curmudgeonthefrog [he/him]

  • 35 Posts
  • 358 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: August 14th, 2020

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  • curmudgeonthefrog [he/him]tochapotraphouseasdf
    ·
    17 days ago

    They're probably just trying to be nice. Folks are more likely to listen to what you have to say when your kind and polite and not seeming judgemental. And being nice pushes against this idea of scary communists trying to take everything you own and change everything you like.




  • Probably not, the US skirts the legal definition of a blockade by creating insane hoops to jump through. Countries that want to trade with Cuba can't use the SWIFT banking system, meaning no digital transactions, meaning they literally have to carry the cash with them to the island and back. They have to use ships that can't dock in US ports for 6 months after docking in Cuba (which Cuba having a gdp less than half a percent of US gdp means businesses have no incentive to choose trade with Cuba). And the trade has to be humanitarian, no military applications (but this also applies to medical and tech equipment which US says have "dual purpose"). All that said, there are awesome countries that choose to go through these hoops at significant cost and risk. But it takes a lot of time and planning to setup and get the right permits.



  • Probably the same goal as any ML party: Spread revolutionary ideas to wider audiences, expose contradictions in the bourgeois political system, develop organizational capacity and connect with and educate the masses. The vote number itself can also be helpful as a structure test for self-analysis. Where was PSL successful, what tactics worked, how did that contribute to cadre growing, larger protests, etc.





  • Unions at their core are just all of the workers in a workplace. Sure workers in the US can be reactionary as hell so how do we change that? Well, Lenin talked about unions being schools for communism. They're where the average person can start to gain organizational skills, political training and ultimately state building skills. These are skills no other school in the US will teach you. You take these skills to address the material conditions of the workplace and then you can broaden that to outside the workplace. As socialists we don't get power from capital, we get it from people. If we want any chance of meaningful power in the imperial core, then we need to meet people where they're at in the struggle. Lots of those people are workers struggling in workplaces and unions are the tool we can use to address that.










  • The Fed does the exact same shit it always does. They raise interest rates to discipline labor when it looks like workers have more bargaining power to leverage over profitable businesses. And then they eventually lower interest rates because not doing so would cripple the economy (cuz companies will just downsize, hold their money and not do anything). Inflation has way more to do with energy prices and global supply chains than interest rates.