PreteenCommunist - ask me anything ^.^

- Are you a good student? What are your favourite subjects?
- Would you rather fight one horse-sized duck or four duck-sized horses?
- Apart from The Internationale, which is your favourite song?
- If you are Preeteen Communist, where is Post-teen Capitalist?
- What is your opinion on the Nationalism on the Balkans?
- If you took me on a date, would we have cevapi or burek and would we have food before Slivovitza and Rakija or other way around?

 

What are some of your favorite Manga? Mine are:
1. Tokyo Ghoul
2. Berserk
3. The Flowers of Evil
4. Knights of Sidonia
5. Monster

Also, what is your opinion on post-apocalyptic fiction?

 

Dw I'm not offended ⌒.⌒ what statement are you referring to? If anyone does engage me in a debate on communism I do try to substantiate my arguments. To varying degrees of success, but still.

As for human nature, I mean...things like laziness, greed and hunger for power exist and prevail in capitalism because capitalism rewards such behaviour, mostly through corporate structures but sometimes through mechanisms like the state bureaucracy and its botched legislation. There is no evidence, empirical or otherwise, to suggest that this sort of human behaviour is invariably the case. And actually, Googling around, you can find some studies showing that "human nature" is actually compassionate and giving.

 

I've actually read some of her fiction (Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead) but not her philosophy, although I'm vaguely familiar with the idea of rational self-interest and selfishness being beneficial and Objectivist ideas in general. I'm probably the only socialist ever to hold this view, but I actually like her writing style. I don't really appreciate it when writers bash me repeatedly over the head with their morals, but Rand's prose itself is lucid and pleasant to read. And I'm a sucker for books with characters representing ideals and all those intellectual sorts of society parties. Probably because I read a lot of Russian stuff.

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Are we talking about a country and the job creation going on in it, or people's personal employment situations?

 

One of the objections to communism I've heard is that centralized planning of any economy is just too complex an undertaking for any human agency. Do you think powerful computers might make such planning possible?

 

- I am in the sense that I'm very academic, but I'm also a heck of a scatterbrain and very, erm, talkative in class, so teachers tend to love me because I get good grades but then hate me because I'm just a really annoying human being. As for subjects...I love every single field of study with almost no exceptions (the only things I can think of that I don't like are ethics, botany and some of the shape and space topics in maths) but absolutely hate school with a burning passion. The combination of abstraction, regurgitation of syllabus material, narrow syllabi, a total lack of autonomy, a classroom and teaching structure which is at base unchanged since Fichte's day and ridiculous "interactive learning" crap which just serves to waste time and resources makes every lesson mind-numbingly tedious even if I love the subject itself. My favourite class would have to be French because my teacher is super-nice and I'm quite a confident speaker so we can just chat about random stuff all the time. Oh, and nothing will stop me from loving physics; I didn't use to like it but have completely changed my mind.

- The entire bird phylum scares the crap out of me (don't judge :s) so the latter.

- Right now it's U.HU.RU - Trust. I also love Raindrops by Kerli and there's a really good remix of La Madrague by Bridgitte Bardot (the Antis remix) that I always bust out in the summer.

- Since that would be my dialectical antithesis...somewhere? Or nowhere. Urghhh the Hegelianism is real

- I love the Balkans, but nationalism is reactionary and illusory wherever it is. Unfortunately, the migrant crisis as far as I can tell has led to a bit of a nationalist resurgence in the region, particularly in FYR Macedonia. The Balkan countries are also falling out of love with the EU, and although the EU is by no means internationalist, it leaves a void which nationalism can fill.

- It depends on how drunk we get; burek seems like reeeally good drunk food. All those glorious carbs. Not that I, um, ever intended to...er, don't drink underage, kids!

Rakija isn't even a drink, it's a way of life. You have to have it before, and after, and during, and throughout the rest of the night, and the next morning...

That isn't even hyperbole. You should see some of the parody letters Croats wrote to the EU after finding out in horror that EU restrictions would be placed on rakija production!

 

How old are you?

