Reactionary forces are the capitalists, the petit bourgeois, the compradors, and the privileged.

People who accuse Marxists of being tankies are not calling anyone out on anyone’s shit. They are moralizing.

You severely missed everything presented to you. Tripled literacy rates. Housing that was 5% of salary or less. Massive life expectancy jumps in the masses.

Direct benefits to the working class.

The reason it’s dumb is because DemSocs don’t actually have the ring of power to be able to cast it into the fire in the first place.

How many Bolsheviks were in positions of government? How much of the PLA was in power in China?

The sad reality is that nearly every successful socialist revolution was born through civil war.

Supa-hot-fire.gif

“I’m about to ruin this man’s whole career”

No. That’s incorrect. Democratic socialism is always and has always been an opposite to revolutionary socialism. Read some goddamned books. ALL forms of socialism are democratic, essentially by definition, but certainly by historical precedent. The only undemocratic “socialist” movements have been fascist movements using socialist aesthetics.

You don’t understand party systems, so you imagine one-party systems are undemocratic. You are incorrect. In a multi-party systems, competing interests fight for power using the electoral system. That means you would have a capitalist party and a socialist party and they would fight for votes. Why in the world would you ever expect a communist country to have multiple parties?

Instead of that, communist parties have structures within them for different factions to have sub organizations within the party. These are all people who support communism but differ on the particulars. They fight for power within the party, ensuring that the country remains communist while still enabling democracy.

It is only in fully capitalist countries that have eliminated the power of their internal communist where you have multiple capitalist parties that actually collaborate and then spread propaganda that only multi-party states are truly democratic. It’s transparent bullshit.

That’s why we say that under capitalism you can change the party but the not the policies and under communism you can change the policies but not the party. Ever notice just how democratic the West is regarding war? No matter how much the people don’t want war, no matter what party is in power, the leadership always chooses war. No matter how much we want profits to take a back seat to social issues, profit always wins. The policies of capitalism are unchangeable by the people. Is that democracy simply because you get to choose which team is oppressing you and killing foreigners?

Good question. No. It was not. Please read about it. There is plenty of writing about the political structure of the USSR, its constitutional documents, its legal and court systems, etc. It is imminently possible for you to learn about it if you’re curious

What are you talking about about? Go read a goddamned book about the political structure of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, its many voting structures, its multiple state entities, its levels of power of distribution, and THEN try to argue that 1 person had full power.

It’s ridiculous to think that your level of ignorance counts as a political perspective on history.

Uh, no. The entirety of the American and European population, with the minor exception of the consistently radical left, are all bootlickers. They cheered for Hillary when she said “we came, we saw, he died” about the public sodomization of 70-year-old head of state. They regurgitate apologia for war crimes. They deliberately ignore the death squads their nations train to torture and rape and murder indigenous people in Africa and South America. They hate the phrase “defund the police” and believe Gavin Newsome is liberal for spending millions displacing unhoused communities instead of addressing root causes.

It has nothing in particular to do with Trump. Biden was a terrorist. Obama was a terrorist. Clinton was a terrorist. The Bushes are all terrorists. Reagan was a terrorist.

They all bombed weddings, funerals, subsistence villages, schools, hospitals. They all oversaw a military that openly refuses to count civilian deaths accurately. They are all briefed on the numerous CIA black sites around the world doing research on human torture and mind breaking, on bioweapons, and housing political prisoners. They are all fully aware of the integration of the military and the telecom industry and the never ending domestic spying.

And the countries have been spying on each other’s citizens and trading the intelligence with each other to get around their own laws against doing so. And people go out on the street and protest in FAVOR of military cooperation and NATO.

They’re all bootlickers and terrorists.

This is puritanism brain worms. Your position is that socialism done correctly is subsistence living. What a terrible vision.

What are you 14?

Yeah, no one is mad at you because they’re libs. They’re downvoting you because you missed the entire point and went off on some bullshit.

You say “working on someone else’s plan” is what you mean by “working for”. You then go on to talk about selling your labor. These are two different things.

Under capitalism, the capitalist doesn’t make a plan. They make a bet. Part of that bet is hiring planners to make the plans that other people will work on. This is why I asked the question I asked.

