ah good, lemmy hasn’t changed a bit since i left it 2 months ago
welp see you losers next year
Thankfully you left me this message so I can block you and never hear from you ever again.
Dem’s aren’t even putting in the minimum effort into pretending to be an opposition party.
They’re gladly letting it all burn because they lazily expect it to mean easy wins in 2026. Then they’ll manage to barely take the House and maaaaybe Senate, and literally do nothing with it.
cuz that worked so well this year. got booty clapped by a felon. utterly waffle stomped right back to the segregation days by this diaper clad casino salesman.
they’re fucking done. they ain’t participating in 2026 as anything but a joke write-in
The current moment is like the recent wildfires. All this trash built up over the years and it sort of has to have its time to burn out. Everything just has to find a way to survive it until it runs out of fuel. When the pendulum swings back the other direction, just be ready to rebuild from the natural disaster.
Sorry. But this is total crap. A dictatorship won’t burn out by itself. People need to fight for freedom and democracy over and over again. It is not for granted!
The current moment is like the recent wildfires. All this trash built up over the years and it sort of has to have its time to burn out. Everything just has to find a way to survive it until it runs out of fuel. When the pendulum swings back the other direction, just be ready to rebuild from the natural disaster.
-Author unknown, February 1933
Suggestions?
Read and learn from successful revolutions, and the Marxist tradition in general, which correctly identifies both the root problem, and has a wealth of historical experiences for how to defeat it, the correct and incorrect roads taken, and what worked/didn’t. Join working-class parties, and organize for our own interests, so that sociopaths who would be happy sacrificing all of us for the sake of profits, don’t control society.
@[email protected] keeps an excellent study guide here, and I have one here.
Thank you, Dessalines. I of course remember your welcome when I first showed up in some instance in Lemmy. I admire the work and the structure of this alternative to social media and I quickly became aware that much of its success is due to your efforts. I have presumed they are all volunteer?
I am grateful for the two reading lists.
I have started one of the audio books already — one I’ve been telling myself I’d read forever.
But I’ll ask — considering how brutal and distorted much of what has been associated with this work became, how do people remain idealistic and hopeful about it?
If you take a gander at my last few posts, you’ll discover I’ve just been sharing a 3 second image of a swastika being blown upanywhere I can manage it. We all know where Trump is headed… same exact thing that happened to Hitler. I say we get to the end of this the sooner the better. I don’t know how to stay positive.
I’m not Dessalines, but as the curator of the other list, I can do my best to answer.
When you say that Marxism has become “brutal and distorted,” I think you’re operating from a mindset and understanding rooted in Western culture and education. I would say, based on my research and reading into AES (Actually Existing Socialism), these countries such as Cuba, the PRC, and the former USSR all apply Marxist understanding and methods to amazing effect.
The Red Scare never ended, and being aware that it existed isn’t enough to actually understand what AES is like. The history of AES, and the conditions within those countries, is not reported faithfully or honestly in the West, so it is very difficult. That doesn’t mean they are perfect, but it means they are real, and come with real victories for the Working Class.
That’s why the opening sections of my reading list include Blackshirts and Reds as well as Dr. Michael Parenti’s 1986 lecture, these 2 really give an eye-opening look into the mythology and demonization of AES in the west, and how that process is intentional and persists to this day.
To circle back to your question, Marxists are hopeful because Marxism works, we know this and see it happening. We learn from the mistakes our predecessors made and we promise to carry their work forward.
As a final side-note, regarding the Nazis: it was the Red Army that did 80% of the fighting against the Nazis. We have Marxists to thank for the defeat of the Nazis, and we can do it again.
I’m surely not here to argue.
What do marxists think of North Korea?
And you are correct that my “education” has been little more than capitalist brainwashing, but what’s true about the millions that Stalin is supposed to have massacred?
Generally, the DPRK is seen similarly to Cuba, they would be doing far better if the US Empire wasn’t sanctioning them directly to cause harm. As for Stalin, it depends on what you’re talking about, the Great Purge had no more than 700,000 condemned to death, and that doesn’t mean every one of them was actually executed. Stalin certainly wasn’t a saint, but at the same time he wasn’t worse than Hitler and killed 10-20 million like the Black Book of Communism would have you think.
