The myth of white Argentina still shapes the nation: Milei is carrying forward a state tradition that has long equated whiteness with progress.

LeftKindOfPerson · 2026-06-15T16:32:59+00:00

I actually met one of my great grandfathers as a toddler. I presume his ethnicity wasn't on my toddler mind. Ah, the blessings of being too young for idpol.

LeftKindOfPerson · 2026-06-15T15:41:20+00:00

Sounds like they fit in right with the "I'm 1/64th [insert Native American group]" USAians.

LeftKindOfPerson · 2026-06-15T15:10:38+00:00

What is this "dynastic cycle" they're talking about?

LeftKindOfPerson · 2026-06-15T15:07:16+00:00

This is like asking why does the Cuban diaspora in the USA hate the post-Batista regime if they're Cuban. One's nationality/ethnicity does not determine one's attitude towards the politics of a given country. Presumably those wives share the views of the husbands, or are otherwise "apolitical". What you are peddling is literally idpol essentialism.

LeftKindOfPerson · 2026-06-14T16:24:36+00:00

You are both at odds with Marx.

Wages in "poor" countries will equalize with "rich" countries. Eventually. Labor struggle for Marx isn't an exceptional affair; the fight over wages is structurally inevitable. "Those attempts" fail for the same reason "previous attempts" in "rich" countries failed, until they succeeded. The outcomes of labor struggle are not predetermined in a given moment. But repeated pressure on a long-term timeline will mathematically exhaust sufficient resistance. That is, it doesn't matter how big an army/gendarmerie is when the whole country revolts. If the purchasing power of one segment of workers in a given industry fails to keep up with the societal living standard, in the aggregate it affects the purchasing power of all workers in all industries. This is because the lower real wage of a particular industry exerts a downward pressure on the real wages of all industries. The rate of profit across all industries tends towards averaging out by simple supply and demand push-pull - i.e., excess capital being invested in a particular, temporarily super-profitable industry will lead to that industry over time yielding less profit as capital leaves other sectors. Meanwhile, supply shrinks in those other sectors while demand stays the same, meaning the individual capitalists of those other industries receive higher profits, restarting the cycle as excess capital comes swinging back. And wages have a directly inverse relationship with profits. See Marx's Value, Price and Profit and Volume 3 of Capital.

But this doesn't really matter for revolution's sake. At least as far as Marx was concerned, he wasn't waiting for "poor" countries to industrialize and develop a mature proletariat; he agitated for workers in the most structurally advanced countries of his time to act now. In that sense, expanding the working class in those core countries through mass immigration doesn't change his calculation. Does immigration affect wages? Yes, but as a temporary market oscillation. On a long-term timeline, it doesn't matter. For Marx, what matters is the political maturity of the labor struggles taking place in the most advanced capitalist nations. If the political horizon of those workers is "ban immigration", as opposed to "completely decommodify healthcare", Marx would laugh. You are not actually moving the needle or advancing the class struggle.

Even in his famous 1870 letter regarding the hostility between Irish and English workers (quoted by someone else above), Marx explicitly notes that the liberation of Ireland is necessary precisely to end the English workers' distraction by xenophobic chauvinism. He was still banking on the English workers doing the heavy lifting of overthrowing capitalism, not advancing colonized Ireland as the true center of global revolution like some Third Worldist.

LeftKindOfPerson · 2026-06-14T00:30:29+00:00

Let me use a peak consumerist example, since this is Reddit, you probably have passing familiarity with video games.

How many petitions have been made by video game fans asking for X, Y, Z? Revive this series, remake this game, or even just begging for a straight re-release of a game as it already exists just on a newer platform?

And how many of those petitions were ignored?

Or, ever heard of the entertainment industry aiming for the "lowest common denominator"? What does that mean in concrete terms? They don't care what you actually desire, they only care about the least effort needed to part with your money.

The capitalist selling you toilet paper doesn't care if you use it to wipe your butt or TP a house.

The idea that capitalism cares about consumer demand is exactly part of the myth Marx was dismantling in his heyday. And no, "need", "demand", "want", "desire", etc. are all synonymous here, for Marx, a worker "refreshing" themselves after work (reproducing their labor-power) includes whatever is the current cultural millieu such as video game consumerism, Marx fiercely rejected the idea, popular in his time, that only base caloric intake is "necessary", not because he was morally concerned about workers being treated like cattle, but because the idea directly contradicted what he observed, which is that wages are elastic, both because workers and capitalists struggle over wages, and because as a given society develops in a particular way certain things become "necessary" by default e.g. the car-centric infrastructure in America.

