So: start organising to fight fascism immediately. We’ve been saying this for years: you don’t fight fascism at the urns. Unionize, make collective grassroots power, read leftist theory (the only ones who managed to stop fascism in the last century).
May do? More like continually does
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ROFL. George Floyd is one of the few good examples of popular mobilisation in the US and you’re using it somehow as a point of how it’s bad to protest???
America as we know it, may be over
Stop. I can only get so hard
The war in Ukraine is about to end
Damn, if only we had listened to the people calling for a negotiated peace since the first moment instead of calling them Putin bots…
NATO might disband
As a western European, I fucking wish, but you’re too hopeful for that. NATO is exclusively a force for evil, and the only interventions that it’s carried out are the bombing of Yugoslavia and the bombing of Libya, the latter resulting in a decade of civil wars that destroyed the formerly most prosperous country in Africa. Extraofficially (not technically NATO), also the invasion of Iraq. How is literally any of that good.
100 years of authoritarianism
The US has never been anything different from that. It’s based on the genocide of natives, on slavery of imported Africans, and the decisions made at the government are consistently against the will and the interests of the majority.
Down with the US empire
Wait, you think the US has had independent media at any time?
Not really, and I say this being a communist myself. Capitalism just requires to extract the maximum profit from the capital investment, sometimes it leads to what you said, sometimes it leads to the opposite (e.g. no difference between i5 1st gen and i5 8th gen)
Funnily enough, I’m Spanish and the meme is somehow also accurate here?
If you don’t wanna be insulted, don’t simp for the oppressors. I’d insult you if you said “I love absolutist monarchy!”
Why no mention to the democratic participation in Cuba in your response?
Who do you think makes such decisions in a capitalist context?
Markets make those decisions in a capitalist context, surely not a committee of experts consulting the unions.
According to Worshiping Power by Peter Gelderloos, decentralized structures have an advantage in self-defense but a disadvantage beyond their base territory. That’s why both the Spanish Civil War and the Makhnovshchina were lost once the popular front strategy were implemented.
I’d have to read that book to give an actual answer to why that analysis is made. My point is that the coup was allowed to happen to that degree in the first place due to the failure of anarchists of arming the working class and stewarding it against the increasing threat of fascism.
Once everything belongs to the state, it really belongs to those who rule the state.
Again, not that easy. Khruschev didn’t decide that the iron in the factory #3 would be used in the steel beam factory #7. The planning of the productive forces was an incredibly complex process in which thousands of bureaucrats union members were involved. Calling that amalgam of workers an “owning class”, especially when they’re not extracting surplus value at all from the workers seems a big stretch to me.
Centralism is never democratic.
The fact that the USSR wasn’t as democratic as ideal, doesn’t mean that the existence of a state can’t be democratic. “Centralism” is an umbrella term covering many different possibilities of governance, and a single party ruled by elected leaders of worker councils is a recipe of some sort of centralism that can provide a very reasonable degree of democracy. I’m not arguing this was the case for the USSR. If you want to read on a practical case of the existence of democracy within a Marxist-Leninist single-party regime, I recommend you have a look at a book called “How the worker’s parliaments saved the Cuban revolution”, from Pedro Ross, which describes this exact form of functioning of back and forth between the central government and the worker councils in which millions of Cubans participated to overcome the worst consequences of the “periodo especial” after the illegal and antidemocratic dissolution of the USSR.
I myself am from a country with a rich history of anarchism in the 20th century: Spain. By the 1930s, the CNT, a union of workers which proposed some sort of anarcho-syndicalism (which I bet you’d be happy to agree is a good method of governance), had more than a million members, which for the population of the country at the time was absolutely huge. The lack of centralization of sorts initially among the leftists, and their consequent weakness to respond to threats, is actually the very reason why fascism could trump the democratic government in many places of the country and destroy this anarchist movement and all social progress for the following 40 years. Funnily enough, the dictatorial USSR was the only country which assisted the republicans in their civil war against fascism, other than the admittedly heroic volunteer corps from the brigadas internacionales.
Nobody in their sane minds argues that there wasn’t overbureaucratisation in the USSR. That’s a well established truth. The question is, if people aren’t only allowed but encouraged to join the party, and if there’s no exploitation of the working class, what’s the argument to suggest that the “bureaucrats were the new owning class”
Id rather wait for you to answer my comment instead of deflecting
Ok, so in the USSR, the country with no exploitation of labor and which promoted membership of party and unions, the owning class was the working class, right? Or are you gonna do some mental gymnastics to say it was the politician class?
I wouldn’t say that an American mainstream economist from the mid 20th century is part of the pipeline to radicalization, but sure
communist party
private property owning class
If there’s no exploitation, and if everyone can voluntarily join the communist party and the unions (and is encouraged to do so), how can you say there was an owning class?
John Maynard Keynes isn’t Marxist though
Get yourself the Pinecil V2. It’s cheap, open software and open hardware, works with USB-C so you can power it with a power bank with Quick Charge or Power Delivery, and it works beautifully. The tips are admittedly not cheap, but they’re great because the ceramic element is welded to the metal so the heat is transferred quick and efficiently. Oh, and they sell the spare parts. AFAIK you can get it directly at Pine64’s website, but probably also on Ali.