To be honest, it's mostly an old grudge I hold on a few users, one in particular. I should move on for sure, but they often post, and it's always a reminder. I love lemmygrad and I keep coming back. But I just wish they knew how much they hurt me when I was at one of the lowest point in my life. As for them dismissing my problems, one person said I lacked discipline, which is not true, and it angers me every time I think about that insult. In the end, I am very scared of losing my disability benefits. Especially because, in general, a lot of people nowadays are against us and want to remove these welfare programs.

I am on welfare because of mental illness. When people dismiss the struggles of people like me, they claim I don't deserve welfare. Do you think the stigma against us is gone? Do you even know how difficult it is to get on disability? Most people think we are just lazy and drug addicts. My material interests rest on the welfare state, and I have the right to defend myself and my interests. What is "inherently elitist" is the fact that people consider us, schizophrenics, bipolar, or autism doesn't matter, to be lazy or blame our problems on a moral falling on our part.

Disrespect can be hurtful but it’s not on its own violent oppression,

It is when it threatens my ability to live.

In what way was that reactionary?

Edit: Hoping for things to happen has no effect whatsoever on reality. Those events happened to me, and the lack of compassion I constantly see here does sometimes make me fantasize about stuff like this happening to people who hurt me. That's all.

My hatred of the educated elite grows every day. Your bourgeois education no longer impresses me. I will never bow down to any PhDs, and I spit on your decrees. It’s the only proper honor you deserve after graduating.

Edit: Doesn't really matter which degree. Computer engineering, biology, STEM, or the liberals arts. And the only proper way to behave with such people is to spit on their face

If the strong are supposed to survive over the weak, why do corporations need constant bailouts from our politicians? Using the public treasury to save a dying corporation is not optimal, and yet in capitalism, this happens often. The societal structure is what permits us to survive, including the survival of businesses or people. Human beings are not innately selfish, nor are we the opposite, innately benevolent. The conditions of production determine human nature. If human beings were selfish, why do families protect each other? Is it selfish because the parents see themselves in their kids and want a better life for them in order to continue the bloodline? But not all families act as such since many parents abuse their children without any regard toward the kids' future. Our economic system produces these families, and today, that would be capitalism. Human nature, it is sometimes said, is all about selfishness, based on the sexual reproduction of the species. Not quite. It does not explain the fluidity of sexuality. Why do gay or asexual people exist? And how do they exist? The idea that human life is simply to survive and to sexually reproduce is evidently false. Humanity exists through systems. Systems that provide for our survival, which we then want to reproduce. Capitalism is such a system, and so is the family. If humans are selfish and we assert that socialism is more efficient at serving human selfishness, we are misunderstanding the class struggle.

Liberals wish for a meritocracy, or at least so they claim. Not everyone is born equal. That's true, but mainly because we are born in different material conditions. For example, a person born in a wealthy family. Such equality would require the abolition of money and private property. Socialism eventually aims at such equality, once the means of production are easily reproduced and improved with ease, thus rendering private property useless.

However, therein lies a problem. Even through socialism and all the way to communism, inequality exists. How can we explain the existence of so-called low ambitious people? Why are some people scientists while others are janitors? Until we achieve a communist system, this question will remain, and many will answer with a biological explanation.

Let's return to the system of the family. Parents don't have an unbreakable, or I should say, observable, link towards their children. Nothing connects the parents to the children in an immutable, concrete way. Society expects them to act as parents; the children need them for survival. The family system is a connection, and this is considered immutable, concrete. Insofar as it is considered to be the optimal choice for raising children. Similarly, capitalism is viewed as the optimal choice for the management of our society.

In the workplace, the boss is a dictator, much like the father of a family, and sometimes, he even declares the business to be one big family. He is correct. The relationship between children and their father is akin to the workers depending on their boss for survival. However, it is systems, not individuals, that permit us to survive.

Human beings are selfish when it comes to survival. The same goes for economic classes. The proletariat is selfish as a class. And on a higher plane, the human race is selfish as one species. Here, the human race is defined as one. But the whole makes the thing. Capitalism or socialism makes a significant difference in the solidarity found within the species; for example, the way the US or China reacted to covid.

Therefore, the only answer we can currently give on the question of human selfishness is that the workers, as a class, are surviving but dying. Selfish and yet organizing.

Why was the British empire so evil? What about imperial Japan? Or the French or Roman empires? Why are citizens of empires self-centered and evil and supportive of their nation? Surely, it must be because of lead poisoning…

No... You're an awful person and have no place in any leftist circle. This conversation is disturbing.

