Yes the USA loots its own citizens as a matter of constant policy. Even though USA produces so much oil it would have no problem looting a few buckets if the rich who own the politicians would benefit from it. Perhaps an example is in order.
A certain ice cream plant produces ice cream in upstate New York.
The ice cream is shipped to Phoenix, Arizona. They load 44,000 lbs. of the ice cream on a freezer truck. The freezer truck drives 2,200 miles from Jamestown, NY to Phoenix, AZ and delivers the ice cream, which is then distributed to supermarkets in the Phoenix area.
The same freezer truck then drives about 5 miles across Phoenix, to an ice cream plant. The ice cream plant loads the truck with 44,000 lbs. of ice cream. Then the semi hauls the ice cream 2150 miles to Erie, PA, just 50 miles away from Jamestown, NY, where it started.
So over 4000 miles worth of diesel fuel was burned, to move ice cream 50 miles en toto.
Why?
Because the ultra rich aristocrats own all the companies. They own the ice cream plants, and they own the trucking company, and they own the oil company that produces the diesel to run the truck and refrigerated trailer.
Since they are all in cahoots, they rig the prices of everything. They also rig the tax rates since they own the politicians, in such a way that the tax system crushes the smaller competitors and keeps them in control of markets and production. This is the real purpose of the progressive income tax on wages and small businesses, to crush them and funnel their capital into the hands of the fat cats on Wall Street and the corporate sector. Such taxes have virtually no effect on these giant conglomerates, who pass the cost of tax off onto the investor, taxpayer, and small businesses that can manage to hang on in such a market.
And this is why USA would invade another country over oil or any other resource. To crush and control competition so that prices for everything may be kept artificially inflated for maximum profit, and so that the means of production remains under their control.
In order to stay on top, they move endless hordes of trucks 4000+ miles in order to have a net movement of ice cream 50 miles. This only makes economic sense when the scheme is devised to cut out all potential non-aristocratic competition.
This is what socialism is really about. And this is why the rich fund socialist revolution at every turn. And this is why the rich pay their parrots to squawk about capitalism, when we don't even have capitalism. We have a centrally-managed, socialist economy--capitalism for the poor, who have no capital, and socialism for the rich, who have all the capital.
Thus the capital of the poor continues to flow one direction, to the rich, and if the rich get into trouble, the government takes more capital from the poor to bail out the rich. That is socialism, not capitalism.
Real capitalism doesn't have bailouts and central management and endless regulatory red tape that favors the rich corporate bosses. Real capitialism is everyone fighting like cats and dogs to provide the best product at the lowest prices, which has not been happening in America since the days before Rockefeller and Standard Oil. So when political weenies gripe about 'capitalism' they don't realize what they are saying, because we live under a hardline socialist regime in the USA. People are decieved by word games into not even understanding their own reality.
So when another country's resource exports would threaten the aristocracy's control of prices and supply in the international market, the US regime sends them democracy bombs.
This is what socialism is really about. And this is why the rich fund socialist revolution at every turn. And this is why the rich pay their parrots to squawk about capitalism, when we don’t even have capitalism. We have a centrally-managed, socialist economy–capitalism for the poor, who have no capital, and socialism for the rich, who have all the capital.
the capital of the poor
the government takes more capital from the poor to bail out the rich. That is socialism, not capitalism.
Real capitalism doesn’t have bailouts and central management and endless regulatory red tape that favors the rich corporate bosses. Real capitialism is everyone fighting like cats and dogs to provide the best product at the lowest prices
we live under a hardline socialist regime in the USA
I won't even ask "are you unwell" because the answer is obvious
the meme is referencing a quote from marx that is greatly useful for dunking on idealist leftists who believe that the revolution can simply be wished into existence without all the dirty work.
you liberals are such fuckig morons, its unbelievable.
i suppose, according to you the slaves of haiti should have simply forgiven the slavers, since they were "playing by the rules". this institutionality fetish of yours is the same excuse fascists use to justify their crimes. "the untermenschen werent playing by the rules."
please read theory. especially engels, lenin and mao.
I do read theory. I just know theory isnt the be all end all of understanding the world. If it was, that would be great, but you just happen to agree with this guys philosophical musings. Besides that, you call me a liberal when I'm literally not but whatever.
You're arguing with an imaginary friend and a beautiful strawman opinion you made for him to hold.
I never said anything about Haiti, but comparing anybody living in a first world country (the vast majority of this site's users and where such a revolution is more likely to take place) to a slave is disingenuous at absolute best.
I also don't think that Dessalines needed to massacre the remaining french people on the island. I'm willing to bet I have a better und3rstanding of the haitian revolution than you. You know they reinstated slavery within a couple of years, right? Read some Trouillot.