When you and the manager both sell your labor power to the capitalist for a wage, you both work for the capitalist, but you don’t work on the capitalist’s plan. You work on your manager’s plan.

If you take the capitalist out, and if we define “working for” as selling labor, then “working for” is abolished under socialism, even though hierarchy remains.

If instead the definition of “working for” is “working on someone else’s plan”, then we have a discussion about the fact that planning is a type of labor. In some context, planning can be done by the people doing the work at the expense of efficiency, which is fine when our goal is maximizing liberty. But there are other contexts where the work to be done and the planning are significantly arduous and complex enough that different people need to do the planning and the execution.

When this is the case, inevitably, anarchists start talking about “voluntary hierarchies” as the correct prefiguration, but this meme is raising the common objections from some anarchists that there is no such thing as a voluntary hierarchy.

Hence, the discussion below about the reality of stratified systems and levels of complexity creating naturally stratified labor distribution, which lends itself to hierarchy.

Honestly, what does this mean? If you abolish ownership, then working “for” someone changes in meaning.

Once ownership and profit are gone, working “for” someone stops meaning “for their economic interest” and starts meaning something very ambiguous. Don’t carry over the emotional meaning from one mode of production to the other.

You might mean working according to someone else’s plan. Is that working “for” someone? Maybe you mean working with someone who has the power to bar you from participating in the work or has the power to stop you doing certain actions?

It’s not clear what you mean, so it would be helpful if you clarified.

It’s not even just differences in skill and experience. The person who is busy cutting a path through the first necessarily cannot also see the entirety of the forest. The person who is taking the aerial view of the forest necessarily cannot be cutting through it.

There is a hierarchy of scale and complexity. It can be solved with voluntary hierarchies of work, but it cannot be ignored. Consequences of actions can take minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, or decades to emerge. The people worried about the immediate consequences of individual actions are not going to have the capacity for also worrying about the long-term consequences of collective actions over time.

We know this. We see this all the time. And yet this axiomatic-bordering-on-religious stricture against hierarchy chooses to believe there’s some way to handle hierarchies of complexity without hierarchies of coordination.

Thanks for reposting. The commenter appears to be a member of the semi-conscious liberation army.

Grrrr

You should study North Korean politics and political structures.

The standard you are using, which is that there should be constant changes in leadership, is an attempt to use your existing liberal democracy as the only possible model for liberatory politics.

Think about it. Is the ONLY way you would ever accept a political system when it has constant leadership churn? Ok, grant that. Then ask, what causes constant leadership churn?

The answers will be either constant fighting between major ideologically opposed factions OR constant disapproval by the people being governed.

Neither of those conditions are good healthy conditions.

Now instead imagine if there were no competing ideologies, the capitalists have been purged and domestically the entire population has a shares collective trauma from the massive bombing campaign by the psychopathic US.

What’s the behavior gonna be? Well, if any leader is capable of leading them out of the caves and to safety from napalm, kidnapping, fire bombing, and famine - that leader is either very lucky and when their luck runs out they will be ousted, or that leader is actually very effective, responsive to the needs of the people, and is capable of adapting to changing times. In that case, the people will have absolutely no desire to put another leader in place.

When that happens, especially in a culture that puts huge importance on multi-generational families, the children of that leader are likely going to be the best equipped to carry in the program. Not necessarily though. They would have to remain constantly engaged, constantly proving that they are capable.

What would that require? It would require a system where by existing leadership cabinets were capable of selecting and assigning those descendants to specific posts. And guess what… That’s exactly what DPRK has.

Your insistence that freedom is defined exclusively by multi-party systems that give “equal” voice to capitalist and working class interests is a form of chauvinism.

That not at all how it works. The point is that dropping bombs for the purposes of imperialism is different than dropping bombs for the purpose of anti-imperialism. The USA is the torch bearer of the globe spanning empire that they took over from Western Europe. That empire at its height dominated 80% of the world’s population and to this day that empire continues to cause more death and destruction than any other movement in the world. We are now in the fifth century of this empire’s existence.

