Says the dude who’s spent this whole time defending a free market economy?

You can’t defend the free market and then be aghast when the free market decides plastics are profitable.

Oh, nope. Rereading it, you’re totally right. Just a little of my dyslexia seeping in lol. My bad!

Yes, exactly why I said it’s a platitude. It’s thoughtless and trite. I’m saying: consumption is not ethical, no matter which system. There is no ethical consumption.

That’s a false dichotomy…even if we agreed with your definition of all consumption being unethical, it wouldn’t mean that there aren’t different levels of unethical practices used to produce those consumables.

All consumption being unethical does not mean that all forms of production are equally unethical. If that’s the case you wouldn’t really have a problem with sending the kids back to the mines.

It paints consumers as mere puppets or robots who are unable to make choices or decisions that could lead to a reduction of suffering.

Can you point to a time in history where a general boycott of a dangerous or harmful product was successful without the help of government intervention?

Any other system created by humans is flawed and infected the human disease, doomed to create suffering and torment.

And apparently that doesn’t happen under capitalism? Then what exactly are you bitching about plastic for?

“ethical consumption” in any other living system is wishful thinking. It doesn’t exist.

Again, your argument is based on a forced false dichotomy.

Not to mention that it seems like you are really just a libertarian angry at consumers for participating in the “free market”.

You can’t simultaneously believe that the free market is the best way to regulate the economy, but upset at the people for their consumption habits in a free market.

Yeah, and helping feed people wasn’t exactly his original motivation for the haber-bosch process either. During the late 19th century empires were running low on natural sources of nitrates for making gun powder, as the British had held a near monopoly of the guano mines in South America and India.

Judging by this, his time as an artillery man for the prussians, his combustion research after he finished the haber process, and his over all obsession with creating weapons of war… It’s pretty safe to assume fertilizer was an afterthought.

Fritz Haber for example

I mean… Haber isn’t exactly a giant of morality and ethics. He did invent most of the chemical weapons utilized in WW1, and expressly defended their use as weapons.

Well, we can’t effectively ban guns. At least not in our foreseeable political future. And the people who are already armed are overwhelmingly voting to elect a fascist who likes to incite violence among minority groups… It’s kinda easy to see why people would want to arm themselves.

Cool, thanks. I’ll have to check out dbzer0 and lemmygrad. Still kinda learning about navigating Lemmy all together. Old man brain isn’t as spry as it used to be when it comes to social media.

Have a good one!

Fair enough, though I apologize if it seems as if I was confrontational in any way. That wasn’t my intent.

If you do have any contemporary readings that go into the subject I would love to give them a read. I’m prob a bit older than most people on this site, and I’m really just interested to see how the divergence between my views as an older leftist and younger leftist have developed over time.

Thanks for your time.

It’s the entire concept of “critical support,” an enemy acting against a bigger enemy can be relied on with respect to their stance against said mutual enemy.

Does that not require a more indepth investigation into the motive of the country you are critically supporting, and isn’t that investigation reliant on perspective?

In one perspective you could critically support Russia for inciting destructive competition between the great powers. While criticizing their motive, and means.

On the other you could critically support Ukraine for defending themselves from colonial extraction from great power. While criticizing reactionary forces within their government.

you can ask Marxists directly in their comms for more info, this is a comm for Anarchism and I don’t wish to infringe on that.

Fair enough, just thought I should take the opportunity while I could. I have tried to breach this subject a couple different times in their comm, but tend to just get called a Nazi or other slurs.

Thanks for the dialogue, I appreciate it.

Hence why Imperialism defeats itself.

Right, I’m not defending imperialism though. It just seems that leftist shouldn’t be supporting the most reactionary views of the masses.

Supporting regimes like Russia is dismissing the social struggle of potential revolutionary voices at home and abroad.

"The tendency of tailism can be observed in the dismissive and confrontational attitudes some on the left take to matters of social importance—women’s struggles, LGBT+ issues, racism, etc.—that are adjacent to class struggle. We have surely all heard it said countless times that certain issues are “a distraction from class struggle,” or “not of any concern to the working class.” It surely does not need pointing out that the working class comprises people of all gender backgrounds, sexual orientations, races, and ethnicities, and these struggles are of direct and immediate concern to them and their lives. In fact these struggles are inextricably linked to class struggle and should always be regarded as such.

As communists, we assert that the primary contradiction that shapes and defines the world is that of class struggle: between the bourgeoisie and the working class. However, it does not follow from this that our work or our analysis must disregard all other contradictions and struggles as irrelevant. Quite the contrary: we must seek to unite struggles against all forms of exploitation in the revolutionary fight for communism. This is the very nature of class struggle.

