Hey its a good question, and its one that a lot of reforming liberal democrats like yourself, and myself at one time, struggle to understand. A revolution is necessarily violent and authoritarian, right?

Well, kind of, maybe. I’m a Marxist and Marxists tend to think of revolutions as a change in the fundamental relationship that humans have to production. What gets made, who makes it, and why. A group of revolutionaries who seize control of the government but do nothing to change those fundamental relations are not revolutionary. Its just the same system with new leaders, maybe a new flag or something. The capitalist revolution took a solid 250-300 years with about 250-300 years of development beforehand. Kings and queens were replaced by industrialists, the divine right replaced by the social contract, church and god replaced by corporations and profits. The capitalist revolutions were hella bloody, with the exception of maybe the American one, which was based partly on the institution of slavery.

But what ended the divine right of kings wasnt the guillotine, it was taking their shit and redistributing it to the bourgeoisie. The slaves weren’t freed by killing their masters, they freed themselves and went over to the union armies. The changes that made real lasting effect were not cold blooded murderous action, in fact the French revolution didn’t last 15 years. It was social, cultural, political change. It was people changing themselves in order to change the world.

The bourgeoisie will use heinous violence to protect their interests, fascism is one of capitalism’s immune responses from mass organization and revolutionary activity. There are others, but that’s the big scary one we are dealing with now. Revolutionary change in the world begins with revolutionary changes to ourselves, and to each other, a cumulative historic project of liberation of the oppressed from our oppressors.

Deposing the bourgeoisie is not to become a new bourgeois. We can’t do what they do to become something that isn’t them. We will have to defend ourselves from violence but violence will not bring the changes that are necessary to create a better world. There will have to be justice for crimes against humanity, and what that justice will look like will be orders of magnitude more humane, and this bears out in historic examples from the Paris commune, to the Russian revolution (which was almost entirely bloodless until the civil war) to the Cuban revolution, and so forth.

The DSA libertarian socialist caucus has reinvented itself the last year or so, they put out some good solid analysis prior to convention, and is doing a lot of work to build a libertarian socialist plurality within the org.

Right libertarians arent politically coherent, their lack of coherence means they are shot through with Nazis who exploit unprincipled movements yo plant the seeds of hate. A libertarian could be your uncle who smokes weed but listens to Dave Rubin and Joe Rogan podcast, or it could be a school shooter, a transhumanist tech accellerationist who always brings up Rokos basilisk after a couple Busch lights, or a neo-Randian objectivist.

As a left-Hegelian, I like discourse around human freedom, but people never concretize what they mean by freedom, and we always end up back to Marx:

Do not be deluded by the abstract word Freedom. Whose freedom? Not the freedom of one individual in relation to another, but freedom of Capital to crush the worker.

I’m warning you that ai could accomplish what it is designed to accomplish

Read Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Read Wretched of the Earth. Read The Revolution Betrayed. Read Kronstadt 1921.

Enjoy your Blanqism and Bonapartism

“When education is not liberating it is the dream of the oppressed to become the oppressor”

Well history shows, that guillotining your ruling class, such as happened in France, leads to centuries of rational peace and prosperity. The French successfully ended all wars, and liberalism ushered in an instant and uninterrupted 250 year peace. Since they designed their guillotines not to cut the heads of any undeserving peasants who were caught in the political maelstrom, and enlightened the peasants so that every citizen was a productive and conscientious member of society, every French person and all of their descendants has become a productive civic philosopher. No despot ever managed to come to power in France ever again, and certainly not within 10-15 years.

Having successfully merged society with the Hegelian world spirit of human freedom, the rest of Europe gave up all colonies, freed the people, and helped them achieve a level of national and self actualization in line with the French wave of historic human transformation. No despot ever managed to come to power in Europe again.

Now, the world’s children know no fear or hunger, only freedom and reason; and its all thanks to the fact that the French did such a good job chopping the heads off of exactly the right people.

inevitable only in hindsight

I’m not so sure. I’m still friends with a guy who told me emphatically “you dont understand what we did, we destroyed the global economy” and then explained the whole subprime mortgage scam to me, back in like 2007. Lots of downstream businesses, new home builders, paint and drywall companies, building materials stores, started folding several months before the official crash as well. I wasn’t nearly as aware of things then, I was a grown adult but not yet 30 and with little formal education, but there were definitely huge flashing signs. Only the media, based 100% on the words of the banks and insurance companies, thought that a crash was undetectable.

I’m not sure quite what it would look like yet, but I’m willing to bet if you look where these data centers are being built, when the cash runs out to keep the whole scam afloat, these big companies will stop paying their bills. The smaller companies providing services and supplies will run out of money before the huge mega corpos start showing signs, so that is one of the metrics I’m watching closely. I just happen to live in the shadow of these data centers so I’ll be pretty close to it, that is if I’m right.

Did you just assume @hitlerball_lover1488’s gender?

