https://x.com/conceptualjames/status/2079677696930402610?s=51&t=cLq01Oy84YkmYPZ-URIMYw
" Seems like a good day not just to talk about the DSA platform, which is (a) Communist af, (b) retarded, (c) unrealistic as hell, (d) childishly presented, and (e) extraordinarily radical -- calling for a new Constitution even -- but to do a thread showing its stupid points.
It starts off with an imaginative exercise, illustrated with silly cartoons: imagine you have a day off in a future without capitalism. Apparently you will work because you like to (a Marxist delusion) and you won't have any bills (another Marxist delusion). The idea that you will work because you like to comes directly from Karl Marx's own vision of a Communist circumstance, where the worker has been transformed back to his original/completed "social (i.e., human)" nature. This vision includes the idea that people will see work, not for themselves but for the community, as their main desired life activity. Communism posits that you and everyone else (who can) will work on behalf of everyone else but never yourself because you have been re-educated (re-socialized, Mao: ideologically remolded) to believe in working for the commune. Everything you have will therefore be provided to you by the organizing force of the society, which is left vague. Everyone knows it will be the state, which is what calling them "common goods and utilities" refers to, but Communists, including the DSA a few more lines down, believes that in the realized Communist world that never arrives, there won't be a state. In the meantime, it will be the state, which is organized entirely to resocialize and remold you into a socialist (that is, human being, says Marx) who accepts this ridiculous notion. So it starts off by asserting that things other people have to work to provide for you are to be free because they're human rights and that everyone (including you) will have to work to provide these things for everyone else (but not yourself) because you've been psychologically transformed to believe in working for the sake of upholding the magical community, including all its loafers, free riders, cheats, scoundrels, etc. Socialists would object here by saying that being such a thing would be outlawed (by the state that isn't supposed to exist) and punished (again, by the state that doesn't exist), and in practice, every socialist/Communist state has actually done this. The problem is that the socialists and Communists in charge get to decide who the criminals and loafers are, and it's funny how most of their political enemies end up on that list regardless of anything else. Oh, and what you really don't have isn't bills. It's recourse when your rights get violated. If the Communists in charge (state or not) decide you're a problem, you don't have any individual rights. Those are bourgeois, selfish, and against the will and needs of "the people," who you have been remolded to always support. Mao instructed that the purpose of this ideological remolding, by the way, is to learn to see from "the people's standpoint," which means as the Communists want you to see it, as the right theoretical representatives of "the people," who are, in Mao's definition as well, those who support the building of socialism. Everyone else is "the enemies of the people," and the purpose of the people's democratic dictatorship of the proletariat, say both Mao and Lenin, is to crush the enemies of the people. If you are listed as enemies of "the people," you will not be enfranchised (voting) because that's not real people's or proletarian democracy. You will not have free speech because you misinform people away from the people's standpoint and cause agitation and division, plus it's an expression of your bourgeois values because not everyone has equal access to speak. You have no rights to due process because the Communist leadership knows what is best and knows all, including all your (imaginary) crimes. You have no right to your property because that's the primary thing Communism is abolishing. Good luck, Wokies! It's only worked like this every time!
After spending one whole short paragraph talking about how you'll live in a magical world with no bills, the DSA goes on with its fantasy and cartoons to imagine your day off. Yes, your day off. Your one day off. In China today, which operates under CCP control, allegedly not even fully Communist or something, the workers or laboring class (who the title of the document says "deserve more") called "ku li" (bitter work) work 12-hour days, 28 days in a row, with the 29th day off. They're paid in a combination of RMB and rice and live in hovels, usually with a few bunks to a room and no indoor bathroom. They wash in a basin on the sidewalk outside of their hovel, if they wash. That's what happens when you live under Communism for a while, though. They wouldn't tell you that up front! But what they actually wrote in this little fantasy is interesting. In the morning you might do some basic things (like stand silently in a bread line). In the afternoon, you might do some hobbies. In the evening, you can recreate. This is an allusion, though. The framing they present is actually borrowed from... Karl Marx! This is how Karl Marx envisioned the daily life of a realized Communist in a world without capitalism, from The German Ideology: “For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.” In practice, Mao Zedong used this idea to make sure that every Communist worker was also fully well-rounded in all the jobs: student, teacher, farmer, steelworker, army, etc. He turned the working population into a de facto military corps and sent people, who never became those things, like Marx said, from one job to the next in cycles. The result was everything that was actually done was done by people mostly incompetent to do them. Guess how it worked out! Famines! Disasters! Catastrophes! Failures! The punishment for those things was gulag, hard labor, thought-reform prison, withholding of food at the canteen (often a death sentence), or death. Worked great! But this isn't the paragraph about your work. They don't talk about that much here. This is your one coveted day off. You could do all kinds of things without ever having to become good at anything! PS: Unless you're in the Party, you're not taking any trips, so don't bother planning them. LOL joke's on you. Don't count on that doctor being there or worth going to either. The movie will be mandatory, and it will be brainwashing propaganda. It only works this way every time!
