does it rule?
anti-idpol action @ pkill @programming.dev Posts 5Comments 360Joined 2 yr. ago
anti-idpol action @ pkill @programming.dev
Posts
5
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360
Joined
2 yr. ago
Political action is violent by definition. To rule somebody essentially means nothing else than to enforce your will upon somebody by force.
There can be no talk of consensual politics in a society where opinions are shaped by media owned and managed by the ruling tiny, very wealthy minority.
No, the question boils down to the effect it has on consciousness. How many people broke free from the defeatist disbelief in the possibility of upending the rule of those who may have seemed untouchable to them less than a week ago is hard to fathom.
Not to mention that it was yet another instance of a large scale masks-off event for the exploiter class, with both Democrats and Trump as well as their media lackeys proving once again that they are really just one single party of capital.
Of course however, this does not mean that it also poses a threat of some people falling into the erroneous conviction that risks resulting in anything more than repression by the authorities, that the problem is personal and not structural.
The exploiter and the exploited cannot be equal.
This truth (...) forms the essence of socialism.
Another truth: there can be no real, actual equality until all possibility of the exploitation of one class by another has been totally destroyed.
The exploiters can be defeated at one stroke in the event of a successful uprising at the centre, or of a revolt in the army. But except in very rare and special cases, the exploiters cannot be destroyed at one stroke. It is impossible to expropriate all the landowners and capitalists of any big country at one stroke. Furthermore, expropriation alone, as a legal or political act, does not settle the matter by a long chalk, because it is necessary to depose the landowners and capitalists in actual fact, to replace their management of the factories and estates by a different management, workers’ management, in actual fact.
(Proletarian revolution and the renegade Kautsky by Vladimir Lenin)
Revolution is undoubtedly the most authoritarian thing in the world. Revolution is an act in which one section of the population imposes its will upon the other by means of rifles, bayonets and guns, all of which are exceedingly authoritarian implements. The victorious party is necessarily compelled to maintain its rule by means of that fear which its arms inspire in the reactionaries. If the Paris Commune had not employed the authority of the armed people against the bourgeoisie, would it have maintained itself more than twenty-four hours? And are we not, on the contrary, justified in reproaching the Commune for having employed this authority too little?
(On authority by Frederich Engels)
Because it's just bing under the hood, same as qwant. And Bing/microshaft doesn't really care that much about you using it for actual search. M$hit wants you to use Copilot. Copilot cannot be fit as easily into meta search engines such as SearxNG. I'm quite convinced that the whole push behind the aggressive AI promotion going hand in hand with search engine experience degradation (ACCELERATED BY THE PROLIFERATION OF SEOMAXXING AI-SLOP ONLINE) is to a large extent driven by the desire to tighten the walled gardens and information control. Millions of idiots convinced that a text generator program is somehow similar to an actual person would more readily accept it providing opinions or censored information, in place of diverse information.
Congratulations to all of you still happily trading your freedom for convenience. Instead of just a ranking algorithm that nonetheless can show you multiple results at a glance, you get the generation of just one result, at the environmental cost much higher than a regular search, up to 10 times more energy, and sometimes even slower than what would be the time required to load a regular page on a good LTE connection if modern web wasn't so bloated.
All while accelerating the march towards digital feudalism. Because even the immense amount of storage space and link capacity required to build your own search index is nothing compared to the cost of training a LLM and then providing it via some SaaSS.
Also the 'cultural exchange' you'd get if you lived in border regions!
Also, synthetic cannabinoids. So glad that kids these days are not exposed to this shit, but I wouldn't say I'm happy either with all the fent out there.
And larping as pagan.
Netbooks. Jfc that performance of a mid-tier smartphone whereby they'd become unusable in a few years for anything heavier than lxqt or some tiling wm, a simple music player like audacious, vim and static websites (accessed only using something lightweight like Netsurf, Badwolf or Palemoon as well). I don't remember what happened to mine but I'm pretty sure that even mpv with no scripts would drop frames like crazy on FHD x265 matroska videos. I'm so glad that ultrabooks started to become more affordable and nowadays I'd be able to buy an i7 t440s for the price of my acer aspire one back in 2011.
I chucked though this would mean that the American solutions are...short-term? Headlines will fleet, the ruling class will become a little bit more vigilant. And then shit will return to business as usual. Unless this sparks a mass movement.
btw, the NHS in the UK offers a cautionary tale. Once it was a beacon of universal care. But look at how the decades of privatization have chipped away at its promise. Even now, UK workers defend it against the creeping tide of market logic, which has not ceased under Starmer because warfare matters more than healthcare to them.
