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mawarannahr
May 21, 2019

I’m thinking of joining SA after doing some volunteering on the Sawant campaign (she’s in my district). I spent two years with DSA but went to ISO (lol) meetings and demonstrations more often, and I’ve come to appreciate the focused efforts of SA. I dont agree with everything and Sawant has some odd positions but I’m not sure they matter enough to me over being part of a somewhat effective organization that does good work where I live and ~raises awareness~what’s the worst that could happen?

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mawarannahr
May 21, 2019

22 Eargesplitten posted:

Are you not from the US or did you somehow miss that every man in the US is required to register for the draft, and at this point most states automatically register you when you get an ID of any kind?

I'm trying to understand if you're justifiably ignorant or just normal ignorant.

lol if you did.

mawarannahr fucked around with this message at 05:37 on Jan 4, 2020

mawarannahr
May 21, 2019

Atrocious Joe posted:

I'm an accelerationist when it comes to the draft.

Giving every able bodied person in the US under the age 25 a concrete reason to reject the war could be a good thing

or Yang Gang will just get bigger when Yang promises to build Skynet

Fredric Jameson thinks this may be a good idea. has anyone read this ?
An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army

mawarannahr
May 21, 2019

apropos to nothing posted:

at some point you can either get organized, or continue to be a party of one. the people that can only poo poo talk every currently existing organization of the working class arent really interested in fighting capitalism, just sitting on the sidelines. people looking for some perfect movement or organization are going to be looking forever. look around you and see whos active and join them. or if your willing to do it, and its a lot of hard work that might not pay off for a long time, find an organization you see doing work whose methods you agree with who isnt around you and join and commit to learning their methods so you can build a presence where youre at. a lot of people are looking for someone or some party to come along and give the answer or show the way. ultimately if you want capitalism to end its up to you to do it. same with me and everyone else/ theres plenty of people out there who will help you every step of the way but they cant do it for you only with you.

this is correct. It’s exciting to make a difference locally. in an internationalist organization you can extend your horizon toward a planetary revolution that really, really needs to happen.

mawarannahr fucked around with this message at 08:09 on Feb 28, 2020

mawarannahr
May 21, 2019

indigi posted:

are there any good leftist podcasts (don’t say chapo please)

i like

swampside chats

quote:

Swampside Chats is a weekly podcast where communists sit down to shoot the poo poo about current events, history, political economy and theory. We're also all high and/or gay.


plough and stars

quote:

History, theory, and current critical analysis of the world utilizing the science of dialectical materialism

the nostalgia trap (not really a "communist pod" like swampside chats or plough and stars)

quote:

The Nostalgia Trap podcast features weekly conversations about history and politics with some of the left’s most incisive thinkers, writers, and extremely online personalities, exploring how individual lives intersect with the big events and debates of our era.

mawarannahr
May 21, 2019

there hasn’t really been a thing of denial in Turkey. there have been strict lockdowns applied to people over 65 and under 20 and if you left your house you start getting text messages to knock it off. they’re allowing over 65s out now, for a while it was a few hours one day a week. also for teens it was like that. I don’t think Turkey is comparable to USA or Brazil in that respect.

mawarannahr
May 21, 2019

I’ve thought of moving back

mawarannahr
May 21, 2019

mawarannahr
May 21, 2019

mawarannahr
May 21, 2019

why is “big” so common an adjective in left-wing writing? is it out if translation or a conscious effort to simplify language and try to increase its emotional impact? I generally see this in writing by Trotskyist and Maoists. Like, “big bourgeois compradors and big landlords” in that letter from the Maoists in the Phillipines posted above. I don’t really care to go to the effort to compute this but I’d say Trot writers use the word “big” possibly an order of magnitude times more than other leftist writers or mainstream media. Is this a real thing, a linguistic idiosyncrasy or is there an underlying logic to Big Writing? If I hadn’t seen the Maoists doing it, it would be ripe for a joke.

mawarannahr
May 21, 2019

ToxicAcne posted:

What mainstream news sites do you guys recommend reading? I'm really trying to get off twitter as reading leftist twitter leaves me both angry and astounded at the stupidity of it all.

mawarannahr
May 21, 2019

indigi posted:

wow you love supply chains huh

A little over a year ago I was unemployed and enthusiastically trying to imagine ways for industrial action to succeed, and the just-in-time supply chain seemed like an obvious weak point. Then the pandemic came and I kept following this news because it turns out it's relevant to basically everything.

mawarannahr
May 21, 2019

on the other hand, isn't it so tied up with labor arbitrage that it allows many companies to employ fewer workers with reduced organizing ability?

mawarannahr
May 21, 2019


jimmy d*re is CIA

mawarannahr
May 21, 2019

ToxicAcne posted:

According to Harvey and the intro to Capital itself, Capital was always intended to be read by working class people (more specifically skilled labourers). Takes like these just make me think that people like the author have the greatest contempt for the working class. It reminds me of Catholic Clergy who discouraged their laity from reading the Bible (might be getting my history wrong here, not Catholic).


