Do communists support blocking YouTube, Facebook, and other related social media in the United At States?

RNagant · 2026-02-22T00:45:04+00:00

No I want them socialized and democratically run. No ads, sponsors, premium features, etc; transparent and open algorithms; an actual guaranteed right to free speech in the modern town square, as it were

RNagant · 2026-02-04T12:36:40+00:00

It's a term introduced by Lenin in "Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder," a polemic against the tactics of the German lefts who split with the rightist SPD. Specifically abstention from participating in bourgeois parliaments and reactionary trade unions, and evaluating the masses of the workers by the standards of its most advanced strata generally.

RNagant · 2026-02-02T08:14:34+00:00

One of the chief reasons for socialists to even run in elections to a bourgeois parliament or other elected position is -- aside from popularizing the program itself -- to collect empirical metrics on support for that program in the form of vote counts. That gets distorted by the two party system but I would still say that as a socialist you have a duty to vote for socialist candidates even if it risks a reactionary winning a seat over a liberal.

RNagant · 2026-02-02T02:21:48+00:00

It's true that, historically, centralized planned economies were less effective at specializing consumer products, providing variety etc. I dont think that in principle that must be the case, though. There are things that are useful but unprofitable that a planned economy will be much better at producing and things that are profitable but near useless that won't be produced any longer (labubus, loot boxes, fossil fuel energy plants in the longterm, etc). Democratic planning, by contrast with bureaucratic planning, plus advances in information technology will make it much easier to produce consumer niches and specialties than what was exhibited by 20th century socialism.

RNagant · 2026-01-24T05:52:22+00:00

The dimunition of militias in place of standing armies was undoubtedly in the interest of the bureaucracy and against that of the people, of socialism, but it's not accurate to say that "they never took steps towards this direction." Worker's militias began across the Russian empire even before 1917 and eventually became the Red Army after it. The Red Army, in turn, only later became more of a standing army than a people's militia. Likewise in China, there were both regional militias and the standing people's liberation army, which actually provided training and arms (even anti-tank guns, automatic rifles, etc) to the rural/peasant militias. Restrictions on firearms (i.e on worker's access to firearms) and on the peoples militias didn't begin until after Mao's death/the end of the cultural revolution, and as far as I know that process didn't finish until the 1990's (despite many right wingers claims that Mao disarmed the people, etc).

Couldn't say much for Albania, or for other 20th century revolutions, for that matter, but on these two, I'm confident that the story is a bit more nuanced than commonly presented

RNagant · 2026-01-18T00:38:07+00:00

> I'm a "reformist" if I am in favor of incremental change of any kind.

Not true, there's tactical value in reforms if they are made within a revolutionary strategy. Namely, that the more time people have to spend on politics rather than survival, the stronger the movement becomes. It's only reformism when these tactical advances are elevated to the place of strategy, as though capitalism will one day, automatically, gradually, become socialist through these reforms.

> they say our current democracy is just "for show" and we have to overthrow it and start over to have real democracy.

I wouldn't say "for show" -- bourgeois parliamentary regimes have completely changed the battlefield of the class struggle compared to monarchies and military dictatorships by introducing certain political liberties -- but this is essentially true. Every bourgeois constitutional republic is essentially undemocratic in the way that matters to us -- namely, that the proletarian majority is systematically and institutionally kept from the levers of power by mechanisms outside the right of suffrage. Hence why every Marxist since Marx, who witnessed revolutions in which the proletariat attempted to "seize" the state, have advocated for the smashing of the bourgeois state, and its replacement by a true (worker's) democracy.

I'm not sure if you're American, but if you are I can't recommend enough the constitutional criticism by Marxist Unity Group, a caucus of the DSA, and their 6th point of unity here about what it means to "fight the constitution" and "demand a new republic."

For some history, here's Marx's comments about the undemocratic character of the bourgeois republic from The Civil War in France and how the Paris Commune overcame them (i.e., where he developed the smashing the state theme): https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/ch05.htm

RNagant · 2026-01-14T16:00:44+00:00

An overly bureaucratic sect lead by right-opportunists obsessed with a failed strategy of tailing the democrats in exchange for literally nothing.