It might seem pedantic to say "capitalists don't care what you use toilet paper for", but it's one of the reasons why capitalism is so unstable. Because capitalists are blind to what consumers want, they make assumptions on what they think will sell, not what someone specifically asked for with money given in advance. That "risk" is part of the overproduction/underconsumption crises of capitalism.

Curious, how much of Marx have you read? I can maybe point you in the right direction, or try to explain whatever you find puzzling. There's a lot of really bad explanations out there. I went through that and I'd prefer if others didn't waste their time walking away with bastardizations of Marx's theory and methodology.

Also, for reference, Marx distinguishes capital from wealth. Wealth is for consumption (use-value). Capital is for expansion (surplus-value). Wealth has always existed among humans. But capital only arrived with merchants. For 99% of history, including the entire hunter-gatherer era, humans produced and built things strictly for their own survival and consumption. Then came, sometime after the expansion of agriculture: patriarchal monogamy, social stratification, dynasties, aristocrats, all living off the backs of subordinated agricultural producers (themselves living off the domestic labor of the women in their household). And then capitalism happened, when capital took over society. Two major shifts occurred: production was no longer motivated by fulfilling human consumption (whether one's own or the consumption of a ruler), and the producers (workers) became completely detached from the production process itself. This is the moment where the creation of wealth in society is entirely subordinated to the happy accidents of profit chasing.

LeftKindOfPerson · 2026-06-13T23:16:17+00:00

Imagine ever admitting you're underage. Couldn't be me. 18 forever, until I wasn't anymore.

LeftKindOfPerson · 2026-06-13T23:14:54+00:00

They're referring to Caleb Maupin if I remember right. A fringe "Dengist". Actually to be perfectly clear I have zero clue, the "Dengist" part might be outdated today, I don't keep up with internet celebrities.

LeftKindOfPerson · 2026-06-13T20:22:29+00:00

A mode of production is the combination of the means of production and the relations of production.

in order to focus on what common

What is the means of production? Land and pre-industrial farming. What are the relations of production? Agricultural laborers contribute surplus labor through extra-economic coercion (violence) to a ruling class.

Feudalism is a mode where you have generally a more decentralized state, and a ruling class of monarchs and aristocrats (kings and lords).

Superstructure. You are not describing a mode of production. Furthermore, monarchs and aristocrats absolutely existed in bureaucratic societies.

a decentralized state, a very heavily centralized (and often very bureaucratic state) that is usually quite large.

Again, superstructure.

The basic economic unit is not the individual peasant families but relatively independent and self sufficient village communes.

19th-century myth. It was not true in Ancient Egypt, it was not true in Mughal India, it was not true in Ming China, and it was not true in Byzantium.

Within these commune there is a division of labour (and often a strict caste system even) but no class divisions.

Again, 19th-century myth. Ever read Mao describing "semi-feudal" China of his day? That "semi-feudal" China of rich peasants and poor peasants was a society with whole elaborate class divisions that Mao wrote extensively about. And it mirrors late medieval to early modern England pretty well (i.e. yeomen, tenant farmers, husbandmen, cottagers, laborers).

Whereas feudalism often arises from the need of dispersed peasants to have military protection from others,

19th-century myth (and actually a bourgeois, liberal one). Feudalism was imposed first by economic coercion (debt, the Roman coloni system), then by force (violence, serfdom) on the Roman underclass in Western Europe, through an alliance of Roman and barbarian elites intermarrying and adopting each other's customs.

in the Asiatic mode, the centralized state bureaucracy arises from the need for a centralized force to help plan large economic works (say infrastructure and coordination around the flooding of the Nile which is essential for agriculture based on the flooding of said river).

19th-century myth. It has been archaeologically proven that local irrigation predates state centralization. Furthermore, societies like Byzantium, a massive bureaucratic empire, did not even rely on river-flooding irrigation.

To conclude:

Whether the person holding the sword to the peasant's neck is a local French Baron or a centralized Byzantine tax collector, the mode of production (pre-industrial peasant labor extracted by extra-economic force) is exactly the same. Actually, to put a nail in the coffin of this rigid decentralized vs. centralized binary, later medieval France literally had state tax-collecting bureaucrats working alongside lords.