The Twitterati left loving suuuuuuuuuckkks.

Edit: He's a Jacobin Editor... I swear they were better 4 or 5 years ago. I guess they wedded themselves to hard to electoralism.

I don’t think Danny Bessner is whomever you think he is.Why would you say he is married to electoralism? Is that what you take away from this article, for instance, or anything else he’s written or said?

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/01/trump-capitol-riot-fascist-coup-attempt

mawarannahr
May 21, 2019

ToxicAcne posted:

Honestly it was just a knee jerk reaction to seeing the Jacobin thing which isn't really charitable.
Edit: Looking at his writing, I've actually read alot of his articles without realizing, nevertheless the take is still bad.


This is basically what he's saying.

He gave some more detail upon David Harvey’s response:

https://twitter.com/dbessner/status/1365026025839550465?s=20

I think that’s a defensible position, and he was speaking as it applies to teaching undergraduates.

I am interested in the question of whom reading Capital helps in 2020, though. Marx may have intended the text to be accessible to workers 150 years ago (but even then each of the revised prefaces apologize for the complexity of the earthly chapters in some way or another) in book form. He welcomed turned it into a serial format for easier consumption by workers. How crucial is fidelity to Marx’s words as expressed 150 years ago to actually achieving the goals he lays out?

E: Tired and poorly expressed. What’s been bugging me is that besides the obvious truth of language changing over such time, there are also the facts that book readership is in massive decline everywhere, that our working hours are going up, that any remaining spare attention is consumed by media, etc., so a book is not the same sort of socio-technical object that it was then and being really attached to the literal words of the book “because Marx intended it to be accessible” seems like essentialist nonsense.

mawarannahr fucked around with this message at 03:05 on Feb 27, 2021

mawarannahr
May 21, 2019

THS posted:

i feel like a piece of poo poo that in a world where people were working like 12 hour days and were way more oppressed, they were able to really kick off socialist revolutions, and i'm the alienated peon of a 9 hour work day, 10 hours with the commute, and i can't really read Capital because my brain is too hosed up from all of the insane everyday poo poo. i should try harder but drat i hate my job and hate everything around it. i just want to sleep when i get home. politics is very marginal to surviving and i feel like if i stopped caring about politics i'd be happier, but i know i will never stop caring about politics

it's not your fault and the conditions on the ground -- i.e., the insane everyday poo poo that happens these days, which is actually much more totally oppressive in a world-encompassing way -- have changed sufficiently since then that you are in no position that you should feel bad about it nor is it politically meaningful to compare your personal conduct poorly against people who are (a) no longer living and (b) would accept you fine as a leftist.

mawarannahr
May 21, 2019

QUEER FRASIER posted:

I love when people like that jacobin fail idiot make a big performance of giving people permission not read marx, as though they're doing something subversive. Hopefully him and his social democrat buddies can succeed in turning Jacobin into Vox.com for leftism so everyone can read some twitter sexpest's 500 word 'explainer' of Capital and nobody ever has to suffer through the real text again


you’re a fail idiot who can’t read so i would hesitate to recommend Marx to you, specifically

mawarannahr
May 21, 2019

So, Kshama Sawant joined DSA, but is still in SA. What should we expect?

https://www.socialistalternative.org/2021/02/26/why-im-joining-democratic-socialists-of-america posted:

The reemergence of a socialist movement in the United States, and rapid growth of organizations like Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and Socialist Alternative (SA), is of enormous historical importance. This is not only because Marxism is beginning to take root again on the hard soil of U.S. capitalism, but also because of the enormous challenges facing the working class in this period.

Capitalism is in the midst of its worst crisis in nearly a century, and it is a compound one – not only do we face the deadly disasters of COVID-19 and the economic collapse, but also the coming climate catastrophe. The disasters we’ve seen in the past year could become far worse unless socialists and the working class rise to the historic tasks in front of us.

