Oh nah I’m talking about mao’s China as well. Modern China is absolutely capitalist in regards to its current system of production

I still have support for them in their modern state

I will say though, that capitalism is not the answer. I live in the most unequal country with one of the highest rates of unemployment in the world, it breaks my heart to see so many homeless people suffering while the few in our corrupt government enjoy easy lives. We keep hearing the "Communism doesn't work" rhetoric, but capitalism is not f***ing working. There has to be a better solution

Do you honestly think it'll meet with any more success in our current context?

Nice, I'm South African Hate how xenophobic people in my country can be, this Operation Dudula s*** going on is not it

Those homeless ppl need to pull themselves up by the bootstraps

/s

I'm not familiar enough with Marx to disagree with you, but don't you think the validity of a political or economic theory depends on the feasibility of successful implementation?

You're making a lot of solid points, by the way.

Yeah, y'all spitting. Really enjoying the conversation.

But why would an individual hold these beliefs? Do they come naturally? Humans are not naturally anything. Human nature is not fixed or defined. History includes the entire spectrum of human behaviour.

Marx says "the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In reality, it is the ensemble of the social relations."

The ideas that humans hold, are relative to the type of society they live in. Some societies oppressed women as a means of upholding their social structures. My culture for example (indigenous Maori) held women in very high regard as recently as the 1800s before British colonisation. If we built a classless society, it's entirely possible that racism and sexism etc would be obsolete. Think big big bro

thankfully no naija south african beef itt i heard that gets ugly

Well if we’re talking about Marxist economic theory, applying it in observation of capitalist systems has basically led to a reinforcement in my support for applying it in practice to change the aforementioned system

At the most basic sense, Marxist theory is surrounding the concept of dialectics, which is basically the idea of a set of existing material conditions continuously changing in reaction to other conditions themselves changing

We see this concept in things like evolution and adaptation, in market dynamics, even in basic human behavior. In essence, when there is a lack of an appropriate reaction to a changing condition, a contradiction is created that will inevitably need to be solved, even as conditions change

Capitalism is a system rife with contradiction (something that we can dive deeply into), and socialism is simply the system that aims to begin solving everyday societal contradictions instead of ignoring them, or exploiting them for money and power

It's impossible to say if it's more successful - that's up to us and how well we organise and struggle. But it's inevitable that it happen again. Capitalism is a system of accumulation, it will always create an exploited working class, which has class interests antagonistic to its own. By design, capitalism creates a working class that has the power to overthrow it. Capitalism cuts the floor out from underneath itself. It's always a matter of time until those class contradictions come to a head. It's hard to see atm because class struggle globally is very low. But it will come.

I do agree that capitalism encourages racism and sexism, but I think they would still exist in some form in a classless society. Even as a form of unconscious bias (e.g more qualified woman losing employment opportunity to man because the interviewer is a man). We're human, it's impossible not to notice our differences

theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jun/24/anc-faustian-pact-mandela-fatal-error

I always enjoyed this article but I've seen even Ronnie Kasrils has now run cover for Ramaphosa even tho that mf literally oversaw the Marikana massacre

My wifey is Zulu/Ndebele from Pretoria

Unconscious bias is resultant from material conditions of class, very little of it is inherent in a person

And it wouldn’t be a classless society yet if we still classified people by race and gender

Noticing differences is different from judging and discriminating by them

The ideas that define “communism” as a material condition are things that are so far and away from what ideological communists aim to do that we must simply understand it as a theoretical conclusion in the Marxist framework, so for anyone reading this, I’d simply treat it as what it is, a hypothetical condition that can be achieved materially.

It won’t be in our lifetime

Marikana was a damn shame, the July riots last year where over 300 people lost their lives because of our former president was too I just wish another party would win an election, we don't hold the ANC accountable enough

Why we got murder laws when we can just like not murder eachother

We need laws to regulate people s***ty behaviour unfortunately

Also obviously not out of control capitalism in one of most prosperous countries in the world that makes this scenario a possibility

Baby, I'm free, baby, I'm free, like a homeless person

Bruh I swear when I first checked the ad it didn’t have a rant updated in there, apparently he’s had people message him saying they plan to “liberate” the camp

Yeah, I saw that on Twitter. Sad s*** all round.

Nah, lol we good

this might help you with historical materialism btw. was thinking about it

I'll go through it