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Comment by noduerme | Hacker News Reader

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If you think all left-wing critiques of capitalism are in defence of totalitarianism, you should read George Orwell's political essays. I can assure you that Orwell of all people had no time for totalitarians.

To quote the poster in full:

>> Capital owners always want to split the workers to more and more groups so it’s easier to antagonize and manage them

First of all, is that a profound left-wing critique of capitalism?

Secondly, I've read Orwell extensively. I don't think he would have had much truck with a troll posting Animal Farm style slogans.

I'd argue it's an accurate statement about power in general. The powerful have always sought to divide the powerless for political expediency regardless of the ideological framework used to do it, you could read that from Machiavelli as much as Marx. Divide and rule is about the oldest political trick in the book and it works pretty well, why wouldn't capital owners who represent the present elite do it?

Yeah, you're right, and that's a thoughtful way to put it which addresses the actual power dynamics and nuance: ANY system is going to have an incentive to divide and conquer. I'm looking at the above two statements:

>> @mgol94 Capital owners always want to split the workers to more and more groups so it’s easier to antagonize and manage them

>> @nkmnz Communists always want to de-individualize humans into a single group with a coherent identity so it's easier to ideologize and agitate them.

And I don't disagree with either of them per se, on the merits, but I see in both of them a major flaw in the way the point is argued.

So you don’t disagree, but have no problems doing ad personam arguments citing my karma and assuming my socioeconomic background?

You're debating on Hacker News; did you expect anything different? As long as the shit is wrapped in enough bows, it doesn't get thrown out.

Do you go around complaining when people post insufficiently thoughtful criticisms of communism as well? There are a lot of them out there, so it would presumably keep you quite busy.

Not all critiques need to be profound. Egregious issues should be called out even if wordsmithing is not your forte.

Man, this is a stupid discussion. Everything gets taken at its most extreme. Humans see a token like "capitalism" and fire off their parroted responses, like "communism". At no point does anyone try to pin down to more specific details.

I have an old account and agree with the post you are replying to. But unlike you, I see capitalism as depressing, hopeless and despairing.

I am also not from a totalitarian country =)

I feel that this deserves a conversation over a beer, as opposed to a new account posting a one-line communist slogan.

Conversations over beer are always better than texting in online forums or social media =)

Believing your system is beyond critique or question, or that anyone who dares must be the enemy, seems pretty commie to me tbh. Like not in the marx textbook theory sense, more in the actual soviet/chinese communist system sense.

I think it’s very obvious that the powers that be are keen to keep people divided and focused on anything but them. Ex: trans issues, trans people have been around for ever, but didn’t start dominating media and politics until about 10 years ago (not long after the global Wall Street protests.) Just mentioning this will send both sides of the issue into a rage (either I’m a genocidal maniac or I support litter boxes in schools, depending on your interpretation.)

I'm not sure I understand your point. I never said my system was beyond critique or question...

Not sure what to make of your note about transgenderism... I think that gender, sexuality, race, religion, ethnicity, borders, abortion, and inequality have all been deployed as boogeymen by parties on both the right and left to scare people into voting one way or another.

You helped me clarify my thinking in one way, though: "Divide and conquer", which has been a theme in this thread, implies that both left and right parties are working together simply to confuse the populace. Or to put it more plainly, "divide and rule" implies that there must be a conspiracy in which the people doing the ruling don't give a damn either way; they only use social and economic issues to keep people divided to prevent an uprising.

I don't really think that's how it works, and to tell you the truth, I think that believing in that sort of thing is not just juvenile and historically illiterate, it's actually harmful to a well-functioning society. And I'm seeing it all over the place, even just implicitly in half the comments in this thread. That's not how the world works. Fascists and socialists and centrists don't actually get together with industrialists and arms manufacturers and oil producers to think up things like "how can we distract the genpop with transgender stuff while we pump the atmosphere full of more carbon." The world is a much more complicated and subtle place; many actors are on the stage, each with their own agenda, and no one is pulling all the strings behind the curtain. In fact, that's what's even more terrifying than a cabal of sociopaths: No one is in control, no one at all. The train has no brakes; the ship is burning, but there is no captain; sixteen people are fighting for control in the cockpit of the plane. That's why I don't like those kinds of reductive assessments.

>> Capital owners always want to split the workers to more and more groups so it’s easier to antagonize and manage them

> It's always the new accounts like yours with 47 votes who write the most depressing, hopeless, despairing and anti-capitalist slogans around here. Day after day. Why is that?

It's probably time for you to let the scales fall from your eyes, and realize that you're a worker and the the shareholders aren't looking out for your well-being. They want you to be paid as little as possible, so they can keep more for themselves.

> Whichever totalitarian country your little troll army represents, it would be fun if you let your own citizens comment on here without fear of penalty. I suspect they wouldn't mind being labeled white collar or blue collar, if they had an opportunity to speak freely. Or for that matter, why not open up your own country's social media so they can speak without fear of reprisal! Let's get going with that project, I can't wait to see the results!

Where did that come from? Do you think the GP is a Soviet apparatchik time-warped into the present-day? I wouldn't be totally surprised, given a lot of libertarian tracts were written during the cold war, and would pound on the Soviet Union to tar far more reasonable and moderate ideas.

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