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This critic could be made to part of academia too, discussing communism in Ivory towers never leaving there.
It retreated to academia because it was one of the only places, in America at least, where disseminating Marxism didn't put you on a blacklist. Even then...
What's funny about this is that keeping Marxism and communism out of the national conversation for so long means that the kids don't remember the arguments against it.
I have a curious question: how do you guys view towards CCP leaders Chairman Mao, Deng Xiaoping and Xi Jinping? In China, people only consider Mao as a "true communist" in their heart.
Do you guys consider CCP leaders are "socialists" or "communists"? Who is the closest one to count as a socialist among these three? It's interesting to see some outsider's opinions.
Do you guys consider CCP leaders are "socialists" or "communists"? Who is the closest one to count as a socialist among these three? It's interesting to see some outsider's opinions.
I'll respond when I have more time and am not day drinking.
There are good things about Mao that are overshadowed by terrible implementation, Stalinist appropriation, his inability to truly break with the Staye, and his absolute terrible right wing turn towards the end.
Deng and Xi Baba are Capitalist readers through and trough and through.
Some reading material.
massline.org/SingleSpark/Mexico/ContribConfusion-Eng.htm
There are good things about Mao that are overshadowed by terrible implementation, Stalinist appropriation, his inability to truly break with the Staye, and his absolute terrible right wing turn towards the end.
Deng and Xi Baba are Capitalist readers through and trough and through.
Some reading material.
massline.org/SingleSpark/Mexico/ContribConfusion-Eng.htm
This is about where I'm at. Also, if you read pamphlets like "Combat Liberalism" that he wrote, it tends to become plain that he always tended to attack the character of his opponents rather than their ideology. Did you know that liberals are bad because they're lazy and gossip, not because capitalism is a broken way of life? Thanks, Chairman! I cannot stand shit like that, because it lends itself so well to authoritarian movements as a whole. Demonizing and othering is a tempting basis for political discourse, because it's easy, but tribalism hardly ever seems to come without centralization and hierarchy becoming an end result, since once you abandon ideology as your basis for discourse all you're left with is a cult of personality around some nucleus of individuals. I would argue that this tendency within Mao (yes, as a person) is fundamentally why he ended up with so, so, so much blood on his hands.
The revolutionary character is replaced with one of social mobility and hierarchy through "proper behavior" and not emancipation.
http://www.kon.org/urc/v8/plowright.html
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I think pretty much everyone would agree that Mao was the one who most had the "heart of a revolutionary" but he did so much crazy awful shit that it's hard to be sympathetic. He did have a pretty keen understanding of how to mobilize the masses in the context of 20th century China though.
Deng is responsible for the return to blatant capitalism but I don't think he meant to be a "traitor". I think after the tumult of the Maoist period he made a pretty logical determination that China had to follow an NEP type policy to get on stable ground. Doesn't excuse him being a capitalist roader instead of trying to transition to a democratic, worker based system but I don't think it was purely opportunism.
Xi is just a blatant nationalist without any real commitment to socialism.
Deng is responsible for the return to blatant capitalism but I don't think he meant to be a "traitor". I think after the tumult of the Maoist period he made a pretty logical determination that China had to follow an NEP type policy to get on stable ground. Doesn't excuse him being a capitalist roader instead of trying to transition to a democratic, worker based system but I don't think it was purely opportunism.
Xi is just a blatant nationalist without any real commitment to socialism.
The Great Leap Forward is...understandable, in the sense that its terrible consequences were a result of tremendous ambition. That doesn't make those consequences less terrible, but it must be considered separately, to me, from the Cultural Revolution which was just more violent instantiation of the iron grip of the state
Xi's vision for China is pretty evidently at this point what I've come to call "nationalist feudalism", which both genuinely is interested in the elevation of China and the Han Chinese people and their standards of living and presence on the global stage while also firmly cementing a tiny class of hyper-elites who, through control of the government, also owns and controls enormous swathes of productive property
Xi's vision for China is pretty evidently at this point what I've come to call "nationalist feudalism", which both genuinely is interested in the elevation of China and the Han Chinese people and their standards of living and presence on the global stage while also firmly cementing a tiny class of hyper-elites who, through control of the government, also owns and controls enormous swathes of productive property
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So! How 'bout that fuckin' thread about millenials hedging their bets on capitalism being over, huh! That was quite the thread. Again. Phweeeeeeeeeee
Someday, hopefully, we'll get over the meme that socialists are entitled and all socialism is a centrally-planned economy with no charter of human rights. But today sure fuckin' seem like that day, huh, guys.