Isn't the context about the overthrow of the Russian Empire by communist revolutionaries? Not modern first-worlders? Am I missing something here? Why would "foreign imperialists" be relevant to modern first-worlders?
That being said, to actually answer your line of questioning, it is the correct solution to change society while ALSO overthrowing and locking up the oppressors. That may involve the elite dying, but those deaths are necessary. Peaceful reformism and strict nonviolence policies never works – unless you consider extremely high amounts of unnecessary suffering for innocents to achieve comparatively minor goals as "success" (cough cough Nelson Mandela). Even Gandhi and MLK (who took most of his influence from Gandhi), although nonviolence advocates, were well aware that violence is often necessary to achieve a better future, and much of the work they did was to the benefit of violent/militant revolutionaries (although of course they're portrayed a lot more neutered/"deradicalized", as well as the roles of complete compliance to nonviolence being completely overstated while violent methods are hidden away as if they didn't exist, not even to be mentioned).
After capture though, death pentalty is not the way to go, but life imprisonment is fine and they may have a chance to be released later, mostly depending on their status/loyalty. I'm sure a lot of "revolutionaries" would disagree with me though, but I'm not an "eye for an eye" believer... I suppose if you're in a situation where the former imperialist rulers would likely have power to directly cause damage while detained or incarcerated, or they're likely to escape or be "rescued", then it would be justified to chop off their heads or put a bullet in their cranium.
The core issue is that these people (the oppressors/ruling class) can not be rehabilitated, and are likely to stir up considerable trouble and disrupt when they have the opportunity, either in a bid to regain their power, or out of a large feeling of loss that makes them go nuts. You can't always reasonably ensure that they won't try to fuck shit up in the future.
That's just my view, but of course there are people other than me who are just bloodthirsty for vengeance (my opinion is that they're not thinking all too rationally and it's the same mindset as parents that hit/yell at their kids, they're convincing themselves it's for the greater good but in reality it's just attempting to satisfy their feelings of anger). Either way, I see their lives as considerably less valuable than the lives of the people they oppressed, not because they have an inherently evil soul or something, but because they are already too far gone and only can bring chaos to the world.
Just vote for a classless society, you fool, you absolute baffoon.
🤡
We live in bourgeois “democracies,” which were formed from bourgeois revolutions. These states weren’t created to represent us, and they never have and never will. The rules of the system can’t be reformed into socialism, because the bourgeoisie will never allow it. They would sooner unleash fascism on us (again in the case of Europe) than relinquish ownership of the means of production.
By the time of Lenins death, he had put in place all the institutions and levers of control that Stalin would later use to brutalize the population, all the worst parts of the Great Purge can be connected back to the systems that Lenin put in place.
Lenin had immense opportunities for positive change as the leader of the first socialist nation, however he squandered it completely by his purge of any ideals that weren't his own, and his project turned into a dictatorship. Meanwhile the Democratic Socialists and Anarchists that Lenin loved to berate helped build societies that are now infinitely better to live in and more open to change from the working class than any of the modern countries inspired by his ideology.
You can say "Marx is the theory , Lenin is the practice" but it's much more accurate to say, Marx is the theory, Lenin is a practice, and not the best one historically.
but you cannot deny that he was on of its greatest exponents
While the revolution was a great propaganda victory for Socialists globally, almost every group that sprung up inspired by the revolution later became controlled by Moscow.
For example, the communists in my home country, the Communist Party of the USA, were summoned to Moscow by Stalin and had their more anarchist/democratic leaning factions purged, with some even being arrested and kept in Moscow till they died.
The amount of control that Stalin and the Comintern had on international communism lead to repeated purges of more democratic/less Authoritarian socialists and basically ensured that Stalinist/Marxist Leninist Socialism was the only type allowed to flourish in any form for most of the cold war.
I certainly couldn't predict what would've changed had the Russian Revolution been more democratic/pluralist, or had a more democratic revolution inspired the last century of global Socialism, but I at least believe that Socialism wouldn't face the uphill "Gulags, Famine, Stalin, Mao" battle that it currently does.
Peace between us, war on the bourgeoisie, comrade
I would love nothing more than a united left, but it's more the actions of Marxist Leninist inspired governments after their revolutions, (Universal banning of non-Leninist Socialists, Universal banning of pluralist socialist democracy, Yugoslav's Split, 1956, and 1968) that makes me bash against ML's. It's hard to trust talk of leftist unity when the history of Leninism has involved the crushing of any other form of leftism since its inception.
Man, anticommunist leftists sure love ignoring the political, historial and material context of things, don't they? Yeah, Lenin was evil and he did that all because he was very very bad and the Bolsheviks are so evil!!! The man who consecrated his entire life to a worker's revolution, read and wrote extensively about it, and from the start was adamant on educating the workers through newspapers and other publications, just was so bad and so evil and so bad. Bad Lenin! Bad!!
