Telegram is awful, but that’s mainly because it is readily bent towards the interests of malicious state actors like we see here. This headline is produced by two things being bad, not just one.

The formatting is admittedly not the most readable, but this is the best article I have seen on the topic.

I find this reply very strange because it’s the core point of Marxism that it’s dialectical but materialist. It has a lot of forebears, but Hegel is the most direct and obvious of them.

This new German philosophy culminated in the Hegelian system. In this system — and herein is its great merit — for the first time the whole world, natural, historical, intellectual, is represented as a process — i.e., as in constant motion, change, transformation, development; and the attempt is made to trace out the internal connection that makes a continuous whole of all this movement and development. From this point of view, the history of mankind no longer appeared as a wild whirl of senseless deeds of violence, all equally condemnable at the judgment seat of mature philosophic reason and which are best forgotten as quickly as possible, but as the process of evolution of man himself. It was now the task of the intellect to follow the gradual march of this process through all its devious ways, and to trace out the inner law running through all its apparently accidental phenomena.

That the Hegelian system did not solve the problem it propounded is here immaterial. Its epoch-making merit was that it propounded the problem. This problem is one that no single individual will ever be able to solve. Although Hegel was — with Saint-Simon — the most encyclopaedic mind of his time, yet he was limited, first, by the necessary limited extent of his own knowledge and, second, by the limited extent and depth of the knowledge and conceptions of his age. To these limits, a third must be added; Hegel was an idealist. To him, the thoughts within his brain were not the more or less abstract pictures of actual things and processes, but, conversely, things and their evolution were only the realized pictures of the “Idea”, existing somewhere from eternity before the world was. This way of thinking turned everything upside down, and completely reversed the actual connection of things in the world. Correctly and ingeniously as many groups of facts were grasped by Hegel, yet, for the reasons just given, there is much that is botched, artificial, labored, in a word, wrong in point of detail. The Hegelian system, in itself, was a colossal miscarriage — but it was also the last of its kind.

It was suffering, in fact, from an internal and incurable contradiction. Upon the one hand, its essential proposition was the conception that human history is a process of evolution, which, by its very nature, cannot find its intellectual final term in the discovery of any so-called absolute truth. But, on the other hand, it laid claim to being the very essence of this absolute truth. A system of natural and historical knowledge, embracing everything, and final for all time, is a contradiction to the fundamental law of dialectic reasoning.

– Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

i don’t think social change boils down to just one theory.

If we believe that the universe fundamentally makes sense, then it must stem from that that it can all be explained on the same terms. Furthermore, within a domain, the extent to which a theory is unable to explain some part of that domain is the extent to which it either fails or is in-utero just a component of a larger theory whose other parts can cover those other areas. Not only can social change boil down to one theory, if you believe we live in an interconnected, logical world, it must boil down to one theory. Obviously there are many competitors for that title, and none of them are yet developed enough to properly claim it, but it is a legitimate and even a necessary title.

Edit: Sorry for piling on about the dialectics part, I see Cowbee did go over it later. fwiw I think he didn’t represent materialism fairly, but part of why I included the Engels quote is because I think he does represent Hegelian idealism and its fundamental problem (How can this dialectic of humans – material beings – take place in the world of ideas?) fairly.

Most people will take “freedom” as an axiom, but how “freedom” is defined varies a lot. In a society where the commons are pretty much fully enclosed and you are homeless, the petite-bourgeois may very well be free, but you really aren’t.

I’m happy I could be helpful!

I guess this is in some ways an admittal of defeat

There’s no need to claim defeat or victory, we’re just talking; Success in communication is determined by the extent to which we are able to understand each other, and I think we did alright.

I think i still need to educate myself more on this topic.

I can’t claim to represent any perspective but my own, but the text that really helped me to begin to see things differently was Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. Feel free to DM me/necropost here if there’s anything I can help with.

How about celebrities and not shitty CEOs. I’m generalizing towards multimillionaires as well as there aren’t that many billionaires. Unless the hate is specifically towards billionaires which I don’t think is the case.

I just took what you put out there. Generally, I’m skeptical that celebrities will really withstand scrutiny, since they tend to be supported by production crew and lesser-paid artists (whether in music or movies) who get regularly screwed over. Perhaps you can make an okay argument with athletes despite them also being held up by the pipeline from the notoriously exploitative college sports industry, playing in stadiums that are mostly damaging to the city, doing merchandising produced from sweatshops, etc.

