Lots of people in the comments saying south park shouldnt be here. i think it should be family guy. the show frequently bashes the right, and they dedicated 2 episodes to Trump entirely, not to mention its a work of Seth McFarlane and if you’ve seen the Orville you know he is definitely not a MAGAt.
i definitely got my understanding from a word cloud that part is spot on.
Many Americans received their entire political discourse up until about 2016 from about an hour of programming on Comedy Central: Daily Show, Colbert Report, and South Park.
I don’t get South Park… It’s a pretty leftist show imo or is it implying people don’t understand the sarcasm of its messages?
it’s not leftist, it’s very enlightened centrist and somewhat libertarian. i say somewhat because they don’t advocate for lowering the age of consent as far as i know. but they’re very comfortable with the status quo and the familiar, and rarely ever point to systemic issues or argue for systemic change. most of their critiques and solutions are based on individuals.
perfect
The amount of bad takes South Park has had over the years is astounding.
“Political choice is between a turd sandwich and a giant douche” being my favorite example.
Neither candidate is/was ideal, but good lord to say that what’s happening now is no different than when the other side was in power is beyond asinine, it’s an incredibly disingenuous and offensive take on reality. (I know the SP episode wasn’t about the current US political situation, but the current US political situation absolutely has its roots going back to those SP episodes.)
Wasn’t the episode about US voting system being systematically flawed, and bashing the general populus for keeping up the status quo?
I mean Stalin Lenin and Mao aren’t exactly that much better
only if you are anticommunist
Only if you’re anti communist and have absolutely zero clue what you’re talking about.
id argue you don’t have much clue if you are any type of anti communist.
unless you are a capitalist oligarch. which i doubt many here are.
Nope, I’m just anti-authoritarian. Still a communist.
so you are a communist who hates every attempt at communism. got it.
ill be waiting here while you build your utopia.
We already have built it multiple times, unfortunately state “communists” were always there to crush it because authoritarians can’t tolerate anything they don’t control.
nah you havent built any utopia, are you that naive?
if all you do is serve capitalist interests you havent really built anything tbh.
I definitely didn’t get my understanding of socioeconomics from Mao or militaristic dictators in general. Marx? Sure. Engels? Sure. Lenin? I mean, as an example of how to use workers’ rights as a veil for the promotion of authoritarianism I guess. Reading the State and Revolution is an exercise in seeing how someone can take a good idea and use it to justify terrible shit.
Personally, I take a view of Marx and Engels as descriptivists. Reading works like the Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital, my takeaway is that these are describing a natural process whereby hoarding of wealth and influence inevitably leads to an overthrowing of power in a cycle that culminates in capitalism and the eventual seizing of the means of production in response by workers. When I read Lenin I see an accelerationist who wants to jump start this process and doesn’t care how many people suffer and die in the interem.
To me, that’s a form of interference that slows progress in the long run. If you start burning rocket fuel as soon as possible before acquiring enough to reach escape velocity, all you do is cause your rocket to crash back down to Earth if it gets moving at all. Do it hard enough or enough times without a controlled landing, hitting cities full of people with the wreckage, and you’re just going to make people skeptical of rocketry.
That’s not to say no one should do anything to bolster workers’ rights, we absolutely should. It’s a natural part of the process for people to be informed by theory and try to advance things. But that’s far different from purging large portions of the population in order to shift the system in the span of a single generation before there’s widespread support. The Dictatorship of the Proletariat is, to me, about the most anti-proletarian measure you can take. It slows things down and harms a lot of people with poor results. For evidence, literally look at Russia today. Look at the reputation communism has in Eastern Europe. Lenin and Stalin forestalled any possibility of a worker’s uprising by at least a couple of generations. The same can be said of Mao.
And the reactions this post is going to get? I’m guessing many will be much more in line with the knee-jerk thoughtless mockery of South Park and Rick Sanchez than the considered and careful words of Marx and Engels. That also functions as a sort of steam valve letting off the required pressure to achieve meaningful results in favor of mindless posturing, which is why I often question its motivation. It serves the bourgeoisie, not the people.
Personally, I take a view of Marx and Engels as descriptivists.
Those are literally the words carved on his tombstone.
If only someone could explain why people like you want to defang Marx’s writings with this blatant revisionism…
What is now happening to Marx’s theory has, in the course of history, happened repeatedly to the theories of revolutionary thinkers and leaders of oppressed classes fighting for emancipation. During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it. Today, the bourgeoisie and the opportunists within the labor movement concur in this doctoring of Marxism. They omit, obscure, or distort the revolutionary side of this theory, its revolutionary soul. They push to the foreground and extol what is or seems acceptable to the bourgeoisie. All the social-chauvinists are now “Marxists” (don’t laugh!). And more and more frequently German bourgeois scholars, only yesterday specialists in the annihilation of Marxism, are speaking of the “national-German” Marx, who, they claim, educated the labor unions which are so splendidly organized for the purpose of waging a predatory war!
