/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

>>469793
After the soviet war-production was fully spun up, the Soviet military was anything but timid, it might best be described as a raging torrent of angry metal rolling over Nazi forces like a force of nature. If anything they probably were a little bit too assertive.

But that's not the point.

Imagine a video game about military strategy. Imagine that you could build a unit that was in effect a mobile battle-factory. Rolling over the battle field and instead of simply destroying enemy forces it would consume them for energy and resources and use it to build more of your own forces. The more attacking units your opponent sends against it, the stronger your forces would become.

>>469795
>Imagine a video game about military strategy. Imagine that you could build a unit that was in effect a mobile battle-factory. Rolling over the battle field and instead of simply destroying enemy forces it would consume them for energy and resources and use it to build more of your own forces. The more attacking units your opponent sends against it, the stronger your forces would become.

thats idealism. who says its even works ?
even if so what stops the enemy from changing tactics ?
it really isn't black and white

hitler particularly lost because it was unwinnable war with his oil resources

and they couldn't secure more

not because of soviet troops and war machine 'bravery' and dedication (altho that is also important)

and alot of other factors like having only light tanks at the beginning of war but also too heavy and too even slow for the battle heavier tanks later that they couldn't even produce anymore or that were costly and unfinished and not very good either (or in small numbers)

basically again idealism doesn't work, its more complex than that (and even that isn't the reason, without america joining they probably could win in europe)

wars in general hard to predict

>>469800
As long as the method of attack is using matter and energy it's possible to find a way to harvest and convert it into something useful.

Remove the law that allows private banks to lend out "money" that they don't have (thus creating new money out of nothing); humans can take care of the rest.
A good start would be to abolish governments because everyone already considers ponzi schemes to be immoral and tax-funded violence is the only force that prevents us from abandonin the mandatory monopoly.

Sage because your summary of whatever you linked to is shit. Please put more effort into your posts.

>>469462
>Omg you haven't read every eurofag "intellectual" who has had literally zero impact on any revolution.
It's not my fault you can't define things succinctly yet fully, anon

You described the problem as capitalist realism, a supposed state of affairs in which people can't even imagine an alternative to capitalism. I point out obvious real world example of people critiquing capitalism and promoting some scifi alternative in fairly mainstream discourse. You rush to shift the goalposts while declaring, 'well ackshully critiquing capitalism and proposing alternatives is part of capitalist realism as well.'

This is why everyone thinks leftists are either deluded or dishonest midwits with just enough mental capacity to spin a fantasy. The real world may be complex, but it doesn't require convoluted explanations.

>>469465
I'm going to interject for a moment.

There is a type of anti-capitalism in scifi that for example depicts capitalist mega-corporations as the enemy of the people and the main obstacle for the protagonists of the story. However those stories also carry a low-key fatalistic message for the present that says all the attempts in our time to overcome capitalism have failed, because if we succeed to overthrow the capitalists and build a better society in our time, then the future would be a nice place, something more in the direction of star trek, where nobody has to fight the evil mega corp.

Of course the back-story of star trek is that humanity doesn't overcome capitalism, capitalism just self-destructs in WW3. After that benevolent Aliens come to earth and teach humanity how-to communism.

The stories you don't see is where people overthrow capitalism and then build a better world that operates on different economic principles. You only get to see either the struggle or the already fully established better world, but never how the change happens, how the old society is transformed into the new society.

I don't know for sure why that is but it sure looks like that's the ideological taboo.

>>469466
Perhaps it's too unrealistic and defies people's lived experience (and even the experience of attempts to build communism in the 20th century, in which the was no clear resolution in which a communist world was built). Generally stories with pristine protagonists are rather boring, and stories that involve personal (rather than societal) conflict are more compelling.

Literature with 2d revolutionary protagonists were quite popular during the GPRC in China. They were quite simplistic, boring, and obviously went out of favor, even in China. (That capitalism realism runs so deep it somehow tricked Chinese people with limited exposure to western media IG)

>>469468
>Perhaps it's too unrealistic and defies people's lived experience
<a story about overthrowing capitalism and building a better world is less realistic than a galaxy ruled by an evil space magician.
Bruh capitalist realism moment.

