/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

Is conservative leftism the way?

>…In response, AMLO in office has combined efforts to shore up the countervailing power of Mexican workers with a blunt economic nationalism. On the labor front, he has boosted the minimum wage (without significantly raising unemployment) and promoted independent trade unionism. He has invested generously in the state oil company after years of neglect and messy marketization, resisted further privatization of the electricity industry, and stunted renewables competition—all to predictable howls of rage from Global North environmentalists, the Biden administration, the Brookings Institution, and The New York Times.
>AMLO’s resistance to Global North green-ism is a telling indicator of his leftist heterodoxy. In this as in many other arenas, he subverts the expectations Anglo-American conservatives and progressives alike have of what it means to be on the left. The differences are even more pronounced when it comes to social issues. While he has personally identified as a devout Catholic, his ruling coalition includes an evangelical junior party, and his government has extended federal funding to biblical-studies programs—a gentle tweak to the laicism that is one of the pillars of the modern Mexican state.
https://compactmag.com/article/amlo-s-conservative-leftism

How much damage will Javier Milei be able to do ?
He seems to be a US vassal, and a rather unhinged nutcase.
He wants to make children a commodity that can be bought and sold, and give the police, Judge-Dredd style, on the spot judgement/punishment powers.

Will that be like in Bolivia a few years ago where crazy reactionaries got into power and began causing massive upheaval and than quickly got kicked out again.

https://farside.link/invidious/watch?v=FN6hoIb-QqA

The Soviets should have reduced the work-day
to 7h by 1965
to 6h by 1975
to 5h by 1985
and finally
to 4h by 1995

4 consequences:

1 The Soviet economy would have been forced to invest into labor-saving/productivity-enhancing technology like crazy to make up for the shrinking per-person labor-inputs. It would have eclipsed the west in industrial power.

2 There is no 90s dissolution/collapse because a shorter work-day means more time to politically organize and make reforms that work.

3 the soviet union would have become an attractive destination for labor, the bottom 40% of the capitalist sphere would have tried to move to the Soviet Union, because they weren't getting much in terms of capitalist luxuries anyway and as soviet citizens would have had a similar life-style with a lot more free time. Less work also means it's easier to raise children for the indigenous soviet population, and by the year 2000 the Soviet Union would have counted half a billion citizens.

4 Incidentally it would have saved social democracy in the west, because the shrinking labor-pool would have maintained the political leverage of western workers, even in the face of industrial offshoring.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/02/17/silicon-valley-military-tech-defense-contractors/
didn't let me post the archive link see pic
<Until recently, tech workers have bristled at applying the fast and nimble start-up ethos to fashion deadly weapons. When Google signed a Pentagon contract to develop AI to target drone strikes, thousands petitioned its CEO in 2018 to cancel it.
<Amid layoffs in tech, the latter has grown appealing. In a Morning Consult survey of 441 tech workers last March, 34 percent they are more likely than they were a year ago to apply their skills to military projects and 48 percent support their employer considering defense contracts involving battlefield technologies.
<“This deep sense of uncertainty about the future that young people have can be molded,” Dey Meyer said.
So the tech-layoffs was to cajole techies into the defense industry.

<Some reject the previous tech era, in particular the protests against Project Maven, Google’s work to target Pentagon drones. This worker dissent ultimately benefited America’s adversaries, former Google researcher Guillaume Verdon said in a recent podcast interview with Joe Lonsdale, a Palantir co-founder and tech investor.
<“What I saw with my own eyes was cultural subversion within Big Tech,” Verdon said.
IMHO This is why it qualifies as fascistic. There are people who simply do not want to build weapons, they are not being subversive, they simply want to build not destroy.

There is clearly a crisis. The war in Ukraine has shown how industrial production in the Euro-Atlantic bloc is in a state of collapse, and emerging economies are demanding the re-division of the world. The nature of the contemporary crisis is imperialist, because it is about the re-division of the world. The growing tensions in the Middle East to secure the oil-rich maritime area of Gaza after the failure in Ukraine show that the capitalist powers are ready to extend this crisis to the world. The moment the crisis enters Taiwan openly, it will be obvious to everyone that this is a world war.
But in the face of the growing crisis of capitalism, the Euro-Atlantic proletariat seems to be relatively calm. There are no mass revolutionary organisations, revolutionary organisations capable of building the foundations for the dictatorship of the proletariat; the workers' organisations are dominated by religious or patriotic groups. They are usually in alliance with a bourgeois party and so on. They are the police organisations of the bourgeois state. Other organisations are NGOs dominated by liberals. These two are the hidden arm of the ideological discourse that is being fed to the agitated masses. The presence of bourgeois political parties in workers' and other organisations means the domination and spread of (petty)bourgeois habits of thought in their mass base.

The revolutionaries are separated or part of a sect and feel safe in their bubble. This is a symptom of the intellectual who calls himself a revolutionary. In times of peace and debate, when the concrete task is propaganda and education, the intellectual is more than welcome if he adapts himself to the needs of his pupils and does not impose knowledge by repetition. But when the movement takes a turn in the other direction, from the peaceful to the preparation for open struggle, the intellectual is afraid of this change. They prefer to stick to their dying sects, carry out symbolic revolutionary actions for other like-minded intellectuals and call it a day for the time being. They refuse to cooperate consistently with the emerging movement.

