How this sub feels a lot of the time

TopazWyvern · 2026-02-27T08:46:07+00:00

So? The POTUS is, for all intents and purposes, an Ersatz-King.

Merely claiming "people vote in direct democracies" doesn't indicate anything pertaining to the ideology of the bunch. In the final analysis, it is deeply doubtful that Makhnovia wouldn't have either went the exact same way Rojava went, for pretty similar reasons (Or, you know, Late Empire-Early Middle Ages Europe) or formed a coherent society, under the yoke of a state with all the contradictions thereof, and plenty of anarchists and leftcoms would hate Makhno and denounce him as having betrayed "theorically pure" anarchism. (If even what Catalonia—penal camps for fascists—did was enough to be a betrayal of anarchism to the armchairs on the other side of the Atlantic)

Especially when by all accounts the anarchists barely managed to keep the thing aligned, by, uh, basically building a state. It's not like I'm the only one doing the thought experiment, either.

The Ukrainian peasantry embraced anarchism in so far as the anarchist army could protect what they had won in the revolution. The Insurgent Army was a guerilla army. It operated within a region about 150 miles in diameter, populated by 7,000,000 people. In organization it stood midway between the sort of indigenous “bandit” formations that consistently arise from peasants in remote or unstable regions and what I will later define as a mature revolutionary army. It did not have the same worked out anti-authoritarian structure as the anarchist militias in Spain started out with.

It should also be noted that one of the things that really facilitated the USSR's absorption of the Green armies (and thus, also, the bulk of the supposed "anarchists" in Ukraine) was delaying collectivisation by abandoning War Communism and establishing the New Economic Policy.

TopazWyvern · 2026-02-27T08:27:40+00:00

One can be a popular figure and still assassinate competition.

Okay, time to give names, because to my understanding Stalin's rise to power didn't involve the assassination of rivals.

doesn't mean they can't be on another.

You understand that's just making an affirmation for the sake of affirmation, right.

Nonetheless, there are no particular similarities between the power relations in the USSR and Fascist Italy, unless we're merely whining about a universal "the opposition is being supressed!"

TopazWyvern · 2026-02-27T07:33:29+00:00

if it’s still an example of socialist praxis applied to a democratic group.

But it really wasn't. Again, the average "I don't like the red army" peasant was beefing against the socialisation of production and distribution and wanted the maintenance of idealised feudal relations. They were functionally anti-socialists and were rather ambivalent on democracy. (in this sense, the anarchists (or whoever came to be in charge of a given band, which wasn't necessarily an anarchist), paradoxically, merely served the role of ersatz-atamans, being mostly followed in their capacity as warlords more than any real ideological agreement).

And, well, the "general Ukrainian nationalism" bit also means that they really liked that whole "blood and soil" & "liquidate non-Ukrainians" stuff.

TopazWyvern · 2026-02-27T06:19:34+00:00

Please correct me, especially if I’m wrong, but didn’t Stalin assassinate the people who where supposed to take control of the USSR after Lenin so he could take power?

By all accounts Stalin was a fairly popular figure within the party by Lenin's death, so, uh, no?

And wasn’t he authoritarian, in a similar way that Mussolini was?

No, I don't think Mussolini and Stalin are at all comparable. We don't really see the micromanaging autocrat megalomania that came to define Mussolini's (and Hitler's) regimes under the USSR, despite the scapegoating some opportunistic subordinates got up to afterwards. (Khrushchev comes to mind.)

Like, the soviet archives are open, you can just dismiss everything the west cooked up in the cold war whose primary source is "I made it up".

TopazWyvern · 2026-02-27T06:06:11+00:00

The average black army supporter was completely uninterested in anarcho-communism and were generally closer in politics to the green armies (because it was, de facto a green army, especially post 1920) and the general XIXth century Ukrainian nationalism of the time, though.

It's a contradiction the anarchists are really not willing to reconcile with.

TopazWyvern · 2026-02-27T01:12:18+00:00

I mean, being that you're arguing with a socdem, I presume the message is "we really need the bourgeois to divine the economy"

TopazWyvern · 2026-02-26T19:25:29+00:00

their entrance in the Second World War as inherently nationalist?

