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- cross-posted to:
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- [email protected]
According to former United States general Ben Hodges, the withdrawal of US troops from Europe is only a matter of time. In an interview with SonntagsBlick, he advises Switzerland to prepare for war.
its not about deciding who to govern here. burgeois elections in a burgeois state will only elect people aligned with their agenda, which means you will keep walking towards fascism regardless of who wins an election, and none of the alternatives will actually enact your will, even when they have a majority. democrats and their warmongering are especially bad to us in the periphery of the planet
as for solutions, join a leftist political organization or union. it will involve talking to people around you, striking, helping and building community and participating in direct action with systemic change in mind. the more people get involved, deeper gets the change we can enact. it doesn’t have to involve capitalist institutions at all. in most socialist/anarchist systems they chose their leaders, yes, by debating and voting in a council but that assumes the system is not rigged against us, which pretty obviously is in capitalism for the reasons mentioned above and more.
you think us as blockheads because you probably read no political theory beyond liberalism, if that. be more open minded towards leftists, and do a bit of studying and you will notice our ideals are close to the left-leaning liberals. we think you as blockheads because you keep trying to change things in a misguided or misinformed way that is pretty obviously not solving any problems.
you can shake your fists all you want at the hefty percentage of people that recognize this (not only us leftists btw, which are a tiny minority in the US) and doesnt bother to vote, but you won’t change anything because a compelling candidate for leadership is not viable in the current system. my country has mandatory voting and nothing changes either, electoralism is not the solution.
This reads like satire, a parody of tankies.
its literally the basics. you heard it before.
No, it’s delusional bullshit. Copy-pasta for LARPers.
doing nothing in the face of fascism is delusional bullshit.
it takes a sheltered westerner to hate leftism that hard.
I am not a “sheltered westerner”.
Your world salad about bourgeois elections leading to facaism is complete bullshit and clearly not true, be it in the west or anywhere in the world.
Fascist/oligarch take over via democratic means is a lot more complex than that and has more to do with local social attitudes and certain qualities of a given political system.
You have no clue what you are talking about.
the very withdrawal of troops in the OP we are arguing under is caused by fascism. caused by burgeois elections failing to present any option that didnt point to it.
oligarchs can take over whenever they want because in capitalism, they are the actual leaders over the puppetshow.
we are literally witnessing it unfold in real time.
Oligarchs taking over is a reflection of a given social situation. It’s not a deterministic thing. It happens because of how a lot of people start to think. This is not a physical law of nature. It’s all in our hands.
Your bourgeois elections word salad is joke. Get real, no one is going to take it seriously outside of internet LARP. You know it yourself, don’t lie!
I say this as someone who speaks 3 languages, has lived for multiple years in countries in North America, Europe and Asia and has visited about ~30 countries so far.
oligarchs are the ruling class in capitalism. “oligarchs taking over” is a misnomer, they already own everything by definition, in every capitalist country. they can choose to fuck your life at any time, if threatened. the US is prime example of just this.
if you don’t think socialism is possible despite the many real world examples, and don’t actually want a solution because you are rich enough to travel leisurely around the world, step aside from politics and stop worrying about it. let the adults do the work, its in our hands after all.
if your larp is true, you really are the “sheltered westerner” i assumed you to be, and a tiny minority in the planet. i don’t think theres much value in this conversation anymore, but seethe more if you will.
So what is the solution? Violently overthrowing one bunch of bastards will only end up with another bunch of bastards. Completely smashing the system will lead straight to warlordism. Lasting positive change was only ever achieved at the ballot box. And if you despise democracy, I despise you as much as the fascists and I fail to see the difference.
i mentioned the solution in my previous post:
i will be more succint: communism is the history proven way.
also from your response it looks like you didnt even read what i’m bothering to type so ill be succint again before i leave: the capitalist electoral system is designed to look democratic but it is not at all.
So personally, as a Scandinavian social-democrat and union member I would like to ask this question in response to “communism is the history proven way”: show me. What examples from history do you have?
cuba, china, i really like the chilean attempt, the recent ones in africa, mexico has walked a few steps, vietnam… theres plenty in the modern era. pick your poison, the third world is chock full of attempts to get rid of capitalism.
scandinavians come to my country to extract pollute and colonize it. very easy to be comfortable in such circumstances. stop that and keep your comforts if you want it to be impressive.
I am not sure what you are trying to say, and I am not sure why you are reacting as you are.
My only point by mentioning Scandinavia was to say I believe in social benefits, unionization, and heavy market regulation by the state. That being said, I personally know of no successful communist state (successful in the eyes of the average proletariat) from history. I don’t believe it is intellectually honest to call Cuba and China successful examples.
I do not see that getting rid of capitalism is a sensible or viable option (or that it has ever been done without famine or other such terrible side effects), but I never doubt that the invisible hand, is the invisible hand in my pocket - so it is our duty as voters to make sure that we regulate the hell out of everything and our government has the teeth to do so.
I believe you mentioned above that you didn’t vote, but you are dissatisfied with foreign companies extracting resources (and presumably your government failing to sensibly tax and regulate the practice). I’m not sure you will be able to change that without either voting or taking part in revolution.
assuming you are arguing in good faith you are, again, in a comfortable and privileged position to take when northern europe is pillaging the third world for our resources using capitalist imperialism. you don’t represent the average proletariat, and thats peachy coming from the place that colonized us for centuries.
china was the poorest hungriest planet in the world before the revolution and is now an industrial world power, cuba has achieved amazing things despite a brutal blockade by the most powerful empire in history, compare it to haiti. look up why some africans are having revolutions right now.
beyond that i don’t know what to tell you, you mention all the nice things you have because of the aforementioned imperialism like its a natural thing to have everywhere in the capitalist world.
here is the problem: the rest of the world can’t vote imperialism away. we get invaded and destroyed, look up what happened to the elected chilean socialist government i mentioned before if you want to get an idea of what i am talking about.