The section finishes with the big lie: "A socialist day off could be like any good day now." But with none of the stuff you hate, like paying bills or dreading going back to work the next day. That's just not true! It will not be like any good day now but without the bad stuff. Your life will suck in a big way, nothing will work, people you know will disappear, others will starve, things you want will be unavailable, and you'll shut up and pretend to like it all because if you don't, you're next. But the fun part of this lie is the "without dreading going back to work." See, you will go back to work, but it kinda sounds like you won't. You definitely will, but because they brainwashed you to be a socialist who loves to go to work for other people but never yourself, you won't dread it. That's a neat little trick they played on you there, isn't it? In reality, what your brainwashing entails is not loving to work for other people. Of course not. That's retarded. It entails learning to keep your dirty capitalist mouth shut before someone shuts it for you and makes an example of you to everyone else. It will also train you to hate yourself for having those dirty capitalist thoughts. This has been documented extensively by psychologists studying the socialist condition as it played out in reality, e.g., Robert Jay Lifton who provided extensive description and analysis of the early Maoist condition as such. And your work is going to be hard and awful, often pointless. You might enjoy it sometimes, but it won't be much different than work now except harder in worse conditions with no compensation except your comradeship and with more problems that arise and can't easily be fixed. You won't complain, though. You'll know better than to complain! Then you can go back to your socialist apartment with three other families and one shared washroom and one shared kitchen and one bedroom per family, maybe overbooked, and not pay rent on it. You can have your free groceries, when they're there, whatever they are, with no real choice in what you get, including whether you get enough, and you won't have to pay for them. Of course, in Mao's China in reality in practice, you didn't have to pay for your groceries at the canteen but you did have to have permission to get them. You had to have fake definitely not-money canteen coupons, and that was the only way you could get food. There was no other way. If you behaved badly, you couldn't use them until they said you could again. Because they weren't money, you couldn't spend them on food somewhere else. There also wasn't somewhere else. Hoarding food or getting food from any other source (like that you grew yourself) was a leading way to get your coupons that weren't money taken away from you. It only works that way every time! At least you don't have to, you know, pay to maintain the privileges of your own life because you can lie to yourself and call them human rights that your stupid socialist state can't actually adequately provide for you.
This first fantasy section, with a direct allusion to Marx buried in it, built on a Marxist conception of social and economic reality, ends by saying you should try to make that impossible thing happen. Because "workers deserve more." Again, 12-hour days, 28 days on, one day off, backbreaking conditions, nonsensical assignments, no pride or dignity in what you do, no safety equipment, no concern for you. That's the "more" you get, worker. It only works that way every time! Now let's go to the next section!!
The next section of this idiotic platform is their "how did we get here?" ("our perspective") section, where they give a childlike analysis in five short paragraphs for how the world got the way it did, apparently. If you suspected that this might actually be where they inject some stupid and manipulative Marxist Theory into the story, you are absolutely right! Let's explore their idiocy and lies together!