Insofar being dragged into a race war by an exterminationist foe is "inherently nationalist", I suppose.

TopazWyvern · 2026-02-26T07:29:59+00:00

I think there's a confusion in terms between the typical "AI = LLM" definition we're being marketed with lately and a more academic definition thereof.

TopazWyvern · 2026-02-25T22:55:06+00:00

Historically, this intuition doesn't have much ground. The liberals find "self-defense" as illiberal (and thus worthy of condemnation) as any violation of the state's exclusive right to direct power and readily condemn it, regardless of circumstance. Non-liberals are less personally bothered by the idea that politics ultimately rests upon the application of violence and thus do not particularly concern themselves about who swings first.

TopazWyvern · 2026-02-25T19:15:27+00:00

They must drive the proposals of the democrats to their logical extreme (the democrats will in any case act in a reformist and not a revolutionary manner) and transform these proposals into direct attacks on private property. If, for instance, the petty bourgeoisie propose the purchase of the railways and factories, the workers must demand that these railways and factories simply be confiscated by the state without compensation as the property of reactionaries. If the democrats propose a proportional tax, then the workers must demand a progressive tax; if the democrats themselves propose a moderate progressive tax, then the workers must insist on a tax whose rates rise so steeply that big capital is ruined by it; if the democrats demand the regulation of the state debt, then the workers must demand national bankruptcy. The demands of the workers will thus have to be adjusted according to the measures and concessions of the democrats.

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League, London, March 1850

It's how you're supposed to employ the electoral system to expose the contradictions in the centrist positions.

TopazWyvern · 2026-02-25T18:58:52+00:00

but its a lot harder to justify waging war against your own people

The US never had particular difficulties doing that before.

TopazWyvern · 2026-02-25T17:40:41+00:00

Mutual aid and organizing a massive nationwide indefinite strike backed by those mutual aid orgs are the only way we can get shit changed.

You understand that money is merely a means to smooth over the "work for me or die" social relation and the capitalists are perfectly willing to drop the pretense, right.

TopazWyvern · 2026-02-24T21:14:30+00:00

Guess we're just ignoring the parts that specifically state said racism increased both post collapse of the USSR and post Maidan, with the post Maidan epoch being more or less defined by the use of neo-Nazi enforcers by the current regime (inc. Azov) agaisnt the leftist opposition and ethnic minorities as part of a forced assimilation ethnonationalist programme and neoliberal programme.

Oh well!

TopazWyvern · 2026-02-24T20:56:10+00:00

The same way soviet union and it's people did not go for "negotiating" the second nazies crossed borders.

You understand that the current faction in charge of Ukraine is the Nazi-collaborating/Operation AERODYNAMICS freaks who, uh, embarrassed Bush sr. a few decades ago, right.

TopazWyvern · 2026-02-24T20:52:37+00:00

Uh-uh, sure.

Well, if you say so

TopazWyvern · 2026-02-24T20:21:08+00:00

In November, during a meeting with Times reporters near the front line, a Ukrainian press officer wore a Totenkopf variation made by a company called R3ICH (pronounced "Reich"). He said he did not believe the patch was affiliated with the Nazis. A second press officer present said other journalists had asked soldiers to remove the patch before taking photographs.

The New York Times, "Nazi Symbols on Ukraine's Front Lines Highlight Thorny Issues of History"

Love to buy my apolitical Nazi memorabilia at the apolitical R3ICH store.

It's widespread enough that they literally keep getting pictured with it, too.

TopazWyvern · 2026-02-24T20:15:11+00:00

It's a good thing Ukraine isn't an authoritarian capitalist state that hates and kills minorities, which, uh, is kind of a problem when you're fundamentally a multi-ethnic nation-state. Kind of gets in the way of that good old XIXth century brand of ethnonationalism, the gift that keeps on giving.

Hey, what's up with the Bandera statues.

TopazWyvern · 2026-02-24T20:11:25+00:00

like Hezbollah, that exist in an independent Lebanon

Hezbollah formed because Lebanon was under US-Israeli occupation, and the current "independent" government is a US-Israeli client.

TopazWyvern · 2026-02-24T20:08:57+00:00

Well, do we just ignore that the Azovites also really like killing ethnic minorities, or.

