redtea

Someone curious asked:

Do you know of any resources where I can hear the options of average Soviet citizens during the time of the USSR?

I linked Dessaline's GitHub page: https://dessalines.github.io/essays/socialism_faq.html#did-the-citizens-of-the-soviet-union-dislike-their-government.

And I suggested Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds but I don't think it quite fits the description.

Can anyone think of other resources, maybe a peoples' history kind of thing?

I've not used this yet, but it could be useful for creating parallel texts for Spanish learners.

El conflicto ucraniano desenmascara a Occidente.

Rusia sigue luchando por la formación de un nuevo orden mundial justo, en el que terminará con la dictadura de Estados Unidos y surgirán nuevos polos de fuerza del mundo multipolar; y uno de ellos será la América Latina. …

No es nada nueva la política estadounidense de sabotear a los gobiernos soberanos, autónomos que no se les arrodillan, ¡revisemos la historia! durante la Guerra fría por ejemplo, Washington financió a los rebeldes radicales en la América Latina y participó activamente en el derrocamiento de los gobiernos latinoamericanos electos legítimamente, principalmente aquellos que colaboraron con La Unión soviética. Para esa fecha, la casa Blanca exhibía públicamente y sin pudor su ambición, convertir nuestro continente en su patio trasero y controlar rigurosamente todos los procesos que se desarrollan en la región. …

Una vez más la crisis de Ucrania demostró la arrogancia y el descaro de la política exterior de los Estados Unidos y el gran desprecio que sienten por los intereses legítimos de los estados. Sus intentos de mantener la dominación mundial tuvieron efecto contrario y provocaron el surgimiento de los nuevos centros de poder en la arena internacional y evidentemente entre ellos los países de América Latina.

I was unsure where to cross-post this. But maybe we should discuss this to make sure Lemmygrad users are staying safe? Similar to the unspoken rule that we strongly discourage people using their real names or giving away too many personal details.

cross-posted from: https://mylemmy.win/post/89871

Edit: obligatory explanation (thanks mods for squaring me away)...

What you see via the UI isn't "all that exists". Unlike Reddit, where everything is a black box, there are a lot more eyeballs who can see "under the hood". Any instance admin, proper or rogue, gets a ton of information that users won't normally see. The attached example demonstrates that while users will only see upvote/downvote tallies, admins can see who actually performed those actions.

Edit: To clarify, not just YOUR instance admin gets this info. This is ANY instance admin across the Fediverse.

"Entre los días 5 al 10 de junio de 1967 las fuerzas sionistas, atacaron a los ejércitos de Egipto, Siria, Irak y Jordania bajo el pretexto, que las fuerzas egipcias apostadas en la península del Sinaí representaban un peligro para Israel. …"

('apostadas' significa 'posted'/'stationed')

Este artículo debe ser bastante comprensible para Marxistas aun si ya no logró un nivel alto en español.

Algunos cuestiones para otro aprendices de español:

1. ¿Que sucede en Asia Occidental en mil novecientos sesenta y siete?
2. ¿Quiénes eran los beligerantes?
3. ¿Que significa 'tergiversar'? (Lenin también usa mucho este palabra.)
4. ¿Qué te gusta o no gusta de este artículo?

Hispanohablantes, sentir bienvenidos a responder también.

(Feel free to correct my Spanish.)

I've wanted to go over to Linux for a long time but I have no idea how to go about it. I hear about incompatibility problems with hardware and all the different options for different Linux OS's and that's it, I forget about it for a while to avoid the headache.

So where do I start? I don't even know how to choose hardware or what to look for. The number of options with Linux makes things a little confusing.

And although others here have answered the question before, I'm unsure what I have to do to stay 'safe' on Linux. Are there extra steps or is it just the standard, don't open dodgy links and turn off Java script in the PDF viewer kind of thing? Does Linux come with a trustworthy firewall/antivirus/malware detection? Is there a chance of Linux e.g. sending my passwords, etc, to someone or just letting someone into my harddrive? I hear that 'open source' means people can check the code but how do I know if someone has checked the code—I wouldn't know what to look for myself.

I followed the Linux subreddit but the users the can be rather… enthusiastic, which is great, but I need something far more basic to get started lol.

Is there a good step-by-step guide somewhere? Or can anyone give me some pointers/tips/advice?

