The consumers’ and workers’ value is only how much capital they can generate; any other consideration is incidental. The disdain for the human aspect of being is palpable in nearly every facet of life in the West.

You have now got a problem, either marxism-leninism as a science of political theory is inadequate or your understanding is incomplete (including what you quoted).

Let’s take your Australian as example. Let’s make him a white male factory worker. Could he, despite being a proleterian, subjugate women or non-whites? If he were to do so, does he do so as individual or as part of a class with systemic features that allows him to enact his power? What do we say is the first division of labor? What is the relationship of the proleteriat in the imperial cores with those from the peripheries? How would a liberal answer these questions? What do you make of Losurdo (or Sankara? Claudia Jones? Kollontai? Fonesca? Fanon? Rodney?)

These aren’t gotchas. And I’m side-stepping your condescension in attempt to answer in good faith but my patience is thin. (It’s fine not to know and explore. It is not fine to confidently double down on ignorance, which is the impression you are giving off)

Would you be happy for me to use your responses and turn it into a post? I’m sure you are not the only one who thinks like this.

As a westerner, you are part of a class that subjugates the global south.

Nations of peoples and genders are definitely classes.

Genders are definitely not a class. Also not a nations. This is wild, where did you read it?

I mean you could at least feign reading what I wrote.

If one is not to consider nations as classes then what part of marxism would national liberation theory come from? What of Engel’s Orgin of the Family with regards to gender (which has since been developed further)? Think about the consequences here if you do not think about them as classes.

This is not wild stuff. This is basic marxism. Otherwise you will end up with the likes of the ACP and Trots

The history of all hitherto existing human society is the history of class struggles. - Marx

There were subjugated non-proleteriat classes now and then.

The term class is not something categorically distinct and opposed to gender and nation. Genders and nations are classes for example.

Dominic Losurdo’s class struggles is a good one for further reading if interested.

Ultimately it is difficult to brainwash people against their perceived material interests. People latch on to narratives where the perceived cost going against it is worse than going with it.

“Blame” may end up being an attempt to draw a clean line between a person and their environment where none such exists. If, for example a class of people refuse to support a peoples’ self determination and progression then they probably have a vested interest against it, and then attempting to convince the former to against their perceived interests maybe futile.

If you can make a narrative reflecting the truth where the target person could potentially see benefits within the short term and ends up being a material benefit to the cause, then it may be worth it. I just have very little sympathy for those who managed to level up to the very minimum of humanity by being sorry for their participation in war crimes. If they are truly sorry then they can join the resistance* (actual not nominal).

We should be materialists and not based on vibes. Growing up in the west and attempting to shed liberal frameworks is not easy because for a lot of us it goes against our class interests.

(*I don’t believe in idealistic nonsense about submitting oneself to some imagined neutral court to be “punished” for said war crimes. Make yourself useful instead.)

The perspectives espoused are relatively new for me; previously how free speech and “propaganda” was understood was influenced by Chomsky’s Manufacuring Consent and Parenti’s (better written) Inventing Reality. The latter is still a good book but the understanding of how this stuff works has evolved.

We have to sometimes take a step back in order to not overestimate an individual’s agency/power over society’s class relations (which is really damn hard for us Westerners - not matter the color - because of how much indvidualism is ingrained in our cultures); it is partly why class betrayal is a big thing. Learning dialectics (still learning, to be honest) and this article made a big impact:

https://redsails.org/masses-elites-and-rebels/

Thanks for engaging and hope you have a good one.

For anyone interested, UK poverty report 2024 by the Rowntree Foundation:

https://www.jrf.org.uk/uk-poverty-2024-the-essential-guide-to-understanding-poverty-in-the-uk

This is purposeful underdevelopment under capitalism and effectively it is socio-economic murder. By not guaranteeing economic rights since the bourgoise French Revolution the supposed political rights on offer are meaningless.

However, it is likely going to be a further turn into fascism as most people in poverty in the west see their salvation in the perceived offer of labor aristocracy and peitite bourgois sentiments to them at the expense of those from the global south.

This is the man who tried to explain that the transatlantic slave trade could not have possibly provided surplus value for the industrial revolution. I still watch his videos in the same way I watch liberal media but with a critical eye. The reason he has any appeal is because we are signficantly uneducated in more sophisticated marxist economics growing up in the West so we latch on to the likes of Cockshott and Harvey when it is clear they are just different versions of the Western Marxist.

Maybe but includes more scalable societies including whole nations and alliance of nations, and censorship could be de facto or de jure.

The choice to opt in and out depends on the class perspective in bourgoisie society; the more subjugated one is the less of a choice that will feel. If one can imagine a censorship in favour of the dictatorship of the bourgoisie then why not in one favor for the dictatorship of the proleteriat?

