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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • Fun etymological fact: very long ago, tyranny used to refer to an autocratic leader that issued a debt jubilee, generally in response to a peasant uprising. A debt jubilee is where most or all debts are declared invalid, a clean debt slate for society, and was generally necessary to keep society functioning. The mini revolution that appointed the tyrant would be short-lived and the prior systen would more or less remain in place, just with cancelled debts.



  • TheOubliette@lemmy.mltoMemes@lemmy.mlFairy Tales
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    25 days ago

    The NYPD budget would make it something like the third largest military if compared to countries’ military budgets. The NYPD’s main purpose is to protect capital which, per “stop and frisk” and similarly racist policies, are intended to harass minority groups. If there is a safety issue where minutes matter, they are only hours away. If a shop window gets broken they’ll be there immediately.




  • Yes, we should definitely not have something like Sweden or the old New Deal.

    I think you need to refamiliarize yourself with what I said, as this is not it.

    We should let children grow up in poverty, let old people suffer, and let the planet burn while we sit around discussing Trotsky and the Second International in hopes that the revolution will come.

    I said something that is the exact opposite of sitting around, actually. Do your best to read a little more carefully before sharing opinions.

    iirc de La Cruz got less than 100,000 votes.

    And?



  • Socialism is always about recreating a ruling class: it is to make the working class into the ruling class.

    There is no practical alternative to this. Imagine trying the only way: to immediately end class relations. You’ve won the revolution. Your ideological brethren are in power and the Great Workers’ Council is going forward with your plan. How are you going to force people to end class relations? Won’t it require a state? Who is enforcing the end of relations? If someone buys up an extra-big plot of land and starts charging tenants rent, reinventing semi-feudal relations, who is going to stop them? And what are you going to do about the bourgeoisie who still exist, especially those overseas, and are working against you to reopen your country for exploitation?

    All of these basic realities require a state. And you cannot simply end all class relations instantaneously, as the wider public will not all agree with you ideologically. Unless you plan extreme forms of oppression for the entire population, you will need to deal with the remnants of various class relations in various forms, engaging, ideally, in a process that will whittle them away. That entire process will be recreating a ruling class, i.e. the working class, to impose this process on the other classes.


  • It’s the opposite, actually.

    The people who talk about “tax the rich” or the New Deal don’t actually do anything, they are armchair activists who have no real idea of how they would ever accomplish this outside of pretending the Democratic Party, which constantly opposes them and crushes such ideas, is the vehiclr, and the way to make it happen is complaining on the internet.

    Communists know that actually addressing our collective problems is a much more difficult task, nothing less than the overthrow of capitalism, something that would need to survive attempts at cooption by liberal power structures like the aforementioned party. So we build from the ground up, educating one another and developing practice so that we can balance growth, education, and having impact through actions. We go to the meetings, we run the meetings, we teach one another, we organize the protests and marches, we build the strategic mutual aid events, we embed with workers’ spaces and unions, we embed with and build from within the marginalized so as to be of them. Communist organizing is adding a part-time job on top of your other obligations.






  • TheOubliette@lemmy.mltoMemes@lemmy.mlA two state solution
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    2 months ago

    The entirety of their logic is myopic electoralism handed down to them by the most insufferable party climbers imaginable. If you are against their neoliberal blue genocider, you must be for the other tean’s red neoliberal genocider, because all of politics must be condensed to the next / the last election day and which neoliberal horse may win it.


  • TheOubliette@lemmy.mltoMemes@lemmy.mlA two state solution
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    2 months ago

    You’re talking to people that want to continue rationalizing their tacit, frequently racist support for genocide, and their easiest out has always been to say, “but Trump is worse”. They have never done the introspection required to look at their own personal role as a political being beyond what they’re told to do by the Democratic Party and their donors: slacktivist vote shaming, always presuming the high ground for themselves (even while tolerating genocide!), and doing as little as possible on the ground outside of minor exercises in false catharsis like a cop-escorted, permitted march or an ignored letter writing campaign.

    When challenged on this by people on the left that do read and do self-reflect, these are the folks that responded in bad faith, even when the context is genocide, because they have made politics into an extension of their egos rather than a project to which to subordinate yourself and devote real work to.

    Whining about .ml is their way of pretending to be vindicated every time Trump does something bad, as they cannot actually argue against what the people in .ml say, they must rely on inventions and emotional implications.

    In short, many on .ml vocally opposed supporting genociding Democrats. None that I’m aware of expected Trump to be better. At best, a roll of the dice.