Ultimately though, Marxism isn’t “become DPRK” or “be Stalin.” I think you have to study Marxism more to understand why those questions largely don’t matter for building Socialism. I suggest you read Blackshirts and Reds.
I dunno, do something. Anything really. You have a handful of the richest people on earth trying to turn your country into a tech monarchy that wants to have the ability to put its people in vr prisons or kill then outright if it becomes uneconomic to keep them alive. Your entire people should be in a fight or flight response. Literally attacking the government and trying to kill the billionaires. It’s that bad of a situation for you. This is the worst possible timeline. In 10 years I don’t think the us will be a democracy. I think it will be a dictatorship kept in power by some type of artificial intelligence run surveillance system. The average man will have less and less economic importance to the oligarchy meaning less and less power to stand up to them until eventually you have to value to them at all at which time they start killing you. This is a nightmare timeline you are in.
This just advocating for adventurism. Lenin said, in Adventurism that,
“*Now take the other groups which pose as “trends”. We shall enumerate them: 1) the Vperyod group plus Alexinsky; 2) ditto plus Bogdanov; 3) ditto plus Voinov; 4) the Plekhanovites; 5) the “pro-Party Bolsheviks” (actually conciliators: Mark Sommer and his crowd); 6) the Trotskyists (i. e., Trotsky even minus Semkovsky); 7) the “Caucasians” (i. e., An minus the Caucasus).
We have enumerated the groups mentioned in the press. In Russia and abroad they have stated that they want to be separate “trends” and groups. We have tried to list all the Russian groups, omitting the non-Russian. All these groups, without exception, represent sheer adventurism.
“Why? Where is the proof?” the reader will ask. Proof is provided by the history of the last decade (1904–14), which is most eventful and significant. During these ten years members of these groups have displayed the most helpless, most pitiful, most ludicrous vacillation on serious questions of tactics and organisation, and have shown their utter inability to create trends with roots among the masses.*”
(https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/jun/09.htm)
Adventurism is just a non-Marxist and non-revolutionary response to reactionary politics. Advocating for it, and following through on it are useless. Assassinating Franz Ferdinand didn’t achieve the Black Hands goals’ and nor will it achieve any other groups’.
Better than not voting and doing nothing.
The best would be voting and being an activist.
The US is not a democracy, it’s a capitalist dictatorship.
Some Background: History conditions much of our thinking about our political systems and most Western democracies resemble Rome’s in 60 BC when, as Robin Daverman humorously says, three aristocrats–politician Julius Caesar, military hero Pompey and billionaire Crassus–formed a backroom alliance that dominated the elected senate. The oligarchs ensured that proletarii votes changed nothing and that the masses remained invisible unless they rioted or died in one of the elites’ endless civil wars. Two thousand years later, in Britain’s general election of 1784, the son of the First Earl of Chatham and Hester Grenville, sister of the previous Prime Minister George Grenville, and the son of the First Baron Holland and Lady Caroline Lennox, daughter of Second Duke of Richmond, offered voters offered a choice of dukes. Today, in many European countries (even egalitarian Sweden) ‘democracy’ is a mere veneer over powerful feudal aristocracies that still control their economies. American voters recently watched a former president’s wife competing with a former president’s brother being defeated by a billionaire who installed his daughter and son-in-law in important government positions and ensured that, as John Dewey said, “U.S. politics will remain the shadow cast on society by big business as long as power resides in business for private profit through private control of banking, land and industry, reinforced by command of the press and other means of propaganda”. Most Western politicians are related by marriage or wealth and have, like all hereditary classes, lost sympathy with the broad mass of their fellow citizens to the extent that, as American political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page found, ‘the preferences of the average American appear to have a near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy’
Even if one accepts the argument that voting is not productive, that doesn’t inherently justify not participating. There’s plenty of things people do daily that are not productive or useful uses of their time.
Please demonstrate the harm caused by voting in the presidential elections.
Even if it’s not productive, it takes at absolute worst case living in a hellscape without properly staffed polling places, one day out of your time every four years. I was able to do it and get back to my shit in 30 minutes this time, from the time I left home to the time I got back.