Someday, hopefully, we'll get over the meme that socialists are entitled and all socialism is a centrally-planned economy with no charter of human rights. But today sure fuckin' seem like that day, huh, guys.
Not that bad this time. Just more "capitalism is great compared to all those nasty nasty communist ideologies that killed so many people. And all these entitled guys wanting the nanny state to come save them... *tsk tsk tsk.*"
People insisting that I'm doing something wrong because I can't find a job despite being an engineer. That kinda thing.
Uggghhh. Well at least we weren't called Nazis this time. For a change.
Damn. I'm really sorry to hear that. Hope you're able to find something soon.
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Afrin fell to Turkish allied forces yesterday.
https://sg.news.yahoo.com/pro-turkish-forces-pillage-afrin-taking-syrian-city-195451166.html
https://sg.news.yahoo.com/pro-turkish-forces-pillage-afrin-taking-syrian-city-195451166.html
http://www.progressive-economics.ca/2018/03/18/inequality-redistribution-in-canada-update/
Recently the Canadian federal government has increased the amount of redistribution a little bit with increases to the Canada Workers Benefit and the Canada Child Benefit. The provinces of British Columbia, Alberta, and Ontario are bringing in $15 minimum wages (those 3 provinces making up a majority of the population). So some progress on both fronts, but nothing that would bring us in line with the Nordics.
My take away from this is that the most promising avenue to reducing inequality in the US is through healthcare, education and minimum wages rather than straight redistribution, matching the Canadian model.
Recently the Canadian federal government has increased the amount of redistribution a little bit with increases to the Canada Workers Benefit and the Canada Child Benefit. The provinces of British Columbia, Alberta, and Ontario are bringing in $15 minimum wages (those 3 provinces making up a majority of the population). So some progress on both fronts, but nothing that would bring us in line with the Nordics.
My take away from this is that the most promising avenue to reducing inequality in the US is through healthcare, education and minimum wages rather than straight redistribution, matching the Canadian model.
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Eh. I dunno. I feel like a 100% inheritance tax and a 100% income tax on those with an income of, like... ten million dollars or more would be beneficial too as a prophylactic measure against regulatory capture which would continue to dismantle these institutions, as a supplement to the introduction of minimum wage increase, healthcare improvements, and possibly housing subsidies.
But that's talking more social democracy and democratic socialism.
But that's talking more social democracy and democratic socialism.
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Getting single payer, or at least even a public option, in the US and fixing the absolutely broken education system would do wonders for sure. We seem to finally be making progress on the healthcare front in terms of the Dems lining up behind UHC but education is a disaster due to the way that it's locally controlled at a pre-college level; college and beyond are themselves a whole 'nother disaster with the student debt crisis and the way that secondary education institutions are becoming subsumed to the market above all else at this point.
Mr. Mike, what is the traditional explanation for Canada's relatively low market inequality? Is it the relatively high amount of highly-educated/skilled immigrants?
Local school control is sort of real in the sense that the federal government can't directly legislate on it, but what it can do is set standards and then tell states that if those standards aren't implemented they won't get money to build highways, which is basically the same thing. Obama barely needed any money to push his horrible charter school agenda and obviously Bush passed through similarly terrible education reform with NCLB.
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There's that, but I was thinking more about the local level fuckery that stills happens like science class teachers treating evolution and creationism on an equal level and the way that school boards influence curricula and textbooks.
I could be wrong but I'm pretty sure a lot of this can still be mandated by the state government. There's a big battle going on right now in Idaho over whether or not to include any sort of climate change education in the curriculum and even my ass-backwards reactionary hometown where both science teachers were Mormons ended up teaching evolution, I assume because it was state-mandated. I'm pretty sure an aggressively progressive legislature could use cross-cutting regulation to unfuck a lot of our primary and secondary education, it would just require Democrats to have a spine, so it will never happen.
