i am so incredibly used to defending good things by explaining how they help people and make their lives better because, yeah obviously that’s why good things are good and people with empathy would want that. i get that modern Western bourgeois “morality” is fucked, but if you tell people that they just think you are amoral or don’t think morals are good or just don’t care about them.
i’m so used to describing things and “good” and “bad” and the fact that Marxist theory just doesn’t seem to bother with that throws me for a loop. and then comes the question of “well REALLY what IS morality” and whether its objective (which i dont think it possibly could be? i’m a hard atheist) and its just kind of a mess in my brain as i’m trying to parse it all out.
edit: i get that the immorality of exploitation is apparent in Marxist analysis and should be to anybody, i’m more talking about how the argument isn’t framed as a moral one, because then you can get really annoying people in there trying to facts-and-logic their way out of it, if that makes sense
I think it sort of speaks for itself. An “elite” class that keeps a “lower” class in perpetual servitude is so blatantly immoral, the goal of freeing society is a natural response.
I like the emphasis on community and getting closer with from each other, resisting the alienation that has been thrust upon us.
“But look how many people died under communism!” some say. I have no idea why people think fascist authoritarianism is a necessary consequence of communism. It seems to be in direct opposition to me, but people seem to think “they did communism wrong” is not a good enough answer. I don’t want secret police or death camps, personally. I think we have more options than have yet been explored.
The short answer is that capitalist states lie about socialist states, giving bourgeois perspectives on supposed terrors inflicted on “the people,” but “the people” in this case are largely fascists, capitalists, landlords, etc, while the actual majority were and are uplifted by socialism. Thus, the Red Scare paints socialist states as overwhelmingly repressive, despite being the opposite for the working classes.
The reason “they did communism wrong” is a bad argument for anyone to make is that it ignores that socialism was and is enormously uplifting for the majority, and that socialist states inevitably run into struggles and conflict that we need to learn from. Painting a prettier and prettier ideal vision of socialism doesn’t really get us closer to it, we build socialism in the real world. We need to carry the work of our predecessors forward, not separate ourselves from their historic struggle.