I vibe with Rosen 2000's suggestion that Marx rejected contemporary, doctrinal morality (➡why he wrote of materialism "shattering" morality) but accepted moral values (➡why he wrote of capitalist "embezzlement" and communism enabling human flourishing): scholar.harvard.edu/michaelrosen/p…
interesting suggestion from Wolff and Leopold 2021: Marx goes beyond "theoretical necessity" in critiquing morality (and refusing to use it as a justifier) in order to distinguish himself from contemporary reformist socialists and bourgeois do-gooders: plato.stanford.edu/entries/marx/
linking the two ideas is Cohen 1983: Marx clearly implies a non-relativistic justice in his frequent use of "robbery" to describe capitalization, and elsewhere suggests relativistic justice is moonshine: Then, Marx clearly thinks that capitalist exploitation is unjust:
in Wolff and Leopold's summary: "In his explicit reflections on the justice of capitalism he was able to maintain his official view" in order to distinguish himself from other socialists. "But in less guarded moments his real view slips out, even if never in explicit language."
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Political terrorism is a deeply ineffective strategy with a high human cost.
Abrahms 2006: in a dataset of 42 terrorist groups, terrorism was rarely successful (7%, 3/42) or partly successful (17%, 7/42); it is more successful against military targets than civilian and with limited goals than maximalist or other goals: mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.116…
Fortna 2015: relative to civil wars led by nonterrorist rebel groups, terrorist rebel groups were 15x less likely to achieve victory and 2x less likely to reach an agreement with the government: cambridge.org/core/journals/…
my takeaway is that most forms of persuasion are effective.
please gimme more neat/strong studies or contrary studies if you know of them!
watching news changes beliefs
Martin & Yurukoglu 2017: data from channel number randomization suggests that Fox News shifts voting patterns rightward: Without Fox News, .46% fewer people would've voted Republican in 2000, 3.59% in 2004, and 6.35% in 2008:
long talks change beliefs
Broockman 2016: deep canvassing (a ~10 minute convo encouraging person to consider a trans person's perspective) increased tolerance of trans people and support for a gender nondiscrimination law; effects persisted after 3 months nytimes.com/2016/04/10/mag…
Hoping to put out a blogpost on the "point" of socialist theory soon, as a starting point for a theory series. I hold that all socialist theory writing attempts either to answers (some of) these questions or rejects (some of) these questions:
1: Justification: Why is socialism preferable to capitalism?
2: Transition: How do we get from capitalism to socialism?
3: Institutions: What social-political structures / relationships (or lack thereof) should organize economic, political, and social activity in socialism?
These are large topics, and I think they cover virtually all "socialist theory" writing. Does any theory you've read seem to fall outside these three?
here's how tankie twitter is spending their moment in the sun:
- simping for Stalin
- saying true socialists have to be Stalinists
- denying Stalin's (now extremely well-documented) mass killings as capitalist propaganda
while we're here: Stalin killed millions, according to the USSR's security services' own documents: