Social Democrats Thread #1

Originally posted by Equality 7-2521 I've been talking about Communism and Feminism man. Don't stereotype me just cause I post in the Libertarian thread.

Don't try to control my mind, man. I'll think and say what I want!

I'm a democratic socialist.

Originally posted by RoyFairbank Originally posted by Ancient Tree when high school begins and i will tell you if im still interested in politics,i'm planning to study biology and evolution this summer and stop with politics . I want to get a gf some day soon(in high school) so i need to stop with politics (or just reduce activity) so that i wount be declared for an leninist again.  p.s: im currently reading lenins work,and i dont know if i should stop reading it or should i read it till the end?  Which one, read State And Revolution. Some of the others aren't worth reading. I wouldn't put Lenin at the top of my reading pile, except State And Revolution, which is breathtaking. Trotsky is the better writer. Revolution Betrayed, My Life, History of the Russian Revolution. The Marx and Engels' Reader is a good intro to Marx and Engels ... As for getting a girl friend, most of high school I was not a Trotskyist,  didn't help me get a girl friend. I don't think there is much of a difference. You can not tell girls until they get to know you. A girl came into my dorm recently and I made a nervous joke about my "communist paraphernalia" but I ams what I ams.

 

Originally posted by The T ^In some countries, saying you are a communist would make you look "cool" and get you tons of girlfriends actually... all you have to do is wear Guevara's t-shirt and flocks of people will become your friends and some girls will want to do the revolution with you.

Originally posted by Equality 7-2521 Have any of you actually read Marx and Hegel seriously?

Corrected (for most cases, Roy seems to be the exception). 

Originally posted by Equality 7-2521 Do any of you actually take Marx's use of Hegel's Dialectic Logic seriously?

Oh yeah. When I quote Wittgenstein at the bar I put the place into an uproar. 

Aw man, I hate when the web shuts off and you don't know it and then you go to post something and it gets lost. I always tell myself when this happens, "well the brain doesn't forget, its in there somewhere even if its subconscious!"

I'm going to briefly type this:

dialectics is the generalization of various processes in nature, for instance a seed only makes sense if you understand it is part of the life cycle of a tree, which only makes sense if you understand a tree is part of the reproduction of the environment, which only makes sense.... material history, phenomena as defined by what processes they are part of, rather than just their immediate attributes.

This is important for social sciences as well and thinking in general. do we approach democracy as this given verb associated with the immediate "attributes": "Elections" "Multiple Parties" "Freedom of Speech"

or do we take democracy as part of the social process, its history, as a process of conflict?

An example of this is Trotsky's definition of the USSR in In Defense of Marxism. He says it should be explained not by its superficial characteristics but by its position in a capitalist dominant world subjected to capitalist pressure given its internal weakness, backwardness and isolation. There is bound to be expressed in the internal situation of the USSR the rise of an agency of capitalism (Stalinism), which will eventually sell out the USSR. The USSR is not therefore a capitalist country, or a workers state, but a degenerated workers state in the conditions of capitalist encirclement.

Trotsky's critics said the USSR was a new form of class society independent of capitalism that would never fall. They ended up as Neo-Conservatives in the 1960s, for instance James Burnham, who was awarded a medal by Reagen.

You have to either accept the socially given assumptions about phenomena which verbalize the immediate attributes (the egg as a shell with yellow liquid inside), or you take the historical and materially based development of a phenomena as its content, utilizing what you know about the general patterns of development seen in all phenomena, their relationships and development. This is called dialectics.

.......

Don't try to read HEGEL or LENIN on HEGEL. Read In Defense Of Marxism by Trotsky (ABCs of Dialectics) and maybe Trotsky's very thin Notebooks on Dialectics, Plekhanov, Labriola and maybe Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness.

it's all on Marxists.org


Edited by RoyFairbank - June 26 2012 at 19:33

Originally posted by Equality 7-2521 I prefer to read Hegel and more modern axiomatic formalizations of Hegel's logic than the convoluted writings of Marxists who I feel found his system as a convenient method to justify hypocrisy.

Which writers do you find more convoluted?

Which writers do you find hypocritical?

What Marxists do you mean? Russian Communist Party, 1950s, Kautsky led SDP (Germany), 1890s, American SWP, 1940s?

"Marxist" isn't all one thing

What about the Democratic Republic of The Congo? Democratic People's Republic of Korea? Are these Democratic countries, because they use the name?

How verbal. This is what dialectics combats.




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Edited by RoyFairbank - June 26 2012 at 20:06