Nola

I don’t think lynchings have been the only way human groups have dealt with crimes against innocents though, historically or presently.

And most of what you are talking about is behavior under capitalist or feudalist systems.

And most crime under those systems is born out of poverty.

I have not heard of the Zapatista’s engaging in routine lynchings for example. The biggest threats to them have not been irrational lynch parties inside their society, it had been the capitalist forces outside of it trying to violently conquer them.

And again, I am not an anarchist, so I feel weird trying to speak too deeply past my own understanding of their positions or things I have some crossover beliefs in as well.

I mean this is sort of backdooring itself into the trove of arguments and theory around why a communist revolution has to be an international liberation movement, and why you need a revolutionary vanguard cause you can’t hope to achieve communism while capitalist imperialism is still around.

Which is precisely why the question of socialism/communism or Anarchism and how to achieve it goes beyond just seizing control of the state or reorganizing production and the relationship with the state within national borders. It’s also became heavily about surviving and overcoming an international system of capitalist power that has both the material incentive and institutional capacity to prevent those alternatives from succeeding.

I don’t think many anarchists are arguing for societies comprised of a billion people…Almost like they are explicitly wanting to go in the opposite direction and eliminate such a state.

And just again for clarity, I am not an anarchist, but I also think it’s silly to get this worked up over an ideology it’s not even clear people have ever spent any time trying to understand in good faith.

Cause you said they all devolved into dictatorships and that is factually inaccurate.

Every example in the OP is from a revolution that occurred in response to an existing non-democratic, capitalist, authoritarian state.

So the revolutions took over states that were in fact not democratic. This is not a moral judgement but a clarification of fact.

Another clarification is the notion of “Have Always”

Do you think those listed are the only examples?

Care to explain the Paris Commune? Allende in Chile? The socialist republic in Spain? Arbenz in Guatemala? Lumumba and the pan african movement in Congo? Nicaragua? The PKI and Sukarmo in Indonesia? And then in East Timor? Just to name a few

It is not a whataboutism to challenge your assertions of factual ignorance.

Could you explain for me what you think that ideology is and what specifically I said would dismantle that and why?

This is a society that is built around a system of forced for-profit market dependency that puts ownership enclosures over the land, commons, and productive forces into the hands of a small percentage of private capital owners then relies upon the forced dispossession of people from direct access to the means of subsistence (land, tools, resources) in order to create a class of individuals with no alternative but to sell their labor for a wage on the market so they can purchase the means of survival.

And that in order to enforce that requires a powerful state capable of using violence when necessary to uphold that.

So yeah, remove the enforcers and that system is likely to break down and a lot of people are going to try and loot and take what they need that they currently don’t have for survival in the short term.

It would also likely trigger our innate communal cooperative nature that has been key to our survival and evolution as a species.

I’m not personally an anarchist but I think you might be guilty of many of the things you accuse others of here.

I’m not even an anarchist but this is pretty easy to simply look at history and answer

It would be like most tribal societies throughout human history. Where small to even very large societal level groups rely upon a economic and social system of mutualism/reciprocity, central planning, and social standing.

People that are able and refuse to contribute would receive little beyond their basic needs, likely socially pilloried, or in extreme cases be asked to leave. And violence against innocents would be punished like in any society.

Like the one thing almost every single human society we have had evidence for it’s social structure has had a version of the Golden Rule.

Devolved?

Which of the listed nations on the bottom were revolutions that overthrew functioning free and fair democratic systems?

Most people also don’t know that the entire tankman saga happened as Chinese forces were LEAVING Tiananmen Square and he wasn’t run over. The tanks tried to go around then stopped and he climbed up and talked to the driver for a while then walked off with some people. And this all happened outside the foreign press hotel in an area that had been largely blockaded during that time.

Where western reports were going out speaking of tons of violence in areas near the square.

Which tankman has always been a peculiar moment in history cause in context it very much comes off like it was possibly staged by the CCP, or at least the CCP thought it might work in their favor PR wise, but ends up getting used in a way that is suggestive of that moment being a moment of CCP violence against the innocent.

And of course the even larger context of what was being protested was never and still is not really contextualized.

The system disciplines everyone is the fuller answer.

And AOC is actually a very good case study in how this happens even if you aren’t explicitly bought and sold

Cause in fact she is not deeply rooted in corporate super pacs or propped up heavily by conditioned billionaire money. The popular narrative that seems to dominate.

Instead she was disciplined by the system itself and the people she has to work with inside that system and the systems of influence in and outside of the government.

So replacing her is not going to be the core fix for this problem. The next person will face the same pressures and the same disciplining forces.

If the DSA had 100 members in congress things would be different, but even then certain mechanisms of discipline will never fully go away until a more fundamental change in the relationship of the state and who it serves and how it is controlled changes.

The only time people in the capitalist class are truly punished in America is if they defraud other capitalists or threaten the broader imperialist policies meant to protect US hegemonic capitalism…Enron, Savings and Loans, and Bernie Madoff.

So if he receives anything, based on history, it will be because of that and would be little more than a pyrrhic victory.

Certainly not a sign that suddenly healthcare CEOs will be dragged to the firing squads for denying cancer treatments to patients to boost shareholder value. Or that America’s institutions set up to protect this system are on the cusp of a reckoning over decades of imperialist exploitation.

I’m sure Kash Patel, the Trump DOJ, and an organization that has heavily functioned to preserve existing political and economic hierarchies will go thru the motions and corporate Dems will hold their hearings and make a pageantry of some things. And the result will be at best, a big wet fart, and at most, it will just be directed in a way that will end up advancing broader capitalist/imperialist interests.