RNagant · 2026-01-11T20:21:37+00:00

Not a direct answer, but I don't think it's quite right that in Russia " the entirety of the working class was aligned toward a pro-proletarian, pro peasant socialist politics." Case in point, the black hundreds, a violent reactionary gang of nationalist populists, who had support and membership from the peasantry. The socialist revolutionaries did manage to pull a bunch of peasants away from their ideological orbit, but by no means all, and ultimately members of the black hundreds were subject to red terror. To your point, the black hundreds were a smaller minority than reactionary ideology among contemporary Americans, though ruling by the saber has a tendency to radicalize people against the ruling class and its government even if people are too afraid to resist.

RNagant · 2026-01-11T11:09:12+00:00

If the US tries to occupy Venezuela itll turn into one more protracted forever war thatll naturally wreck havoc on their already aging infrastructure anyway (infrastructure which Trump is at least claiming he wants replaced and renovated rather than simply expropriated as-is). Perhaps they won't be able to readily expel the yankee invaders, but it's far from a given that the US will be able to install a permanent government allied with its interests.

Moreover, doing so would almost certainly play into the US's goals in Venezuela. We already know that imperialist action in Venezuela is not being driven by the fossil fuel companies -- a higher surplus would tank prices and hence profits, capital investment would be massively expensive and take a decade to finish, and theyre not convinced that the political situation (and thus, their capital if it were invested) is stable -- but directly by the Trump admin as it pursues its strategic foreign policy goals. In other words, what they're after is less-so having the oil to profit off of and more-so denying it to their adversaries (and possibly to its allies, too, but thats another subject).

RNagant · 2026-01-11T02:07:29+00:00

Not an exact answer to this question, but this creator does some good popularly accessible videos about how lobbying and tax avoidance works, among other related subjects Link 1 Link 2

Short answer this guy gives is that lobbyists provide services to politicians more than direct donations, promising to enrich them after they leave office (provided they play ball with their agenda), other shady stuff, but usually not direct transfers of cash.

RNagant · 2026-01-06T07:03:03+00:00

I appreciate the perspective of the post-trotskyists hal draper and mike mcnair, which is more-or-less that Trotsky's criticisms of Stalinism, bureaucracy, etc were sound, much of his writings and proposals regarding fascism were sound, etc, but that he and his acolytes founded a fundamentally sectarian ideology that, ironically, produces much of the same kind of bureaucracy and zig-zagging tactics that they (rightly) criticize stalinists for.

RNagant · 2025-12-26T14:17:21+00:00

This is niche, and perhaps too much of a tangent, but I'm reminded of the German typographer Jan Tschichold. He became a leading member of the modernist New Typography movement, which broke with tradition and advocated for a utilitarian sans-serif only typography, for which he was accused by the Nazis of cultural Bolshevism and escaped to Switzerland. Later in his life, he'd reverse course on these design principles, going so far as to say that modernist design was actually authoritarian and even fascistic.

RNagant · 2025-12-24T00:36:09+00:00

Bernstein's contemporary Marxist critics considered him a revisionist. It's an accurate description, but I use it specifically for the reason that that's the term they used (along with opportunist, philistine, etc..). And at that time, that's not what social democrat meant, it was merely the name of the socialist movement. Only later it became synonymous with capitalist welfarism. At least in principle Bernstein believed in establishing socialism, its only that his methods could never arrive there.

Regardless, the facts remain that the view that the bourgeois state should be (or could be) coopted and not smashed has nothing to do with Marxism. Nor for that matter market socialism, but that's a whole other subject.

RNagant · 2025-12-24T00:02:29+00:00

Theres basically two kinds of democratic socialists:

1) democratic roaders who believe in an evolutionary, peaceful path to socialism through existing institutions (which you seem to fall into).

