SweetLava [he/him]

europe/EU needs to start regulating these twitter bots ASAP

No.

I assume “tankie” is a roundabout way to lump revolutionary leftists with those fomenting red-brown alliances. That is, a “tankie” in the modern day is a way to describe someone as Strasserist, NazBol, LaRouchite, etc.

When you were a kid (if you ever grew out of being a kid, that is), did anyone tell you the story of the apples and oranges? Did you ever hear someone talking about comparing apples to bananas? Anything of that nature? You still can’t explain why you specifically chose to compare Hitler and Bin Laden to Raisi.

Let me break it down for you slow, in hamburger American terms.

Say I want to talk about America. Should I compare America to McDonald’s and apple pie? Or should I compare America to shrimp and gyros?

Fill in the blank: As American as _______.

Did you say “apple pie” or did you say “shrimp and gyros”? Why? Reflect on this in your own time.

Just admit you make awful comparisons and fail to make analogies work.

Hitler, for one, had a specific fascist ideology comparable to Mussolini. I’d feel comfortable comparing the two. Not only based on their alliance and ideology alone, but also their actions taken.

When we compare people to Hitler, we generally make the assumption that we are talking about genocide, fascism, and an extreme passion for exterminating and villifying the “other” (whether that be Jews or Muslims or Slavs or something else). I wouldn’t even make a comparison between Hitler and Netanyahu if I had to be professional and make time for an appropriate comparison.

On to Bin Laden, now. Why isn’t he similar to Hitler? Back in the day, the US had a strategic alliance with Saudi Arabia. Backing the dollar with gold wasn’t the best plan for us, we didn’t gain a strong advantage doing so. Saudi Arabia was happy to help us with new US policy abroad. We went above and beyond to treat Saudi monarchs to the best life available, all at our expense. We even ignored the Saudis backing of people like Bin Laden back when we first knew of his type, all the way in the 1970s. We even used his allies and people with the Mujahideen that fought against the Soviets in the 1980s. Long story short, we had a blowback incident. 9/11 came around to hit us, likely with Saudis allowing it to happen while US intelligence was too incompetent or bogged down to act effectively (or maybe we knew and couldn’t or wouldn’t do anything). We went to war with Iraq and Afghanistan - not Saudi Arabia. Afghanistan was a failure the US contributed to actively for about 20 years, not including the interference from years prior. The Taliban is still governing Afghanistan today in fact. It wasn’t anything like Hitler, except for the brutal anti-Communism. It certainly wasn’t like Raisi either, considering that Iran and Afghanistan’s Taliban aren’t on the best terms.

I would compare Raisi to General Torrijos. Why is that? Because they were both nationalists, both concerned with sovereignty and not bending the will of their country to the US, yet each of them were not inherently accepting of either far-right extemist ideology or Communism (or other explictly left-wing political movements or ideologies). In spite of ideological differences, they both had a desire to stay neutral, choose key allies, and were rather accepting of liberation movements. People didn’t really celebrate the death of Torrijos, at least in Panama. I wouldn’t say people were exceptionally happy in Iran about the death of Raisi either. They weren’t good leaders per se, but they stood on principles. I don’t care for either figure myself, but I recognize who they were and what they fought for as humans.

Again, I know what an analogy is. We already established that. So, that means I do know Hitler is not just a nom de plum or alias for Raisi, or vice versa.

It’s just not a good analogy. Look at the names I wrote and think about it for a second.

Why do I think comparing Hitler to Bin Laden is not a good comparison? Why do I believe comparing General Torrijos to Raisi is a good comparison?

Then, back to you. “[Celebrating] the death of horrific people is not necessarily a bad thing.” You didn’t even clarify what made Raisi a horrific person comparable to Hitler. You sound like everyone else in that Reddit-esque circlejerk.

If you read closely, you can see I don’t really mind the act of celebration itself. My problem is that there is no acceptable reason to compare Raisi and Hitler, first of all; and, secondly, the people celebrating don’t even know who Raisi is. Your comparison alone tells me you’re in that group, the people who are celebrating without even knowing.