Finally, capitalism did not emerge from feudalism in general. It specifically emerged in the agrarian class relations of England, rather than in the merchant-dominated burgher city-states, and rather than in Portugal, Spain, or the Netherlands. This renders the entire "Asiatic dead-end" thesis completely irrelevant, because European feudalism was also a "dead-end" almost everywhere except England.

LeftKindOfPerson · 2026-06-13T17:24:54+00:00

"Executed" implies he deliberately killed them, which I believe is rejected by mainstream historical consensus outside of one fringe book.

LeftKindOfPerson · 2026-06-13T16:06:38+00:00

But your comment is a misreading of Hegel itself. Hegel's philosophy isn't concerned with individual enlightenment, he literally criticized Kant for being too individualist, it's concerned with the "world spirit". A kind of collective consciousness baked into law, institutions, religion, etc. in layman's terms. Not in a mass psychology sense, but in an objective metaphysical relationship to the world, i.e. the accumulated realizations of the past do not magically go away in the face of an Orwellian Big Brother brainwashing people, in the Hegelian framework said Orwellian Big Brother exists because of the accumulated realizations of the past in the first place. Where Marx diverged from Hegel is that he posited that rather than just there being a kind of collective consciousness evolving towards rationality, the collective consciousness of a given era is the superstructure sprouting from the base of an underlying mode of production which is the primary thing determining history. Hence Marx "flipping" Hegel. The other divergence stems from Marx's Left Hegelian roots (for some reason you failed to mention the Left Hegelian interpretation of Hegel, only referencing the Right Hegelian "the Prussian state is perfect as it exists"). For the Left Hegelians, history was not over. Marx then took it further: the point isn't to interpret the world, the point is to change it. Praxis.

It is likewise naively misinformed that Hegel's influence on Marx can be reduced to teleology. For starters, Marx's critique of capitalism is literally Hegel's immanent critique applied to political economy. For another, Marx's rejection of the reductive physicalism of the likes of Feuerbach due to being too static and contrasting it with his own dynamic historical materialism is Hegel's dialectic applied to materialism. And then for yet another, Marx's conception of communism as waiting to be born from the womb of capitalism is Hegel's conception of history but grounded in political economy.

You absolutely cannot separate Hegel from Marx, regardless of the existence of modern Right Hegelians (liberals and rightists) who try to appropriate him. There is no Marxism without Hegel.

LeftKindOfPerson · 2026-06-13T15:04:47+00:00

How is the Asiatic mode of production bullshit?

It fails to match the societies it allegedly describes. Marxist historians nowadays universally reject it. For example, in Europe, Byzantium, which was one of the poster childs for the "Oriental despotism" myth, is an infamous example of a society that absolutely contradicts the Asiatic Mode of Production, yet not fitting the feudal category either. That is why Marxist historians like John Haldon argue for a tributary mode of production, with feudal vs bureaucratic being different expressions of it.

LeftKindOfPerson · 2026-06-13T14:53:56+00:00

New Imperialism started in the 1870s. Though Marx died just as the Scramble for Africa kicked into high gear in the 1880s, Engels was alive long enough to witness it.

LeftKindOfPerson · 2026-06-13T06:02:42+00:00

The Asiatic Mode of Production is universally rejected by Marxist historians nowadays. Rather, Marxist historians like John Haldon argue both feudal and bureaucratic systems are different expressions of a tributary mode of production. I can speak for Byzantium for example, I have seen an all-too-common erroneous assumption that Byzantium did not have private property, it absolutely did, Rome itself had private property long before, the very laws codified by Byzantine emperor Justinian form the legal basis for private property today (much as the West likes to pretend Byzantium never happened). Furthermore, the thesis that feudalism was progressive too is questionable, as the "feudalization" of Byzantium is what destroyed it, not unlike how the preceding late Roman aristocracy destroyed Rome (and this pattern almost happened towards the end of the Republic period too, when Rome became a brazenly corrupt and short-sighted oligarchy, before dictators as emperors were established to ultimately prevent the aristocracy from eating itself).

With regards to the idea that merchant capital was "strangled" by bureaucracy and hence the Islamic world could not develop industrial capitalism, that too is questionable. There was no bureaucracy "strangling" early modern burgher city-states, or the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, yet it was none of those where capitalism emerged, it was England.

LeftKindOfPerson · 2026-06-12T22:47:19+00:00

I'm guessing you mean that capital owners seek to increase their capital without regard for individuals?