In addition, Lenin critiques the narrow focus of economism, which he describes thus: “The Economists [limit] the tasks of the working class to an economic struggle for higher wages and better working conditions, etc., asserting that the political struggle [is] the business of the liberal bourgeoisie.”[2] He asserts that the fight for revolutionary gains must be waged on a political as well as an economic front. The task of communists is to unite the working class in a revolutionary movement, not to limit our focus to mere economic demands, which are in any case quantitative and not transformative."

My point is that the “war” was a side effect of the extraction process. Moreover, using modern terms like Global South and Imperial Core is shorthand to convey the meaning more effectively

But people are utilizing the “short hand” of imperial core to validate conflicts like in Ukraine as anti-imperialism. Which seems to be a byproduct of an extraordinary process.

Finally, it isn’t antithetical to Lenin to understand that certain Imperialist powers can be dominant in a given period of time.

Even if there is a dominant power, capitalism demands there still be a competition for extraction to maintain growth among the great powers.

I just don’t really see how people are validating the support of the competing great powers, even if it is critical support. It just seems like tailism to me.

Haven’t read politzer, so I will have to give it a read. Thanks.

However, I was moreso asking how dialectical materialism is being applied in a way that validates supporting right winged nationalist governments like Russia or Syria.

It stems from the dialectical part of dialectical materialism.

Yeah, but anyone can claim that they are acting within dialectical reasons. If you have some reading material that explains the actual dialectical process, I would love to give it a read.

So the thought is basically “let’s get the shitty part out of the way, so we can get to the good stuff.”

Yeah, but Lenin wrote specifically why this (tailism) is a mistake.

“Lenin describes tailism in What Is to Be Done? as the tendency of some activists to drag (like a tail) behind the most progressive elements of the working-class movement, by reflecting in their politics only the most reactionary views of the masses.[1] This is a mistake, because, firstly, it underestimates the political and revolutionary potential of the working class, and secondly, communists must be the revolutionary vanguard of the struggle, not lagging behind it as reactionaries within the movement.”

Lenin didn’t define Imperialism as “competition between great powers,” just that that was a side effect of the division of most of the world among the Great Powers.

I feel like that’s a semantic dispute, as a division of the world between capitalist great powers would be done competitively.

The actual definition of Imperialism by Lenin’s analysis is better simplified as export of Capital to the Global South to hyper-exploit for super-profits

I think you are injecting a little modern bias into the interpretation. Lenin didn’t really ever mention the “global South”, during his time the great powers were more focused on Asia and parts of Africa.

selling back in the Imperial Core.

Again, the term imperial core is a modern term utilized in global systems theory. Imagining that there is a single imperial hegemony is kinda antithetical to the idea of lenins writing about a division of the world between great powers.

Well the crazy thing is, I’m starting to think they don’t read anything but reductionist interpretations made by their fellow shit posters.

A lot of the language they use are terms made by liberal academics made to critique neoliberal policies in the Regan era. They just ignore the rest of the theory they don’t agree with, and then claim it all as Marxist Leninists, despite it being antithetical to actual ML writing.

Any idea where their current definition of imperialism is being grafted from?

I know they use a lot of language from world systems theory, designating America as the imperial core. However world system theory specifies that it’s only a way to analyze global trade, and that global trade is strictly defined by capitalism.

Any time I ask anyone on ml or hex, I just get downvoted and told that If I read lenin I would understand… But fucking lenin defined imperialism as a competition between Great powers, not a war between peripheral states against the “imperialist core”.

Is this all coming from some fucking streamer I don’t know about or something?

“burn it all down and let a socialist utopia rise from the ashes” perspective of the far-left.

Yeah, I haven’t really been able to make sense of all the tailism and accelerationism happening on .ml and hexbear. I don’t know how we’ve gotten to the point where stanning a bunch of right winged authoritarian countries is a form of anti-imperialism.

Eh… Lemmy is already a lot like reddit in the very beginning, just more extreme.

I think a big problem with Lemmy is that even the large instances only have a few terminally online posters, so a lot of the communities get warped by those posters biases.

Right now Hexbear is having a little internal conflict between the mods and some posters over the harassment of lgbtq and POC. The mods started out handing out temporary bans to offenders and then people started freaking out because no one was posting shit.

Too bad anyone who doesn’t adhere to their specific definition of imperialism is a neoliberal in their view.

Don’t want to support a right winged authoritarian government that is actively engaging in imperialism…? What a lib.

Even ignoring the math, the assertion that a statistically unlikely amount of bullet ballots means there has been fraud is kinda out there. Historically, bullet ballots are fairly common with populist candidates.