>The experience of attempting to build communism in the 20th century, in which the was no clear resolution in which a communist world was built.
The experience of building 20 century communism was a time of tremendous hopefulness and sense of possibility. I don't know why you would expect the first motion towards communism to be a victory lap. Given it's means and the opposition it faced, the result was defying the odds.

>Literature with 2d revolutionary protagonist
Story with uninteresting characters went out of fashion, wow what a shocker.

Anyway i don't see a narrative reason why there can't be stories about overcoming capitalism and building a socialist society. It's not unreasonable to suspect that the reason why those stories aren't told is because capitalists won't fund it.

That's an ad.

Starbucks Union Demands Company Bargain A National Contract
The union Workers United has been trying to negotiate first contracts for the more than 300 Starbucks locations that have formed unions since late 2021. But since those stores unionized one by one, the coffee chain has maintained that each store should negotiate its own contract. Lynne Fox, the union’s president, told HuffPost that workers want to consolidate the talks so they can start making headway on an accord. Workers have gotten nowhere with the company even though many unionized more than a year ago, she said.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/starbucks-union-bargaining_n_646d1e5ce4b0ab2b97eadccd
https://archive.is/w2O3k

Striking Clarios workers overwhelmingly reject second UAW-backed deal
In a resounding defeat for the United Auto Workers bureaucracy, striking workers at the Clarios auto battery manufacturing plant in Holland, Ohio, overwhelmingly rejected a second UAW-backed concessions contract at a union meeting Monday morning. Although local union officials have not released the official results, several workers have reported to the World Socialist Web Site that they have received reports that the deal was defeated by 75-80 percent of the membership.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/05/22/akxm-m22.html

Target to remove LGBTQ merchandise following threats to workers
The retail chain Target has announced that it will withdraw some LGBTQ merchandise from its stores across the United States ahead of Pride month, following violent threats against its employees. In a statement on Tuesday, the company said that it was removing certain items, although it did not specify which ones.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/5/24/target-to-remove-lgbtq-merchandise-following-threats-to-workers
https://archive.is/VXYZr

DEA’s failure to punish distributor blamed in opioid Post too long. Click here to view the full text.

TrueAnon: Episode 292: Liar, Liar
We breakdown the charges against soon-to-be-former congressman George “Anthony Devolder” Santos, work though why it is that so many politicians just make up insane shit, and get the accused congressman himself on the phone for some answers.
https://soundcloud.com/trueanonpod/liar-liar

American Socialists Have Grappled With Race From the Very Beginning Review of Workers of All Colors Unite: Race and the Origins of American Socialism by Lorenzo Costaguta
(University of Illinois Press, 2023).
For a century and a half, socialist movements in the United States have been dogged by the allegation that they fail to understand or properly address the complexity of racism. While socialism has surged in popularity in recent years, centrists and liberals have seized on socialism’s “race problem” as fuel for a host of self-serving distortions: that Marxism is inherently Eurocentric; that socialism is a “white movement” that “only cares about class”; that Bernie Sanders was unelectable because he lacked nonwhite support; and that because some New Deal programs were racially discriminatory, universal programs such as Medicare for All are somehow innately exclusionary or even racist. Most of these are willful obfuscations — part of the liberal tendency to separate racial justice from economic justice and frame “anti-racism” in terms of moral reckoning and individual “work” rather than material redistribution. Others are sincere misunderstandings. Some are, however, rooted in demographic realities, made worse by deunionization, rampant segregation, and the decline of working-class institutions. Indeed, despite holding less racist attitudes than liberals, the disproportionately white, urban, and college-educated composition of present-day organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) has exposed the barriers between socialists and other sections of the working class. Socialists of all colors have largely attempted to address and overcome rather than sidestep these hurdles. They have done so through internal education and by spotlighting the rich, heterogenous tradition of black socialism, the essential role socialists played in anti-colonial struggle, and the many socialist experiments in the Global South. Socialists of color have refused to be whitewashed by the liberal commenPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

