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why do millenials like communism so much

is it because they think they can make money being a ***** artist with CoMmUnIsM

Posted - January 15, 2019

Responses


  • 32700
    Everybody likes getting free money. 
      January 15, 2019 6:04 PM MST
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  • and starvation and poverty too  i guess 
      January 15, 2019 6:07 PM MST
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  • 4631
    According to Marketwatch, 44% of millennials prefer socialism.
    44% is a lot, but not most. 
    Many people are more left voting when young; some swing further right as they age.
    This has been so ever since the first left-wing politics evolved.

    It's a mistake to conflate communism with socialism; they are not the same thing. 
    The communism we witness in self-identified communist states is mostly oligarchy or dictatorship in practice and nothing like the model that Marx outlined.
    There never has been a country that has achieved communism as Marx imagined it.

    Socialism is a softer option and comes in many degrees. The most extreme is when the state owns the means of production.
    Another version is when the workers own the means of production; this has rarely happened and never on a national scale.

    The much watered down version is when the government uses taxes to take more from the rich and give more to those who are not capable of earning due to disabilities, injuries, illness or age. It usually supports a minimum legal wage which is livable and linked to the inflation index. This can easily operate in tandem with democracy. It can also allow capitalism to continue, but with greater constraints on its psychotic tendencies.

    Young people are more likely to support a somewhat left politics because they are usually disadvantaged by their age. They tend to be much poorer and have far less power and fewer choices available to them. Because of this, they often identify more easily with others who are disadvantaged for reasons not within their control.

    This suggests that as some people become older and more materially secure, they begin to lose empathy with those who are less well off and to invent reasons why it may be the fault of the disadvantaged.

    The old saying is "The young have a heart but no brains, while the old have brains but no heart."

    This post was edited by inky at January 30, 2019 3:41 PM MST
      January 16, 2019 1:49 PM MST
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  • 1305

    The Communist Manifesto. Download here for anyone who wants to read it.

    https://www.fulltextarchive.com/pdfs/The-Communist-Manifesto.pdf

    The main points of the manifesto is to do away with ALL private property, with the intent of abolishing all class, and to forcibly overthrow ALL existing social conditions. Karl Marx ideas were not new, they can be traced back to the Levellers of the English Revolution and even to Lollards such as John Ball in the English Peasant War of the 14th century. The manifesto did not deal with the real social relations that make up capitalism. He did state that ""the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an over-riding law," indeed, that "its existence is no longer compatible with society.”

    The winter of 1847-48 was still the inception of the bourgeois epoch, not its high point, let alone its end, and the words globalization and multinationalism were unheard of, even as The Manifesto described similar phenomena. The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class, and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible. However, the question that always presented itself, even to Karl Marx was "How could an entire class, the proletariat organized as a "movement" that would eventually speak for society as a whole, institutionalize itself into a "political" (or state) power? By what concrete institutional forms would this class, whose revolution in contrast to all previous ones would represent "the interest of the immense majority, exercise its economic and political sovereignty?" They probably assumed a "republic."

    Anarchist critics of Marx pointed out with considerable effect that any system of representation would become a statist interest in its own right, one that at best would work against the interests of the working classes (including the peasantry), and that at worst would be a dictatorial power as vicious as the worst bourgeois state machines. Indeed, with political power reinforced by economic power in the form of a nationalized economy, a "workers' republic" might well prove to be a despotism of unparalleled oppression.

    Apart from their writings formally in support of the Paris Commune, neither Marx nor Engels ever resolved the problem of the political institutions for proletarian rule that they set for themselves in The Manifesto: the problem of how a class, still less the mass of the people in bourgeois society, will take over the reins of power as a class or a people.

    The question of the institutions of political and social management by a class as a whole, and eventually by citizens in a classless society, has no easy resolution. Plainly it is not answered adequately by Proudhon's system of federalism, which is too incoherent and vague and retains too many bourgeois features, such as contract and individual proprietorship, to provide a truly revolutionary solution. The solutions that later anarchists, more collectivist than the Proudhonists, offered many possibilities, but they too suffer from a lack of definition and articulation.

    For their part, anarchosyndicalists have offered workers' control of industry as the most viable revolutionary alternative to the state, adducing the takeover of factories and agricultural land as evidence of its feasibility. But as social elements for a liberatory society, workers' control has basic problems, not only their parochialism (narrow scope) and the highly visible decline in numbers of the manufacturing working class but most especially their tendency to turn into competitive collectively owned capitalistic enterprises.  The latter is why Marxist communism has never worked.

