I was wondering that too. Doesn’t the military signing on anyway put him in a position to fully Yeltsin it?
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cn38321180et?post=asset%3A69e3ba8d-55f4-443e-9531-84ad91772741#post
He lifted it himself. I guess he didn’t have it in him to really take over, which makes me wonder what he even hoped to accomplish in the first place.
Currently it looks like the parliament is working on approving impeaching him
He could be bullshitting, and he and his cronies are incompetent enough to fumble this even if it was true, but this theoretically would be a great outcome for not having more war in the region.
It’s probably just because they want to arm and train Azov II with even fancier weapons to do terror attacks or something.
That’s exactly what doesn’t happen usually, but it’s one of the best outcomes (the other good outcome is if it was a hit and the corruption was uncovered as an unintended consequence)
In communist China . . .
How can you look at what cocaine does to people and come to the conclusion “the only problem with supplying them with cocaine is exploitation in the supply chain”? Granted, cocaine isn’t black tar heroin or something, but it still fucks people up. There’s a substantial difference between not punishing drug users (because you obviously shouldn’t) and fucking “narco communism” trafficking drugs to them. Like half the people in this reply chain are just ridiculous.
They do say that, but I’m not understanding your meaning in mentioning it. Could you say a little more?
iirc it’s specifically blue jeans, and black jeans are fine (and in fact produced in the DPRK). idk for sure though.
To be honest with you, I am not very interested in this, but I’ll point out as what I think is a meaningful and bizarre ideological failure because it’s easy to:
After going on, in an essay directed against Leninists, about the importance of dual power, with no recognition of the irony therein, this paragraph pops up:
Some Leninists might still advocate authority as a method by which one more “advanced” elements of the working class bring other elements of the working class into line in the fight against capitalism. But this can only ever re-create a class dynamic within the workers’ organisation and sabotage our own goals. If, at a given moment, the working class as a whole is not sufficiently class-conscious to defeat capitalism without resorting to authority, true social revolution is not possible at that moment. As Marx said “The emancipation of the working class must be the work of the workers themselves.” to which I would add that “the workers themselves” can not be taken to mean some tiny sub-faction of the working class that is destined to become a new exploiting class.
This person either catastrophically misunderstands Marxism and Marxism-Leninism, or they are willfully misrepresenting it so they have an excuse to do “The People’s Stick” Bakunin bullshit like their type just love to do.
The philosophy that Engels is arguing for is one of democracy overcoming capitalism, and the authority of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat is the dictatorship of the many over the few. This few inevitably includes some proletarians for various reasons, though it is more discussed as being bourgeois because they are overwhelmingly within this collection of minorities. No one has an interest in this red aristocracy that the author strains to depict.
The author furthermore bares the poverty of their philosophy in this insinuation that the entire working class must be in unanimous agreement, that of a population of millions or even hundreds of millions, every single one must individually have all policies be completely in line with how they spontaneously prefer to act. That is the only way we can interpret these claims about “the working class as a whole”. No, we should not hold back 9/10ths of a hypothetical class-conscious working population because the remaining 1/10th isn’t on the same page.
I really think though that the average person can see problems like these just by having a passing familiarity with Marxism, specifically reading On Authority, and then reading this essay. I say that on good authority because I might be average on a good day.
Tell them to substantiate the claim instead of just going “um, that’s been declared incorrect”
Granted, I think people copy-paste On Authority too much (though I basically agree with it), and it comes off kind of bad in that respect because, when a bunch of people always jump to telling you to read a text and it’s always the same text, it comes off as (and often is) book worship. Think of how liberals came off during the election cycle with every single fucking one of them saying “it’s a trolley problem”. Again, I don’t think On Authority is wrong, I just think it’s a faulty tactic rhetorically. In that respect, I guess “rote” is right. The people telling you it’s “debunked” can still get fucked.
This brave truth-speaker act is pathetic. By your second comment, the mods were right to regard you sitting there repeating yourself as spam, and a disgusting practice in sneering at poverty. It’s also not literally true, there absolutely is electrification in Cuba, just not everywhere. So it’s not a “simple fact,” it’s a false generalization.
You were just spamming chauvinistic and incorrect bullshit, that’s why your comment was removed.
For some reason I can’t connect to any .kp websites at the moment, but I am wondering where they consider the current frontier in state ideology to be. That is to say, what new ideological work are they concerned with? Not just the preservation of standing ideology among the people, which I understand is a necessity.
I’ve read some of their publications – and here I am most thinking of the humorously titled “No One Can Replace Women” (available online at kass.org.kp if I remember right) – and I can’t help but notice reactionary trends. For example, in the aforementioned article, women are given such a status because of their ability to produce and rear children. I’ll grant the first part, but the publication says things like, paraphrasing, “a mother must devote the entirety of her existence to raising her child” with no mention of others being involved, even the father. Are we really going to endorse such an isolating family structure? Are we not going to exercise collective life by involving others, even beyond the father, in the task of child-rearing? Can’t a mother have other aspirations for her own accomplishments besides reproduction? Or does it believe a mother has no other life for however many years?
