Human nature is a socio-historical phenomenon, fatalism is in part structural. I mostly agree with you in the form of what you think moves history forward, I just think its a little more descriptive than it is a theory of change. I guess, fatalism resists developing a theory of change, which is why it appears to us as consistent and logical. That little quirk is something I’m gonna have to think about more, thanks.

I def have a similar concern but I’m a critical pedagogist which means the students are, amomg other things, there to learn about the death of the billionaire class from one of its nastiest defenders. She may be teaching writing but not as an authority

Cowbee my friend, we are probably not gonna see eye to eye on this. Still mad respect.

The justification is also an accidental quirk of history. The administration of national sovereignty, especially during wartime, requires a layer of administrative workers. The og Bolsheviks were a pretty distinct org with their own character, made up of bourgeois educated intellectuals, a large bellicose element from Russian society, and since the Bolsheviks had the best penetration into the lives of the workers a significant proletarian membership that kept the party afloat during the years of severe tsarist repression from 1907-1912ish, that was itself blended between urban proletarians and peasants transitioning toward proletarianism. But when the time came to administer the Russian state, the intellectual Bolsheviks were spread extremely thin.

The period after the revolution saw a massive influx of members into the Bolsheviks. Were these members revolution hardened Marxists? No. The Bolsheviks were a micro minority up until the April thesis. They swelled in membership immediately prior to the revolution, but these new members were among the workers and soldiers. But after the revolution, they included intellectuals from all stripes: former Mensheviks, SRs and moderates (that is moderate toward the Tsar.) Many people resumed their former posts within the Russian government out of necessity for the state to function. The contradictions during this period were compounded again and again because of the civil war.

This moderate, self interested administrative body is what I refer to as “Stalinist”, since I don’t really consider the post revolutionary Russian bureaucracy a product of Stalin so much as I consider Stalin a product of this bureaucracy. Stalin and the bureaucracy became dynamically fused to one another via mutual self-interest. The banning of factions, one of the major fuck ups of the revolutionary government in 1921, only heightened these contradictions as the Bolshevik party became the primary avenue for naked opportunism.

The Russian revolution was revolutionary and proletariat via the soviets, but when the productive capacity was crushed and the soviets were banned, robbed of the productive base and therefore the concrete power of the workers, what was left? There was no proletarian power represented in the government, especially as Stalin started replacing the old Bolsheviks, who at least had an ideological commitment to worker power, with people loyal to him and the wider project. This bureaucracy had a bourgeois character because it was a middle administrative class ascentionist project, like we’ve seen historically overthrow and maintain power over aristocracies. And honestly I don’t hate this. Lenin would have accepted a bourgeois revolution that completely overthrew the Tsar over a socialist revolution that regressed back into Tsarism. Stalin was extremely moderate toward bourgeois revolution, and Trotsky would have been fine with it too if he had taken leadership. That was what existed, that was all that was left, and that is what persisted into the future. The ideological commitment to socialism was admirable but mixed in that where there was no material basis for socialism it could only exist ideologically.

Here we may run into conflict between definitions of socialism, since I know you define socialism in an AES kind of way, where as I define it as a practical progressive struggle. We’ve discussed this before. Socialism is a movement of the mass base for the class interests of this base, demcent is a way for the masses to appoint leaders in a transparent Democratic way, and communicate material conditions across the uneven development of the proletarian movement, not for leaders to institute top-down discipline. The leaders submit to the discipline of the mass movement, not the other way around, which is bourgeois centralism. In Russia, the proletarian mass movement was crushed by the Capitalists and Tsarists, and what was left over was admittedly much better than what would have come without the revolutionary leadership of the Bolsheviks. But when the base was crushed what was left was a deeply troubled state apparatus that had a distinct class character that could never have been proletarian. Like I said, this is a quirk of history, a consequence of a socialist worker revolution in a country that was deeply blended between peasant and proletarian in character.

My understanding comes from Trotsky’s works, so HRR, HRR through Brest Litovsk, and Revolution Betrayed; Paul Averich’s Kronstadt 1917; essays by Loren Goldner, and other sources. I find it a little annoying that you brought up the “justification” as if I’m just making shit up. I understand that my “left Trot” political orientation probably auto disqualifies me from a certain perspective. But I’ll def consider any other justifications, articles def appreciated if they pointedly address some of the points I’ve made.

This is bait.

Rolling up my sleeves to fight for both anarchists and MLs, effectively alienating myself from both.