      January 30, 2019 10:09 AM MST
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  • 4631
    Which, of course, is why democracy (despite its fallibility, mediocrity and inefficiency), is still the best means of representing the majority and minimising (or attempting to minimise) the worst abuses of minorities.
    It is also, usually, the best means of avoiding the unnecessary bloodshed of civil war and coup d'etat. This post was edited by inky at January 30, 2019 3:52 PM MST
      January 30, 2019 3:50 PM MST
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  • 1305
    Search for the history of the Frankfurt School which was Marxist influenced academics, and was started by a bunch of mainly Jewish men, and look at its agenda, then you will see that agenda laid bare in todays society.  Nothing happens that isn't planned.
      January 17, 2019 5:26 PM MST
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  • 4631
    Quite a few Jewish intellectuals were attracted to communism in the early to mid 20thC. The idea appealed because it echoed the idea of Kibbutz Galuyot  (lit. "the gathering of Israel", meaning the heart, people and community of those who believe in the Jewish God and the Torah), as recommended by Moses in the Torah in Deuteronomy 30:1-5, Isaiah 11:11-12, Jeremiah 29:14 and Ezekial 20:41-42. Thes ideas are further explored and recommended by various sages and scholars in the Mishneh, a book of interpretations of Mosaic law.

    The Frankfurt School of which you speak, kjames, was actually anti- capitalism, fascism and communism. They were critical of both capitalist and Marxist-Leninist thought as philosophically inflexible systems of social organisation. The School's critical research and theory advocated alternative paths to realise the economic, cultural and psychological development of a society. They thought Marxist ideology had holes which made it inadequate for the 20thC, so they incorporated the ideas of Kant, Hegel, Freud, Weber, Simmel, Lukács, Habermas and several other innovative philosophers, sociologists and psychoanalysts.

    In exploring their ideas, they seem often too ambiguous to be capable of practical application in the real world.

    kjames, I would be very interested to read how you see the ideas of the Frankfurt School reflected in today's society. And since this is an international site and not just an American one, I would be grateful if you name specific laws, institutions, practices and countries in which you see these theories in operation.
    I'd also be interested in whether you see the effects as beneficial, harmful, both in different ways, or ineffective - and why.
      January 17, 2019 6:53 PM MST
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  • 1305

    With regards to the Frankfurt School Institute For Social Research), it initially was based upon Marxist and Hegelian premises of idealist philosophy. The School’s sociologic works derived from syntheses of the thematically pertinent works of Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Karl Marx, of Sigmund Freud and Max Weber, and of Georg Simmel and Georg Lukács.

    It was founded as the first Marxist Research centre, by Carl Grunberg, who was born in FocÈ™ani, Romania in a Jewish-Bessarabia German family, and originated through the largesse of the wealthy student Felix Weil a Jewish German-Argentine, who’s father was a wealthy grain merchant.

    Carl Grunberg – studied law and political economy, Grünberg was one of the founders of Austromarxism. Among his students were Otto Bauer, Rudolf Hilferding and Karl Renner. 1912 he got the chair for history of economy at the university of Vienna. Austromarxism is a theory of theory of nationality and nationalism, and its attempt to conciliate it with socialism in the imperial context, by using the “personal principle” developed by Otto Bauer (one of the leading thinkers of the left-socialist Austro-Marxist grouping. He was also an early inspiration for both the New Left movement and Eurocommunism in their attempt to find a "Third way" to democratic socialism). in his 1907 book Die Nationalitätenfrage und die Sozialdemokratie seen by him a way of gathering the geographically divided members of the same nation to "organize nations not in territorial bodies but in simple association of persons", thus radically disjoining the nation from the territory and making of the nation a non-territorial association.”

    Note: these men alone, who started the Frankfurt School and the influences they had and the wealth, are well worth looking into as it shows their thinking from the beginning, once you do that you will see the influence on not just todays countries but on the globalist, multicultural idea in general, to eradicate individuality for collectivism.  The scope of this is far too great to cover here.

    “"Let us consider the case of a country composed of several national groups, e.g. Poles, Lithuanians and Jews. Each national group would create a separate movement. All citizens belonging to a given national group would join a special organisation that would hold cultural assemblies in each region and a general cultural assembly for the whole country. The assemblies would be given financial powers of their own: either each national group would be entitled to raise taxes on its members, or the state would allocate a proportion of its overall budget to each of them. Every citizen of the state would belong to one of the national groups, but the question of which national movement to join would be a matter of personal choice and no authority would have any control over his decision. The national movements would be subject to the general legislation of the state, but in their own areas of responsibility they would be autonomous and none of them would have the right to interfere in the affairs of the others".

    At university, Weil’s doctoral dissertation dealt with the practical problems of implementing socialism. In 1922, he organized the First Marxist Workweek (Erste Marxistische Arbeitswoche) in effort to synthesize different trends of Marxism into a coherent, practical philosophy; the first symposium included György Lukács and Karl Korsch, Karl August Wittfogel and Friedrich Pollock.