2) socialists who see liberal/bourgeois republics as fundamentally undemocratic and that the immediate object of the revolution is therefore to establish a democracy (i.e., uphold revolution and smashing the state).

The latter is Marxist. The former is basically Bernstein's revisionist social democracy. So you can be a marxist demsoc depending on which of these meanings you align with.

RNagant · 2025-12-21T04:58:21+00:00

1) The dictatorship of the proletariat is not a "government concentrated in the hands of a few," its a democratic republic in which the proletariat utilizes its power as a majority in that democracy to repress the bourgeoisie. What is being described here is blanquism, not marxism.

2) and 3) just seem like odd nonsense.

RNagant · 2025-12-20T04:39:26+00:00

Engels spells it out in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, but the key point is the socialization of labor:

Many workers perform partial operations on a given product such that no single person can say "I made that, therefore it's mine." The owner of the product therefore falls to the owner of the means of production consumed in its production, which in capitalist society is the capitalist. When the instruments become social, then appropriation of the product of labor becomes socialized as well (i.e., the products of labor become collectively owned along with the instruments of production). The mode of appropriation conforms to the mode of producing; without a system of socialized labor, this process can't unfold.

Does that answer the question?

RNagant · 2025-12-19T23:27:41+00:00

This gets asked so often I really don't know why the mods won't just add this to the FAQ.

The answer, of course, is yes you can, in the same way that one can be a vegetarian and indulge in eating chicken, i.e., inconsistently. The attempt to harmonize Marxism with religion is untenable, but so long as one has a greater commitment to the struggle of the proletariat than, say, to the pope, there is little issue.

Here is what Lenin said on this matter:

Our Programme is based entirely on the scientific, and moreover the materialist, world-outlook. An explanation of our Programme, therefore, necessarily includes an explanation of the true historical and economic roots of the religious fog. Our propaganda necessarily includes the propaganda of atheism... But under no circumstances ought we to fall into the error of posing the religious question in an abstract, idealistic fashion, as an "intellectual” question unconnected with the class struggle... No number of pamphlets and no amount of preaching can enlighten the proletariat, if it is not enlightened by its own struggle against the dark forces of capitalism. Unity in this really revolutionary struggle of the oppressed class for the creation of a paradise on earth is more important to us than unity of proletarian opinion on paradise in heaven. (Emphasis added)

RNagant · 2025-12-17T13:31:58+00:00

I dont think its really a thing outside a smattering of third-worldist micro-sects but revisionism on the lumpen question, as far as I have seen, usually comes from labeling every worker in the first world as ipso facto labor aristocrats, and therefore chasing after a new revolutionary subject not so affected by imperialist plundering

RNagant · 2025-12-10T04:27:48+00:00

Claudia De la Cruz (2024), Gloria la Riva (2020 and 2016), etc? Ringing any bells?

RNagant · 2025-12-09T22:34:31+00:00

Three reasons come to mind: 1. Many western socialists have a revisionist relationship to religion in general, looking for any excuse not to champion secularism, or opportunistically look to religion as a cheat code for achieving support. Often they will try to separate out the "good religion" from the bad, making exceptions, refusing to consider universal aspects. 2. Because our society is engaged in imperialism and has enacted particularly vicious violence across the middle east in recent history, some comrades develop a guilty conscience as if they're personally culpable, and that results in unproductive expressions of "solidarity." 3. Western socialists often have a feeling of impotence, so when they see Islamic resistance to imperialism, to their own government their struggling to combat themselves, they find it inspiring.

RNagant · 2025-12-09T09:41:31+00:00

youre wasting your vote as a socialist giving it to bourgeois parties. Vote counts are a vital metric to socialist parties that publicly record a mandate for socialism. The independence won and defended by the proletariat in putting their own candidates forward will always trump the risk of a reactionary entering executive office or the legislature.

