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let's try doing good things
Last time we tried to do good things 10 billion died is that what you want?
fuck i guess we gotta do bad things because it's the lesser evil to good thingsActually I've been reliably told there is zero difference between good and bad things. Reliable sources.
A right to healthcare and an education!
THE HORROR! THE HORROR!This is that fartknocker that wrote “American Marxism”, which surprise surprise didn’t contain any evidence that he even understood the basics of Marxism. I know because I scanned through it one afternoon because my dad had it lying around the house (his Sunday school men’s group was reading it….)
Edit: ok I watched some of the video. He’s doing the thing that goes back to at least Hayek. Specifically, that we can’t have nice things and the government is unable to do nice things because of LaWs oF eCoNoMiCs. So anyone who is pushing for like, paid family leave, is a dumdum who doesn’t understand bAsIc eCoNoMiCs.
I don't think he's even being as generous or sophisticated as "the government is unable to do nice things because of LaWs oF eCoNoMiCs", really. The guy's rhetoric sounds to me more like "these nice things may sound nice to you, but actually they are complete lies which those city-slicker commie liberals tell us honest god-fearing folks to get into power and once in office they'll take do all the bad things that we don't like (i.e. the same bipartisan neoliberal and neoimperial policies with a trendy new "progressive" veneer instead of good old-fashioned American flag aesthetics) instead of any of these good things which they promised".
edit: Which isn't better, I guess, but kinda interesting as an illustration of how while the two US ruling parties want effectively the same things policy-wise, Republicans operate with the assumption that Democrats are always acting in bad faith/with treasonous intent.
How is this asshole so angry about this? He's like, equal rights for women!? That's commie shit!! What a lunatic!
Fun 10 seconds out of context at 5:44
Stalin was a...communist dictator who killed 10s of millions of people; none of that happened!
this is briliant , you can even here the handlers calling in the backround ...
the game here was that the constitution sounds good but was not real, that it was a lie sold to the soviet people and symbolic of their hypocrisy.
and the failure of the soviet state to make those outlined rights real was a genuine failing of the Soviet government.
We will one day talk about the American constitution with almost identical words, except it will be correct.
the USSR's revolution didn't. though the diagnostics for what exactly in the practice was incorrect is necessarily speculative.
i tend to view the USSR, imperfect as it was, in light of the following:
- in contrast with what came before it, i.e. antisemitic reactionary patriarchal semi-feudal tsarist autocracy, to which it was superior in every way
- in the light of it being the 1st country to have a successful proletarian revolution that lasted longer than a year (1871's Paris Commune did not last a year)
- in the light of it happening against the backdrop of WW1
- in the light of it being born out of a brutal civil war that immediately followed WW1
- in the light of it happening in a country that was mostly peasant, and not proletarian
- in the light of it happening in a country that had not yet even fully industrialized, and a country where much of means of production were destroyed in the two largest wars in human history
- in the light of it being attacked by the international bourgeoisie for the entirety of its existence, from the coalition of 14 nations that invaded it immediately after the october revolution, to the attempted genocide against the soviet peoples carried out by the Nazi fascists in operation barbarossa (with the nudging and winking of the bourgeoisie in what would later become NATO countries), to the arms race that claimed much of their GDP during the cold war years, to the couping of their allies in the global south, to the arming training and funding of reactionaries against their allies in bordering nations (like operation cyclone) to the massive support of the Yeltsinite reactionary privatizations carried out immediately after it was illegally dissolved in a bourgeois coup in 1991
Marxism is, among other things, the ruthless criticism of all that exists, so I welcome constructive criticism of the USSR, but I also defend it as ultimately a positive thing. It made the bourgeoisie of the world seethe for a reason, and they plotted every single day for its undermining or eventual destruction between 1917 and 1991, including when they were ostensibly allies against Hitler.
i said the difference between soviet practice and de jure law was an error. and that people were getting the point of the segment backward. it's not a general condemnation of the soviet union.
and for being the most experimental and failed, the USSR occupies a unique historical position for education and correction.
