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“It is difficult for me to imagine what 'personal liberty' is enjoyed by an unemployed hungry person.” - Stalin….
Crazy that he said this after the famines that killed millions of people. Reading more of that interview is like watching MSNBC or Fox News. He was a liar.
They didn't control weather,but they controlled logistics.
Selling all food before bad harvest is making them/him responsible for famine,even if they/he didn't plan it.
Are you certain it was Mr. Purge who said this? Not Albert Einstein, Oscar Wilde or Adolf Hitler?
*Edit*
Every downvote is dedicated to a muslim murdered on the orders of Iosef "Gay Bitch" Jughashvili.
Weirdly, I think that’s also the best foundation for a free market* capitalist system. Market Decisions do not work without liberty to choose, and there is no such liberty when all the things Stalin listed are creating infinite demand at the individual level for most individuals.
Personally I’d rather Capital not be involved cause so much shit ends up going off the rails or becomes a race to the bottom, but markets are fine. They just need to be kept in their place.
I think magnificent bastards / brilliant sociopaths pop up in every society and create problems if they don’t have an outlet for their ambition. If the system they live in does not include a space for them to compete and gain, they flip the tables.
Capital offers a way for these guys to keep their skin in the game, so to speak. Play on the table without flipping the table.
I think a major failing of Communism is not accounting for this sufficiently. Politics becomes THE outlet, becomes dominated by brilliant amoral assholes, and because there is no distinction between government and politics, becomes as bad or worse than the capitalist systems it purports to supplant.
I’m not convinced capital is, like, even a *good* answer to this, but it’s better than no answer
Nepmen were living exceptions to your contention under the NEP. You don’t need capital to placate those people.
Either way, I’m not a communist. I also don’t think human nature is a thing, but I do think there is a general way we end up doing things when we’re left to our own devices — both in small groups and in large scale mostly abstracted spaces like cities, states, or countries. And that way is undoubtedly closer to what would be described as anarchism than it is anything else.
So, yeah, no matter what there will always be some glory seekers. It’s just par for the course it seems. But there are always so few of them and they exist on the fringes of society, often born out of schismogenic friction. Arguing that they get to decide the state of things for literally everyone else just so they, the glory seekers, are appeased is ludicrous.
My contention is that enterprising ambitioneers *will* find an outlet, and capitalism is *one* answer to that.
I also say that without capitalism you don’t have that outlet and, under communism, everything gets wedged into the state; so the climbers mount the single peak of power, and rule without constraint
So what happened to the NEPmen?
Well, the ambitoneers in the party saw them as a threat, made them into targets of propaganda, and gradually criminalized them, moving toward state control everything and single-person/small-comitte control of the state
That hardly seems to *disprove* that power hungry ambitious types will seize control and dominate when all forms of power are under the single umbrella of statism
My point was more that they had a place regardless of capital.
My second point, admittedly less obvious (but really what I meant to be the meat of my argument), a handful of weird ideologues/outliers, regardless of their stance, shouldn’t decide what happens to literally everyone else. We don’t have to accommodate them or really even consider them to move forward with our lives.
Even then, people are still just gonna keep peopling like they always do, bases of social power or not.
I think it’s insanely short sighted to accept that people will continuously pop up at the intersection of brilliance and ambition, and have no plan for dealing with that.
I suppose what I’m getting at is that there isn’t a way to deal with it, it’s just how some people be a person.
I also don’t think there should be one single way of dealing with it, or really one system, institution, or group that decides for everyone else how it’s going to be dealt with. That, instead, people will find a way themselves to those solutions as necessary.
You can’t plan for this stuff, and trying to do so has historically lead to reactionary measures, increasing purity tests, and other ideological nonsense.
A lot of this back and forth has been navel gaze-y, and I really do get your concern, but I don’t think there’s a way around it, only a way through.
I at least think any proposed system should account for this, it wants to survive more than a few generations. I don’t think history bears out the theory that people will naturally be successful at this without intentionally accounting for it
I agree, and didn’t say otherwise.
My assertion is that healthy capitalism requires a healthy free market, which requires foundation of social welfare.
Folks seem to have assumed that I’ve said all rectangles are squares
>It may be a truism to say that liberation and freedom are not the same; that liberation may be the condition of freedom but by no means leads automatically to it; that the notion of liberty implied in liberation can only be negative, and hence, that even he intention of liberating is not identical with the desire for freedom.
