volodya_ilich @ volodya_ilich @lemm.ee

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1 yr. ago

Medical and psychological consensus says we shouldn't allow children to marry or drink alcohol or do drugs. Where's the medical consensus that we shouldn't allow GRT?

You didn't get their point. The only children who are getting gender reassignment surgery are the ones who right wing doctors are trying to assign a gender to, despite medical consensus that it's unnecessary, he's calling the right wing misinformed and hypocritical

on purpose

lol

At least they're not blowing their budget exploding rockets...

Feel free to stay an ignorant

Tell me you don't understand colonialism and imperialism without telling me you don't understand colonialism and imperialism.

You haven't read a single thing about unequal exchange, or colonialism, or imperialism. The western countries (imperial core) RELY on cheap raw materials and cheap labour from third countries (colonial periphery) to be able to attain the levels of wealth and development that they enjoy. The USSR simply didn't participate in this, and you saying otherwise proves you know jackshit about this topics or about history.

Planned obsolescence is a direct consequence of capitalism, and it gets worse the more capitalism develops. Capitalism, through competition and markets, makes some companies triumph and some companies to be outcompeted by the ones that triumph. This, coupled with ever-increasing capital investment by the companies that get the most profits, leads unequivocally and necessarily to increasing concentration of capital in the hands of a few companies in a given sector: oligopoly and monopoly. And when a sector is dominated by oligopoly and monopoly, it means competition between companies, the whole premise of capitalism, disappears. And it is at that point when malpractice such as planned obsolescence becomes a thing, because consumers literally don't have a choice.

You're absolutely right that it would be great to go back to times before planned obsolescence, but the only possible way to do so is politically, by eliminating the very system that leads to planned obsolescence.

Again, you can't expect the USSR, a nation that started industrialising and educating people in 1920s, to be able to outcompete the entire rest of the world in every sector of the economy. It was a poorer nation than the US, Germany or England historically, it developed much later. The fact that it got as far as it did is impressive enough of a feat, especially since it didn't abuse colonialism and imperialism to do so, but instead used only the sheer work of its inhabitants and the natural resources found within its borders. The USSR falling behind in some extremely novel fields such as computing, is only to be expected.

Yeah I'm not denying they cloned them, I'm saying they were cloned due to the inability to access them widely and affordably in the international market. Cloning stuff is good btw, copyright is a scam

Being able to purchase some models of some products here and there doesn't mean you can sustain a segment of the industry through imports

Going back to the cold-war era where the USSR had to manufacture and provide mostly every single consumer good for its own citizens due to economic sanctions and isolation. You can't compare luxury goods made all over the entire world for a wealthy minority, designed by experts from all other industrialized countries, against soviet-made mass-produced items which were meant to be able to be produced in as many units as possible using the least amount of resources possible. It's just different manufacturing paradigms.

The USSR was what is called a "shortage economy" as opposed to western capitalism's "surplus economy". In capitalism, an abundance of competing companies in the same field leads to overproduction of most goods in a way that some products from some brands end up on the shelves of stores and storage houses collecting dust, and companies who manufacture a lot of these non-desired products, disappear. This leads to an inefficient waste of resources and labour, since it leads to unused goods and services.

The USSR, on the other hand, had a state-planned economy in which, using predictions of the planned output of raw materials, decided what to produce with these materials. Producing 10 more drills, meant that you had to produce 10 fewer units of something else. Hence, the economy was optimized so that only as many as strictly necessary of most goods would be manufactured. Additionally, the products were design to require the least amount of labour and resources necessary to be manufactured, taking into account mostly long-life and easy repairability to prevent inefficiencies. It was the only way that the USSR could, as a less industrialized state than for example Germany or the US or Britain (which had started industrialising around one century before the USSR did), could provide goods for everyone, and for the most part it did. The quality of products may not have been as high as high-quality consumer goods in the west, but that's simply a combination of design choice to be available to cover more goods with similar amounts of raw materials and labour, of fewer experts in design and manufacturing than worldwide due to the size of the soviet block and their economical embargos.

We need, as commies, to establish grassroots movements that will improve things locally, create safety nets, organize labor to get progressively better victories through strike and if necessary through other means, and to have a growing sector of workers that are class-conscious. When the material conditions arrive, we need to have a critical mass of class-conscious workers so that we can organise as best as possible, and help to educate the rest of people, and to discuss the wants and needs of the workers and translate those needs to the vanguard party. But we also need the vanguard party.

You talk about how things can "go wrong and corrupt the entire thing", but by doing so you're forgetting that that's already the case, that we live in a corrupt, bloody and oppressive system, which kills millions every year worldwide through violent and less-violent means. You say it's never happened, but I disagree with you. Ask an anarchist and they'll tell you about Zapatista and Rohinya movements. Ask a Marxist-Leninist like me and we'll tell you about Cuba and the USSR and why we believe they're inherently more democratic and less oppressive than the current system, although admittedly not perfect. Our best tool to prevent the system from being corrupt, is to have as many class-conscious workers as possible. So let's organise labor, let's create communities and activist organizations, and let's improve things on a local level, so that people's material conditions start to improve and as a bonus we can draw more people to the movement that actively improves their lives.