That quote comes from The State and Revolution, which you claim to have read. A claim I find hard to believe considering that the author proceeds to painstakingly refute your exact line of thought and interpretation of Marx, by extensively citing, “the considered and careful words of Marx and Engels.”
Lenin had contemporary critiques.
When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called “the People’s Stick”.
- Statism and Anarchy by Mikhail Bakunin
A concern is the vanguard party ruling over the prolitariate thereby exchanging capital ownership from one minority to another.
Engels argued the imbalance of ownership is natural because a mill is subject to the authority of the water to operate. There is a lack of imagination in justifying a ruling minority after the revolution by saying that’s how capitalist technology works.
What good are my electric tools if I am unable to get electricity from the centralized power plant of the vanguard party? I will need to subject myself to the minority and pay rents. How does Lenin’s vanguard party differ from capitalism in terms of ownership? Does it only work if the vanguard party are benevolent towards the prolitariat?
Then you agree with me.
What we are discussing here is not whether Lenin was correct but rather whether he had an accurate interpretation of Marx and Engles. If you want to argue that Marx and Engles were wrong, and that Lenin was wrong because he was following in that tradition, that’s a completely different position from that of the person I replied to, that Marx and Engles were right and that Lenin was wrong because he deviated from that position.
I’m not really interested in getting sidetracked here from this point into this much broader discussion. I’d be happy to discuss it another time, but for now, we’re talking about whether Lenin correctly interpreted Marx’s writings and followed in his tradition or not.
I realize I expanded the scope by bringing Engels’ “On Authority” into the conversation. I want to remain focused on Lenin’s vanguard party as an implementation of the “dictatorship of the prolitariat”. I agree that Lenin’s ideas were informed by the writings of Marx.
Marx’s “dictatorship of the prolitariat” could be implemented as a vanguard party as per Lenin. Lenin’s iteration could be construed as accurate to Marx’s definition.
However, Marx also referred to the Paris Commune as a “dictatorship of the prolitariat” even without a vanguard party. Therefore my qualm, similar to the original comment, is that Lenin’s vanguard party is a method to extract rents from the prolitariat.
Trotsky argued for The Permanent Revolution as a counter to the vanguard. Might be interesting to read.
I haven’t read much Trotsky. Thank you for the recommendation. I will give it a read. My fault with Lenin has been the mechanism by which the vanguard party relinquishes power to the prolitariat.
Stalin had Trotsky killed for how out spoken he had been on the USSR and its devolution from socialism to deformed communist state. one of his books FASCISM What It Is and How To Fight It is a great read, it explains the necessity for a party.
you might also be interested in Council Communism, it side steps the vanguard for a more transparent workers’ democracy.
How dare I disagree with Lenin! Oh no!
You’re not just “disagreeing with Lenin” (and characterizing my response that way is an obvious strawman/bad faith), you are disagreeing with Marx, and claiming he said the opposite of what he actually said. The only reason I cited Lenin is because he did a very through job of proving you are wrong, using the exact standard that you said you wanted, “the considered and careful words of Marx and Engels.” It’s not as though I’m expecting you to accept him as an authority.
Marx was undoubtedly great at identifying the worst aspects of capitalism, however, his solutions left a lot to be desired.
Basically, all he proved is that you can’t murder your way out of economic inequality.
I don’t think you should be taking socio-economic understanding from the guy whose mismanagement caused/exacerbated this. And, you know, created an authoritarian state out of a revolution; that was bad too.
What, you can’t learn from century old mistakes? That particular famine’s not the real warning though, that’s just war shit and Russian cyclical famines that were ended by modern agriculture. Look that up by the way, it’s fascinating.
What you want is the Lysenkoism-caused famines that followed it, partly because the Soviets were so desperate to end the cycles and thus prove their legitimacy. Ironic.
That particular famine’s not the real warning though, that’s just war shit and Russian cyclical famines that were ended by modern agriculture.
Okay so cyclical famines don’t kill millions of people that’s not how that works. The main cause of the famine was the war, but the war caused the famine through (among other things) War Communism. In the immortal words of one angry Irish dude: God created the
potato blightcrop failures; theBritishCommunist Party created the famine.What you want is the Lysenkoism-caused famines that followed it, partly because the Soviets were so desperate to end the cycles and thus prove their legitimacy.
Those are more clear-cut since there was no war to blame for incompetent Soviet policy, but I wanted to point out that even Lenin himself was a failure as a ruler and not at all the source of sound socioeconomic ideas when it comes to actually solving the problem he claimed to have the solution for.
I mean… does South Park have bad socioeconomics? Like it’s not something to base your understanding on but I don’t see it as inherently right wing.