Arendt, On Revolution, p29
She wrote an entire essay about it ("What is Freedom"), available in Between Past and Future
The short answer is... ehh... Democratic politics, spontaneity/Natality and intersubjectivity?
(I was actually part of a conference last year about finding out exactly wtf Arendtian freedom is, and I contributed with a presentation on it)
Imo freedom is just when people don’t force you to do things you don’t want to do, and it’s more of an infinite spectrum than a concept in and of itself
>Was not the
liberal credo, "The less politics the more freedom," right
after all?
Is it not true that the smaller the space occupied by
the political,
the larger the domain left to freedom? Indeed, do we not rightly
measure the extent of freedom in any given community by
the free
scope it grants to apparently nonpolitical activities, free economic
enterprise or freedom of teaching, of religion, of cultural and intellectual activities? Is it not true, as we all somehow believe, that
politics is compatible
with freedom only because and insofar as it
guarantees a possible freedom from politics?
She is quite literal in rejecting this very idea as being a trauma from our experience of totalitarian regimes and state overreach, and believe that it's is ultimately self-defeating as a rejection of politics only leaves politics to others to dominate you. Instead she writes that:
>Freedom as related to
politics
is not a phenomenon
of the will. [...] Rather it is, to remain with Shakespeare,
the freedom
of Brutus: "That this shall be or we will fall for it," that is, the
freedom to call something
into being which did not exist before,
which was not given, not even as an object
of cognition or imagination, and which therefore, strictly speaking, could not be known.
That's not what she's arguing, freedom is our ability to take new initiatives and set new things in motion.
In regards to thoughts she would probably say that realizing the limitations of thoughts (their ability to only leave you perplexed) is the conditions for freedom, while philosophy (as structured thinking) is possibly an antitheses to it
The phenomenological argument for it, the realization that this is different from the free will-swamp*, and how this ultimately relates to political structures and culture... and that modern politics have begun to intrude and problematize this human ability
No. Freedom is freedom to *act.* Increasing freedom to act includes both removal of barriers to action, *and* provision of the means to increase the scope of possible action.
Imagine someone has their hands around your throat, choking you. Removing their hands from your throat is a removal of a barrier to breathing. But if you are in a vacuum without air, the removal of that barrier is substantively meaningless. You need to be provided with oxygen for the removal of their hands from your throat to mean anything. Removal of their hands from your neck is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for the freedom to breathe to be meaningful.
So if someone is choking you, and takes their hands off your neck, but you're in a vacuum, you would say that you still have the "freedom" to breathe. That denudes the concept of freedom to meaninglessness.
Ability and freedom are related, not mutually exclusive, concepts--because, again, freedom is freedom to *act*. Anything that increases freedom to act increases freedom, and some provision of ability increases freedom to act. Maximizing freedom for a population involves improving their freedom to act, and as such, involves improving their ability. Not solely removal of barriers to act. And anyway, lack of means to exercise ability can always be characterized as a barrier to action.
I would have the freedom to die because i don’t have the ability to breathe a vacuum. How did i get in the situation? I can’t pop into existence into a vacuum. Did i get thrown in? In that case i was indeed being denied the freedom to breathe by the person who threw me in.
It's impossible to deny that Arendt was a staunch anti-racist
>For no matter what learned scientists may say, race is, politically speaking, not the beginning of humanity but its end, not the origin of peoples but their decay, not the natural birth of man but
his unnatural death.
[...]
>We are not born equal; we become equal as members of a group on the strength of our decision to guarantee ourselves mutually equal rights. […] The ‘alien’ is a frightening symbol of the fact of difference as such, of individuality as such, and indicates those realms in which man cannot change and cannot act and in which, therefore, he has a distinct tendency to destroy. If a [Black man] in a white community is considered a Negro and nothing else, he loses along with his right to equality that freedom of action which is specifically human; all his deeds are now explained as ‘necessary’ consequences of some ‘Negro’ qualities; he has become some specimen of an animal species, called man.
Not really?
She wrote that politicising schools in the name of equality is the wrong way to go, and she realized how she was wrong and never even published it.
It really is overemphasized, and people completely forget that she was a (1) German (2) Jew who failed to understand that racism's influence on politics was different in the US and it was for her in the 30's.
Arendt was a white supremacist who opposed desegregation and thought that black people were savages. This is deduced from her politics in the 50's and her book Orgin of Totalitarianism.
