barsoap @ barsoap @lemm.ee

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2 yr. ago

One proletarian has the strength of two average proletarians.

That's a relationship to a crate or to barbells, not to capital or the means of production.

People claiming simply to have an “understanding of the cultural context” when speaking of the Palestinian Genocide often do so to avoid criticism for not condemning Israel.

Do those people also call out Israel's annexations and settlements as illegal?

culturaly underdeveloped and are incapable of ruling themselves

Again: Your words.

I quite clearly pointed to the rooting out of Communists in the East and the regular fostering of Anti-Communists in the West leading to current conditions.

And I pointed you to actual literature. Read it if you don't want to make a fool of yourself.

All this talk of “shutting off higher mammalian and human insticts” is more Idealism than anything else, it fronts the idea of “fear states” as a genuine mechanism when the fear comes with the fascism.

"Psychology is idealism" that's a new one. The fear is used, imposed, as a control mechanism. Not just the obvious "do what I say or I hit you" but implicit "wouldn't it be a shame if..." narratives making alternatives unthinkable. A teacher scolding, shaming a student for not answering quickly enough breeds a life-time of preferring ready-made answers over careful consideration -- any ready-made answer: The preference is for answering quickly, not for agreeing or disagreeing with the authority figure. The affective layer of the mind is fine either way, all it wants is to not be shamed for saying "I'll need a moment to consider".

I'm being quite orthodox here, actually, what I'm talking about is nothing but the socio-psychological aspect of alienation.

Further, Communism isn’t to be grouped in with fascism and Capitalism, it’s diametrically opposed.

Granted. As far as "communism" means the real existing ML experiments it's still the same fucking river, though.

and the approval of government in current Socialist states is high.

You know where else approval of the government was high? Nazi Germany. Poll numbers are a thought-terminating cliche, you can do better.

but retaining the same labor relations to the Means of Production.

So you're saying that there's no difference in things like capital access. "Same relations" implying "no difference, nada, zilch". I don't find that assessment compatible with the material conditions we live under.

Class instead is a social relation to ownership of the Means of Production.

And the managerial class doesn't have that? Is it easier or harder for an MBA to get a loan to become a millionaire than it is for a worker coop? To furnish golden parachutes for themselves while leaving workers with not even the dole (heard of some nasty practices in the US, there, making people 'quit without cause' by bullying etc which would disqualify them from welfare).

Though, “understanding the cultural context” is often a dogwhistle, so you may wish to drop that language.

Really. Dogwhistle.

This is about things like inflationary use of the term Nazi, just as an example not even Die Linke calls the AfD Nazis -- the agreed-upon term is fascist. That's because culturally we're careful about not diluting that term.

So when someone goes over to say feddit.org and posts about how "German police is all Nazis", that won't fly. Not because the absolutely left-heavy and German demographics of feddit.org fail to recognise issues with the German police, but because you just trivialised Nazi rule.

That kind of cultural context.

“culturally developed enough”

Your words. You seem to be right-out seeking terms that pass judgement. I suggest finding language that seeks analysis, instead.

Fascism can only be truly beaten by advancing to Socialism.

The psychopolitics of fascism are anxiety: Shutting off higher mammalian and human instincts by induction of fear states. Socialism is an answer to that, yes, but the KGB surely doesn't help with the anxiety. All that paranoia, all that distrust, and policies which do not alleviate it but only deepen it. Psychologically, capitalism, fascism, and tankiism are different sides of the same socio-psychological maladaptation to human nature. Don't swim against the stream, instead, get out of the stream and onto solid ground.

drag quite clearly has stated that “Marx was an Anarchist.” This is wrong.

Absolutely.

The insistence that managers make up a distinct class is more of an Anarchist thing than a Marxist one, as adopting such analysis would be similar to calling plumbers and elictricians their own classes in and of themselves, rather than substratums.

Plumbers are not in a power hierarchy relationship to electricians so that's a strawman.

despite robust democratic control.

You might want to calibrate your democracy-o-meter. At the very least, not conflate a disagreement about degrees of democracy in some specific state with a disagreement on principles.

administrators of public property do not constitute a distinct class,

Ah. So not revisionist enough to acknowledge the professional-manegerial class, I see. I mean it's not like the concept would break with Marxian analysis, it just re-analyses things with a more complete set of data points. So in this case you can choose between being a revisionist and giving up on materialism, I suggest the former.

Did you just call me a fascist Zionist. As far as opposing the genocide is concerned I haven't been cracked down on -- maybe because I understand the cultural context. The government itself, btw, has always considered Israel's annexations and settlements outside of the 1967 borders to be illegal.

and looks down upon the people of East Germany as “stupid” and “compliant.”

They're neither. What's lacking is a cultural habit of self-rule. Complaining "why don't the people on top do things properly", that's not compliant, that's not stupid, but it's also quite ineffective when you could run for office and do it better yourself.

The west's denazification didn't happen after the war, true -- it happened '68, when kids started to ask their parents inconvenient questions. That never happened in the east. It could never happen in the east because the party insisted on its monopoly on politics.