This is one of the right things to do if we are going to try to reform current systems, but it also feels like something that's never going to have popular support unless you suddenly achieve the sort of class conflict awareness that would allow for much greater change. Like, when you're at the point where 100% income taxes aren't getting laughed off of the stage you can probably do even more
iirc FDR (not even a social democrat really) wanted a 100% income tax and had to get haggled down to 94% or whatever it was at its peak.
obviously the New Deal shouldn't be the limit of our imagination even if you're a succdem like me but damn imagine how cool it would be to have a president talk like this
obviously the New Deal shouldn't be the limit of our imagination even if you're a succdem like me but damn imagine how cool it would be to have a president talk like this
The high proportion of highly-educated immigrants is probably a part of it. But also I think schooling in Canada is a lot more equal, with basically every school being fine to good (with the notable exception of remote and/or Indigenous communities). At the post-secondary level we don't really have any universities that are exceptionally better than others in Canada like the Ivy League is in the US (well, maybe Waterloo for Computer Science), and pretty much all of them are good. Also we have really high tertiary education attainment rates, higher than countries with free education (although we do have a lot of grants for students and tuition is much cheaper).
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"New Deal"ism isn't really workable. The conditions that made it a thing are well into the past and not repeatable.
Yeah even as a social democrat/democratic socialist I don't really think the New Deal should be the model or goal going forward, outside of maybe some particularly successful programs. At the same time, having even a single party leader willing to voice any sort of class conflict, even if ultimately only a liberal kind, is something that is pretty hard to imagine now.
But obviously it's bourgeois electoral politics or whatever.
You guys are more rational and informative than many Chinese people I talk to.Thank you guys so much for the :replies, really appreciate your guys' answers!
Not only that, but FDR should be a real lesson on why anything short of dismantling private ownership will fall short. Concessions when capitalism is weak go away when it regains strength. I'm embarrassed that this realization came to me in my forties and not sooner.
Another thing I constantly bring up when Democrats and even "progressives" punch left is that FDR only wrangled those concessions by threatening capitalists with the very real spectre of a strong Communist movement in the United States.
Saw this funny picture on China social media. The subtitles said" the Corn is holding Khrushchev."
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Saw this funny picture on China social media. The subtitles said" the Corn is holding Khrushchev."
I'm in love
Hi guys,
With the recent discussion on The Great Leap Forward, what do you think of the thesis that Mao only went with it because the numbers his people gave him made it seem possible with no real consequences.
That the blame should be on the party and not him.
I want to read if you have something to say about this.
With the recent discussion on The Great Leap Forward, what do you think of the thesis that Mao only went with it because the numbers his people gave him made it seem possible with no real consequences.
That the blame should be on the party and not him.
I want to read if you have something to say about this.
https://joeyh.name/blog/entry/prove_you_are_not_an_Evil_corporate_person/
The economic status quo is playing a precarious game where they are more than happy to reap the great abundance provided by these leviathan corporations, in innovations and widespread efficiency, while letting them become unconscionably powerful.
I don't really trust government. But I know I trust Google less.
France strike against macron
https
://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/strikes-in-france-disrupt-rail-air-service-in-opening-shot-against-macrons-labor-plans/2018/03/22/ba0b1abe-8a69-4729-90c9-bd94d839f60c_story.html?utm_term=.4ebc1f607550
I readed 480.000 in another site not in english
https
://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/strikes-in-france-disrupt-rail-air-service-in-opening-shot-against-macrons-labor-plans/2018/03/22/ba0b1abe-8a69-4729-90c9-bd94d839f60c_story.html?utm_term=.4ebc1f607550
I readed 480.000 in another site not in english
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Do you have any more information on that? Certainly Mao wasn't the only one responsible - one man does not make history - but it's always been my understanding that collectivization of agriculture was long a goal of his in contrast to others in the party who wanted a more gradual approach, and he pushed for a lot of the wacky stuff like the backyard furnaces. If he was making decisions during the course of the GLF based D on bad data provided by lower levels, it was partly because officials were inflating the numbers to please him and their other superiors for fear of being punished for failing to meet targets.
