TheOubliette @ TheOubliette @lemmy.ml

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2 yr. ago

The LGBTQ+ community is not a monolith and you do not speak on behalf of us.

"against their own people" is a chauvinist attitude. Why would it be particularly bad to oppress people in "their own" country vs other countries? The only way this logic works is if you subscribe to nationalism and are projecting it onto others.

EU countries overlap with NATO, an aggressive military force that, among other things, destroyed Libya, turning it from the highest HDI African country into a hellscaoe with open air slave markets fought over by warlords. Would it be worse for that to happen to Germany?

EU countries also still have their own neocolonies. Sahel countries are still trying to kick out the French, who saddled them with debt and still controls their banking systems. Would it be worse if that were happening to French people?

Finally, there are no socialist countries in the EU, nor "socialistic" countries. Every EU country is run for and by capiralists and by capitalist parties. They have social safety nets left over from the cold war when they were combatting and coopting communists and they are now being slowly dismantled by capital.

authoritarian regime

Both of these terms are obfuscstory propaganda that mean a person hasn't placed enough scrutiny on what they have internalized. That might sound like I am simply attacking you, but I mean this as a way of answering your (combative) question: you want a space where people have some basic ideas about cold war propaganda but where they retain a significant amount of chauvinist framibgs from that propaganda. You can find like-minded people wherever left education arrests itself, which is why you won't find it in organizations or spaces that require reading on these topics.

To explain my response, I'll go over the two words.

Authoritarian. This word is poisoned beyond clear meaning. Every state is authoritarian, so what is the meaning of calling a particular state authoritarian? Every revolution is authoritarian, so do you also criticize them as such and seek out anti-revolutionary spaces? In reality, I know that this term is just thrown around in chauvinist contexts as a dog whistle. In this context it just means "bad" and "the enemy". It's the liberal version of, "they hate us for our freedoms".

Regime. This term is synonymous with givernment or state, but just colors it as, again, "bad". Venezuela must always be described as being led by a regime, not a government. As a target of imperialist propaganda, it must be implicitly propagandized as illegitimate and bad. Think of someone saying, "the Biden regime". How often do you hear that phrase? If you've heard it, it was a socialist trying to make this point and even the playing field.

If you remove the propaganda aspects, your framing becomes, "still not pretend it isn't a government". Becomes less spicy, doesn't it? Despite having no differences in meaning outside of implying it is bad.

Finally, Xi didn't make himself president for life, he must be regularly reelected. The government itself removed term limits in the normal way: with a vote. Imperialist media calls this "president for life" because they are chauvinists. When the US had no term limits, was every president "president for life"? Aren't term limits antidemocratic, i.e. more authoritarian?

In short: please do some self-criticism on this internalized chauvinism and you will find it easier to find comrades. You are currently in an incoherent position and that means you'd only find comeradery among the incoherent snd incurious. Be around people that challenge you based on their reading and knowledge.

I recommend backing up a bit so that we can frame these questions.

One of the more pointless questions anyone asks is a simple binary of, "is XYZ socialist?" Being real people doing real projects in the context of global capitalism and relentless imperial oppression, there is no such thing aa purely socialist, but many things are projects by socialists to advance socialism. When people learn this, they start to use the term as a shorthand: "my communist organization is socialist", "the Cuban revolution was socialist", "China is socialist". These claims only mean that the project is a socialist one. This is different from saying any of those projects have achieved socialism. None of them have and I have yet to meet a socialist who defends China while saying they have achieved socialism.

So really, this is a question of semantics and language using similar or identical terms with different meanings, and this is one of the reasons why those who read up on the topic have such a dramatically different opinion from those who do not.

So, for example, China has a stated ambition of becoming socialist within the next 30 years or so, setting concrete targets for what that means. And it is still a socialist project created and maintained by socialists.

Regarding owning the means of production, this is a Marxist concept. Marx's postulate was that the ruling class is that which owns/controls the means of production and that society is then crafted according to the interests of that ruling class. Under feudalism, the ruling class was landlords (own/control land), with the major underclass being peasants, serfs (they work the land). Under capitalism , the ruling class is the bourgeoisie, those who own factories, shops, etc and the major underclass is workers, those who work in the factories and shops. Marx hyoothesized that the proletarians who work in ever-concentrated companies would have the capacity to take the means of production by force and then continue running it themselves.

So why am I giving this crash course in Marxism? Well, because Marx himself described the period in which the working class had seized the means of production from the bourgeoisie not as socialism, but as the dictatorship of the proletariat. A period in which society still functions as capitalist in many ways, as the mode of production has not changed and production itself must be maintained, and the bourgeoisie still exist, but in which the working class has become dominant and can oppress the bourgeoisie. China is firmly in this category, exactly what Marx described as this transitional period of unstated duration, attempting to survive and thrive while under constant pressure from imperialists.

Information density and transmission is polluted by the fears of not being convincing enough and not sounding radical enough.

It is just rhetoric on Johnstone's website. It is a position piece. In what way are you being manipulated? This is actually more honest and direct than the faux-objectivity of typical articles.

[..] major world events do not occur independently of the actions of the major world powers who have a vested interest in their outcomes.

Sure, but this does not explain why Assad, North Korea or Putin are good enough for an opposition or even the seed of that.

It is unclear to me why you are quoting and arguing with that. Do you think I am Johnstone?

Not even the claim was on the books

Haha what if we apply more US bad to world events

Then you would have a more correct understanding of geopolitics.

No, seriously, that article is manipulative AF.

I have no idea what that means

That never existed

I'm gonna download more copyrighted media today just because you told me not to.

Gotta save the legal fund for inheritance squabbling

Many people do say that I deserve to be murdered, actually. The cool part is that I am right and they are wrong.

Nope it is a great, correct, and good way of thinking. These are thieves and murderers and they rarely receive justice.

lmao there are already very good "which programming language is this?" guessers but ratger than just use one they throw it at an incompetent black box.

Dead CEOs is a moral good

Abolish with prejudice

Yes I should have put an asterisk there for Foucault at least. I have had many fights with faux-left Foucault appreciators that use him to avoid, e.g. having an anti-imperialist stance. I was listing him just for the context: it is good to know his terms and ideas, despite his influence being negative and incorrect for practical organization, so that one can enter and participate in left discourse. I should have made that a category and added Trotsky to it.

Debord is a bit separated from them, though. His work is actually a quite gokd Marxist expansion on the analysis of capitalist society and it presents no distraction from the necessity of its removal.

lmao

"Still love the truck car though"

I present to you: the NGO-industrial complex.

All that money comes from somewhere and "the donors" expect influence for their cash.

It's a good book but the people that need to read it are those already trying to organize but stuck in an ineffective "horizontalism" rut.