Also it's plenty well-documented of how the SED just didn't bother to crack down on Nazi structures. Roughly 25% of SED members had a Nazi past, Plenty of boneheads starting in the 80s, later on they infiltrated the FDJ, in 1992 about 24% of GDR youth agreed with the statement "there were positive things about nationalist-socialist rule". Have a wikipedia article to kick off your further research into the topic. Why is there only a German version? Because apparently noone outside of Germany actually gives a fuck about these things.

Well it certainly is capitalist if it's not democratic. You can have public ownership and worker control, or you can have public ownership and a dictatorship of people who are not workers. Like, bureaucrats, apparatchik, the nomenclatura, etc. Or the army. Or whoever who's not workers.

As such drag might operate under the Anarchist definition of state (which I, as an Anarchist, can't stand, because in

<currentyear>

Gee that worked well in Germany didn't it have a look at the polling results for the AfD.

Trouble being that in the east, antifascism was considered state matter, therefore, ordinary people did not get involved. In the west, it was a civil society issue. The SED de-politicised the population, "join the party and read the script or don't get involved", and now the east is severely lacking in civil society capacity to oppose fascism. Capacity to engage in politics in the first place, the east is run by West German politicians because East Germans just don't bother to become politicians, they rather elect West Germans instead. And then they're complaining that they're not getting heard.

Nothing about what the Soviets did in the GDR was "taking fascism seriously", unless with "take seriously" you mean "fertilise the ground".

Nazi collaborators

...like Ukrainian Red Army veterans who fought the Nazis, but didn't like Moscow calling the shots afterwards. I see you've drunken that age-old propaganda wholesale.

Marxist-Leninist
but I’m not a “State Capitalist”

So you're a revisionist.

I was talking about the foundation itself, not foundation+subsidiaries. And yes ever since the writing was on the wall wrt. google funds they've been putting more and more money in investments to make sure they can survive, as opposed to grants. Still keeping with the foundation's mandate, though, e.g. all their VC investments into AI are the polar opposite of what the likes of OpenAI are doing. Kinda sceptical e.g. huggingface will ever turn a profit, much less a significant one, but it's important to have them.

Firefox is a way for them to make money for their charitable projects. Always has been.

They've been opening secondary streams of income -- also via Firefox, like pocket and stuff, but it's unclear whether that would even allow them to keep developing Firefox. It certainly would mean that Mozilla doesn't have any money left over to give to others which is their main purpose of existing.

If you actually had a look at their actual numbers, they're a charity you know, they're public, you'd see that the bulk of money is spent on charity. Mozilla has never been a charity to develop Firefox, Firefox has always been the breadwinner for Mozilla's charity operations.

The article, most of all, misses that it's about CBD to THC ratio, not raw overall cannabinoid content. CBD is an antipsychotic and on the cusp of getting the stamp of approval for treating schizophrenia. Strains on the street, in the meantime, have been bred for THC at the expense of CBD because it's THC which gives a head-high, makes consumers believe they got strong stuff.

The deeper question, overall, is why we live in a society which prompts people to take anxiolytics to cope.

Legally, the only thing that happened is that the BfV can now use their whole toolbox of covert instruments against the AfD. The federal government, parliament, or a majority of states can always starts proceedings before the constitutional court to ban a party. Of course you don't want to do that if you have a flimsy case, but in principle there's no requirements at all.

Politically, it means that politicians have less of an excuse to not open proceedings.

Side note I doubt those 1100 pages are all the BfV has on the party: In their press release (the actual report is still classified) they only mentioned the AfD attacking human dignity, while for a court case you'd definitely also want to argue the wanting to dismantle democracy part, and if that was in the 1100 pages then the press release would've included language saying so (that's just how bureaucracy works in Germany, summaries don't randomly leave stuff out).

I very much doubt Germany could grant Netanyahu immunity from arrest without withdrawing from the ICC, which is not going to happen. Just because Merz says he'd like to do something doesn't mean it's going to happen, he's running his mouth all the time.

Nah there's also plenty of mismanagement, in particular spending the cold war being a one product economy and thinking that the USSR will be around forever, overpaying for sugar and sending industrial goods in return.

Venezuela messing up royally and not being able to subsidise Cuba with their oil any more is a more recent problem, but pretty much the same pattern.

Cubans are masters of improvisation and the party is smart enough not to interfere with the people's capacity to self-organise to get around acute problems, unlike Americans and Russians they don't micro-manage for the sake of micro-managing, but they're very much not masters of strategic planning.

Over long, better short, Cuba has to increase its value-add and labour productivity. Export fewer resources, more and most of all more high-value finished products, also become energy independent. It's nice that they can help out Venezuela with toilet paper but truth be told it's not really a product that's highly sought after on the world market because by and large, countries are better at not fucking up their economy than Venezuela.

Or, differently put: Wake me when Cuba exports electric buses. That, preferably, look weirdly like 40s, 50s American cars, in a retrofuturistic way. Or something more niche, but have something that's not rum, tobacco, or honey. Oh, pharmaceuticals, gotta give them that.

You know what also doesn't make sense? Not boiling chicken in milk. I can guarantee you that's not the milk of the chicken's mother. The "don't boil a young goat in the milk of its mother" thing at least has a proper interpretation in the sense of "there were some people who did that and God came and God said 'yo that's nasty, stop it'". Something about not using sacrifice as an opportunity to practice transgression.

In the end I think scripture is just a tool for Jews to have something to argue about endlessly.