I think I posted in your other thread, so I’ll just say, dont skip the footnotes. The text is dry, intentionally so, but the flavor is in the footnotes.

I’ll also add that while I went into it thinking that the book was something like “the rules of capitalism” like I would come away a better economic understanding of capitalism. While still true, the book is a work of immanent criticism, like Marx is using the rules of bourgeois economics to criticize bourgeois economics. It’s not just a book full of conclusions, its a practical application of Marx’s method.

It’s good, it’s def on the list. You’ll be surprised by how moderate-seeming of Reforms it actually calls for, while being a revolutionary program.

Also read "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Wage Labor and Capital, and Critique of the Gotha Program. State and Revolution by Lenin and Reform or Revolution by Luxemburg are other great foundational works.

This is a good theory foundation to begin reading socialist history books: Wretched of the Earth, Black Reconstruction in America, Hammer and Hoe, Black Jacobins, History of the German Revolution, History of the Russian Revolution, etc.,

Also big recommendation for Ten Days that Shook the World by Jack Reed, it’s legit one of the most exciting books you’ll ever come across. It’s better than any action fiction book, and it’s just straight journalism of the actual October Russian revolution.

If you like podcasts, Mike Duncan’s Revolutions podcast is pretty good, his last season on the Russian revolution is a good primer for the years prior to the 1917 revolutions, and the first fiveish episodes are pretty good historical and theoretical primers on various revolutionary movements and theorists. Season 10 episodes 2 and 3 are about Marx and Engels specifically, and I know lots of people who had their eyes opened to M&E by these episodes. I think Duncan ends the series on a sour note wrt Lenin that lacks real complexity and depth, but those early episodes are pretty good as an entry-point to Marx&Engels and socialist theory.

Instead of bending over backwards trying to justify an abstraction that only works sometimes when viewing politics through an incredibly limited perspective, read another book. Or, seek out people who have direct experience of whatever you’re investigating and, in good faith, tall to them, ask them questions, and think for yourself.

Expanding a heuristic to more dimensions does not aid understanding. It just confuses the subject by adding abstract complexity, when what is really needed in order to understand a social or political movement is direct experience in the conditions that create these movements. There is no abstraction that is a passable substitute for practical experience. Less fancy abstractions, more relatable concretions.

Oh that’s nice then

I wish people would talk to me instead of just down voting or vaguemoting.

That they would get dehumanized and treated the way they/other men treat gays and women.

Why sad though?

Socialism, AI way scaled down more of a niche tool, data centers turned into hydroponics farms

It has the glow

Feminism is a social movement, made up of the practical activity of people in solidarity with each other. While centering and amplifying the voices and experiences of women and other victims of chauvinism is absolutely essential, remember that there is an incredible need to organize. Movements need people to take notes, make phone calls, promote campaigns, educate, show up to events, share our own experiences where people we care about were victims of patriarchy, and much much more.

Feminism isn’t just an idea, and patriarchy victimizes men as well as women, though obviously in drastically different ways and to drastically different degrees. Ideas don’t make up social movements, people do. Ideas help us name the world/the problem, which is the first step of revolution, but actual abolition of social structures takes work. Leaving all that work to the victims of patriarchy actually reinforces patriarchy.

Patriarchy and other consequences of class hierarchy are defeated by the contradictions that they create in society. A man who devotes himself to the abolition of male dominant society is the embodiment of such a contradiction. That’s what we are, don’t over think it. Just roll up our sleeves, listen and take good notes, offer to help organize and always center the voices and experiences of the victims of patriarchy.

OK I’m really not invested in relitigating the USSR, I don’t believe that differences in interpretations, often sourced totally differently, add up to a fundamental theoretical and political difference between mls and left socialists. The tasks before us are clear. I can’t fairly condemn bad behavior by any ML sect any more than I can condone bad behavior by any Trotskyist sect. The people who are committed to the work of socialism, building disciplined cadre, formation of a workers party, opposing colonialism and imperialism, building coalitions or entering authentic worker movements are being taken up by both our tendencies, as well as principled anarchist comrades.

But the industrialization of Russia leading up to 1936 was not a mass movement, it was a forced march. Perhaps necessary, mistakes were inevitable and being in a position to make these drastic but necessary changes is unenviable. But I just can not buy the idea that the Soviets of the late 1930s are proletarian in nature. 1936-1938 was the height of mass purges! How the fuck is the working class supposed to develop an independent working class movement with a literal gun to our head?

The only acceptable explanation is the shocking buy in for the purges across such a huge swath of Russian society. So, if it wasnt brutal dictatorship, then it was mass hysteria. In neither case is this a more progressive and rational society.

