/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

>>479593
Do you think you're anything other than a fag? Go away. You have no insight and no one is intimidated by the snark any more. That worked during Obama, but the masses have adapted. Resistance is futile.

>>479545
think about it this way, if money flows through all of society it can command labor-power and collect surplus value. In a slave society the slave masters command labor power and collect surplus value.

>>479587
>And slaves actually were bred,
No, slave-societies never managed to breed slaves, they had to keep catching new ones. One of the reasons why feudal societies could beat slave societies was because peasants reproduced. Slave population have extremely low fertility, nowhere near population replacement levels.
>down to fucking science. Like cattle.
Also No. Cattle are the result of breeding via artificial selection. That only works on a few rare species like cows, dogs, pigs, sheep, horses, etc. Most species can't be bred, including humans. Humans like most species lack the biological features that make that possible. Humans also have a very long reproduction cycle, so even if it was biologically possible, it would take too long.

It's probably possible to breed Elephants from a biological standpoint (there is some debate about it, still) but elephant reproduction cycles are also very long, and that's why elephant breeding isn't really a thing. Nobody wants to invest and wait a thousand years for the returns.

>>479595
People, including myself, have tried to explain these things to this retard for weeks, even months, on end and he never listens. At worst he will log off and rage quit for a while then come back. At best he will just ignore everything you say and just keep repeating to same stupid debunked talking points over and over again. He just wants the attention.

>>479539
No, the difference is how the labour-power of the slave was treated in comparision to a proletarian. The slave is entirely tied to their labour-power, selling the slave is selling their labour-power once and for all to be used by the buyer. The proletarian has to sell his labour piece by piece on the market on which he entirely depends upon to sell labour-power as a commoditty (something exchanged only because it has no use-value and the receiever has some use-value out of it).

The slave is not tied to the irrational market, the proletarian is. The slave's existence as lifetime labour-power is guaranteed by his buyer. The proletarian existence has none of this security even when selling of labour-power

>>479616
When farm laborers were kicked off their land and entered the cities, it was understood to all that their condition was effectively slavery. They had no legal rights, no legal standing, nothing at all that the bourgeois city had to respect or regard. The only distinction is that there wasn't formally a deed saying this person is property in total of another person - but what is an employment contract and the worksheet every worker was obligated to show to receive pay? What is their condition if they are obligated by contract to police their entire life on and off the clock to conform to the dictates of the city and their boss? In an economic and moral sense, the proletarian was considered devoid of any more rights than a slave, and would be treated accordingly. You might convince proletarians to spit on slaves or nigras, or sell them some ideology, but no one is confused about the nature of their relation to society, and what their lives have been. Usually the behavior of slaves is that they don't want this situation to be worse, because existential wank is not a condition laborers in general care for. That's always been an aristocratic vice - and it is an aristocratic vice rather than a bourgeois vice or the vice of producers or technocrats. The typical middle class bourgeois man is not a frilly pissant, but someone thinking how he can make a buck, swap his wife at the parties, and play the part of the game he is allowed to play. Usually the bourgeois man is practical rather than given over directly to fetishism by some blind and unknowable impulse. The reasons why middle class people buy into fads are not difficult to discern if you are allowed to make comparisons with reality, and disregard the mythology regarding social class and what this really is. No middle class person, bourgeois person, is unaware of his own situation and relations to others of his kind at a basic level. It would be impossible for him not to be, and the bourgeois man is more acutely aware of this than any other class, precisely because the bourgeois life is a precarious one by the standards of history. We didn't always have a stable population of city-dwellers with this particular concept of civic participation, where they adopted a very alien manner of speaking compared to what humans had been doing for centuries in the same sort of social position.

Also, slaves aPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

Your premise is way too far in the future to be anything other than fantasy. If we get to the point where your assumptions are true, life would be unrecognizably different and I don't know what kind of attacks we would face.

But I think America's strategies in regime change are under-studied by leftists. How come their tactics haven't been co-opted by the left yet? Off the top of my head, let's look at some broad things that the CIA does to overthrow a government:

> Fund right wing extremist groups or religious extremists
< Do lefty groups lack funding? Is that the problem? Common some of you anons are in IRL orgs, what do they materially need to be successful?

> Color revolutions (you mentioned) and protests
I'm thinking of the hong kong protests, but those didn't overthrow anything. Perhaps we should study how places like Iran had their democratically elected government overthrown by the CIA / british feds in the 50's. There's a documentary about that called Coup 53 that I haven't watched yet (picrel).
< leftists should by now know how to protest but maybe they've forgotten

So what does the CIA do that leftists can't? If it's a lack of resources, which ones? I think we need an objective list.

