GarbageShoot [he/him]

The one is not the other

Frequently they blame ““communist”” politicians for letting the immigrants in

Such a pathetic thing to say. Even if what they were saying was true, why does the show need to be about the election? Isn’t it, like, a political comedy show? Aren’t there other political issues to talk about? idk, I hate South Park anyway, but it seems like a remarkably stupid thing to say.

Oh sure, Owen was mistaken from the outset because his genuinely more-efficient way of running things isn’t going to be as profitable to the owning class, meaning that no amount of advocacy can escape the gravitational pull of the profit motive dragging it down into the mire of human misery. I was just talking about what he did that ruined his career from a practical standpoint by drawing the ire of the bourgeoisie, which was not his company town model alone.

Sorry to spam you with nitpicks, but I do feel obliged to say that while Einstein was certainly a socialist and spoke very well of Lenin and even Stalin, I don’t think we have evidence of him having a specific and cultivated political ideology that fit a label like “Marxism.” I think he was more of a generic humanist who appreciated what his Marxist contemporaries were doing.

Incidentally, how did Marx borrow from Proudhon? I fully only know of Proudhon through Discourse about concerning material he wrote and that quote about, ironically, wishing for a future where he would be executed as a conservative.

I think that what fucked over Owen, according to Engels, was not his coops but his assessment that they were inadequate and more fundamental changes to society were required, concerning marriage, religion, and something else that I forget. For just the coops, he was celebrated in a way that isn’t even that different from the OP, because he didn’t really shatter the existing paradigm, but produce an extremely productive version of it that just happened to be relatively pro-social.

They absolutely are, and many people would be excited to answer questions you have (including me, depending on the question). You just need to be careful not to come across as combative, because they’ll meet you in kind and it’ll be a dogpile.

c/askchapo , depending on the question

Don’t you know that Stalin owned the whole Soviet Union?!?

I don’t see what the Zionist entity has to do with this, it’s not like they claim to be communist (though that would be a funny bit). I was talking about your reference to “dictator states” since Cuba surely is one of them, being communist.

I wish you wouldn’t believe what those very plutocrats you disavow tell you about Cuba.

Trump doesn’t have even a double-digit number of loyalists in the Senate and proportionately probably about the same in the House. This is a relevant detail because his enablers in Congress are overwhelmingly party loyalists who will drop him like a sack of potatoes the moment it becomes more expedient to. The reason that matters is that it was mainly the Republican Party that got all those Congresspeople elected, not Trump, even in the races where Trump endorsed them, so the relative locus of power is the Republican Party (and really it’s the donor class, but we don’t need to get into that).

All this to say that AP’s simplistic and unsubstantiated flattening of Venezuelan politics to “There’s one guy in charge of everything, his lockstep minions, and the brave rightists fighting them” is below you to believe.

He has shat the bed for his country

US sanctions fucked over the country, so unless you think “being disliked by the US” is a grave sin, this isn’t an accurate framing

I believe this is the “whataboutism” that liberals love to cry about so much (more properly, you’re deflecting to a completely different topic)

Maduro isn’t a socialist, Chavists aren’t socialists and he’s openly a Chavist (i.e. a follower in the tradition of Hugo Chavez, who was a great progressive but not really a socialist).

I don’t give a shit what the Carter Center has to say about any of America’s enemies, and they provide no means to evaluate the substance of the claim by “experts from the UN” (which is different from a report by the UN or an official committee of the UN).

And, again, Maduro did not appoint the judges; he doesn’t even have the power to.

Maybe most pertinently: Do you not remember last election cycle, when all the neoliberal news outlets were joined together in their outrage over the NED and friends saying Maduro stole the election, only for that claim to “just turn out” to be pulled from thin air? Do we need to do this every six years when a US-backed reactionary loses?

Quoting something that AP says without substantiation is not actually a good citation. It’s not like Maduro appointed the judges.

None of its supposed assets make up for the corporate overlords who run it and promote or permit all sorts of terrible things

There would be an immense toll, but it would mean the destruction of the US, Israel, NATO, and neoliberalism generally, which I think means there is also room for optimism. If I may gesture towards Mark Twain, there are two Reigns of Terror here, and though we have reason to fear the latter one, it will not last as long or kill as many as the former one that it puts an end to. If there is not a nuclear holocaust, anyway

Reddit is notorious for astroturfing. The lemmy hivemind(s) is the lemmitor hivemind from people socialized on Reddit who came to lemmy and brought that shit with them. Same with other instances like .world, but worse because they have fewer legacy users.

What do you mean fiat doesn’t work on a finite planet? Current economic models certainly don’t work on a finite planet, but fiat was here before them and will be here after they are long gone.

what is a good way for the working class (90%+ of all humans) to save and succeed in this current environment?

There isn’t one. A big chunk of that class can do just fine and you probably already have good normative answers in that respect, but the current economic model is one that demands poverty. Even with all of the ridiculous developments in production we have, the available infrastructure even with the qualms we might have with it, and all the other things going for us that you might want to list, the closest that the current economic model has achieved to escaping its age-old need for having a sizeable portion of the able-bodied population unemployed is by slightly expanding that same portion and then having them sell themselves by the hour and minute in the Gig Economy. If you want that whole 90% of the population to all be able to do well, you need to change the system they are operating within.