The Ultimate Doge posted:

Which type of front is the DSA

GalacticAcid posted:

Pod casts,

Doc Hawkins posted:

single-issue anti-meat people are unfortunate not because they are wrong about any metaphysical questions of morality, but because they are wrong about the material realities of building organizations.

they remind me of people who can't shut up about bicycles. the sin isn't having a pet issue, it's lacking self-awareness.

Gulping Again posted:

this very forum has repeatedly established that 'harm reduction' is the same kind of fake idea as 'making hard decisions'

you do not get any credit for making the orphan-grinder kill orphans faster and less agonizingly when you are the one who developed and implemented the orphan-grinder and then based everything in society around the orphan-grinder's output of tar-soaked orphan grist

smarxist posted:

ding ding

the game is rigged against agitators regardless of what paradigm you use if capital is in control.

"cancel culture" and The Big Call Out such that they exist and have been wielded have already largely only been effective at destroying people involved in intra left/prog conflicts of varying degrees of onlineness, everything from ousting legitimately abusive / toxic people to crushing people's posting enemies and leaving people from marginalized pops isolated and without support networks for petty bullshit. sometimes movements concerned with legit criminal behavior and laser focused on the top dogs of abuse (cis het white men) get decent results, like the industry call outs we've seen, but the day to day bread and butter canceling that goes on is a lot of externalized social strife

Look at someone like Peter coffin, if a little turd like that dude can't be flushed by cancel culture purely on the strength of being shameless what good is it

VictualSquid posted:

Leninism, not general marxism. The tendency to become an autocratic dictatorship is inherently prefigured in the idea of a vanguard party.

VictualSquid posted:

If your solution to any problem is building a centralized command group that looks down on the peons, then you will end up with being ruled by a centralized group that looks down on the peons. The step from oligarchic autocracy to leader cult is pretty small.

MizPiz posted:

https://twitter.com/irockgnomes/status/1290387466654949376

V. Illych L. posted:

well no, but a commitment to nojoe involves an affirmation of the importance of electoral politics - actively refusing to vote for a candidate necessarily assumes that such a vote would be meaningful in some sense, i.e. it's an electoralist strategy

Peanut President posted:

Bernie got cheated pretty much conclusively and Corbyn was victim of a real deal conspiracy to make sure Labour would stay a center right party and not rock the boat.

indigi posted:

iirc the exit polls were so wildly out of sync with the results that there’s basically only one explanation

3 posted:

It's because the most vocal subset of vegans most people have the misfortune of interacting with are predominantly petit bourgeois liberals who uphold a lifestyle choice without being cognizant of the exploitation of labor necessary to make it possible. Veganism is a moral choice only when capitalism has vanished from this earth.

Southpaugh posted:

Being a vegan is fine and dandy, on paper. Its not a one size fits all diet though and you need to stay ontop of your micro and macronutrients. If you want to do it, fine.

Veganism as a movement a typical liberal non-solution to any material question you might have i.e. We need to reduce methane/food carbon emissions.

That all the vegans I know will lecture you on meat production in between railing lines of coke is an irony lost on them.

i say swears online posted:

strict veganism never made sense to me from a sustainability perspective. i get my eggs from the egg lady down the street but my avocados are from chiapas and huehuetenango

Southpaugh posted:

It was better put up thread, but basically, all industrial agriculture is suspect. Capitalism makes it that way. Look at the vast oversupply of food that went to waste right at the start of the pandemic. Crops being mulched back into the fields and so on. We overproduce and the mismanagement starts in the boardroom.

This is without bringing up things like food grading and other oversupply/production issues. Or the vast amounts of traditional forests/rainforest that gets cleared and tilled every year to supply an ever growing demand for vegetable oils palm and soybeans and poo poo. Look up how much water almonds take up in california alone and you'll realise that the issue like, everything else is gross mismanagement and free market capitalism.

Veganism as a solution is often brought up as a personal choice that the individual has to make, you know, its the ethical choice. You want to do the right thing right? But individuals do not effect markets, corporations do, and a corporation already decides what diet you eat based off of what's available in your locally (often traditionally)/their own supply chains. Unless you are hitting the farmers market you're probably being fed by a corporate entity.

My take on it is that people have very strong emotional connections with foods and diets, frequently unexamined ones and bringing up your personal diet is about as relevant to the discussion as your sex life.

StashAugustine posted:

it's eternally funny that guys effortlessly switch from yelling about tankies to calling for military intervention on unfriendly governments

Doc Hawkins posted:

very disappointing to see supposed communists discuss individual consumption choices for pages. we can decide how much meat non-indigenous people get to eat after we control the production of it.

VictualSquid posted:

Well, I have stopped all my direct personal consumption of coal and now only use coal if it is filtered through abstract corporate systems. I do not see how going vegan would make a significantly larger impact then that.

Doc Hawkins posted:

in the past i have also shared the hot take that veganism is an eating disorder, specifically orthorexia: compulsive thoughts about the impurity of foods. this was exactly as emptily self-satisfying as when people share the hot take that everyone should be vegan.

what you think other people should and shouldn't do is loser talk. opinions are like ships in a bottle, it's natural to be pleased by crafting a good one and sharing it, but it will accomplish nothing beyond that pleasure, whether social or solitary.

PERPETUAL IDIOT posted:

Does "wait until after the revolution to worry about it" extend to all individual choices that we can make to help the environment? I'll stop rolling coal after the revolution? Let's wait to hear what my soviet has to say about running my house's raw sewage into the river?

