And you really should read CoB if you think everybody does not have a natural right to life, and that we need oppressive top down systems to control us.
Direct action, mutual aid, build up from the grassroots to empower people not politicians.
We can’t reeducate or shoot the reactionaries because that would make us evil authoritarian tankies
Oh no, the reactionaries we didn’t reeducate or shoot instituted an armed takeover and now they’re torturing and killing us along with countless innocent people! It was worth it to preserve our moral purity, though
Real revolutionary socialist states: “evil authoritarian red fash, why can’t you be instantly perfect utopias?!!!?”
Failed revolutions: pure, good, unburdened by reality and the fact that every capitalist state wants you dead, totally would have established a worker’s utopia in a week if it succeeded, despite being besieged on all sides.
The Bread Book is good, if more people read it I think the world would be a better place. However, I firmly disagree with your analysis on the merits of Marxism. I find it insulting that you claim I don’t believe everyone has a right to life, and it’s disingenuous to say that a publicly owned, centrally planned, democratically run government is the same as a Capitalist State.
I can recommend Marxist theory, if you’d like an intro list.
That sounds great, but you can’t get there from here, at least not directly, because the capitalists will always kill it in its crib. That’s one of the reasons that such a configuration has never lasted more than a few months. If you had read Blackshirts and Reds, you might understand this.
But a real socialism, it is argued, would be controlled by the workers themselves through direct participation instead of being run by Leninists, Stalinists, Castroites, or other ill-willed, power-hungry, bureaucratic cabals of evil men who betray revolutions. Unfortunately, this “pure socialism” view is ahistorical and nonfalsifiable; it cannot be tested against the actualities of history. It compares an ideal against an imperfect reality, and the reality comes off a poor second. It imagines what socialism would be like in a world far better than this one, where no strong state structure or security force is required, where none of the value produced by workers needs to be expropriated to rebuild society and defend it from invasion and internal sabotage.
The pure socialists’ ideological anticipations remain untainted by existing practice. They do not explain how the manifold functions of a revolutionary society would be organized, how external attack and internal sabotage would be thwarted, how bureaucracy would be avoided, scarce resources allocated, policy differences settled, priorities set, and production and distribution conducted. Instead, they offer vague statements about how the workers themselves will directly own and control the means of production and will arrive at their own solutions through creative struggle. No surprise then that the pure socialists support every revolution except the ones that succeed.
The pure socialists had a vision of a new society that would create and be created by new people, a society so transformed in its fundaments as to leave little opportunity for wrongful acts, corruption, and criminal abuses of state power. There would be no bureaucracy or self-interested coteries, no ruthless conflicts or hurtful decisions. When the reality proves different and more difficult, some on the Left proceed to condemn the real thing and announce that they “feel betrayed” by this or that revolution.
And you really should read CoB if you think everybody does not have a natural right to life, and that we need oppressive top down systems to control us.
Direct action, mutual aid, build up from the grassroots to empower people not politicians.
Sounds great, can you grassroots me some air defense systems so my grassroots mutual aid non-state can stop getting bombed by the USAF? Thanks.
We can’t reeducate or shoot the reactionaries because that would make us evil authoritarian tankies
Oh no, the reactionaries we didn’t reeducate or shoot instituted an armed takeover and now they’re torturing and killing us along with countless innocent people! It was worth it to preserve our moral purity, though
Real revolutionary socialist states: “evil authoritarian red fash, why can’t you be instantly perfect utopias?!!!?”
Failed revolutions: pure, good, unburdened by reality and the fact that every capitalist state wants you dead, totally would have established a worker’s utopia in a week if it succeeded, despite being besieged on all sides.
The Bread Book is good, if more people read it I think the world would be a better place. However, I firmly disagree with your analysis on the merits of Marxism. I find it insulting that you claim I don’t believe everyone has a right to life, and it’s disingenuous to say that a publicly owned, centrally planned, democratically run government is the same as a Capitalist State.
I can recommend Marxist theory, if you’d like an intro list.
That sounds great, but you can’t get there from here, at least not directly, because the capitalists will always kill it in its crib. That’s one of the reasons that such a configuration has never lasted more than a few months. If you had read Blackshirts and Reds, you might understand this.