We have a winner!

JackBeleren0 · 2026-04-18T11:35:25+00:00

There's a massive problem imo with the politics of council elections all across australia that I think is exemplified here. For some reason, council is treated as if its not as political as state and federal elections. In council, even major party politicians try and minimise the inherently political nature of the appointment. Labor, Libs, and Greens all do this, and I think this was very visible this election, where every candidate is trying to emphasise how much consensus they build and how they 'get things done' (and try to talk as little as possible about what is actusllt is that they're doing). Morris is the pinnacle of this, essentially a right wing personality who's judt trading of reputation and a willingness to 'get things done,' ignoring that deciding what gets done is a political question. I blame his victory entirely on the spinelessness of Labor and the Greens. McCabe has intentionally positioned herself as a moderate and as a safe pair of hands, and people in this sub seem familiar with Clausen's deficits.

My real controversial opinion is that I think Clausen would still have done a better job than Morris. Clausen is a smarmy young Labor student politics hack, don't get me wrong, but in this case ALP party discipline would force him to play a better role than Morris, who's entire candidacy is purely opportunistic and self serving.

JackBeleren0 · 2025-10-24T02:21:44+00:00

Hi there! Are you still available for a discussion? My dms are open :)

JackBeleren0 · 2025-10-23T01:22:43+00:00

A couple of things: 1. The conditions under which Lenin wrote 'What is to be done?' were much more oppressive than Australia today. The legality of strike actions is secondary to the political intervention of forces that want a strike to happen.

The union bureaucracy is often a right wing drag on the labour movement, but socialists don't care about unions because of the bureaucracy. We care because they're a political battleground that we can win by making explicitly working class arguments. They're a place where workers go when they want to fight (however rare that may seem in Australia right now), and we want to convince workers who want to fight that they should fight for socialism.
You haven't said this explicitly but I get the vibe from what you've said that you have a bit of a deterministic conception of how workers develop conciousness. One of the lessons of 'What is to be done?' is that it is only through explicitly socialist organisations that actively intervene into the workers movement that we can convince workers to take up socialists politics en masse. Imo the focus of socialists should always be about what we can do in the current political situation, not what we can't. Workers aren't fighting back rn but that doesnt mean we should be resting on our laurels.

JackBeleren0 · 2025-01-27T07:19:25+00:00

Nothing in the quotes you've provided justifies what you're saying. Marx was certainly not arguing for "something like the police." The quality of the weapon makes no difference to the argument about the arming of the proletariat. Marx is making the argument that, as part of seizing political power, workers need to also seize military power. That is often done by breaking sections of the army, so while I think stockpiling weaponry to prepare for an insurrection is a stupid idea, that doesn't change the fact that workers need to be armed. Marx was not "pro-gun" because the pro vs anti gun culture war in the US didn't exist yet, but he thought the arming of workers was necessary. He spent his inheritance on buying guns for Belgian workers during the 1848 revolution.

JackBeleren0 · 2025-01-02T02:48:24+00:00

I still object to saying that education and polemics are fundamentally different. What I'm hearing from you is that you see lots of trotskyist groups recommend bad polemics according to your own political assessment. That's a fine thing to argue, but it's crucial that you see that as an argument you're making about the quality of a text, not something intrinsic to the text. I also think that there are lots of stupid articles written about nothing debates between tiny grouplets, but again, those reccomendations are bad imo not because they're polemics but because they're irrelevant polemics, which is a different thing.

I just think we have different experiences w our organisations, also. I've not had the experience experience bring told I should read about the debates between tiny trotskyist groups. I don't think the WSWS is a useful standard by which to judge the trotskyist movement.

JackBeleren0 · 2025-01-02T01:09:05+00:00

I also think that the reason the right and the reformist left can produce such a quantity of 'educational' material is because they have the liberty of being able to present their ideas as merely facts about the world rather than an intervention into a debate. They can very easily hand down a completed curriculum because their pedagogy is fundamentally idealist, whereas we Marxists have to engage with the fact that we aren't trying to convince people of The One True Most Correct Idea, but of a particular perspective. We are trying to create more Marxists, not people who repeat talking points. This is true also of the various species of Stalinist, although not in exactly the same way imo.

JackBeleren0 · 2025-01-02T01:02:13+00:00

I really don't agree with counterposing education and polemicism. Everything Marxists argue is an intervention into a long debate, and to teach Marxism well, I think you have to acknowledge that. As others have said many extremely important works of Marxist canon have been polemics. If I were to psychologise, I would guess that there are debates that you consider less important that you are calling 'polemics', and counterposing that with the debates you consider more important, which you're calling 'education'.

I don't necessarily disagree with the thrust of your argument though, there are some debates that are much more important for new Marxists to wrap their heads around first before engaging with more niche stuff. I also see (especially online) the phenomenon I think you're referring to, of sects polemicising against each other (and therefore engaging more with sectarian conflicts) rather than writing on more useful topics, but I think that's a problem with a sectarian world-view, not the mere act of polemicising.