This isn’t a one-off, I just don’t have access to the website to refresh my memory or read more articles.
Edit: the collection of articles might also be on naenara.com.kp, idk
You were so much nicer to me before, but in my process of trying to look up that butterchurn thing, all I found was an argument that you had with Barx 12 days ago, where you had a tone much more like you have here. I’m not sure what I did to deserve it. Also I still want a source on the butterchurn thing.
In 2024 it’s on its face ridiculous to attempt to segregate farm labor from industrial labor
I would consider farm labor in a modern state like the US to be proletarian. This should be obvious. It’s a backward country in many ways, but the relations of production are not medieval.
rather than advocate for labor solidarity,
Even if they [modern American rural workers] were peasants, or we were talking about an industrializing nation in the modern day that actually does have something like a medieval peasantry alongside a proletariat, I would advocate for solidarity among the working classes against the owning classes. Nothing I said contradicted that. You underestimate how specific a criticism I was making, just because I support one of Lenin’s premises in a defective argument does not mean I support every premise, every inference, and every conclusion. You’re shadowboxing.
that’s exactly how I know you’re writing apologia.
It turns out you don’t.
Under Leninism peasants are not proletarians. Let me underline that. Under Leninism anyone who worked on a farm was not a worker in the communist sense.
This is just a silly thing for you to say. “Proletarian” does not mean the same thing as “worker,” it refers to someone who is reliant on selling their labor for wages. Peasants and proletarians are both workers, and it’s a basic feature of the development of (e.g. European) capitalism that there were successive stages of owning and working classes.
I really don’t think the butter-churn benchmark was representative of Leninist theory about divisions in the peasantry* (which is not me saying that they didn’t make catastrophic errors). It feels to me like saying “People engaged in ritual cannibalism during the Cultural Revolution” as a way of characterizing the CR. Yes, such a thing did happen as far as I can tell, but it’s not like it was a national issue or part of Mao’s doctrine, it was a bizarre thing that took hold among certain factions in a certain region during a period of upheaval.
Obviously, Mao handled the peasant question much better, it’s probably what he is given the most credit for, but he does something similar in his ““cosmology”” in terms of dividing the peasantry into three major types, (poor, middle, rich) and aligning himself fundamentally with the poor while accepting collaboration with the middle, making distinctions about “well-to-do middle peasants” and so on. Here’s an example from Stalin. This is not to say Lenin and Stalin did not make grave errors, I repeat that they did, but when you were sneering about a ““cosmology,”” you were failing to explain these differences against Mao.
Lastly, I admit that Trotsky was more honest before his exile, but I really question using him as a source for criticizing Stalin when he would historically go on to do any anticommunist thing he had to in order to attack Stalin. I don’t think you need to go and get, idk, some troubled journal entry from Molotov, your point is made, I just think speaking of Trotsky as though he’s credible is, uh, fraught.
*Edit: I reread your post and it seems to be suggesting that the butter-churn thing actually came from Moscow. Is that so?
kulaks became a targeted class
Turns out communists target classes. Weren’t they extremely explicit about this? And the pearl-clutching libs then say that “every domestic enemy of the state was called a kulak”
Or do you mean, like, they were all explicitly targeted with death as the only allowable outcome rather than the dissolution of there class? (a number of them were killed either way, of course)
It seems like it would be more satisfying to use an insult that you don’t need to self-censor
nor is it to “de-Nazify” Ukraine
I think they do want to do this, since the Nazis are extremely hostile to Russia, so it’s crushing the opposition. Obviously this is pretty different from the historical de-Nazification efforts whose corpse Putin cynically puppets as cover for his actions.
If there are meaningful factions of Greater Russia Nazis in Ukraine, he’d obviously be fine with those as he is fine with them in Russia.
I hate league, but I’d argue in a better setting than the present culture and present game, a Dota-like RTS is ideologically better because it encourages teamwork, while a Starcraft-like RTS is basically great man theory the game.
Yes, they both have great man theory to a comically literal degree with the disposable and physically tiny minions spawned in each team, but in a Dota-like those adds operate autonomously and again, it’s lead by a team.
that would be a prefix but yeah.
Prefixes are a type of affix, along with suffixes (and infixes, and circumfixes, though English doesn’t have those)
I think that the current generation generally don’t care about a thousand year Reich or they have some pastoral fantasy of it in the vein of Jefferson. I think they just want money and personal power and then eventually they die. What do they care about the subsequent 700 years or whatever it is? They got theirs.
And I think this mindset is prevalent in less blatant forms in other imperial core nations, they just haven’t reached the advanced rot or the US. Just look at the UK.