Oceans Yet to Burn

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

You Can’t Have It All (even in communism)

[thathopeyetlives]

In past ages, communists, socialists, and anarchists were usually reacting to a world in which resources were scarce in general as well as in specific and in which the situation of the poor in general was one of miserable deprivation. Meanwhile, the future potential of automation and robotics – machines which might not merely reduce the amount of work that needed to be done, but largely eliminate it – was not really visible. 

Today things are… different. 

It’s pretty common that I see far leftists more-or-less promising the following after a Revolution: 

1. That it will no longer be neccessary for everybody to work, and moreover that people will be permitted not to work, and yet to have enough to live on, without needing to justify not working to anybody. 

2. That industry will change to vastly decrease damage to the enviroment

3. That material quality of life and industrial capacity will not catastrophically plummet, especially not in things like medical technology

I think that this is… very optimistic. The kind of optimistic that no wise person would ever bet on. 

Some far leftists claim that communism is more efficient and will do better than capitalism. This is unlikely. The Soviet Union did great things – industrializing rapidly after everyone else had a head start and after having the Nazis burn half their country – but they were just catching up to others, and they were oppressive, enviromentally destructive, and didn’t let people not work by any means. It didn’t last. 

(However, in the post-Stalin soviet union, there were some labor rights that would make Americans drool.)

If you combine this with confiscationism and the intersectionality thing where anybody’s position in the grand hierarchy of justified people can be questioned, you have a nightmare: a society that continually eats itself, finding new classes of “bourgeoise” and kulaks and “counter-revolutionaries” to force into slave labor or just murder and loot, so that the Beautiful People can have their gleaming solarpunk utopia and their communism of leisure. 

I do not wish to suggest that I intend to be the enemy of hope; our current system is unjust and needs to be reformed. We can reform it in a way that will turn automation from a curse into a blessing, and which will improve peoples’ lives now and in the future. But this will not be revolution but counter-revolution, and will have no place for bloodstained red flags. 

[rendakuenthusiast]

Endorsed.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[youarenotthewalrus]

This post is interesting, because it is going “csa/nazi victories are racist, what if something Woke™ happened instead, like a native american victory,” but the reblogger preemptively notes the problem with it, that is, the writers would portray the natives as being just as bad. Such a portrayal is characterized as racist. This is dumb, but it does gesture at a point: no well-realized Native American victory scenario could please the kinds of people calling for one. The Aztecs and the Inca were both very unpleasant empires that engaged in human sacrifice and were defeated in part because their Spanish conquerors had ready-made allies in the form of the tribes they had subjugated and mistreated. The history of a native-run North and South America would be a history of emergent states fighting and conquering both their less sophisticated neighbors and each other. To say nothing of the fact that no polity grows into a global superpower without doing horrible, horrible things. All the great global empires–Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, the US, Russia, Germany, Japan–gained their power through violence, at home and abroad. An Inca superpower, an Aztec superpower, a Mississippian superpower: all these countries would gain and keep their power through the exact same imperialistic methods Europe and its settler states are denounced for. To explore a scenario in which the indigenous populace of the Americas get to run their continents more or less unmolested is to call attention to the fact that this means that while some people are going to win (ex. the Inca), other people are still going to lose (ex. the Mapuche). It is to acknowledge that scalping wasn’t just something inflicted on white settlers, that the difference between oppressor and oppressed is a matter of historical circumstance, that one world’s Poor Marginalized People of Color are another’s Imperialist Oppressors Living on Stolen Land, that a noble savage is only noble because he does not have the power to be wicked, and that, in gaining civilization, he gains that power. And that’s all a bit too much to handle for someone who thinks “I’m gonna write a story about members of the underground resistance in a world where Nazi Germany won” is racist.