Mastodawn

very normal person 1d ago

so i guess all the western media are running with 'cluster bombs' and not bothering to define what that term means

another thing i've noticed is how they talk about " straining the iron dome' which is wild. Weeks ago, most of the US radar systems were taken out, so there is no more 'iron dome' at all, there are interceptors, and they are running out, and only work about half the time

Oh no, how will the Nazi government protect innocent Germans 🥺

very normal person 1d ago

@burnoutqueen Israel got seriously fucked up yesterday, both from Iranian Missiles and Hezbollah, like Hezbollah destroyed maybe a hundred tanks in 48 hours, absolutely wild, and so they've pivoted from denying the damage, to 'boo hoo, what about our civilians' and whining about 'cluster municians' dishonestly, Israel has no problem using actual cluster municians, but they literally went to the UN to complain about this, when these Iranian missiles are not cluster municians at all

everyone at the UN has been done with their shit decades ago so idk what they think they'll get them.

Please please feel bad for German civilians 🥺

very normal person 1d ago

@burnoutqueen the actual modern Germans are very concerned, volkswagen is now helping make parts for the iron dome, don't think that will be much help there

@mook im making fun of how Israel is doing terror bombings and committing a genocide and invading like 3 countries at once

very normal person 1d ago

@burnoutqueen yes i understand lol

@mook the germans never met a Holocaust they didn't like

very normal person

@burnoutqueen they really do be tho, i just read about how west germany supplied the components for Saddam Hussein to gas kurds and iranians

truth is that 'denazification' was a myth and and the US heavily utilized former nazis and other allied fascist to build NATO and the post war order

very normal person 1d ago

@burnoutqueen

Do you know about operation Gladio? shits crazy, basically every single post-war european state included secret paramilitaries made up of fascist gangs used to kill communists and serve as 'stay behind units' in case of a Soviet invasion https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGHXjO8wHsA

Operation Gladio - Full 1992 documentary BBC

YouTube

@mook sounds about right

America also interfered in Italian politics to stop their communist party from ever winning government.

I would also note that I personally am a person of communist sympathies and I feel no shame in it.

very normal person 1d ago

@burnoutqueen yes, in several countries 'christian democrats' which still exist in many places were invented to white wash fascists and keep communists out

basically the entire European order has been a US occupation since after the war, there was always a fascist 'deep state' ( this is where the term came from actually, the underlying military dictatorship behind european democracies ) and for almost a century the US has directly intervened in almost every national election everywhere in the world.

Another really good documentary while we're on that topic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYrznlDTE_M

Inside The CIA - On Company Business (1980) [COMPLETE] HD

YouTube

very normal person 1d ago

@burnoutqueen what i think is a great irony is that if soviet style communism prevailed against american style capitalism in the last century, it would have just ended up as more efficiently managed version of capitalism like they have in china now

another irony, thinking about how Spain seems like the only European country willing to assert any autonomy against the US/Israel, and that's probably because they were never occupied and rebuilt in america's image, and that fascism was toppled from within rather than from without.

very normal person 1d ago

@burnoutqueen i mean the irony in the first point it was really all so pointless, like with Vietnam or Cuba, the US could have just negotiated with them and they would have been open for business out of economic necessity. The US could simply lift the embargo and that would do more to undermine socialism than any of this coup shit.

The Soviet style system is a little silly tbh

@mook I would not say the Soviet style system is what we should do.

@mook but even then, I don't think the Soviet Union would have just been "efficient capitalism".

China is like that because of the success of neoliberalism

@mook I think the Soviet Union needed a second revolution tbh

very normal person 1d ago

@burnoutqueen

i mean there was a second revolution in the 20's and the Bolsheviks brutally repressed that, and there were mass uprising in Soviet block countries in the 60's that were brutally repressed, and even the protests in the late 80's that led to the callapse were basically democratic socialist in character, but then Davos and the Clinton Admin had to support the coup de etat of Yeltsin which is how we got Putin.