You're insulting all the people who suffered even more oppressive regimes than Stalin or Mao as a consequence of NOT arming themselves. Chileans suffered Pinochet as a consequence of lack of oppression of the fascist opposition during Allende. Spanish suffered Franco as a consequence of lack of oppression of the fascists during the Spanish Second Republic. Oppression is sadly a tool that must be used, as sparingly as possible that's true, to prevent reactionary elements from maintaining or reinstating even more oppressive structures.

People everyday in post-colonial countries suffer immeasurable despair as a consequence of lack of revolution. If you criticise Stalin or Mao and consider them undesirable and illegitimate, you should be even more convinced of the illegitimacy of current western governments that impose imperialism on the global south. Every day that we delay or refuse these armed revolutions, we're perpetuating this system which is even more harmful than the USSR or communist China by any metric possible.

The only exception was started by rich landowners because they didn't want to pay taxes to the king. (American)

You really think the US is the only American colony that seceded from its colonial authority by means of violence? And are you implying that the current US government isn't tyrannical?

or succeeds only for the winners to establish a new tyrannical system

You're just making that up. You're tautologically defining any successful violent revolution as failed because it didn't eliminate every single hierarchy overnight. Even if I'm a Marxist-Leninist I can conceive why you'd make that argument about the USSR (though I'd disagree with you), but if you make that argument about Cuba too you're just wrong. Cuba is a state much more democratic and much less oppressive by every metric than its predecessor. You're just falling into that mentality that "the only acceptable revolutions are those which failed".

Additionally, you're failing to acknowledge that non-violent revolutions, such as Allende's Chile and the Spanish Second Republic, can end up in bloodshed and a more authoritarian and repressive form of government not as a consequence of violent revolution, but as a consequence of the lack of it. As a Spanish myself, I'd have much rather seen a version of my country where there was an armed socialist repression against fascism (for example by the CNT or some Bolshevik party), than the history we lived, where a democratically elected, non-violent leftist government was nevertheless couped, plunged into civil war, and eventually turned into fascism. An armed revolution could have actually possibly prevented that. (Funny historical note: the only country that really supported the struggle against fascism in Spain was the USSR, despite the Italian and German fascists helping their Spanish counterpart.)

You say that as if communists don't want democracy. I want the highest degree of democracy possible, I just understand that the material conditions that allow revolutions don't always allow for extremely high democracy at the beginning, and how a vanguard party of communist intellectuals can initially serve well to guide an uneducated populace or, worse, educated against communism as we are now.

Anti-communists thinking that by doing blanket condemnations of past mistakes instead of historical and material analysis of why it happened, how much was necessary, and how much was the excess, they can totally avoid them in the future and bring down capitalism with the power of love.

What's the alternative? Ending up like Allende, or the Spanish second republic, or Rosa Luxembourg? "The only good socialist movements are those who fail"

China bad, what other source do you need?

Are you suggesting that republicans want to spend taxpayer money on mental treatment of homeless people? Are you really that fucking dense??

I'm sorry but citing England and France, two of the most imperialist countries in the world, as examples of where workers managed to achieve victories against capital, is a bit racist to me. The whole welfare in the Global North (for the lucky ones who enjoy it) is built upon unequal exchange with colonial countries. It's imperative to understand that non-internationalist worker movements that don't care about imperialism are the actual bourgeois concessions that you mentioned earlier.

Zapatistas and Rohinya are some of the few examples of functional, more anarchist and decentralised cases of socialist movements that triumphed, and while all of my support goes to them and I love what they're doing, they're regional and small movements for a reason. As soon as the west seems them powerful or big or influential enough to be a threat, I fear they'll be eliminated.

Currently the democratic socialist movements have more control in the Democratic world, global South and global North, than the Leninists do.

Excuse me, which demsoc movements have control in the so-called "democratic world"?

The very second that China, Vietnam, Cuba, or Laos actually allows for free elections between multiple socialist factions, and not just the control of society by a party elite, that's the second I'll consider those leninists more successful than the Democratic Socialists.

Speaking of Cuba, I bring another source: a book by Pedro Ross called "how the worker's parliaments saved the cuban revolution" on how the cuban unions democratically decided the future of the country in an unprecedentedly democratic manner during the so-called "periodo especial" in the 90s when Cuba's main economic partner, the USSR, dissolved overnight. It's a textbook example of what democracy means to me, much more so than multi-party liberal democracy systems in which 100% of the parties in power represent the oligarchic capital. Anyhow, how's your statement that as soon as they have multi-party systems you'll consider them successful, consistent with your claim that you measure success on the material conditions of the working class?