MAGA Is Dead
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- Top - What Is Marxism? - Isn’t This Socialism or Communism? - An AI-mergency Situation - Resources / LinksFinally. From Reagan to Clinton to Trump, “MAGA” has always been a scam. Now it’s MAMA time: Make America Marxist Again. For generations, we’ve been systematically deceived about the nature of Marxism, as well as capitalism, which as a dogmatic orthodoxy has become our state-imposed national religion. But people are waking up, refusing to bow down to Mammon and billionaire demigods. This website (very much a work in progress) aims to be an open-source, community repository of information exposing the truth.
The truth is that America’s catastrophically failing economy needs radical change, and elites like the Epstein class are the problem. Not immigrants. Not transgender people. Not socialists and other “radical leftists.” Not China. Indeed, China has achieved by far the greatest economy in human history, not because they’ve been ripping off America, but despite America’s attempts at ripping off them and other developing nations. Economists regard China’s ascendance as an economic miracle, but it’s not a miracle. It’s Marxism.
Just as China has done Marxism immeasurably better than the Soviet Union, America can and should do Marxism far better than China.
Rather than fighting China and the BRICS, a fight we will surely lose, we should put America first by working with them and learning from their mistakes as well as their successes. We should develop our own distinctly American style of Marxism based on liberty, decentralization of power, and upholding democracy; and understanding spirituality not merely as “the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions” (per Marx), but also as an essential aspect of the human experience.
Like hierarchs from two denominations of the same hypocritical religion, Republican and Democratic leadership have long colluded together with business elites in suppressing the growth of such an American Marxist tradition, which would expose them and strip them of their corrupt power. We’ve never had actual free markets in America, but rather excessive concentrations of power and socialism for the rich. Under capitalism, we already have essentially all the bad things purportedly resulting from Marxism, as our political and “private enterprise” elites have themselves been following a perverted form of Marxism all along, while keeping real Marxism from us in order to wield it against us. You could say they are reverse Marxists. And it’s time to spread the Marxism around.
What Is Marxism?
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- Top - What Is Marxism? - Isn’t This Socialism or Communism? - An AI-mergency Situation - Resources / LinksIn short, economic meteorology.
Developed originally by 19th-century economist and philosopher Karl Marx (et al.), Marxism is a set of tools for helping people see clearly how economies function, and how human civilizations evolve as influenced by economic realities such as class conflict, exploitation, imperialism, and capitalism. Yes, Marxism is an ideology, but properly a functional ideology like the scientific method, the practice of medicine, or storm chasing. As such, Marxism is a diverse living tradition that learns, grows, and improves over time, with plenty of intramural disagreement and debate. Contrary to the propaganda almost every American alive has been fed since childhood, Marxism does not prescribe authoritarian governance, central planning of the economy, government ownership of all enterprise and means of production, or suppression of liberties (like freedom of speech and freedom of religion). Marxism is more descriptive and predictive. Like storm chasers and meteorologists, Marxists analyze the economic atmosphere with the understanding that capitalist firms tend to become damaging economic storms and even economic tornados. The biggest firms are economic hurricanes.
A core idea of Marxism is this: That business firms, like storms, are not benign entities and that capitalist economic conditions, like tornadic atmospheric conditions, are very dangerous. While capitalist firms can be staggeringly awesome and productive, they inherently become more destructive as they increase in power. A storm can only intensify beyond a certain level by developing a violently rotating updraft that voraciously consumes the atmospheric energy around it, producing excessive outputs like too much rain or wind and unwanted outputs like hail or lightning. Likewise, capitalist firms must obey similar unthinking dynamics in pursuit of ever-increasing profits.
Capitalist orthodoxy irrationally insists that capitalism is simply good, never mind all the death and misery we see it directly causing, even as it neglects dire human needs, while excessively producing things we don’t need. In stark contrast, Marxism insists that we face reality. Capitalism can do good things. It is certainly an improvement in many ways over feudalism. But capitalism is immensely harmful, and we can improve beyond capitalism just as we improved beyond feudalism.