 

I don't actually read manga; I can never get into any books with pictures. No clue why, but I've had that issue since I was like 5. But the anime I watch is mostly trashy slice of life/shoujo stuff: Itazura na Kiss, Kaichou-wa Maid-Sama, Special A, Kiniro Mosaic, Ouran High School Host Club etc. etc.. I don't watch TV so I basically watch anime as a cuter and better thought-out equivalent of soaps.

I do like post-apocalyptic fiction, though generally not when it gets paranormal. But it has to be executed well. I'm a bit of a connoisseur (connoisseuse?) of dystopic sorts of fiction; I dislike most of the product of the recent young adult fiction trend for dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction, but I don't know if that's just me being a snob. My favourite novel ever - Zamiatin's We - is a dystopian novel which could be described as post-apocalyptic, although the events which led to the formation of the society depicted in the novel are never disclosed.

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Absolutely. I mean, we were almost there with Synco in Chile and that was in the 70s. Computationally-speaking, though, central planning should not be that difficult. It's just an input-output matrix with a few more layers.

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14; I'm going to be 15 in just over a month.

This account was made when I was 12, though, in the summer of 2014. But I didn't post much at all then and proceeded to forget about the site for over a year.

 

Do you have a positive view of Anarchism?
and
What is your religion(if you belong to one)?

 

Hmmm, to each his own I suppose...I'd also like to know about your opinions on Market Socialism. Brexit? Is the EU exit movement in Germany popular? In Albania, they'd sacrifice their first-born child to join the EU.

 

I was an anarchist myself two years ago; if you trawl through my really old posts, when I first signed up to the site and made an intro thread I described myself as an anarcho-syndicalist (pretty much because I was reading a lot of Spanish Civil War stuff and romanticised the whole thing a fair bit). I would still be very willing to co-operate with anarchists in the event of a revolution, and of course in the struggles going on right now and leading up to one. But I think the idea of abolishing the state immediately after the revolution rests on the premise that class struggle will disappear immediately after the revolution, which is not realistic.

I'm extremely strongly atheist, and while I have nothing against individual believers, I have nothing but contempt for religious institutions and for the people who use religion to justify discrimination, suppression and other reactionary guff.

 

I thought Stalin was anti-religious.

 

- Market socialism is an oxymoron, in my opinion. Fundamentally, socialism necessitates the abolition of exploitation, and if you've got markets you've got exploitation by virtue of the need to make a profit from surplus-value.

- Brexit is complicated; I obviously don't like the EU, as a socialist, but the situation is more nuanced than that. I wrote an article on it here: http://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1112/the-politics-of-platitudes/

- The "Deusgang" movement (I just made up that term) is gaining ground, like its equivalents across Europe, and AfD is expected to make some gains next year, as they did in the fairly recent municipal elections, particularly in the former GDR which has a view on immigration more comparable to that of Poland. But from what I can gather, there is a newfound resilience in Germany after Brexit; the European project is closer to home for Germans, and though they have their grievances they want it to survive.

- Funny that that's happening in Albania; my impression was that in most of the West Balkans, people are growing less warm towards the EU, although they do still hope for accession at least nominally. I only know about the Serbo-Croatian speaking countries really, though.

 

I woke up to a dream where I was in a room that was on fire because I wanted to catch a Venonat. It was at three in morning.

 

Agree

Personally I view the EU as an economic counterweight to America, since it collectively is stronger than the US in total GDP. But the whole Brexit thing is also not good as it basically forces a vaccum in Britain's economy, which American capital can fill in. Thus, it basically makes Britain even more dependent on America.

Hope AfD doesn't get any more popular, to me they seem quite dangerous. Along with the right in Austria, Hungary, and France. You saw what happened the last time a far-right party took over Germany...

Albania is a poor country (not as poor as it was previously), so naturally we would be seeking to have strong economic ties and investment relationships with the big rich powers. Now that we've been put into NATO, I assume accession to come in the near future.

 

Omg I had to look up the word "Venonat"...I thought it was a car :') :')

Maybe you couldn't be so productive in that case! But fire in dreams is always nice. You get all the coolness without actually getting hurt.