I can celebrate the deaths of Hitler, Mussolini, Kissinger, Pinochet, Reagan, and so on. That’s because I actually know who they were and what they did.

I understand what an analogy is. But you know (and I know) that we don’t make analogies at random. There’s a specific reason you chose Bin Laden and Hitler to make the analogy. Even comparing Bin Laden and Hitler is dishonest and lacks appropriate context.

I’d say Raisi’s death celebration is more akin to celebrating the death of someone like Omar Torrijos (Panama), and I’m not speaking of similarity of death itself or the conditons that created the death. I’m talking about their respective policies.

Death happens everyday and you chose to make the specific comparisons you did. It wasn’t an accident, no one forced it into your brain. You did that.

If you think Iranian leaders are equivalent to Biden Laden and Hitler, you still have a few years (or decades) of brain development left. Please at least make an attempt to sound educated when making comparisons. This place is going to be more embarrassing than Reddit soon…

It’s not the fact that they celebrated his death that is most important. It’s the fact that the people celebrating have no coherent understanding of who he was. All they know is “Media told me Iran bad. Iran bad means Iranian dying is bad man dying. Funny meme death of people I don’t see as human.”

You can tell based on responses they haven’t read even a single article in full about anything even tangentially related to the man.

Today’s financial capitalists, unlike capitalists in Marx’s day, now claim their share of the surplus by passively extracting interest or economic rents broadly, rather than through control of the production process. Like landlords and other non-capitalist elites, their pursuit of private wealth does not develop the forces of production, broaden the social division of labor, or prepare the ground for socialism. Pursuit of rents, unlike market competition, generates pressure neither for improvements in the production process, nor for cost-reducing public investment. So the transition from industry to finance as the dominant form of surplus appropriation has been associated with economic stagnation and a withdrawal of the state from social provision.

Not against this article by itself, but I did have some questions based on Engels’ “Anti-Duhring” or “Socialism: Scientific and Utopian.”

Wasn’t the point brought up that as this process develops, the former functions of the capitalists instead turn to the functions of proletarians? and, even though the state should really have more control and power through this process, isn’t the financialization the exact reason we have this broadly connected and globalized society through which workers in the imperial core will have greater access and insight into the inner workings of the bourgeois class?

Of course you can call them a separate class, maybe the PMC, but isn’t this extremely advantageous once class contradictions sharpen once again at home (to the imperial core), which is happening as we speak?

I agree with the author’s point precisely when he chimes in to say,

Companies like Walmart and Google and Amazon are clearly examples of industrial capitalism, relentlessly seeking to push down costs of production. Cheap consumer goods at Walmart lower the costs of subsistence for workers today just as cheap imported food did for British workers in the nineteenth century.

This is in no way to defend Amazon and Walmart, though we shouldn’t deny that their logistical systems are genuine technological accomplishments that a socialist society could build on. The point is just that the greatest concentrations of wealth today still arise from the competition to sell commodities at lower prices.

from which it follows that this is just the natural process of capitalism and we just need to seize the opportunity to manage these widescale operations for the sake of international trade and socialist development.

Anyways, I lately started to see that I can’t find any justification for separating industry capitalism from financial when the dominating capitalist powers have already been at a stage of imperialism for the last 120+ years.

and, going back to Marx and Engels, this isn’t really going to be a meaningful discussion without a socialist revolution, a recent one, getting to the question. Otherwise, capitalism is capitalism is capitalism, sans the nuance of capitalism’s tendency towards monopolization (imperialism) and the conditions between the dominant imperialists against the rising imperialists against the ordinary capitalist regimes. Replacing capitalism with the words “finance capitalism” or replacing “anti-capitalism” with “anti-imperialism” is just going to obstruct the main issue and will, in the long run, turn capitalist regimes into a broader assortment of methods to organizing bourgeois states with a multitude of strategies to further obstruct class struggle.