>>469687
>German police conduct raids on climate activists as impatience mounts

<In recent weeks, they have brought traffic to a halt on an almost daily basis in Berlin, gluing themselves to busy intersections and highways. Over the past year, they have also targeted various art works and exhibits.
<Munich prosecutors said the people under investigation are accused of organizing and promoting a campaign to “finance further criminal offenses” by the group and collecting at least 1.4 million euros ($1.5 million). Two of them also are suspected of trying to sabotage an oil pipeline that connects the Bavarian city of Ingolstadt with the Italian port of Trieste in April 2022.
I don't know if i can trust this information, but if it's accurate that's a lot of money and pretty hardcore tactics. Which is pretty suspicious. Does anybody know whether these are organic eco-activists or is this something else using eco-concerns as a cover story?

<Leading figures with the environmentalist Green party, which is part of his governing coalition, have said the group’s actions are counterproductive.
The German green party got taken over by careerist shills and probably also CIA glowies who turned it into a neo-liberal war-monger and poverty for the masses party. Does it mean anything that they denounce those eco-activistts ? I'm asking because i was wondering whether these could be their militant cadres ?

how do you figure out if activists are genuine and driven by convictions or not ?

>>469697
>how do you figure out if activists are genuine and driven by convictions or not ?

Mostly you don't - it's rarely super-obvious outside of certified clown groups like Black Hammer. But keep digging, though.

>>469678
I saw that estimate somewhere. I should have said a single automobile model. The number includes distribution, marketing and the told time to build all copies of a single model. Seeing as how a popular model can sell into the millions it seems plausible.

>>469681
oh that makes more sense, thx for clearing that up

>>469676
The point I'm making is not about the essence of human thought or knowledge, but about how we mechanically approach a problem compared to how an algorithm is written to solve a problem. Becoming a good computer programmer and approaching problems with such a machine is not trivial, nor is it universal to solving problems. Humans do not think algorithmically when solving all of their problems - far from it, humans are constantly active and react to many events around them, and possess an ability to integrate all of that information quickly in models which made sense to us. It makes us very good at recognizing patterns and figuring out machines or situations, through a process that is highly alien to an algorithm which must break down any sense-data into logical propositions. The algorithm can be programmed to do this, but there are long-understood barriers to doing this with a naive approach. Algorithms for example do not handle infinite regress with naive approaches - they will enter an infinite loop if carelessly programmed. Humans avert that as part of their functioning, unless they are made to go mad - and this madness is usually the result of humans' own symbolic knowledge faculties being turned against them, rather than something that happened because their brains were just defective. Humans with severe brain damage manage to continue operating in some way without being "mad" in their own approach to the world. They will likely not have the ability or function they would like or we would expect of others, but they would in their own way proceed through life, and to them what they do is as reasonable as they could be and makes some sense. Very often, the "mad" are not disconnected from the world at all, and see the same things a normal human sees, doing many of the things a normal human would. But this gets into a long discourse about political insanity and what it would mean for sanity to exist in a genuine sense, becuse there is indeed a genuine disconnect with the world and material events which is different from how we are told to consider insanity. Clearly insane people are allowed to rise to prominent positions and their insanity is celebrated, while innocent people who did nothing wrong or little wrong are declared madmen because they hold the wrong political conceits.

The point here wasn't about the machines being "crazy", but tPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

>>469694
To put it another way, the problem isn't that computers exist, but that the NSA exists, and the computer makes the NSA possible. You will never compete with the NSA's command of information individually or in any organization you would create, let alone the wider network the NSA is connected to with the state.

>>469695
And of course, you don't get to wish the NSA out of existence because you don't like it. Something like the NSA, CIA, etc. will exist for reasons that make a lot of sense. The world where this is forbidden is the fantasy. Intelligence and command of information would always be carried out in some way, and this is the way it is done and can be done in the time we live in.

