Communism Doesn't Know How

New Discourses

Education

4.8 • 2.4K Ratings

🗓️ 23 April 2021

⏱️ 85 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 31 At the heart of communist and communistic thought is faith in a kind of historical trajectory toward utopia that's driven by social alchemy. There are many reasons why this fails in practice, but the simplest thing to say is that communism fails because communism doesn't know how communism will succeed. The fundamental belief driving communists is that once enough people become true believers that the communist utopia lies on the other side of certain social changes, a perfect society will manifest. How? Because they will. The details aren't meant to be known or told; they're meant to be figured out. This is in exact alignment with the historicism in Marx's dialectical materialism: once we get capitalism out of the way, we'll enter a worker-managed system (socialism) that can start figuring out how to make the state redundant to its purposes, at which point a stateless improvement of the same will emerge and the communist utopia (and end of History) will emerge. On this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, James Lindsay gives an example of how a contemporary police abolitionist activist has made almost exactly this same argument perfectly explicitly and walks you through how you can spot it for what it is. Join Lindsay for one of his more important discussions. Support New Discourses: paypal.me/newdiscourses newdiscourses.locals.com/support patreon.com/newdiscourses subscribestar.com/newdiscourses youtube.com/channel/UC9K5PLkj0N_b9JTPdSRwPkg/join Website: https://newdiscourses.com Follow: facebook.com/newdiscourses twitter.com/NewDiscourses instagram.com/newdiscourses newdiscourses.locals.com pinterest.com/newdiscourses linkedin.com/company/newdiscourses minds.com/newdiscourses reddit.com/r/NewDiscourses Podcast: @newdiscourses podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/new-…es/id1499880546 bit.ly/NDGooglePodcasts open.spotify.com/show/0HfzDaXI5L4LnJQStFWgZp stitcher.com/podcast/new-discourses © 2021 New Discourses. All rights reserved.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everybody, I'm James Lindsay and this is a new Discourses podcast.
0:24.4	I need to talk to you about something very important today.
0:27.8	The idea I want to get across is that Communism doesn't know how.
0:32.5	So I ran to this Twitter thread recently on the stupid bird app, that makes it really
0:37.3	clear.
0:38.3	And I thought to myself how important it is that people learn to spot this fact about
0:43.3	communist ideologies, which are all over the place right now, whether you don't know.
0:46.9	If you don't know that, you know, the woke stuff is buried deep in it.
0:50.2	It's basically neomarchism that's picked up postmodern tools and that means it has this
0:54.3	sort of communist flavored utopia at the end of its woke rainbow.
0:59.0	So I need people to understand how important it is.
1:03.9	I need people to understand how I didn't say that well.
1:06.8	I need people to understand what's going on with that and how important it is that the
1:10.6	Communism doesn't know what it's talking about.
1:13.0	So I want people to be able to see that where it comes up and want people to understand
1:16.0	it.
1:17.0	I want people to get it and see it when it's there.
1:19.0	So they can spot it, not fall for it most importantly, and maybe even help other people
1:24.7	see it and not fall for it and call it out or whatever.
1:27.8	It's just so damn important to understand this about Communism.
1:30.6	I spent a lot of time when I was young trying to figure out why Communism is so seductive,
1:35.3	why so many people get pulled into it for a lot of reasons.
	...

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