Like say putting much stricter controls on the sale of AMD/Nvidia chips which will conveniently benefit all the AI companies who want China and even consumers to have less access to the underlying components of this tech. Which is the one area Jenson was at odds with AI. Open weight and broad access to AI is good for Nvidia, but not for the AI companies.

The big issue with American unions has been that capitalists were very slick with things like Taft Hartley and largely banned or made incredibly difficult sectoral bargaining.

That not only makes it very hard to unionize, it creates contradictions and alignment asymmetries that make the labor movement easier to discipline or suppress.

But as imperfect a vessel it is(american unions, for instance, were at times bulwarks of defending US imperialism), aside from actual revolution, no social democratic advancement has succeeded in a capitalist country without strong organized labor movements on their side.

This is a very good conversation about the connection with unions and socialism from a Marxist that is also colleagues or working in close proximity with other people at top levels of DSA strategy and thinking.

https://confrontingcapitalism.substack.com/p/why-socialists-fight-for-unions

If you think this stops with Nvidia you are missing the forest for the trees…AI companies want to put a militarized moat around their techno fiefdoms. In the words of Altman “if only all these people didn’t have DRAM at home”

“did you see the latest model break containment OMGOMG!!!” I guess the government should step in and serve as gatekeeper for who can have this “dangerous national security threatening” tech…I mean we just can’t risk some open weight chinese model or some incel with a local LLM hacking into the pentagon with a rogue AI, guess Antrhopic, Microsoft, X, and Google need to be allowed to form a cartel to control this dangerous tech and we should put strict restrictions on who can buy certain AI components…for national security of course.

That all swallows AMD too. Who is partnered with Anthropic.

Please don’t give them any more ideas lol, what OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic want is exactly more stuff like this.

They want a “moat” around their services. Protected by the most powerful government in the world, the US.

Almost everything these companies have done has been an attempt to keep this tech and it’s supply chain as closed and proprietary as possible.

Hell, Sam Altman is out there saying the quiet part out loud that they don’t even want consumers to have direct access to things like ram anymore.

And frankly, I wouldn’t be shocked if the reason this is happening is for that very reason. A justification they can carve out to justify letting Nvidia stock fall as they simultaneously lock down the tech in a way only US AI companies will be able to easily use it.

I think like almost everything else America does it will bite us in the ass longterm, but this is directly giving the AI companies what they want. And I suspect we are on the road to that happening.

Honest question, why should I give a shit that some CEO wanted to sell GPU’s to China?

Of all the things I would want to see an American CEO put into jail for, selling GPU’s to China(which everyone knew was happening) and being semi in favor of China’s open weight AI development strategy that would be better from a consumer perspective is close to the bottom of that list.

Put the CEO’s in jail for systematically exploiting global south labor for decades. For colluding to bribe politicians and override democratic processes to force data centers into communities. For stealing more productive human output in a few years then all the labor theft in the whole history of capitalism.

Throwing it all away?

Even after losing his job and the divorce settlement he’ll be one of the wealthiest people on the planet and to ever live.

It’s not like this is China where they will actually jail or execute CEO’s.

Capital still runs the show.

Just like third party’s, I wish it were this simple…

Putting DSA in charge of the DNC will still lead to whoever that is being disciplined by the same broad economic and systemic pressures as the current corporate Dems…assuming they don’t purge and block DSA before that.

You still have to fundraise, still have to staff the party, still have to support all the infrastructure to operate, still have to buy ads on oligarchy owned media, still have to provide resources for candidates etc. And that will still confer enormous power to the oligarchy to influence and discipline the party because there is currently no alternative base of organized power to counteract that.

This is not me arguing defeatism or some sort of pragmatic centrist bullshit, but it is to say that entryism can’t just be about replacement or it will fail.

Historically the only proletarian centered balance of power was not from the inside, but from the outside. Namely, organized labor and mass semi organized movements of people. The only group that can literally bring capitalists and imperialists to their knees by organizing things like strikes, mass boycotts, and coordinated vote conditioning in a way no singular politician in the American system can. It’s not a perfect tool, as history also shows, but that is also why IMO an entryist strategy should be centered first and foremost on making it easier to organize power outside of the two party system.

TBH all this shit is so farcical and humorous to me. Just the sheer absurdity of how this is playing out in the face of all the larger contradictions and moral rot that is just normalized, ignored, or outright encouraged in this economic sector.

This is a company that’s core growth trajectory now is to melt the planet for quarterly profit to keep a bubble going on a tech sector that wants to deskill workers and put rent-seeking enclosures around knowledge and expertise itself off the back of the largest theft of productive output in human history. Built off a supply chain dependent on slave-like labor for it’s basic resource inputs. Led by increasingly fascistic psychopathic unaccountable tech billionaires. Thats part of a larger economic system that requires constant exploitation and violent imperialism to maintain. But the thing that produces scandal in the zeitgeist and crisis inside this monstrosity is the PR hit from their CEO getting his dick sucked by some CCP baddie and breaking their HR rules about workplace romance.

I feel the term is both overused and improperly used most of the time, but this is the sort of example I think is fitting of the term Late Stage Capitalism.

The problem to me is the demand for feature parity and availability on both Microsoft specs. Same issue they forced on developers and consumers with the Xbox 360 with no HDD.

It does legitimately force an entire generation to design for the lowest common denominator and everyone pays for that opportunity cost.

If Microsoft just allowed companies the freedom to skip the Series S, or reduce more settings/features, then it wouldn’t be a problem.

But of course if Microsoft allowed that then consumers would be upset they can’t play every game and it would reduce the value proposition.

And from a consumer perspective, I hate that. So yeah, I dont want more Series S type consoles either.

Especially cause enough games for years continue to be cross platform so if money is an issue just stick to the cheaper last gen consoles and wait for the price drops