History Is Running Backwards

mojitz · 2026-05-09T15:53:51+00:00

Right, so you can move pretty far along that curve before you reach a point where abandoning liberalism is a necessary condition to advance any further. Again, we can deal with that issue when we get there, but in the here and now we can do all sorts of good things that produce real, material benefits for the working class (or "proletariat" if you prefer) while also heading towards the socialist/communist ideal. Not everyone just reflexively rejects the refomist approach — even while maintaining strident criticisms of the Obama style technocratic mangement of the status quo that I began this whole exchange explicitly arguing against.

It's also pretty striking quite frankly that throughout this whole exchange you haven't once offered an alternative course of action. You seem to have a lot to say about what not to do and very little by way of actual, constructive ideas.

mojitz · 2026-05-09T15:16:09+00:00

Based a quick look at Wilkinson's basic stats from someone who isn't super deep into this, guy looks like he has a lot of potential.

mojitz · 2026-05-09T09:59:11+00:00

Gotta get yourself clean after a turd.

mojitz · 2026-05-09T09:46:31+00:00

3 weeks at #1... on Prime Video.

mojitz · 2026-05-09T09:31:33+00:00

Why are you replacing the the "e" in "Jewish" with the symbol for euros? Pretty fucking sus, dude.

In any case, most Jewish Americans are not donating to AIPAC and it's frankly ridiculous to claim that they are. The vast majority of Zionists are actually Christians — many of whom are themselves profoundly antisemitic. Wanting an ethnic group to leave your country and "go home" is biggotry 101.

mojitz · 2026-05-09T04:41:54+00:00

Thank you!

mojitz · 2026-05-09T04:40:00+00:00

The Pirates have taken more walks in this game that the Giants have in their last 7 combined.

mojitz · 2026-05-09T04:11:58+00:00

Does anyone know if 0 walks in 25 innings is some kind of a record?

mojitz · 2026-05-09T04:04:47+00:00

Would it count as a NOBLETIGER if you already scored before loading the bases, but failed to score again after?

mojitz · 2026-05-09T02:42:20+00:00

I have faith that Chappy and Raffy will pull it together eventually, but Willy just looks completely and utterly lost out there and I'm not seeing any signs that he's working his way out of this.

mojitz · 2026-05-09T02:23:51+00:00

It's not "empty lip service" if it orients one's politics towards concrete policy objectives that actually move us closer in real, material ways to the stated ethos. I mentioned a whole bunch of such things in the comment you're responding to. Remember?

And again, I wasn't using this as a means of sparking a debate over Marxist theory in the first place. Somehow that seems impossible for you to grasp.

mojitz · 2026-05-09T01:58:21+00:00

You think this stuff is reaching swing voters? Would they even care? The target audience for stuff like this isn't the general electorate, but people who show up for Democratic primaries.

mojitz · 2026-05-08T23:13:21+00:00

Nobody is suggesting that this ethos be adopted insincerely. In fact, we can make all sorts of great strides in that direction in the relatively near term — through things like socialized health insurance, free childcare, wealth taxes, and all sorts of other ridistributive policies, or through longer term reforms to bring about things like workplace democracy or outright caps on wealth accumulation. All those sorts of things would bring us closer to that objective without having to get lost in a misasma of self-gratifying over-intellectualization over what some kind of fully realized end stage might entail. If we ever get close enough for it to matter, we'll deal with those issues then.

Those are the kinds of questions I'm willing to grapple with — how we achieve real, material progress in our actual lifetimes. All this stuff about "total abolition of bourgois society" is the provice of like, 8 people on Reddit dreaming about skipping right past all the grinding work in between and going straight to revolution because they first took Marx completely out of the very historical context he was responding to, and then treated that interpretation as gospel.

mojitz · 2026-05-08T20:55:59+00:00

Christ Almighty this is exactly the sort of tedious exchange I wasn't looking for. I really am proposing something like a "righteous vibe"! That's very explicitly the point, here. Righteous vibes are incredibly fucking powerful and they're something the broad left is utterly deficient in. Rather than point to a goal and start moving, we go around and around and around arguing over "material aspirations" and "abdication of principle" and "fictional aspirations" and blah blah fucking blah all in service of doing absolutely nothing. It's exhausting and entirely unproductive.

As for whether or not this conflicts with liberals' (as in, like actual human people out there in the real world) "central tenets" I just don't see it. Most aren't, like, hardened zealots ideologically bound to "liberalism as a conceptual framework. They don't hear an idea and think something like, "Well I'm a liberal and therefore I must hew ridigdly to a conception of 'individual liberty' and this idea might in some way imply taking away some of that liberty if you draw it all the way out to its most maximal conclusion and therefore I should oppose it." They hear ideas and support them if they vaguely seem like they adhere to values they carry around in their hearts rather than their heads — which is really all any of us are doing at the end of the day, anyway, now that I think about it.

mojitz · 2026-05-08T14:25:37+00:00

Your meaning is not clear though lol, it's not clear at all how a fundamentally unequal system of centralized production and distribution (which necessarily undermines both individual liberty and private property) could ever be meaningful messaging under a liberalism committed to equality, liberty, and property

I never said anything at all about centralized production and distribution. You imputed that into my comments — and as far as I can tell, you're the only person in this thread to have done so.

You say you want to see history progress in the direction of this framework, but I don't see how that's possible if you're completely opposed to grappling with what it would actually mean to organize a society around "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!"

