Water boils when you keep heating it. Quantity changes into quality.

As the US Empire continues to decay, and neither party is capable of rescuing it, support for abandoning the system altogether and adopting a new one will rise.

It’s less that the midterms and primaries aren’t important, and more that the candidates allowed in them are not even passable.

If you want to get into political activism, I made a basic Marxist-Leninist study guide, might be fulfilling to try to contribute to a better world. This helps with the human connection bit, and also is compatible with having a full-time job in whatever you decide.

Fair enough, I’ll keep my headspace in mind for whenever I start. I have to recommend to you to read Piranesi, it’s my favorite book I’ve read in the past few years. It’s never bleak due to the way the main character sees and interacts with the world, while still being quite suspenseful.

Nice! My coworker recommended Mistborn as a starting place for the Cosmere, but Stormlight sounds fun! I’m reading Game of Thrones now though, but it’s really not my style, just trying to finish it for the sake of it at this point. Might move on to Sanderson next for my fiction fix. Thanks for the rec!

Good quote! Need to read Sanderson eventually myself!

Interesting point! I tend to do similar, I try to focus on “blurred areas” where people are open to socialism but not yet aware of it or educated on it. Per bit of energy, it’s far more effective in gaining new comrades, and these comrades can in-turn create new comrades from the new “blurred areas!”

“Left” anti-communists, a subset of western progressives.

Yep, he was incredible at creating new comrades! Hopefully we can carry the torch forward!

No problem!

I didn’t make the meme 🤷

The left tends to support reunification, as do the far-right. It’s mostly the centrists that seek the status quo or independence. The mate drinking part is a dig against the western liberals that think they can decide for them.

How can any system of government be defined as democratic when that system concentrated power into a single party system? All the while suppressing dissent and suppressing civil liberties.

Democracy means “rule by the majority,” not “choose between political parties.” Liberal democracy reduces participation in governance to choosing which party represents you, while soviet democracy integrated the public into the democratic process of governance itself. Capitalists, fascists, etc. were oppressed, of course, but this is necessary for maintaining socialism.

When it comes to social progressivism, the soviet union was among the best out of their peers, so instead we must look at who was actually repressed outside of the norm. In the USSR, it was the capitalist class, the kulaks, the fascists who were repressed. This is out of necessity for any socialist state. When it comes to working class freedoms, however, the soviet union represented a dramatic expansion. Soviet progressivism was documented quite well in Albert Syzmanski’s Human Rights in the Soviet Union.

Democracy is defined as power ultimately residing with the people, either directly or through freely elected representatives. None of which the USSR had. It was a totalitarian dictatorship with power concentrated centrally through the politburo and a dictator sitting at the top of it all.

This is not reality. The people both had direct participation in the democratic process, and elected representatives that laddered upward. It functioned like so:

(Not affiliated with PCUSA).

For evidence, I’ll point you to exactly the comment you responded to:

First-hand accounts from Statesian journalist Anna Louise Strong in her book This Soviet World describe soviet elections and factory councils in action. Statesian Pat Sloan even wrote Soviet Democracy to describe in detail the system the soviets had built for curious Statesians to read about, and today we have Professor Roland Boer’s Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance to reference.

Did you just brush past this paragraph?

Did I also spot an apologist for the acts of the great purge elsewhere in this thread?

Yes, kicking fascists and sabateurs out of the communist party was necessary. The USSR was in a state of prolonged class struggle, still grappling with vestiges of the prior tsarist system while also defending itself from imperialist aggression.

Also, your “meme” is based on the logical fallacy of false equivalency. Comparing a single aspect of two different systems of government, doesn’t equate that either of them are better than the other. You’ve selectively chosen a single frame of reference that doesn’t prove your argument in your “meme”. It is a misleading and fallacious method of debate.

“My” meme (stolen from r/marxism_memes) is about comparing a democratically constructed constitution with an undemocratically constructed constitution. I didn’t equate anything, just pointed out how the soviet constitution was enormously progressive for its time and how the US Empire’s still is not even to this day. There’s no fallacy here, just a direct comparison, which is totally valid.

The largest opinion in Taiwan is “status quo,” both independence and full reunification are minority opinions.

Both the PRC and ROC maintain that they are the legitimate governments of all of China, both mainland and Taiwan included. Both adhere to the idea that Taiwan is Chinese, they disagree on which government is legitimate.

Why? Both the PRC and ROC maintain that they are the legitimate governments of all of China, both mainland and Taiwan included. Both adhere to the idea that Taiwan is Chinese, they disagree on which government is legitimate.

You have not at all connected your claims to the evidence you believe supports them. That’s my point.

Do you believe the constitution created the collapse of the USSR? Are you arguing against full employment guarantees, equality of the sexes and ethnicities, etc? What specifically is your point on why the USSR dissolved, do you think the democratic process by which the constitution was drafted caused it to dissolve?

You haven’t explained why socialism was dissolved in the USSR, though, despite gesturing towards your belief that it was an inevitability of the system to do so. This is wrong, though, contemporary analysis shows that the USSR, though slowing down in development, was still positively growing and developing, and was under no real material crisis at the time of its dissolution. It was killed politically. Without understanding the context and underlying causes, you’re just hinting that it’s related to the socialist system itself.

Why then, have the PRC, Cuba, DPRK, Vietnam, and Laos continued their socialist systems? How are they similar, and how are they different? Do you believe their collapse is similarly inevitable as you believe the USSR’s dissolution to have been, or is that unique to the USSR’s conditions?

As for Italy and the cooperative movement, it’s neat, but it isn’t socialism, and is in the context of an imperialist state. If Italy had cooperative ownership as the principle aspect of its economy and had given up on its imperialism, we would have an interesting discussion on socialism vs cooperativism, but that’s not the case. Australia is a capitalist settler-colony and too depends on imperialism.