I agree with whatever gigachad Norman Finkelstein thinks about BDS.

>>469627
Finkelstein says that BDS is a valid tactic but there currently is no movement that's doing it.

Finkelsteain also says that Israel is working behind the scenes to get all criticism of the Israeli state labeled as antisemitism, in order to counter any new movements. Which means we have to accuse the Zionists of being antisemitic, which they technically are because Palestinians are ethnic Semites.

>>469647
I though Finkelstein was kind of ambivalent about BDS because he thinks it's insufficient.

>>469652
>I though Finkelstein was kind of ambivalent about BDS because he thinks it's insufficient.
Yes he does, and that is correct. But pretty much everything that the Palestinians or western leftists could do would be insufficient.

Israel has nukes, even if the US and Europe went full communism, we'd still be in a situation where the Zionists would be able to extort a continuation of the imperial gibs for many decades (until the nukes go inert from reaching the end of their shelf life). Lest we be willing to roll the dice on interdicting nukes.

Russia already has kinetic impact weapons that can destroy nuclear missile bunkers and the US is also working on similar tech, but even using that to neutralize the "Samson option" (what the Israeli call their nuclear weapons) would still risk enormous contamination. This tech will likely make it possible to destroy the cold-war type ballistic nukes and jet-launched nukes that Israel has, in sufficient quantity it can prevent nuclear explosions but these kinetic weapons are comparable to mini asteroid-impacts, and will catapult matter into the stratosphere. I don't think that it's politically viable to blast that much plutonium dust into the atmosphere. Israel has 200-400 nukes. You'd have to make everybody sit indoors next to air-scrubbers or wear breathing-filter-gear when going outside for 6 to 18 months. And eating fish from the ocean will be inadvisable for 5 years. It's better than 200-400 mushroom clouds but still very far from a palatable option.

What Palestine needs is some kind of battle-hardened productive forces, that would allow them to rebuild while under the Zionist siege. If they can rebuild faster than Israel can inflict damage by "mowing the grass" (their slogan for their periodic mass-murder campaigns), it will become a futile exercise in brutality and the Zionists will have to give up. Think along the lines of guerilla war but instead of fighting it's doing construction.

Maybe China's got some more of that diplomacy magic that they used to pacify the Saudi-Yemen conflict, and it will also work on the Israel-Palestine conflict. They already offered, but i don't know if that's going anywhere.

>>469521
Go back

>>469548
Why?

>>469556
Wut? Can you speak in terms that doesn't require being terminally online.

>What are the political implications of the end of the Republican party?
What end of the republican party?

Anyway, to answer your question:
None, as long as nobody believes that any human (or robot) has the right to tell another human how to live his life.

>>469148
>You are yourself whether you want to be or not
State of being is idealism at its peak stfu hypocrite
>Politics informs our existence and we are acutely aware of when we have no political rights or status in society, but it does not define us. We have a life other than politics or "society" in this sense.
Sounds like some Hegelian bs. Polítics is a reflection of material reality.

>This would make more sense after reading my book, which I will get back to shortly.
Charlatan

>>469152
To say you are anything other than "you" is to engage in symbolic wordplay. We are instinctively aware of ourselves to a sufficient degree because that is a real connection we have with the world, of which we are a part. All the nerves, impulses, and so on could only be relevant if they were real and did not require a mediator to exist or be understood. We are aware of this existence and that, at the least, there is a thought process active to speak of any consciousness. To suggest this process is anything other than a real, material event - and in our case, a physical event and an event of living things in its origin - requires invoking a whole different model of reality, which would be contingent on the existence of some world to allow the idea of "us" to exist.

