Well, it’s been a very big topic in American politics since Oct. 7th, as the majority of Americans have now become aware that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians with our tax dollars, and most of our politicians are complicit. Even the right-wing has largely woken up to this, though there is some extra baggage in their case.

You been living under a rock?

Communism is a post-socialist mode of production established by resolving the contradictions within socialism. States eradicate themselves by eradicating the basis of class, and this happens by collectivizing production and distribution.

The contradictions within socialism will not be resolved without people acting on their own initiative to resolve them. The state siezing the means of production and claiming it is doing so on behalf of the people forms a new basis of class, it does not eliminate it. It is simply taking the means of production from one set of private hands to another more centralized set that is only somewhat more responsive to the people’s will. The people must act of their own initiative to forcibly decentralize the power of the state until no hierarchy remains in order to eliminate class.

Cooperatives are petty bourgeois collectives of private property, not socialist property. The idea of competing small cells of worker-owners is petty bourgeois in origin and stands opposed to collectivized production and distribution.

Who says they have to compete? Realistically they would form federations to organize production and distribution on larger scales. Cooperatives in Italy do this, though they face strong resistance from corporations and the state as they do so. If you have eaten Parmigiano Reggiano you have eaten something created by many small cooperatives banding together to collectivize production and distribution. The cheese is made with milk from many small cooperatively owned farms that pool their resources together and share in the profits.

states exist to establish the supremacy of a class

Already we’re dropping the pretense of eliminating class, which is the entire premise of communism. A system which establishes supremacy in any form could never hope to eliminate class.

Independence from socialism is a petty bourgeois notion, not proletarian.

And again you are uncritically equivocating socialism and the state. Socialism can and does exist independently of the state whenever workers collectively organize production and distribution anywhere and for any reason. Cooperatives are socialist, not petty bourgeois, because the workers themselves have collectivized the means of production. Small businesses that are privately owned are petty bourgeois.

These [socialism and the state] are one and the same in the context of a socialist state transitioning towards communism.

Always transitioning towards but never quite getting any closer and never will without the people themselves acting collectively to dismantle the state. The idea that the state will just “dissolve,” or even more ridiculously disassemble itself, is absurd.

This slogan sounds nice, but ultimately just means that people should have a right to undermine socialism against the will of the people.

Again, people collectivizing the means of production on their own terms does not undermine socialism, it undermines the state. It’s funny you suggest people acting on their own initiative undermines their own will, and not the state cracking down on them. I thought from our previous interactions that you were more reasonable than this.

a union in a socialist system is somehow “class collaborationist” for being official and supported by said socialist state requires a ton of heavy lifting on your part.

A union in any system that stops short of supplanting the boss and siezing the means of production is class collaborationist. Such a union in a capitalist republic is essentially just a bureaucratic arm of the company that serves as controlled opposition, and in a “socialist” republic is a bureaucratic arm of the state that exists to ensure the working class acts in the state’s interest. You think the latter is acceptable because you believe the state truly represents the will of the people, but I believe that only the people themselves are truly representative of their will.

If it’s not independent then it’s not proletarian. The state doesn’t crush independent unions because they’re opposed to the socialist system, but because they are a threat to the authority of the state. I believe people have a right to self-determination, and preventing workers from organizing on their own terms violates that right. The means of production should belong only to those who actually do the work of production, not private individuals and not the state claiming falsely to represent them in the abstract. I’m a syndicalist in that I believe that the purpose of unions is eventually to overthrow the hierarchy and establish a cooperative, not to settle and become a class collaborationist union or an arm of a class collaborationist state, though it is preferable to no union at all.

the working class is in control of socialist authority

Independent unions are illegal in China with only the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) permitted by the Chinese state and the Chinese Communist Party to operate. Seems to me like you got it backwards, the “socialist authority” is in control of the working class. Any who attempt to organize on their own terms are met with state repression. Your insistence that the Chinese state only oppresses capitalists, fascists, and saboteurs is provably false.

Were there not an Israel the USA would have to invent an Israel to protect her interest in the region.

• Joe Biden, 1986

You kidding? Lots of politicians now are on way more than just meth. Sortition with a recall vote and the ability for those selected to recuse themselves would be a much more representative sample than the politicians we have now.

That’s because Dems are capitalists and always have been. Even when they had the support of powerful unions it was only the class collaborationist unions, never radical unions. The Dems were social democrats when there was a strong socialist movement that threatened capital interests, making it necessary for the capital owners to co-opt and redirect it. FDR implemented his reforms in the interest of preserving capitalism, not for the benefit of the working class. He saved the ruling elites from their own hubris, and they hated him for it.

Anyone eating that much THC has been working their way up to that for a long time.

It’s a bad argument anyway, since street-blocking protest crowds almost always part to allow an ambulance through. If an ambulance is stopped, it’s usually the cops blocking it.

Surely someone’s had the idea of doing the re-encoding client-side before uploading. That seems to me the obvious solution, especially since online creators already generally have beefy hardware for video editing.

The Trump administration literally sold merch at the front gate of one such camp in Florida. Old prisons are being reopened and new ones are being built to hold all the new ICE detainees, and they throw them all together in a cell with deportation papers in the middle of the room hoping they’ll give up and sign to be willingly deported. ICE now has massive deportation quotas that they’re being pushed to meet.

The above doesn’t even scrape the iceberg of everything that’s been happening. Your confident ignorance betrays your stupidity.

https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/22871468

I think we’re on different wavelengths because I’m coming at this from the position that there’s a distinction to be made between who is the better candidate and who is better for the country. Trump, despite being a fascist moron who has and continues to destroy the lives of millions while enriching himself and his donors, was a better candidate than Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris. Any of those three would have been better for the country (marginally) but were absolutely god-awful candidates. The only reason Biden even won by a hair is because of how awful Trump’s first term was, that people were willing to hold their nose and vote for Biden despite hating his guts.

You don’t even know who it’s gonna be and you’re already stating they’ll be better than Vance as if it’s a truism. I can absolutely see the DNC fucking up so badly that Vance looks like a better alternative. INB4 we end up with two Peter Thiel acolytes running against each other; “abundance” vs. “Christian” nationalism, a true clash of ideas.

“Dem candidates are never bad, progressives are just fickle!” - you

You don’t have to believe me, I just found it amusing. I remember seeing it and I can also see the hammer and sickle in this one is sharper than the rest of the image, meaning it was pasted over something. Don’t know if OP edited it or found it already edited, but I know the original is out there somewhere.

I swear I saw the original version of this meme with the anarchy symbol instead of the hammer and sickle, though I can’t find it anymore. MLs don’t do anarchist erasure challenge: impossible.

SMH

I’m so fucking sick of this argument. It’s nothing more than centrist cope; a way of willfully misunderstanding the reason for Hillary Clinton’s and Kamala Harris’ campaign failures.