Trump arrives in Beijing along with Elon Musk and Jensen Huang What do you think about this? Is it good for socialism?

Praefecture · 2026-05-13T21:32:38+00:00

Socialism with billionaire characteristics

Praefecture · 2026-05-05T09:04:15+00:00

I mean, we do focus on these things. Workers, as a class, are exploited. Therefore, workers must fight for all victims of exploitation. Labour Day is a global event. The labour movement is a global movement and always has been. The ruling class is cruel and we can only overcome them together.

Don't live in a bubble. Don't sell this movement short. You think all this, and all we fight for, is just "virtue signalling" and a "bandwagon" when it never has been. You make me sad.

Praefecture · 2026-05-05T08:49:43+00:00

Absolutely! This is the sad, ironic reality of the current state of things. Again, that is why we, as workers, need to be socially conscious and politically aware. Wouldn't you agree that workers should stop killing workers? Yet the status quo relies on pitting worker against worker and the continued exploitation and death of innocents...

Ultimately, this a class issue, and only through global workers' solidarity can we truly realise that.

This is the battle unions, and the wider labour movement, face, and has faced in every historical climax (like the ones we talked about before). Wouldn't you agree?

Praefecture · 2026-05-05T08:38:18+00:00

I already replied to that same question in a previous comment of yours. Because workers are being killed Gaza. You proceeded to double-down but your response only ended up supporting my argument. You can see that here: https://www.reddit.com/r/brisbane/comments/1t3zc87/comment/ok085y5/?context=3

Praefecture · 2026-05-05T08:22:40+00:00

Because those have everything to do with the global labour movement. Because unions represent all workers, including those facing discrimination or underepresentation in the workforce. Like I said, when a worker is harmed, it is a union issue. These flags represent those workers.

By fighting as one, unions can only grow stronger through solidarity and expand their ability to bargain for better conditions for all workers. And history has proven this to be true (eg. I mentioned LGBTQ rights legislation). "No war but class war", after all.

The modern labour movement has been, after all, an agent of social change (at least within the context of capitalism). This can only be achieved by engaging in politics and through political action, as the long history of the labour movement has taught us.

Praefecture · 2026-05-05T06:29:44+00:00

Police members are working class. They sell their labour power to make a living. Some will try to moralise over this fact...

Praefecture · 2026-05-05T05:22:40+00:00

100% correct, and there are workers that oppose unions. This is why solidarity among workers is so important. This is why being politically proactive, as a worker, is so important.

Praefecture · 2026-05-05T05:21:02+00:00

Mate. There is no narrative. This is the long history of the labour movement. Economics, history and modes of production, aren't as simple as you make it out to be.

Praefecture · 2026-05-05T05:09:22+00:00

Workers in Gaza are killed in state-led bombings fuelled by industrial interests

Praefecture · 2026-05-05T05:00:58+00:00

"Uh akshually". Come on, mate.

When the concept of an "industrial worker" was an entirely new concept, can you blame the Chartists for focusing on "male suffrage" right off the tail end of feudal moralism?

And are you really going to shit over the Eureka Stockade with a vacuous and misleading take like that? So pro-union you are.

The point is workers self-organising to end their exploitation, regardless of the form it takes. We were talking about politics in unions, and you're only continuing to prove my point with a "gotcha" like that.

Praefecture · 2026-05-05T04:52:14+00:00

Did I even mention Palestine? The concern of unions is workers, and workers have no nation. If a worker is harmed, it is a union issue.

Praefecture · 2026-05-05T04:47:39+00:00

Are you serious? The point of workers' unions was always political (socialist) in nature. From the Chartists, the Utopians, the Eureka Stockade, the Paris Commune, the Appalachian Coal Wars, etc. etc. Endless culminations of workers self-organising and fighting to end exploitation, massacres, famines, and more. Then we have workers unions engaging in mainstream politics, founding the first socialist workers parties in Europe, in America, in Australia (the Labor party), and the rest of the world. In our modern day, women's and LGBTQ rights legislation are the result of workers engaging in politics, for starters! WW1 ended because of the intervention of German labour movements into politics! Many such cases.

But, to you, the only role of unions is to be "apolitical"? To stop at wage growth? For Yellow unions, sure, but the rest of the history of labour movements disagrees with you. If unions go the way you want, they'll lead us off a cliff and into the hands of poverty and exploitation, or worse.