It's absolutely clear: systems run for the many must remain in the hands of the many. This fight really requires worker control—why should administrators and profiteers dictate care when the expertise and needs of frontline medical workers and patients could lead?
Even if a mass movement for universal healthcare is born and somehow the government with both parties being virtually on the insurance profiteers' payslip somehow concedes, it will be immediately subject to sabotage.
And then the billionaire media would point a finger at the alleged inefficiency of "public services", all while it is implemented in a way where it isn't at the expense of
- the military-industrial complex
- the wealth of the mega-rich and their corporations' profits
so if not that, then it'd be financed at the expense of the already ballooning public debt, which would then be paid in austerity.
If universal healthcare is to succeed in the U.S., it must be accompanied by bold economic realignments: ending absurd military expenditures, expropriating billionaires and putting critical industries under public and worker control. Otherwise, the promise of care for all will collapse under the weight of contradictions, and the media will be more than happy to point fingers at "socialist inefficiency" while the real culprits—corporate greed and the war machine—walk away unscathed.
If an oak blocks the sunlight, you don't pick an acorn, but chop the whole tree down
Yes that's why the rotten system of choosing a slave master every few years, of the duopoly of parties which are equally complicit in war crimes and are on the payslip of big business must be replaced with bottom-up system of lively democracy within worker, student and tenant councils
That's where the permanent revolution would help. The workers must not allow splitting the revolution into stages of concessions and compromises but fight until total victory and the dissolution of the state.
Also this is the reason why communists are not pacifists — the working class has the right and a duty to defend itself and it's gains. That's what Marx meant when he wrote that under no pretense must workers be disarmed.
The political system we live under is rotting. It’s holding us back, suffocating real democracy, and clinging to relics of an era we should’ve buried centuries ago. Why are we still pretending centralized power structures, dominated by presidents and parliaments, are the best we can do? It’s time to turn the whole thing upside down. Imagine power flowing not from the top down but bubbling up from councils—real, grassroots bodies in towns, workplaces, and universities where people directly decide what matters to them. No presidents. No untouchable elites. Just democracy as it was meant to be: local, participatory, and alive.
Critics say that direct democracy would be too costly and cumbersome in large countries. But that’s a lie told to make us think power belongs anywhere but in our hands. The truth is, it doesn’t work their way—infrequent, clunky referenda that barely scratch the surface of what real participation looks like. But why not councils that meet regularly, that use technology we already have to count votes and hear every voice? Why not frequent, transparent, and accessible decision-making? We have the tools. What we lack is the will—and that’s on us.
And about the politicians. They’ve turned ruling into a career. They live above us, pocket bribes, rub shoulders with CEOs, and laugh at the idea of accountability. Enough. All representatives should be recallable at any time, earning no more than the median worker’s salary. Partial sortition (random official selection) could ensure even more fairness. It worked in ancient Greece which was (for the free male citizens ofc) closer to actual democracy than the unaccountable neo-aristocratic order we have today, so why not today when we have the formal equality before the law and equal rights, but we know the reality.
But if no one will be above anyone because everyone will get their chance to actually change something about the world and their life without running into the stone walls of the system, it will be a complete revolution in human relations that will uproot the poisonous root of disdain so many feel for their fellow humans for simply being worse off than them.
Imagine a system where politics isn’t about who has power but about how power flows and where the needs of the people are actually heard and resolved. Blockchain (and no, I'm abso-fucking-lutely not a cryptobro. PoW is still useful for things like captcha replacements but the whole thing is the biggest example of capitalism's way of turning useful and promising inventions into means of speculation and outright scams by and large) could be used to make the process more transparent than ever. It's not the technology that hold us back, but their fear of us using it to take what’s ours.
Term limits, too. No one should sit in power long enough to forget what life is like for the rest of us. Politics should be service, not a career. If we’re serious about democracy, every single one of us—no matter how "uneducated" we’re told we are—needs to learn how to govern. Because democracy isn’t just voting for the lesser evil every few years. It’s taking the reins of your life, your community, your future. It’s about ruling instead of being ruled.
