Weapons can be used for defense or offense. Just be sure that you can sleep at night with the potential consequences - and that your work may be used on the wrong side just as easily as the right side.

On the other hand, if you're working for an Israeli defense company, you can be pretty certain where your results are going to go, and should maybe just... not.

I mean, I'm not entirely disagreeing with your cynicism here, but my point is that the intention of this message is towards voters.

And, for that matter, the same electorate that votes is the same that, potentially, revolts. Though I wouldn't put my hopes high there either.

More like “the ideology has created fundamentally broken and selfish, if not evil, people, and expecting anything to get more righteous and fraternal in a country/society that was created through genocide and grew/grows stronger through murder and pillage is just silly”.

You don’t think I pray for the West and wish they would turn to God and righteousness?

For some reason, I'm disinclined to take the word of religions which sanction slavery and pedophilia (and expanded through genocide and grew stronger through murder and pillage) as the final word on righteousness.

The whole world basically has suffered the greed and rage of Western Europeans through millennia, I also would like for it to stop! 😭

Lord.

Again, this is not aimed at the administration

It's aimed at voters who might otherwise sit out.

The goal is not to shame the administration, it's to point out to the "This is just normal politics" fence-sitters that no, it's fucking not.

Ok but now you’re mixing up socialism and communism, I’ve lived under communism and it was not pleasant. So I’ll never ever like it in practice.

No?

Communism, as the shorthand for the ideology, refers to any worldview with an end-goal of a stateless, moneyless, classless society. Communism, in common usage, often refers to, specifically, Marxist-Leninist interpretations (which are ironically not very Marxist) like the Soviet Union.

However, these Marxist-Leninist interpretations themselves did not claim to have reached communism, the end-goal of a stateless, moneyless, classless society. They claimed to have reached a socialist workers' state, and I can quote any number of official statements from the USSR and PRC to that effect.

They reached nothing of the sort, of course, but when most people are discussing what next step we should take, various forms of socialism are what's being discussed, not the end-goal of communism.

Like come on really? You’re debating me on the FACT that humans are selfish at their core and will always help their own first? I had no idea this was even up for debate

The idea that selfishness is humanity's foremost trait ignores man as a social animal and the immense amount of self-sacrifice - even for strangers - people are capable of even without a firm ideological basis.

People are selfish. People are also selfless. 'Human nature' is not something that can be boiled down to simple platitudes to justify an ideological view.

Communism sounds great but it assumes that the people who rise to the top and run the government are going to share the wealth. Humans aren’t like that, we are too selfish. The ones who reach the top will always take more and give less to the ones at the bottom

Assuming, for the sake of the argument, that's true...

The response should not be to lean into that and make taking more and giving less the foundation of your society. Nearly every improvement in the organization of civilized societies for the past 3000 years has been based around increasing rigidity of redistribution of wealth and decentralization of power, not its concentration.

An imperfect solution is better than a decision which honestly claims to be no solution at all.

"Socialism won't solve our problems" is a legitimate argument, perhaps, against utopian types. But those of us looking to make life less shitty by 10%-20% by implementing a socialist system are less impressed by the appeal to imperfection.

Do you really think the provisional government would have just lasted if Lenin had stayed home, so to speak? From where I’m standing it seems someone else from some faction somewhere would have started their own coup.

The previous coup attempt against the provisional government failed because there was no mass appetite in the population for a coup from the right, and the Bolshevik coup only succeeded at the cost of - again - sparking a civil war. The Mensheviks and SRs were both onboard with the provisional government; neither of them were likely to attempt a coup. Most of the right-wing elements had been stripped of power, and the military refused to follow a right-wing putsch attempt. If Lenin had stayed home, so to speak... what faction does that leave to attempt a coup?

It hardly seems ridiculous to think that the legislature that everything since the overthrow of the Tsar had been working towards - complete with arguments and concessions with competing factions - finally assembling after the long-awaited elections might have forged something lasting had the Bolsheviks not closed it down by military force, yes.

There are many systems that reduce the risk, but none so far that eliminate it.

All systems are made up of people, and all rules are only relevant insofar as people are willing to follow and enforce them...

I don’t think you can separate it like that given just a few months passing in between. Once they had power, they were pretty single-minded about reinforcing it and leaving nothing to chance.

"They tried to make their own reign stable" isn't really an argument against them creating a power vacuum, no more than the Tsarist obsession with autocracy as a means of stability counts against the Tsar's incompetence leading to a power vacuum.