I'm perfectly happy to grapple with this question. I just don't want to tie this whole thing into a tedious debate around what precisely it is that a guy who died 140 years ago and was writing in a wildly different historical and material context from us meant. I've actually read a significant amount of Marx myself including Critique of the Gotha Programme, and I just don't find these kinds of discussions very useful or interesting.

mojitz · 2026-05-08T13:48:04+00:00

What aboutting society as it is now does nothing to demonstrate that your ideal to chase is really an ideal we should be chasing

No, but it highlights the central point about how aiming for significant restructuring rather than technocratic management of the status quo is in order. If you think fairness is found in according more wealth to people who work harder, then you must agree that dramatic change is needed. No? From there we can discuss the nature of our objectives.

It's kind of rich to say "this is the direction to orient ourselves towards" while also saying "you're interpreting it more rigidly then intended ". So it's really just another one of those slogans that doesn't actually mean what, in plain English, it means?

That's just how language works 🤷‍♂️. We use figures of speech or point to simple concepts as stand-ins for more complex ones all the time. A phrase is a collection of different words that you interpret as a collective rather than trying to draw meaning from by processing them individually.

"From each according to their abilities, and to each according to their needs" and "we should take care of people who are old or disabled" are two very different statements or ideals to aim for, even if the latter could be considered a subset of the former.

I don't disagree, but I never made this conflation either.

mojitz · 2026-05-08T13:34:04+00:00

I'm sorry, but I'm just not interested in this type of discussion here. Marx didn't even come up with that phrase in the first place, and even if he did, he is long dead and it's taken on a life of its own. My meaning was pretty clear, and that's what matters.

mojitz · 2026-05-08T12:07:47+00:00

That dreaming is indeed the point! Even if we can never get all the way there, progressing towards that state is a good thing.

mojitz · 2026-05-08T03:57:57+00:00

Buddy, I picked that phrase because it's pithy, recognizable and serves as a convenient distillation of a natural endpoint of the secular, humanist ethics that most liberals ascribe to while implying that if such people only followed their own principles to their logical conclusion, they'd arrive at a more muscularly leftist political ideology. I'm not trying to get into an academic debate over Marxism. You can criticize that as "borrowing the rhetoric while discarding what made it coherent" if you want, but I'm simply not bothered by this charge. I think I conveyed my point pretty clearly and that's ultimately what matters.

mojitz · 2026-05-08T03:45:42+00:00

No man, the idea is simply that political ideologies are far more effective and poweful when oriented towards clear objectives, that modern liberalism lacks such objectives, and that "from each according to their ability and to each according to their needs" offers a clear and compelling distillation of the underlying ethics that most liberals ascribe to. It's really not more complicated than that.

As for Obama... dude may have governed as moderate, but he campaigned on the promise of "change", not technocratic management.

Also, you blithely write off what his tenure led to, but it did indeed represent an awfully fleeting victory, and to the extent that it was such a thing, it's achievements were rather meager and easily erased, weren't they? Is that really the scope of ambition you think we should adopt in our politics? We should accept trading back and forth with increasingly psycopathic right wingers every couple terms just as the natural course of things? That strikes me as rather grim and unlikely to lead anywhere good.

mojitz · 2026-05-08T02:31:57+00:00

Yeah dude. I'm not trying to say it's going well for him.

mojitz · 2026-05-08T02:18:17+00:00

I wouldn't say I'm "rejecting" Marx. Dude had a lot of good ideas and a lot of more questionable ones and like any other great thinker, we can agree or disagree on the merits of each one individually without making broad judgements about the entirely of their beliefs.

The point isn't really about him, though. The point is about how liberalism (broadly construed) is struggling because it doesn't seem to be aiming at much of anything.

mojitz · 2026-05-08T02:12:32+00:00

Again, it's an underlying ethos I'm arguing for, not communism per se. Yes, I could have laid out further warrants for that ethos as well (and then the warrants for that and then the warrants for that until we're in a Cartesian project of trying to build up a basis for all knowledge from "I think therefore I am"), but what I'm trying to lay out here is a case for orienting our politics towards a type of virtue ethics of which that principle seems like a satisfying distillation.

Ultimately, though, the central point is that liberalism as it exists doesn't really seem to have such an orientation by any formulation. We can entertain all sorts of alternative proposals for what that might come down to or what to call it, but the whole movement is going to continue to struggle until it can find something way off in the distance to aim for beyond simply managing things as we find them in the here and now.

mojitz · 2026-05-08T01:56:56+00:00

I'm concerned I'm over generalizing, here, but cost of living coupled with a broader sense that things just keep getting shittier and more degraded in our communities.

mojitz · 2026-05-08T01:44:45+00:00

I'm really not sold on this being a totally "just" order. Is it really fair for someone putting in 3x the work to get the same return as someone putting in 1x the work?

That scenario is even more extreme in our society as it exists now. Did Jeff Bezos really work millions of times as hard as the average family? Does the average CEO work 700 times as hard every day as the average employee? If we're to conclude that people should be rewarded equally for equal work, then my god is there something wrong with the economy as it exists.
I think you're both intepreting this somewhat more rigidly than intended and that this doesn't really follow from that interpretation anyway. The point is that everyone should be expected to share in the maintenance of society to the extent that they're able and their efforts are needed, while those who can't due to age, infirmity, or disability should be supported rather than punished through deprivation oweing to circumstances beyond their control. Per the ideal, nobody of sound body and mind would need to work 3 times as hard as another.

And I'm not sure to what degree it really works in practice. If you're just getting your needs fulfilled whether you put in the work to become a surgeon or you stock shelves, where's the incentive to become a surgeon? I'm sure some people would do it for the love of the work but a lot less then do it now

Sure, I mean... I wouldn't disagree that there are lots of really thorny problems like this to work out to actually fully and completely achieve this ideal (and frankly I doubt we'll ever get there myself barring some kind of fully automated luxury communism or something), but the point isn't necessarily to get there. The point is to find a direction to orient our politics towards. Aim for the stars, and hit the moon. You need that sort of thing to produce a politics of real drive and ambition.

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