Serf posted:

https://twitter.com/RadEmpanada/status/1311433368735809544?s=20

comedyblissoption posted:

NED's long-serving president (since April 30, 1984[24]) is Carl Gershman, former Senior Counselor to the United States Representative to the United Nations and former Executive Director of Social Democrats USA.[25][17]

lol

apropos to nothing posted:

i think at some point you have to say that words like anticapitalist, socialist, radical, anarchist, etc. have to mean something. concretely, calling for a vote for mike bloomberg (which chomsky says he would do if he were the dem nominee) in really any circumstance either means youre not those things, or they have no meaning. its fine to say ideally you want socialism, ideally i want to have a billion dollars. but concretely if you would call for a vote for a billionaire capitalist running on a pro-capitalist program in a capitalist party, then it kind of has the same meaning as me saying i want to have a billion dollars meanwhile i work as a teacher.

mila kunis posted:

Hodgepodge posted:

is this actually some dumb poo poo i picked up without realizing it, or are you just reacting to the sheer horror of the implications?

ToxicAcne posted:

How does leftist resistance to Putin look like? Are there groups against Russian intervention in Syria for example?

Edit: Also am I crazy but does anyone else feel that Marxist scholars like Vijay Prashad don't take climate change seriously as an existential threat. I've read Bookchin but are there more orthodox Marxist works on enviromentalism?

mila kunis posted:

i dont understand this argument (i never read that people's republic of walmart book). i don't think capitalists deny that sub-units (firms) may form that are internally unified, non-anarchic, with planned goals and inputs/outputs, their argument is that the optimum arrangements is that these firms have to compete with each other on a marketplace so the best ones can supply consumers efficiently. a sub-unit of a system acting in a certain way doesn't mean the system itself should be organized the same way

Lady Militant posted:

some pencildick in a maryland suburb googling "left groups that don't like other left groups" and hitting the first link that comes up

Varinn posted:

its really convenient how a bunch of posters who didnt do any political work had this great awakening into realizing that the only moral action is to keep not doing anything, but be self righteous about it lmao

indigi posted:

have any of you ever visited Cuba?

indigi posted:

as much as you'd like to share about everything, tbh. if I had to narrow it down though how hard would it be navigating as an English speaker (with a year or so of Duolingo Spanish)? did you do any cool communist stuff? would it be a good place to visit solo or should I try to get someone to go with me?


e: would this be better to ask in the Latin America thread

BrutalistMcDonalds posted:

a friend of mine visited and liked it. he went to santa clara and got to see the train that che blew up. said people have basic stuff provided for and people are also proud of their history. but there was one time where he was passing through a nicer area and was like "woah, where are we?" to his tour guide. and the guide responded in a sarcastic, smart-rear end way "we're in the most cuban part of cuba." this was an area where more privileged people lived, like nomenklatura types.

indigi posted:

what’s beb

Atrocious Joe posted:

still funny
https://twitter.com/lib_crusher/status/1290309692736995328?s=20

ToxicAcne posted:

Who is this?

GalacticAcid posted:

Lol. Beyond puerile

VictualSquid posted:

A really fascinating video about a small village that managed to become a cooperative.
The origin story is also interesting, because it has very different religious dynamics then we normally see. They originally became Christians in order to protect themselves from chinese and japanese imperialism.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnK5ew37QVI

Finicums Wake posted:

it's a big deal because it has allowed anti-marxists to claim that marx's (and most marxists') labor theory of value leads to contradictions, or is inconsistent. if the LTV is inconsistent, then all of marx's economic theories can be ignored because we know a priori that they're false. basically, marxist economics can't even get off the ground because its foundation is rotten.

exmarx posted:

mila kunis posted:

https://www.thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/52-kerala/



In early December, Kerala held local body elections across the state. The communists won more seats in these elections than all the seats won by the opposition. The right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which runs the Indian government in Delhi under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and the centre-right Indian National Congress, which is the main opposition in Kerala, ran a vicious campaign against the Left, including harsh personal attacks directed at Kerala’s Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan. The media – controlled almost exclusively by the major private corporations – led the attack on the Left and ignored new initiatives pushed by the Left in this remarkably difficult period.



[....]



Kerala’s Left went into this election with a series of important advantages. First, over the course of a century of struggle and governance, the communist movement has driven an agenda to improve the living conditions of the people, including by promoting health, education, and housing, and has inculcated a tradition of public action. Second, it was the Left that initiated a people’s planning campaign twenty-five years ago; this process enlivened the local self-government bodies and made them crucial platforms for public action and for the development of the Left alternative. Third, the current Left Democratic Front government has an exemplary record of managing crises that predates the pandemic, such as the catastrophic floods and the outbreak of the Nipah virus, both of which struck the state in 2018. Fourth, the Left’s mass organisations in the state are alert to the needs of the people and are often found working to provide relief, to fight against social indignity, and to fight to expand the rights of people. This was most clearly visible during the pandemic, when student, youth, women’s, workers, and peasant organisations delivered food and medicine to the people, built public washing facilities, and assisted local governments with testing, tracing, and enforcing the quarantine. It was this mass work that provided the best antidote to the virulence of the corporate media.

Cpt_Obvious posted:

Aren't we rapidly approaching a time where labor is becoming less and less needed due to automation? Wouldn't it just make sense to pay people not to do anything rather than create a ballooning Keynesian nightmare?