The socialist left faces both challenges and opportunities. We need a mass working-class party, a stronger labor movement, and victorious struggles in our ongoing fight against the billionaire class. In my view, to move forward we need to advance the Marxist ideas that will be necessary to win both immediate gains in the present crisis and a final victory over capitalism’s exploitation and oppression.

Because of the urgency to build a wider socialist movement, I am now joining DSA, while remaining a member of Socialist Alternative. Other members of my organization are doing the same, as outlined in our article last December. Working class people are moving into struggle, and the socialist left will need to have patient debate to reach political clarity; I hope to contribute to this process in DSA and am excited to bring my experience as an openly Marxist elected representative.
Mass Movements Emerging

It is no accident that alongside the rebirth of socialist ideas have also risen mass protests and social movements. We saw the mass Women’s Marches, which while episodic and limited in their demands, included the largest single day of protest in U.S. history.

This summer the historic and transformational Black Lives Matter protests broke out in the wake of the brutal police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. The 2020 BLM protest movement was the largest in U.S. history, with an estimated 20 million participating. Our struggle against racism and police killings will be an ongoing fight in the coming years, as few key demands of our movement have been met thus far, much less systemic racism ended. A central question facing us – what strategies do socialists bring into this movement? There are of course competing ideas, such as a redevelopment of the ideas of black capitalism which, if they gain sway, will weaken the ability to effectively fight racism. I agree with Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, who said, “We don’t think you fight fire with fire best; we think you fight fire with water best. We’re going to fight racism not with racism, but we’re going to fight with solidarity. We say we’re not going to fight capitalism with black capitalism, but we’re going to fight it with socialism.”

We see the beginnings of a reemergence of a fighting labor movement, after decades of disastrous business unionist leadership which, while unfortunately still the dominant force, is beginning to be challenged. We saw this with the teacher strikes that swept “red states,” coming out of West Virginia, where a class conscious rank-and-file leadership developed and won a crucial victory that spread to other southern states and beyond. And it must be said that the WV teachers won their historic strike only because they exposed the insider deal of the higher-up union officials, rejected that deal, and kept on fighting.

We see young people at the forefront of all these movements, including of course the historic climate protests in 2019.

Today, working people around the country are watching the incredible organizing of workers in Bessemer, Alabama, fighting to win a first union at Amazon. A victory in this struggle could send shockwaves around the country and enormously push forward the necessary process to rebuild a fighting labor movement. It comes at a time when billionaires, like former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, have made more than $1.1 trillion off the pandemic as working people face unsafe conditions, mass unemployment, and mountains of debt.

Along with these steps forward, important debates have developed in the emerging socialist and workers’ movement and we have come under increased pressures. We already see fierce attacks on our movement from the outside, particularly from Democratic Party leaders. In the wake of the November elections, Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger emphatically blamed the loss of seats in the House on left politics, telling Democratic Party members: “Don’t say socialism ever again.” Much worse has no doubt been said behind closed doors. We should have no illusions that the corporate Democratic Party, with Biden in the White House, will hesitate to ramp up its attacks on socialists and working class movements, particularly in the midst of this honeymoon of illusions in the new administration and with so many fearful to challenge them. Biden and the Democratic Party are forced to carry out some stimulus spending and other measures to stave off the collapse of their system, but will always seek to make the working class pay for the crisis.

In Seattle, we see the right-wing recall campaign against my council office, which in essence is an attempt by big business and the political establishment to overturn not only our democratic election but also our movement’s many victories for working people and marginalized communities. If successful it will be used as a springboard for further attacks on the left, not just in Seattle but nationally, and that’s why it’s crucial we defeat it.

We will need to stand up against attacks wherever we encounter them, whether in mass movements, in labor, in election campaigns, or in the socialist movement itself. Whether or not socialists do so is not a matter of abstract principle, it can decide the outcome of key struggles. The socialist movement in the past has unfortunately been derailed many many times by a failure to stand up against pro-establishment ideas and forces, a desire to get along with powerful “progressive” individuals, a lack of clarity about Marxist ideas, and by the influence of careerists within our ranks.
Principled Unity

Unity in the socialist movement, on a principled basis, will be crucial. As we engage in serious debates, and sometimes sharp ones, about how we can fight back and how we can bring effective strategies and tactics into the emerging struggles, to push them forward and help lead them to victory.

