TODAY I’LL DRINK TO THAT!

“Oh, beware the Moscow Gold!”

Yes, it’s also the guy who takes advice from the spirit of his dead dog. I’m not kidding.

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Well, I’m Brazilian so I can tell you: they’ll do it as many times as we allow them.

Since the 90s we had at least three neoliberal waves in Brazil with mass privatization and austerity measures, punctuated by center-left periods of “it’s ok to enrich banks but let’s at least guarantee that people can eat” periods.

Dude, I’m going to show you how to get rich with this simple trick:

step 1: find a dependent capitalist country and destabilize its government

step 2: find a way to destroy it’s public infrastructure. Just coopt a local comprador class and defund everything, but if all else fails just start a war.

And so on.

It’s ripe for some good old neoliberal shock therapy and mass privatization.

In Brazil we call that “lapada seca”. I don’t think I know how to translate the spirit of it, but literally it’s something like “dry slap”.

You say that when someone got slapped so hard you can feel the pain from afar.

Dê a ordem, camarada! <3

I used to be a left leaning socdem during my early years until early adulthood. My parents had been militant in communist orgs against the military dictatorship in Brazil in the 70s so I was very proud of the that story, which helped build this left leaning tendency. But most former communists had gone socdem in Brazil after the 90s.

I took a firm liberal dive during post-grad studies and after I began working, influenced by economic literature and also by work environment ideology. That was exacerbated by the failures our socdem government. I was still kind of “left liberal” and respectful of my family’s history, but I tended to be the “progressive on social issues, conservative on economics” kind of liberal.

Until we elected an actual fascist here in Brazil.

That started unraveling a mental process that started questioning everything. My belief in liberal institutions took a hit, than electoral bourgeois democracy, than all the bullshit in economics started unraveling. I finally realized that what bugged me about liberal economics was the complete disregard for political processes. Fetishizing the technical aspects without taking into account the political processes behind them, which completely turn the theory upside down.

I went back to reading Marx ann Lenin again and… here I am.

100% agreed, comrade.

That’s where we can converge. Thank you.

That’s a fair point, but… Well, that’s what the Leninist party organization is for. To forge this revolutionary spirit on the advanced members of the working classes and then spreading this through the class.

It will not come naturally. Class consciousness doesn’t come from nowhere. We can’t complain that there isn’t class consciousness without actually building organizations to foment it. We need more Lenin in this conversation.

Edit:

Sorry for editing but this is an important point. As Marxists we shouldn’t rely on idealism but on the material conditions for something to happen, right?

This discourse “people aren’t ready for the hardships of revolution” is idealist. It pressuposes that metaphysical conditions and ideas (“being ready for the revolution”) are the movers of history. As Marxists that’s not what we believe. We believe that material conditions are the movers of history.

So we ask ourselves: what material conditions make people apt for revolutionary action? And we work to bring about those conditions.

That’s the Leninism in “Marxism-Leninism”!!! That’s one of the great contribution of Lenin (not the only one, of course): the first steps on the theory of revolutionary organization.

That’s what frustrates me about the phrase in the title. We have a lot of past theory and practice to apply for that problem. Granted: I didn’t listen to the podcast. Maybe that’s what he talks about later. But I think the phrase as it’s written is a disservice.

That’s a weird question. Of course it would be inherited by their successors. I don’t know if I understand the question.

Their assets would be inherited and production would continue, simply business as usual. Nothing would change in the big scheme of things for two reasons:

1. Billionaires are not needed for production. They’re literally useless. They are leeches that steal the value workers produce. They are not needed for production to go on.

2. If the mechanisms of wealth accumulation aren’t disrupted, new billionaires will appear.

The problem is not the individual billionaires. The problem is the existence of bourgeoisie as a class and their private ownership of the means of production, through which they capture and accumulate the value that we produce through our work.

Even if their wealth is not inherited you’d still have capitalism. Suppose a crazy government killed all billionaires and redistributed all their assets. Even in that case, if private ownership of the means of production continues, surplus value accumulation will eventually produce new billionaires.

You’ll never see serious Marxists advocating for polítical assassinations as a strategy. Because it’s pointless. They know that the problem isn’t specific individuals and their morals, but the mechanisms. Those mechanisms produce a class of individuals who can accumulate power and wealth by controlling other people’s work. The only solution is eliminating this mechanism and turning those people into regular workers.

In the late 19th century oppressed Russian workers managed to assassinate multiple magnates, ministers of state, and even managed to assassinate Czar Alexander II in 1881. You know what this accomplished? Absolutely nothing but increased oppression and vigilance. Because the problem isn’t individuals. It’s how we collectively organize around production.

Absolutely not. This is boomer talk. Idealistic rant without basis in reality.

Who is he talking about? Extremely privileged white upper middle class in core capitalist countries?

Because everyone else is living fucked up lives everyday and dealing with it. The working class deal with “discomforts and inconveniences” daily. What the fuck is this guy talking about?

Those people need to get out of their bubble and talk to working class people every now and then.

By looking at the objective reality, there’s two possibilities: global socialism or the break down of modern society as we know it (and I’m trying to avoid being overly pessimistic and talking about extinction).

If the capitalist production continues in the direction it’s going, climate change will get so extreme in the next couple of centuries that the very existence large scale human organization will become less and less probable.

That much I think even left liberals will admit.

