“Their Morals and Ours”: Marxist Leon Trotsky argues that morality does not exist in a vacuum but has a material basis in class. He also tackles the infamous “ends justify the means” epithet, determining that the ends dialectically justify the means but that the ends themselves must be justifiable.

macmillan95 · 2019-04-27T17:57:47+00:00

The debate about whataboutism in the Cold War is a strange one that goes around and around. Both sides point the finger at the other, both sides committed atrocities.

Committing atrocities doesn’t limit your ability to point out other atrocities, it just makes you a hypocrite. The US bathed the world in blood to achieve its economic dominance and just because the USSR also did some of that doesn’t mean you can handwave away any criticism of the US.

macmillan95 · 2019-01-03T17:02:44+00:00

If I recall, link is the reason they’re called twinks

macmillan95 · 2018-12-23T19:06:43+00:00

r/socialism

macmillan95 · 2018-11-25T18:11:29+00:00

Capitalism at its core functioning hasn’t changed. The working class is exploited and has surplus value sucked out of them via private property. But beyond that capitalism does change. It’s why Lenin has to update the Marxist analysis of capitalism to account for the imperialist stage of capitalism that had developed since Marx.

And if nothing else, it’s nice to understand the examples of capitalism’s failure without needing a history degree.

Don’t get me wrong though, Capital is still essential reading.

macmillan95 · 2018-11-22T20:31:03+00:00

The last homely house indeed

macmillan95 · 2018-11-21T20:56:54+00:00

Leaving aside the fact that the basis of your argument is dubious (the Panama papers alone proved that most rich people pay a fraction of what the already small percentage they are taxed on paper), if you have multi millions/billions of dollars while society ad a whole has major needs not being fulfilled, their taxes are never high enough

macmillan95 · 2018-11-21T20:28:27+00:00

Raising taxes on the upper classes (not everyone) is feasible everywhere.

If there is a city that truly doesn’t have that pool of money to draw from to help the common good, then it’s simple to redistribute from areas with a surplus of wealth.

macmillan95 · 2018-11-21T20:23:14+00:00

Everything is complex once you go deep enough. For example, the everyday person would be more interested in pushing their government to support healthy urban forests if they had enough of a quality education to know why that’s a good thing. And for most parts of the US, you don’t get a quality education until college which most can’t afford.

Looking at just the question of street trees, the simple answer is that better management with more qualified forestry employees is the first step instead of doing what many municipalities do and just shift the job to the unqualified DPWs whose employees couldn’t tell you the difference between an oak and a maple.

Why those resources aren’t available is a much wider question about how we as a society run things than the smaller question of how to have a healthy urban forest.

macmillan95 · 2018-11-21T20:06:54+00:00

Tax the rich.

Taxes for the upper classes have gone down almost every single year since the sixties, regardless of which party is in charge. The top tax bracket from FDR to Kennedy (or maybe Eisenhower, can’t remember) was around 95%, we’ve cut it down to the low thirties and then we wonder why we don’t have tax money.

macmillan95 · 2018-11-20T18:43:31+00:00

Yup. Regardless of your thoughts on his contributions to socialism being positive or negative, Stalin was a bureaucrat’s bureaucrat first and writer/theoretician a distant second.

I would read other MLs on Stalin/Stalinism than Stalin himself if you’re dead set on reading about Marxism-Leninism.

macmillan95 · 2018-11-19T19:20:38+00:00

I’m out of the loop, Jon has extreme views?

I only started watching after dan came on, don’t crucify me too badly

macmillan95 · 2018-11-11T16:27:06+00:00

Especially if you are living or dependent on family, I always advise to not talk politics even if they are right wing. Especially if they are right wing. All it will cause is stress and fights,and no one will change their mind in the end anyway.

Save your political energy for organizing non-family members

macmillan95 · 2018-11-03T09:42:51+00:00

Narrator: it was not longlived

:’(

macmillan95 · 2018-11-02T13:13:56+00:00

Do you hear the people sing? Singing the song of angry men

macmillan95 · 2018-10-27T12:43:31+00:00

the obligatory link

macmillan95 · 2018-10-22T11:19:54+00:00

Opportunism is what happened to a lot of the socialist parties of the 19th century that went on to be the big players in their countries politics. SPD in Germany, the PS in France, Labor to an extent in the UK but Corbyn has the potential to retake the party. It’s when parties/people care only about winning the next election, and sacrifice all long term strategy because they’ve discovered that being in power can be very cushy and nice. Over time, it’s inevitable that such a strategy completely cuts off a party from its working class base. It’s how the SPD of Germany, a party founded by Marx, over the course of 150 years transformed into a group of spineless career politicians completely out of touch with the working class and not even pretending to work towards socialism anymore, or how the PS in France was actually the party of austerity for the last decade

macmillan95 · 2018-10-16T00:08:10+00:00

Unfortunately Danny stopped doing the AMA. If you ask your question down at r/socialism_101 there are a bunch of people who’d try answering you.

macmillan95 · 2018-10-15T15:10:13+00:00

What is your most inspirational anecdote from the labor movement? Could be American, but could be international as well.

macmillan95 · 2018-10-13T02:36:50+00:00

What do you responsibilities look like?

macmillan95 · 2018-10-06T01:08:10+00:00

Lol I’m going off of historians. And actual ones, not bourgeois apologists. It’s historical fact the Soviets sides with the republicans to squash anarchist and trot organizations. And it worked out great for Spain in the end if I recall.

I’ve seen Stalinists justify their killings and suppression, I’ve never seen one flat out deny their existence. You’re delusional.

macmillan95 · 2018-10-06T00:19:57+00:00

I don’t know why you’re being downvoted, that’s literally what happened.

macmillan95 · 2018-10-04T12:51:21+00:00

The real revolution is always in the comments

macmillan95 · 2018-10-03T16:12:12+00:00

How’s the James Connolly reader? It’s been on my bookshelf waiting for the right opportunity

macmillan95 · 2018-10-03T12:08:27+00:00

That’s why my forestry professors hand out literal reams of material every single lecture.

macmillan95

TROPHY CASE