I mainly browse, type, and read pdfs and other text files. No gaming, although I wouldn't be opposed to it. No need to be mobile; laptops are terrible for my back so I always use an external monitor, anyway, so I won't be using it 'on the go'.

Edit: Thanks for all the advice. I got a machine up and running from a bootable USB.

Any others who read the comments here because they're interested in trying out Linux – if you have Windows installed and want to keep it on your HDD/SSD, partition your drive within Windows. Then boot from the USB. You can partition your drive (and keep Windows) from the bootable USB but it's a bit more complicated and it makes it harder to create a swap partition and a storage partition. I had to go back and forth a few times to figure this out.

Omg I've been here for a year today!

I just wanted to thank everyone for making this place what it is. I've never been much of a poster elsewhere because I can't stand much internet drama. But here, where good faith is the starting point, I feel that I can talk as I wish and have meaningful conversations and interactions.

Take care, everyone.

This isn't intended to close the debate on what counts as socialism. It's a comment I wrote in one of the federated instances that I suspect will be deleted. So I'm posting the text here as I thought it might generate some good discussion:

It's okay for us to disagree on our assessments of AES, but these disagreements must be based on some common understandings. I don't think we're there at the moment. Partly this comes down to the way language has shifted in the last 200 years.

The dictatorship of the proletariat is to be contrasted with a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. It means 'dictatorship' in the way that liberal democracies are dictatorships because they are governed by consistent (class based) institutions that hold executive, legislative, and judicial power.

The meaning of dictatorship has changed. Back then it more clearly meant something like 'governance by', and Marx's contemporaries would have inferred this meaning.

A dictatorship of the proletariat means the workers, not the capitalists, control the state and the means of production. In the words of one scholar, it means something like:

… either state-controlled [where the state is controlled by the proletariat] or private-but-worker-controlled economy with a democratically elected government and not necessarily single party.

The idea being that capitalism is a class-based political economy, and communism is the abolition of classes. The dictatorship of the proletariat is the stage of history where the workers have control of the state/means of production. Once the workers have such control, the distinction between bourgeois and proletariat falls apart. At that point we have reached communism.

You might even challenge the way that this has been tried so far. I would say to look again, if so. But either way, it doesn't change the theory. One can detest the way that an idea has been put into practice without rejecting the theory. As Kwame Ture advises, an ideology should be judged by it's principles, not it's practicioners.

No state has yet reached communism. The very idea is an oxymoron as communism is stateless. What some few states have begun to achieve (but no state has quite got there yet, as the class struggle is ongoing, although China, at least, is close) is socialism.

Marx used different terms in different works to discuss all this. As primarily a critic of capitalism, he didn't really flesh out a theory of socialism or communism in the way that you suggest. For that, we must look to Engels and to Lenin's State and Revolution. Nonetheless, a birds eye view of Marx's work reveals that he advocated for socialism (a dictatorship is the proletariat) as a stepping stone to communism. The logic of this progression grows directly out of an historical materialist analysis of class society.

At the same time, there is another sense of the Marxist concept of communism, but I don't think this is the one you mean. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels wrote:

We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. Further, in the Communist Manifesto, they wrote: Communists everywhere support any revolutionary movement against the existing social and political conditions.

In this sense, Marxist-Leninists are 'literally communists' but Marxist-Leninist states cannot be 'literal[] communism' but they are socialist (or trying to be).

If you want to read a short text about socialist governance, you might enjoy Roland Boer, Friedrich Engels and the Foundations of Socialist Governance. His Socialism with Chinese Characteristics may also be of interest for giving a detailed analysis of governance in China.

You can still disagree with MLs, AES, and the above definitions and propose other definitions, but that would involve speaking at cross purposes. It might also involve idealism because throughout history the only revolutionary socialist projects to have succeeded for a significant time have been guided by Marxism-Leninism. It's okay (albeit idealist) to have a different concept of socialism but a definition based on concrete examples must look to Marxism-Leninism.

And one cannot simply dismiss the experience of the attempt of billions of people trying to build socialism as not socialism because it doesn't match an esoteric and contrasting definition of socialism.

Edit: the scholar referred to in the text is the person I was replying to, who criticised the DotP but gave a definition of socialism that could describe a DotP.

Often, when we discuss the labour aristocracy, the focus turns quickly to the US, the core of the imperial core. A problem then arises because there is a lot of poverty in the US, which can be taken as representative of the whole imperial core, and that poverty is used to discredit (aspects of) the labour aristocracy thesis.