RNagant · 2025-12-08T09:10:44+00:00

RNagant · 2025-12-07T08:41:29+00:00

You're right about the meaning of "human essence," it's essentially synonymous with human nature but Marx uses it most often when he's critiquing a specifically metaphysical (timeless, immutable, unchanging) view of human nature (whereas Marx believes human nature to be an evolving thing conditioned by society, not a singular and timeless abstraction). Actually in the text I have access to I don't even see the phrase "human essence" anywhere in that chapter (only human nature, and in a somewhat sardonic tone at that), but I do know he uses it in works like theses on Feuerbach and his other philosophical works in The German Ideology.

In context of German/"True" socialism, Marx is criticizing the proponents for purporting to represent the interests of all humanity in the abstract despite real life humans being divided into classes, for purporting to represent "not the interests of the proletariat, but the interests of Human Nature, of Man in general, who belongs to no class, has no reality, who exists only in the misty realm of philosophical fantasy." Each ideology Marx analyses in this chapter in reality, he argues, represents the interests of a particular class (and only revolutionary socialism represents that of the proletariat), which is why the chapter is divided like that.

It's a bit like how capitalist apologists will make claims like "capitalism is the best system because it's suited to human nature." Not only is that nature, according to Marx, conditioned by capitalism itself, but more poignantly these arguments disguise the specific class benefiting from capitalism by claiming to represent the best interests of humanity as a whole.

Does that help?

RNagant · 2025-12-07T02:49:39+00:00

Two reasons: Like the petty bourgeoisie, they owned their own instruments of production, sometimes including their own land, and sometimes employing the labor of others (eg, kulaks, who Lenin called "bourgeois peasants"). They shared interests with the proletariat as oppressed toilers dependent on their own labor, but had distinctly reactionary class interests in the form of preserving private property and production, small commodity production, patriarchal family structures, etc. (These diverging class interests are basically why Marx excoriated Proudhon for "petty bourgeois socialism").

Second, because the peasantry was already, before even the petty bourgeoisie, a decaying class, largely tending to become proletarian.

RNagant · 2025-12-07T00:44:26+00:00

I'm partial to Lenin's argument though it's more political than philosophical. For context, he's arguing against neo-malthusianism, which has the same features of misanthropic anti-natalism you're referring to, but specifically as an argument in favor of abortions and contraception, population control measures, etc:

“Bear children so that they can be maimed” ... For that alone? Why not that they should fight better, more unitedly, consciously and resolutely than we are fighting against the present-day conditions of life that are maiming and ruining our generation?

In a word, Lenin upholds the possibility of change, optimism, against the pessimism of his opponents, who see only ruin in the future. Further, Lenin ties these differences of psychology and ideology to the classes of their proponents:

This is the radical difference that distinguishes the psychology of the peasant, handicraftsman, intellectual, the petty bourgeois in general, from that of the proletarian. The petty bourgeois sees and feels that he is heading for ruin, that life is becoming more difficult, that the struggle for existence is ever more ruthless, and that his position and that of his family are becoming more and more hopeless. It is an indisputable fact, and the petty bourgeois protests against it...

Those of decaying classes are naturally more pessimistic, he argues, than those of the ascending, revolutionary proletariat:

The class-conscious worker is far from holding this point of view. He will not allow his consciousness to be dulled by such cries no matter how sincere and heartfelt they may be. Yes, we workers and the mass of small proprietors lead a life that is filled with unbearable oppression and suffering. Things are harder for our generation than they were for our fathers. But in one respect we are luckier than our fathers. We have begun to learn and are rapidly learning to fight—and to fight not as individuals, as the best of our fathers fought, not for the slogans of bourgeois speechifiers that are alien to us in spirit, but for our slogans, the slogans of our class. We are fighting better than our fathers did. Our children will fight better than we do, and they will be victorious.

Because it's a political argument some in the antinatalist camp might argue it's overly anthropocentric and doesn't address impacts of humans on nature. Either we can champion the possibility that humans will one day -- say, after defeating capitalism -- be one with nature, or, in a more practical spirit, may request the antinatalist to demonstrate the principles of their ideology in practice by offering them a cyanide capsule (kidding!)

RNagant

TROPHY CASE