o7

Fun etymological fact: very long ago, tyranny used to refer to an autocratic leader that issued a debt jubilee, generally in response to a peasant uprising. A debt jubilee is where most or all debts are declared invalid, a clean debt slate for society, and was generally necessary to keep society functioning. The mini revolution that appointed the tyrant would be short-lived and the prior systen would more or less remain in place, just with cancelled debts.

The NYPD’s total budget is over $10 billion. They pull from other line items for things like buildings and benefits.

The NYPD budget would make it something like the third largest military if compared to countries’ military budgets. The NYPD’s main purpose is to protect capital which, per “stop and frisk” and similarly racist policies, are intended to harass minority groups. If there is a safety issue where minutes matter, they are only hours away. If a shop window gets broken they’ll be there immediately.

The British

Do you think you’re doing something else?

Yes, we should definitely not have something like Sweden or the old New Deal.

I think you need to refamiliarize yourself with what I said, as this is not it.

We should let children grow up in poverty, let old people suffer, and let the planet burn while we sit around discussing Trotsky and the Second International in hopes that the revolution will come.

I said something that is the exact opposite of sitting around, actually. Do your best to read a little more carefully before sharing opinions.

iirc de La Cruz got less than 100,000 votes.

And?

Great quote and book!

Socialism is always about recreating a ruling class: it is to make the working class into the ruling class.

There is no practical alternative to this. Imagine trying the only way: to immediately end class relations. You’ve won the revolution. Your ideological brethren are in power and the Great Workers’ Council is going forward with your plan. How are you going to force people to end class relations? Won’t it require a state? Who is enforcing the end of relations? If someone buys up an extra-big plot of land and starts charging tenants rent, reinventing semi-feudal relations, who is going to stop them? And what are you going to do about the bourgeoisie who still exist, especially those overseas, and are working against you to reopen your country for exploitation?

All of these basic realities require a state. And you cannot simply end all class relations instantaneously, as the wider public will not all agree with you ideologically. Unless you plan extreme forms of oppression for the entire population, you will need to deal with the remnants of various class relations in various forms, engaging, ideally, in a process that will whittle them away. That entire process will be recreating a ruling class, i.e. the working class, to impose this process on the other classes.

It’s the opposite, actually.

The people who talk about “tax the rich” or the New Deal don’t actually do anything, they are armchair activists who have no real idea of how they would ever accomplish this outside of pretending the Democratic Party, which constantly opposes them and crushes such ideas, is the vehiclr, and the way to make it happen is complaining on the internet.

Communists know that actually addressing our collective problems is a much more difficult task, nothing less than the overthrow of capitalism, something that would need to survive attempts at cooption by liberal power structures like the aforementioned party. So we build from the ground up, educating one another and developing practice so that we can balance growth, education, and having impact through actions. We go to the meetings, we run the meetings, we teach one another, we organize the protests and marches, we build the strategic mutual aid events, we embed with workers’ spaces and unions, we embed with and build from within the marginalized so as to be of them. Communist organizing is adding a part-time job on top of your other obligations.

Norway is a capitalist country. It us an OECD hanger-on to the US-led imperialist world order.

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Oh I see. I think I guessed wrong then. So they mean the mainstream left and right are both liberals, they are of the ideology of capitalism and therefore very similar, primarily defining themselves through shibboleths that are not really about commitments to policy or political action.

US politics has no left. It only exists as very small groups that, when they start having influence, get shut down by the feds. That video is super slow so I only watched 15 minutes but I would guess they are referring to a rejection of liberalism emerging from degrading material conditions being the main force of peeling off a left and right, and thus there us a similarity. Is that about right?