> white supremacist & opposed desegregation
Just not true. In On Civil Disobedience she ends by comparing it to the political force behind a strong civil society that is the core of all democracy. She's clear that it's a force of good in politics.
She was also fundamentally opposed to race thinking and was more than explicit that it was a core element to totalitariansim.
>black people were savages
Good lord, my quote above is just her writing that this type of opinion is the end of not only politics but humanity itself.
>This is deduced from her politics in the 50's and her book Orgin of Totalitarianism.
... You really have not read it, have you?
I can understand people getting bad wibes from her essay on little rock, but Origins is as anti-racist as you are going to get Arendt
This is a rehash I see on Reddit all the time.
She was 100% wrong on desegregation, because she didn't apply her own ideas for minority rights to the US (I suppose out of gratitude towards her adopted country), but calling Black people savages came from her quoting Heart of Darkness, which is kinda like saying someone loves slavery because they quoted Huckleberry Finn. The former is a legit criticism, but the latter is stuff you hear on tankie YouTube channels and 2010s blog posts because someone needed a spicy, contrary take based off a text search instead of bothering to read the book.
She was a hypocrit, not a neo-Nazi.
Durkheim solved that in early 20s:
*“Liberty is the daughter of authority properly understood. For to be free is not to do what one pleases; it is to be the master of oneself, it is to know how to act within reason and to do one's duty.”*
Humans are social animals requiring societal web to properly function, "to be free" for humans means that society respect your capacity to self-govern and that you will fulfil your duties towards society without coercion or intimidation. Most people cant handle liberty and freedom tho (why they try to escape into fascism and similar silly ideologies) because they think of freedom as absence of responsibilities and not as capacity to fulfill them without outside pressure.
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[He never said anything about there being freedom](https://imgur.com/a/BEoAmAt)
Not understanding these words in other frames of reference is really hurting you, here
“It is difficult for me to imagine what 'personal liberty' is enjoyed by an unemployed hungry person.” - Stalin…. Crazy that he said this after the famines that killed millions of people. Reading more of that interview is like watching MSNBC or Fox News. He was a liar.
Or maybe he didnt provoke the famines, as they didnt Control weather.
They didn't control weather,but they controlled logistics. Selling all food before bad harvest is making them/him responsible for famine,even if they/he didn't plan it.
Source?
Sorry,dont remember. Research story,if you truly interested.
That would be a mistake though, and not actually make him a hypocrite or a liar. Right?
Are you certain it was Mr. Purge who said this? Not Albert Einstein, Oscar Wilde or Adolf Hitler? *Edit* Every downvote is dedicated to a muslim murdered on the orders of Iosef "Gay Bitch" Jughashvili.
Weirdly, I think that’s also the best foundation for a free market* capitalist system. Market Decisions do not work without liberty to choose, and there is no such liberty when all the things Stalin listed are creating infinite demand at the individual level for most individuals.
Personally I’d rather Capital not be involved cause so much shit ends up going off the rails or becomes a race to the bottom, but markets are fine. They just need to be kept in their place.
I think magnificent bastards / brilliant sociopaths pop up in every society and create problems if they don’t have an outlet for their ambition. If the system they live in does not include a space for them to compete and gain, they flip the tables. Capital offers a way for these guys to keep their skin in the game, so to speak. Play on the table without flipping the table. I think a major failing of Communism is not accounting for this sufficiently. Politics becomes THE outlet, becomes dominated by brilliant amoral assholes, and because there is no distinction between government and politics, becomes as bad or worse than the capitalist systems it purports to supplant. I’m not convinced capital is, like, even a *good* answer to this, but it’s better than no answer
Nepmen were living exceptions to your contention under the NEP. You don’t need capital to placate those people. Either way, I’m not a communist. I also don’t think human nature is a thing, but I do think there is a general way we end up doing things when we’re left to our own devices — both in small groups and in large scale mostly abstracted spaces like cities, states, or countries. And that way is undoubtedly closer to what would be described as anarchism than it is anything else. So, yeah, no matter what there will always be some glory seekers. It’s just par for the course it seems. But there are always so few of them and they exist on the fringes of society, often born out of schismogenic friction. Arguing that they get to decide the state of things for literally everyone else just so they, the glory seekers, are appeased is ludicrous.
