Keep commenting, keep getting critique, listen learn and grow

Focus isn’t the thing that helps. It’s iteration.

You are raised in a conceptual framework that predisposes you to think about new things in specific ways. To get a more accurate worldview, you need more iterations, you need to explore new experiences, you need to see the same things presented in slightly different ways.

Above all else, though, you need to make posts and comments like this, and you need to have live conversations where you express your current understanding and you need to receive feedback. Sometimes you’re wrong, sometimes your omitting something, sometimes you have a good grip on it. You can’t just focus and read and hope to have correct understanding. These things are not dead concepts that can pinned to the pages of a book - they are living dynamic understandings generated through dialogue.l

It was an industrial war. Yes, the command was critical. Yes allies were critical. But Stalin directed the economy on the basis of a prediction of the war in a way that I don’t think any other economic thinker at the time would have

Do we think that the level of development of the local Soviets and the higher order Soviets was sufficient enough to coordinate the necessary response to the threat of the Third Reich? As far as I understand it, even with Stalin’s significant control he still had opposition to the idea that Germany would be such a near-term threat and such a massive one. Maybe I am wrong about that.

Suuuuuuper easy to forget

Every single person has something to teach.

Everyone.

Sometimes, that thing is patience. Sometimes it’s compassion. Sometimes it’s how to communicate better. Sometimes it’s when to walk away.

But if you believe every single person has something to teach you, that is a huge hack.

Classic book, very illuminating, but it does contain a warning that MLs need to wrestle with.

If you build the system from the top down, it will fail.

Reactionary forces are the capitalists, the petit bourgeois, the compradors, and the privileged.

People who accuse Marxists of being tankies are not calling anyone out on anyone’s shit. They are moralizing.

You severely missed everything presented to you. Tripled literacy rates. Housing that was 5% of salary or less. Massive life expectancy jumps in the masses.

Direct benefits to the working class.

It’s a farce.

There are never only two choices. It is impossible to actually construct a real world situation where in there are only two choices. Even in an elementary school, given a test with only on question on it and it only has two answers, you can eat the test, scribble on it, punch the computer screen, walk out, etc.

Even in prison with guards pointing guns at you and putting you in a position to do either A or B you have options.

However, the concept of lesser evil is a shallow abstraction of the real world experience of pragmatism. Amongst all of your options, what course of action leads to the most desirable outcomes?

This is a real thing. We do it all the time. People in positions of grave responsibility have to do it with consequences and constraints that are absolutely gutting. Let’s say the war has already started, well, now you have to make decisions about how to avoid losing the most strategically important objectives, even if that means people dying. In fact, the strategies employed in war force decision makers into these sorts of choices as a matter of course - an opponent knows you don’t want to make certain sacrifices and will therefore create pressures that trade off those sacrifices with strategic objectives. Sometimes it’s not even that they believe you’ll give up the strategic objectives but the delay you have when choosing will give them an advantage, or the emotional and psychological toll of being put in such situations repeatedly over a long campaign can create substantial advantages.

Lesser evil is rhetorical sophistry or mildly useful thought experiments when exploring the consequences of ethical frameworks in academia.

The reason it’s dumb is because DemSocs don’t actually have the ring of power to be able to cast it into the fire in the first place.

How many Bolsheviks were in positions of government? How much of the PLA was in power in China?

The sad reality is that nearly every successful socialist revolution was born through civil war.

Supa-hot-fire.gif

“I’m about to ruin this man’s whole career”

No. That’s incorrect. Democratic socialism is always and has always been an opposite to revolutionary socialism. Read some goddamned books. ALL forms of socialism are democratic, essentially by definition, but certainly by historical precedent. The only undemocratic “socialist” movements have been fascist movements using socialist aesthetics.

You don’t understand party systems, so you imagine one-party systems are undemocratic. You are incorrect. In a multi-party systems, competing interests fight for power using the electoral system. That means you would have a capitalist party and a socialist party and they would fight for votes. Why in the world would you ever expect a communist country to have multiple parties?

Instead of that, communist parties have structures within them for different factions to have sub organizations within the party. These are all people who support communism but differ on the particulars. They fight for power within the party, ensuring that the country remains communist while still enabling democracy.

It is only in fully capitalist countries that have eliminated the power of their internal communist where you have multiple capitalist parties that actually collaborate and then spread propaganda that only multi-party states are truly democratic. It’s transparent bullshit.

That’s why we say that under capitalism you can change the party but the not the policies and under communism you can change the policies but not the party. Ever notice just how democratic the West is regarding war? No matter how much the people don’t want war, no matter what party is in power, the leadership always chooses war. No matter how much we want profits to take a back seat to social issues, profit always wins. The policies of capitalism are unchangeable by the people. Is that democracy simply because you get to choose which team is oppressing you and killing foreigners?

Good question. No. It was not. Please read about it. There is plenty of writing about the political structure of the USSR, its constitutional documents, its legal and court systems, etc. It is imminently possible for you to learn about it if you’re curious

What are you talking about about? Go read a goddamned book about the political structure of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, its many voting structures, its multiple state entities, its levels of power of distribution, and THEN try to argue that 1 person had full power.

It’s ridiculous to think that your level of ignorance counts as a political perspective on history.

Uh, yes. Wikipedia is biased. There’s an entire cadre of editors on the payroll of the CIA and they have thoroughly infiltrated that organization to manage narrative.

Uh, no. The entirety of the American and European population, with the minor exception of the consistently radical left, are all bootlickers. They cheered for Hillary when she said “we came, we saw, he died” about the public sodomization of 70-year-old head of state. They regurgitate apologia for war crimes. They deliberately ignore the death squads their nations train to torture and rape and murder indigenous people in Africa and South America. They hate the phrase “defund the police” and believe Gavin Newsome is liberal for spending millions displacing unhoused communities instead of addressing root causes.

It has nothing in particular to do with Trump. Biden was a terrorist. Obama was a terrorist. Clinton was a terrorist. The Bushes are all terrorists. Reagan was a terrorist.

They all bombed weddings, funerals, subsistence villages, schools, hospitals. They all oversaw a military that openly refuses to count civilian deaths accurately. They are all briefed on the numerous CIA black sites around the world doing research on human torture and mind breaking, on bioweapons, and housing political prisoners. They are all fully aware of the integration of the military and the telecom industry and the never ending domestic spying.

And the countries have been spying on each other’s citizens and trading the intelligence with each other to get around their own laws against doing so. And people go out on the street and protest in FAVOR of military cooperation and NATO.

They’re all bootlickers and terrorists.

This is puritanism brain worms. Your position is that socialism done correctly is subsistence living. What a terrible vision.

What are you 14?