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?

Yeah, no one is mad at you because they’re libs. They’re downvoting you because you missed the entire point and went off on some bullshit.

You say “working on someone else’s plan” is what you mean by “working for”. You then go on to talk about selling your labor. These are two different things.

Under capitalism, the capitalist doesn’t make a plan. They make a bet. Part of that bet is hiring planners to make the plans that other people will work on. This is why I asked the question I asked.

When you and the manager both sell your labor power to the capitalist for a wage, you both work for the capitalist, but you don’t work on the capitalist’s plan. You work on your manager’s plan.

If you take the capitalist out, and if we define “working for” as selling labor, then “working for” is abolished under socialism, even though hierarchy remains.

If instead the definition of “working for” is “working on someone else’s plan”, then we have a discussion about the fact that planning is a type of labor. In some context, planning can be done by the people doing the work at the expense of efficiency, which is fine when our goal is maximizing liberty. But there are other contexts where the work to be done and the planning are significantly arduous and complex enough that different people need to do the planning and the execution.

When this is the case, inevitably, anarchists start talking about “voluntary hierarchies” as the correct prefiguration, but this meme is raising the common objections from some anarchists that there is no such thing as a voluntary hierarchy.

Hence, the discussion below about the reality of stratified systems and levels of complexity creating naturally stratified labor distribution, which lends itself to hierarchy.

Honestly, what does this mean? If you abolish ownership, then working “for” someone changes in meaning.

Once ownership and profit are gone, working “for” someone stops meaning “for their economic interest” and starts meaning something very ambiguous. Don’t carry over the emotional meaning from one mode of production to the other.

You might mean working according to someone else’s plan. Is that working “for” someone? Maybe you mean working with someone who has the power to bar you from participating in the work or has the power to stop you doing certain actions?

It’s not clear what you mean, so it would be helpful if you clarified.

It’s not even just differences in skill and experience. The person who is busy cutting a path through the first necessarily cannot also see the entirety of the forest. The person who is taking the aerial view of the forest necessarily cannot be cutting through it.

There is a hierarchy of scale and complexity. It can be solved with voluntary hierarchies of work, but it cannot be ignored. Consequences of actions can take minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, or decades to emerge. The people worried about the immediate consequences of individual actions are not going to have the capacity for also worrying about the long-term consequences of collective actions over time.

We know this. We see this all the time. And yet this axiomatic-bordering-on-religious stricture against hierarchy chooses to believe there’s some way to handle hierarchies of complexity without hierarchies of coordination.

Thanks for reposting. The commenter appears to be a member of the semi-conscious liberation army.

Grrrr

You should study North Korean politics and political structures.

The standard you are using, which is that there should be constant changes in leadership, is an attempt to use your existing liberal democracy as the only possible model for liberatory politics.

Think about it. Is the ONLY way you would ever accept a political system when it has constant leadership churn? Ok, grant that. Then ask, what causes constant leadership churn?

The answers will be either constant fighting between major ideologically opposed factions OR constant disapproval by the people being governed.

Neither of those conditions are good healthy conditions.

Now instead imagine if there were no competing ideologies, the capitalists have been purged and domestically the entire population has a shares collective trauma from the massive bombing campaign by the psychopathic US.

What’s the behavior gonna be? Well, if any leader is capable of leading them out of the caves and to safety from napalm, kidnapping, fire bombing, and famine - that leader is either very lucky and when their luck runs out they will be ousted, or that leader is actually very effective, responsive to the needs of the people, and is capable of adapting to changing times. In that case, the people will have absolutely no desire to put another leader in place.

When that happens, especially in a culture that puts huge importance on multi-generational families, the children of that leader are likely going to be the best equipped to carry in the program. Not necessarily though. They would have to remain constantly engaged, constantly proving that they are capable.

What would that require? It would require a system where by existing leadership cabinets were capable of selecting and assigning those descendants to specific posts. And guess what… That’s exactly what DPRK has.

Your insistence that freedom is defined exclusively by multi-party systems that give “equal” voice to capitalist and working class interests is a form of chauvinism.

It wasn’t slave labor, exactly, but it was massively exploited labor. 75 years ago China was easily the poorest country in the world and it’s people were living in the equivalent of $1/day, possibly less.

However, the entire goal of the socialist program was to alleviate that poverty and exploitation, not by enslaving people but by developing the country’s economic and industrial base.

Today, Chinese people have a higher average purchasing power than US citizens do. That means the average Chinese family can afford to buy more goods and services than the average American family. Wealth inequality is also way lower in China than in the US which means that way more of Chinese people have better purchasing power than USians do, simply because that’s how averages work. The US raises the average by making very few people very wealthy and China raises the average by making their billion residents sustainably and incrementally more wealthy.

As for slave labor, the US imprisons more of its people than any other nation on the planet and all of those prisoners are subject to slave labor and massive debt burdens. Official US slave labor from prisons produces over $11Bn in goods and services, much of which goes to the profits of for-profit prison management companies.

China has no such system.