The Russian Federation is not an empire and it is not imperialist. Just a few decades ago it’s entire system of government and economics was completely ended and rebuilt under the dominance of the empire (described above). The Russian Federation does not occupy any colonies or subjugated territories, as the US does (Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Guam, etc). The Russian Federation is not the continuation of a settler colonial state like the US is. The Russian Federation does not have 600 military bases all over the world where it operates without legal oversight.

Russia has done lots of bad things. All worthy of criticism. But that criticism needs to be contextualized, because while those bad things are worth analyzing and discussing, they can in no way ever be used to justify the actions of the global spanning baby killing family starving genocidal eugenicist world destroying empire.

A lot of reading, listening, arguing with people I disagreed with, forcing myself to contend with discomfort, to reexamine my beliefs, trying to disprove what others were saying or writing, and lots and lots of time.

I was already a relatively well-read kid by the time I hit college, and I had some counter cultura approaches to political beliefs (like taking care of people being more important than raw profit), but I was fully invested in the American project and had a ton of unexamined racism, mysoginy, classism, and cultural appropriation that I just replicated without question.

I studied philosophy and my particular path through that degree forced me to develop not only the ability but the respect for the process of arguing something from multiple perspectives equally well (or aspiring to that as best we can). So by the end of college I was committed to taking up the best version of anything I disagreed with so I could understand it better but also to boost my ego so I could defeat it more soundly.

But “no go” zones always bothered me. For example, we studied the classic skeptics Descartes and Hume, but never responded to them once. We simply examined how their skepticism led to the impossibility of knowledge and then just never solved it. Worse, whenever someone used an argument that was sufficiently skeptical, it was met with “well that just leads to solipsism”. That bothers me as it’s not a refutation. What bothered me more was the position that if anyone used arguments from solipsism that we could just dismiss them as bad faith and ignore what they had to say.

That particular aspect of my path built this sort of vigiliance for these “no go” zones of thought and I saw them popping up all over the place. If a Republican said something, some people would immediately dismiss it without examining it at all, and the same would be true for different people if a Democrat said something. The same was true if a Chinese or Russian report made a claim. The same was true about satanists, communists, addicts, and many others.

These were far more numerous than people arguing strong skepticism. And the positions being discussed didn’t threaten all possible knowledge or the existence of reality, but they did threaten deeply held personal beliefs.

So, overtime, when I witnessed someone else saying “well, that’s pro-China so it can’t be trusted at all”, I slowly started to examine these things. And then I found myself saying the same thing - “oh you’re a communist, you can’t be trusted with anything you say”.

That’s when I realized I had some built-in problems. And it was about that time I started to question my long held beliefs that I wasn’t racist, that I wasn’t sexist, that I wasn’t mysoginst. And that was really hard. It took years of stop and start, years of resisting the evidence, years of not paying attention because it made me uncomfortable.

But eventually 2020 happened, I was forced to slow down, I had far fewer social connections reinforcing my behavior and beliefs, and the national discourse at the time gave me huge opportunities to “argue it from the other side” and examine what was really going on. And that was a hell of a ride. Anger, depression, rage, resentment, just everything came up. But my commitment to earnest engagement with ideas and reality and facts and history forced me through the process.

There were distinct periods where (1) I believed the USA was the greatest country in the world and also I and most of the people I knew were not racist, mysoginst, and white supremacist, and then (2) the USA was the greatest country in the world with some problems and I can see how I have unconscious racism but I can fix that and I’m not mysoginst or white supremacist and most of the people I know are not either, and then (3) the USA is a pretty bad actor but at least it’s better than Russia, China, DPRK, Cuba, Iran, etc and racism is actually a system not a personal moral failing and while I can work against it I have been raised in this way and also wow ok I realize now that mysoginy is insidious and embedded in so many of my ways of relating to the world but I can work on that and then (4) oh wow the US is the evil empire and racism and mysoginy and white supremacy are actually these massive historical processes that I haven’t even begun to wrestle with and I actually can’t really say anything about them until I really dig in and am willing to be wrong in ways that makes me sick to my stomach…

And my process is still ongoing now, but, this is maybe a long winded story about how I escaped the matrix.

Oh …