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Cake day: June 3rd, 2024

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  • By giving your unconditional vote to Harris, you’re not saying “I’m voting for the progressive candidate because of trans rights”. What you’re doing is saying “you can being the most republican-minded, Dick-Cheney-endorsed, conservative economically, and gaza-genocider candidate, as long as it’s minimally less harmful than Le Drumpf”. That’s how you enable the constant slide to the right in politics that you’ve seen for the psst decades. The idea isn’t solely “I’m too morally superior to vote for either wing of the American Corporate parties”, it’s also “enough numbers of progressives conditioning their vote to the end of genocide might make the dem administration sway towards ending the genocide.” And if not even that will make democrat leadership even question their commitment to the extermination of Palestinians, then the conclusion is simple: death to America.

    If Harris wins, the republicans will nominate “evil candidate Mk.2”, and we’ll have you libs criticising people for protesting against Kamala’s support of the genocide, saying that “protests weaken democrats and we need them to win again in 2028 or else…”



  • volodya_ilich@lemm.eetoLefty Memes@lemmy.dbzer0.comFrench libs right now
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    2 months ago

    We need to actually appeal to people sometimes, actually talk about difficult subjects that affect people

    One side wants to talk about housing, public pensions, public healthcare, public education, salaries, discrimination against women and minorities, and work/life balance.

    The other side wants to talk about immigrants being bad and evil, and about how trans people in films are turning their children gay






  • When socialists say they want to collectivize private property, they use a meaning of private property which equates to “means of production”, or “capital”. The goal is that there won’t be owners of capital earning money simply by employing other people to work the capital and stealing a part of what they produce (surplus value).

    In your example, summer cottages and family farms aren’t means of production, so there’s no reason to redistribute them. Pensions and retirement were guaranteed to everyone even in the USSR, where women retired at 55 and men at 60, so I can guarantee socialists want you to have a pension. Small businesses that employ other employees would have to be collectivized eventually, which could mean that the owner simply becomes one normal worker in the business, working alongside the previous employees instead of above them. Regarding the apartment, you don’t need to rent out an apartment if the rent of your apartment costs 3-5% of your income (as was the case in the Soviet Union). Land ownership and inheritance are a bit grey. Obviously nobody wants to collectivize your nana’s wedding dress, or your dad’s funko pop collection. Obviously we would want to collectivize if you inherit a big factory, or 20 flats that your mom rented out. For things in the middle, it becomes a bit more grey, so there’s no easy answer. I bet everyone would agree that uprooting people isn’t generally a good thing.



  • Why no mention to the democratic participation in Cuba in your response?

    Who do you think makes such decisions in a capitalist context?

    Markets make those decisions in a capitalist context, surely not a committee of experts consulting the unions.

    According to Worshiping Power by Peter Gelderloos, decentralized structures have an advantage in self-defense but a disadvantage beyond their base territory. That’s why both the Spanish Civil War and the Makhnovshchina were lost once the popular front strategy were implemented.

    I’d have to read that book to give an actual answer to why that analysis is made. My point is that the coup was allowed to happen to that degree in the first place due to the failure of anarchists of arming the working class and stewarding it against the increasing threat of fascism.


  • Once everything belongs to the state, it really belongs to those who rule the state.

    Again, not that easy. Khruschev didn’t decide that the iron in the factory #3 would be used in the steel beam factory #7. The planning of the productive forces was an incredibly complex process in which thousands of bureaucrats union members were involved. Calling that amalgam of workers an “owning class”, especially when they’re not extracting surplus value at all from the workers seems a big stretch to me.

    Centralism is never democratic.

    The fact that the USSR wasn’t as democratic as ideal, doesn’t mean that the existence of a state can’t be democratic. “Centralism” is an umbrella term covering many different possibilities of governance, and a single party ruled by elected leaders of worker councils is a recipe of some sort of centralism that can provide a very reasonable degree of democracy. I’m not arguing this was the case for the USSR. If you want to read on a practical case of the existence of democracy within a Marxist-Leninist single-party regime, I recommend you have a look at a book called “How the worker’s parliaments saved the Cuban revolution”, from Pedro Ross, which describes this exact form of functioning of back and forth between the central government and the worker councils in which millions of Cubans participated to overcome the worst consequences of the “periodo especial” after the illegal and antidemocratic dissolution of the USSR.

    I myself am from a country with a rich history of anarchism in the 20th century: Spain. By the 1930s, the CNT, a union of workers which proposed some sort of anarcho-syndicalism (which I bet you’d be happy to agree is a good method of governance), had more than a million members, which for the population of the country at the time was absolutely huge. The lack of centralization of sorts initially among the leftists, and their consequent weakness to respond to threats, is actually the very reason why fascism could trump the democratic government in many places of the country and destroy this anarchist movement and all social progress for the following 40 years. Funnily enough, the dictatorial USSR was the only country which assisted the republicans in their civil war against fascism, other than the admittedly heroic volunteer corps from the brigadas internacionales.


  • Nobody in their sane minds argues that there wasn’t overbureaucratisation in the USSR. That’s a well established truth. The question is, if people aren’t only allowed but encouraged to join the party, and if there’s no exploitation of the working class, what’s the argument to suggest that the “bureaucrats were the new owning class”