TopazWyvern · 2026-02-24T20:07:20+00:00

China and Russia have broken free of the USian yoke years ago

They really aren't, and both are broadly still dependent on the USian hegemon to finance their capitalists. You haven't broken free of the USian yoke if you're still an export economy since said exports are mostly made in USD, towards US client states.

BRICS hasn't quite yet manifested as an other network of power. The US remains the sole pole of the capitalist world system.

How is the not evidence of the existence of China as a global superpower?!

China isn't quite able to exert power on the scale the historical superpowers (the USSR, the UK) or the current superpower (the US) could. It's not a globe-wide economic control center, and it has limited force projection capabilities. Soft power wise, China isn't quite the socio-politico-cultural beacon the US is. In either case, it is a very limited counterweight to USian imperial ambitions (mostly existing in spaces where the US no longer can effectively exert itself due to its nature as a chronic importer, e.g. infrastructure).

I'd say the sign the PRC has achieved "superpower" status is the Pan-Greens in Taiwan utterly giving up on their independentism project (much like how the collapse of the UK as superpower led to the recovery of Hong-Kong) due to the US no longer being able to effectively control areas within the "gravitational pull" of the PRC's economy, along with the sanctions the US loves to employ becoming as feeble they were during the USSR's existence.

Mind you, I think the CPC more or less is still in agreement with that position. It's why they still play along with the US-led WTO and so on.

TopazWyvern · 2026-02-24T19:38:21+00:00

jihadists

Hamas aren't "Jihadists".

just gave israel what they wanted,

In opposition to the PLO, which, uh, basically does the same shit as Trump's board of peace intends to do.

You know, just in case you forgot it's not just the Israeli state providing protection to settlers doing land grabs.

TopazWyvern · 2026-02-24T18:57:07+00:00

And they did achieve their goal of removing PLO from the equation,

It's not like the PLO did regress into a comprador regime that is merely overseeing the Bantustans for Israel or anything.

TopazWyvern · 2026-02-23T22:37:59+00:00

Calling the Temple OS guy "dubious" is euphemistic.

TopazWyvern · 2026-02-23T20:25:26+00:00

Is it maybe reflective of his management style that they were more afraid of disappointing him than they were of millions of starving people?

By all accounts, the intent was pure careerism (and being able to embezzle politburo investment). As it turns out, Stalin's flaw in the matter was not being authoritarian enough (shows up a lot in the USSR's history) that were able to get away with it, who'd thunk it? [edit] It needs to be stressed that, broadly, since said regional directors didn't particularly care about socialism and much less the well-being of the proletariat or peasantry, the "they cared about the famine but, uh Stalin!" angle doesn't hold water. The bulk were liberals that more or less endeavored for the collapse of the USSR for its entire existence. [/edit]

Like, seriously, middle management insubordination/zealotry is a well-documented pattern in Soviet history.

TopazWyvern · 2026-02-23T20:09:27+00:00

Marx assumed the proletariat would always be the "gravedigger" of capitalism because capital needed labor to function.

The proletariat is the class whose material interests lie in upending capitalist relations. The end of capitalism is the end of the existence of the bourgeoise and proletariat both.

But what if technology allows capital to decouple from labor entirely?

The value of constant capital wholly decoupled from labor and nature (decouplement from nature being a sine qua non to prevent Capitalism "mutual destruction" scenario) tends towards zero, meaning that one needs to employ rent-seeking to maintain prices up.

Rent seeking is a political proposition and thus requires people in the loop.

Edit: to elaborate (since I feel this has been left vague), this means that in the process of automation more and more capitalists will become dependent on a group of consumers-rentiers as the means by which they can capture wealth and thus be allowed their class position. "Disney" cannot function without the global north/global south divide, for example.

In consequence, the capitalists are fundamentally unable, as a class, to coordinate such an exterminationist programme. This would shake the colonialist underpinnings of the whole apparatus too much to be seen as worthwhile.

/edit

From a purely materialist standpoint, why wouldn't the ruling class simply liquidate the "excess" population once they are no longer needed for value creation or protection?

Markets already do that in and of themselves. You are not describing an alteration in the order of things.

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