So even if it’s useless, for me it was the same as sitting on my ass and watching a TV show. Explain why that is such a horrendous waste of my time that I should have instead not done it at all.
The harm is simple, people get the illusion they’re making a difference and that it’s enough, it also legitimizes voting as the way to change things despite ample evidence it doesn’t.
This leads to Dems hating protestors, or telling protestors to protest quietly and no in the road. This leads to liberals hating the working class when they go in strike, because why didn’t they just vote for better conditions. It leads to liberals hating anything useful, because they already did the only ‘useful’ thing and voted.
This leads to lesser evilism and accepting institutions as the foundation of society, instead of any ideology that will positively change things.
Okay, and? How does voting harm us? Not voting does a lot more harm.
If your democracy is staged like reality TV, then it does nothing.
Does voting in a capitalist dictatorship work? It got the US to where it is now. Doing the same strategy over and over again, when proven that historically things keep getting worse, should tell you that not only is it a pointless strategy, it’s actively harmful because it draws energy into an electoral contest that does nothing to improve people’s lives.
Bourgeois democracy is an elaborate theatre piece used to keep people distracted, and give them the illusion of choice.
I’m not going to say the same thing twice, take a look at https://gregtech.eu/comment/3527169
That doesn’t address anything. Saying vote over and over doesn’t make it a viable strategy, especially in bourgeois “democracy”'s staged elections, where the vote choices are stacked between various capitalist puppets.
Essentially you’re asking us to play a rigged game, and insisting both that it’s not rigged, and that it’s super important to play it. Also that anyone who refuses to play it deserves ridicule. This is the level of zealotry people have in their fake political system.
I never said it wasn’t rigged. Not voting is not going to help you achieve the goal of stopping this madness. It will only make it harder. Democrats are, of course, the party of the rich, but so are Republicans. Republicans, however, are way more against the redistribution of wealth.
Not voting is not going to help you achieve the goal of stopping this madness. It will only make it harder.
You can only make statements like this, by ignoring history. People in the US have voted for 150+ years. This is the result.
Again, if voting is working so well, why do things keep getting worse? Are they just not voting hard enough? No, it’s the system that’s broken, it’s theatre, a catch-22, a rigged game. Those of us who’ve studied US history and it’s class history learned this a long time ago. The liberals coming and telling us to vote to fix things, aren’t bringing any new arguments, and appear to us like fanatical zealots, who think that if they repeat mantras over and over, it cancels history.
Both voting and not voting have the same effect. Nothing. It is not a democracy and pretending you are in one does fuck all.
- votes Kamala
- at least 51% of others do the same
- Kamala wins
Explain again how voting and not voting does the same? I know the first past the post system is horrible, but saying that voting does nothing is disingenuous.
This is false, multiple presidents won more than 51% of the vote and lost. Your elections are decided by election riggers during redistricting. It is called gerrymandering. You live in a corrupt society that uses voting and a circus every few years to mollify you. Even if Kamala won, which was basically impossible based on how the districts were drawn, you’d still live in a capitalist dictatorship that would be every bit as bad as it is now. You would still be causing wars around the world, you would still have homeless people everywhere, and most people would still be living pay check to paycheck while she did absolutely nothing. Kamala Harris is a manager of capitalism, not leader in any sense. You have absolutely no vote or say in the people who run your country, the board members of Goldman Sachs, Chase, Citigroup, ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and the rest.
The sad thing is, trump won even the popular vote. And, even with gerrymandering, voting still makes a change, if even a small one.
Also, are you saying trump and kamala are the same lmfao
It’s clear that you are completely unaware of the history of the US democratic party as controlled opposition, and how thoroughly evil they are.
Here’s what the Biden administration did to Palestine:
Some more on your party:
Just try to tell them the parties are the same. I’ve been pilloried three times, they cut my balls off, and I’m set to be hung tomorrow at dusk.
See?! See?!
Yeah, there is a reason my instance doesn’t have downvotes or federates with the lemmy.world idiots
Glad I finally got off world and can see your comments again. Missed you. Not trying to be weird, I just like your style.
Yeah, I feel you. Every time I say that the earth is flat I get ridiculed left and right
EDIT: Apparently I need a /s
Why should you say that out loud?
