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The obvious response is to own it and be an actual commie. Join a revolutionary party, organise in a trade union, set up mutual aid, learn self defence, etc.

PartiallyTyped 3y ago
I am all for this, the problem is that that behaviour on their end shuts down any discussion and mutual aid becomes harder.
- dontlaugh 3y ago
  You don’t have to lead with it necessarily. I don’t, but I don’t hide it either. People pay attention to their material interests. In most cases, you can get through to working class people despite ideology. Can’t win everyone over either and that’s ok too.
int_19h 3y ago
The problem is that most large left-wing movements tend to be about highly centralized socialism that is at best soft authoritarian (and in practice tends to quickly devolve into something much worse). I understand why - once you take away the cudgel from the people who currently have it, using it yourself to quickly solve problems is just too tempting. But it does mean that many (most?) of those parties are not a viable solution.
- dontlaugh 3y ago
  Class struggle doesn’t end in one stroke. When the working class wins state power over the capitalist class, the former doesn’t stop existing. The cudgel is to keep internal and external capitalists from counter revolution. Ultimately, results matter. My country started semi feudal and it was under socialism that it industrialised, electrified, developed universal health care, built homes for every working family, etc. Sadly the coup in 89 ended that, but it doesn’t have to have been perfect to have been good.
  - hkt 3y ago
    Which country? 89 makes me think not Russia.. Romania? It is worth pointing out your observation applies to lots of post-colonial societies, too. Socialism took Tanzania's literacy rate from about 10% at independence to 80%+ in a generation, and IIRC it also doubled its agricultural output in that time by organising farming along collective lines. Life expectancy rose substantially too, though I forget by how much. (So much for empires being about spreading civilization, eh?)
    - dontlaugh 3y ago
      România indeed. Similar astonishing improvement in all socialist countries, for sure.
      - chrysler 3y ago
        How old were you in 1989?
  - int_19h 3y ago
    My passport still says "place of birth: USSR". As a child, I lived on a street named after a prominent Bolshevik who was famous for using poison gas to crush a local peasant rebellion against the Soviets when they started to confiscate grain at scale to the point of starving whole villages out. Even if all the achievements you claim were true, the ends still not justify such means; but the achievements are mostly a lie anyway. Many other countries saw development from mostly rural to mostly industrialized during the 20th century and got all the benefits you described without a pile of "enemy of the people" corpses to go along with it, so socialism has very little to do with it. FWIW I don't even think USSR and its satellite states were socialist in any meaningful sense. Socialism, after all, is the common ownership of the means of production. But most of the populace on all those states were excluded from governance, and thus from any effective ownership. So, in practice, it was collective exploitation of the workers by the elites under threat of direct physical force - strictly worse than wage slavery. Some orthodox opposition Marxists in USSR even claimed that it was the perfect example of what Marx originally called the "Asiatic mode of production".

PartiallyTyped 3y ago

I am all for this, the problem is that that behaviour on their end shuts down any discussion and mutual aid becomes harder.

dontlaugh 3y ago
You don’t have to lead with it necessarily. I don’t, but I don’t hide it either. People pay attention to their material interests. In most cases, you can get through to working class people despite ideology. Can’t win everyone over either and that’s ok too.

int_19h 3y ago

The problem is that most large left-wing movements tend to be about highly centralized socialism that is at best soft authoritarian (and in practice tends to quickly devolve into something much worse). I understand why - once you take away the cudgel from the people who currently have it, using it yourself to quickly solve problems is just too tempting. But it does mean that many (most?) of those parties are not a viable solution.

dontlaugh 3y ago
Class struggle doesn’t end in one stroke. When the working class wins state power over the capitalist class, the former doesn’t stop existing. The cudgel is to keep internal and external capitalists from counter revolution. Ultimately, results matter. My country started semi feudal and it was under socialism that it industrialised, electrified, developed universal health care, built homes for every working family, etc. Sadly the coup in 89 ended that, but it doesn’t have to have been perfect to have been good.
- hkt 3y ago
  Which country? 89 makes me think not Russia.. Romania? It is worth pointing out your observation applies to lots of post-colonial societies, too. Socialism took Tanzania's literacy rate from about 10% at independence to 80%+ in a generation, and IIRC it also doubled its agricultural output in that time by organising farming along collective lines. Life expectancy rose substantially too, though I forget by how much. (So much for empires being about spreading civilization, eh?)
  - dontlaugh 3y ago
    România indeed. Similar astonishing improvement in all socialist countries, for sure.
    - chrysler 3y ago
      How old were you in 1989?
- int_19h 3y ago
  My passport still says "place of birth: USSR". As a child, I lived on a street named after a prominent Bolshevik who was famous for using poison gas to crush a local peasant rebellion against the Soviets when they started to confiscate grain at scale to the point of starving whole villages out. Even if all the achievements you claim were true, the ends still not justify such means; but the achievements are mostly a lie anyway. Many other countries saw development from mostly rural to mostly industrialized during the 20th century and got all the benefits you described without a pile of "enemy of the people" corpses to go along with it, so socialism has very little to do with it. FWIW I don't even think USSR and its satellite states were socialist in any meaningful sense. Socialism, after all, is the common ownership of the means of production. But most of the populace on all those states were excluded from governance, and thus from any effective ownership. So, in practice, it was collective exploitation of the workers by the elites under threat of direct physical force - strictly worse than wage slavery. Some orthodox opposition Marxists in USSR even claimed that it was the perfect example of what Marx originally called the "Asiatic mode of production".