We can look at Germany for another example, to see how workers' interests become aligned with the capitalists', and create an incentive for them to work together at the expense of the periphery. A relevant quote from the linked article:

What is particularly interesting about the participation of labour interests in capital is the way in which these interests have been united in the period of the so-called social-democratic consensus.3 Alexander Hicks … argued … social democracy in the second half of the 20th century, coupled to the interests of large-scale capital, led to the creation and consolidation of a form of government known as corporatism ….4 The leading corporatist or fascist idea was that class and all other disagreements in capitalism would be resolved by allowing participation of groups in society seen as integral to decide on the direction in which society would develop – that is, class collaboration. Workers, capitalists, bankers, craftsmen and others were to work together to make these decisions. … [I]t is essential that social unity is always maintained and that compromises are made. Corporatism as the leading ideology in the West is accepted by large capital, the social-democratic parties, and the major unions.

The most significant example for this rise of corporatism is again Germany. … [S]ince the 1980s, an unprecedented wave of economic integration of labour and capital in Germany began, with the same program taking place in many of the core countries. By the end of the 1990s, pension funds became the most important investors on stock exchanges in the United States, and after the unification of Germany, the same process was seen.5 Laws have been passed that allow pension funds to invest significant capital (which has been collected for decades from the payment of pensions to workers) on the stock exchange in the shares of large corporations.6 The argument was that a quick inflow of money into corporations would enable large profits and stock market growth, and that funds would increase their capital through dividends or payments that all shareholders receive when a company records profits.

After … the unification of Germany, the infusion of capital from pension funds … created a sufficient amount of money in German corporations to carry out the privatization of the industrial giants from the former DDR and not destroy them – as they were destroyed in Serbia and many other post-Soviet nations – as it was politically important to undergo a smooth transition to capitalism in Germany in order to forestall social unrest. Soon afterwards, the same capital was used in the privatization of industrial companies throughout Eastern Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union. German firms were most likely to pick up all the strategically important companies in a short period of time. For example, Wolkswagen bought the Czech Škoda and integrated it into its automobile conglomerate, where it still operates successfully today.

The best example of this economic trend, however, is the German telecommunications giant Deutsche Telekom, which is partly owned by the state (holding 32% of shares), and a large part of the remaining shares then held by various pension funds.7 This company, whose ownership structure represents the embodiment of corporatism, is owned by the German state, German big capital and German pension funds. In addition, it is part of the world’s telecommunications cartel and has a significant share in the ownership of British Telecom and major US telecommunications companies., Operations of Deutsche Telekom are of great importance to Serbia and other countries created by the breakup of the communist republics. Deutsche Telekom has purchased near the entirety or a significant part of the telecommunications giants in Slovakia, Hungary, Albania, Montenegro, Croatia, Romania and Greece. The Greek OTE (Greek Telecommunications Organization), which is largely owned by Deutsche Telekom, held 20% of Serbia Telekom shares by 2012, and then sold the company back to the Serbian state for 380 million euros in preparation for the complete privatization of Serbia Telekom. It was said at the time that Serbia Telekom could reach the price of approximately one billion euros, and Bloomberg wrote that Deutsche Telekom was the main contender for the purchase.8 A simple calculation shows that the state of Serbia bought 20% of its shares of Serbia Telekom for 38% of the sum for which it planned to sell the company. For now, this malversation has not been realized, but we are aware that the sale of Serbia Telekom is one of the most important obligations of the Government of Serbia towards European, primarily German, capital.

We see that Deutsche Telekom owns the most important telecommunication companies across a large section of Europe, as does Wolkswagen, which bought Audi, Seat, Porsche, Bentley, Bugatti and other smaller companies in addition to Škoda. It is clear that this is a matter of forming unprecedented monopolies in the region’s key and most profitable industries. This entire project was made possible by the infusion of additional capital by pension funds. In Germany, pension funds now account for over 200 billion euros in stock market investments.9 By comparison, this is four times more than the total economic production of Serbia, which amounts to less than 50 billion euros. Even just one pension fund, BVK, which has a portfolio of 55 billion in shares of various corporations, is more powerful than the entire Serbian economy.10

German pension funds are now in the hands of the most qualified investors, and capital is so diversely distributed in shares of various companies that the losses of individual companies cannot significantly damage it. In other words, as the stock market grows, the capital accumulation of these funds grows, and thus the interests of workers whose pensions are found in these funds are structurally linked to the interests of capital. The higher the accumulation of capital, the higher wages can these workers expect. When all this is added to savings, which is an inevitable item of almost every traditionally generous German household, and which was made possible by the extremely high salaries of past decades, the question of the real interest of German workers for any changes other than those favouring capital is starkly raised.