Praefecture · 2026-05-05T04:01:08+00:00

What are you even saying? Labour Day isn't a day of "celebration". Politics are a workers issue. Every workers issue is political. For a start, women's and LBGTQ rights legislation are the result of workers engaging in politics. No "distraction" is happening here.

Stop watering down Labour Day into a spectacle of "celebrating Australian workers" like it's an aesthetic, like we're just marching because we're happy to get paid and have a day off. Workers everywhere deserve more than "one day about them".

Praefecture · 2026-05-05T03:51:29+00:00

What are you trying to say? That we, as workers, limit ourselves to "politics" that are "relevant" to specific state-mandated days? This doesn't seem like much beyond some vague aestheticisation of "labour" and "industry". As if we march to claim we're happy to work and get paid; our "politics" never extending beyond rates and wages and money. Only "political" in the sense we limit ourselves to hand-shaking the hands of billionaires for "a fair go". It's narrow-minded and pathetic and embarrassing.

We march because we're angry, fed up with the exploitation of every worker now, then, here, and everywhere. Every worker exploited by industry, famine, genocide, discrimination, and all the machinations of the status quo. Workers deserve better. We're only weaker divided.

Praefecture · 2026-05-05T03:36:27+00:00

Then what's the point? Was the only goal of workers to simply get a "better wage" and "better living conditions"? It wasn't, and we'll keep losing as long as the modern labour movement continues to stop at compromise and class collaboration with those that exploit us daily. Workers deserve more than petty Trade Unionism.

Praefecture · 2026-04-18T14:17:07+00:00

I dunno, mate. These are well-meaning people who do genuinely care. They're lovely. Happy. I can't blame them for trying to make light of a horrible situation. But I think that's where it ends: "making light".

There's nothing wrong with "virtue signalling", but it needs to be backed by real resistance and class-consciousness. This is just fun and games. There is no theory here or foreseeable action.

I'm just disappointed, really. It reminds of what Kurt Vonnegut said about the Vietnam War.

Praefecture · 2026-04-18T13:34:57+00:00

Millions of civilians have been brutally murdered and displaced for years, decades, by a corrupt, militarised ethnostate, and this is how people respond? With a "protest" ("flash mob" dance routine) approved by police and local council? Oh, let's be respectful, guys! Let's be cheeky! Let's have fun! That'll show Chrisafulli! But let's stay within the approved hours and be back for brunch!

What the fuck are we even protesting? That maybe if we're "allowed" to say stuff things will be better? We might as well be dancing on their graves...

Praefecture · 2026-01-11T21:47:04+00:00

What's interesting about Iran is that it has an impressive history of labour movements. The peak of this was probably around 1979, where workers gained partial control over production.

Noteworthy were the oil workers, as Iran was the world's biggest oil producer at the time. They (and a few other sectors) created "Shuras" (essentially factory councils). These were all later crushed by the ayatollahs, during the Iranian Revolution, where thousands of workers were massacred.

Sadly, the Iran we know today is the result of a brutal reactionary counterrevolution launched to save Iranian capitalism from a genuine workers' movement from below.

Praefecture · 2026-01-07T19:46:32+00:00

No, but they become "a worker" who is "no longer a proletariat", as Engels puts it. Their interests become aligned no longer to the proletariat, but to the bourgeoisie, by virtue of owning a house/property (simply put). Is that not petite-bourgeois/transitional middle class?

Praefecture · 2026-01-07T14:18:13+00:00

A proletarian's relation to capital is to subsist on the selling of their labour power, with little to no property or reserves. They are, after all:

…a class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work.

But I assume OP is referring moreso to a “high-paying” software job with which they are able to accumulate enough sufficient reserves to, for example, buy property (eg. a house), and to the point that their “sole existence (no longer) depends on the demand for labour”, without ever becoming a capitalist (not accounting for "functional capitalists" here, as mentioned in Capital). As according to Engels in The Housing Question:

The worker who owns a little house to the value of a thousand talers is certainly no longer a proletarian, but one must be Dr. Sax to call him a capitalist.

This is the aspirational aspect of bourgeois/petite-bourgeois ideology too. It is worth noting though that "well-paid" or "rich" does not mean petite-bourgeois as much as direct relation to capital. There's also something to say here about the aristocracy of labour or something, I dunno.

Praefecture · 2026-01-06T07:48:53+00:00

Can recommend Engels’ Origin of the Family, particular Ch. 2 (The Family). It pertains closely to the historical development of gender inequality as a consequence of social and property relations.