The model is obviously Russia. In Russia, something very instructive happened: the working class legit overthrew the Tsar but was very close to giving in to moderates who were unambiguously going to reinstall the tsar as part of a constitutional monarchy, and carry out violent martial law via Kornilov to accomplish this.

The revolutionary leadership of the Bolsheviks was able to to defeat the capitalists and the tsarists, to “finish” the revolution, but what came after was a horrible civil war that destroyed what little productive capacity Russia had developed. Without factories, there’s no workers, without workers, there’s no workers councils (soviets) to hold power. What was left over was the bureaucracy that developed during wartime. This is the class that developed their own interests apart from the working class, effectively becoming a new bourgeois to administer the mixed economy of Stalinism.

Yes Anarchists should be wary of this, and yes “authoritarian statists” are IMO no more revolutionary than a moderate social bureaucrat. I just wish there was better discussion around the practical history of these movements. Even Paul Averich, the anarchist historian, blames events, not ideology, on the degeneration of the Russian revolution.

What you’re calling a revolution, is a coup. A violent one off that amounts to a power grab of one affinity group over an entrenched power.

What a revolution actually is, is a fundamental change to the social structure of society, it is the “evolutive” process that you describe.

This is a widely adopted paradigm all over the revolutionary left that includes anarchists, Marxists, and left socialists. The revolution of capitalism took hundreds of years, and occurred unevenly all over the world. There were wars and coups, sometimes those wars were progressive, sometimes regressive, sometimes a war starts progressive and ends regressive, and sometimes the opposite occurs. The mindset of the people must be changed, but often these changes occur in messy ways. The mindset of the masses is not something that happens only in peoples minds, any more than a “evolutive” change can’t occur as a legal legitimacy. I’m not sure why you want to reframe revolution as the conservative definition.

The part of your comment I’m most critical of, is that it amounts to a gradualist theory of change. This really isn’t descriptive of progressive movements which assert themselves on history, dragging along the regressive elements kicking and screaming. Often this elicits a counter reaction, but this doesn’t indicate a historic failure of progress. It is IMO a failure of progressive movements to not push far enough into their demands, accepting compromises from the center that amount to huge losses for the mass movement.

I agree that there is an incredibly important role for our movements to try and educate the masses, before, during, and after the revolution. Some of the great failures of revolution, such as the German revolution 1917-1925ish, was a failure to educate, which led to a tendency for movements to become coopted, or putsch, which definitely demonstrates the parts of your comment that are correct. Other revolutionary moments, such as the self-emancipation of black slaves during the USAmerican Civil War, are much more complex. The planter class was effectively abolished, but Reconstruction was halted and partially rolled back by extremist reactionaries. You wouldn’t advocate a policy of gradualism against the KKK.

Decolonization is inherently a violent process that is messy and fraught with contradiction. The indigenous people are absolutely justified to fight for their freedom and sovereignty against colonial forces which dominate and rob their lands directly. How these movements degrade into neo-colonies is a subject in and of itself, I’d only mention that the imperialism of capitalism has a persistent character of violence and class war that victimizes the masses every day. The gradualist approach is nakedly ineffective against this persistent hegemony and dominance.

I’ve never met an Anarchist with views quite like yours, I know Anarchism is not a totality but a plurality by nature, and though I am not an Anarchist I admire this kind of commitment to plurality and individual freedom. But I’ve never met a non-revolutionary Anarchist on the left.

I’m a man. It was a joke.

God, so sensitive

That’s fair, although I don’t have friends who play it either. Found a discord group with an active common and pick up games from there by and large. The game is also quite good solo IMO, especially with the Executor character I mentioned. Just thought I’d bring it up because Executor checks basically all of your boxes. I actually couldn’t get the hang of Sekiro until I played NR, so I feel a lot of fondness for NR since Sekiro is probably my fave FS game, and it used to frustrate the hell outta me, so getting over that hump was huge for me

To fascists, fascism is free speech and other free speech is fascism. To everyone else, a spade is a fuckin spade.

Take her wealth, use it to fund gender affirming care for her victims, and put her in prison until she’s willing to teach writing at a free community college

Other red flags:
Man owning Meta glasses.
Man using Meta products.
Man

I just completed a few runs of Elden ring with a parry build, it was really fun! Forced myself to develop parry strata for Malenia and PC Radahn. The more I played with it the more parryable attacks I discovered. Most of the time if an enemy is two handing a colossal weapon, you can’t parry. Otherwise there are tons of attacks that are parryable. Parrys absolutely trivialize lots of otherwise very difficult fights.

