I’d really love an open-source WYSIWYG for android, but I’m stuck with obsidian currently.
Dessalines
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Cake day: April 17th, 2019
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10·3 days agoExcellent post. Its def striking that anarchism’s “propaganda of the deed” non-solution to society’s problems is becoming mainstream in a lot of modern media (v for vendetta is another example). Fidel has this to say:
Did you and your followers use terrorism, for example, against Batista’s forces? Or assassinations?
Neither terrorism nor assassinations. You know, we were against Batista but we never tried to assassinate him, and we could have done it. He was vulnerable—it was much harder to fight against his army in the mountains [than to kill him], much harder to try to take a fortress that was defended by a regiment. How many men were there in the Moncada barracks that 26 July 1953? Almost 1,000 men, maybe more.
Preparing an attack against Batista and killing him was ten or twenty times easier, but we never did that. Has tyrannicide ever served to make a revolution? Nothing changes in the objective conditions that engender a tyranny. The men who attacked the Moncada fortress could have assassinated Batista on his farm, or on the road, the way Trujillo and other tyrants were killed, but we had a very clear idea: assassination does not solve the problem. They’ll put someone else in the place of the man you killed, and the man you killed becomes a martyr to his people. The inadvisability of assassination is an old idea, arrived at and incorporated into revolutionary doctrine a long time ago.
I’d also like to add aimixin’s post on why anarchism is not a socialist ideology:
u/aimixin - originally from r/GenZhou
No, anarchism isn’t just “fuck all the rules”, it’s a whole ideology and it’s riddled with nonsense and contradictions.Anarchists like to put themselves on the same side as socialists, yet anarchism is fundamentally is not a socialist ideology. Socialism is based on the socialization of production, which is something anarchists reject. They are very individualist and view society as oppressive to the individual and want to break up society into small independent units.
A wide gulf separates socialism from anarchism, and it is in vain that the agents-provocateurs of the secret police and the news paper lackeys of reactionary governments pretend that this gulf does not exist. The philosophy of the anarchists is bourgeois philosophy turned inside out. Their individualistic theories and their individualistic ideal are the very opposite of socialism. Their views express, not the future of bourgeois society, which is striding with irresistible force towards the socialisation of labour, but the present and even the past of that society, the domination of blind chance over the scattered and isolated small, producer.
– Vladimir Lenin, Socialism and Anarchism
Anarchists are more concerned with morality than actual concrete reality. They have the liberal mindset that the political and economic system is merely a reflection of the beliefs and ideas of that society and has no connection to the society’s material conditions, and therefore to change a political or economic system, all that is necessary is changing people’s ideas.
Because of this, they think building a utopia merely requires imagining that utopia in your head and convincing everyone else of it, and by extension, any country that has failed to achieve a utopia has only done so due to a moral failing on their part. They think the reason every single socialist experiment failed to achieve some imagined utopia is because of moral corruption, that the leadership was just evil and immoral.
They extend this idea not to just the leaders of those countries, but anyone who supports those countries. If you defend any actually-existing socialist country, they will assume you must only do so because you are morally inferior, they will accuse you of being an “evil tankie” and whatever other insult they can imagine to try and attack your character, rather than your arguments, because in their mind, they don’t believe you believe what you believe due to good arguments. They believe you believe what you believe due to a moral failing.
Let’s stop talking in generalities and take a look at a very concrete example: economics. Going back to Smith’s LTV, we understand how capitalist economies are capable of, to some degree, balancing resources to convert the supply into the goods and services demanded, and how market pressures push companies into buying and selling roughly at cost of production. A planned economy can also balance resources because, in principle, they would have access to the information and computational power needed to directly calculate costs of production and allocate resources efficiently to achieve similar, and with sufficient infrastructure and technology, even better, results.
Many anarchists will propose some economic system outside of markets and economic planning, what they call the “gift economy”. They don’t propose this system because they arrived at it objectively through a rigorous analysis of the development of capitalism as Marxists arrive at their understanding, no, they propose it because it sounds morally good to them.
