FunkyStuff [he/him]

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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2021

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  • It’s weird that boomers tend to strawman us as responding to criticisms of AES with “that’s not true socialism.” Maybe socdems who think Norway is socialist but Cuba isn’t would say that, but anyone who’s reading Marx and is actively participating in discussions about socialism above a high school level probably understands that real socialism has been tried and has succeeded.

    Which brings me to my next point: Socialism’s biggest success story is China. It defies every trope yet it looks like most Western leftists are too afraid to claim it as the success it is, evidence that without sanctions, coups, and blockades socialism is a system that can take us to the future capitalism is currently killing. For every rags to riches story in America, there are thousands of people who received dignity, employment, and an economy that worked in their favor thanks to Chinese socialism. It’s the best example of what socialism can achieve without being sabotaged, a country that went from a feudal backwater with tyrannical landlords, where the local warlords could claim the peasants’ daughters as their property, where famines would routinely come and kill several million people, to the largest and most advanced economy in the world in less than a century. And they accomplished this by taking on Western capital and beating them at their own game.





  • FunkyStuff [he/him]@hexbear.nettoMemes@lemmy.mlDouble standards
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    5 months ago

    If China tested fewer athletes than the US, you’d call them lax. But they test more than anywhere else and that’s sketchy because it makes this particular metric look better.

    parenti-hands

    During the cold war, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime’s atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn’t go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them. If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.


  • No one is telling you you need to do violence, though. No one in Lemmygrad or Hexbear believes that the time to take to the street and start shooting is right now, obviously it wouldn’t achieve anything and would just be a waste of life, that’s why fascists are the ones committing mass shootings. What we believe is that when the contradictions mount to the point that the ruling class clashes down on its opposition with violent force, we need to be organized and ready to carry out the revolution come hell or high water, like every single socialist revolution in the past. Whether or not you personally want to participate is irrelevant because the historical process in which capital undermines its own existence is inevitable, some amount of time from now the crisis of capitalism necessarily must reach a point where its contradictions can’t be reconciled anymore and either the ruling classes succeed at preserving the system, or the workers succeed in transforming it into something new. Furthermore, regardless of your own participation in the violence necessary to maintain capitalism right now, that violence is happening anyway, and it’s orders of magnitude larger than the violence that the left is capable of, even if we were the bloodthirsty maniacs some liberals claim us to be. The black book of communism claims that communism’s death toll nears 100 million, but every 10 years far more than 100 million people die because of preventable illnesses, hunger, and conflict, which are all direct effects of the decaying economic system. If you reject to resist that system, then you’re complicit too, even when so little is asked of you.







  • FunkyStuff [he/him]@hexbear.nettoMemes@lemmy.mlThank you American software
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    10 months ago

    The current situation over in China still allows internet users to easily access services like Facebook or YouTube through VPNs, it was more of a measure of digital protectionism to allow local development of IT companies, online business, etc. If China wants to do similar censorship in response to these measure, they very well could still crack down on VPNs.



  • FunkyStuff [he/him]@hexbear.nettoMemes@lemmy.mlEverytime
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    10 months ago

    The state is part of the superstructure that is shaped by the economic base, which is in turned maintained by said superstructure. However, changes in the superstructure are never transformative unless they also come with radical change to the mode of production. Billionaires, and the capitalist class as a whole, completely block the path for the workers to seize the means and reshape society towards progress. It doesn’t matter what faffing idiot you put in power in the state, when the economic base keeps operating with the same logic of capitalist extraction.


  • Yeah, real resistance fighters should take advantage of all the empty space there is in the world’s densest city, so they can fight in a way that’s acceptable to white westerners! If only they were really trying to liberate themselves instead of pursuing their evil terroristic agendas, their movement would be morally unimpeachable and the whole world would recognize their plight. Alas, Israel killed a bunch of kids, which is Hamas’ fault actually, so we have no choice but to glass them. maybe-later-kiddo maybe later kiddos!


  • FunkyStuff [he/him]@hexbear.nettoMemes@lemmy.mlsToP pOsTiNg pOliTicAl mEmEs!!!
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    1 year ago

    Look, yes obviously as socialists we are not welcome in most public places if we speak out, but of all places to make that claim Lemmy.ml is not the one. The mods here are comrades. This is, next to hexbear and grad, probably one of the online spaces most receptive to us. The lemmitor you were replying to has no institutional power against us at all. I hate to tone police but posting on Lemmy is not comparable to being Rosa Parks and trying to make a tortured analogy isn’t helping anyone.