-_-
Link so y'all don't call me a lib again.
They also like V*ush. Think "eat the rich" is a metaphor for taxation. And say Tankies turned them from Anarcho-Communist to a Neoliberal. Think the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact meant the Soviet Union was fascist. Like, okay, how fucking twisted do your priorities have to be that you dunk on a state that hasn't existed for 30 fucking years instead of, you know, your own state that is currently involved in who know how many fascist conspiracies. And that's it. I'm not going any deeper into their timeline. I'm too tired.
yes the PLA answers to the party. it's called not getting couped like the USSR did.
Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate? Why did the Communist Party of the Soviet Union fall to pieces? An important reason is that in the ideological domain, competition is fierce! To completely repudiate the historical experience of the Soviet Union, to repudiate the history of the CPSU, to repudiate Lenin, to repudiate Stalin was to wreck chaos in Soviet ideology and engage in historical nihilism. It caused Party organizations at all levels to have barely any function whatsoever. It robbed the Party of its leadership of the military. In the end the CPSU—as great a Party as it was—scattered like a flock of frightened beasts! The Soviet Union—as great a country as it was—shattered into a dozen pieces. This is a lesson from the past!
In recent years there have been a few commentators—both at home and abroad—that have asked if what modern China is doing can really be called socialism. Some have said we have engaged in a sort of “capital socialism;” others have been more straightforward, calling it “state capitalism” or “bureaucratic capitalism.” These labels are completely wrong. We say that socialism with Chinese characteristics is socialism.
Definitely not state capitalism, folks. Nope! See, it's socialism because he says it's socialism.
I don't know how much you've actually read, but the method is governance in China is not very far off from the models laid out by Marx and Lenin.
Both stated that the transitional state between capitalism and socialism would have a lot of similarities to capitalism, but with the important distinction that:
A) "From each according to their ability, to each according to their work" would be one of the guiding principles
B) The transitional state would take the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, or a tool for class oppression directed at the bourgeoisie/capitalists*
C) The length of the transitional state is unknown and will last until it withers away due to not being needed anymore.
*Marx makes it clear that the oppression of the bourgeoisie is not the same as their extermination. The class will be liquidated, and the primary method for that is to abolish private property and bring it all under the control of the state. While they did reintroduce private ownership of factories in 2007, all land is still owned by the state and anyone using it for private reasons pays a ground rent to the state.
Most property in China is still either owned by the state or collectives.
State capitalism would be a step forward as compared with the present state of affairs in our Soviet Republic. If in approximately six months’ time state capitalism became established in our Republic, this would be a great success and a sure guarantee that within a year socialism will have gained a permanently firm hold and will have become invincible in this country. as my sibling commenter said, state capitalism is a stepping stone
that Molotov-Ribbentrop lie is so tiresome, completely historically ignorant
Strangely the people who go on and on about the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact never ever mention the Munich agreement, nor how the western capitalist nations refused Soviet attempts at forging an alliance against the Nazis.
And now we're at it: In 1952 Stalin proposed to reunite Germany, with no conditions on economic system and guarantees for liberal democratic rights. The only condition was that the new united Germany should be neutral.
The Western powers refused. They preferred a US-aligned West Germany.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalin_Note?wprov=sfla1
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/34kpfw/did_stalin_offer_an_alliance_to_the_west_before/cqvxhid?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share&context=3
There were serious talks of an Anglo-French-Soviet alliance against Germany but the British killed it by dragging their feet, forcing the USSR to sign a treaty with Germany to buy time.
Someone posted this excellent article on here a while back: https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/08/26/the-hitler-stalin-pact-of-august-23-1939-myth-and-reality/
I've had the opinion for a while now, that Bernie's attempts to rehabilitate public opinion around socialism have done harm as well as good (but still probably a net improvement)... the rhetoric about socialism for the rich, rugged individualism for the poor just adds to the confusion by conflating socialism with welfare, which only reinforces the reactionary fear mongering around welfare economics without getting people to think about their social relationship to the means of production and all the class interests and contradictions that spill out of that.
I don't see this. A ton of people who started moving left with one of the Bernie campaigns are now farther left than those campaigns. Doesn't that suggest that those campaigns were effective at eventually leading people to a better understanding?
What's a ton, 1000 lbs? So maybe 5-7 grown adults?
