Greed as in people that abondon all morals for material and money.

If someone is both they will continue to live with only one of those.

Just curious what leftists target more.

    • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
      8·
      1 day ago

      No, I don’t, actually. For starters, all states are authoritarian, as all states are means by which the class in charge exerts its authority. To get rid of the state, all property needs to be collectivized, which both gets rid of class and the state itself. That means its good for the working class to have a hold of that authority, and use it against the Capitalist class. There’s no “promising to abolish” anything, the state gradually withers away with respect to class withering away as property is sublimated and collectivized.

      I am a Marxist, yes. I became one after engaging with history, theory, logic, and practice. The fact that poor logic and false history doesn’t sway me doesn’t diminish my points. I haven’t seen any ethical arguments being brought up here.

      • WillStealYourUsername@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        18·
        1 day ago

        all states are authoritarian

        Not in the same ways. You support dictatorships where workers have no power, nor the means to eventually hold power later down the line. I support neither capitalist regimes nor dictatorships pretending to be socialist.

        To get rid of the state, all property needs to be collectivized, which both gets rid of class and the state itself.

        Yes.

        There’s no “promising to abolish” anything, the state gradually withers away with respect to class withering away as property is sublimated and collectivized.

        No marxist can describe how this will happen. The dictators in charge do not have incentives to give away their power, nor are there other mechanisms in place that can bring about socialism. It’s literally just propaganda. Inequality in china is not withering away, there’s just a growing middle class the same way we had a growing middle class in other places where industrialization happened. The state owning and running things does not equate to socialism. It could, if there was democracy of some kind rather than oligarchy supplemented with very minor political participation from a fraction of the population.

        I am a Marxist, yes. I became one after engaging with history, theory, logic, and practice. The fact that poor logic and false history doesn’t sway me doesn’t diminish my points. I haven’t seen any ethical arguments being brought up here.

        Your auth states commit all the evils of capitalist empires and yet you still defend them. That’s not exactly ethical. Authoritarianism can’t be ethical in practice because of the incentives the people in power have to keep their power, and the things they do to keep it. “Communist” states are far more authoritarian than most liberal democracies, which is why I call them authoritarian. I call you authoritarian because you defend them and wish to implement similar oligarchies/dictatorships elsewhere. This is not to say I like liberalism, just by comparison your system is in many ways worse. Unions are way more suppressed, people are less active politically, and there are no big benefits to make up for it. Genocide is still happening, billionaires are still being produced, freedom of speech is still suppressed, etc. Like yeah we can sit here and compare metrics and see both capitalist and marxist states are doing good and bad in all sorts of different ways. Both systems work to a point. I don’t care. I want actual democracy. I want actual freedom. I want actual socialism, or at least a system which can produce socialism unlike your auth vanguard states.

        I will be blocking you after this.

        Edit: To me the big mystery is why defend these states? Why aim for vanguard states? Can’t we aim for something better rather than something that has “succeeded”? Why do we have to choose between liberalism and marxism when we can instead try to work towards actual socialism?

        • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
          8·
          24 hours ago

          Claiming I support states where the workers have no power, without doing the legwork to explain how that’s the case, is just smearing. It isn’t a point. The socialist states I support are those that are broadly recognized as such by socialist and communist organizations and states, I am not acting out of the ordinary for doing so.

          Marxists have described the withering of the state. From Engels:

          When, at last, it becomes the real representative of the whole of society, it renders itself unnecessary. As soon as there is no longer any social class to be held in subjection; as soon as class rule, and the individual struggle for existence based upon our present anarchy in production, with the collisions and excesses arising from these, are removed, nothing more remains to be repressed, and a special repressive force, a State, is no longer necessary. The first act by virtue of which the State really constitutes itself the representative of the whole of society — the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society — this is, at the same time, its last independent act as a State. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The State is not “abolished”. It dies out. This gives the measure of the value of the phrase: “a free State”, both as to its justifiable use at times by agitators, and as to its ultimate scientific inefficiency; and also of the demands of the so-called anarchists for the abolition of the State out of hand.

          To Lenin’s State and Revolution, which centers this very issue. Marxists have written about the state and how it withers away upon collectivization for centuries, this isn’t a new thing. Administration is not the same thing as a state. Further, the PRC is democratic:

          The rest of your comment is a baseless, unsupported rant about socialist states supposedly being “just as bad” as capitalist states, despite the opposite being the case when it comes to uplifting the working class. From doubling of life expectancy, to certified safety nets, to tripling of literacy rates, to certified healthcare, to decolonial action, to fighting imperialism, socialist states around the world are rising while capitalism is dying, and you sit on the fence and say real socialism isn’t good enough for you while you live in a western country. It’s social chauvanism, plain and simple.

          I don’t block people, nor would I announce that I am going to. I don’t take ill-founded insults or libel seriously, either.

          To respond to your edit, here:

          Edit: To me the big mystery is why defend these states? Why aim for vanguard states? Can’t we aim for something better rather than something that has “succeeded”? Why do we have to choose between liberalism and marxism when we can instead try to work towards actual socialism?

          I defend the achievements of really existing socialism, that have brought dramatic democratization and uplifting of the working class. From Russia to China to Cuba to many other countries, socialism has proven to be extremely successful at meeting the needs of the people. We need to use a vanguard because it works, and vanguards themselves will appear whether we formalize them and democratize them as they have been in AES countries, or if we ignore them and let them form naturally and unaccountably.

          We should always aim for better, but when that takes the form of saying “real socialism isn’t good enough,” then that becomes an incredibly privledged and chauvanistic viewpoint. Workers fought and died to win socialism in their countries, and are making constant improvements. This is actual socialism, not the socialism that lives only as a perfect ideal in our heads. Rather than saying that they did it the wrong way, or that they didn’t fight hard enough, we should respect the tremendous gains they’ve made and try our best to carry out our own revolutions, charting a path to a better world collectively.

          When we oppose the working class in socialist countries for the mistakes they make, and declare these states enemies when they ought not to be, we make the same mistakes as those who oppose Palestinian liberation because they aren’t very queer friendly (and I say this as a pansexual person myself). It completely aids the imperialist narrative and serves as justification for color revolution and massive setback on the path to building socialism. It’s against solidarity.