 

That's one way of putting it lol!

 

A country. People have complained a lot about Brexit and populism, saying we need to invest in the right kinds of jobs and not the wrong kinds. I wonder sometimes if that's a false dichotomy. It seems to be predicated off of two ideas, first that everyone has the talent to do anything with a proper education and second, that everyone who was not properly educated early on in life could be re-educated later on.

 

Actually Capitalism REWARDS hard work. Humans want food and power. It is a natural state. Capitalism provides the opportunity for able-bodied people to work for what they want. A societal morality is responsible for taking care of those truly in need.

One cannot be 'compassionate and giving' if one is subjected to receiving less than the energy they have expended to support themselves.

 

No question that some systems feed the beast, but there are people in the world that are built lazy, or greed, or (pick a trait that doesn't work well with groups) and it's not something this is taught or learned it just is. What is the plan to deal with these personality types?

I personally believe humans are the main reason that no system based upon a united group will ever function on a large scale. The same drive that made people adventure to new lands, lust for someones wife, or get a joy out of conquest will also make a group minded society not function. I need to point out that I don't think I'm pessimistic, just realistic.

 

Great pick. The duck-sized horse would probably bite your head pff and only the sight of it would be intimidating as heck. The latter you could just kick away.

 

It takes a time to produce many things and if you don't have a surplus of product, you have a real risk of a deficit (i.e the weather doesn't go as you planned, people's demands change). and this is why the USSR had to bring in the NEP (to curve the consequences of a shortfall in food production). Most business people know that you save your resources in the good times so that you can survive in the bad times. The problem with the Marxist theory of removing the profit motive is that society only focuses on the here and now, and not on what will happen in the future.

Don't get me wrong, the concept of the community (or by the "dictatorship of the proletariat") owning the means of production is a good thing. However, I don't see how creating a group of "bourgeoisie" that have more rights than the proletariat will result in a dictatorship of the proletariat. True liberalism came out of the Spanish War of Independence, in which they were fighting the oppressive feudal dictatorship. So yes, true communism will follow capitalism, the question most people disagree with, is how we get there (I believe the way we will get there is through the government getting out of the way and letting the community run its own affairs).

Can you explain to me, how installing a bourgeoisie dictatorship will ever morph into a proletariat dictatorship, considering what we know from history?

 

hi commie - why do you supposed Che Guevara shirts are so popular world wide?

 

Admittedly I haven't thought about this, but I'm not sure that by "the right kind of job" people necessarily mean "high-tech jobs." The "right kind of job" is one which pays a decent wage and is sufficiently stable for the worker not to worry about the precarity of their position; and is it not just common sense to prefer these sorts of jobs to low-paid and unstable ones?

Are you suggesting that there are some able-bodied people who are invariably incapable of doing certain jobs, even given sufficient education? I think it depends on the job - some particularly squeamish people would not be able to be surgeons even if they were trained, for instance - but education would enable the majority of people to do the majority of things.

 

Capitalists who leech off proletarian labour and people who get rich off ultimately useless jobs (I'm mostly referring here to obscure finance & PR jobs) or get rich off their parents' money are not being rewarded for hard work. They're being rewarded for sitting on their arses and ordering people around. The former applies to some able-bodied welfare recipients who are unemployed and disincentivised to work by a combination of the general undesirability of labour under capitalism and the contradictory nature of the welfare state. On the other end of the scale, manual labourers in poorer countries work incredibly hard and get nothing in return. Even in the rich world, cleaners work hard and perform useful labour, for example. The whole idea that capitalism is doing the impossible - adequately quantifying the value and intensity of someone's work - is an act, and a ridiculous one at that.

Agreed. I'm just going to point this out before it pops up somewhere else: I am not arguing that humans are naturally compassionate, but that there has been evidence against the idea that humans are naturally selfish. I think whether we are compassionate or not depends on social conditions, and as you perhaps inadvertently said, capitalism is not conducive to compassion. I'm not saying this is a negative aspect of capitalism. It just explains some of the lack of compassion we see in the world (and even within capitalism, people can find ways to be compassionate).