No time for learning, only tests

So has anybody considered like trying to get a job at ice, but never doing the job just eating up as much time as possible? Just like showing up and asking a lot of questions, telling stories, etc., and then if you do get hired you just continue to take up as much time and energy as possible? I think if you could organize a bunch of people to do it, or just one at first, you could probably learn a lot. Like they’re desperate for people to hire, there’s gotta be a way to further mess with that

No but what if I did it?

Okay fair. But what is meant is that leases, debt, market forces are justifications for class domination.

Remember that all financial activity begins and ends with the banking system. New money is created by banks, it circulates throughout the economic system, and then returns to the banks in greater amounts via interest and exploitation. This all supports a system that ensures a wealthy few have domination over the precarious existence of poor and middle class workers.

Small capitalists are especially vulnerable to these pressures. When you own a business to take a lease on a building then the price they pay is determined by the market. But market prices are driven by political and private interests. The commercial real estate market has been described as a “zombie” for over a decade. Supply is tightly controlled so that owners can return a profit on their profit year over year. This has created unsustainable circumstances, a bubble that could pop if a movement came along to seize it.

Power over the workers is the only thing that the system offers small capitalists, who are as beholden to large capitalists as the rest of us. But for us we get mad at our boss or manager, who is more like an overseer of wage slaves than a plantation owner. Coming back to work means people have to go buy new business attire, we spend more on gas, we put more wear on our vehicles, we get less free time to improve our lives or sustain a work/life balance. And for what? People are more productive when we work from home, we make more money for our companies, we are happier and more effective. What does keeping us poor and stressed and tired do to sustain a rational system of labor, even exploited labor?

But the system isn’t rational. And if it isn’t just about profit and productivity than what is it about?

As leftists have been saying for at least two centuries, it is about the power of one class of owning capitalists over all others.

Its like saying that an automobile drives with its wheels. In a very minor way it is true, but it is a complex machine operated by many essential systems. When we look at the car its important to inspect where the rubber meets the road, and understand the component systems, but to understand it we need to look at how all the seemingly disparate systems operate together, as well as who is driving it and where they intend to go with it.

Return to work is a mandate that one billionth of the world’s population demands of .0075% of the worlds population, in order to control the remaining 99.9925%.

Relevant screen name

Shaky leg Ratatouille

We are the terrorists now, for caring about people’s suffering.

Nice

A wiggler? Did you learn that on the first day at sophistry class at fallacy school? Is that a technical term or are you completely, totally, irredeemably full of your own farts

Mfw it took me 20 seconds to read the whole meme

Ah a rationalist. That’s what I love about rationalism, any relationship to reality is severely rationed

Irish and Islamic Arab scholars were widely sought during medieval era because their countries contained the last surviving copies of the entire roman classical canon and before, locked up in monasteries with monks and scribes copying them by hand, in all different languages, since the fall of Rome and the spread of the catholic and islamic religion into those areas.

In the dark ages, they were the only people with any access to information about the past, they spoke and could read and write many languages. Advanced mathematics were developed in Iraq in the 9th century, or even earlier in the vedas, and made their way to Europe in the 12th century. Fibonacci made a name for himself in Italy through these discoveries, which had a thriving intellectual culture in various regions for the larger part of the feudal era.

So no I dont think its a recent idea. The ruling class in every era has always needed the educated to interpret the world. The formation of an educated middle class is fairly recent, but as the middle class gets squeezed harder, look how the first thing to go is quality public education.

A sharp, curious and questioning mind is route to whatever passes for freedom in any age. Whether or not that opportunity is available to everyone is a sure indicator of a whether a society is more free, or more repressive.

Well you see, I watched half of the yellow lecture and now good thing bad and bad thing good! Its Dialectical Materialism!

Neo-Stalinism is a meme ideology that produces radical liberal bureaucrats, not revolutionaries.

But principled MLs and Maoists are much better at decolonial struggles and centralization than most of the left. And they tend to be much better educated on history and theory than the based Stalinists, and certainly most ambient liberals.

The trick is to learn to tell the difference between aspirational leftists and real ones. The real movement, you can disagree but you have to prove yourself in action because in political struggle the stakes are real. And to be effective we have to work together in evaluating and acting on what is objectively real. But in the real movement, people come from all different backgrounds, and live in all different environments that affects the way they look at social problems.

The people you’re arguing with don’t understand that the most loyal supporters that Stalin enabled in those early days after the revolution, were later executed/purged on trumped (heh) up charges of anarchism and Trotskyism. They have memorized a few apologetics for why its good actually, or never really happened. Its because they want to be actual practical organizers, but they’re still idealists who think repeating certain phrases legitimizes them. The older ML and Maoist organizers know this too, and try to educate where they can but any movement can become sectarian and self referential.

Don’t take the bait, the history is deeply contradictory no one really understands how easily it breaks people’s brains. Its better not to worry and focus on doing something real