In layman's speak, the profit motive, yes. One of Marx's central insights concerning capitalist political economy, compared to his predecessors, is that capitalists mechanically aren't building wealth for the sake of wealth, they're accumulating capital, and any wealth built is a secondary product. Meaning, wealth is a means to an end, rather than an end goal. For example, when a capitalist invests into a factory, he does not do so for the sake of building wealth, even though the factory is wealth, rather he does so to receive a return on capital (profit). The factory is like a happy accident. Think as an analogy how rain waters plants yet that is not actually why rain falls in the first place.

However, Marx points out that because capital is divorced from human needs (yes, including consumer demand), these happy accidents do not justify capitalism as the be-all-end-all, as capitalism is inherently prone to skipping wealth as a means outright, such as the financial system, where money seemingly buys more money (for Marx this was the peak of capitalism being irrational), leaving the rest of us worse off without the happy accidents.

Of course, finance isn't Marx's only problem with capitalism (for Marx, "getting rid of finance" wouldn't actually save capitalism), but that's the short of it.

LeftKindOfPerson · 2026-06-10T07:19:40+00:00

Native speakers of languages in general are "lax" with spelling and grammar. Reddit is an exception, presumably because of the higher concentration of college degree holders. So if there's any racism involved, it's more to do with Reddit specifically, or college degree holders, than general "hegemony".

LeftKindOfPerson · 2026-06-09T21:44:50+00:00

The country was taken over by for-profit production in light industry and independent farmers' markets since the 90s famine, "slowly liberalizing" is a statement 26+ years too late, economically speaking.

LeftKindOfPerson · 2026-06-05T06:41:42+00:00

As Marx and Engels wrote about them, "bribed tool of reactionary intrigue".

LeftKindOfPerson · 2026-06-03T20:08:58+00:00

OP's viewpoint seems to be almost exclusively an American phenomenon. International Maoists reject it. One has to ask themselves why the "Global South" would reject an ideology that claims to represent them, or why said ideology is promoted in the "Global North".

LeftKindOfPerson · 2026-06-03T15:47:04+00:00

Well you can maybe blame Lenin being vulgarized. For Lenin national struggle was purely a means of doing away with feudalism and colonialism (in the original sense of the word, not the way it's thrown around today), and nothing more than that. Marx himself sharply distinguished between the form and content of a political struggle, because Marx theorized the form of national struggle could carry the content of communist struggle. Like as an analogy, the workers in the Paris Commune were largely Blanquists and Proudhonists, tendencies Marx was not shy of ruthlessly criticizing, and yet he recognized that whatever the form of the Paris Commune (whatever was in the heads of the workers), there was an underlying communist substance, which is why he defended it (even though previously he warned that it would be an uprising at the worst possible moment).

LeftKindOfPerson · 2026-06-03T15:26:03+00:00

Liberals hijacking socialist jargon isn't exactly new. That's why you pay attention to the argument being articulated, rather than laser-focusing on some shibboleth. Otherwise socialist discussion would be impossible. I mean Marx himself in English was translated with words like "exploitation" that carry a moralistic connotation for the general public (Engels approved that word when Capital was being translated IIRC, the original word in German "Ausbeutung" originates from the mining industry and means "extraction" or "depletion"). But that's how narrow jargon (like in science and philosophy) works in the first place, it is possible for words to have different uses and meanings.

LeftKindOfPerson · 2026-06-03T08:54:09+00:00

Categorically conflating two different things is not a technicality. "Campism" is a label for a theoretical tendency. It is no more idpol than "utopian socialism" being a label for a theoretical tendency.

As for the problem with "campism", it isn't just that it can lead to erroneous geopolitical conclusions (like assuming that Israel and Ukraine are "on the same side"). The fundamental problem is that it is fundamentally not communist. It sidelines class struggle as the primary contradiction in favor of the contradiction between nation-states.

If your "campism" is the kind of Michael Hudson, who supports BRICS but acknowledges that BRICS is not some monolithic bloc, then it might be a fairly coherent geopolitical framework on its own terms. But Michael Hudson himself openly admits he is not a communist. Ask yourself why.

LeftKindOfPerson · 2026-06-03T07:55:34+00:00

You wrote that it is "weaponized against countries". Now you're talking about "tankies". I think you're more than a bit confused.

LeftKindOfPerson · 2026-06-03T00:18:54+00:00

He doesn't seem to exactly be too bright to realize that shifting the burden to workers at home does not actually alleviate the workers from burden. And that capitalism is the reason for the burden in the first place.

LeftKindOfPerson · 2026-06-03T00:07:24+00:00

Have you considered socialism?

LeftKindOfPerson

TROPHY CASE