It’s pretty standard “enlightened centrist” from what I’ve seen (where of course “centrist” means centered between the right-wing party and the fascist party in the US).
How so?
it focuses on social aspects never seen it touch economics, very American view point which inherently means a right wing economic baseline, it mocks right wing ideology and dogmatism and encourages a more liberal and socially just perspective but never really explored economic aspects
There was the Margaritaville episode. I think that said… something… about capitalism and economics.
But I think the political commentary got a lot less pointed around the time hindsight kicked in on the climate change episodes. Kinda felt like the recurring theme was “everyone is an idiot, even us.” Giant Douche v. Turd Sandwich felt a bit enlightened centristy.
I can’t say anything about that, I haven’t watched those
Yeah that’s kind of what I thought as well.
Yes. Matt and Trey are kinda nihilistic in ideology. Enlightened centrists. Everything is dumb. etc.
They’re centrist, which in a country with a right wing and a far right wing party, equates to being right wing. In general they have this smug sense of superiority, shitting on anyone taking a stand for anything. I really can’t stand the show’s attitude, because it’s exactly like that mac from it’s always sunny quote: “I play both sides, that way I always come out on top”, except with this completely undeserved arrogance and smugness on top of it.
The only person i know who still watches it has horrifically right wing socioeconomics.
I mean me and my wife still watch it and we’re dirty communists. I just don’t really see them talking about economics much.
Yeah I’m not judging the show or other viewers. I haven’t seen it since season 9. Probably more of a reflection that i just don’t know a lot of people who watch it.
Your friend probably just sucks
I never said they were a friend, and yes you’re right about them.
To be even fairer, how many leftists or progressives reading this can name anybody in the photo collage besides Marx, Lenin, Mao, Castro, Malcolm X, and maybe Angela Davis, without doing an image search? And I say this as a guy who has voted progressive all my life. Too many people nowadays seem to get their “understanding” from memes.
I don’t disagree with you on a lot of people getting their information from memes, but the idea that if you don’t know what some arbitrary number of authors look like you have nothing meaningful to say about the subject they write about reminds me of the 90s era “Oh you like the band you have a tshirt of? Name five of their songs or you’re s poser.”
Like, presumably Marx and Engels also didn’t know what most of the people in that picture looked like, because they weren’t aware of their existence at all, but one would imagine they have plenty of substance to say about socioeconomic theory.
Knowing what some people look like isn’t a proxy for understanding communism or capitalism.
Marx and Engels lived their entire lives in the 1800s. For them not to know what other relevant people of their time looked like makes infinitely more sense than someone with today’s incredible information access. IMO someone today who has genuinely studied the material would have seen enough of these people in articles to recognize more than the most famous few I mentioned. I think far too many people get too much “information” from memes and pretend to know more than they know. If all you’ve got is a strawman analogy about band t-shirts, well alrighty then.
I don’t know about you, but when I took classes on this stuff we weren’t like, staring at the pictures of the authors. We were talking about the material. The faces I picture in my head when I think of this stuff aren’t the people who wrote the books we read and discussed, it’s my professors and the people who were in my classes.
Nobody like, stares at the pictures, but if people like, actually studied and digested the source material instead of glancing at amusing blurbs and telling themselves they’re smart, they would be able to express more complex, coherent thoughts about things like politics and economics and post fewer memes and “capitalism bad!” chants that fill most threads. In spite of unparalleled access to information and in spite of educations they’ll be paying for until death, modern liberals are collectively as lazy-minded as conservatives. They just respond to different stimuli to trigger cheering, booing, and pressing BUY buttons.
Yeah, that’s the part I agree with you on. I just don’t think recognizing pictures is a meaningful metric as far as that’s concerned.
And that’s the reason the Right is in power. The Left needs to endeavor to be more culturally relevant. Liberals cuck us pretty hard there and then the Right threatens us for it. Gotta keep trying though.
Me, meanwhile, hanging out on solarpunk memes. . .
The right also has some prominent socio-economic writers such as Thomas Sowell and other writers adjacent to Austrian school thought, so it’s not just media slop but also book slop.
It’s just a bit unfortunate that the right doesn’t read any theory, even ones that agree with their worldview, they just like talking about the authors because book = smart. Same with the left - there’s lots of people who proclaim themselves to have some theoretically heavy position (e.g. communism or anarchism) then proceed to say the most stupid shit.
I like how your post addresses the anti-intellectualism of the original post. I also like the acknowledgment of cherry picking sources. The critique validly states the meme creator is ignoring scholarly sources on the right. The best part is, even with scholarly sources involved, humans are still silly. Humans sometimes consume content, TV show or book, to feel superior to other humans.
