lolableu reblogged

I love going viral on tumblr.com. It’s like if you stood in a field and said some of the stupidest shit a human being is capable of and then like fifty thousand crows attacked you

popsunner

Don’t do this to me

my brother in christ you made the post

lolableu reblogged

wilwheaton

animentality

delicious-trash-tree

This info needs to be out there, it turned the tide against cryptocurrency in the public eye it might fit so too

lolableu reblogged

rosegardeninwinter

hanniballz-lecter

*john mulaney voice* the youtubers listened to the fans and genuinely apologized?.... i didnt know they knew how to do that

lolableu reblogged

liberalsarecool

Elites see student loans as a way to discipline poor people.

lolableu reblogged

politicalprof

Free speech

Of all the perversions of the notion of free speech that have harmed US society over the last decades, the notion that if I say something you don't like I have threatened you, or made you feel unsafe, has got to be among the worst.

Threats are threats. Stochastic, "wouldn't it be nice if something happened to that person" statements are a threat. Being an asshole is not a threat.

It'd be nice if our society was capable of understanding the difference.

lolableu reblogged

truth-has-a-liberal-bias

alteredarchie

Poor Josie....not enjoying the hazy day

scottguy

Pollution really was BAD in the 1960s. Younger generations can't even imagine it.

Back then there were essentially no regulations what corporations could dump into the air and water.

Creating the EPA and regulating factory emissions while also putting smog controls on cars (and removing lead from gasoline) have made a phenomenal difference in the quality of the air and water and in everyone's quality of life.

Right-wingers who complain about "regulations" want to go back to those days when you could poison an entire city or region just to save a few bucks for extra profit.

lolableu reblogged

partisan-by-default

iberiancadre

this may shock the viewer but I actually do prefer the temporary violence the bourgeoisie will suffer in the event of a revolution over the unending and worse violence the working class suffers every day just to maintain the status quo

iberiancadre

the viewers are getting shocked smh

iberiancadre

SHOCKED VIEWER REPLY ROUNDUP

The slippery slope/uncontrollable mob violence/killing the wrong people/when will the violence end/etc argument

Literally every annoying person on the notes is saying the same thing except with more or less words and sometimes incorporating their fandom. I'm going to reply seriously to the ones that try to be serious and then make fun of the rest because man you really can't take some of these seriously and because I've been itching to do so after a month of seeing these ignorant takes in my activity page

(btw im not acknowledging the people who've written at length about the french revolution on this post because that's a bourgeois revolution (learn historical materialism to understand what I mean) and because any other general points made about revolutions in those comments are already reflected in the screenshots below)

^All of the above points wouldn't be issues if this website's conception of a revolution wasn't an anarchist-like spontaneous burst of violence and had any concept of how actual communist revolutions work:

For a communist revolution to happen, there are a set of conditions which have to be present, and these set of conditions are categorized into objective and subjective conditions. The objective conditions are those which are, relatively, out of our control and, relatively, unaffected by our actions. They are governed by the internal logic of the capitalist system, subject to historical, economic, political and/or social currents and forces, out of reach of any individual (yes, even the trillionaires). The subjective conditions, conversely, are those which are within reach of us. We are the ones who must create them, through our interventions. This is the role of a pre-revolution vanguard party, to analyze reality and make sure the subjective conditions are met.

It is important not to have a mechanical conception of this. Communist revolutions happen if and only if capitalism presents a weakness that can be exploited AND if there is a revolutionary, organized group who is able to exploit the weakness and channel it correctly. There can be a sufficiently strong and prepared mass of revolutionary working people, but if the objective conditions aren't right, any attempt at revolution will end in fruitless bloodshed. On the inverse, capitalism can present weaknesses and cracks at any time, but if the subjective conditions aren't met, those weaknesses can't be exploited for our aims.

The objective and subjective conditions are not independent; they are correlated and influence each other. You could say they have a dialectical relationship.

To sum up, the objective conditions are the basis for change and the subjective conditions are the agents of change.

So, when we talk about the violence that we will have to use for a revolution (because it isn't optional), given that what I've talked about above happens, the working class will have been elevated to a revolutionary conscience and understand how and why violence is applied to the group of people that fall under the class of the bourgeoisie and those who are used to fight the revolutionaries. The "plan" isn't to enact street violence or mob violence, it is to attack, destroy, and replace if necessary the discrete set of institutions and mechanisms through which the working class is oppressed and through which capitalism is protected. Any violence which we are forced to use to achieve this goal is incidental, and not the end goal. Any Leninist who isn't taking the piss will admit this without any issue.

