WATCH: stirring call for networked, global resistance to catastrophe and corruption

boing
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Small-c communism is probably antithetical to government, because to have a government one must have at least two classes, the governors and the governed, but actual communism would have to be strictly egalitarian. Otherwise the governors would almost certainly appropriate the best and most stuff for themselves as a kind of property. Certainly this is what occurred in nominally communist states like Russia, China, and their imitators. Lenin admitted as much when he said, in 1924, that the system he and his colleagues were creating was ‘state capitalism’. This was somehow supposed to transform itself into cooperative socialism and then communism, but of course it didn’t.

Many hunter-gatherer communities may have been communistic, and in the historical, even the modern period, we know of successful instances of communism (such as the Dukhobors and some other religious groups). The difficulty seems to be in scaling things up, plus, of course, the epidemic group mental disease of slavery as embodied in the state and its inherent violence.

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Everyone, of course, thinks that he or she will be the redistributed to, not the redistributed from.

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Indeed. While communism is a failure when it comes to production, capitalism is a failure when it comes to distribution. When the capitalist can produce all with virtually no labour, then who has money to buy anything that is produced.

Ironically Milton Friedman’s negative income tax may provide the Keynesian stimulus that fixes the distribution problem with capitalism in a way that satisfies the left’s problem with inequality.

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Those are amazing graphs.

If they are correct, it seems hard to avoid the conclusion that the correlation between “increased energy consumption per capita” and “reduction in absolute poverty” is damn near unity.

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I call dibs on the guy with the axe!

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Well if you ignore RFK and MLK being assassinated, the USSR invading Czechoslovakia, and Nixon being elected President, I guess it was an okay year.

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Hurrrrr.

I didn’t say everything that happened in that especially tumultuous year was positive.

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Not a single specific stated in the video, not even the topics alleged by the title of the BoingBoing post. All I kept thinking was, “What’s the difference between this and a Teahadist militia video?”

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Yes of course if you use absolute poverty as $1.25 a day

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Has it already started?

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It really is easy to imagine a completely different police response if Black Lives Matter did something like that.

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I imagine something like the Philadelphia PD’s bombing of MOVE and subsequent hysterical white support for the end result.

ABC News’ headline shown in the above link from Jim is positively repulsive. One camp of Orwell’s readers took “newspeak” as a prediction of social disaster; others, those in power, have evidently taken it as prescription. Of course this state of affairs has gotten so bad it’s cliche at this point.

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This is an excellent propaganda video. It is internationalist. It embraces both reactive and proactive resistance, while at the same time, explicitly saying we need a global mass bottom up movement. That we need to create a new world, and it will be a fight. For the people saying it ‘doesn’t offer solutions’, you are just showing your ignorance of the people/images pictured. These people obviously have a libertarian left socialist bent. Hence the pictures of the Zapatistas, and the women’s Kurd IPJ. As well as, you didn’t see enough black and red flags in there? Har.
They did a video without anarchist or socialist propaganda. It’s pretty obvious to this old working class american, the whole video is predicated on building a ‘social’ and real democracy both in our social lives, and economic democratic lives. Didn’t you hear the phrase “governments have been overthrown only to be replaced by just as repressive ones.” This video offered a real answer just without dogma, with conservatives and liberals always criticize the left for, and still it is ‘wrong’. Har. The answer is to build a new world outside of capitalism, and hierarchical rich peoples’ democracy
and fight like hell. Pretty obvious to me.

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Is it build and then fight? Or fight and then build? And is build and not fight an option?

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Which implies that every time it’s been tried it has failed in the implementation stage, not even getting to operations. I think that’s very telling as to its viability!

I think you kind of hit the nail on your later comments: something like communism may work for small, tribal groups, but in praxis it doesn’t scale. And small, tribal groups have their own problematical nature (like the fact that orders of magnitude more people get killed in warfare in such societies).