As some reading this will no doubt know, I am a longtime member of Socialist Alternative, and was elected as an open socialist in 2013 before Bernie Sanders’ campaigns for president or the elections of Squad members like AOC. In Seattle, we have used our elected office as a lever for the working class and marginalized communities to build movements to win historic victories.

The victory of making Seattle the first major city to pass a $15 minimum wage, was based on a socialist, class struggle strategy – on building mass movements, not on building relationships with progressive Democrats or NGO leaders. Rather than negotiating with the city’s establishment, we organized relentlessly to build the strongest possible force for $15/hr. We launched the 15 Now campaign and coalition, which overcame not only the vicious opposition of big business and the corporate Democrats, but also the cautious instincts of the key labor leaders who did not want to clash with the establishment. SA and 15 Now campaign organized a series of mass democratically run conferences, launched “neighborhood action groups,” held marches, and then democratically decided to file a grassroots ballot initiative so that we could take the issue to voters if Democratic City Councilmembers failed to act.

We have used this same class struggle strategy to win a series of major victories in Seattle, from last year’s Amazon Tax to fund affordable housing and Green New Deal programs to landmark renters rights laws to a first-in-nation ban on police use of tear gas, rubber bullets, and other so called “crowd control weapons” last year. Many DSA members have made major contributions to these struggles.

But while these are important victories, the challenges facing our class are enormous, and we have to raise our sights to what is needed – winning transformative change on a national and global scale and to fight for an end to capitalism and for a socialist world. Immediate questions face us regarding the platform popularized by Bernie Sanders’ campaigns and the wider socialist movement.

How do we fight for and win Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, a federal $15 minimum wage, the cancellation of student debt, and an end to police brutality and systemic racism? We have won enormous support for demands, but without a socialist strategy they could also tragically remain mere slogans. What is the best way to defeat the opposition of the ruling class and its representatives in both parties to push forward in the fight for $15, for example? AOC pushed back on the call to #ForceTheVote for Medicare for All saying we should focus on “winnable” demands like a federal $15 minimum wage. Now $15 is being abandoned by Biden, who privately told a group of governors and mayors last week that the $15 minimum wage hike likely isn’t happening.

I think the experience of the socialist movement in Seattle in recent years speaks volumes to these questions, and we need to bring that experience forward into these national struggles. We will need to apply this on a far larger scale – to build powerful movements of millions of people behind a socialist strategy to win these transformative demands.

If socialists don’t put forward clear strategies and tactics, and instead the Squad and other leaders continue to hesitate to go head-to-head with the Democratic Party to avoid a clash, we will lose. If socialists don’t build powerful and fearless movements for a federal $15 minimum wage, Medicare for All, and a Green New Deal, the working class will look elsewhere for leadership.

We will not defeat the dangerous rise of right populism and the far right in the U.S. and globally, if we don’t build a mass left alternative. Because while Trump is gone, Trumpism is alive and well and can grow rapidly under the current administration as Biden backs away from his progressive promises and defends the interests of big business.

There is a long history of multi-tendency organizations in the socialist movement. DSA is now the second largest socialist organization in U.S. history, and present day expression of “big tent” socialism, in which some political trends identify as Marxist (with differing interpretations) and some do not. SA is explicitly a revolutionary, internationalist, Marxist organization that is part of International Socialist Alternative, which has sister organizations in 30 countries around the world.

I believe the socialist movement needs both kinds of organizations, and so I am excited to be a member of both SA and DSA.
Debates in the Socialist Movement

There are important debates taking place right now in Seattle DSA as well as nationally. Recently, in a discussion about Seattle DSA’s platform, some leaders of one caucus in the organization argued against the inclusion of a call for democratic public ownership of big energy corporations. While I was not present for that debate, I was very disappointed to hear of the vote to not include this key point. I think it is something the local chapter should revisit. The call for democratic public ownership of big corporations has long been absolutely central to socialist ideas, and for good reason. And in the case of the big energy corporations, without democratic workers’ control we have no hope of avoiding climate disaster. We saw this brutally exposed earlier this month with the collapse of Texas’s profit-driven, deregulated energy grid.

The goal of Marxists, of course, is not just ownership of one corporation or another but of the commanding heights of the economy as a whole, and for a rationally planned, sustainable socialist economy run democratically by workers themselves. We know capitalism can never be made to work in the interests of working people, marginalized communities, or the planet. It is a system of crisis, and one which is rapidly taking human civilization over a cliff.