It is possible to say that you can be something other than "you" as defined by another, or some static concept of yourself, but you can't decide that you don't exist by thought alone, or that anyone changes simply because of symbolic language far removed from their actual existence. If you are making that claim, first of all that has no material basis whatsoever, which makes this whole screeching about me being "idealist" absurd. Strictly speaking, what I describe would be some sort of physicalism, but I find that to be a limiting understanding of the concept. All I said is that some thought process has to exist to speak of anything being conscious in the sense we appreciate it. If you are speaking of a wholly disembodied abstract mind, you are speaking of something very different from us who are by all accounts a series of events. Even if you suggested an idealist framework from on high, you would have to suggest a reason why our lives are consistently like this, and that is what God or religion typically does - provide answers that the adherent can accept or not, or understand through the faculties available to them. In our rational thought and symbolic language, we only have ideas, but we are aware that those ideas point to some world outside of us or any conceit we hold about it.

I don't know why this autism repeats, but the people who are this committed to the bit are not running a script. They actually do believe this - and I know because I know the mentality and how this is drilled into people, the fear of people who simply do not get it and have this triggered resPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

>>469155
>that TLDR
You are literally arguing at nothing. Most of what you’re arguing to isn’t my positions or anything similar. It’s like you conjured your own straw man and replied to it. My argument is
>there is no static concept of self, to try to prove so is literally just entering idealist arguments
>”self” is constantly changing in response to objective material conditions, not “experience” which is too subjective and susceptible to idealism
>memory should be the materialist conception of consciousness, it’s what results as a response to material conditions
>if one could, through either biological or cybernetic means, materialize memory so that one could perfectly remember in every way including how they felt and thought in that exact memory; humans would truly achieve full self actualización
>humans would have objective materialized memories that could be analyzed over and over again to understand who they are as a person
Essentially I’m going a step above your “physicalist” argument by actually transforming “experience”(a subjective idealist basis for consciousness) into hard material data

>>469222
You're not going "above" anything. Fetishizing data is an old conceit about consciousness - very old actually. It isn't saying anything except, essentially, there is no knowledge, but just matter in motion that can be anything you interpret it as. You do understand what "data" means in information theory and computer science, right? What "data" means in philosophy of science?

This is what makes things like Galton's statistical pseudoscience appear viable - i.e., you insist over and over that correlations you choose to collect are themselves the "truth", and then fit your theory of knowledge to this highly curated selection of data, intended to suggest a just-so story. It is very easy to disprove this theory of mind or knowledge, or at least to say what it would imply if its origins are followed through to their conclusion. It is an intentional pseudoscience, which obscures anything meaningful about statistical analysis.

Long story short:
Entropy as a concept is wildly abused when studying life, and this is intended for political purposes and to make claims about the world that are not substantiated by any actual meaning or data. The study of heat systems is useful for its purpose, but does not explain literally everything.

The point I'm making is that knowledge and consciousness are not Turing machines or mere information processing. As information processors, human brains are remarkably bad, but humans do a lot of things like pattern recognition that is inherent to life with central nervous systems and sufficiently large brains. If you knew anything about cognition or computer science you wouldn't say this stupid shit. This is the retard version taught to code monkeys so they can produce low grade programs without really knowing what they are doing.

Since this is the philosophy thread, I figured I would post a preview of what I've written. Not yet ready for general release and will get some final edits, but maybe this would clarify some arguments I've made.

http://eugeneseffortposts.royalwebhosting.net/mymethod.html

This is the first part of a series, and fairly lengthy. It should be noted that the purpose of the book is not to reveal the one truth, but to explain roughly how an ontology of reality control works - and so I have no problem with mereological nihilism and many philosophical no-nos.

To make a summary short:

- Our basic expression of reason in language, and all of the ideas we communicate to describe the world, are at first symbolic. The sensory data we translate to a picture or what we see, hear, etc., is a symbolic representation of the world, and could only be that.

- All of this communication can only exist because we hold that meaning is possible through knowledge. Much of the book builds up to the point I have described here first.