I have found delving into the views of others has helped me create better arguments. For example, I read “Anarchy, State and Utopia” by Robert Nozick, to better understand the anarcho-capitalist minimal state position. Even if I can form a better argument, I realize I can “proceed to say the most stupid shit”. Keep it stupid comrades.
You fuckin’ dorks ain’t a source of the art You can’t be cooler than the corners Where you source all your parts
- Dorks by Ian Bavitz (Aesop Rock)
I honestly don’t mind if someone bases their beliefs based on flawed theory or books, as that does show some degree of engagement with actual texts and leaves the room open for recognizing why it might be flawed via future reading or discussion.
What I was mostly referring to were people who claim to be Marxists/Anarchists/whatever, proceed to not read any theory whatsoever and just roll with what they imagine the theory to be, usually based on some surface-level discourse floating online. Now that’s where one can find true incoherent bangers
Yeah, all the Hayek’s and Fridman’s.
At the end of the day, the actual field of economics is mostly built on capitalist assumptions except for some smaller subfields. So you get A LOT of neoliberal types as economics professors.
And the Chicago school
The Right has captured a good portion of the American lumpenproletariat (excluding me).
At least that is what I think that these media choices were chosen to communicate.
If you’re watching Fox for the cartoons, you might accidentally catch their “news”
Simpsons did it?
Different channels. Different companies. Fox News does not own 20th Century Fox broadcast channel.
True, but both were aired on the same station, at least where I’m from.
I wonder if Seth McFarlane and Matt Groening ever lose sleep over the fact that they certainly helped turn more edgy boys into fascists than fascists into liberals?
I’m sure the piles of money help.
…this isn’t funny…
Who said memes are funny?
I hate how atlas shrugged has been highjacked by the right! It’s such a good book and doesn’t mean what they think it means!
the book is literally about how capitalists shouldn’t be subject to government
It most certainly is not.
You’re missing the point of Atlas Shrugged by boiling it down to “capitalists shouldn’t be subject to government.” That’s a shallow take. The novel isn’t anti-government; it’s anti-looting, anti-coercion, and anti-mediocrity enforced by bureaucracy. Rand’s argument is that the mind, the individual, the creator, is the engine of progress, and when that engine is shackled by systems that reward need over merit, collapse follows.
It’s not about capitalists dodging laws. It’s about a system where laws are written to punish competence and reward political pull. Rand isn’t saying we don’t need government. She’s saying we need a government that protects individual rights, not one that redistributes or controls outcomes.
So no, it’s not “literally about capitalists avoiding government.” It’s about the morality of freedom, the sanctity of production, and what happens when we demonize the very people who keep the world running. Read deeper. Or read it at all because I doubt you have otherwise you wouldn’t say something so daft.
The two of you are saying exactly the same thing, except you’re being a bit more weird and bootlicky about it.
Atlas shrugged is genuinely shit. Even without the rancid political themes.
No it’s not. You’re just, and I mean this in the most clinical way possible with out insult, stupid.
can’t tell if this is supposed to be satire
It’s not.
yikes
It is amazing how you people on this platform don’t like atlas shrugged not knowing anything about it at all.
Right wing nut jobs highjacked the book thinking it’s pro capitalism when it isn’t. Seriously read the damned book! You’ll be surprised.
I did, and its such an absurdly bad book that if Rand didn’t take so long to get to the point, it would be an effective satire of what libertarians actually believe.
You’re entitled to your opinion, it’s wrong of course.
You’re like those idiots on steam that give great games bad reviews because the game crashed once with outdated drivers.
right wing nutjobs like it because it caricaturizes communism and socialism as people on top jealous of genius businesspeople who earned every penny through nothing but their own merit only for these pesky government people to steal their success. which is like a baby’s understanding of nationalization, if that baby is repeatedly hit on the head.
If that’s the take away they got from the book then god help us all because they’re idiots.
The book doesn’t demonize communism nor does it idealize entrepreneurs.
In fact the variable hidden Utopia the intellectual elite made to hide themselves in the world was a perfect example of Communism in and of itself.
And a variable waste land they left behind was a perfect example of capitalism run rampant.
A “good book”? Are you a teenager? I dropped it half way through on how boring it was… my issue with it is how overrated it is. Please let the right have it lol
I agree, but it still is culturally significant, because it influenced so many boomers who found that it reinforced with the cultural narrative of the time.
“I personally didn’t like it therefore it must be bad” -courval
Are you a teenager?
I dropped it half way through on how boring it was…
Calls someone a teenager, then proceeds to give the most teenager reason for dropping a book.
People complain when I ask them to read like 1000 words of theory to understand a strain of thought that’s extremely historically significant and remains prominent in many countries around the world, but somehow it’s reasonable to expect someone to slog through 1000 pages of boring masturbatory bootlicking just to be allowed to say it sucks.
Comrade TRAORE spotted!!!
