Roger Waters - Comfortably Numb, Bad Empanada - Confident and Dumb

  • TrashCompact [none/use name]
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    2 years ago

    Russia is not AES. It's part of the anti-imperialist bloc, but that doesn't make it socialist at all and literally no one here would assert that it is. Not caring about Russia but also opposing western intervention is a perfectly fine position. Viewing Putin as a mafioso and Russia as a plutocracy (like all liberal democracies) that is only a member of the new eastern bloc for opportunistic reasons is likewise perfectly compatible.

    AES doesn't gatekeep what counts as socialism any more than reality does. Little anarchist communes are also AES, they are just politically unimportant most of the time (beyond their local communities) by their very nature, though historically there have been important ones and there may be more in the future.

    "AES" is used to distinguish between supporting socialism as a living project and supporting "socialism" as something that "has never been tried" and only exists in the (imagined) future.

    • Venusta [any]
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      2 years ago

      the term literally wasn't though, look into it's original derivation, it was made by the Breznev government (originally called real socialism) to quash criticism in the eastern bloc for people who started wondering whether Mao's system might be a better approach for them who disagreed with self evidently revisionist policies, you may use it that way, but the reason it was invented was to gatekeep definitions of socialism so the only real socialism was the :ussr-cry: specfically after Stalin USSR

      • TrashCompact [none/use name]
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        2 years ago

        Today it is also used to describe SWCC, whatever we might say about that historical usage. If you go look somewhere like GZD, which you identified as aligning with AES spaces, they do use the term for the Mao-era PRC as well as many other places like Cuba and Vietnam.

    • Venusta [any]
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      2 years ago
      CW mildy hostile, I'm sorry

      supporting “socialism” as something that “has never been tried” and only exists in the (imagined) future

      this is literally untrue you just have never looked up the original usage, the textbook definition would not apply to any anarchist commune or maoist insurgency or whatever else