

Do you have any sources on this?