Granted, we are in the prewar period, with the greatest existential threat to progress festering practically next door. I’m not saying there aren’t reasons. I’m saying that as far as a proletarian character to the state, it just isn’t in Russia in this period. There’s concrete structural and historical reasons it isn’t there, I’m not really passing judgement so much as stating what I see as fact. International proletarian class hegemony was being strangled, and the imperialist fascist powers finished us off. The international industrial proletariat was the only thing that lent prole legitimacy to the Russian project, but even it had become deeply compromised by the extremely pro-Stalin loyalist Comintern. The third world and international socialism was all but abandoned.

In my estimation you can either say 1. The purges didn’t happen (they did) or 2. they were necessary. And maybe they were. But where I break left with my Trotskyist comrades is at Kronstadt. I think we can make arguments that these atrocities were necessary, that without them something much worse would have occurred, which I think bears out historically. But I just can not be convinced that there is a dominant proletarian character in a society carrying out mass murder/mass purges. The working class does not desire war and death, that is what the capitalists want for us. And I don’t believe that a state carrying out purges and mass executions is doing so in the interests of the international working class. And I think our movements are actually worse off because of them.

But thank you as always for the considerate and well informed response!

Human nature is a socio-historical phenomenon, fatalism is in part structural. I mostly agree with you in the form of what you think moves history forward, I just think its a little more descriptive than it is a theory of change. I guess, fatalism resists developing a theory of change, which is why it appears to us as consistent and logical. That little quirk is something I’m gonna have to think about more, thanks.

Cowbee my friend, we are probably not gonna see eye to eye on this. Still mad respect.

The justification is also an accidental quirk of history. The administration of national sovereignty, especially during wartime, requires a layer of administrative workers. The og Bolsheviks were a pretty distinct org with their own character, made up of bourgeois educated intellectuals, a large bellicose element from Russian society, and since the Bolsheviks had the best penetration into the lives of the workers a significant proletarian membership that kept the party afloat during the years of severe tsarist repression from 1907-1912ish, that was itself blended between urban proletarians and peasants transitioning toward proletarianism. But when the time came to administer the Russian state, the intellectual Bolsheviks were spread extremely thin.

The period after the revolution saw a massive influx of members into the Bolsheviks. Were these members revolution hardened Marxists? No. The Bolsheviks were a micro minority up until the April thesis. They swelled in membership immediately prior to the revolution, but these new members were among the workers and soldiers. But after the revolution, they included intellectuals from all stripes: former Mensheviks, SRs and moderates (that is moderate toward the Tsar.) Many people resumed their former posts within the Russian government out of necessity for the state to function. The contradictions during this period were compounded again and again because of the civil war.

This moderate, self interested administrative body is what I refer to as “Stalinist”, since I don’t really consider the post revolutionary Russian bureaucracy a product of Stalin so much as I consider Stalin a product of this bureaucracy. Stalin and the bureaucracy became dynamically fused to one another via mutual self-interest. The banning of factions, one of the major fuck ups of the revolutionary government in 1921, only heightened these contradictions as the Bolshevik party became the primary avenue for naked opportunism.

The Russian revolution was revolutionary and proletariat via the soviets, but when the productive capacity was crushed and the soviets were banned, robbed of the productive base and therefore the concrete power of the workers, what was left? There was no proletarian power represented in the government, especially as Stalin started replacing the old Bolsheviks, who at least had an ideological commitment to worker power, with people loyal to him and the wider project. This bureaucracy had a bourgeois character because it was a middle administrative class ascentionist project, like we’ve seen historically overthrow and maintain power over aristocracies. And honestly I don’t hate this. Lenin would have accepted a bourgeois revolution that completely overthrew the Tsar over a socialist revolution that regressed back into Tsarism. Stalin was extremely moderate toward bourgeois revolution, and Trotsky would have been fine with it too if he had taken leadership. That was what existed, that was all that was left, and that is what persisted into the future. The ideological commitment to socialism was admirable but mixed in that where there was no material basis for socialism it could only exist ideologically.

Here we may run into conflict between definitions of socialism, since I know you define socialism in an AES kind of way, where as I define it as a practical progressive struggle. We’ve discussed this before. Socialism is a movement of the mass base for the class interests of this base, demcent is a way for the masses to appoint leaders in a transparent Democratic way, and communicate material conditions across the uneven development of the proletarian movement, not for leaders to institute top-down discipline. The leaders submit to the discipline of the mass movement, not the other way around, which is bourgeois centralism. In Russia, the proletarian mass movement was crushed by the Capitalists and Tsarists, and what was left over was admittedly much better than what would have come without the revolutionary leadership of the Bolsheviks. But when the base was crushed what was left was a deeply troubled state apparatus that had a distinct class character that could never have been proletarian. Like I said, this is a quirk of history, a consequence of a socialist worker revolution in a country that was deeply blended between peasant and proletarian in character.