If we count people in terms of biomass, yeah, I'm going to say potentially 10s of thousands of tons of people or more are further left now than where his campaign was in 2016-2020, which largely amounted to taxing rich people more to pay for free college and being friends with Joe Biden but having "very different plans."
Leftists did vote as a bloc in 2020, they just didn't vote the way you wanted in the general.
You said leftists did not exert any voice as a voting bloc in 2020. They did -- both during the primary and the general -- they just didn't vote the way you personally would have had them vote in the latter. That's not the absence of a leftist voting bloc; that's you disagreeing with the voting strategy of that bloc.
As for Bernie serving as a sheepdog, "sheepdog" implies there was somewhere else to go. But in a two-party system there isn't anywhere else to go. There was no viable third-party candidate as-is, Bernie wouldn't have been viable had he ran as an independent, and it's reasonable to think (note that this does not mean that you have to agree with it) that him running as an independent would have been worse for the left than him endorsing Biden. He got dealt a shit hand in the primary, and when you get dealt a shit hand the results aren't going to look great even if you play it the best you can.
yeah it does dumbass
This is reddit-tier asshole stuff, and you're not responding to anything I said, anyway. If I say "this is reasonable even if you ultimately disagree with it" and you reply "no it isn't, I disagree with that," we're not really having a conversation.
This is not good detournement.
Also what is your definition of "achieving anything"? According to you has the American left in 50 years "achieved anything?"
not sure if that’s a shitpost or if you don’t quite know what that concept is
It's neither. Just referencing your name buddy.
It's fine to be pessimistic on a macro scale and say nothing has been done on the left since neoliberalism flattened all morality into the accrual of capital. I do mean that, it's absolutely fair. But then why even comment on or debate about any particular political act or "movement" when it all amounts to the same thing for you?
Yes, a ton. Obviously we don't have a mass movement yet, but there are almost 100,000 DSA members now (and the DSA itself gives Bernie a lot of credit for that) and probably two or three times that many people who are to the left of Bernie but unaffiliated (or affiliated with a different org). And they're not just members as a bit -- the DSA has actually put people in federal, state, and local offices. There's something we can work with there, and it's growing.
my local one has 3000 or so members, but their active membership is only around 2-3% of that (60-100 people attend general meetings and/or working groups)
This is good to be mindful of, but it sounds pretty typical of political organizations (it might even be more engagement than most political organizations see). Consider how many Democrats are in your city/county compared to how many show up to any sort of Democratic Party meeting.
I should think these things through a bit more before posting lol.
Let's not get carried away here! Posting from the hip is the only way to fly.
And you're right, the Bernie campaign itself didn't lead people to the left of it. What it did was provide people with an easy first step down the path to leftism, and put them in contact with people who could take them another step, and then another. Getting people even to that position is extremely difficult, so for me the Bernie campaign was an enormous net positive.
More than anything else in the world, the fact that they treat fascism as a socialist concept is one of the most disgusting things the public education system does. Just say you want to funnel anyone with a few IQ points into the nazis, why don't you? Like, they are all like "oh, how scary that they were socialist, that's horrifying and makes them weak" but also "the nazis were so strong we could only barely defeat them with the three strongest nations to ever exist. Also the soviet union was socialist and stronger than the nazis but don;t think about that holodomor 10 billion dead." I honestly have no idea what we were supposed to take from this distorted view of history.
lmfao someone tell this loser that here in murica we make children swear fealty to a fuckin flag
I’m not one to stan China, but calling the CCP fascist is one of the dumbest things I’ve heard in a while.
Also, Vouwstch is a fucking neoliberal shepherd and one of the worst things to happen to American anarchism in recent memory.
If China was actually as bad as they say it is, they'd love it.
Almost makes you wonder what he thinks the American occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan (and South Korea and Germany and Japan) amount to.
First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
-The opening section of Martin Niemöller's 'First They Came...' that gets conveniently erased for western audiences.
It's a good thing that actions like that don't shape political understanding in the present.
:agony-soviet:
I'm gonna just go with my get out of jail free card to protect my brain of "this person is no older than 13 years old".
i can't do it. i read the first two sentences of that and just gave up. i hate how big of an influence these wannabe feds are on the internet. but i mean every quarter-generation or so on the internet has horrible influencers like this, it's like some internet law or something idk