Historically, the way I like to play fs games is to like pick one strong build and use it all the way through. This doesn’t really work for ER, every boss is kinda like a puzzle with different weaknesses and strengths to defend against. So you need a few different approaches in your build unless you wanna struggle like hell using a slash weapon against like Radahn. Parry is like this too, its a good tool against many enemies, absolutely trivializes others, but doesn’t work well, or at all, against some others. Its just how the game is, IMO.

But there’s def some sides of it I don’t like. I really enjoy quick roll mechanic but the game gravitates toward heavy armor and a giant fuck off weapon. Being quick and nimble is hard, being unga bunga is easy. There’s not really incentive to develop a quick and nimble play style, eventually it becomes like a challenge run. I could not defeat like Malenia or even make real progress in the dlc with a light roll character. I accept it for what it is, but it doesn’t work for me. And yeah there’s probably a skill issue component, but I’ve completed probably 10 playthroughs of Elden Ring base game, and SOTE 4 times. I’ve platted every game since bloodborne, and have thousands of hours logged in soulsborne series, I got as good as I am going to get.

Sekiro is one of my favorites though, mastering the parry in Sekiro made me want to try a parry build in ER. I think my favorite thing about Sekiro is if I’m struggling with a boss, the strategy isn’t to find some gimmick, but to just play them straight, defect their attacks, focus on position and spacing, concentrate. It feels more honest to me. I also came from Bloodborne. Have you tried Nightreign? There is one character that is parry focused and is very fun.

I’d never considered how the algo might actually be improving user experience.

I still haven’t considered it, and I never will, but I never had

First of all, none of these downvotes are mine. Just to clarify, I don’t do that.

I did write a long response to you, but honestly, I don’t see the point. My objective in these spaces is to learn and educate. If you want to self medicate with asinine debate, find a different mark. There is nothing in your reply that merits repeating the points I already made and which you, intentionally or otherwise, ignored.

I appreciate the discussion. If you have anything you’d like to discuss related to reality, I’d hear you out.

This is all hypothetical. These are hypothetical houses and a hypothetical owner in a hypothetical market, frozen in time. There is a direct correlation between quantity and quality, since changes in quantity lead to changes in quality. This is a fundamental part of socialist theory of change. This is not a moral consideration, there is no “right amount.” Because there are absolutely no possible scenarios where someone owns 10 vacant houses and just loses money on them indefinitely. Is this someone who owns and maintains ten houses all for their own personal recreation and use? How can they afford 10 houses?

The discussion is about the difference between personal and private property. The definitions of these things are socially contingent. We cannot conduct analysis outside of the social context and be serious about truth or social transformation. There is no arbitrary number cut off, splitting this hair in this way is completely besides the point. There is no reason for someone to own and maintain 10 empty properties while others have nowhere to live. My point is even if we aren’t consciously capitalizing on the houses, the houses exist within a context. Broadly, that’s capitalism, and broadly the properties still function as part of capitalism whether the owner intends it or not. Trying to further abstract this hypothetical in a desperate search for a generalization that is so alienated from reality that you “might be” sort of correct if viewing the situation from one very narrow perspective does not help anyone understand the relationship between personal property and private capital. Because over time, at some point, circumstances beyond our ideals decide that our ten houses are worth more if they have a use value or an exchange value for us. The system asserts itself upon our lives, and there’s no real escape.

You have not discovered a loop hole by inventing a kind of property that has neither a use value or an exchange value. You’ve merely discovered a pit of idealism where material relations exist to suit one’s own confusion and wrong headedness. This is not a road to understanding socialism. But I do appreciate the contribution to discussion.

The distinction is a class distinction. Capitalism functions to.ensure that the greatest number of people do not own enough to be self-sufficient. Peasants under feudalism were self sufficient and communal, so the first job of the capitalists in countries that were industrializing was to buy up most/all the communal land, kick everybody off of it and force people to still work it for a paltry wage. There were still people who owned houses and land during this period, but legal and economic pressures forced people to give up what they owned and get a waged job. Even today, small family owned farms fall into debt and get bought up by large landowning companies/trusts and converted into farmland or data centers. It isn’t happening to everyone at once, but its a gradual process where it happens to a few people here and there. Some people buy farms and are successful, there are always contradictions and exceptions.

If you are able to sustain yourself 100% on your own production, that’s extremely rare. My cousin was a nurse practitioner and stacked cash his entire life, and in the last few years became like a yeoman. He butchers his own meat, he grows much of his own food, but still buys 10-20% of what he needs, mostly flour and grains. Under socialism, at least any socialism that I would fight for, he would be left alone, because he really isn’t the problem. The family that owns an ice cream shop or a bakery, particularly small businesses who help people, contribute to social movements, are against ice are pro Palestine, pay their workers well, these people own capital but they aren’t the problem.