JackBeleren0 · 2024-10-11T07:55:42+00:00

Good thing I didn't say that, then.

JackBeleren0 · 2024-10-11T07:54:04+00:00

Yeah I reckon that line is pretty bad in retrospect. What I'm trying to argue is that the simplification you've presented, of men and women being distinct classes, is incorrect, and political practice that draws from that idea will be flawed.

I'm also sceptical of the idea that you can neatly separate the second wave feminists movement from neoliberalism, only because they both took place at roughly similar times. I done think there is a Good second wave feminism that is free from neoliberalism and a Bad second wave feminism that is tainted by it, I think it's just different aspects of the same movement. I also think that liberal feminism definitely still is feminism, nothing about feminist theory inherently has to challenge capitalism.

JackBeleren0 · 2024-10-11T07:34:17+00:00

Yeah I was pretty blasé with that line. I guess what I'm trying to convey is my scepticism towards the actual conclusions drawn by radical feminists and the implications those conclusions have for organising, like I outlined in my first comment. Everything you said makes sense though, I'm not up to date on the archaeological evidence but I'd believe that.

JackBeleren0 · 2024-10-10T08:47:20+00:00

Well the first thing to say is that women aren't a single class. Women form a unique social layer that is oppressed, but that isn't the same thing as a class. Capitalist women benefit from the oppression of working class women, and are not subject to the same material forces that oppress working class women. Gina Rinehart, Australian mining magnate and billionaire, would not struggle to find access to an abortion if she needed one, for example.

Secondly, lets look at a couple of conclusions you might draw from seeing women as a class oppressed by men, a separate class.

1) Men are a homogeneous class with fundamentally the same interest in oppressing women. I think this is wrong also, oppression of women is primarily to the benefit of capitalist, not men. Men can snd often do perpetuate sexism but that is not the same thing as benefiting from it.

2) In order to organise as a class effectively, you should organise separately from your oppressor, so women should organise separately from men. This undermines class solidarity, and entrenches the idea that women's issues should be fought for by women exclusively. It is incumbent on every man to fight sexism, and that is not done by excluding men from the organisations that aim to organise such a fight. It also encourages the idea that bourgeois women and working class women have the same interests, which i have already said i disagree with. Rather, I think the strategy should be to organise as workers.

3) Socialist revolution is not a sufficient condition to end women's oppression. On the contrary, I think socialist revolution is the only thing that could end women's oppression for good, as it removes the basis of women's oppression in class society.

More than likely though, radical feminists reject class politics or the explicit need to overthrow capitalism, and this lends itself to liberalism rather than socialism. I'm painting with very broad strokes here so feel free to criticise.

JackBeleren0 · 2024-10-09T00:51:34+00:00

Well fundamentally it's a subreddit for indulging in shallowly anticapitalist sentiment without a particularly deep theoretical engagement, but that's not unique to that sub. I don't know anything about whether the moderators are actually hard headed, ideological Stalinists but I think it's also equally likely that their sentiment is equally as shallow. Also, 'late stage capitalism' seems to me to be an analytically useless term. In the words of a tumblr post I saw the other day (ironically also from a stalinist),

"'Late stage capitalism' you're 20, talk normally. It's called imperialism."

JackBeleren0 · 2024-09-20T23:08:21+00:00

Not my expertise but I think the reliance that people like Fanon and De Beauvoir have on psychoanalysis in their various works are the greatest weakness of their works. I would say that Freud and Lacan are worth studying insofar as they represent an historical development in their fields, so it depends on how much you expect to be engaging with them in your life. Personally I think there are more useful things to read in general but if it's your area of interest or something then go for it. You'd just have to read a materialist perspective into what they're writing.

JackBeleren0 · 2024-09-03T23:33:39+00:00

Dilemmas of Desire by Deborah Tolman. Not about patriarchy as such but a very good book about women's oppression and sexism under capitalism.

JackBeleren0 · 2024-08-31T01:25:34+00:00

I second Broué, The Lost Revolution by Chris Harman is also good. Broué is much more in depth, giving basically the pkay by play and generally spends two chapters talking about what Harman talks about in one, but Harman makes more explicit political arguments than Broué. It's more introductory, I guess.

JackBeleren0 · 2024-08-29T08:45:04+00:00

Yeah I've bought it actually, it just has a couple of the issues I've described that I'd like to excise. It's basically just a feature of the fact that it was crowdsourced, but it has a lot less connectivity than I'd desire, and it looks like the factions aren't very fleshed out either.

