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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   17594 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 23, 2026

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After 100 years of scientific and technological progress, the workers are not starving any more, how great!

Something that the commies were struggling with despite the same technological progress...

Communism was never about higher pay and longer lunch breaks for proletarians, and it was ever less about wokeness and LGBTQ+. It was about building new world, world free of all oppression and exploitation

I know communism includes some crazy utopians thinking the oceans will turn to lemonade, but I thought it also had some hard-headed people mostly preoccupied with the material conditions of the working class.

Also totalitarian states running on command economies are not what I'd call "free of all oppression and exploitation".

Most of the interview is about the vanished world of interwar Europe, but here is how he feels about modernity.

Yeah, and if an early Christian managed to live 10 centuries I'm pretty sure he'd say how fucking awesome it is that we converted all the heathens. Most of what he's saying sounds pretty copey.

Most of what he's saying sounds pretty copey.

After everything that happened, most of what he says sounds superhumanly calm and level headed, looking to the future instead of past grudges.

Loren Balhorn: When you met people, didn’t you often ask yourself if they had been Nazis?

Theodor Bergmann: I knew that about some people. Professor Röhm, he was the rector for the anniversary in 1968, 150 years of Hohenheim. He said to me: “Mr Bergmann, I was foolish. My wife was smarter. I was foolish, but I’m not a Nazi anymore.” I can understand that: “I learned.”

Loren Balhorn: You can accept that? That was enough for you?

Theodor Bergmann: That was enough for me, yes. I can’t say “you’re guilty forever”. The people didn’t know any better. He’s from a small village, the village was full of Nazis. “But my wife was smarter,” he said. I accept that.

I don’t believe in collective guilt! There were Nazis and there were others. I have nothing to do with the Nazis, but I’m in solidarity with the others. We’re trying to do something better.

I know communism includes some crazy utopians thinking the oceans will turn to lemonade,

Charles Fourier wasn’t technically a communist, he was a different, unrelated branch of utopian socialist.

Communism as a technical term refers to the end state of history predicted by Marx. This end state doesn’t happen to exist, ofc, but there is a reason that the Soviet Union did not claim to be a communist regime. Thé Leninist idea was a departure from orthodox Marxism(which held that this end state will just happen after a series of events that were falsified in the Victorian era- more of a prophecy than a policy plan) in that it held socialism could be directed into a communist society- this of course didn't happen, because communist societies are, it bears repeating, not real, but still, thé idea was to reach a wild eyed utopian project even if for the time being quite a number of concessions need to be made to practicality.

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