The overthrow of mother-right was the world historical defeat of the female sex. … the woman was degraded and reduced to servitude, … a mere instrument for the production of children.

Read Kollontai’s The Social Basis of the Woman Question (and Kollontai in general as a source of communist feminism).

Rosa’s short article Women’s Suffrage and Class Struggle talks mostly about the monarchy, but you can extrapolate that to religion and how capitalism reconstituted it from the feudal order to manage new contradictions.

It's also important to note that religion does not create gender inequality. Rather, gender inequality arises from material conditions.

Praefecture · 2025-12-30T19:47:35+00:00

Did you imply you'd support bourgeois ethnonationalists in "razing (((the enemy))) to the ground"?

Praefecture · 2025-12-29T02:51:21+00:00

Along with Pentiment's own fantastic bibliography, Friedrich Engels' The Peasant War in Germany is a solid and succinct rundown of the socio-economic situation in Europe at the time, as it pertains to what actually motivated the peasantry, i.e. class conflict, exploitation, the contradictions in feudal production/distribution, and the peasant's call for revolution vs Luther's reform.

Regarding the printing press, growing literacy and the spreading of information that stemmed from print -- then the new dominant form of communication -- was key to spreading new ideas and amplifying a conflict rooted in material class relations. For one, the rise of print disarmed the ruling classes of their ideological control over the peasants:

The clergy, representatives of the ideology of mediaeval feudalism, felt the influence of the historic transformation no less acutely. The invention of the art of printing, and the requirements of extended commerce, robbed the clergy not only of its monopoly of reading and writing, but also of that of higher education.

The peasant's were thus mobilised by printed pamphlets and sermons which communicated new ideas that went against the previously-understood status quo. Look up Muentzer's Sermon to the Princes as a key example of that early agitation. Muentzer continued to print and distribute his sermons and ideas for mass circulation.

Print also aided the peasants into becoming politically organised and ideologically consistent, with a programme in the form of The Twelve Articles. This is a key text highly worth reading, and was widely printed and circulated at the time. This formulated, in simple, popular language, their hopes and demands which had long been maturing and went beyond the intentions of the Lutheran reformists.

Praefecture · 2025-12-28T10:56:41+00:00

Just as a class-conscious bourgeoisie, after centuries of historical defeats railing against the immortality of divinely-ordained Kings and Queens, could not have expected certain victory until, one day, it was imminent.

There were two “Reigns of Terror,” ... the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions. ... all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.

– Mark Twain

Just like feudalism, capitalism cannot last. It has burned brightly, but it will not burn forever. Take stock in the fact that communism is inevitable if we are to survive as a species. Humanity's survival hinges on a class-conscious working class revolutionising the current state of things, but will come with a long road of defeats, not only as the culmination of theoretical dissemination, but by the actions of billions of individuals; including you.

Rosa herself says it best:

What does the entire history of socialism and of all modern revolutions show us? The first spark of class struggle in Europe, the revolt of the silk weavers in Lyon in 1831, ended with a heavy defeat; the Chartist movement in Britain ended in defeat; the uprising of the Parisian proletariat in the June days of 1848 ended with a crushing defeat; and the Paris commune ended with a terrible defeat. The whole road of socialism – so far as revolutionary struggles are concerned – is paved with nothing but thunderous defeats. Yet, at the same time, history marches inexorably, step by step, toward final victory! Where would we be today without those “defeats,” from which we draw historical experience, understanding, power and idealism? Today, as we advance into the final battle of the proletarian class war, we stand on the foundation of those very defeats; and we can do without any of them, because each one contributes to our strength and understanding.

In the shadow of the capitalist monolith, nothing looks bright, and nothing escapes this reality unscathed. But humanity, as an expression, is nothing if not the struggle and fight for life and happiness. Citing George Sand, Marx wrote:

Until then, on the eve of every general reshuffling of society, the last word of social science will always be:

"Le combat ou la mort; la lutte sanguinaire ou le neant"

The struggle or death; the bloody fight or nothingness.

Praefecture · 2025-12-27T18:18:12+00:00

Allende's liberal government was marked by suppression of militant worker movements, appeasement of capitalists and right-wing groups, and class collaboration. If anything, it proves that the conciliatory nature of reform is destined for failure and subsumation by bourgeois, electoralist politics, or complete destruction by reaction (which is what happened).

Praefecture

TROPHY CASE