My understanding comes from Trotsky’s works, so HRR, HRR through Brest Litovsk, and Revolution Betrayed; Paul Averich’s Kronstadt 1917; essays by Loren Goldner, and other sources. I find it a little annoying that you brought up the “justification” as if I’m just making shit up. I understand that my “left Trot” political orientation probably auto disqualifies me from a certain perspective. But I’ll def consider any other justifications, articles def appreciated if they pointedly address some of the points I’ve made.

This is bait.

Rolling up my sleeves to fight for both anarchists and MLs, effectively alienating myself from both.

The model is obviously Russia. In Russia, something very instructive happened: the working class legit overthrew the Tsar but was very close to giving in to moderates who were unambiguously going to reinstall the tsar as part of a constitutional monarchy, and carry out violent martial law via Kornilov to accomplish this.

The revolutionary leadership of the Bolsheviks was able to to defeat the capitalists and the tsarists, to “finish” the revolution, but what came after was a horrible civil war that destroyed what little productive capacity Russia had developed. Without factories, there’s no workers, without workers, there’s no workers councils (soviets) to hold power. What was left over was the bureaucracy that developed during wartime. This is the class that developed their own interests apart from the working class, effectively becoming a new bourgeois to administer the mixed economy of Stalinism.

Yes Anarchists should be wary of this, and yes “authoritarian statists” are IMO no more revolutionary than a moderate social bureaucrat. I just wish there was better discussion around the practical history of these movements. Even Paul Averich, the anarchist historian, blames events, not ideology, on the degeneration of the Russian revolution.

What you’re calling a revolution, is a coup. A violent one off that amounts to a power grab of one affinity group over an entrenched power.

What a revolution actually is, is a fundamental change to the social structure of society, it is the “evolutive” process that you describe.

This is a widely adopted paradigm all over the revolutionary left that includes anarchists, Marxists, and left socialists. The revolution of capitalism took hundreds of years, and occurred unevenly all over the world. There were wars and coups, sometimes those wars were progressive, sometimes regressive, sometimes a war starts progressive and ends regressive, and sometimes the opposite occurs. The mindset of the people must be changed, but often these changes occur in messy ways. The mindset of the masses is not something that happens only in peoples minds, any more than a “evolutive” change can’t occur as a legal legitimacy. I’m not sure why you want to reframe revolution as the conservative definition.

The part of your comment I’m most critical of, is that it amounts to a gradualist theory of change. This really isn’t descriptive of progressive movements which assert themselves on history, dragging along the regressive elements kicking and screaming. Often this elicits a counter reaction, but this doesn’t indicate a historic failure of progress. It is IMO a failure of progressive movements to not push far enough into their demands, accepting compromises from the center that amount to huge losses for the mass movement.

I agree that there is an incredibly important role for our movements to try and educate the masses, before, during, and after the revolution. Some of the great failures of revolution, such as the German revolution 1917-1925ish, was a failure to educate, which led to a tendency for movements to become coopted, or putsch, which definitely demonstrates the parts of your comment that are correct. Other revolutionary moments, such as the self-emancipation of black slaves during the USAmerican Civil War, are much more complex. The planter class was effectively abolished, but Reconstruction was halted and partially rolled back by extremist reactionaries. You wouldn’t advocate a policy of gradualism against the KKK.

Decolonization is inherently a violent process that is messy and fraught with contradiction. The indigenous people are absolutely justified to fight for their freedom and sovereignty against colonial forces which dominate and rob their lands directly. How these movements degrade into neo-colonies is a subject in and of itself, I’d only mention that the imperialism of capitalism has a persistent character of violence and class war that victimizes the masses every day. The gradualist approach is nakedly ineffective against this persistent hegemony and dominance.

I’ve never met an Anarchist with views quite like yours, I know Anarchism is not a totality but a plurality by nature, and though I am not an Anarchist I admire this kind of commitment to plurality and individual freedom. But I’ve never met a non-revolutionary Anarchist on the left.

Idk you’re basically asking people to think in a way that they really don’t process info. Its akin to being like “in order to understand my point you have to complete this trigonometry problem” and they’re just gonna go, “nah” and then revert to their heuristic.

They might like Facebook, or really rely on google. So all you can do is talk a little bit about alternatives. Since all these companies spy and steal data, they are speaking from a place of like resignation. Asking to stop using any service is kind of a maximum demand, not in essence (I actually don’t believe in min/max political demands) but in affect. Its like, to stop using google would be a major change, require some intimidating technical expertise (are you gonna offer IT support for their Grapheme phone/Linux Mint computer?) and then all the other services are just gonna steal their data anyways. Leaving Facebook is scary and hard, its like an addiction. And like all addictions you can fully know that something is wrong, and still be afraid or fail to quit it. There has to be a breaking point and you’re not gonna be able to offer that in one conversation.

