Greenleaf

Republican Megadonor Threatens to Cut Off Funds to GOP Lawmakers Unless They Support the TikTok Ban Bill

VC / tech oligarch just openly stating he buys off politicians and if they don’t do his bidding he will stop paying for democracy.

LotR, as much as I love it, is definitely orientalist too.

IMO I don’t like citing the referendum because it only shows that people wanted to maintain the USSR, not that they necessarily wanted socialism. At that point Gorbachev (and the party, tbf) had fucked things up so much, things were already in a death spiral. If you want to talk about public opinion though, you can highlight that after the Soviet Union broke up socialist and social democratic parties did so well in the Duma that Yeltsin basically had to strip them of their power and concentrate all the power in the executive.

You could point out the fact that in 1985 or so, no one in the USSR or the US thought the USSR would face an economic collapse (I think there’s some CIA document to that effect somewhere). When people reference “bread lines” or major shortages in the USSR, usually that references the period only after Gorbachev started fucking up - those shortages were precisely because Gorbachev was throwing monkey wrenches into the works. Before then yeah they didn’t have as many blue jeans or dishwashers but major shortages weren’t anywhere near as prevalent.

The Soviet economy absolutely had problems, but so does the current US economy. There’s always some problems going on in every economy. They don’t all collapse. That’s where part of the “overthrow” comes in. The problems in the US economy haven’t lead to a collapse because the US is in a hegemonic position - no one is “pushing” our economy to collapse. For the USSR, the economic pressures placed on them by the west can only be described as “total war”. Especially in regards to military spending and nukes.

If I want to be as charitable to as possible to Gorbachev, I would paint him simply as a loser and a coward. I think he saw the military and nuclear buildup of the US and figured there was no way to catch up; and that eventually, the US will start a nuclear war that could jeopardize all life on earth. However, instead of rising to the challenge, he capitulated. There’s some letter he wrote to the US State Dept I think (which they didn’t even respond to) where he basically said “ok, what kind of government do you want me to have?”. I really think all of Soviet leadership deserves blame but it’s hard not to pin so much of it on Gorbachev when he was such a pathetic little worm.

But honestly, all of this is details. I think the best response when people say that socialism in the USSR “didn’t work” is to give them the Parenti response: that socialism in the USSR did work. It took a poor, mostly pre-industrial society and transformed their economic capacity to be able to get tens of millions of people out of poverty and up to a standard of living nearly up to the west in an unprecedented time frame, all without the imperialism that the UK and US needed. For the vast majority of Soviet citizens, socialism did work. Of course, there’s a minority of people for whom they definitely would have been better off materially in the west (business owners, highly skilled professionals and managers, doctors, etc) but we only ever hear their perspective in the west, not the perspective of the overwhelming majority of workers. That is intentional.

You have to look at the overall arc of Soviet economic history. After the civil war, socialism took a completely broken, already poor country and in less than 20 years put their productive capacity on par with the fully industrialized west. So much so that the USSR was able to save the world from fascism. In the process though, they lost much of that industrial capacity and 25% of their people. No big deal, Stalin had them back on their feet and in fighting form in less than a decade. From there, despite the intense pressure and the poor economic leadership under Khrushchev and Brezhnev, the Soviet economy still grew like gangbusters well into the 70s. There was a slowdown from then on but growth was still basically fine, it was just less than previous. Essentially the socialism in the USSR delivered decades of incredible growth, only to be punctuated by a few years of intentionally fucking things up. The pressure on the USSR meant unlike capitalist countries in the west, they had a lot less space to try and work out those problems.

Apologies, it was the Trot Socialist Workers Party and not the Trot Socialist Alternative. This is where I saw that take, though: https://www.ocregister.com/2024/01/20/laura-garza-us-senate-candidate-2024-primary-election-questionnaire/

The Russian people supported entering WWI at first. Throughout the war, the Bolsheviks maintained their anti-war position and even though it may have been unpopular at first and brought official persecution on them, in the end that principled stand helped fuel the revolution as the fate of the war turned against Russia and the people wanted out of it.

NATO and Ukraine will not win this war, there are zero paths to victory. It’s over. Only way to avoid Ukraine capitulating is for NATO to get directly involved and that’s not a “win” for anyone, that’s WW3. Putin I have no doubt will ensure that it’s abundantly clear who won in any peace terms. So when that happens, and NATO can’t hide their shame or the fact that they got all those people murderered and pissed away tens of billions of dollars… I think the political situation in Europe will completely flip. The parties that opposed war will benefit as people will try and do what Americans did with Iraq (pretend they were against it all along). Unfortunately, for much of Europe this means the far right will benefit since the left parties in places like Germany were all on board with pushing for war.

Respectfully, the takes I have seen from ~~Socialist Alternative~~ Socialist Workers Party regarding international issues are beyond the pale. Like “unwavering support for Israel against the capitalist regime in Tehran” level shit.

I don’t have a huge problem with Trots in theory (if they put Trotsky’s ideas on a pedestal and express distaste for Stalin, for example). But my problem is when Trots start taking positions that happen to perfectly align with the US State Dept, then we have a problem.

Meh. Wrote an overrated book about central planning (thesis is that central planning is possible because Walmart and Amazon do it - of course central planning is possible but not for that reason, Phillips kinda misses the point) that spends a chapter devoted to shitting on Stalin.

I’m totally going to do this, just need to think of a name that hexbears will catch on to, like OutdoorCat or something.

I don’t think so. They know there’s no genocide and they know they don’t even have enough to fake one. Bringing a case to the ICJ would only expose the lies.

I think a lot about how we should “market” socialism to masses in the west. There’s of course no one right answer or approach. But sometimes I feel like we lean too much on the past and don’t speak enough about all the future possibilities.

I can’t help but wonder if “ecosocialism” is the way to go. I have seen in real time, the younger generations go from first wrapping their heads around climate change, to pushing for things like a green new deal, then on to realizing it’s all fundamentally a part of our system and nothing will be done without a change to the underlying system. Young people are justifiably freaked out over things like this. They see how we are killing our planet over bitcoin and ChatGPT with a clarity that most people in older generations lack. And more importantly, they know we will never actually address climate change unless we fundamentally change our society.

We have a solution to the climate crises. We are the ONLY ones who have an actual solution to the climate crisis. I think socialist solutions to climate change should be the 21 century “Peace, Land, and Bread”.

Moments are the elements of profit

Marx really opened my eyes to how vitally important time is to capital. Whether it’s squeezing more time out of workers, speeding up production processes, or reducing the time it takes for a capitalist’s money to return to them… arguably time, motion, and speed is what capitalism is all about. And none of this speeding things up really benefits us workers. It’s all done in the service of accumulating more capital and profit for capitalists, that’s all.

The US produces 30,000 artillery shells per month, of which 10,000 go to Israel

This is truly staggering. Fully one-third of production of an entire major segment of the military (artillery) is going to Israel. You cannot pretend the US is passively involved in this genocide. Those bombs that are killing innocent Palestinians are American bombs, that Joe Biden has gone out of his way to ensure that Israel has plenty of, with the full knowledge that those bombs will be genociding a population.

Joe Biden is an evil man, and just losing an election is far better than he deserves.