Contrast this with the popular conception of a revolution that seems to be pervasive on this webbed site: a group of people, presumably in all black and armed with whatever they could find the day before, and without any previous organization, march through the city to drag out the people in the bigger houses and bash their skull in. Then chaos reigns and (though some unknown mechanism) a generic Far Cry™ tyrant takes the place of the previous one, rinse and repeat. Can you spot the differences? Every better known depiction of revolutions, which are always fiction, from Animal Farm to The Hunger Games follows a similar formula. This is not what revolutionary marxists believe, because our analyses are based on reality.

Onto the second part: what about after the revolution?

Assuming a vanguard party was able to, after the subjective conditions were met, exploit the objective conditions and assault capitalism in their country, what happens now? Historically speaking, the actual revolution, the process of taking power (what our actual goal is) is practically bloodless. The bolshevik revolution, the best example IMO, caused no deaths between the beginning of the assault and the taking over of the Winter palace and other important points. The vast majority of violence happens after the counterrevolutionary reaction, which may or may not cause a civil war, and in the post-revolutionary period after power has been secured. Socialist states are under constant threat of counter-revolution, sabotage, and violence from outside capitalists and people who would have preferred to keep their privileges.

The act of taking power itself, more often than not does not spill blood or does so in comparatively small instances and exception (because the subjective conditions were sufficiently developed to efficiently take power, remember that our goal is not to inflict as much pain on individuals as possible). The loss of life and limb that can happen during this is a direct consequence of the revolutionary initative. The many times greater loss of life after power is secured is a reaction that is out of control of a revolutionary government and only happens because it is in the interest of capitalists to do so.

I'm sure most of these people wouldn't condemn the capitalists for the violence the working class uses to act on its interests, so why is the opposite true? perhaps this reveals some underlying preference for the status quo? maybe it's because they aren't the ones who suffer the most under it? some might even call it privilege...

Anyway, instead of moralizing violence depending on whose interests you feel more inclined towards, it is far more productive to acknowledge the reality that violence, in a class society, is always present, whether it's invisible or not, whether it is used by one class over the other. This might seem heartless, but surely the far less empathetic stance (god, do these people love to talk about empathy) is the one that chooses to be blind to the constant violence exerted on the working class to sustain the capitalist system.

Every single worker that dies in the imperial core from unsafe working conditions, every worker in the third world who works from sun to sun for a fraction of a fraction of the price displayed under the produce they collect and is sold in your nearest supermarket, every worker in the world who gives their life and body to an unknown capitalist, is a victim of the violence you people protect by condemning all serious attempts to end it. No war or genocide in history even comes close to the exponentially expanding death toll of class oppression, from the slaves that built the roads of the roman empire, to the south american day laborer who is an unproductive day away from dying of malnutrition or a bad day away from dying of exhaustion. But sure, your tv shows and fanfics are right, we better worry about what could happen if we try to end all of this.

This isn't fantasizing about revenge, even if such feelings are unavoidable once you begin to grasp the scale of the injustice imposed on us. This is about taking real steps which have worked before to end it. It is not utopian thinking about killing the right people to fix everything. It is acknowledging that the first step to begin fixing things will always be violence against the oppressor class.

Okay next

this set of screenshots is a conversation between two people

Besides the points that have previously been addressed, and that they are taking a song lyric more seriously than real revolutionary practice and theory, it is interesting to see the simultaneous rejection of real, successful revolutions because of an unprincipled, nebulous concept of authority (I wonder if someone maybe more than a 100 years ago had written a short and simple pamphlet on authority) and the very boilerplate critique of capitalism. I've already made a post about this.

This is a good example of putting the cart before the horse. In order for people to be "better" at a big scale, the material conditions which dictate their attitudes towards the world must change first. We aren't economicists here, we acknowledge that further work is needed to change the social relations of society beyond changing the underlying economic system (in marxist terms, infrastructure). But one must come before the other, and wishing upon a star that people suddenly get better opinions won't get us anywhere. If they are talking about organizing irl to achieve this, then they're just approaching marxist revolutionary strategy without knowing it. As has been repeated by many people so far, people love the idea of communism until you start using communist words.

NO FURTHER SERIOUS ANALYSIS OR DEVELOPED OPINIONS BEYOND THIS POINT. UNLESS LINKED TO OUTSIDE POSTS, ALL IDEAS EXPRESSED ARE EITHER EXAGGERATED OR SARCASTIC TO ACHIEVE A HUMOROUS REACTION IN THE READER

traycakes

Question: which communist revolution would you say actually worked? What "real, successful revolutions" do you mean?

Because not a single past revolution has successfully led to communism. With Cuba embracing market reforms a decade ago every single country that had a "communist revolution" is either openly capitalist, capitalist but lying about it, or moving towards open capitalism. Many of them were capitalist right after the "communist revolution" ended. The revolution just changed who the capitalists running things were.

The communist revolutions of the past are failures to learn from, mistakes to avoid, not models for going forward. Replacing market capitalism with state capitalism and a red flag is not a communist victory. Vanguardism is a failed theory for how to achieve communism.