Here’s the thing: the ruling class will not go quietly. When we start to take real power into our hands, they’ll fight back. They’ll use every dirty trick in the book to claw it back. That’s how this game works. But if we stand together, if we build a united force that can’t be undermined, if we refuse to let fear or complacency stop us—then they lose. And we win something they can never take away: the power to determine our destiny. That’s what’s at stake. Let’s stop settling for scraps. It’s time to demand the whole damn table.
or maybe because they are working class instead of a sheltered Ivy League graduate elite
Class consciousness
Bourgeois parties support bourgeois fat cats? Nihil novi. A proletarian mass party must be built urgently. Revolutionary Communists of America do a lot of laudable effort in that direction.
mps wouldn't have managed to do shit without the protesters
don't forget the thousands of brave protesters. if it wasn't for them, those MPs would probably have been blocked effectively
Let's step back and contextualize. The Russian Revolution, for all its flaws and tragic outcomes, was not a singular, isolated event floating in a vacuum of historical inevitability. It emerged out of unimaginable conditions: the ruins of Tsarist autocracy, a regime that was arguably one of the most backwards and repressive in Europe, compounded by the catastrophic toll of World War I, which had already thrown the region back decades in terms of development. The Bolsheviks inherited a situation of near-total collapse: famine, mass illiteracy, civil war, and an international blockade that strangled the new state at its infancy. To blame the USSR's trajectory solely on Bolshevism or communism is to ignore this harrowing historical reality.
But there’s more to this story. Ask yourself why we don’t have multiple socialist success stories from the early 20th century. Why does history offer us no alternative points of reference? Let us turn to Germany, Austria, Italy, or Poland, where proletarian revolutions flickered between 1918 and 1924. The harsh truth is that the social democrats of the time, ideological forebears of today’s reformists, drowned these revolutions in blood. In Germany, the SPD actively collaborated with the Freikorps—proto-fascists, no less—to crush revolutionary uprisings like those of the Spartacists. The betrayal in Poland was no less devastating: under the leadership of a reactionary regime tied to German imperialism, Poland waged war against the fledgling Soviet state, attempting to reimpose the draconian terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.
These betrayals left the Soviet Union in complete isolation, surrounded by hostile capitalist powers eager for its destruction. Without the support of an international revolution, the USSR faced an impossible dilemma: build socialism in one country or perish. The resulting “Stalinist caricature” of socialism was as much a product of this isolation as it was of internal contradictions.
From the ashes of Tsarist oppression, the Soviet Union undertook a massive and unprecedented experiment in societal transformation. This was no small feat. Lenin himself repeatedly warned of the dangers of bureaucratization and made efforts to curtail the growth of the party and state apparatus. However, his health declined rapidly after 1922, and contrary to the reactionary trope of Lenin as a dictator, his influence waned with his incapacitation. By the time Stalin rose to power, the bureaucracy had grown into a powerful force that would shape the course of Soviet history.
Nonetheless, for nearly a decade, the USSR remained one of the most progressive societies in the world, even under unimaginably difficult circumstances. Consider this: while half of the so-called "land of the free" still languished under Jim Crow apartheid, the Soviet Union was rapidly urbanizing, eradicating illiteracy, and introducing women's suffrage and workers' rights in ways that were unprecedented for the time. This was a country transitioning from a predominantly peasant society to an industrial power in record time.
Yes, concessions were made to private property owners. Yes, the Stalinist obsession with quantity over quality—manifested in the chaotic implementation of the Five-Year Plans—led to inefficiencies and waste. But here’s the rub: even with its deformations, the Soviet economy achieved staggering feats. It not only survived but outpaced many capitalist economies during the Great Depression. By the late 1930s, it had transformed a feudal backwater into an industrialized powerhouse capable of withstanding and defeating the Wehrmacht, the most formidable military machine of its time. And this was after enduring one of the most devastating invasions in human history.
And let’s not ignore the strides made in education, healthcare, and gender equality. The USSR turned an overwhelmingly illiterate population into one of the most educated in the world. Women gained access to professions and education in ways that far outpaced their counterparts in the West. And while Stalin’s purges and bureaucratic authoritarianism gutted much of the early revolutionary spirit, the foundations laid by the October Revolution persisted in remarkable ways. Even amid the Stalinist counterrevolution, the USSR managed to rebuild itself at an astonishing rate after the destruction of World War II, without relying on the Marshall Plan.
In conclusion, the failure of the USSR was not an inherent failure of socialism but a tragedy born of historical contingency: isolation, betrayal, and the crushing weight of imperialist opposition. The same forces that scoff at the USSR today—bourgeois ideologues and their reformist allies—bear responsibility for sabotaging the international revolutions that might have prevented the Stalinist degeneration. To use the USSR as a strawman against socialism is intellectually lazy and historically dishonest. The real question isn’t whether the USSR "worked out" but whether the world’s workers were ever given a fair chance to build a socialist alternative in the first place. The answer, dear reformist, is no—because your ideological ancestors made damn sure of it.