I definetly did not say that at all.
I apologize for the misunderstanding- I took your statement that imperialism cannot be voted away as you not voting.
I consider the current Chinese government to be closer to fascism and imperialism than to actual socialism, and to say that the great famine was not a direct result of bad (Maoist) policy would be revisionist.
You state that imperialism cannot be voted away, but is that not what the Chileans did? Is that not what has happened in Bolivia and Venezuela? Yes the imperialists do their best to meddle, but they were in fact voted out, which is counter to your original point.
As someone who believes in strengthening the community to forment change you must know that antagonizing me for something I am unable to apologize for is no way to create more comrades. Yes, luck of the draw I was born Scandinavian and not Yemeni, I understand that there are socioeconomic consequences of that. Shame on you for not even attempting to have a friendly conversation with a unionized factory worker.
maoist policymakers tried to do the same rapid industrialization that stalin did in the ussr and failed, but it was by no means the main reason for the famine. i will remind you again that china was one of the poorest countries in the world and you don’t build strong infrastructure to feed everyone reliably overnight. it was also greatly exagerated by the west, as always.
the thing is, though, that this was about 70-ish years ago? china has enjoyed record economic growth, and improvement on the lives of average citizens. of course i’m not saying its perfect and they have many Ls but when push comes to shove, its nothing short of amazing seeing what they were able to achieve in just 50-60 years. especially coming from a country that can get as poor as they were back then in some regions. they have struck a good balance between free markets and state control, and they are slowly transitioning away from capitalist free markets as it lives out its usefulness.
i find the “china bad” rhetoric of many westerners to be a bit disingenious because you can attribute similar catastrophes to most countries if you look to their past.
i asked you to check out chilean socialism precisely because their electoral system was attacked easily and quickly, with dire consequences. please check it out, its eye-opening to why voting socialism in rarely works, even if the socialist somehow manages to win with the burgeois puting their fingers on the scale. sometimes violence is the only way, sometimes it is not. sometimes going back to a parlimentary-like system like china is necessary, sometimes you can do direct elections like cuba. good on the countries that manage to do this more peacefully, but blame not the victims for trying to defend themselves.
venezuela is victim to constant destabilization attempts in the form of sanctions and attacks to its elections. it literally just happened again last year, they are unable to enact good policy and move further than the frankly kind of weird socialism they built. i wouldnt say they are managing well, nor that they have a good future ahead. their situation is closer to cuba in that the sanctions do the brunt of the damage.
i don’t know about bolivia enough to talk about it without saying some wrong bullshit, so ill abstain.
i’m simply explaining to you something that you might have not noticed, judging by the content of your posts. i’m sorry if sometimes i come across as frustrated with some of this. it really is peachy for westerners to be saying “just vote! we have all these things by voting :D” to us when it goes much deeper and is sometimes related to that. europeans can keep whatever system they want as long as they treat others fairly.
with that said, socialism is a system that allows for the comforts you have, but not the excess consumption you enjoy. it is, however, a system not so dependent on exploiting poor people to keep the rich rich. i don’t actually expect many westerners to think about revolution before suffering through capitalist crisis from losing their colonies and/or not being able to grow forever.
us fascism looks to be just that, so they are trying to turn the exploitation inwards. socialism is a proven way to stop fascism, but i don’t expect americans will do it until it gets really bad either.
I was going to ask the same thing.
If we evict the socialist dictatures/guerillas led by marxist-leninist parties and other authoritarian flavors of communism, remains some attempts at libertarian communism, some surviving longer than other : Paris in 1871, Ukraine in 1917, Spain in 1936-1937 are short lived examples of past communist situations that brought social changes a century or half a century before they could be obtained again, for those we obtained back. Nowadays examples are Rojava and Zapatistad territoried in Chiapas, Mexico.
Thank you for answering. I appreciate the efforts of your listed examples, especially considering their attempts at establishing human rights or dignities before it was even a thing. What I do feel is a counterpoint is how short lived they all were. I also feel for the Kurds (tough neighborhood) but I am not quite ready to move to Rojava, despite their developments I also fear that in time it may be added to your list of short lived examples. Do you feel that libertarian communism is the best theoretical alignment for a modern communist state?
Thanks for your appreciation. We of course agree that they all are very very short lived. Sadly, the Kurds will effectively probably have a rough time in the near future. Zapatistas are quite an exception in here, they manage to stay steady for some years now, but of course their situation is quite unique (though in all examples I gave it was unique situations).
The common point in all those cases are that the reason for their short durations are more or less authoritarians states, in its diverse forms (Republic in 1871, Fascists+Republic in 1936, Communists in 1917, Turkey for Rojava, etc.). So i feel like if every system that has been criticized as bad all fought against libertarian communism, maybe that’s a hint about how good a system it is. I’m not sure if it’s the best for modern communism, maybe nowadays situation requires something else, but thanks to its versatility, I think it could adapt. So yeah, I kinda feel that libertarian communism and its declinations are the best theoretical alignment for communism in general (though it’s not necessarily a state, precisely).
The whole world is a “tough neighborhood” for small states. Cuba has been remarkably successful given its adversaries.
revolution itself is ‘authoritarian’, countries suffering violence can’t save themselves with love.
good on the countries in a better off position that can take that moral high ground.