Guys, I been thinkin'. Do you think maybe we should have a thread on Etcetera covering misconceptions about socialism? I'd do it myself but, yunno, junior. Whenever someone makes a thread critiquing capitalism or promoting socialist solutions to the problems of our age, a ssssiiiiiigniiiiiiificant quantity of time is spent refuting the same goddamn ridiculous points over and over again, mostly founded on misconceptions about the current beliefs of socialism. So I was thinking maybe we should make a thread focused specifically on misconceptions people have, that can be used as a reference. Like at the top of our thread we could have a brightly colored line that says "HEY, DUDE, MAKE SURE YOU KNOW YOUR SHIT BEFORE YOU GET IN HERE WITH THE HELP OF THIS THREAD." We could keep it from getting buried in the churn by advertising it as a sort of "test yourself!" thing, yunno? D'you know as much as you think you do about socialism? Fuck, we could even make a Google Forms quiz thing about it and then discuss the answers.
I'm talking about it here so maybe we can do some brainstorming on common misconceptions people have about socialism that you regularly encounter. Here's a few I frequently come up against:
-Socialism demands forms of violent revolution.
-Socialism means you don't get to have personal possessions.
-Socialism for sure means that you need to get rid of the free market.
-Socialism requires a strongman or vanguard.
-Socialism and anarchism are vastly different movements.
-Socialism is an majority-atheist, or even wholly atheistic movement.
-Socialist thought has no antecedents prior to Marx.
-Major socialist thinkers post-Marx tended to either excuse mass murderers or be mass murderers themselves. (I've only encountered this one through inference, I guess, where people just aren't aware that most socialists a) aren't fuckin' tankies and b) have ideas not made by fuckin' tankies)
Are there any other misconceptions you guys regularly encounter?
If you guys think this kind of thread is a good idea, let me know. But please, don't just go off and post it all on your lonesome. Let's work together on it. Collective action, yunno?
I'm talking about it here so maybe we can do some brainstorming on common misconceptions people have about socialism that you regularly encounter. Here's a few I frequently come up against:
-Socialism demands forms of violent revolution.
-Socialism means you don't get to have personal possessions.
-Socialism for sure means that you need to get rid of the free market.
-Socialism requires a strongman or vanguard.
-Socialism and anarchism are vastly different movements.
-Socialism is an majority-atheist, or even wholly atheistic movement.
-Socialist thought has no antecedents prior to Marx.
-Major socialist thinkers post-Marx tended to either excuse mass murderers or be mass murderers themselves. (I've only encountered this one through inference, I guess, where people just aren't aware that most socialists a) aren't fuckin' tankies and b) have ideas not made by fuckin' tankies)
Are there any other misconceptions you guys regularly encounter?
If you guys think this kind of thread is a good idea, let me know. But please, don't just go off and post it all on your lonesome. Let's work together on it. Collective action, yunno?
Thats a tough Job, i dont feel that i would have the patience to deal with trolls and anti-communists, so i Will not participate in the thread because i would be pissed, and i realized i'm not good dealing with that stuff. It would be bad for the thread in the end. Its a good idea, but thats a herculean Job, and you need the patience of a monk be prepared. Good Luck to you and who Will Help, may the dialectical materialism be with you.
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I made a post.
https://www.resetera.com/posts/5954268/
No offense to anyone here, but I don't think anyone on this forum can really adequately define it in any regard for people who might be curious. And now I'll contradict myself by commenting on the following:
-Socialism demands forms of violent revolution.
'Violence is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one'
-Socialism for sure means that you need to get rid of the free market.
It's the destruction of the market in all of its forms.
-Socialism requires a strongman or vanguard.
It does.
-Socialism and anarchism are vastly different movements.
They are.
-Socialism is an majority-atheist, or even wholly atheistic movement.
No, only the intelligentsia pretending to be socialists espouse that.
-Socialist thought has no antecedents prior to Marx.
There's no such thing as "Socialist Thought".
-Major socialist thinkers post-Marx tended to either excuse mass murderers or be mass murderers themselves. (I've only encountered this one through inference, I guess, where people just aren't aware that most socialists a) aren't fuckin' tankies and b) have ideas not made by fuckin' tankies)
The first bullet point about Violence applies here. Both China and Russia would have experienced significant violence even without Lenin, Mao, Stalin, etc, as they were societies struggling with advancing to the next phase of life.
That Socialism is an ideology, that it is something you can "identify" as, that it is compatible with the State, that it can mix with capitalism, that markets will exist within it, that it requires *insert Utopian behavior here*, that it is the solution to Racism/Sexism/Bigotry/etc.