A clear example of the lack of consistency is this moment. The protests against Israel on behalf of the Palestinians have mobilised many progressive people into the ranks of the anti-war front and given new impetus to anti-imperialism. The sheer relative size of the movement compared to the small number of self-proclaimed revolutionary organisaPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

>“Montes betrayed our nation, but not for money. In fact, she never received payment for any of her actions – astonishingly, she was motivated purely by hatred for America,” Rubio wrote in an op-ed penned for Americano Media.
GIGA BASED

‘Queen of Cuba’ spy released from US jail
Ana Montes, described as “one of the most damaging spies” in US history, has been released from federal prison in Texas. The double agent for Cuba was freed on Friday after more than 20 years in custody, data on the Federal Bureau of Prisons website shows.

Montes, now 65, made a solid career with the US government, initially working for the US Department of Justice before joining the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) back in 1985. She ultimately became a senior intelligence analyst for Cuba –even scoring a nickname the ‘Queen of Cuba’– and worked in this role until her arrest in 2001, days after the 9/11 attacks.

It turned out that Montes had been spying for Cuba throughout her whole government career, as she had been recruited by that country’s intelligence when she was a student at Johns Hopkins University. Officials at the time said it was believed that the Cuban Intelligence Service (CIS) had pushed her to pursue the DIA career in the first place.

As a double agent, Montes is believed to have funneled highly-sensitive information to the CIS for nearly two decades. According to federal charging documents, Montes was very careful, never taking classified information from her work computer but memorizing it instead, as well as using water-soluble, easy to destroy paper to deliver the data to her Cuban handlers.

According to the Bush-era US Counterintelligence head Michelle Van Cleave, Montes has become “one of the most damaging spies the United States has ever found,” who has compromised “virtually everything” Washington knew about Cuba.

In 2002, Montes pleaded guilty to espionage charges which could have carried the death penalty for her, yet was ultimately sentenced to 25 years in prison under a plea deal. According to her lawyers, Montes was primarily motivated for spying by a belief that “the Cubans were treated unfairly by the US government.”
Post too long. Click here to view the full text.

https://leftypol.org/siberia/res/500371.html#500371

Ok, give me 1 legitimate, material, non moralistic or idealistic reason for why child labor should be banned?

Current system where people spend 11 years in school + 4-5-8 years in university, is nothing more but a way to indoctrinate children into clerical PMC identity, where all you have to do is write the right thing on paper and you're golden. Not to mention the anticommunist propaganda that constitutes school education material in capitalist states.
Such a system destroys class consciousness and perpetuates false, clerical consciousness:
Even if both the parents are working class, the school system trains their child to act, think and identify as a PMC (writing papers and dealing with bureaucracy to succeed).

Let's not forget the bourgeois origins of universal education: the british bourgeois state needed clerics, accountants, educated managers, etc., to fill the ranks of the bourgeois war machine.
Pink Floyed made an entire album about this.
TEACHERS! LEAVE THEM KIDS ALONE!

Whereas if children started doing labor immediately, they would develop worker identity just like their working class parents, instead of PMC identity, and then develop class consciousness, simply through the act of being workers rather than going through 15 years of PMC LARP indoctrination.

Everything harmful, reactionary, and counterrevolutionary that the youth learns, they learn in school, through bourgeois education systems that feed them status quo propaganda.

What american historical figures were leftists and did something major? First people that come to mind are Oppenheimer and Helen Keller. Anyone else?

<A video game company that appointed an artificial intelligence bot as its chief executive has announced a market-beating stock increase.
<China-based NetDragon Websoft named the AI program Tang Yu as its CEO in August, tasked with supporting decision making for the company’s daily operations.

https://archive.is/b3uPW

This specific case might be mostly a PR stunt, but it could be that the managerial strata in the corporate bureaucracy gets replaced by robots before the proles do.

What does that mean for Socialism ?
Will this make it easier to convert the economy to something like cybernetic socialism ?
Since it's all in the computer anyway, it just needs to be reconfigured a bit ?

Well, I've been thinking about this issue, which is quite delicate for obvious reasons, and I think that eugenics is not necessarily a policy of the left or the right, but it depends on how it is applied.

To begin with, it must be said that eugenics is nothing more than favoring certain biological characteristics over others for future generations, it could be said that it is a form of self-managed evolution, it has a bad reputation because when it was applied in countries like the United States or the Nazi Germany what was intended was to exterminate populations considered inferior, however, is this the only form of eugenics?

If 20, 30, 40 or even 100 years from now, genetics were mastered well enough to be able to modify the DNA of an embryo with minimal risk, couldn't this be used to improve our species? Couldn't dozens if not hundreds of genetic diseases be exterminated? Couldn't we design children who grow up to be healthier, stronger and more intelligent? And if that were the case, couldn't a public eugenics program be promoted? that is to say, that couples who are interested can access a genetic modification program to promote these beneficial characteristics in their future child. Wouldn't this be a kind of "socialist eugenics"?

I believe that eventually it is inevitable that genetic modification of embryos will become commonplace, and therefore it is important that the idea of ​​public eugenics be promoted, otherwise only people with enough money to pay for these programs could access to them, and that would eventually lead to a much more evident caste system than the current one, where the rich are practically supermen with advantages that allow them to dominate the labor and scientific market while the poorest classes would be relegated to occupying a position increasingly irrelevant in society.

Anyway, I'd like to discuss the matter because I find it interesting.