As Marxists, we are fighting for a complete end to this system and its repressive state – which is not a neutral or reformable entity but in essence a violent apparatus of “bodies of armed men,” including of course racist police forces. Instead we need to build a classless society based on solidarity and equality, with an economy run and democratically planned, where there is no capitalist class that can steal the wealth created by workers.

The question of democratic public ownership is a crucial one and those who argue against it need to explain if they think capitalism can be reformed.

I believe socialists also need a discussion nationally about how to build a new party for working people in the U.S., because we need a much broader organization of the working class beyond the socialist left. Support for a third party is at its highest point in the history of polling, according to a new Gallup poll. And there is real urgency, because if we do not build a party for working people, the coming sellouts of the Democratic Party on behalf of big business will give further impetus to the growth of the far right, in the absence of any left alternative.

Building a new mass party will not be easy but it is absolutely necessary because the Democratic Party is under the firm grip of the capitalist class. The notion popularized by a section of the left is that socialists can “take the party over.” But this represents a dire underestimation of both the resistance of the establishment and the fact that the party is completely undemocratic and there are no mechanisms to take it over.

We saw what Democratic Party leaders were prepared to do to stop Bernie Sanders and his call for a “political revolution” (twice!). We also saw just how firmly they control all the levers of power within the party.

We have seen up close in Seattle all the rotten tactics of the city’s establishment in defense of Amazon and big business, alongside the attacks on our movements like those against Black Lives Matter last summer. We see now how the Democrats in both Seattle and Olympia are in lock step in their efforts to undermine or phase out the Amazon Tax.

I believe our movement must strive to discuss our differences in a comradely way based on the issues. We must seek to find political clarity and agreement where possible, basing ourselves always on the needs of the working class and marginalized communities and on how we can most effectively build our movements.

I look forward to these coming discussions, in Seattle and nationally, as we strive to take up the historic challenges facing us. We must work together with urgency in this period of profound crisis, to fight for transformative change, and to raise the consciousness and confidence of our class in the struggle for a different kind of society.

mawarannahr
May 21, 2019

SA is still a democratic centralist organization. I don't think DSA has changed its policies but they might have worked something out with Seattle DSA. Things used to be a little more acrimonious: a few years ago, a couple of SA members were booted from Seattle DSA in the past when they joined. Things have changed a lot in the past year, though, with some of the most active members of SA leaving it and joining DSA as the "Reform and Revolution" caucus. I'm a little wary -- DSA in Seattle kind of sucks.

mawarannahr
May 21, 2019

Trabisnikof posted:

is there a name for people who claim to be marxists but also think capitalism has won and any worker/socialist/communist revolution is impossible to occur ever in the future?

running into more and more people like that these days

I think it’s possible to conclude that without diverging from Marxism. Why do you need a special name for them? If an asteroid was certain to hit next week and someone expresses doubts over a worker’s revolution in that timeframe, it doesn’t make their claims to being Marxist any less or more valid. It’s hard to blame someone looking at the situation today and guessing that nothing we want will happen in time, and they might be right. I don’t think there’s anything better to fill up the remaining time but I’m also pretty sure we will fail.

mawarannahr
May 21, 2019

Trabisnikof posted:

I guess I'm more meaning the people who think that under any situation capitalism was inevitable and would always destroy all workers before they're able to do anything about it. A step beyond the asteroid scenario.

I'm just curious if there is an existing ideological line here within Marxist thinkers that also argued capitalism would ensure it was impossible for a worker's revolution to occur.

Sounds like Herbert Marcuse tbh, but New Left (?) is a little outdated

mawarannahr
May 21, 2019

a lot of people don’t know this but robots are just machines that can’t decide anything at all, let alone make judgments on whom to establish solidarity with. you might as well speak of Marxist photocopiers.

mawarannahr
May 21, 2019

a sentient ai is out of reach and not especially useful to anyone who might make and reproduce it on a scale that would matter. a bigger threat is other people who will believe in "AI" lies and ascribe intelligence to the actions of a walking security camera, the people who believe that it can read your thoughts and assess situations objectively.

mawarannahr
May 21, 2019

Ferrinus posted:

i read a little althusser recently, he seems pretty sharp

his work on overdetermination was a big early influence on Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff, whose conceptualization of class as a process I found useful. supposedly Wolff’s more recent work on SDEs is an application of the lessons taken from this but I haven’t been interested enough to see what he’s up to. Knowledge and Class is a good book.