Who is this comment aimed at? Criticalresist or that other guy, yugopnik?

Edit: it matters because influencers are shitty people. Most of them are in the petite bourgeoisie class. Those who listen to them to learn about communism will have a petit bourgeois understanding of communism.

The expulsion of a group, any group, from the category of human beings is extremely dangerous. Below are some passages from Losurdo's book, War and Revolution. Although I did gather the passages and quickly made this comment, I think it might resonate with some of you.

"At times of acute conflict, we witness a kind of mutual excommunication from civilization (this is the essence of the process of de-specification). The friend/enemy dichotomy tends to coincide with the civilization/ barbarism dichotomy. However, the two forms of de-specification are not equivalent. One of them establishes a politico-moral distance between the self and the enemy, while the other establishes a distance more charged with naturalistic elements, because it identifies the enemy as foreigner and barbarian or, with reference predominantly to revolutionary leaders, as a lunatic, who is likewise alien to a community within which conflict arises not because of internal contradictions, but because of an external pathogenic or ethnic cause. The first type of de-specification refers to a form of conduct which, by definition, is particular and mutable. Going beyond conduct, the second ends up referring to characteristics that tend to assume a naturalistic fixity."

"The ideology developed to legitimize and celebrate ventures against the barbarians also ends up materializing in the capitalist metropolis. [...] In other words, during serious conflicts between members of the civilized community, forms of war traditionally employed against barbarians tend to emerge within it as well."

But the definition of race/barbarians can be vague. For example,

"Between 1907 and 1915, thirteen US states enacted laws for compulsory sterilization, covering, according to Indiana’s legislation (the first state to move in this direction), ‘habitual delinquents, idiots, imbeciles and rapists’. There were those who proposed extending such legislation to ‘vagabonds’ (for the most part members of an ‘inferior race’)."

However, we on the left usually react to such racialization with moral condemnation.

"We register a paradox. At the very moment when de-specification on a naturalistic basis is indignantly rejected, moral sentiment can result in a different type of de-specification, with the expulsion from the moral (and human) community of a social stratum (in this instance, slave-owners)."

And,

"The most radical representatives of American abolitionism seem to argue in similar fashion. [Condemning] the institution of slavery as a ‘combination of death and hell’, and having branded the US Constitution as a ‘covenant with death and an agreement with hell’. [...] Reconstructed via the rejection of racial prejudice, the unity of the human race is once again undermined by moral or politico-moral sentiment or fanaticism."

Yet,

"In the USA, the ancien régime presented itself in a highly peculiar form. The residues of censitary discrimination were not of much significance. More important was the fact that the aristocracy of class was configured here as an aristocracy of race."

Finally, there's the last part of this passage, which I think serves as a prescient warning:

"Tocqueville identified the French and, in particular, the Jacobins as the carriers of ‘a virus of a new and unknown kind’, which allegedly underlay the incessant French revolutionary cycle. Having condemned ressentiment as the motive behind rebellion against the power exercised by the masters and the successful, Nietzsche pointed to the Jews as ‘the people of ressentiment par excellence’. Finally, Hitler prided himself on having finally discovered the source of the disease and the revolutionary infection. It was Jews and Bolsheviks, who were regularly equated, in part on account of the Jewish origin of a significant number of leaders of the Russian revolutionary movement. The process of ethnicization of the revolutionary virus can assume very different forms. But what remains constant is the danger of slippage from the psychopathological paradigm, which refers to mental illness, to the naturalistic paradigm, which refers to the inferior or degenerate ethnicity and race."

Perhaps the moral condemnation of the West, and since white people have presented themselves as naturally superior for such a long period of time, can at the same time be a rejection of the Western population as part of the "real" human race by those they have oppressed. It sounds like a reversal of white supremacists' own self-perceived superiority. This strand of thought admits that a certain kind of white people were born without a way out of said group, but judges them negatively and attributes to the group only bad, eternal qualities.

It is a form of reactionary nationalism I guess. According to your other post about them, it seems they accuse the US of meddling in other countries' immigration policies. Assuming they were referring to European countries, the account could be capitalizing on the growing worldwide condemnation of the USA. The reactionaries who happen to praise China are often ignorant of the PRC's history and achievements. I guess they could be fascists riding the waves of mass discontent and using our socialist rhetoric for their own nefarious purposes.

I knew I recognized this pic from somewhere. I used google lens and found it's from some pretentious smug lib artist. It's a photo of workers inside a manufacturing plant in China. And there's no evidence whatsoever that the workers were maltreated.