When the German state, German capital and the German banks sit parasitically on the back of the European (and world) periphery, and German workers reap tremendous benefit from this parasitism, there is no concrete possibility of revolution in that country – such a possibility does not exist! Germany is only taken here as an example of a dominant European economy, and its role here is largely played out by the United States at the global level. In structural terms, it is clear that one cannot speak of an international solidarity of the working class emerging evenly from all regions of the world. The class struggle has completely shifted to the level of global conflict between the core and the periphery.

The linked article is worth reading in full if you have the time. It's short and to the point.

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/497897

This is a contentious subject. Please keep the discussion respectful. I think this will get more traction, here, but I'll cross-post it to !Communism, too.

Workers who sell their labour power for a wage are part of the working class, right? They are wage-workers because they work for a wage. Are they wage-labourers?

“They’re proletariat,” I hear some of you shout.

“Not in the imperial core! Those are labour aristocrats,” others reply.

So what are the workers in the imperial core? Are they irredeemable labour aristocrats, the inseparable managers and professionals of the ruling class? Or are they proletarian, the salt of the earth just trying to get by?

It’s an important distinction, even if the workers in any country are not a homogenous bloc. The answer determines whether workers in the global north are natural allies or enemies of the oppressed in the global south.

The problem is as follows.

There is no doubt that people in the global north are, in general, more privileged than people in the global south. In many cases, the difference in privilege is vast, even among the wage-workers. This is not to discount the suffering of oppressed people in the global north. This is not to brush away the privilege of national bourgeois in the global south.

For some workers in the global north, privilege amounts to basic access to water, energy, food, education, healthcare, and shelter, streetlights, paved highways, etc. As much as austerity has eroded access to these basics, they are still the reality for the majority of people in the north even, to my knowledge, in the US.

Are these privileges enough to move someone from the ranks of the proletariat and into the labour aristocracy or the petit-bourgeois?

I’m going to discuss some sources and leave some quotes in comments, below. This may look a bit spammy, but I’m hoping it will help us to work through the several arguments, that make up the whole. The sources:

• Settlers by J Sakai
• Corona, Climate, and Chronic Emergency by Andreas Malm
• The Wealth of Nations by Zac Cope
• ‘Decolonization is Not a Metaphor’ by Eve Tuck and K Wayne Yang.

I have my own views on all this, but I have tried to phrase the points and the questions in a ’neutral’ way because I want us to discuss the issues and see if we can work out where and why we conflict and how to move forwards with our thinking (neutral to Marxists, at least). I am not trying to state my position by stating the questions below, so please do not attack me for the assumptions in the questions. By all means attack the assumptions and the questions.

Este orador es claro si quieres escuchar una defensa de Stalin.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXzWMIRngGU

¿Que piensas?

(Habladores nativos: es aceptable usar "piensas" aqui en sitio de "piensa usted"?)

¿Cualquiera ha leído Sidi por Arturo Pérez-Reverte? Yo fue disfrutandola pero la historia tornó islamófobo de repente y luego se fue arruinar para mi. No lo sé si continuar con el libro.

Entonces yo busqué sus nombre y 'islamofobia' y retornó un artículo – sobre otra obra de él – cuyo introducción explicarlo perfectamente (https://www.laizquierdadiario.com/La-historia-de-Europa-segun-Perez-Reverte-una-leccion-de-ignorancia-islamofobia-y-neocolonialismo). Él utiliza

la lógica binaria "salvaje - civilizado", que tanto sirvió para deshumanizar a las gentes racializadas desde los tiempos de la explotación colonial, y para marginar y/o expulsar a todos aquellos que no cumplían con la "normalidad" …

Pero la "normalidad" de este libro parece europeos cristianos (y quizás los blancos).

¿Cualquiera has encontraste algo similar con otras novelas?

¿Es tan decepcionando, no?

(Si hay errores en mi español, correctalo si te quieras, pero no hace falta si no quieres.)