I think it goes back to Lenin being basically a fanatic and having no conception of political pluralism or democratic process whatever, like had Lenin kept the Constituent Assembly and so not brutally repressed the SR's and Menshavicks, even if it was a sham and toothless parliament that were give some mechanism to channel popular resentment, and so they could have reformed and addressed issues. But the leadership was so extremely centralized, and the economy was so bureaucratic that it just couldn't adapt.

Then again Vietnam or China or Cuba don't really have these same problems, so whose to say, if Communists in Italy took over i doubt it would be rigidly Stalinist, probably Eurocoms would split with the Soviets over some bullshit.

@mook lenin had some good ideas, but ultimately he fell prey to the same thing Robespierre did

very normal person 1d ago

@burnoutqueen what? being a fuckin dick?

@mook I mean, I like his criticism of imperialism.

very normal person 1d ago

@burnoutqueen he just stole that from Bukharin https://www.marxists.org/archive/bukharin/works/1917/imperial/

lenin's intro here actually applies to a lot of the faux anti-imperialists who defend one imperialist against another

Nikolai Bukharin: Imperialism and World Economy

@mook I mean, lenin was a fucking jerk, and did a lot of bad things. I don't idolize the man

@mook but he's better than, say, George Washington or something

very normal person 1d ago

@burnoutqueen i think if it wasn't for Lenin we'd have global communism right now

@mook I heavily disagree

very normal person 1d ago

@burnoutqueen that's cause you haven't read the theory

Read all of this and get back to me https://www.connexions.org/CxArchive/MIA/lenin/works/cw/index.htm

Lenin Collected Works

Volume Index to the Lenin Collected Works

very normal person 1d ago

@burnoutqueen you just don't understand dialectical and historical materialism, comrade, you gotta do a concrete analysis of concrete conditions, begin at the beginning again, one step forward, two steps back, ya know?

very normal person 1d ago

This Imperialism shit is different yo, it's not like the other capitalism yo, it's the highest stage, the highest stage - Lenin

very normal person 1d ago

@burnoutqueen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eDOJ4L0Edk

The Big Lebowski - Lenin

YouTube

@mook @burnoutqueen
Higher than fascism? Or are fascism and imperialism inextricably intertwined?

very normal person 1d ago

@burnoutqueen

So basic problem with the leninist conception of the workers state is that it conflates socialism, the socialist mode of production, with state ownership of the means of production, or State Capital.

State Capital is actually the oldest form of Capital, that is what the state does, it owns stuff and provides public services. Egypt or Rome or other ancient Empires had emense state capital, and from what I've read the first wage workers were state employees.

So using the state to monopolize all productive activity, that's not creating a new mode of production, you're just using the state as a kind of mega-corporation that owns everything. And it creates a class of state managers who naturally enrich themselves, being a distinct class from the workers. ( Soviet Ideology basically mystifies the concept of 'class character' when all it means is your particular relationship to the means of production. Managers obviously have a different relationship than workers.

So there's no way that State Capital will ever lead to another mode of production on it's own. It's simply a state monopoly on property. You can provide many public services and build great works of architecture and patronize the arts and all that, but it's still, structurally capitalism, with money and wage labour and all that, the mode of production is the same, it is only the ideological content of the state, and the relationship between the state and private industry ( in the case of the soviets little existed )

The difference between China and the USSR is that in the USSR the state managers, now several generations end, decided they were better off going with the west and just looted all the state resources to enrich themselves. Whereas in China, they adopted a more mixed economic model that allowed the development of the private sector, within a State Monopoly. In the USSR the existence of private enterprise itself was seen as evil.

Both are quite similar, as you have state managers enriching themselves, just in China they managed to do that without looting the socialist state.

It might be that having State Capitalism is advantageous to the development of the socialist mode of production, I think in China or the USSR there is an example of socialist enterprises that were autonomous from the state, but these were almost always isolated communes or cooperatives and never central to economic planning.

@mook the implementation of the "workers state" in the soviet union was a product of desperation, a weird amalgamation of ad hoc measures from the Russian civil war that stuck.

What I will say is that the Spanish Republicans eventually triumphed against the yankkkee backed fascist invasion of their country. Mostly.