Also for those that are more well-read than me, what other tactics have been employed? Can they be co-opted?

So yeah let's bring this discussion down to earth a bit and think about what we can use that's already been tried and tested by the ruling class. It's been occurring more and more to me that the point of "seize the means of production" shouldn't be to destroy everything and rebuild, but literally use and appropriate every fucking function that capitalism has invented, shamelessly.

>>479524
A simple and very effective CIA operation to study is the original "orange revolution" in Ukraine in 2004. Victor Yanukovych won a presidential election but the CIA was able to organize enough protests to compel two new elections (the Ukrainian constitution only allows for one) until they got the result they wanted.

>>479524
>premise is way too far in the future
>life would be unrecognizably different and I don't know what kind of attacks we would face.
the implication of the thought experiment in the opening post is that going hardcore privacy respecting has strategic advantages.

>Do lefty groups lack funding? Is that the problem?
in a way yes
>what do they materially need to be successful?
i'm convinced that socialists cannot copy the methods of political struggle that the bourgeois factions use, because those do commodified politics, which is a kind of simulated fake politics.
Socialists might need a less sophisticated version of labor vouchers as an economic circuit for political struggle.

>I'm thinking of the hong kong protests, but those didn't overthrow anything.
Maybe Chinese counter intelligence hacked into the US surveillance system, and used it to find out who the CIA handlers were, and that's how the Hongkong color revolution was shut down.

>Perhaps we should study how places like Iran had their democratically elected government overthrown by the CIA / british feds in the 50's
Post too long. Click here to view the full text.

>>479519
dog, what a fucking retarded tldr

>In the history of socialist countries, the biggest problem has always been attacks from foreign state actors
lol only the in minds of idealistic shizo leninoids

the biggest problem always was economic backwardness and fucking retarded vanguardoid political system

you assume direct democracy with fucking secret police retardoid, when direct democracy REQUIRES transparency

ie you don't understand wtf you are talking about

>>479534
So you didn't read the opening post. Because it said it wouldn't require internal secret police.

>>479456
Your not wrong but to keep it fair, there is a media selection bias for showing the shit that's not normal.

>>479457
This has got to be bugging the ruling class, they want soldiers that are willing to die for their causes, not the causes of "the other side". So keep the memory alive, perhaps to make them less trigger happy when it comes to new wars.

>>479428
Again with this self projection about being a lazy online leftist retard.
You really need to take meds and see a psychiatrist.l

>>479459
>pharma propaganda
>bootlicking cockroach scuttles in the shadows
neoliberal garbage

>>479456
I'm still not sure if it's been established who that one guy is. People have said he's police, Israeli security, or secret service… I'm not sure. But it's batshit insane seeing him dodge around with Matrix moves pointing his gun at a flaming body on the ground while everyone else tries to put it out.

>>479505
>it's batshit insane seeing him dodge around with Matrix moves pointing his gun at a flaming body on the ground while everyone else tries to put it out
He's probably operating with the logic of
<put the gun between you and the danger
<Fire is danger
In general this is not a bad logic, but it failed in this episode

>People have said he's police, Israeli security, or secret service… I'm not sure.
That might explain the strange behavior, people wouldn't do this unless they have undergone a lot of very specific firearms training drills. This looks like conditioned reactions. Police, Security and spies are more likely to have undergone conditioning. They do that because subconscious reactions are faster than conscious actions, but the speed excludes the involvement of higher reasoning, so there are trade offs. Apparently one of those trade offs might be embarrassing matrix moves in unusual situations.

>>479494
Wages for Chinese workers rose by a factor of 5x over the last generation, how is that cuckoldry ? I wish western workers had any wage-growth at all.

A little over a century ago the Chinese were completely crushed, by the Japanese Empire, the British empire and others. Famine was perpetual, 20% of the population was addicted to Opium, and it was usual for parents to sell some of their children because they couldn't feed them and average life expectancy was something like 33 years. Within the last 100 years the Chinese overthrew their own ruling class, as well as the foreign occupying empires. Their life expectancy more than doubled and in addition to that they rose from the bottom of the "global rank" to the largest industrial power whose industrial output rivals the combined industrial output of the rest of the world. By any measure they're the people that stood up, and now nobody can slap them around anymore

How is this not a success story ?

If you want to complain that Chinese lack civil liberties, i tend to agree, but given their track record of raking in the Ws, what makes you think they're not going to achieve that as well ?