Apparently, everything you experience is going badly, but this is all by design for "the bosses," for whom "it's all going according to plan." This combines two Marxist approaches in one: Paulo Freire's "generative themes" approach, which he derived in his own telling from Mao Zedong's "mass line" approach, and Marxist class antagonism (or conflict theory). Class conflict theory (roughly, Marxism) says that there are essentially two classes in society by the time we get to capitalism (more in earlier stages of development), and they are intrinsically in conflict with one another. These are the owners, who are oppressors, and the workers, who are oppressed, also known as "bourgeoisie" and "proletariat," or "capitalist class" and "working class." This is spelled out explicitly in the opening paragraph of the main body of the Communist Manifesto. "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes." Marx and Engels make clear that this fight necessarily always ends either in total ruin or in a revolution installing the underclass as a new overclass. "Oppressor and oppressed" comes straight from the original language. A few lines down (I'll spare you the quote) they say that in earlier periods these classes were more diverse, but the period of economic development called capitalism concentrates them into two classes: capitalists (bourgeoisie) and workers (proletariat). The latter of these, the second chapter explains, are naturally to be led by their "most advanced" segment, the Communists (even though most of them aren't actually workers at all). The theory is more than we need, but it's basically that capitalist ownership with lots of workers in concentrated corporations is already highly "socialized" (socialist) production except the owners still exist in a separate class and extract the "surplus value" of the labor of the workers, so the capitalist owners could just be thrown out, let the workers own and run everything, and it would be the same but without the alleged exploitation. That's literally Marxism in a sentence, as a bad economic theory. Of course, "the workers," to round this out, can't actually own things except nominally. Someone actually has to run the "means of production," and that will naturally now be the Communists, who are the leaders of the workers. Never mind now that the Communists don't know how to run anything because they're mostly bookish malcontents who never learned anything but Marxist theory. They're allegedly doing it in the name of "the workers" and "the people" whom they claim to "represent" (theoretically) in their interests (again, only in the theory). So this paragraph is Marxist class conflict from the get-go and then at the end, and everything in between is the "generative" method laid out by Paulo Freire (a Marxist) who figured out how to connect the real personal suffering of individuals to the Marxist conflict theory. So the next step is to invoke the suffering of hot summers and economic instability, brainless distaste for the ugly realities of war and its occasional necessity, and to get the heart-strings pulled so that a Marxist conflict-driven explanation can be given for why people suffer these problems and apparent indignities. That's the first paragraph of their perspective. Emotional manipulation into the Marxist oppressor-vs-oppressed framing for all world affairs, with "the bosses" and "the billionaire class" named as the enemies, who apparently make summers hot (but not as hot as they were in the 1930s, somehow, mercifully). This is Marxist manipulation, not explanation or analysis, that is.
Paragraph II of their explanation is the same, really, but they're more explicit about blaming the "political and economic system under which we live" and naming "private ownership and profit" as the root of the problem (they strawman this by saying "at all costs," which virtually nobody lives by outside of the deranged imagination of Communists). They invoke a ridiculous specter of right-wing authoritarianism, which is on the rise now but as yet another anti-capitalist faction, not a pro-capitalist one, so there's lying and fearmongering to make it work, dealing and trading on the delusional anxieties, near-total ignorance, and deep, active prejudices of their target audience. They position the issue as being beyond political cure because both political parties are inadequate to the task. That necessitates revolution, which is what they're offering. It's pretty funny that what they invoke as "hatred" is the tired identity politics of the last few years, but it still works on their target audiences to manipulate them. Woke 2.0 has to incorporate (dialectical sublation) Woke 1.0, though, and they make that clear here. Even though they're moving to third-worldist and materialist (economic) analyses, they can't drop the identity politics of the last decade completely. They have to pay it lip service and tuck it in there, pulling it out as a power card when it works and pretending to care about it the rest of the time so their lunatics don't turn on them and the normie Dems don't figure them out. In all, this is just more of the same dreck pretending to be analysis. No further comment.