- The main purpose of symbolic language and expression is not to simply say "A is A" or "2+2=4" for its own sake, but to refine meanings and understandings for our knowledge and a full picture of the world and ourselves. We communicate these ideas not just to say them or spread them, but because they mean something at a level that is not symbolic. We would have to accept that there is a world where meaning is relevant that is shared between all who are in dialogue, and that however we participate, we are not in disagreement about certain facts.

- Facts are themselves product of symbolic language that are proven by some authority, rather than facts simply being true by assertion. That is, formal logic is always demonstrated in institutions of some sort. We may consider ourselves persons with authority to judge facts, but in society, institutions decide facts, not people. If people individually decide facts, it is because this is institutionally accepted, and even the concept "person" is an institutional rendering of a human being. We of course need to do this - we must agree on facts to hold a dialogue, and so in such discussions, we hold to facts, and among those facts we would hold is that there is a world to describe that is outside of the institution. The main purpose of institutions is nPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

>>469345
I'm not sure i get it ?
Is that a reference to the Nazi "final solution" ?
Because Zionists in Israel have recently become even more unhinged.

Is this news anon? O:

>>469345

We got the joke.

>Betty McCollum has reintroduced her bill to prohibit Israel’s government from using American taxpayers’ dollars from being used to abuse Palestinian children.

So will that have a better chance at passing into law now that the Zionists in Israel are going mask off by trying to abolish judicial independence ?

>>469341
no, thats because of some schizo monkeys fuked other monkeys

>>469208
I'm not sure what to make off your concepts of rights, or where you are going with this.

From the materialist perspective, stuff has to do what it says on the label. So if you have a right that means that it's not possible to be violated. A right to privacy means that there are no organizations or structures that are capable of collecting data and compiling secret dossiers about people. Of course it's not completely absolute, there's still nosy neighbors but nothing happens on a systemic level. The information systems don't really have a technical necessity for collecting all that data about people, they work perfectly fine without that, it costs extra effort to put in all the data collection.

The mass-surveillance/data-mining is imho the result of class society. You have a tiny minority of a ruling class that's getting super rich by draining wealth from the masses. They are trying to keep tabs on the masses because that's who they perceive as their enemy. Because if the masses can emancipate them selves their game is up.

For the sake of security mass surveillance is antithetical.

Lets assume that there is a socialist society that works like cybernetic socialism with democratic economic planning. That society also has to do security. Lets look at the thread models. There could be legacy capitalists trying to overthrow the socialist system to restore their former power. There could be external capitalist countries looking to overthrow the socialist system for the sake of expansion. There could be new people with ruler-aspirations looking to establish them selves as a new ruling class. All what these threat models have in common is that a relatively small group will use sophisticated methods to attempt to undo the socialist system. All the threads are narrow and operate at great depth. Mass surveillance is very broad and shallow, it's not suitable for this stuff.

The masses aren't a threat for socialism because by establishing democratic control mechanisms to direct economic surplus, the information that is necessary to keep the system stable will be gathered through that. Quite simply if the system upholds the interests of the masses and it is receptive to popular will, it'll be perpetually rock-stable, bar some natural disaster.

Of course the security against the afore mentioned narrow threadsPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

>>469214
Why are you assuming a state is somehow naturally limited in what it does or "ought" to do? Almost as soon as the United States Constitution is passed, the second president pushes acts through Congress that clearly censor the press when it says bad things about him, and entail illegal search and seizure up the wazoo. That's something that is not controversial knowledge.
The rights of the constitution outlined rights of the states and federal government, not the people in an individual sense. Collectively, the people were presumed to possess certain rights, but legal rights enumerated in the constititution were clearly about the states and what laws can and can't be passed.

The intent of the 14th amendment did not say "everyone gets unlimited freedom", but was written to ensure that states could not pass laws clearly intended to re-enslave black people, or maintain segregation which effectively restored slavery. The interpretation did not make people morally equivalent to each other, but entailed political rights like not being enslaved.