If by "nothing required the overthrow of the results of a democratic election" you ignore the ever-increasing threat of a reactionary, pro-Tsarist coup under lukewarm administration, then yeah, it wasn't required.
If by "nothing required Lenin to purge other fellow socialists" you mean there weren't counter-revolutionary Mensheviks and other such assets in positions of power during a literal civil war, then yeah, it wasn't required.
If by "crushing syndicalism" in Russia you mean not immediately giving the means of production to uneducated workers, but instead slowly growing unions to unforeseen levels of participation, with tens of millions of union members in the 30s already, but understanding that socialism can't survive against the onslaught of external powers without heavy planning (as proven by the 20+ million soviet deaths in WW2 in the fight against Nazism due to still comparatively low levels of industrialization), planning which initially can be done better by a vanguard party of socialist intellectuals, then yeah, it wasn't required.
If by "crushing the working class" you mean creating unforeseen levels of access to healthcare, education, eliminating unemployment and homelessness. Or maybe you mean going against the interests of Kulaks and understanding that the best for peasants isn't direct ownership of the land, but the elimination of structures of ownership of it altogether. Then yeah, it wasn't required.
Talking of war communism as if the USSR wasn't facing constant struggle against the rest of Europe portrays that you either don't understand the history or you're making a malicious intent. The Bolshevik revolution faced a coalition of the Tsarist loyalists in the civil war, which was militarily and economically supported by a total of 14 other countries, including Britain and its colonies, France, and many other European powers, in the direct aftermath of WW1. It's basically a miracle that the Bolsheviks were able to win the war, and it speaks very highly of their power to mobilize the population and resources in times of extreme difficulty. This was in the immediate inception of the newborn state, before the USSR even existed as such. Then it was subjected to economic sanction and isolation. Afterwards, during several attempts to make agreements of mutual defense against Nazism with France and Britain (and even Poland) for all the decade of the 30s and being systematically ignored, what is the USSR to think about the rest of the world? Again, the victory of barely post-feudal agricultural USSR against the industrial power of Germany which was established for more than a century at that point, is basically another miracle. Saying that the USSR didn't have reasons to see itself in "war socialism" is astonishing. It falls into what Michael Parenti said in his work Blackshirts and reds: for anticommunist leftists, the only worthy revolutions are the ones that failed.
This is not to say that there weren't excesses in repression during the USSR. Of course there were. Stalinism was extremely excessive and brutal during WW2, and the oppression went way overboard. Then again, that's the nature of the history of states up to that point, isn't it? How can we expect the people born in brutal systems of oppression, who directly suffered that oppression, to not fall in excesses of oppression when times are hard? The best we can do is analyse these excesses from a historical, materialist, constructive point of view, and try to minimise the excesses. But let us not deceive ourselves with idealism: revolutions are bloody, and the ruling class doesn't give away its power without fighting. Let's learn from the mistakes of the past and build more fair and resilient systems that won't commit those excesses, or will minimize them. But let's not be ignorant about the historic and material conditions that led up to them, or we will fall in the same mistakes, or even worse, be on the receiving end after the reactionaries take over.
I for one think we should continue with the way things are. Obviously the people who own companies like Tesla and Amazon are better than us. We should be happy to have a job tbh. Seriously, why would I want to be burdened with decisions like whether or not I get healthcare, or whether or not food and education is accessible. We are better off letting the market decide. If education was so important, wouldn't the market find a way to make money off of it?
I miss multiplayer in PC games being done by joining a server and playing. No match making bullshit, it was fun to be in a server with a mixture of skill levels. As compared with a lot of game snow, when ever your skills improve, you just get thrown into a harder tier of match making until you reach your limit and burn out.
But then newbies would get killed a lot and cry, and stop playing. For some reason, this didn't happen 20 years ago but now, it's appearently a big fucking problem if a player doesn't feel powerful in the first five minutes of the game..
I think gamers are just really entitled now. They expect awards for turning on the game. And God forbid if someone else kicks their butt because they have more experience.
I was playing quake and unreal tournament growing up and I got absolutely wasted in the beginning. Made me laugh so hard. Then I got good, very good, because I had to be to not die.
My match making in Quakeworld late nineties / early two thousands went from LAN with dad and brother at home, to LAN at compsci lab at HS after school, to local PC cafe, to regional LAN tournament to international scene once ISDN & ADSL became ubiquitous.
We were always welcoming newbies to the scene. But then starting 2003 the Nordic players became increasingly cliquey and started refusing to play anywhere further south than servers located near the Stockholm datacentre.
Well, I’ve read a lot of theory, and I’m pretty sure our best bet is posting memes online, crossing our fingers, and hoping for the best. We definitely shouldn’t go outside and talk to people, that’ll never work
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