MarxMadness [comrade/them]

I could be a billionaire if someone gives me a billion dollars

It’s a really easy idea to drop in a conversation with libs and have them shrug and say “yeah, shit, I guess you’re right.”

Spitballing here:

• If a variety of people with various degrees of leftist credibility all raise a similar idea, it at least shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand.
• How easy is it to fool someone who’s 17 or 18?
• “I was propagandized” is not an absolution from all personal responsibility, but when the vast majority of entertainment and cultural/political/religious leaders in the U.S. tell people joining the military is fine (or even noble), that carries some weight.
• Education is a huge part of building a political movement, and education implies your audience doesn’t have all the right answers to start.
• It’s really hard to think of revolutionary movements that did not have a lot of help from people who once worked for the enemy. Maybe Cuba?
• It’s really easy to think of examples of revolutionary movements that took revolutionary stances on how they treated even potential enemy turncoats. Mao: “Our policy towards prisoners captured from the Japanese, puppet or anti-Communist troops is to set them all free, except for those who have incurred the bitter hatred of the masses and must receive capital punishment and whose death sentence has been approved by the higher authorities.”
• There’s a contradiction between identifying structural problems and attributing them to the capitalist class, but also insisting on harsh treatment of low-level individual servants of the capitalist class.
• There’s a contradiction between leftist views on criminal justice generally and an insistence on harsh treatment of those same low-level servants of capitalism.
• Telling a bunch of guys with guns that they deserve to die and there’s nothing they can do to change that will get them to continue to fight. The way to get them to quit is to tell them there’s a way they can go home.
• The gap between the harshest rhetoric and actually trying to build a real-world movement reminds me of this line from Parenti: “They do not explain how the manifold functions of a revolutionary society would be organized, how external attack and internal sabotage would be thwarted, how bureaucracy would be avoided, scarce resources allocated, policy differences settled, priorities set, and production and distribution conducted.”

Ha great point.

For minor personal computing, “eh it partially works OK” is extremely annoying, but maybe worth it if it’s dirt cheap. For anything more complex or important, that level of unreliability is an enormous net negative no matter how low the cost.

I’m closing the Delaware River to gabagool shipping

http://foodnotbombs.net/new_site/

I’m not an anarchist, but this is plainly wrong, and a poor response even if it applies to twitter anarchists. There’s plenty to say here about how anti-imperialists should view imperfect leaders in states being actively targeted by imperialists. Ham-handed leftist infighting misses the mark.

I’m not saying this should be reflexively opposed. I’m saying that if a movement is accepting help from some of the worst people in the world, that movement deserves a great deal of skepticism.

Who here is just pro-revolution independent of context? Violence is a tactic, not an end unto itself.

If your revolution is being propped up by fascist state that wants nothing more than to kill a bunch of your fellow citizens and steal your oil, there are some serious open questions about what your revolution seeks to achieve, and for whom.