mawarannahr
May 21, 2019

Phone posted:

they didn't ban it

they're just probating anyone using the term

completely different, and it's frankly unsurprising that neither of you can understand the nuance

I didn’t even use the term and got probed for the first time in my 18 years on this stupid website thanks to Biden’s concentration camps. You’re straight up not allowed to disagree with the posters there or call them out on any kind of bad behavior they accuse everyone but themselves of.

mawarannahr
May 21, 2019

Comrade Koba posted:

there's a corollary to this where in every (western) news piece on china they absolutely have to refer to it as "the communist dictatorship" or "the authoritarian one-party state" at least once, even if it's just a one-paragraph notice about some tech company opening a new branch in Shenzhen

also “saving face” and “draconian”

mawarannahr
May 21, 2019

the logical endpoint of social democracy


quote:

Denmark: Non-whites shouldn’t exceed 30% of any neighbourhood

https://www.trtworld.com/magazine/denmark-non-whites-shouldn-t-exceed-30-of-any-neighbourhood-45125

Denmark has announced that it will limit the number of ethnic minorities in neighbourhoods to up to 30 percent in an apparent bid to "reduce the risk of religious and cultural parallel societies."

Some have branded the decision to limit "non-Western" residents as a "white supremacist" idea that avoids tackling racism in the country and keeps immigrant communities from integrating into society.

The announcement by the Social Democratic government will scrap the controversial term "ghetto" currently being used in legislation to describe immigrant neighbourhoods.

Instead the government will opt for the term "non-Western" arguing that neighbourhoods should not allow ethnic minorities to exceed 30 percent within 10 years.

Denmark has had some of the most draconian immigration policies in Europe, which the leftist Social Democratic party led by Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen has continued since gaining power in 2019.

In 2015, the country ran a series of controversial ads in Lebanese newspapers warning refugees to stay away.

The country in 2017 enacted a so-called 'jewellery law' which would see the state confiscate assets from refugees above $1,300 using the proceeds to pay for their upkeep. The United Nations described the decision as "at a minimum inhumane and degrading."

In 2018, the right-wing Danish government introduced laws that only deepened ethnic divisions in the country by designating areas with more than 50 percent ethnic minorities as "ghetto areas."

Under the proposals, children would be forcefully separated from their parents, starting from one to receive special education. Crimes committed in ghetto areas could also result in a double sentence.

International condemnation hasn't, however, dented consecutive governments enacting incrementally draconian legislation. More recently, the Danish state created an island where it would banish refugees until their case was processed.

Even as the civil war in Syria continues, the Danish government considers the parts of the country controlled by the Assad regime safe enough to return refugees. This year it became the first European country to deport Syrians back to the country.

The latest announcement is part of an anti-immigrant political consensus that has emerged in the country that spans the left and the right.

Following the latest decision, one activist said, "we need to stop putting Denmark on a progressive pedestal."

In 2018 the country banned the face-veil for Muslim women, which activists decried as enacting laws that "exclusively target the Muslim minority."

Increasingly Muslims feel that they have become scapegoats in the country. In the run-up to the 2019 elections, there was an increase in anti-Muslim rhetoric resulting in hate crimes against the community.



also

quote:

Currently, the only European Union country with more pigs than people is Denmark, with Eurostat figures from 2016 putting its pig-to-human population at 215 pigs for every 100 people. Denmark's human population is 5.7m, meaning that there are approximately 12.3m pigs.

mawarannahr fucked around with this message at 18:29 on Mar 19, 2021

mawarannahr
May 21, 2019

namesake posted:

That whole line of thought is undone by simply observing that industrialisation or industrial development does not inherently mean capitalism. The USSR refuted the idea its economy was predominantly state capitalist, plenty of Trotskist and other anti-USSR tendencies analysed it and called it other things, having read some of the arguments about the IS traditions use of the term I find it lacking, it's just bonkers to take some pre-revolutionary term and declare that's what actually happened.


Dreddout posted:

Trots and ultras like to pull the state capitalist card as a gotcha, but in reality the only alternative to this strategy was a socialist revolution suceeding in an advanced industrialized country. Which up until this point has yet to happen.