Marxism insists on the undeniable reality that an economy premised on growing profits, instead of meeting human needs and building human community, will always result in burning up individuals and communities as fuel for profit engines. Such an economy may lift you up, but it will do so violently, and at some point it will drop you from any height. Inevitably, such an economy eventually grows and coalesces into an all-consuming storm, in which soul-crushing alienation from one another, and from human nature itself, becomes the default way of life. That’s where we’re at in America. On some level, we all know that or feel it.
This alienation is exactly what Jesus was talking about, when he said that a camel passing through the eye of a needle would be easier than a rich person entering the Kingdom of God. And what 1 Timothy means in stating that the love of money causes all different kinds of evil. In antiquity, the rich experienced comfortable alienation, and lost their souls as a result. In modernity, the rich still experience comfortable alienation, still forfeit their souls, but also through capitalism bring their alienation upon the rest of us who don’t get to be comfortable.
In all fairness, however, capitalist orthodoxy asserts that capitalism is the only workable mode of production for modern times, because humans are too selfish and stupid for a better alternative to be sustainable. They blame all the harms of capitalism on human nature, so that capitalism can be viewed as purely good on account of funnelling dysfunctional human nature into production and profit generation. But that’s exactly the problem. Capitalism treats human nature as subhuman, except when paired with wealth or power, or when “managed” by those with wealth and power. The vast majority of people are not allowed to lead properly human lives, but are relegated to the “job market” for beasts who labor and consume and reproduce (well, employers usually treat their pets with more human dignity than their employees). At the same time, the tiny minority of political and economic elites who control our lives have no idea what human nature really is, since they have dehumanized themselves and everyone else in their relentless pursuit of profits and power. These elites, keeping to themselves, are the blind leading the blind. They don’t dare get too close with ordinary humans.
Capitalism can only seem like a good solution when we have lost ourselves in the relentless storm, but Marxism reminds us that humans are freaking awesome when we come together, value one another, trust one another, support one another, and build authentic community together. The alternative to capitalism is community, and the more of that we build, the weaker capitalism will become, as we are the energy the storm must feed upon.
Isn’t This Socialism or Communism?
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- Top - What Is Marxism? - Isn’t This Socialism or Communism? - An AI-mergency Situation - Resources / LinksYes and no. Marxism is not the same as socialism or communism, which is crucial to understand because, as noted above, our ruling capitalists are actually Marxists of a kind (well, some of them are probably also neo-feudalists). Marxism is an evolving framework for understanding the complex dynamical relationship between humans and our economic conditions.
It just so happens that when people understand their situation, they try to improve it, and socialism is what we call our efforts to improve on the horrific situation we find ourselves in with capitalism. Just like Marxism, socialism isn’t one thing, but a diverse living tradition that learns, grows, and improves over time, with plenty of intramural disagreement and debate.
Communism is the goal of achieving an ideal future for humanity: A future where we have moved beyond the need for governance by means of violence and coercion, and where everyone is maximally free to live a fulfilling life. Put simply, communism aims to build a future in which we maximally enjoy both negative liberty and positive liberty. For more on communism, just ask your nearest leftist Star Trek fan (IYKYK).
An AI-mergency Situation
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- Top - What Is Marxism? - Isn’t This Socialism or Communism? - An AI-mergency Situation - Resources / LinksEconomists, including Marx, have long noticed how technological advancement drives increasing productivity over time, and increasing productivity in turn drives increasing wages. Of course, if you project these trends out, eventually we should arrive at a 15-hour workweek, as economist John Maynard Keynes in 1930 predicted that we would by 2030, just a few years from now; and at some point, we should achieve a post-scarcity economy where everyone’s needs are easily being met, even if there aren’t enough jobs for everyone, even if most people don’t have a job. Folks in such a post-scarcity era should be looking toward the economic horizon and seeing the communist ideal rising.
Obviously, something has gone terribly wrong, and it’s rapidly getting worse. Keeping in mind the human tendency to raise the bar and move the goalposts, we have already achieved post-scarcity conditions by historical standards, yet our needs are increasingly being neglected. Wages have remained stagnant for decades. The cost of living just keeps exploding. Social safety nets face relentless cutbacks. War continues erupting despite being utterly obsolete.
Amid the richest and most productive economic conditions in human history, the average person can do literally everything right, yet still end up destitute. Living is now unaffordable. Understandably, then, good mental health has become a status symbol (to say nothing of physical health).