If a formal censorship is not declared it does not mean an informal does not exist, one which is dictated by class relations within that society (this is itself one of the criticisms against anarchist ideas of post-capitalism ie not based on science but on utopia/idealism of the assumption of lack of formal hierarchies would free mankind’s innate nature for freedom or some such Bakunin nonsense. Our nature is in a relationship with nature outside us, each constantly changing the other - ie it is dialectical. )

Every community has censorship to filter out its perception of noise or topics they feel are dangerous/ destablising/ upsets decorum/creates havoc with internal structures etc etc. We do it here for example with bad-faith liberal slop. It could be de facto or de jure.

In capitalist society it would be those that fit with their narratives and perspectives. For example, we live in a world of (crumbling) Western Hegemony so there will be self-censorship on the genocide or pro-Russian perspectives of the Ukraine war; from schools to newspapers to entertainment media - there does not need to be someone at the top pulling the strings, the associated communities (formal and informal) will do that themselves.

Education will not in itself lead to “enlightenment”. One of the first organisations to discover climate change were oil companies but their class perspective did not take them down the path of environmentalism.

We have to a degree accept the fact the people intelligently seek narratives that they feel benefit their perceived material perspectives - including us - and it behooves us as MLs to understand this and allows us to better understand which class our audience is and focus our energies where it is productive.

Anti-vaxxers and flat-earthers could look up the same information we do but choose not to believe them. It comes from a level of privilege where they feel the consequences of their ignorance does not affect them. They create spaces for themselves to talk about the issues that are important to them and filter out the “noise” in those spaces.

In the wider community the above two groups fester as they are not a threat to capital. In a spcialist society such nonsense is stomped out for the greater good.

There are for example stories where “traditional” communities with overbearing patriarchal structures who were forced at gunpoint for their women to be literate and educated. There is a “generational trauma” but the outcome of good is exponential as a result for all the following generations. (This is not a specific example of socialist history, this was actually Kemalist Turkey. Socialists usually use more tactful approaches)

We have to understand freedom not from an idealistic conception but a scientific understanding of social sciences, and it ia from that true freedom is acheived.

The west has at its disposal significant access to vast volumes of knowledge through the internet but people voluntarily choose wilful ignorance for their perceived material benefits.

The above is not a nihilistic perspective, it is encouraging to know there is a scientific approach to liberation of the world despite what it seems like an unsurmountable obstacle of bad-faith ignorance. It just means we have to direct our energies towards the revolutionary classes.

(English was not initially my first language either; hope life at your end gives you a break!)

“Marketplace of ideas” means the idea with dominant capital will be dominant; it is not the “merit” of the argument that wins a person over. In a dictatorship of the proleteriat by seizing the means of production the socialist enterprise controls the capital and therefore “wins” the argument for the proleteriat. The perception whether an idea is good or not is always affected by bias; the point is for whom the bias should be in favor of.

That does not mean there is no objective reality or concrete solutions to real-world problems. Science is the method of figuring this out and marxism is a science. The problem is where and when people choose science in the day to day world. There are classes of people with sufficient privilege that perceive not to be affected by this ignorance, and therefore ignore the science when it suits them.

It is not a question of whether “censorship” is good or not; de facto censorship will always exist with every community and society - the question who gets to decide which censorship, what gets censored and which media it should take form in.

If one imagines a space with no formal censorship that does not mean it does not take place; a lack of a formal structure and hierarchy just means an informal one takes place instead, and in a capitalist world this means capital will dictate what those will end up being.

In early stages of socialism by definition it will have capital mechanisms such as markets; this is not maintained in a “neutral” environment, it will inevitably come with the culture of liberalism.

We should aim to have a scientific approach and understand of how things works and try to step away from the liberal frameworks we are brought up in which often conceptualises problems it does not really want to solve in absractions, rather than ground them in the concrete of the real.

My argument isn’t for or against censorship; it is just a tool and to understand how and whether we use this tool we should understand the science of how ideas “win” people over.

One can think of a socialist country as where the standards enforced on an educator is enforced on every aspect of society and this includes what gets amplified and de-amplified for the progression of society. No individual has the correct answer, our collective knowledge and trials of how to apply this scientifically in a continually shifting landscape is the way forward.

It is difficult to “brainwash” people against their perceived material interests. People are “apolitical” because they benefit from the status quo. There are plenty of Chinese liberals within the mainland who are allowed to benefit from the current system as they interact with it in a way that is overall beneficial to the dictatorship of the proleteriat but if there are narratives that they feel will benefit them further which they can act on that causes malevolence, then they will potentially be a greater cost to the system than a benefit; a burden the country could do without.

Western propaganda works because of perceived material benefits of going along with it and the costs of going against it exceed the benefits in a capitalist world; not because it injects ideas into human beings scifi/horror-movie-style like a poltergiest taking over them against their will.