Paragraph III is the turn. Democratic Socialists know there's an alternative! No one has to live like this! Ooooh! There are certain historical possibilities that have come to be regarded as utopian possibilities, but they're still possibilities, to paraphrase (and nearly quote) grand Neo-Marxist Herbert Marcuse, grandfather of Woke. What is that alternative? Another direct call to Karl Marx: "If we lived in a classless society and governed ourselves..." Communism: a stateless, classless society, where class has been overcome and abolished and the state withered away of its own accord for lack of necessity. PS: Communists believe that the state exists for two essential functions only, neither being the management or governance of society. First, a state exists to maintain class divisions on the side of the ruling classes, and, second, a state exists to punish the enemies of the ruling class in the name of the law. Lenin laid out in The State and Revolution (1917), while talking about this "withering away" nonsense, that the socialist state isn't a state at all, but a "semi-state," because it doesn't uphold both of these functions. Lying, he insisted socialists states don't maintain class divisions but seek to abolish class (the new classes are actually the Party and "the people," i.e., their slaves). They only use the state to punish their enemies. Thus, they're only half a state, a semi-state, and as such, as the enemies get more and more destroyed, expropriated, killed, reeducated, or whatever, that function becomes less and less important and "withers away." That's how it's supposed to work. That is, Communists believe their states become stateless through the long process of killing everyone who doesn't come to agree with them. Full stop. Stalin made this more clear still. He also had to try to explain this nonsense because it clearly wasn't happening. The Soviet state was increasing in its totalitarian control of everyone, not withering away. He explained that the state will wither away suddenly in exactly the moment it reaches the zenith of its power. That is, Stalin insisted that the totalitarian state necessary to maintain Communism will end when it has the power to mentally transform or kill everyone under its reach. The next part of this paragraph invokes the standard negative idealism of the Critical methodology, which cannot articulate any ideal world except to say it's just like the world we have now except without class enemies (here: racists, bigots, people who don't actively care for others on Communist terms, etc.). Negative idealism is when you hold out that there's an ideal that's theoretically possible but that cannot be described in positive terms, but you can criticize the parts of the society that an ideal world couldn't possibly contain. You can't say what the world will actually look like or how it works when it finally arrives, but you know what it DOESN'T contain and criticize and attack that relentlessly, offering no real solutions except the empowerment of commissars who were good at naming the problems in Marxist terms. It's literally Utopianism, meaning literally "nowhere-ism," since "utopia" is a Greek word that means "nowhere." The negative idealist world is nowhere. Building this movement, they say, which is actually impossible, is the "guiding star of [their] movement." The best thing that can be said for it, then, is that it's chasing a utopian fantasy that will eventually kill everyone because it can't work and all enemies preventing it from working have to be killed. This is called "laboring for the common good," just like the Woke Right (right-wing authoritarians they pretend to be against), and the reward is everyone who doesn't get killed in the process (nobody) gets to use their time and talents however they want.
Paragraph IV is insane. It starts off with a demand to organize because that's actually all Communists are good at except for complaining, lying, and breaking things. But what are they organizing for? Not beating your individual boss or all the individual bosses but overthrowing the whole system! Revolution! What a surprise! It isn't the bosses who need to be overthrown but the system that allows the existence of bosses that must go. That goes for cops, judges, and presidents, too. The result demands "winning the battle for democracy," which must be understood in Lenin's terms of a proletarian democracy that silences and disenfranchises all bourgeois elements on behalf of "the people," which he literally described as a dictatorship (led, conveniently, by the Communists; led, conveniently, by him). See, Lenin explained in State and Revolution (1917) that all existing democracies are actually bourgeois democracies because the bourgeois classes have unfair advantages. They're not real democracies, which would require revoking freedoms of speech and movement from the bourgeois elements of society and removing their rights to vote so that only proletarians (workers who have accepted socialism, in his view) can vote. That, he said, would be the first true attempt at democracy. Ideal democracy, as he called it, was even more remote. Without "actual equality" (total equity, in today's language), the inequalities still present in the system prevent actual democracy. Thus, to make a true democracy possible, you need Communism, which is also stateless, so... you figure out who you're voting for. Just kidding, you don't vote for people in the real Communism because everyone (who is still alive) all know what's best for everyone by their nature, and they only vote when decisions about using resources have to come up, which is pretty much never because they're all socialists by nature and don't do it wrong. That's actually true because real Communism has only showed up when everyone involved is dead. But, hey! They'll draft a new constitution too, apparently, and turn our country, America, into a "democratic socialist republic," which is Commie-speak for a Communist Shithole and Terror Regime. I don't know if you caught that. The DSA platform explicitly says they're going to draft a new constitution, which would literally abolish the United States of America. How these people can possibly hold an office or take a naturalization oath to uphold and defend the Constitution they openly say they'll get rid of, WITHOUT LYING, is a mystery to me. That is, they can't. DSA members should not be allowed to hold public office anywhere in the United States of America at any level, or hold any office in the public trust, nor be naturalized as citizens or keep naturalized citizenship, because their stated PARTY PLATFORM prevents them from holding and fulfilling the required oaths of office. Enforce this."
I simply cannot go any further with this, it is just too long and contains too many graphics and screenshots of the various DSA proposals. If this is interesting, of infuriating, hit the link.
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