Big fan of beans, rice, and veggies. Cheap, vegan, filling, and healthy, while tasting great too!

Considering that once Capitalism was restored wealth inequality skyrocketed, 7 million people died, and previously relied on safety nets were destroyed or sold for parts to Capitalists, I don’t think it’s something that can be attributed to simple youthful nostalgia.

They already are seen as bad guys by most people, yet are still around, that’s the power of FPTP.

Only once, and in passing, lol. The word is definitely very online

As always, thanks for the excellent work you do, comrade 🫡

Kinda? Hard to disentangle that from the economic structures that changed.

It relates to talking with USians in general, which includes interactions online, including Lemmy.

In the Marxist notion of “class,” no, they did not form a class. The State is an extension of the class in power, not a class in and of itself. In the Soviet Union, that class was the Proletariat.

Party members and Soviet officials did have privledges like higher pay, but in the Soviet Union this difference was only about 10 times between the richest and the poorest, unlike the 100s to 1000s or more in Tsarist Russia or the modern Russian Federation.

First off, bureaucracy is not a “class,” the Socialist states like the USSR were controlled by the Proletariat. The formation is described in Soviet Democracy by Pat Sloan, or you can check this infographic if you prefer:

Anyways, back to your question. In the instance of single-unit factory councils, it isn’t so much as a “ruling class” as it is that these workers have control only within their immediate domain, and no real control outside of it. The Soviet model is different, it laddered upwards and extended equal ownership over all within it.

The Marxist critique of the cooperative model is that trade between these cooperatives will result in the resurgance of Capitalism, not the elimination of class society, as time goes on and some cooperatives swell in power and others fall under their control, without equal ownership between them. Engels elaborates on this in Anti-Dühring. Cooperatives don’t scale without administration, either, which means at that point you may as well extend ownership equally across the whole economy so that it may be democratically controlled by all, even if those more local to an issue have more of a voice.

Now, that doesn’t mean cooperatives are bad, it’s just that they only really serve to play a role of “filling in the cracks” large industry leaves behind, as said large industry should be publicly owned. Cooperatives being small can remain as such, and only make themselves able to be properly folded into the public sector when they grow to include large networks of administration, at which point they have outscaled their original cooperative nature anyways.

I think I’d agree with you more if I believed “pushing for XYZ” was a valid strategy for implementing structures opening the door for progress in a system dominated by those who benefit from the status quo. Without that belief, I turn to other historically succesful methods of gaining change, like millitant labor organizing and revolution.

Still doesn’t really solve the problem of candidates being pre-approved for the bourgeoisie.

European countries aren’t Socialist, though, and they depend on Imperialism to fund their safety nets like the US does, it’s just that in the US this money goes pretty much straight into the pockets of the bourgeoisie outright, instead of also funding safety nets.

It’s pretty undeniable that learning from the successes and failures of previous revolutions increases your chance of success. The Haitian revolution in particular was one of National Liberation, the likes of which Marxists like Frantz Fanon have spent lifetimes analyzing. It isn’t about finding “predefined theory,” but not reinventing the wheel every time. See what can be universalized, see what can’t be, and work from there.

Again, though, I recommend you dive into the myriad factions at play in the many successful Socialist revolutions we have seen. Many factions supported the idea of “general radicalization,” like the SRs, but ultimately it ended up being the more organized and dedicated to theory that successfully guided revolution.

That’s only one of his attempts at resignation. If anything, it seems like he hated his position, wanting to just retire and do small party work without the intense stress that came with his position. He even advocated eliminating it entirely, as he believed there was no need for his 2 positions given the collective nature of Soviet leadership.

That doesn’t mean he was some selfless great man, either. He had his fair share of errors, even the CPC considers him to have been 70% good, 30% bad. However, simply saying he only tried to resign because Lenin was angry at him for insulting his wife is wrong, he seemed to have hated his position for his whole career until his death.

Sure, but IRL and outside media I still hear “tankie” more than “commie,” and more importantly the original comment was made in the context of Lemmy.

I do expect pushback on this, though. I still think that at scale, revolution maintains its edge strategically.

For sure! Definitely different, but if I had to pick one it would be Blowback as there’s sticking power to it, and more importantly generates sympathy for the Global South. Too many new Leftists in the US take on nationalist stances, rather than internationalist.

🫡

No problem! Have a good one! 🫡

He’s great! I do think Blowback goes way farther though, while being entertaining and heart-wrenching.