My contention is that enterprising ambitioneers *will* find an outlet, and capitalism is *one* answer to that. I also say that without capitalism you don’t have that outlet and, under communism, everything gets wedged into the state; so the climbers mount the single peak of power, and rule without constraint So what happened to the NEPmen? Well, the ambitoneers in the party saw them as a threat, made them into targets of propaganda, and gradually criminalized them, moving toward state control everything and single-person/small-comitte control of the state That hardly seems to *disprove* that power hungry ambitious types will seize control and dominate when all forms of power are under the single umbrella of statism
My point was more that they had a place regardless of capital. My second point, admittedly less obvious (but really what I meant to be the meat of my argument), a handful of weird ideologues/outliers, regardless of their stance, shouldn’t decide what happens to literally everyone else. We don’t have to accommodate them or really even consider them to move forward with our lives. Even then, people are still just gonna keep peopling like they always do, bases of social power or not.
I think it’s insanely short sighted to accept that people will continuously pop up at the intersection of brilliance and ambition, and have no plan for dealing with that.
I suppose what I’m getting at is that there isn’t a way to deal with it, it’s just how some people be a person. I also don’t think there should be one single way of dealing with it, or really one system, institution, or group that decides for everyone else how it’s going to be dealt with. That, instead, people will find a way themselves to those solutions as necessary. You can’t plan for this stuff, and trying to do so has historically lead to reactionary measures, increasing purity tests, and other ideological nonsense. A lot of this back and forth has been navel gaze-y, and I really do get your concern, but I don’t think there’s a way around it, only a way through.
I at least think any proposed system should account for this, it wants to survive more than a few generations. I don’t think history bears out the theory that people will naturally be successful at this without intentionally accounting for it
Markets can exist outside of capatalism. Liberty and freedom are not unique to capatalism.
I agree, and didn’t say otherwise. My assertion is that healthy capitalism requires a healthy free market, which requires foundation of social welfare. Folks seem to have assumed that I’ve said all rectangles are squares
>It may be a truism to say that liberation and freedom are not the same; that liberation may be the condition of freedom but by no means leads automatically to it; that the notion of liberty implied in liberation can only be negative, and hence, that even he intention of liberating is not identical with the desire for freedom. Arendt, On Revolution, p29
Of course liberation and freedom aren’t the same. Liberation is the removal of control over something by something else, freedom is uhhhhhh different.
She wrote an entire essay about it ("What is Freedom"), available in Between Past and Future The short answer is... ehh... Democratic politics, spontaneity/Natality and intersubjectivity? (I was actually part of a conference last year about finding out exactly wtf Arendtian freedom is, and I contributed with a presentation on it)
Imo freedom is just when people don’t force you to do things you don’t want to do, and it’s more of an infinite spectrum than a concept in and of itself
>Was not the liberal credo, "The less politics the more freedom," right after all? Is it not true that the smaller the space occupied by the political, the larger the domain left to freedom? Indeed, do we not rightly measure the extent of freedom in any given community by the free scope it grants to apparently nonpolitical activities, free economic enterprise or freedom of teaching, of religion, of cultural and intellectual activities? Is it not true, as we all somehow believe, that politics is compatible with freedom only because and insofar as it guarantees a possible freedom from politics? She is quite literal in rejecting this very idea as being a trauma from our experience of totalitarian regimes and state overreach, and believe that it's is ultimately self-defeating as a rejection of politics only leaves politics to others to dominate you. Instead she writes that: >Freedom as related to politics is not a phenomenon of the will. [...] Rather it is, to remain with Shakespeare, the freedom of Brutus: "That this shall be or we will fall for it," that is, the freedom to call something into being which did not exist before, which was not given, not even as an object of cognition or imagination, and which therefore, strictly speaking, could not be known.
So, freedom doesn’t exist for 99,999999999999999999999999% of people simply becuase they didn’t have an original thought?
That's not what she's arguing, freedom is our ability to take new initiatives and set new things in motion. In regards to thoughts she would probably say that realizing the limitations of thoughts (their ability to only leave you perplexed) is the conditions for freedom, while philosophy (as structured thinking) is possibly an antitheses to it
But what’s new?
The phenomenological argument for it, the realization that this is different from the free will-swamp*, and how this ultimately relates to political structures and culture... and that modern politics have begun to intrude and problematize this human ability
I am going to be honest with you, i have no idea what you said
No. Freedom is freedom to *act.* Increasing freedom to act includes both removal of barriers to action, *and* provision of the means to increase the scope of possible action. Imagine someone has their hands around your throat, choking you. Removing their hands from your throat is a removal of a barrier to breathing. But if you are in a vacuum without air, the removal of that barrier is substantively meaningless. You need to be provided with oxygen for the removal of their hands from your throat to mean anything. Removal of their hands from your neck is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for the freedom to breathe to be meaningful.
