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davel

@davel@lemmy.ml

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davel,
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gulag

davel,
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There’s apparently at least one temporarily embarrassed billionaire who disagrees.

davel,
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FYI “temporarily embarrassed”: en.wiktionary.org/…/temporarily_embarrassed_milli…
www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_LvRPX0rGY

davel,
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I’ve never seen so many downvotes fidel-salute Parasociality is a fuck.

davel, (edited )
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Trump’s real power base has never been the white working class “basket of deplorables”:

The Nation, 2017: Trumpism: It’s Coming From the Suburbs

But scapegoating poor whites keeps the conversation away from fascism’s real base: the petite bourgeoisie. This is a piece of jargon used mostly by Marxists to denote small-property owners, whose nearest equivalents these days may be the “upper middle class” or “small-business owners.” FiveThirtyEight reported last May that “the median household income of a Trump voter so far in the primaries is about $72,000,” or roughly 130 percent of the national median. Trump’s real base, the actual backbone of fascism, isn’t poor and working-class voters, but middle-class and affluent whites. Often self-employed, possessed of a retirement account and a home as a nest egg, this is the stratum taken in by Horatio Alger stories. They can envision playing the market well enough to become the next Trump. They haven’t won “big-league,” but they’ve won enough to be invested in the hierarchy they aspire to climb. If only America were made great again, they could become the haute bourgeoisie—the storied “1 percent.”

davel,
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You just described the exact same people the article described, so I don’t know where you’re getting “really affluent corporate types” from.

davel,
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You’re right. I can’t photoedit my way out of a paper bag 🫤

davel,
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That is mean, and we’ve all thought it.

davel, (edited )
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First of all history began in 2022 not 2014, and second of all those children are Untermensch and don’t count.

davel,
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Won’t somebody please think of the porky-scared-flipped

davel,
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This is one of the most destructive things we’ve done as a society: making our homes into investment vehicles. It is the root cause of people no longer being able to afford housing.

davel,
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This article is a great summary. Thanks!

davel,
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On the one hand the super straights don’t wash their asses because that’s gay, but on the other hand the super straights are bootlickers for following orders.

davel,
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Already trying to both-sides the narrative before even knowing who the other side is, because all you’re interested in is deflection.

davel, (edited )
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Capitalist realism is liberal cope.

davel, (edited )
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Reformism keeps not working, as evidenced by the last 45 years of ever-worsening neoliberalism, but liberals will keep trying anyway.

Marxists are not idealists; they are materialists, specifically, dialectical materialists.

It is the liberals who are the idealists.

davel, (edited )
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_hegemony.

davel,
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No socialist State has ever been won at the ballot box, though electoralism has its tactical uses in the interim. It’s mostly done through helping the working class develop class consciousness, through labor organizing and militant labor action, through developing dual power, and then ultimately replacing the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie with the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Few people remember that Communists and other socialists helped us win the weekend and the eight hour workday, and these weren’t won through elections but through labor militancy. They don’t remember because we were purged and memory-holed by two red scares and a cold war.

davel, (edited )
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Actually Existing Socialisms (AES): The five predominantly recognized AES states are China, Cuba, Laos, Vietnam, and, [North] Korea.

The Nordic model is a social democratic one, which is still fundamentally a capitalist one. This is what someone like Bernie Sanders claims to want.

Sanders gets away with calling himself a socialist because Americans have forgotten what https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism actually means: “social ownership of the means of production, as opposed to private ownership.” Americans have forgotten what socialism means because the American socialists were persecuted into obscurity in the 20th century. So now even the vocabulary for socialism is lost in Orwellian fashion.

davel, (edited )
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I think these are very good questions. You can’t rely on Atlantacist government propaganda or corporate media to get good answers to them, unfortunately. The don’t like there to be any threats of a good example, which is why the CIA tried to assassinate Fidel Castro hundreds of times and why Cuba is still under a trade embargo. It’s one of the reasons they never stop attempting regime changes (the other reason being to steal countries’ natural and labor resources).

North Korea is especially difficult for a Burgerlander like me to get a clear picture of. I hope the Kim dynasty largely acts as a state figurehead, but I haven’t investigated and have no idea.

China does have a limited capitalism going on right now, which, if I understand correctly, is a part of the ongoing Reform and Opening Up project. From my (still fairly ignorant) P.O.V., I can’t help but imagine a risk to this strategy, where the capitalists become strong enough to wrest control. The project has brought hundreds of millions out of poverty, though. The government recently took the capitalist real estate speculators to heel (to the dismay of capitalists everywhere and the delight of people just wanting a place to live), so it seems they haven’t lost control. Their professed long-term plan is to phase out capitalism entirely.

It’s worth noting that no Marxist worth their salt will paint any of these socialist countries as utopias, especially given that Marxists reject utopian socialisms.

davel,
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But they engage in massive censorship among other issues and I just can’t see how there can be a democracy (which I consider the most important component to make something socialist) with that degree of control

Maybe they do, maybe that’s mostly the propaganda we’re fed. I’m sure that at least some of the “censorship” is the Chinese State keeping foreign capitalist enterprises from dominating China’s indigenous internet.

The state has control over all the means of production in the country and I believe it uses it for its own benefit.

I do think that is predominant (though there are also worker co-ops & individual projects). If China is a democratic socialist state, then the “it” in “its own benefit” is largely the working class. This is in contrast with a bourgeois democracy like the US, where the “it” is largely the capitalist class. Our votes are somewhat effective when they don’t conflict with the capitalists, but otherwise not so much. We get fed a lot of propaganda about socialist states having an authoritarian “ruling class,” analogous to our capitalist class, living high on the hog at the expense of the people, but is that really so, or is it projection?

I guess I’m just an anti-authoritarian first […] I’ve always been more inspired by anarchist philosophy and go by Libertarian-socialist if forced to pick a name.

Quite understandable: I came from that place. It took a lot of convincing, because my heels were pretty dug in to a Noam Chomsky/Mark Fisher position. I think one of the quicker/easier ways to seeing arguments on why this position has never and can never succeed, and why the “authoritarianism” of communism has succeeded and is a necessary step on the path to socialism, is Michael Parenti’s Blackshirts and Reds. It’s a short book and as such doesn’t—on its own—provide a whole lot of backing evidence; it’s a jumping-off point for further inquiry.

davel,
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A few capitalist tech companies started a brutal 996 system, which from what I’ve heard was illegal, and the state has since been cracking down on it. I agree that we shouldn’t assume what China has done to be the best possible path, nor should we directly imitate it, because our material conditions are very different from theirs.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

davel,
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The purpose of the embargo is now and has always been to crush the threat of a good example.

davel,
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Please don’t make our admins have to deal with copyright takedown notices by quoting entire articles.

davel,
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Do kbin.social users even notice the irony in their name?

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