I'm not as familiar with Trotskyist arguments, but how can Trotsky use that as a "gotcha" when he rejected state capitalism?

there's interesting reading in chapters 3 and 4 of resnick and wolff's "class theory and the history of capitalism and communism in the USSR" -- a class theory of state capitalism & debates over state capitalism, where they basically restate their decades-old thesis that builds on overdetermination and differentiates between class-, power-, and ownership-based conceptions of capitialism. i have to get back to work but check it out.

quote:

Since day one of the Russian Revolution, friends, foes, and others have disputed the actual class structure of the USSR. On one point, most admirers and many detractors agreed: in terms of class, the USSR was socialism en route to communism. Among critics, some saw it as a "degenerated" or "deformed" socialism or collectivism, while others judged it to be a bureaucratic or state capitalism. Some even construed the USSR's class structure to be a merger of private and state capitalist enterprises akin to European fascisms. The groping for appropriate names to identify the USSR's class structure-and the above are but a sample-reflected both its uniqueness and disagreements over how to understand it. Intense passions, ideological commitments, and high practical stakes attached to these terms in a debate that has flared up recurringly from 1917 through the present. A small but significant part of that debate has focused on the term "state capitalism." However, neither supporters nor opponents of using this term for the USSR's class structure ever defined it as we did in chapter 3 above. Instead, they deployed the word "capitalist" to refer to a particular distribution of ownership of means of production or, most often, to a particular distribution of political power or to combinations of both. Thus, the long-standing disagreements over the definition of class resurface again. Where we use a surplus labor concept of class to build an analysis of the USSR's class structure as largely capitalist, other references to state capitalism have marginalized or, more often, altogether ignored surplus labor. This chapter aims to demonstrate how both their analyses and conclusions consequently differ fundamentally from ours.
...

quote:

On the other side, early defenders of the Soviet Union's development path, including Lenin, also used the term state capitalism, but positively. Reminiscent of Engels's remark, they saw Soviet state capitalism as a necessary stage between the overthrow of capitalism and the achievement of socialism (not to speak of communism). In Lenin's view, the unforeseeable twists and turns of social conditions forced the Soviet leadership periodically (and always conditionally) to rely on a controlled "state capitalism" as the means to their socialist ends: The workers ... are advancing towards socialism precisely through the capitalist management of trusts, through gigantic machine industry, through enterprises which have a turnover of several millions per year-only through such a system of production and such enterprises. The workers are not petty bourgeois. They are not afraid oflarge-scale 'state capitalism', they prize it as their proletarian weapon which their Soviet power will use.9 In effect, Lenin was arguing that state capitalism, if under the control of workers committed to the transition to socialism (i.e., Communists), was an acceptable as well as necessary stage for the USSR to pass through. The transition was ongoing so long as Soviet power was secure. Not the organization of surplus labor, but rather power relationships stood at the core of such qualified endorsements of state capitalism in the USSR. In the years after Lenin's death in 1923, the term state capitalism was less frequently used by defenders of the USSR as a descriptive or analytic term for state industry. After Stalin's ascendancy in the late 1920s, it vanished (Bettelheim 1978, 371-372). Instead, those who admired or defended the USSR's actual class structure labeled it socialism. Having abolished private property in the means of production, replaced markets with state planning, and subordinated the state to the workers' power via the Communist Party, they reasoned, the USSR had thereby eliminated capitalist exploitation and classes altogether. With socialism secure and communism ahead, there was no possible object for and hence no need to undertake class analyses of Soviet society.10 Ironically, most Marxian defenses of the USSR thus came to share with most anti-Marxian defenses of Western capitalism a strong disinclination to use any class qua surplus analysis. The defenders' reasons for banishing class analysis in this way included the undesirable and uncomfortable connotations of phrases like state capitalism or class structure. Having achieved the USSR's survival at stupendous social costs, its defenders could not tolerate phrases that seemed to them to denigrate the achievement and render those costs in vain. They also sought to distance themselves from and to counterattack the critics who denounced state capitalism in the USSR. The defenders thus rejected the notion of state capitalism as hostile propaganda. State capitalism evolved then as a concept used chiefly by critics to attack Soviet leaders and social development for betraying the 1917 revolution's goals.
...

quote:

