Too real. Realizing as an adult I did permanent damage to my brain as a child by accident by watching things like the pain olympics has been a wild one

Advocating for the death of your enemies and crying over them getting killed are two separate things.

I am pro revolution for sure BUT we must be pragmatic with how we approach it - no bourgeoise capitalist system has ever been reformed away but the revolution will not happen over night. I also completely agree on the candidates’ purpose - whether they are winning their races or not, and I do think we can win races, the main job needs to be agitation to bolster the ranks of the organized masses.

Time to find some new activities if meeting people is a priority then I think. Which isn’t to say it will be easy to do but neither are most things worth doing that improve our material existence.

Sweet we’re gonna have systems that not even humans can work on because they didn’t design them? What could possibly go wrong?

You joke but I think a lot of leftists online unironically believe this.

And I’m not even saying armed revolution is necessarily off the table - but it’s certainly not what we try first or even second or third for that matter.

I understand your desire for change NOW but the unfortunate reality is we do not yet have the conditions for it. There’s plenty of room to criticize many of these figures on the left in the US for various things - I have plenty of smoke for them as well.

BUT while class consciousness remains nearly nonexistent in this country we must engage with the masses where they are at. We must be in the governmental structures that the masses are engaged in so we can be part of the conversation. We must run cadre candidates in elections EVEN WHEN THEY MIGHT LOSE (tactically though we only have so much capacity) so we can spread our message to more people. We must go to the trade unions and tenant unions so we are where the people closest to our movement are.

Left coms will call me a reformist for this take but it is simply a necessary evil we must contend with in the interim. Even once we take control of society we will still have to reckon with the capitalist structures we inherit. We will not be able to do away with it in one fell swoop it simply does not work this way. It will be a decidedly incremental path of dismantling them one by one so we can return power back to the working class citizen.

The primary goal MUST be a pragmatic takeover of the state by using and abusing the systems that exist today, doing what we can to expand the permissibility of our messaging until we no longer need these systems anymore. Organizing a true socialist movement that will not become subordinated to liberals (or hell even the rightist or far leftist socialist tendencies) or worse necessitates a more strategic and patient path towards global liberation and emancipation.

Which is to say…them supporting Israel both here and with all the weapons and tech they send them routinely.

Ok China supporting Israel and sending them weapons is a clear and massive L but this is kinda wild lol

How can this woman’s political instincts be this bad

That’s not what I did at all but that’s a fun way to characterize it.

My man we are both arguing opinions here lol you dont get to pretend like your opinion is correct because you like your logic and I don’t lol

We just disagree on this its not as deep as you’re trying to make it out to be with this weird self aggrandizing attitude.

Finding an exception to the rule and then claiming that exception is the rule is kinda wild. The vast vast vast vast majority of human beings do NOT engage in exploitation of each other. As such I do not believe exploitation is a part of human nature but is rather a manifestation of anti social behavior intersecting with the material conditions of the time. Humans are egalitarian and communal by nature, things that pull us from that are aberrations to our nature not pillars of it.

lol

Or maybe when you make right wing chud arguments that are almost incoherent I assume you’re a right wing chud.

You’re out here larping as a bible thumper and think its a gotcha when people think that’s reflective of your world view. Brother I dont know who the fuck you are am I supposed to just assume everyone is out here making disingenuous devils advocate arguments all the time or something?

Man I don’t even know where to start with this comment. I’m not sure when we say socialism we are even talking about the same thing first of all.

Second of all of course Jesus was not literally a socialist - that didnt exist when he was alive. But if you extrapolate the underlying vibe of the lessons Jesus taught they are ones of empathy and community.

It’s always y’all religious types that bastardize and twist your texts to match whatever flavor of mental illness you have. Respectfully Jesus would find you to be a charlatan lmao.

Every company?

Vertical integration is an extension of capital’s desire to completely capture any competition into one giant monopoly of possible. Vertical integration allows companies to gain functional monopolies over large parts of an industry usually by buying out the companies that make up the parts.

In this context its the companies that the biggest ones driving development pipelines. Microsoft has become incredibly potent here by buying companies that make up some of the most common development practices for some of the most popular programming languages. As a web dev, Microsoft owns NPM which is where my packages are stored and published, they design the languages I write my software in, in buying Github they own where my code lives and builds as well as their artifacts, they build both editors I use to do the lion share of my work. Then they own the operating system I am mostly commonly accessing these tools from. Because they own all these parts they can make friction between them incredibly low and make every other competing option look frustrating and less polished thus harming adoption and further solidfying their functional monopoly in the absence of it being written out explicitly under just one entity.

When you look at why people did the enslaving you will inevitably find someone who is creating hierarchies by abusing some facet of the material conditions of the time. Slavery is not a part of human nature.

Apologies I responded to the wrong convo thinking it was the response to another comment. I think you are trying to make the point that modern day civilization is slavery due to the exploitation of capitalism but I’m not really sure of the point you are trying to make beyond that. Slavery is bad. Capitalism is slavery. Capitalism is bad.

I think we are agreeing unless you think I’m taking the position that slavery is good. Or are you trying to make the point that I am wrong because human beings have employed slavery in the past (and still do today)?

Please go read the Bible lol Every single moral value that Jesus preaches is like a straight up pillar of socialist ideals. Feed the hungry, house the homeless, cloth the naked, etc etc. If you extrapolate these ideals to the rest of society…what do you get? Definitely not capitalism!