The social relations you are describing are so far in the future that they are virtually impossible to understand. The first socialist revolution will shift power from the capitalists to the workers, but will not abolish private property. This will begin a phase of transition where private property will be collectivised. But the biggest barrier to collectivization isn’t just who owns what, it is the divisions in the working class. There are a lot of social relations that have to be “worked out”, and nobody is able to create a one sized fits all solution for everywhere (socialism is necessarily international) at once. Some places might hold on to private property and become more social democrat, retaining their ruling class in order to have higher wages for workers. Other areas might try to become fully communist. Some places will try to ban all private industry, some will collectivise some large industries and leave others privately owned.

Social conditions are deeply contradictory because people are contradictory. So trying to logically work these things out is always gonna be incomplete and imperfect. What matters is the working class continually working together to create better conditions for more people. Eventually, this collective effort will reach like a tipping point, and the next revolution will occur, which will be more humane, more democratic, and less violent than any that came before.

There is a ton of real world struggles that can actually be won (universal healthcare, universal jobs guarantee, robust social safety net, improved transportation/sanitation/education) that can be accomplished by just taxing the rich to the hilt. But in order to get there, we need solidarity and class unity. Once we have that, we can reorganize society in ways where the answers to your questions will have clearer solutions.

Socialism isn’t just a future, it is being able to see the resent society, the people in it and their needs and experiences, and working for a better society. IMO individual private/personal property questions will make more sense once the conditions for them have a concrete basis.

Actually, no. If you have 10 houses and 9 are vacant and remain vacant then your nine vacant houses are contributing to the surplus that keeps rents high. Landlords not only rent homes but crucially, keep homes/units empty to control rent prices. Developers and landlords often work hand in glove with local governments to craft policies for just this purpose. Blackstone holds a high number of empty houses in their portfolio, it would be silly to believe that those homes are not capital.

Personal vs. Private property is not really an individual choice but a systemic set of incentives and consequences. What happens when one of the houses has property taxes that come due? What happens when the roof leaks and needs replaced? In the winter, pipes in vacant buildings are kept from freezing by running water, and there’s going to be electric and/or water costs associated with that maintenance. will it just remain vacant while the owner hemorrhages money indefinately? If all ten units are empty and creating no income, and the owner has no plan to appreciate them as assets to resell them (because if the owner does, then they become capital) then is the owner really just like a wage worker, or do they have capital that makes them enough money that they can have 10 houses for personal use?

I’m sorry, but you are misunderstanding how capitaliam functions as a system. If someone has one extra house, maybe because of circumstances, I could see your point. But ten? No at that point they’re practically no different from a landlord, as they are propping up rent prices whether they intend to or not. As long as there are ten families who need homes who can’t get housing, that is private capital whether the owner uses it to make money or not.

I see the comma now, but Percy Bysshe Shelley was an incredible writer who is studied and lauded, rightly, on his own merit. Anyone reading this thinking Mary’s husband is insignificant compared to Frankenstein needs to read Ozymandias or The Masque of Anarchy right now and witness this beautiful, humanistic and liberatory spirit.

Marry Shelley’s husband was not John Polidori, it was Percy Bysshe Shelley. Surprised no one picked this up. Percy was an amazing poet.

John Polidori was in love with Mary, but was not married to her

Idk you’re basically asking people to think in a way that they really don’t process info. Its akin to being like “in order to understand my point you have to complete this trigonometry problem” and they’re just gonna go, “nah” and then revert to their heuristic.

They might like Facebook, or really rely on google. So all you can do is talk a little bit about alternatives. Since all these companies spy and steal data, they are speaking from a place of like resignation. Asking to stop using any service is kind of a maximum demand, not in essence (I actually don’t believe in min/max political demands) but in affect. Its like, to stop using google would be a major change, require some intimidating technical expertise (are you gonna offer IT support for their Grapheme phone/Linux Mint computer?) and then all the other services are just gonna steal their data anyways. Leaving Facebook is scary and hard, its like an addiction. And like all addictions you can fully know that something is wrong, and still be afraid or fail to quit it. There has to be a breaking point and you’re not gonna be able to offer that in one conversation.

The better strategy is to try and find common ground on problems that people are concerned about, like data centers, and then offer actions or political leadership. If we really care about an issue, then the best method I have found is to schedule one on ones and try and draw people into work. If you want to teach then you need a theory of pedagogy and the idea that good ideas can replace bad ideas is fundamentally broken.