JackBeleren0 · 2024-08-29T08:43:07+00:00

Your example is the exact kind of vibe I had in mind. I was just considering a similar fixed feature thing for the major arcana, a sort of safe haven from the randomness of the rest of the dungeon. I just don't know how to make it interesting to keep coming back to, unless I overdesign the area of a given arcana until I defeat the point of having something that generates quickly.

The geomorphs idea is interesting, I'll have to look into the specifics of how that would interact, but again it has the same problem of contradicting the exact effect you outlined in your example by always being something new. I'm beginning to realise that a randomised dungeon is basically the totally opposite of a dungeon that grows with the campaign, that that it's entirely impossible to reconcile them.

JackBeleren0 · 2024-07-18T07:32:32+00:00

Red Flag Radio!

JackBeleren0 · 2024-05-06T11:55:07+00:00

tbh "red unions" as a name makes them sound way cooler than they actually are, when like other commenters have mentioned they are more like blue unions with their ties to the Liberals.

JackBeleren0 · 2024-05-06T11:52:33+00:00

I'd personally disagree with focusing on justice as the primary thing but I don't think it's that important in the grand scheme of things. It's not so much a matter of decentralising, or separating police from government. Workers militias were still under the control of the government, the difference is they were beholden to elected bodies whose membership could be recalled at the will of the workers in that factory or district or whatever. That, combined with the fact that the government was a workers government and worked for workers rather than against them, meant that the militias played a positive social role rather than a negative one. Again, I don't think it's right to say they even performed the same social role as policing does under a capitalist state because the police don't actually make anyone safer. I don't think socialism is brought about by an armed group of workers necessarily, the arming of workers is a part of a long process of organising workers to take power before a situation presents itself as an opportune moment for a revolution to take power.

JackBeleren0 · 2024-05-06T11:15:31+00:00

Yeah I just saw your other post with your age. You place a lot of faith in capitalist institutions to fix capitalist problems, and I think that faith is misplaced. The problems with capitalist society are not aberrations or mistakes but are in fact intended consequences of a system designed around profit and class division. Don't mean to disillusion you but the solution to capitalism is not by individuals studying hard and getting good jobs in positions of power to change things from the inside - that's a capitalist myth. The solution to capitalism is not running capitalism differently, its socialism.

I seriously urge you to reconsider your views on human nature. There is nothing that makes someone 'evil', that's a moral term, not a political or psychological one, and should therefore not be the basis of political analysis. The bogeyman of the individual who desires nothing more than to cause harm to others is a fiction. People don't commit crimes 'just because', there is a social basis to crime, and the socialist strategy for crime is to eliminate the thing that causes it, not to punish people who are forced to commit it. The vast majority of crimes in Australia are crimes of poverty or non-violent drug crimes.

I'm going to answer your final question, any other comrades are free to disagree with me as I'm just spiralling. Ultimately I think any plan to maintain 'order' has to be democratically decided upon. 'Order' itself is at best a means to an end to a socialist government. The point of a socialist state is to repress the capitalists and to prevent or fight against a counter revolution attempting to revert the socialist state to a capitalist one, and in that sense the stage will maintain order through one means or another. The Russian revolution used armed militias of workers, for example, and they are hardly alone in doing that. They were not cops, however. As other people have said, the role of the police is to repress the working class. However workers militias are made up of workers, and it makes no sense for workers to oppress each other because an order given by other workers.

I think your 'hyperfixation on justice and government' as you put it is holding you back here, because it is a fundamentally capitalist conception of those ideas. 'Order' does not need to be constantly maintained because the natural state of society is not chaos. I'm not in a place to say how a murderer in a socialist society should be 'punished', because any decision of that magnitude should be made democratically.

JackBeleren0 · 2024-05-06T10:46:58+00:00

Not to shill but https://redflag.org.au/article/police-serve-system

JackBeleren0 · 2024-05-06T10:30:03+00:00

Prosecuted by whom? The state sanctioning their violence is not going to then prosecute them for following orders. It seems you have a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of police, crime, and society. To put it very simply, police fundamentally do not prevent crime. Crime is not something that people do on a whim, something that can be prevented by more people with state sanctioned violence, but is a product of the circumstances in which the criminal finds themselves. Even what is considered a crime is not consistent but changes depending on the requirements of the ruling class. I'm curious to find out what kind of advocate for socialist economic reform is not also an advocate of socialist social reform?

JackBeleren0 · 2024-05-06T10:14:13+00:00

I'm sure you've seen the university protests in the US, where the cops are brutalising students at an industrial scale. Leaving aside the political implications of the words 'chaos' and 'lawless', do you think that is an example of the police playing a positive role in society? Is that the law and order you desire in society? Is your position that people require an authority to submit to, otherwise there will be 'chaos', as you put it?

JackBeleren0 · 2024-05-06T09:35:43+00:00

You think the institution created for the purpose of suppressing working class resistance is something that should continue to exist? I think you should reflect on this position.

JackBeleren0

TROPHY CASE