>This is totally different than western capitalism and totally not exploitation.
China isn't de-industrializing, it's not dominated by neocon ghouls that want to blow the surplus of society on stupid imperialist adventures. They build lots of trains and solar panels. That is different.

Chinese workers are exploited there is no doubt about that, but the rate of exploitation has begun to go down.

>Jack Ma? Oh yes, he is a capitalist, but he is /ourguy/ trust me bro.
Post too long. Click here to view the full text.

>>479495
Oh you misunderstand my politics. The neocons are currently painting China as the big bad scary that's supposed to serve as the next excuse for fear-mongering and war-mongering. I simply can't say negative things about China until they remove it from the big bad scary list, because i wish to avoid contributing to fear/war-mongering.

we got off topic, somehow threads about bad shit happening in the west somehow always derail into pointing fingers at China. Might be an intentional distraction tactic or something.

>>479492
>I'm not that optimistic.
I guess it's going to be a bitter struggle for
<a free internet that's uncensored and surveillance-free
<technological self-determination
<personal ownership over personal technology

But it can be done, this is a winnable battle.

>>479497
Reading your post reminds me of myself a few years ago. A few years ago, I would had totally agreed with your post. But not today anymore and I know exactly, there is no point to talk with you about China. In the past I was like you, I was also a total China fanatic. I know all these phrases, I've also read Xi's and Deng's texts. I've been watching CGTN and reading China Daily every day. But at some point I've realized, this all just copium. This world is a mess and believing in chinese socialism and the CPC gave me strength and hope. But in the end, its just a belief. It's a cope. Sooner or later, your belief will shatter as well. I don't even have to convince you, it's just a matter of time.

>>479497
Btw I agree with you, that we should oppose fear/warmongering towards China.

I can also say - this has been in the works for a long time, and certainly has been the plan since the 1990s, acted on by more than a few people in high places. There is a base ready for the next thing - the thing where they get rid of the people they've always wanted to kill. The thrill of torture must be and will be maximized. That is the way this country set for itself.

We can say what foreign influences wanted it to be this way, but the ugly reality is that this was only possible here, for this purpose. The rest of the world will do whatever, but America will be isolated and made into the end result of this social experiment, as will its closest associates. I'm seeing this set up not just in the US but UK and Israel, hence what is happening to set it in motion.

Really, I don't believe they have a "plan for the world" - they are rooted in transnational authority ultimately as empires must be, but they are probably happy to keep three superstates attacking each other. That's what "multipolarity" is code for - creating Ingsoc and that world. They don't hide that this is what they are engineering into existence, doing everything possible to make it real to drive home "this is what you are". It's ritual child abuse and they revel in it.

>>479429
Maybe the judges were tired of getting dragged into political mud wrestling

>the death of anything resembling democracy in the US
no that happened when they legalized corruption, and political candidates became pre-selected by "donors"

>>479445
>Maybe the judges were tired of getting dragged into political mud wrestling

That's why they took the job in the first place.

>>479445
The supreme Court judges were appointed by trump himself. That's why they ruled they way they did.

>>478986
For domestic US politics it is about petty revenge (and partisan bullshit when Clinton is involved), but on a geopolitical stage the Assange case is about flexing hegemonic soft power and keeping its "allies" in line.

>>478989
I remain unconvinced that soft-power behaves analogous to a muscle that can be flexed. I think soft-power behaves analogous to a finite resource. It has to be build up before it can be spend. A muscle grows stronger the more it's used, a resource just diminishes the more it's used.

I think they are wasting finite soft-power resources for the sake of taking petty revenge on Assange.

I love how everyone outside the tiny neolib/neocon bubble universally agrees that Assange is based

>>479082
yes very based indeed

>>479082
The same thing applies to hatred of Israel.

>>479249
>but it has not happened.
do you know why international unions haven't formed ?

>>479286
Because China has abandoned its role as leader of the proletariat and has refused to organize the international working class.

>>479291
Why do you think that creating international unions would require the help of China ?

Also the Chinese are not going to export the revolution as long as they can trade with capitalist countries. So far that strategy seems to have worked for them.

>>479325
>Why do you think that creating international unions would require the help of China ?

Because the reactionary response will also be international in scope and China of all places should be a safe haven for internationalists to meet and coordinate at the very least.

>>479328
A safe haven sounds nice, but the planet is very large, and traveling to china a lot might become impractical.

>>468947
Reading theory is best and only form of praxis

>>468923
Reactionary leftist 🤡

>>468923
trad leftism is a thing for sure

especially outside the USA

I wouldn't really be against trad leftism it if it's leaders weren't sociopaths or narcissists.

