FunkyStuff [he/him] @ FunkyStuff @hexbear.net

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4 yr. ago

a lot of people think the new pope Leo XIV chose his name in honor of Leo XIII but he actually was giving a subtle nod to Leon Trotsky. That's because he's about to be extremely annoying about China for the next 15 years.

What do you want to happen to the homeless people, then? If the thing the other states are doing is pushing homeless people to California, and you want California to push them elsewhere, where do they end up?

The contradictions of capitalism are universal and inherent to the system. Much the contrary, as soon as the major seats of global financial capital are defeated I don't see why the unwashed masses of the world would wait very long to seize power. As the system currently stands, comprador colonial governments only maintain stability because they can buy weapons and maintain large armies thanks to the imperialist powers.

I'm not an anarchist but in their defense, while anarchism proper has never had lasting success the Zapatistas are much less centralized than other socialist experiments and have taken a lot of inspiration from anarchist principles. Left unity should mean that we take an earnest and good faith approach to learning about what we have in common, not just seizing any opportunity to dunk on the other "team."

Also, even MLism still recognizes that different contradictions demand different approaches. Marx doesn't prescribe a one-size-fits-all approach either. For some revolutions the right move is a guerilla struggle. For others a general strike. For others it's about landless peasants doing protracted struggle. So on and so on.

There still has to be a point where there is a state and then a point where there is not. Are you advocating for seizing control of that state before it seizes to exist, or does your political program want to stay outside of the state until the state stops existing?

But how do you expect people to pick up weapons and fight a revolution without understanding just how horrible capitalists have been to them? I don't think people should be guided by hate, I agree with you there, solidarity is much better than hate as a guiding principle. But the way I see it, people already hate a lot. They hate minorities, the homeless, foreigners, entire foreign states, etc. etc. So the function of our agitating propaganda is to redirect the hate that people feel towards things that haven nothing to do with their oppression into the actual source of their oppression, the capitalist system.

I never said there wouldn't be policy, lol.

Let me put it in other terms. Focusing on just "changing the policy" is like if you were a restaurant and they served you a plate full of sewage and you told your dinner party "ok we really need to make sure we get some better ingredients put in this thing."

I don't think we really disagree here. What I actually support concretely is for workers to have stronger unions that are linked to socialist parties and those socialist parties should build parallel power structures, armed and unarmed alike, that eventually threaten and destroy the capitalist state to replace it with a socialist state. Then that socialist state should tend to the needs of the working class, developing productive forces and redistributing wealth to create better outcomes. That would be done through what you call "beneficial policies." I just think that when you only talk about the "beneficial policy" to a public that's mainly used to hearing about reform rather than revolution it is easily co-opted by social democrats.

I thought when you were talking about fighting for beneficial policy what you meant was running electoral races trying to elect progressive candidates. IMO the better way to describe a revolutionary state is that it's a whole new system with a different structure, it's not just a matter of "policy." Talking purely in terms of policy is missing the forest for the trees.

You never explained what you believe in. You just came here with a kneejerk reaction to the meme that criticizes the way westerners often do want an idiotic peaceful revolution, when we explained why we disagreed with your reaction you have just been on a tirade against "hate" which is deeply anti-materialist. If you agree with the revolutionary agenda then by all means, I'm sorry for dogpiling you, but you shouldn't spend so much energy arguing against people who also agree with you on the broad strokes?

“One of the mistakes which some political analysts make is to think their enemies should be our enemies”

You didn't ever say what makes the dems too far left? Is it the lip service to trans people? Spending a lot of money? DEI?

And if any of those are the reasons, you're not only a coward for burying the lede, but you're also extremely wrong about everything lol

My mind was just flooded with a vision of this condition aggravating very suddenly and the whole country being inundated with updates, which everyone received with applause, and Biden dies Beau is Afraid style with the whole of the world cheering it on.

Jakarta Method

We find that, in 2021, the economies of the global North net-appropriated 826 billion hours of embodied labour from the global South, across all skill levels and sectors. The wage value of this net-appropriated labour was equivalent to €16.9 trillion in Northern prices, accounting for skill level. This appropriation roughly doubles the labour that is available for Northern consumption but drains the South of productive capacity that could be used instead for local human needs and development. Unequal exchange is understood to be driven in part by systematic wage inequalities. We find Southern wages are 87–95% lower than Northern wages for work of equal skill. While Southern workers contribute 90% of the labour that powers the world economy, they receive only 21% of global income.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-49687-y

If your political program isn't based on getting the power to stop imperialism, you're not only complicit, but are stepping on a rake because the methods of imperialism will inevitably come bouncing back to exploit workers in the core.

There's gonna be things that can be attended by direct action (union organizing, literacy, breakfast program, that kind of thing) and things that can't. I think what leftist leaders should do about the things that can only be tackled by national reform is to encourage people to vote for the progressive democrats where it makes sense; worst case, they lose and we learn nothing, but best case they win and when everyone sees them fail to change anything, it makes it a lot easier to sell people on further revolutionary action.

The buregoise are a plague a systematic plague and you help them by having a class war that they become desperate to win.

These were your words from the previous comment. Are you against class war or not?

And when I say there's no beneficial policy I mean you won't ever get lasting reforms by electing better politicians, you'll just get temporary concessions that will be taken away the next time there's a crisis. I think looking at the fall of European social democracy since the dissolution of the USSR should prove my point: European workers opted for just getting "beneficial policy" instead of revolution, and now the benefits are gone.

I am cringe, but I am free.