sexpig by night posted:

yea, see, this, this is real pervert poo poo, real sick freak poo poo you only say if your brain is too poisoned by the idea of the individual being the ultimate power

Atrocious Joe posted:

At least a couple million more people in the US are going to die of infectious disease before any revolution happens.

sexpig by night posted:

'we can't do anything until the working class 'adapts' to the pandemic by not having any contact with each other physically'

Atrocious Joe posted:

Tbf the real annoying thing with COVID organizing is when people insist you take off a mask before talking with them. I'll do it it but I hate it.

Mr. Lobe posted:

Who the hell asks you to do that

Tankbuster posted:

nymphenburger. Also, where do I look up nacht der amazonen?

F Stop Fitzgerald posted:

its possible to defend stalin and also be normal

sexpig by night posted:

the covid thread is a great example of the failings of individualist focused societies, where after generations of the collapse of the state as a force that can provide good and aid, and now multiple years of its response to a pandemic being overtly saying 'eh, maybe you should die for the DOW, did you think of that?' the best solution people come up with is 'well I wear a full body gimp suit and gas mask to Walmart to protect myself and yell at people who have to leave their homes still'. Individualism is the death of a society.

gradenko_2000 posted:

Lol does the dsa even mandate masks

gradenko_2000 posted:

Lol does the dsa even mandate masks

MLSM posted:

You’re even worse than apropos of nothing is at reading comprehension, congratulations

apropos to nothing posted:

id also say that re: the discussion yall had earlier about reading marx, you should read with people, and not people online.

Ferrinus posted:

it's always weird when people are like listen, you gotta break a few eggs to make an omelette, rome wasn't built in a day, come on you apes do you wanna live forever, but only ever in favor of loosening or ignoring covid precautions. somehow the logistical difficulties of making it possible to call in to a meeting are always what we sacrifice safety to avoid, rather than a sacrifice we make to avoid getting sick

Ferrinus posted:

it's always weird when people are like listen, you gotta break a few eggs to make an omelette, rome wasn't built in a day, come on you apes do you wanna live forever, but only ever in favor of loosening or ignoring covid precautions. somehow the logistical difficulties of making it possible to call in to a meeting are always what we sacrifice safety to avoid, rather than a sacrifice we make to avoid getting sick

Regarde Aduck posted:

i think the issue is the effort to maintain defense takes constant effort, and covid isn't going away, whereas taking the risk of 'giving up' is kinda passive and you get to carry on with 'life' as long as you don't die or get crippled. They're not equivalent in terms of mental stress. For most people. If you're an anxious person running scenarios in your head all the time then yes the virus itself can become an unbearable threat. But most people's mental defenses tend towards 'it won't happen to me' in order to get through life.

unwantedplatypus posted:

But how am I supposed to get people to follow me from my personal charm if we’re not in person and maskless? Just like Ilych of old?

tristeham posted:

i don't see what's wrong with people online making you understand marxist ideas better. i live in a very small town and i don't have many opportunies to talk to stuff through irl.

apropos to nothing posted:

when stalinist ideas are put forward though im gonna attack them politically...

if people wanna argue that stalin doesnt represent the crystalization of a reactionary turn in the soviet state from where it started, theyre free to do so. people were discussing abortion/gay rights in the ussr and its actually one of the reasons that the russian revolution is the greatest event to ever happen in human history that the early bolsheviks and soviets did more than any other country of the time to ensure rights for women, lgbtq, and oppressed people. its beyond criminal then that the first ever workers state abandoned many of its principles when they criminalized those things later.

DeimosRising posted:

there are a lot of very different stalinist ideas. i'm entirely in agreement that the turn away from personal freedoms in issues of sexuality/bodily autonomy etc in the 30s were bad. but do you have the same problems with his expansion of lenin's nature conservancy efforts people were talking about earlier? it's just dumb and weird to storm in and insist that ACTUALLY we can discard anything and everything done in the USSR from 1928-1952 or whatever because Stalin was a jerk

quote:

I have discussed this in my essay "On Practice". To be one-sided means not to look at problems all-sidedly, for example, to understand only China but not Japan, only the Communist Party but not the Kuomintang, only the proletariat but not the bourgeoisie, only the peasants but not the landlords, only the favourable conditions but not the difficult ones, only the past but not the future, only individual parts but not the whole, only the defects but not the achievements, only the plaintiff's case but not the defendant's, only underground revolutionary work but not open revolutionary work, and so on. In a word, it means not to understand the characteristics of both aspects of a contradiction. This is what we mean by looking at a problem one-sidedly. Or it may be called seeing the part but not the whole, seeing the trees but not the forest.

BrutalistMcDonalds posted:

unwantedplatypus posted:

Don’t talk about anything you wouldn’t want to own up to in court over any online platform. That being said, the surveillance state exists and I don’t think it’s possible to hide from it entirely. Abandoning the idea of education or some organizing online is hobbling yourself.

Shiroc posted:

Needing to debate Stalin as a proxy for the value of Marxism is a trap no matter what because you're ultimately trying to prove if the decisions made in a different society with different conditions were the right ones or not. The particular alliances and actions that Lenin took in the Russian Revolution are unlikely to be able to directly apply to what would be happening in a revolutionary moment in the modern era.

Not to say to discard the lessons of the past but Marxism needs to be treated as a living mode of analyzing the current material conditions in order to figure out how to move forward, not something to endlessly cycle on debates from the more and more distant past.

Ardent Communist posted:

i agree with mao that stalin was 70/30 good/bad in his decisions, but that's a discussion to be had between communists. if you don't have the moral courage to defend stalin against liberals, despite it's unpopularity, you've already conceded in your own mind that communism is comparable to fascism.

hence, "stalin did nothing wrong"