Almost a year passed, in which Russia remained cohesive enough to maintain participation in WW1 and have radical, nationwide elections.

I mean, didn’t Spain and Portugal do something similar with South America?

Fighting very separate polities.

If they were actually fighting together you’d have a point, but what happened is that they drew a line on a map through Poland, independently expanded to it, and then didn’t cross it for a little while.

'Independently expanded to it' is a funny way of saying "Invading within two weeks of each other, causing the sudden dissolution of the Polish war plan, then meeting in the middle and having a joint victory parade".

Oh, you meant the US. Sure, Soviet blood, American steel.

And without Britain staying in the fight, the US wouldn't have gotten involved in Europe at all. And without Britain staying in the fight, a massive amount of air power would have been available for Operation Barbarossa.

Mandatory note: Fuck the elites of red fascist nations, this is just pointing out the immense hypocrisy of conservatives. When it's painted red, it's bad - when it's painted gold, it's apparently Just Good Business.

... also, secondary mandatory note, the elites of many Soviet-style nations lived worse lives than Western proletariat, other than the potential for managerial-style exploitation of subordinates (both practically and sexually), and achieved that standard of living only by import of massive amounts of Western consumer goods. Kings of the Ashes...

I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm sure it's a fucking nightmare to live in, but visually I feel like it has a very captivating charm.

Based 🙏

China is absolutely not 'playing nice' right now with other countries, even excluding the US-aligned bloc.

while china has been fostering better ties and attempting to do no bad

what

Let me put it this way: in many places around the world the people are allowed to challenge the state’s claim to properties in courts with varying success. Your step one would take that away, so it is leaning in the direction of authoritarian.

Bruh, in state societies without widespread private land ownership there remains a distinction between state and public lands, and the state can be challenged with regards to ownership or usage rights in courts.

But I’m pretty sure Marx was more interested in Option B, I don’t think he was interested in using politics to build a strong democracy but rather wanted to topple any current system and hope a firect democracy pops up over night.

Reformism was not his first choice, but he mused at several points that bourgeois democracies with strong workers' movements, like the USA and the UK at his time (big RIP to our labor movements), could potentially reform without mass revolution.

“It would perhaps be as well if things were to remain quiet for a few years yet, so that all this 1848 democracy has time to rot away.”

I'm unfamiliar with that quote or its provenance, but considering that the entire point of the disappointments of 1848 was that the revolutions, both liberal and socialist factions failed, and the 'concessions' offered in response by the established authoritarian regimes were nothing more than window dressing (with executions for flavor), thinking that the sheen of that farce needed to fade before further action could be taken is not unreasonable.

“…it happens that society is saved as often as the circle of its ruling class is narrowed, as often as a more exclusive interest asserts itself over the general. Every demand for the most simple bourgeois financial reform, for the most ordinary liberalism, for the most commonplace republicanism, for the flattest democracy is forthwith punished as an assault upon society and is branded as Socialism.”

How is that in any way in opposition to democracy or even reform?

“…the first step in the revolution by the working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle for democracy.”

I repeat the second statement.

These are three separate Karl Marx posts and they’re extremely vague, but he has been somewhat consistent that any form of government that is not direct democracy must be “overthrown” or “fought” or “toppled”.

In the long term, sure. If your goal is direct democracy without a state ("Communism"), then the goal is to eventually get there. But Marx was always very clear that intermediate steps were not fucking nothing, and in many cases were necessary.

You may need to jump over the gap on a broken bridge, but better a broken bridge to jump over than the whole goddamn river.

Teleporting to Albania seems OP, I'd definitely take it.

A) An Authoritarian state who controls all property with no method to implement such state.

... what?

Abolition of private land ownership in favor of state land ownership is not inherently 'authoritarian', nor is it particularly impossible to implement.

B) An Anarchy where, since nobody owns anything, the influential will go wherever they want and take whatever they want.

You... you do realize that public lands does not mean "First come first serve", right?

Man, this is basic pre-modern society shit. Read up on medieval village commons. Shit, read up on public lands today.

What’s up with lemmy “anarchists” being crypto-tankies?

Lonely terminally online folks tend to shift their views to accommodate their online communities, and the main anarchist instance on Lemmy is all about welcoming Nazis Red Fash to their table.

For many, then, it's a small move to normalize the positions of Red Fash. After all, Red Fash Bot #304 talks with you about Linux and video games and hates "turbolibs"! Surely a few 'problematic' positions can be forgiven in light of that, or even justified...?

Deep-cover 😔