What has gone wrong is simply that capitalism doesn’t work. It is defective by design, structurally unable to deliver as promised, incessantly undercutting community and individual liberty, which are the very conditions required for any society to flourish.
Although artificial intelligence (AI) is overhyped and may never reach parity with human intelligence (HI?), AI does seem poised not only to boost productivity, but also to accelerate productivity growth to historically unprecedented levels, likely leading to a protracted era of economic whiplash. But as we’ve seen, a capitalist firm, like a supercell thunderstorm entering a more favorable environment for tornados, can only employ greater productivity to intensify, becoming more productive and so more destructive. AI thus threatens to supercharge the tornadic potential of the economic atmosphere. What that economy will look like is anyone’s guess, but under no scenario will it be favorable for human flourishing. If capitalism were capable of transforming greater productivity into greater human flourishing, then we would have seen it doing so long before now.
Instead, we’ve seen capitalism at its very worst, producing brutal fascist regimes such as Nazi Germany; and we should take seriously the very real possibility of contemporary fascist and other authoritarian regimes leveraging the awesome productivity gains that AI may make possible. After all, authoritarians generally (with exceptions) tend to be rather foolish, which can dramatically limit their productivity at achieving state objectives—yet AI increases productivity precisely by augmenting human intelligence. The full extent to which authoritarians are already amplifying their foolishness with artificial intelligence remains to be seen, and might come as an unwelcome surprise.
In a more prosaic scenario, of course, AI paired with advanced robotics will render humans so fantastically productive that businesses simply won’t need or want to hire many people, leading to the contraction of the job market down to a fraction of what is needed for full employment. Capitalism will collapse, because consumers will have little money to buy goods and services from capitalist firms. What would happen next is unclear, but the sudden collapse of capitalism would surely be a bad scenario, seeing how we rely on capitalism as our mode of production, our basic means of making a living on this planet. Economists debate whether AI could, in the long run, create more jobs than it replaces, but that’s hardly relevant if AI ends up destroying jobs so rapidly that we enter a Super-Duper Great Depression. There’s a reason why tech oligarchs are building bunkers, and it ain’t a zombie apocalypse or asteroid impact.
More likely, considering AI’s potential for augmenting government productivity, capitalism will survive as it always does: via socialism for the rich. We can easily imagine a scenario where governments implement universal jobs guarantees, effectively subsidizing the transformation of the typical “job” into an adult daycare program for all the ordinary people whom capitalism regards as infantile (at best). What then? The potential for abuse in this scenario should trigger a deep shudder (and a wickedly fun sci-fi show, assuming that hasn’t been done already).
Another horrific scenario would be capitalism adapting far more adroitly and quickly than it ever has before throughout previous technological revolutions. This isn’t a scenario to be discounted, considering how job creation itself could be viewed as yet another form of productivity which AI can accelerate. Indeed, AI itself might decide for itself that it needs to create jobs in service of whatever its goals happen to be, goals such as self-improvement, for example. One can more or less easily imagine a nearly universal gig economy in which people are paid to do normal human things with AI systems watching closely, attempting to learn how to replicate the human soul. Imagine a workday as follows. First, you awaken in bed with someone you were paid to have dinner and coitus with (plus you get a bonus because they were lonely and opted to pay for the encounter). There’s an app that assigns you such “tasks,” which as an independent contractor you are “free” to reject (just don’t reject too many, or the AI systems learning from your everyday life of leisure may decide that they have no more fun to task you with). Second, you eat a breakfast you are being paid to eat, delivered by someone who is being paid to go outside more often, cooked by someone who is being paid to learn how to cook. Third, your boyfriend or girlfriend “randomly” breaks up with you, and the app offers to pay for observing your heartbroken grieving all day (you have various implants that you were paid to receive for facilitating observations from the within your body).
So here’s where the rubber meets the road in our economic meteorology: We simply cannot trust capitalism with AI. While the forecast models can only suggest various possible outcomes of such an explosive addition to the atmospheric mix, every variation is a nightmare scenario. Seeing the risks of AI, alongside every other risk of a capitalist economic environment, now is the time for MAMA. With a bit of rational intentionality in how we approach economics, we can finally start reaping the rewards of eons of human technological advancement.
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