Mao was under no illusions of consequences and I don't know what you mean by "the numbers of his people". The Chinese countryside was the victim of incredibly one sided economic investment and growth within the city and by private, foreign, institutions. The GLF was an attempt to liberate the countryside from the total control of commodity by a "bourgeois elite" that existed only within the affluent coastal cities. It was a reaction against the Stalinist solidification of the Peasant/Proletarian divide and an attempt to break from Stalinism and the Stalinist wing of the Party. Its failure lead to the Cultural Revolution a decade later.
https://www.resetera.com/posts/5954268/
No offense to anyone here, but I don't think anyone on this forum can really adequately define it in any regard for people who might be curious. And now I'll contradict myself by commenting on the following:
-Socialism demands forms of violent revolution.
'Violence is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one'
-Socialism for sure means that you need to get rid of the free market.
It's the destruction of the market in all of its forms.
-Socialism requires a strongman or vanguard.
It does.
-Socialism and anarchism are vastly different movements.
They are.
-Socialism is an majority-atheist, or even wholly atheistic movement.
No, only the intelligentsia pretending to be socialists espouse that.
-Socialist thought has no antecedents prior to Marx.
There's no such thing as "Socialist Thought".
-Major socialist thinkers post-Marx tended to either excuse mass murderers or be mass murderers themselves. (I've only encountered this one through inference, I guess, where people just aren't aware that most socialists a) aren't fuckin' tankies and b) have ideas not made by fuckin' tankies)
The first bullet point about Violence applies here. Both China and Russia would have experienced significant violence even without Lenin, Mao, Stalin, etc, as they were societies struggling with advancing to the next phase of life.
That Socialism is an ideology, that it is something you can "identify" as, that it is compatible with the State, that it can mix with capitalism, that markets will exist within it, that it requires *insert Utopian behavior here*, that it is the solution to Racism/Sexism/Bigotry/etc.
Mao was under no illusions of consequences and I don't know what you mean by "the numbers of his people". The Chinese countryside was the victim of incredibly one sided economic investment and growth within the city and by private, foreign, institutions. The GLF was an attempt to liberate the countryside from the total control of commodity by a "bourgeois elite" that existed only within the affluent coastal cities. It was a reaction against the Stalinist solidification of the Peasant/Proletarian divide and an attempt to break from Stalinism and the Stalinist wing of the Party. Its failure lead to the Cultural Revolution a decade later.
I know Marx used ideology using the bad definition, but thats not the only one, depending of the meaning of the word you are using socialism can be considered an ideology.
But i dont think thats something Worth fighting.
But i dont think thats something Worth fighting.
It's not an ideology because it isn't something that can be concretely defined and implemented. It can't be built. "Building Socialism" is was a motivator for Stalinism, not a liberator of the working class.
Capitalism isn't an ideology and neither is Socialism. Capitalism changes constantly, how we relate to it and how it generates profit. If Capitalism were a specific ideology to be implemented then you just end up with immobile and unreformable monolithic organizations like the Stalinist state capitalism.
Capitalism isn't an ideology and neither is Socialism. Capitalism changes constantly, how we relate to it and how it generates profit. If Capitalism were a specific ideology to be implemented then you just end up with immobile and unreformable monolithic organizations like the Stalinist state capitalism.
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Just because it's rooted in material causes doesn't mean it's not an ideology. Materialism is itself an ideology.
There's a few other places where you're passing off a personal opinion as a definitive definition up above as well. Resisting identity politics, for instance, doesn't mean that a proleteriat that's self-aware wouldn't identity as proletarian. It's not identity politics because it's based in material conditions, but it still exists as an identity.
Thanks for your reply, House of Lightning! I was actually looking for commentary like this (as well as, yunno, more misconceptions, but what can you do. One thing at a time, eh?). While I agree that probably nobody here is really qualified to describe socialism for everybody, we are still socialists and we can at least represent and clarify what our own positions are when presenting an argument to Etcetera at large, so I think my idea might still be worthwhile.
That being said, I'm now gonna comment on your commentary.