The problem is, a gift economy fundamentally has no way to balance resources. If I could take whatever I want without expectation of returning sufficient materials, you would inevitably have huge shortages in the economy.
Shortages are avoided in market systems by requiring direct recuperation of cost upon consumption (payment), while centrally planned systems may recuperate cost immediately, but since they are centrally planned, resources from one sector can be allocated towards another, i.e. health care could be provided free at the point of service but funded by another sector of the economy, and it would balance out, because planning is centralized and able to do such a thing.
A gift economy lacks both of these features. It has no planning capabilities nor any market capabilities to regulate consumption of resources. It’s not that economic calculation can’t be done, it’s that in a gift economy, economic calculation never even takes place. Once you begin to introduce any sort of mechanism for economic calculation, you inevitably end up with either a market system or a planned economy. The only way economic calculation could be done away with entirely is if we had a post-scarcity society, i.e. the conditions to achieve full communism, which obviously doesn’t exist.
Of course, this is just one example. Anarchists believe in many things and not all believe in gift economies, but it’s an example of something many anarchists fundamentally believe in purely on moral grounds despite it being nonsense economically.
Anarchism is fundamentally based in decentralization which plenty of Marxists such as Friedrich Engels and Che Guevara already criticized this concept as nonsensical and pointed out how decentralized production is the basis for capitalism and will inevitably return to capitalism.
Anarchism is an incredibly self-contradictory ideology that fundamentally is based in morality without any concerns for concrete reality. It’s concerned with trying to force reality to fit into an idealized utopia rather than deriving answers from concrete reality itself. Political and economic systems are not in our heads, they’re in the real, material world, and they have to operate and maintain complex social relations and modes of production. You can’t build a political and economic system based on morality any more than you can build a smartphone based on morality.
You are literally the one in the right in this pic. Shaming people for wanting to improve the world rather than voting for your status quo genocidal party.
6·8 days agoA dog’s tongue all flopped out. Or maybe any noodley-shaped animal doing noodely things.
"[Supporting Israel] is the best $3 billion investment we make. Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interests in the region.”
- Biden
This thread is very clearly proving that US liberals actually think they live in a democracy.
Liberals would sooner imagine the end of existence, than the thousands of other alternatives and types of political action and organizing, other than voting for their genocidal parties.
Many imperialized peoples in the world rejected liberalism and its controlled opposition parties, and decided to build their own working class parties to oppose capitalist domination… and they freed themselves from imperialism and uplifted millions of people out of poverty in the process.
Despite being far poorer and less educated than imperial-core liberals, they are much more intelligent, and realize that step 1, is to form their own pro-worker / pro-peasant parties. They don’t eat the shit on a plate given to them like US liberals are happy to do.
The USA is not the world, and its citizens should start looking towards the welfare of the people their country murders.
Neither is also an option. You don’t need to put up with either manager.
When is your country going to return the land they stole to its indigenous peoples? When is the US democratic party going to stop supporting the genocide of Palestine?
If its people not voting for the US democratic party, rather than either of the above issues that “gets your blood boiling”, you might need to re-evaluate which side of the white supremacist line you’re on.
Damn commies raising a stink about the US genocide of Palestinians again. /s
Joe Biden also raped a woman, Tara Reid.
No content correct the record bots are downvoting you and a lot of other ppl in this thread, who say anything even slightly negative about them. I’m having to ban a lot of them rn.
No probs. Here’s an overview of how communists view democracy.
ICE and deportations grew massively during Obama’s presidency.
By the numbers: Under the Obama administration, total ICE deportations were above 385,000 each year in fiscal years 2009-2011, and hit a high of 409,849 in fiscal 2012. The numbers dropped to below 250,000 in fiscal years 2015 and 2016.
You can’t achieve a democracy through voting, it always results in an oligarchy. The wealthy / economically dominant classes are the only ones who have enough money / prestige to finance their campaigns and win the popularity contest. It makes any political system based on elections nothing more than political theatre.
This is basic stuff even the ancient greeks knew, and communists learned through trial and error, yet liberals in the 21st century can’t wrap their heads around it.
And signal, considering its a centralized US company that has your phone number.