    After Max Horkheimer took over as director in 1930, this focus widened. Leading members, such as Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Herbert Marcuse, influenced by aspects of existentialism and even psychoanalysis, developed a version of Marxism known as “Critical Theory.” Critical Theory set out to challenge all previously accepted standards in every aspect of life from a Marxist perspective. They saw much within Marxism which could be employed to form a new foundation for a post-Christian society.

    Georg Lukács was born Löwinger György Bernát, in Budapest, Austria-Hungary, to the investment banker József Löwinger (later Szegedi Lukács József; 1855–1928) who was knighted, and his wife Adele Wertheimer (Wertheimer Adél; 1860–1917), who were a wealthy Jewish family. As son of one of the Hapsburg Empire's leading bankers he was a baron, and he trained in Germany and already an important literary theorist, Lukacs became a Communist during World War I, writing as he joined the party, "Who will save us from Western civilization?"

    Korsch and Lukács were members of the communist party, a communist party is a political party that advocates the application of the social and economic principles of communism through state policy. The name originates from the 1848 tract Manifesto of the Communist Party by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

     Theodor Adorno - His mother, a devout Catholic from Corsica, was once a professional singer, while his father, an assimilated Jew who had converted to Protestantism, ran a successful wine-export business. His writings—such as Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), Minima Moralia (1951) and Negative Dialectics (1966)—strongly influenced the European New Left.

    This post was edited by kjames at January 30, 2019 10:23 AM MST
      January 30, 2019 10:17 AM MST
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  • 4631
    Yep - I read up on the history too.

    But you didn't answer my question - which was, how do you see socialism as evident or being practised in today's world. I don't mean communism - which is just another form of totalitarian dictatorship. I mean - where and in what ways do you see any of the original forms of socialist theory being actively practised in the world today?

    And what evidence do you have that millennials are especially enthused about it? The data I found said it was only 45% of millennials - which is about normal for most young people in every generation since Marxism first started to be included as part of political studies at universities.

    My original reply still holds as my point of view. This post was edited by inky at January 30, 2019 12:57 PM MST
      January 30, 2019 12:50 PM MST
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  • 1305
    If you have read the information on the people who started the Frankfurt School, and those who influenced it later on who were part of the communist party, (some of who I have mentioned here),  and their influence on the New Left, then there is no need to ask me how this has influenced the world today, because that information would tell you. I've already told you multiculturalism and globalisation with the goal of eradicating sovereignty and identity in favour of collectivism, as shown by the quoted paragraph I have already addressed.

    Have you ever been to a Kibbutz? It is volunteer work, (no pay) working in the kitchen, washing dishes, in the potatoe fields, etc, and there is lots of opportunity for sex and drinking, which is why it appeals to youngsters or those who look on it as a holiday to experience another country, but to base a political and economic theory of social organization would be to promote, slave labour with no possibility of progression or competition, and hardship for the disabled or unwell who cannot work.  In Marxist theory socialism is a transitional social state between the overthrow of capitalism and the realization of Communism. This post was edited by kjames at January 30, 2019 2:41 PM MST
      January 30, 2019 2:02 PM MST
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  • 7776
    This generation seems to like things that they don't fully understand.
      January 30, 2019 12:59 PM MST
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  • 7919
    I could make a couple educated guesses. 

    Millennials, more than any other generation, have been raised in single-parent households. Single-parent houses are far more likely to be impoverished. Poverty is linked to all sorts of things, from lack of education to poor health outcomes. Without the supportive household many others have grown up in, millennials have been largely on their own. The concept of someone having their back is appealing and in many cases, is necessary to make the playing field even.

    Adding to this, student loan debts are at an all-time high. It's harder than ever for young adults to carve out a path on their own. They're the driving force behind all sorts of sharing platforms. They share cars, homes, etc. They've come into adulthood relying on community sharing to have any kind of a "normal" life.  It's natural for them. 
      January 30, 2019 1:01 PM MST
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  • 46117
    Because it sounds historical and romantic. It ain't.  They did not live it, they are idealizing it.
      January 30, 2019 1:07 PM MST
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  • 3684
    Nothing new in that. Seen it all before as a someone who came of age in the late 1960s.

    Left-wing politics has long attracted far more young intellectuals (or at least those who'd call themselves 'intellectuals') than the Right wing ever could.  

    I am  not sure why that that was and is the case; but the only new things available and worshipped by these so-called 'millennials' are the so-called "smart"-phone and Facebook. 

    They have yet to learn the irony in an intellectual in a democracy, espousing a dictatorship! 
      January 30, 2019 3:36 PM MST
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  • 46117
    We all know EVERYTHING when we are growing up.
      February 1, 2019 11:19 AM MST
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  • 3684
    Oh, yes, I am sure of that!
      February 1, 2019 1:10 PM MST
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