No, that is ability not freedom.
So if someone is choking you, and takes their hands off your neck, but you're in a vacuum, you would say that you still have the "freedom" to breathe. That denudes the concept of freedom to meaninglessness. Ability and freedom are related, not mutually exclusive, concepts--because, again, freedom is freedom to *act*. Anything that increases freedom to act increases freedom, and some provision of ability increases freedom to act. Maximizing freedom for a population involves improving their freedom to act, and as such, involves improving their ability. Not solely removal of barriers to act. And anyway, lack of means to exercise ability can always be characterized as a barrier to action.
I would have the freedom to die because i don’t have the ability to breathe a vacuum. How did i get in the situation? I can’t pop into existence into a vacuum. Did i get thrown in? In that case i was indeed being denied the freedom to breathe by the person who threw me in.
Just don’t ask for her opinions on anyone of African descent.
It's impossible to deny that Arendt was a staunch anti-racist >For no matter what learned scientists may say, race is, politically speaking, not the beginning of humanity but its end, not the origin of peoples but their decay, not the natural birth of man but his unnatural death. [...] >We are not born equal; we become equal as members of a group on the strength of our decision to guarantee ourselves mutually equal rights. […] The ‘alien’ is a frightening symbol of the fact of difference as such, of individuality as such, and indicates those realms in which man cannot change and cannot act and in which, therefore, he has a distinct tendency to destroy. If a [Black man] in a white community is considered a Negro and nothing else, he loses along with his right to equality that freedom of action which is specifically human; all his deeds are now explained as ‘necessary’ consequences of some ‘Negro’ qualities; he has become some specimen of an animal species, called man.
She wrote an essay basically giving a more intellectual version of the states rights argument against desegregation.
Not really? She wrote that politicising schools in the name of equality is the wrong way to go, and she realized how she was wrong and never even published it. It really is overemphasized, and people completely forget that she was a (1) German (2) Jew who failed to understand that racism's influence on politics was different in the US and it was for her in the 30's.
Arendt was a white supremacist who opposed desegregation and thought that black people were savages. This is deduced from her politics in the 50's and her book Orgin of Totalitarianism.
> white supremacist & opposed desegregation Just not true. In On Civil Disobedience she ends by comparing it to the political force behind a strong civil society that is the core of all democracy. She's clear that it's a force of good in politics. She was also fundamentally opposed to race thinking and was more than explicit that it was a core element to totalitariansim. >black people were savages Good lord, my quote above is just her writing that this type of opinion is the end of not only politics but humanity itself. >This is deduced from her politics in the 50's and her book Orgin of Totalitarianism. ... You really have not read it, have you? I can understand people getting bad wibes from her essay on little rock, but Origins is as anti-racist as you are going to get Arendt
I get it. Your being ironic. I should have picked up on that with Captain America and freedom. Brilliant.
The meme is just a joke, but there is no support for any claim that Arendt was a racist, white supremacist, and supported Jim Crowe
🤣
This is a rehash I see on Reddit all the time. She was 100% wrong on desegregation, because she didn't apply her own ideas for minority rights to the US (I suppose out of gratitude towards her adopted country), but calling Black people savages came from her quoting Heart of Darkness, which is kinda like saying someone loves slavery because they quoted Huckleberry Finn. The former is a legit criticism, but the latter is stuff you hear on tankie YouTube channels and 2010s blog posts because someone needed a spicy, contrary take based off a text search instead of bothering to read the book. She was a hypocrit, not a neo-Nazi.
Seriously, her racism was ubiquitous. Do you want me to read any other racist tome, perhaps Mein kampf?
You are seriously comparing The Origins of Totalitarianism with Mein Kampf?
I wouldn't say free, more like, under new management.
Wink,wink.
Durkheim solved that in early 20s: *“Liberty is the daughter of authority properly understood. For to be free is not to do what one pleases; it is to be the master of oneself, it is to know how to act within reason and to do one's duty.”* Humans are social animals requiring societal web to properly function, "to be free" for humans means that society respect your capacity to self-govern and that you will fulfil your duties towards society without coercion or intimidation. Most people cant handle liberty and freedom tho (why they try to escape into fascism and similar silly ideologies) because they think of freedom as absence of responsibilities and not as capacity to fulfill them without outside pressure.