Authority as indirect or direct force (essentially the engels) argument is the only logical way of definition authority, as the hexbear post argues using the example of the armed mugger. The definition of authority as blind obedience (as defined by the anarchist) is completely flawed in that it doesn’t account for the source of the blind obidelience and isn’t easy to measure.
That’s exactly how most social movements, including slavery, evolved, but OK.
Have you … not heard of the civil war?
This is very delusional thinking. Imagine trying to negotiate with the winning side and your minimum negotiating conditions are for the winning side to just abandon all of their gains for no discernible reason. This too while the winning side offers generous terms which still leave Ukraine with access to ports and most of its territory, despite Ukraine being in a desperate situation now.
It is even more farcical when consider that these demands are already the de facto conditions. Russia holds most of the territories it is demanding. There are no current plans for Ukraine to join NATO as NATO doesn’t accept members already active in war, and the NATO countries have no actual plan for either shoring up Ukraine’s security in the future or even for rebuilding. The closest NATO states got was trying to use $50 billion from Russian funds to loan to Ukraine for rebuilding, which they didn’t even go through with because the deal involved the EU taking all of the risk while benefiting the Americans.
In fact, ending the conflict now on Putin’s recent terms is more beneficial to Ukraine and NATO than it is to Russia, even if the conflict were to start up again in the future. The returning Ukrainian refugees will restore Ukraine’s manpower, and the NATO militaries will gain the time needed to restock weapon supplies, which they need more than the Russians do because Russian (and allied) military production is higher than that of NATO in volume.
I am of the opinion that the terms Putin has offered are cynically generous. He knows that the west won’t let Ukraine end the conflict right now, so he can afford to boost his image right now. In later negotiations, he can point back to these terms and tell the Ukrainians that if they wanted better terms, they could have gotten them earlier.
This is the kind of analysis you get when you have no understanding how organizations work. Mao was not some lone actor who miraculously acquired supreme power, and then starved “half of China” for shits and giggles apparently.
Anyone familiar with the way that Mao operated knows that he made frequent use of the mass line and mass mobilisation. He also made use of the collective leadership of the party, and was often frustrated by their lack of cooperation with him (at one point even threatening to launch a revolution against the party). Even anti-communists who have at least studied China in detail know that the lone dictator nonsense is well, nonsense. It is just great man theory of history. A society is made of many moving parts.
As to the failures of the glf, they were entirely technical. The rush to industrialise in a decentralised manner left agricultural production vulnerable to poor weather conditions. This was compounded with the fact that much of the country at the time had poor transportation and communications, and ruled by corrupt cardie, leading to a disastrous lack of effective coordination across the nation. It is only with higher level organization today that countries can mount effective disaster responses. The glf proves the opposite of your point.
The laws or nature impose required forms of organization upon human society to function. The “double slavery” idea is not some obscure idea. When humans enslave nature to use it for their benefit, nature enslaved humans and imposes specific forms of organisation in turn. The specific form of organization imposed upon a society of large scale industrial producers is large scale centralized organization, in which the will of singular individuals is drowned out.
You are wrong on the factual level.
The role of money in soviet society was always subordinate to material production. Money was necessary only due to the technical limitations of planning a vast economy without sufficient computing power. The sphere of commodity exchange was supressed as much as possible. Much of the soviet citizen’s consumption was either heavily subsidised or free. This went all the way from food, transportation to even fancy entertainment (like spas and theatres). In fact, the heavy distortion of prices in soviet society is often cited as a reason for its eventual collapse.
Therefore, calling the soviet union state capitalist is absurd. Capitalism requires a dominant bourgeois class, the operation of the law of value and the anarchy of production. None of these elements were present in the soviet union.
Aren’t people on ML instances also doing the exact same thing when they shout down and decry the wretched “liberals” (which seems to refer to anyone left-of-centre who doesn’t support communist party rule)?
Liberal is a well defined category though. Liberalism as a self-described ideology opposed to both communism and monarchy has been around for centuries at this point. Most people being decried as liberals would themselves identify as liberals.
Got captured by anti-communists, who then proceeded to march tanks through moscow to bomb the supreme soviet (ironic, right?) and dissolved the union, strip all of its capital assets leading to one of the largest peacetime drop in living standards in human history.
It gets very tiring trying to have a conversation with contrarians who think everything Western is bad and anything Chinese/USSR is good.
Why do outsiders keep making shit up about lemmygrad and hexbear?
Or worse, that their highly suspicious news sources (some random blog usually) are telling you the real truth, while using any mainstream news media source makes you a deluded Lib
I use this instance regularly and more often than not, the articles posted on the news coms are from mainstream sites. And even the “random blogs” (not really, it’s a few relatively well known blogs) use mainstream news to get basic facts. As proof, !worldnews@lemmygrad.ml is a link to the world news com. Out of the 20 articles on the front page (as of writing this comment), 9 are from the typical mainstream sites (like reuters) and 5 are from sites that may be mainstream, but I don’t know them. Only 6 are from sources like FT or things like a youtube video (which again, may be from some mainstream author).
State control over the literally is pretty much communism 101. It’s not really surprisingly or revealing of anything given that it is a Chinese company. It’s like going to America and being surprised that they have hamburgers and McDonalds.
Yes we have the NSA and stuff spying, but they don’t control anything.
Most media in the US simply parrot the state department line. Not even out of a conspiracy or anything, but because the US government is very often the only “realiable” source of information for media outlets on a lot of topics. Since corporate media is lazy and tries to report on things asap, they also tend to copy each other a lot, often to hilarious results. I can’t count the number of times where have tried to dip deeper into a story looking at multiple articles only to find that most news websites are simply using the exact same wording as each other. If you look for primary sources, you will often find entire media spectacles built upon just 1 shaky primary source.
And yet all of the concessions that tiktok has made until now show that it is perfectly willing to play ball with the US government, it just isn’t willing or allowed to sell its algorithm because China clamps down on capital exports heavily for economic reasons.
Alexander Smith, a contractor for the US Agency for International Development (USAID), said he was given a choice between resignation and dismissal after preparing a presentation on maternal and child mortality among Palestinians, which was cancelled at the last minute by USAID leadership last week.
This is not a resignation, he was (effectively) fired because his slides could be taken as implying the existence of a Palestinian state.
Ukrainian forces were being trained and armed by NATO members for 8 years after euromaidan. It is ridiculous to believe that western powers were not trying to encircle Russia.
Even if the war was not worth the cost in lives, it is absurd to believe that Russia attacked Ukraine for shits and giggles. Or even for resources (Russia has some of the world’s largest natural resource reserves), or land (largest country in the world), or people (Ukraine had a worse demographic problem than Russia, and the war has made things worse). The only thing they can plausibly gain is access to warm water ports (they already got that with crimea in 2014), and security against NATO.
What the fuck are you talking about? Countries with low birth rates and high incomes are the ones eating giga tons of meat
The reading comprehension devil strikes again.
The convention says that these acts must be committed with the intent of destroying an identity, and not simply committing them against a group with an idenity
What about the UN’s non political work? It does plenty of work regarding health, education, poverty and so on.
No Biden. Dude refuses to tighten the leash on Israel.
The West would outproduce Russia by at least an order of magnitude, maybe even two.
No it couldn’t. They have already been trying to ramp up production and keep running into problems like shortages in cotton and lead times for factories.
Being against “anti-authoritarians” is not the same thing as being “authoritarian” as these categories are not useful in the first place. No marxist considers themselves to be either category.