Same with liberal leftism.

A trad leftist is better than a progressive rightoid
At least Castillo started appointing gay people or something despite his tradcath attitudes

>>468923
kill yourself

>>476912
You actually think money is made of magic and the line going up is due to offending the gods? Look at real inflation and then imagine if you didn't have the social and capital controls available to the US, the only country that can print unlimited money and get away with it. The triple digit inflation is a consequence of that policy since it is a global rather than national policy. All of this is intended - create crisis with neoliberalism, find a figurehead who will plunder the place and promote faggotry, then find either an actually competent fascist or a socdem or someone who settles the matter and makes the advance of plunder the new line to retreat from. Repeat every generation. That's what we have been consigned to. It relies on endlessly relitigating history, pretending that we're looping to some past example, and then rewriting the examples to say that we were always at war with Eastasia and humanity was always this.

None of that resembles reality, and it's always been a dogma of the fags who only think of kicking down to take the wealth of anyone who worked or built anything.

Im from Argentina and I CAN SAY any argentine who opposes Milei is effeminate.

>>477404
why though? I get it if you just want to fuck with social democrats or something.

Bump. Ben Norton is profoundly based

>>479083
He's a dumb contrarian who never successfully got out of his Brooklyn Trotkyite hipster roots. He should stick to journalism (which he's good at), and leave the analysis to more careful thinkers.

>>479044
>Soviet type ML systems which are sometimes called leadership democracies
Only by rulers who want to continue the self-serving liberal tradition of inverting the meaning of democracy to mean its exact opposite. Rule of the few is not rule by the people.

>>479045
If you want data about the Soviets, a good place to start is the sources in the footnotes of the book: Towards a new socialism by Paul Cockshott and Allin Cotrell

>What is stopping the leaders from abusing their position to enrich themselves?
The Soviets understood the Soviet model as a holding pattern to wait until imperial capitalism had run it's course. Higher stage Socialism had to wait until capitalist countries became less aggressive as a result of imperialism getting frustrated.

Imperial capitalism is an economic model that requires conquering to keep going. The Soviets thought if they used their military might to undermine the conquering, imperial capitalism would go away. They were correct in a way. The Soviets completely undid the colonial empire mechanism. They however miscalculated about how long it would take for the alternative imperial mechanisms to be broken. They also made political and economic errors.

To answer your question the ML system used anti corruption purges to prevent abuse of state positions for self enrichment. It was very politically disruptive, but it did work.

>>479046
You are correct Sortition democracy is the bug-fix the Soviets should have applied.

>>479056
>Towards a new socialism by Paul Cockshott and Allin Cotrell
I'll put it another way, do you have any sources that are not marxist authors cherry picking footnotes to stroke their confirmation bias? People on this board unironically think the holodomor was a hoax and gulags were summer camps there is no end to the delusions marxists have about the USSR.

>The Soviets understood the Soviet model as a holding pattern to wait until imperial capitalism had run it's course.
Why? They ruled half of the planet with an iron fist what was stopping them from achieving "higher stage socialism" within their own borders? Then the USSR would be the one tearing down the berlin wall to allow in all starving citizens of failed capitalism instead of the other way around.

>the ML system used anti corruption purges to prevent abuse of state positions for self enrichment
Who is doing the purging? By electing a leader to control the distribution of resources the people have already given up their power.

>>479070
>the holodomor hoax
The holodomor narrative appears to originate in Nazi war propaganda and then later it got picked up by cold war propaganda. The default assumption is that nazis and cold warriors are liars, because most of what they said turned out to be lies. I did not investigate much, but i only found facts that support there having been a famine, not a politically motivated plot to starve people on purpose.

You appear to be complaining that we don't unquestionably accept ruling ideology narratives. That is very odd, why would we ? We're not the ruling class. Also Anti-communist biases are very common, so you have to account for the fact that the Soviet Union is being misrepresented most of the time.

Lately the holodomor narrative has been picked up again as a talking point in the propaganda battle for the Ukraine war, by the people who are arming and funding neo-nazi groups no less. That makes it look like some kind of propaganda narrative, that is lying around, and gets reused from time to time. That pattern is very suspicious, very few truths behave that way.

If you want to accuse the Soviets of intentionally starving people, the burden is on you to make the case for it. There is no expectation that we have to believe your story at face value. You haven't made a case for this assertion at all, you only have accused us of not sharing your opinion.

>>479070
>People on this board unironically think the holodomor was a hoax
AKA People Who Read.