But I don’t really care about those arguments. The reason I don’t care is that the conversation is based on an obscurantist metric, that being income. Any decent anti-capitalist is not mainly concerned with how much money someone gets or has, but their relationship to the means of production. That is, they are concerned with whether this person subsists by owning or subsists by working. You displayed what I would consider a good intuition by shifting from CEOs (who generally subsist by owning) to celebrities (who at least kind of subsist by working). It seems somewhat plausible to me that there would be very wealthy athletes, say, in a socialist state, because their job requires a lot of work and, at the top levels, having the talent to accomplish what they can accomplish is rare!

However, i would put money on the off chance that there is at least one billionaire who wasn’t shady about their wealth accumulation

If a machine produces a thousand cubes but also produces at least one octahedron, what would you describe the function of the machine as being?

think Steve Jobs.

When I think of Steve Jobs, I think of someone who put a lot of money and dedication into PR.

As a starting point if you believe that, here’s an article that lightly goes over some of his controversies (ignore points 4 and 10). And here’s one that I think is somewhat more interesting that incidentally demonstrates how dependent he was on exploitation of the third world.

Unless you consider holding companies to be shady.

Owning a company is just a legal status, it’s what you do with it that matters. If what you do with it just happens to be amassing more wealth than many, many people could obtain in a lifetime of labor, you probably didn’t get there with clean hands.

Can you name a billionaire who doesn’t match that description?

Usually it’s my friend Cowbee here who tells people to read things, but here I will:

https://redsails.org/masses-elites-and-rebels/

“Brainwashing” is a reactionary myth (that originally comes from orientalist stories of Chinese hypnosis that were used to explain-away defectors in the Korean war) that is used to position the believer in a position superior to the masses (“sheeple”), and which only knows how to treat the latter condescendingly as blind followers of this or that, which is not how you do mass organizing if you want to succeed.

It’s not because they think they can be billionaires, it’s because they’ve been taught (and in a minority of cases this is true) that they are better off going after the crumbs that billionaires leave them than trying some other system.

Fight Club and the countless movies like it, which are character-driven and the character is driven by extremely maladjusted desires and behaviors.

“Alright, but isn’t that being ableist in Fight Club’s case?”

No, if both of the alters acted like normal people, you’d just have an especially weird buddy comedy with none of the conflict of the original movie.

That people were killed in Tiananmen Square itself, that the soldiers were the first ones to kill, and that the death toll was something like 10,000. It gets played up on Reddit because of red scare propaganda and plain old chauvinism.

I wasn’t going to say that at first [simply because it’s a bit obnoxious] but since other people are courting drama and I was collecting links from another conversation so it’s convenient to do, so I’ll repost them here:

There was a great deal of violence and many students (along with other protestors, as well as the militants and soldiers) died, so I’ll mark each link with an appropriate content warning, though that’s mostly because the last one is rough, while the ones before it are unlikely to cause people issues.

First, here are video interviews with some of the former student leaders, the first one with Chai Ling actually being before the incident took place. There is some gunfire and yelling that a western news program uses for “ambience”, but nothing is shown. Chai Ling describes a bloody scene, though that specific scene is patently fictional (this is established by the others who are interviewed).

Next is an article which discusses the subject, partly quoting student leaders above. It describes violence in broad strokes but doesn’t have any pictures. It also talks about statements made by a British reporter who was there.

Third, here is secondary reporting leaked on documents from the US Embassy in Beijing and the actual report from a Latin American diplomat that was leaked. The latter revealing contains in its summary: “ALTHOUGH THEIR ACCOUNT GENERALLY FOLLOWS THOSE PREVIOUSLY REPORTED, THEIR UNIQUE EXPERIENCES PROVIDE ADDITIONAL INSIGHT AND CORROBORATION OF EVENTS IN THE SQUARE.” (source text is all caps). There is very little description of violence, just mention of gunfire being present, people being wounded, etc.

{Caution} Lastly, here’s an article written arguing that the event is misrepresented in mass media. I link it mainly because it includes photographic evidence that is very difficult to argue with for reasons beyond it being difficult to look at. Graphic depiction of stripped corpses of soldiers that were strung up after death.

Obviously there’s more than this, but these were the links I collected recently. Chai Ling says things that are even more unhinged in footage I think they excluded from that excerpt of the interview.

Go set up your own instance and never raise this subject here again