The Swedish activist Greta Thunberg has been detained by Israel and reportedly maltreated by her Israeli captors after she was kidnapped, along with hundreds of other activists, from Gaza’s territorial waters on Friday.
“Personal liberty” is what allows capitalists to exploit us. They have all the “liberty” you think you have. The “liberty” to put lies in the media, to pay you less than the value of your labor in order to extract a profit, to charge extortionist prices for healthcare and other basic needs, to influence politics and to crush competing public industries. These are all the things that “liberty” gets you under capitalism. “Personal liberty above all” != working class liberation.
Communism operates under what was referred to by Marx as a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, which we regard as complete liberation of the working class, because it allows the public to have control which is simply not possible under the liberal framework of “personal liberty for all”. Under the liberal framework, even the smallest most democratic intervention is decried as “government overreach”; that is, if it is even made democratically possible in the first place.
Which isn’t totally incorrect, because what you’re talking about isn’t “personal liberty for all”. You exclude billionaires. Us socialists/communists exclude capitalists as a whole, because the sole interest of a capitalist is to enrich themselves at the direct expense of the working class and our liberty. Billionaires are certainly the worst and most visible offenders, but a materialist lens allows one to see that each and every capitalist serves interests that are fundamentally in conflict with those of the working class. To operate any other way would be to betray their own interests, and wouldn’t make for a very effective result.
Liberation will only come when the working class has the power to decide collectively how our resources will be used, which will only come when we have majority control over the means of production, which will eventually lead to the capitalist class becoming completely obsolete. Liberation means being able to provide for our needs above anything else; for the sake of our humanity alone, and from the work that we are already doing; rather than our labor power being extracted for private gains and our needs provided only to the extent that it serves capitalists’ profit motives.
Fascists and their enablers are not our friends.
I’m not a fascist enabler. I believe in personal liberty above all
“Personal liberty” is what allows capitalists to exploit us. They have all the “liberty” you think you have. The “liberty” to put lies in the media, to pay you less than the value of your labor in order to extract a profit, to charge extortionist prices for healthcare and other basic needs, to influence politics and to crush competing public industries. These are all the things that “liberty” gets you under capitalism. “Personal liberty above all” != working class liberation.
So there’s no liberty under communism? I’d say class freedom is extreme liberty
Communism operates under what was referred to by Marx as a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, which we regard as complete liberation of the working class, because it allows the public to have control which is simply not possible under the liberal framework of “personal liberty for all”. Under the liberal framework, even the smallest most democratic intervention is decried as “government overreach”; that is, if it is even made democratically possible in the first place.
Which isn’t totally incorrect, because what you’re talking about isn’t “personal liberty for all”. You exclude billionaires. Us socialists/communists exclude capitalists as a whole, because the sole interest of a capitalist is to enrich themselves at the direct expense of the working class and our liberty. Billionaires are certainly the worst and most visible offenders, but a materialist lens allows one to see that each and every capitalist serves interests that are fundamentally in conflict with those of the working class. To operate any other way would be to betray their own interests, and wouldn’t make for a very effective result.
Liberation will only come when the working class has the power to decide collectively how our resources will be used, which will only come when we have majority control over the means of production, which will eventually lead to the capitalist class becoming completely obsolete. Liberation means being able to provide for our needs above anything else; for the sake of our humanity alone, and from the work that we are already doing; rather than our labor power being extracted for private gains and our needs provided only to the extent that it serves capitalists’ profit motives.
Lol k