The history of discussion of state capitalism-like the history of so many other aspects of the Soviet experience-reveals the conceptual blinders of its time. The passions of the 1917 revolutionaries and their czarist and liberal enemies, of the Stalinists and Trotskyists, and of the cold warriors endlessly juxtaposing state and private property and planning and markets: most were obsessed with power. They struggled, albeit in different ways and toward different ends, to understand and transform the distribution of power in society as the key lever by which to shape history. They presumed, rarely stopping to wonder why, that power was the object that must be the focus of theoretical attention and political action. Marxian class analyses thus became analyses of the distribution of power, whereas Marx had prioritized surplus labor for revolutionary attention. Marxists defined classes literally and almost exclusively in terms of who wielded power over objects and other people: capitalists or the propertyless masses. Anti-Marxian analyses likewise focused on power, equating Marxism with centralized, economically inefficient, dictatorial statism and contrasting private capitalism as equivalent to individualism, democracy, and economic efficiency. Because power was the essence on all sides, no one felt the need to pay much attention to surplus labor. Theorists did not do so, nor did the Soviet authorities in the planning or execution of state policy. Nor did the workers and managers in enterprises. One result was theoretical and practical blindness to the enduringly capitalist form of the production, appropriation, and distribution of surplus labor insid the USSR. Another result was the inability to see, let alone address, the ways in which the maintenance of a state capitalist class structure-conceived as socialism by most supporters and enemies alike-contributed to many of the USSR's deepening nonclass problems, including those which finally provoked its collapsee.

mawarannahr
May 21, 2019

You can hope it gets better, you can follow your dreams
But hope is for presidents and dreams are for people who are sleeping

mawarannahr
May 21, 2019

I’m Turkish and while I can’t tell you what The Uyghur Mind is up to, I guarantee this is what Turkey is trying to facilitate. Free my banned brother and/or sister and gently caress US (mod) interventionism

mawarannahr
May 21, 2019

are there countries where jailed judges still jail others?

mawarannahr fucked around with this message at 22:24 on Mar 21, 2021

mawarannahr
May 21, 2019

waiting for the mods to delete TCC and ban everyone in the weed thread

mawarannahr
May 21, 2019

Raskolnikov38 posted:

how many Turkic flash mobs does DC have

apparently this was organized by a DC nonprofit called national awakening: http://nationalawakening.org

it is run by Salih Hudayar, the 27-year old president in exile (unelected) of east Turkestan


fun facts:

- The University of Oklahoma (BS in International Studies and Political Science)
- Masters in National Security Studies, American Military University (ongoing)
- Oklahoma Army National Guard, Private First Class, 179th Infantry Regiment
- From a business family
-Senior capstone: “From Central Asia to the Uyghurs: Refining the American Grand Strategy."


quote:

In the summer of 2017, Hudayar founded the East Turkistan National Awakening Movement and moved from Oklahoma to Washington, DC to engage in human rights and political advocacy.[13] He is widely known as the Founder and President of the East Turkistan National Awakening Movement. In early 2018, Hudayar began to meet with members of Congress and advocate for the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act and since June 4, 2018, he has led weekly demonstrations in front of the US Capitol building and the White House to protest China's policy in Xinjiang.

What a go-getter!

mawarannahr
May 21, 2019

apropos to nothing posted:

the bullshit organization are my chinese comrades. maybe you disagree with them/us but i trust them because ive had discussions with them, read what they put out regularly, etc. which demonstrate that we have the same
now if you think the ccp is genuinely a workers party which is leading a workers state, that is a separate debate, though my feelings should be obvious. and, as always, mods suck, free larry and the others

I hope you don’t trust Vincent Kolo as a Chinese comrade. Is chinaworker still mostly plagiarized from the Guardian and/or quoting NED-adjacent sources exclusively? It’s not good for SA and I wish Kolo had gone off with Saunois.

mawarannahr fucked around with this message at 13:17 on Mar 31, 2021

mawarannahr
May 21, 2019

if GJB catches wind of this they’re so hosed

mawarannahr
May 21, 2019

if magic is technology sufficiently scientifically advanced that we struggle to comprehend it, we might consider Marxism as a form of advanced social technology that is so powerful it might as well be magic for taking the working class from the field to the stars in a few decades.

mawarannahr
May 21, 2019

Dreddout posted:

I am begging you to go outside

ah, I’m sorry to say this but there’s some bad news about the outside these days. have you been aware of the goings-on?

mawarannahr
May 21, 2019

SSJ_naruto_2003 posted:

They loving spelled the hash tag uyghur then spelled it uighur in the tweet

neither Turkic languages nor the other official languages of China can be represented soundly in the Roman alphabet so there are lots of ways to spell it, among them Cenk Uygur's last name. this is further compounded by the practical and symbolic relevance of Arabic orthography, which is no more suited to the task. Epstine!

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mawarannahr
May 21, 2019

are there any other electeds in the us who call themselves Marxist ?

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