The better strategy is to try and find common ground on problems that people are concerned about, like data centers, and then offer actions or political leadership. If we really care about an issue, then the best method I have found is to schedule one on ones and try and draw people into work. If you want to teach then you need a theory of pedagogy and the idea that good ideas can replace bad ideas is fundamentally broken.

Freakonomics was a big breaking point for me too. I used to think it was really cool, and even read the first book! But there was an argument in it that stuck with me, and was sort of the marquee analysis for the show for a long time.

It went something like, in the 90s there was all this fuss about super-predators, urban youths who would grow up without stable families and surrounded by gang violence, and they would basically never develop a conscience, and you’d have a generation of killers that made the cities unliveable. Apparently this was something Killary stumped about but I remember it being all over the news at one point. So why did this never occur? Because this generation would be the first who grew up with favorable laws and views toward abortion, so women were able to terminate unwanted pregnancies.

And at first I was pretty amazed at this, I was like, wow aren’t liberal reforms great? But after reading and learning and thinking more about the world I realized what I wish was obvious: there never was a threat of “super predators,” these people are just incredibly racist, and the freakonomocs team were fucking hacks.

Then one day I was picking my kids up and listening to Elliot Abrams on freah air or some shit speaking in dulcet tunes about the necessity to invade Venezuela. Another segment on Wait wait don’t tell me was about a precision missle that could precisely target a particular person, and they made a joke about how the missle could fly so close to the target that samurai swords would pop out and slice up the terrorist. Queue hysterical laughter.

And that was it, I realized these people are the most bloodthirsty fucking freaks imaginable. People who sounded smart to sell massacres and racism to dumb idiots, like myself at one point, to middle brow pseudo intellectuals who didn’t really pay attention, just wanted to feel good about being informed while learning nothing.

Once you see how NPR is just dripping in gore, you can’t unsee it

Yes. For one, the older they get the more independent they get. When they’re little its like you gotta lug around like 2 large bags and a playpen if you wanna just like go to someone’s house. Eventually you don’t need the playpen, then two bags becomes one bag, then the large bag becomes a small bag and then they can just carry their own little backpack if they need any personal items.

In a couple years, prob when he’s between 4 and 5, if you need to go anywhere, you can just be like “let’s go!” And he will put on his shoes, put on his coat, run out to the car, open the door, jump in his carseat, buckle his seatbelt, and be ready. This is very fun.

If he is a 2 year old boy, there’s a good chance he will still be in diapers, so not changing diapers is a big QOL improvement.

2 yo can be very challenging. Take him to the park where he can run off all that energy. He will chill out. My oldest son was extremely challenging when he was that age. He was impulsive, destructive, unpredictable. If he wasn’t in the room with you he was painting the carpet with nail polish. If we invited people over for dinner, he would grab whatever was laying out on the dinner table and break it. He quick grabbed cellphones and immediately dropped them in classes of water, he would grab your glasses off your face and just break them in half. He destroyed multiple baby gates within seconds. But I just took him to the park in the morning, let him run, tried not to be too hard on him despite being sometimes incredibly frustrated. Told him I loved him every day, sang him to sleep. He chilled out, and now he’s a hard working, committed young man. He’s still a pain in the ass, but he’s a good guy, I love him and trust him.

It gets easier but it gets more complicated. Some of the issues that can come up around age 11-13 are not easy. But its also my favorite age, because they become like self aware in a way that they weren’t before. They develop little identities, but they’re still kids. But this process, esp around other kids going through it can be really difficult. Teenage years can be difficult, even if they’re not rebellious and chaotic, they become very self absorbed and it feels like they’re slipping away. This also changes with time, and it has its own rewards watching them mature into young adults.

Parenting never gets easy, but those young years when they are so dependent on us are the most like labor intensive, and the labor is very like “make sure you have all of the 500 things you need for them in order to leave the house.” Make time for your self and your partnership if there is still a partner in the picture. Ask for help if possible from relatives. Don’t lose yourself and don’t let your partner (if there is one) lose themselves either. Strive for balance over happiness. The happiness will come if there’s balance, and it gets easier to find balance as they become more independent. But ironically, with independence comes strong ambivalence, not necessarily like happiness.

Hang in there dad, you got this

I don’t have a ton of experience with different distros, I’ve probably tried out 5-6, but I was a fedora user for several years. After a string of headaches, I switched to Mint, and the experience has been wonderful. I was avoiding it because its a “beginner” os, but honestly its been so nice having something that just works every time. On the same PC, apps which would freeze my system run smoothly, there’s no buggy little quirks like buttons that don’t work, so far everything I’ve tried installing on it works great, including docker which I could not get to work on fedora, also was able to easily install graphene os which would not work on fedora (and I bricked my machine trying).