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“Comrade” is a comrade indeed. As all anarchists have always been to the real people. Not the rulers.
Anarchism, or socialist libertarianism, or just call it participatory democracy and participatory economics, is completely the standard of what regular people would call ‘orderly’. It would be a system that would be so inherently bottom up both economically and socially, that waste would be near non existent. How do we get there? I don’t see it in my lifetime. But these are SOCIAL and ORGANIZATIONAL philosophies and political ideologies. These are not party lines that get elected and then implemented. The people move towards them. And have implemented them for hundreds of years as ‘comrade’ points out. It is nothing new at all. We have just always been crushed by the rich and their militaries. Nothing new there either. Simple demands for a 40 hour week are still met with bullets all over the world. Just because ‘us left libertarians’ haven’t fixed everything for the layabouts, still believe in leaders to save us, doesn’t mean the social and economic philosophy will die. It never has and never will. When ‘liberals’ and progressives realize capitalism is bankrupt, we might get somewhere in the ‘first world countries’. Meanwhile, we will fight till we die, and you can make fun of us as we do so. Nothing new. And the USA will probably do a sweep of many of us soon, when things go bust again. We know that. And we expect liberals to wash their hands of us, when ‘we’ have always done the pressure and street work against the right. Nothing new.

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Part of the problem of scaling up is that humans have mostly lived under conditions of slavery and other forms of domination for thousands of years, so the practices of domination, submission, and exploitation have sunk deeply into the culture. However, it might be possible to create a different culture, starting small (this has been done in many places) and working up from there. Agreed, it’s a long shot. But as the alternative is probably self-annihilation, it seems like one worth taking.

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starrygordon’s account specifically speaks to the Marxist strategy of revolution. This model has indeed proven to be ineffective and is, generally speaking, no longer favored or even relevant in most contemporary communist or revolutionary left currents.

That doesn’t mean there still aren’t hangers-on.

However, since the very beginnings of communism (starting especially with the clear break that occurred in the 1889 Second International, which expelled the anarchists), there have been two camps–those that favored the state capitalist route (Marx’s camp), and those who thought it would fail (Bakhunin’s camp).

The former camp went on to become Marxist-Leninists, Maoists, etc.

The latter were and have always been “libertarian communists,” or anarchists.

Marxists historically have devoted much time and energy to eradicating anarchists and others known as “left communists.”

Lenin and his Party elites, for example, crushed an anarchist rebellion in Kronstadt, which is to say nothing of the thousands of dissident communists and anarchists who they sent to die in the work camps.

Orwell’s firsthand account of serving in the POUM militias during the Spanish Civil War contains a rather grim description of how the bulk of the Stalinist forces and arms stayed behind the front lines in 1937, waiting for the anarchists and left communists to come home from the front, at which time they were hunted down and killed by the Stalinists. Orwell himself lost a number of friends this way and was forced to flee the country in order to evade capture.

So, Marxist-Leninists and Maoists occupy, generally speaking, the right side of the political spectrum within communist currents.

So it’s reductive to lump all communists, and their strategies, together. It simply looked to millions of people, for about a century, that the Marxist-Leninist strategy would prevail.

We are now in a period in which the left is pursuing more anarchistic currents, because generally speaking these have seen the greatest success for some time now and have a more popular appeal.

Still, the general consensus is that what has been tried unsuccessfully before should not be attempted again, which includes the last anarchist revolutions that were to some degree internally successful but failed largely due to international intervention.

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eehh, no thanks


Vague description of malaise followed by an even more vague prescription for a solution, surging music, clip of a violent mob in Baltimore throwing rocks at cops?

A bunch of BS is what it is.

Ironically, the woodbine website/facebook is a little more down to Earth
 photos of CSA pick-ups, hipsters making Sauerkraut, talks, and a small-scale protest agains turkish oppression (in central park).

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Well, I’m not an acidificado of communism, so I ask: why was it that the marxist path got the upper hand and spent to much energy quashing the competition? Was it merely historical accident, or was there some systemic reason?

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