As for a right to "unlimited property", that has never been the intent of the constitution or any law. It's retarded me wantee thinking. The same is true of privacy. There was never a "right to privacy", let alone a right that was entirely dependent on the government refusing to use police powers available to it. What prevented this in the past was not a constitutional right or any legal principle that was inviolable. What prevented such centralization in a democratic society is that democratic society has every reason to distrust large institutions collecting information about them, and so there would be agitation to prevent this from forming in the first place. Once it forms, there is no law that would stop it, and no force of nature that will make the state stop doing this out of kindness.
Needless to say, virtually everything about the national security state is blatantly unconstitutional and does not even regard the law as relevant. If you understand the political thinking in vogue, the "permanent state of exception" was accepted and eroded republican concepts of the law or any interest of the governed. All of that would now be controlled by a clique of people who controlled all the ideas that were permissible and had an effective veto that was taboo to even acknowledge. That of course Post too long. Click here to view the full text.

>>469214
I say this because a concept of legal rights is very important - if you don't have that, you have no leg to stand on to maintain any democratic society except rule of fear. These words do not mean anything you think they mean though.

The only right to privacy you possess is that you can stay silent. The government cannot make your silence a crime, even when they insist they can. You would have to be brought to a court or some setting that can make you talk, and there are clear precedents against self-incrimination. It isn't just about not allowing courts to force someone to confess explicit guilt, but about using legal trickery to insinuate someone is guilty of a non-existent crime. Eugenics in principle is a brazen opposition to that, built entirely on baseless insinuations. Its fundamental theory and approach to reason is a gigantic baseless insinuation glorified to its maximal extent. Everything about it is one brazen lie after another. You couldn't construct something more suited to abolish the United States as an entity than eugenics, and that is a large reason why it adopted the stance that it did. It was, in effect, eliminating the United States' governing principles and any idea Americans had about what they thought their rights were, if any.

One more thing that came to mind:
Let's take the Soviet Union, which had a much different conception of rights and values. The Party can control everything, monopolizes the political system, and no one seriously believes they have a direct choice in which high-level politicians rule. That stuff is all decided by the men in smoke-filled rooms, and the people are generally cool with that and figure that's how it has to work. The PArty in principle does not care about the letter of the law in the way Americans are taught to be this litigious. The Party can rewrite the constitution at will, and the constitution isn't a part of the civic religion.

There was one freedom Soviet workers really, really liked though, and this was something ordinary workers said when communism ended: "What good is voting for the politicians if I cannot vote for my boss?" To some extent, Soviet workplaces were democratic, in that workers usually picked their managers at the base level, and the state and party had no problem with this. Directives came from the Party about what to do, and the Party was big on scientific management, but the managerial culture of the capitalist world, where management cannibalizes everything in sight and gloats about terrorizing workers, wouldn't be possible. This didn't prevent your "democratic workplace" from shitting on you or being filled with assholes on the take, but it is a difference that was noted right away.
When the managerial culture of Reaganite America was launched, you can see why people hate this sort of thing. That's when people started going postal, then shot up schools or any institution seen as alien to them - and this made sense to men with nothing to lose, who were openly thrown away and told they were worth less than dogs.
By having a principle that your workplace was intended to have some input from the workers, and was operated in the interest of the workers, you have a right that is in principle very important. It wasn't all that it was cracked up to be, but it makes a huge difference when you see today's managerial overreach and HR tyranny, where the workplace is nothing but a giant eugenics project and treated as such. No one produces a fucking thing in today's workplace, and this is intended. The idea that work entails making anything for the people is anathema to the ruling values of 21st century society. Anyone who worked for that is considered a simp, a retard, or worse a potential trouble source that wPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

>>469253
This by the way is the "stifling bureaucracy" we were told was choking the USSR. They didn't care about the bureaucracy - far from it, the bureaucracy remained large as it was selling off Russian assets after the USSR fell. The "bloat" was all that stuff that the workers watned, and this is in line with the neoliberal ethos of gutting anything that is actually productive. You should listen when Kissinger said he wanted the economy to scream. Neoliberalism is a death cult and you are idiots for being stupid simps and enabling any of it.