Now, we as Marxists know that the forces within capitalism prevents reforming it. So we know that only revolutionary change will prevent this collapse of contemporary capitalism. So either way capitalism will eventually collapse under the weights of its own contractions, either by revolutionary change or by extinguishing itself.

As climate change fucks up the lives of more and more people, revolutionary change gets more and more likely. So I do believe we’ll have a revolution in most parts of the world before the final collapse of everything. I’m actually very optimistic and I think the contradictions of capitalism are rapidly marching towards another cycle of intensification of class struggle that might kick off a revolutionary cycle.

If this is true and we really witness revolutions starting to pop in the next 10-20 years, remains to be seen though. And honestly, I think futurology exercises of this type are kind of meaningless. As Marxists we should adhere strictly to materialism and avoid idealistic speculation. We can and should evaluate the material reality, its contradictions and movements. But we should avoid idealistic projections. A revolution will happen when the material conditions for it are satisfied: a revolutionary class exist, it’s conscious of its class and organized, and the levels of class struggle are getting to a point of inflection where the cost of enduring oppression are bigger than the risks of revolution, and so on.

We can only talk in those terms: is it likely that those conditions materialize in the USA in the next decades? In my opinion it isn’t impossible, but I don’t think it will start there. But this is a futile exercise.

Trying to predict if or when is kind of meaningless. What we can and must do is organize ourselves, and bring about the conditions we can control: class consciousness, worker organization and intensify the struggle in a way that makes the working classes ready and able to recognize the moment, seize it and fight for it when it comes.

Ah yes, the vast fields of tea plants that grow in Yorkshire…

I always had a difficulty to choose those things. Favorite genre of music, favorite movie, favorite artists…

I like music. That’s it. I’d listen to and learn to like mostly anything. The secret is trying to understand each musical tradition’s language, values, aesthetic aims and how they achieve them. If you do, you end up liking it.

neo-bonapartiste

People really go out of their way to call themselves fascists without calling themselves fascists.

I tried to write that in 200 paragraphs and the comrade above said it beautifully in a single one. Listen to them.

I honestly think those kinds of debates are useless. They tire you, make you sad and despondent, and accomplish nothing. We don’t bring people over with angry arguments with liberals about how Marx felt about jews. We don’t make progress on the revolution by dunking on liberals online on minutia about the history of the USSR.

Let’s take a look at how it played out in the past we could have some pointers on what is an useful controversy.

When Lenin debates Kautsky in writing, does that resemble what we do in online debates? When Marx debates Proudhon, is it the same thing we are doing? I would argue that it isn’t at all.

First of all, Marx and Lenin are engaging with people they perceive to be in the same camp as they are. They are not debating hostile outsiders. They are addressing what they perceive to be errors within the same movement. They also do, of course, address theoretically and practically the actual enemies of their camp. But they rarely do so nominally and point by point. They do so more generally, when building their own theory.

Second of all, they are doing so in long form writing. Not point by point argument with immediate response. This is important. It allows you to build an actual argument, enriched with data, enriched with a thorough reading of the thesis of the person you’re addressing. It also doesn’t have the same dynamics where the other person can move goal posts freely.

Third, were them hoping to convince their opponents? Was mit directly addressed to the other side in hopes of bringing them over? They weren’t.They were writing to an audience that will read both texts and hope to make that audience see the problems with the thesis the other side is defending and propose alternatives. The audience is the target to be convinced, not the opponent. If they see the error of their thinking, good! But that’s not likely to happen by the very nature of debate.

I think we should emulate this. And this is what I see, for example, online agitators doing (for example on YouTube). They don’t engage directly with the liberals. They collect the liberal thought they see online and respond in long form, with a thorough take down, well supported by data and theory, aimed at the audience, not at the people they’re responding to.

Also, we need to remember that liberals are not on our camp. Addressing them is not a weeding out of errors by our comrades that we hope to prevent from spreading. They are our enemies. Remember they are the ones that will side with the bourgeois state to kill us, like they did with Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.

I understand that it’s difficult to resist when you see people saying shit online and not respond. I do it all the time myself. It’s also not without value to not allow the shit to stand there to be read by people without response. But I would advise you to only do so if you have the time and fortitude to engage non-emotionally with it, without any hopes of convincing the other person, but only of not allowing the record to go on without correction. Remember: you’re not talking with that person. You’re talking to someone reading that thread. Disconnect emotionally from the process because this will take a toll on you.

Repeating: online angry debate have never and will never bring anyone over to our side. Nobody ever became a socialist after being “convinced with facts and logic” in an angry online debate. As I said, if it has a function, it’s only function is to not allow the other side to have full control of the online record.

But where and how do we actually convince people? I’d argue that it is one-on-one conversations and with a lot of love and patience. Spend your energy talking one-on-one with people. Listen to them, understand their problems, and discuss the problems they bring to you. Stick to topics they care about. Don’t dump a bunch of theory and history of the USSR on their head. Patiently listen and use theory to guide you on how to address the things they complain about and show them that there’s an alternative world that is possible. Point their anger towards the real problems that prevents this world from existing. Do this and this person will naturally come towards socialism. And do it out of love and care. With a patient attitude. It’s not a debate anymore. You’re talking to a fellow worker about making their life better. You’re not trying to win a debate. You’re trying to win a person.

And most important of all: don’t sacrifice your mental health in the process. Burning yourself down trying to debate liberals online will not accelerate the revolution. It serves no purpose but wearing a motivated comrade down. And that’s to their advantage.