Well, yeah, exactly. Violence isn't inherent to socialism so much as it's inherent to radical paradigm shifts. So socialism doesn't advocate for violence, and makes no impositions on the specifics of that violence or its volume, and the specifics of
Precisely my point in the first bullet point, actually. The violence wasn't a feature exclusive to socialists-- and socialists today don't stand by the violence committed by the socialists of the past. With this misconception I'm mostly arguing against people like that guy who thought I wanted a strongman like Mao to come take the guns away, if you remember that fuckin'... disaster. It also brings a light to peacetime figures who didn't try to promote the violence of certain regimes. Yunno, like Bookchin. Discussing African socialist movements and what happened to them might be appropriate here as well.
That being said, I'm now gonna comment on your commentary.
Well, yeah, exactly. Violence isn't inherent to socialism so much as it's inherent to radical paradigm shifts. So socialism doesn't advocate for violence, and makes no impositions on the specifics of that violence or its volume, and the specifics of
What about libertarian socialists? They tend to be not-wholly discredited by the rest of the movement at large, right?
Well, it does require a vanguard in the sense of "group that gets the ball rolling and actually understands what socialism is," but not in the sense of "a bunch of people make unilateral decisions for society at large." See my whole Bookchin-loving thing.
Define "vastly," I guess. This is more of a "Yes, and" situation. Because for one, you have to distinguish between ancaps and every other flavor of anarchist. This is actually the context in which I frame anarchist and socialist movements as more similar than they are distinct. We've got guys like Bookchin who switch without really having to change their ideas nearly at all, just the label and circles in which they run. You've got people like me and some of my friends who identify strongly with both movements and try to coordinate with both. You've got a mutual geographical/historical coincidence in figures like Marx and Stirner, a basis that is either revolutionary or permuted from such, and an end-goal of abolishing the state.
Well yeah. This is an excuse to introduce people to dudes like Tolstoy, or how liberation theology intersects with socialism. Weren't the Sandinistas an explicitly Christian movement as well, or am I misremembering? It's also a good place to commemorate the Islamic communist movements that were sadly quashed-- most people aren't aware of these movements.
There are people who are socialists, and they are occasionally known to think. I dunno about that. My intent with this misconception is to describe how the antecedents of communalism had influences on socialist thought, and how thinkers within Marx's lifetime like those in the Paris Commune who might have been inspired by him but were ideologically distinct from him can and do influence communist thoughts.
Precisely my point in the first bullet point, actually. The violence wasn't a feature exclusive to socialists-- and socialists today don't stand by the violence committed by the socialists of the past. With this misconception I'm mostly arguing against people like that guy who thought I wanted a strongman like Mao to come take the guns away, if you remember that fuckin'... disaster. It also brings a light to peacetime figures who didn't try to promote the violence of certain regimes. Yunno, like Bookchin. Discussing African socialist movements and what happened to them might be appropriate here as well.
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Well, if we want to simply use the Wiki definition of Libertarian Socialism:
Libertarian socialism (or socialist libertarianism) is a group of anti-authoritarianpolitical philosophies inside the socialist movement that rejects socialism as centralized state ownership and control of the economy.
Socialism supersedes an economy, a state, and centralization. So if we want to roll with that as a general idea, I don't see why they would be discredited as that's a pretty solid basis for a post state, post ownership, post capital society.
The issue with anarchism is that, as a whole, the movement is focused on the destruction of hierarchy and not the destruction of capital or the actual social revolution of man kind. If your politics are similar to the above "Libertarian Socialist" but you call yourself an Anarchist then it is a moot point. The content of your political outcome trumps the form of it. Behavior trumps what you choose to call yourself.
It is inconsequential. "Religion is the opiate of the masses" was taken so wildly out of context and weaponized that it's saddening. There is much to be said about religion being a reactionary and conservative political movement, and that political movement itself will need to be cast off along with every other "traditional" political structure, but that doesn't mean people aren't free to believe what they want to believe. Religion existed along side primitive communism and religious beliefs are, largely, separate from society's production.
We can presuppose a Socialist society all day, but how silly would our world be if Capitalism in 2018 merely came to reflect the imagination of a feudal serf in the 1200s? The modern credit slash gig slash gift slash advertising slash etc economy of today is simply a completely alien and infeasible concept to a human of a different epoch in time.
What about them is anything other than a historical curiosity at this point? What should we talk about when we discuss the Khrushchevist/Stalinist State Capitalism that was the Congo, Angola, Benin, Ethiopia, Somalia, or Mozambique? Their rise and fall all aligned in similar fashion, with similar goals, and similar failure.