/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

What are your thoughts on military conscription during peace times?

Conscription impacts many expects of a nation, from its military capability to its politics depending on the degree of consciption. Today few countries continue this practice. Norway, Singapore and Israel are among the few countries which still practice this, in Europe conscription is mostly non existant.

From a military standpoint conscription crates a large pool of units which can be quickly mobilised during war. Manpower which can be used to stem the tide or for offensive actions. Conscription can also limit the political power of the army or at least that's how the French reasoned it prior to ww2. It is also a vital part of national identity which would explain why many nationalist also advocate for conscription. However conscription can be costly as large stockpiles of weapons must be maintained for the conscripts as well as refresher training for conscripts. Futuremore it restricts the "freedom" of people by forcing then into the army for sometime.

I personally believe that conscription is essential for any socialist state, the likelihood of violent retaliation by capitalist nations and reactionary nations is far too high. As such we should be prepared for non nuclear
total war and having a large pool of soilders early on would be favourable.

Why do people think we won the Vietnam war?
Yes, burger's military got wrecked but that doesn't mean they lost. That's just like doing k/d ratio idiocy. In fact what they couldn't achieve militarily (the containment of communism) they obtained other ways when Vietnam severed its ties with China.

So recently here in the UK we had an "incel shooting" (Technically he was ex-Incel) and it has the entire media doing interviews and talks about the Incel "problem". What is triggering me though is that all these attempts to understand "Incels" seem to go actively out of their way to never, ever address any points Incels make or any of the material conditions that have led to the rise of Incels in the past decade. I can understand not wanting to give Incel views any creedence, but at the same time, you can't just ignore all the data which does show Incels do have a point that something in the dating scene has gone very wrong.

In the past decade, sexlessness among men under 30 has risen from 8% to 28% in one US study and 40% in another Australian study. Women's "sexlessness" has barely budged. You also have apps like Tinder which specifically use algorithms to put down young men and make them feel unattractive, unless they buy gold, suddenly with gold their profile is shown to more "compatiable" women thus they start getting matches, Tinder thrives on male misery and 80% of modern dating is done through this single app.
The one piece I've seen in the week since that did address one Incel point, debunked the Incel 80/20 view (80% of young women go for the top 20% of men almost exclusively), by showing all the data we have shows it's only between 60-70/20… I have no idea how this is supposed to be a massive own of Incels but apparently it is. People all over Reddit UK and twitter thought so.

These are real material societal issues, the fact it's leading to radicalisation is the obvious one, but there are many issues linked with not having relationships, being single is almost as bad for your health as smoking and the 20s are an extremely formative time in someones life, if you're going throughout your 20s without a single relationship or sex, how are you going to adjust to one in your 30s or 40s?

I don't have any real solutions to this, I think the only thing I could think of is making an open-source dating app that doesn't have the super manipulative algorithms and focuses more on and values and interests like OKCupid used to do before Tinder, but what is more interesting to me is why is everyone beating around the bush so hard on this topic instead of just addressing the material cause? Online Dating systems mashed with the the social order of dating (men have to approach) has massively weighted dating to the extreme Post too long. Click here to view the full text.

It is time once again:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJMGihBTUJs

EVERYBODY GET IN HERE

https://www.crisisgroup.org/content/turkeys-pkk-conflict-visual-explainer
so I read this article and it seems like the pkk is losing, what's the next step of their master plan, is there anyway they can turn the tide, especially if the US leaving syria?

The role of the trade unions: Biden’s fairy tale vs. reality at Dana
>On Wednesday afternoon, President Joe Biden gave a Labor Day speech that presented a fairy tale version of the role of the trade unions. The brutal reality is playing out across more than 15 Dana auto parts plants as the UAW and USW attempt to force through concessions contracts that workers overwhelmingly voted down.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/09/10/pers-s10.html

Biden's "we'd be in trouble" if there was a strike movement today speaks volumes as to what is the real power of the working class.

The ruling class is running scared. So much so that a section under Biden have turned to the Unions 'precisely' to nobble it.

Workers must not fall into the trap of subjective pessimism. They must grasp a more examined understanding of 'the reality' of who they are in capitalist society. That they have immense power at their fingertips.

The significance of the world capitalist debt crisis means that capitalism is hanging on to life by a mere thread, to which it knows if the working class merely flexes a collective muscle it will collapse like a pack of cards.

The stock market at "ever greater heights" is an illusion of strength. A desperate gamble and attempt to deceive the working class as to the "supremacy of the capitalist system".

In truth it is a giant Ponzi. Stock valuations that are nothing but "the Emperor's new clothes".
Post too long. Click here to view the full text.

Michael Robert's:

150 years ago John Mills wrote that
>“panics do not destroy capital, they merely reveal the extent to which it has been previously destroyed by its betrayal into hopelessly unproductive works.”
These are perceptive points about financial speculation and its eventual demise: from leverage of debt to deleveraging; from boom to crash, brought down by investment in ‘unproductive sectors’. As Marx put it:
>“since property here exists in the form of stock, its movement and transfer become purely a result of gambling on the stock exchange, where the little fish are swallowed by the sharks and the lambs by the stock-exchange wolves.”

But what causes money to be increasingly invested ‘unproductively’?

Marx offers an answer based of the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Falling average profitability leads eventually to a slowing in the growth of total profits from value-producing capital, which even a switch into speculative sectors cannot reverse indefinitely. Eventually overall profits can fall absolutely. Marx called this point an ‘absolute over-accumulation of capital’. A slump in investment, production and financial asset prices then ensues. Credit is necessary in a capitalist economy to extend economic growth and productive investment, but it cannot sustain that expansion because that is dependent on the creation of real value, not fiction. If new value does not grow to match more credit, credit will turn into unpayable debt.

Financial crashes occur in sectors or even across the board, but they are not always accompanied by a collapse in investment and production ie a slump. But a slump in production always engenders a financial crash as credit drains away and debt defaults emerge. This suggests that what is going on in the ‘real economy’ is what decides a financial crash, not vice versa. Indeed, that’s the evidence from the post-war slumps has shown (see graph): when profits in productive sectors fall, so do financial (fictitious) profits.

from https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2021/09/07/booms-and-bezzles/

Post too long. Click here to view the full text.

Bolsonaro’s coup plots in Brazil, under the shadow of January 6
>The Brazilian and international media’s recognition of the imminent threat of a coup is unprecedented in the 35 years since the fall of the US-backed military regime.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/09/09/pers-s09.html

Bolsonaro’s turn to outright fascism and authoritarian rule under these conditions should be a wake up call to the working class population. His policies are almost identical to Donald Trump in every respect.

this could be the last fucking straw. If there's any chance for total collapse it'd be this and we need to prepare for it.

how do we get ready for when shit hits the fan?

> "Stalin was a mass murderer!"
< "No he wasn't, he was a mass executioner, because murder implies a broken law against killing and all killings under him were absolutely legal under positive law."

Whenever some anti-commie accused us of murder, always remember murder implies law. Revolution is the negation of old law and the creation of new law. Revolutionaries that win (and only revolutionaries that win) are never murderers. They are only killers at most.

And if you believe in natural law, you believe in spooks.