i don't know if you caught that at the end, there.

how's this for a simple explanation: the reason venezuela has been dealing with crippling food shortages since the death of chavez is that food production actually remains under the control of american multinationals that would prefer to export for profit than sell to the local population, and that this is happening with the tacit support of maduro?

they talk of everything except what matters, which is that resources continue to flow in a one-way direction.

i stated this countless times when he was alive: what made chavez special was that he controlled the military. this is my realism burbling back up again, and as usual i don't like the reality it presents. but, this is both the reason he survived and the reason his reforms were partially successful. the threat of force was real.

it evaporated on his death.

jun 6, 2014

the united states was violently anti-socialist centuries before the russian revolution and remains violently anti-socialist today. cuba may not be a perfect utopia, but it has ideas about common ownership that the united states cannot and will not tolerate. this thinking of a "cold war mentality" does not understand the historical war of american landowners against common ownership, which is a struggle that exists independently of the struggle for hegemony over europe.

if the americans are in a "cold war mentality" with cuba, they were in that same mentality when they crushed land revolts in the eighteenth century and when they crushed the occupy protests a few years ago. even it's use during the cold war, and especially in latin america, was generally little more than a flimsy excuse to exert property rights by extreme force. this has nothing to do with democracy, with castro, with dissidents or with russia. it has to do with ideas that the american elite has never and will never coexist peacefully with because, if exported, they would pose a threat to their own power.

Kevin J 1 year ago
The US as a whole was not "violently anti-socialist centuries before the russian revolution." In fact, there was quite a lot of sympathy for the labor movement especially among immigrants but also in society at large. In many places around the country, socialists were elected to local and state governments throughout the late nineteenth and most of the twentieth century, even during the Cold War. The idea that socialism is somehow inherently un-American and has no native history here or is some sort of alien ideology is incorrect. I do agree with you that the elites in the US are definitely violently anti-socialist and that the US used anti-Communism during the Cold War as a flimsy excuse to intervene in the affairs of Latin American countries.

jessica 1 year ago (edited)
+Kevin J i apologize if i wasn't clear.

jessica 1 year ago
an early source of violently anti-socialist writing from a prominent member of the united states elite is in the writings of james madison.

jessica 1 year ago (edited)
this is probably the most insightful paragraph in all of the literature written in the period. madison is explaining why he prefers a system of devolved power (states' rights) rather than a centralized federal government.

"The influence of factious leaders may kindle a flame within their particular States, but will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other States. A religious sect may degenerate into a political faction in a part of the Confederacy; but the variety of sects dispersed over the entire face of it must secure the national councils against any danger from that source. A rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project, will be less apt to pervade the whole body of the Union than a particular member of it; in the same proportion as such a malady is more likely to taint a particular county or district, than an entire State."

that is, the entire system was designed to limit the cancer of socialism to a small area where it can be isolated and attacked. it's modular thinking. divide and conquer. and it's pretty smart, if you're a powerful landowner trying to prevent an actual revolution.

Kevin J 1 year ago
The thing is, socialism, in particular the Marxist variety, did not exist until after the Revolutions of 1848 in Europe, long after Madison's time. While French socialism has its roots in the French Revolution, it isn't really an actual force until after the 1830s. I'm just trying to suggest that your timeline is a bit off, that's all.

jessica 1 year ago
+Kevin J it would be difficult to speak of industrial age economic systems before the industrial revolution. marxism doesn't make any more sense in a pre-industrial society than it does in a post-industrial one. but, ideas of collective ownership can be traced very far back into history. there were crusades launched against socialists in france. you just have to understand that the economic systems were different, so they had different forms - as future (current, really) forms of socialism in a post-industrial reality will not have much in common with marxism. madison lived in an essential feudal society, which meant that the socialism of his period had to do with social ownership of land (farming co-operatives, essentially) rather than social ownership of production. when there were revolutions in this period (and there were.), that's what it had to do with.

it's actually quite relevant, as cuba is not a productive force and does not threaten to export worker ownership of factories. the threat that cuba poses is in the way that it organizes farming and land use in general, and the place that it poses a threat is in the rest of latin america, which is largely still under the boot of american plantations. even venezuela still exports well over half of the food it produces, and the united states is it's largest customer.

but, there's a lesson here: this is how you get him. this is accidental. but he exposed just how fucking hard-headed he is and how glaring of a weakness it is.

he seems like he's very easily manipulated: you just have to go after his inflated ego with a trojan, and you can take total control of his system through the backdoor. 

had he just shut up about it, nobody would be talking about a commission that may actually outlast not just his time in office but his time left, in total. he could be fighting this for the rest of his life.

as it is, he's walking into a trap. and he could very well trip it and walk right past it before he even knows he's been tricked.

the fact that they're comparing the proposed commission into russian hacking to the warren commission and 9/11 commission (for real...) should not be lost on anybody: those were both statist cover-ups.

so, yeah: trump is going to have to shut up, eventually.

but, this is a strange topic for him to admit he's wrong about, for the first time in his life. you give him the keys to the oval office, and the first thing he does is admit he's wrong for the first time in his entire 70 years? bullshit.

when he quiets down, it's not going to be because he changed his mind so much as it's going to be because he's going to understand the context better. specifically, he shouldn't want this commission to get going. it will drag on for years. so, he's going to have to shut up or face it.

i'm an atheistic communist that agrees with the pope pius that the term is incoherent.

to start with, that quote from matthew is really ironic, because marx' argument against christianity was always that it co-opted revolution by promising an afterlife. marx was very explicit: there can never be a real socialist revolution until workers discard the idea of an afterlife. this is not an isolated thread, either. it was picked up by bakunin and also by kropotkin. it was really the central tactical idea on the left: how to get workers to discard this idea of the afterlife that is preventing them from revolting.

these christian societies were never classless, either. they always had supreme leaders. they could never be described as leftist.

but the biggest problem with christian socialism is that socialism argues that morality is a consequence of the economy, itself a consequence of technology. this is the central philosophical idea in marxism: that the social order follows the economic order. so, it's literally impossible to be a christian and a socialist at the same time, as understanding socialism means undercutting the very basis of christianity as a religion: it didn't come from god, it came from the economy. and, it equally follows that it would be impossible for the future moral and social order to be christianity if this is true.

i know these people exist. but they've lost the plot somewhere. it really doesn't make any sense.

listen: you can call yourself a christian socialist if you want, but somewhere along the way you lost the plot. it really is a gigantic contradiction. you have to take very narrow concepts of one or both of them in order to make it work.

if you don't want to live in a low income neighbourhood, then don't buy property in one.

what bothers me about trump isn't really his policies. i should quickly clarify: i mean relatively. it's not like i think clinton would have been much better. and, what the democrats in congress are broadcasting is that the direction they're going in might actually be worse.

in four years, we may find ourselves in the situation where we're stuck rationalizing that "at least trump doesn't want to start a war with russia."

what bothers me is the delusional level of optimism that's sprouting up - this idea that trump is somehow different. and, that's what i aim to target, primarily.

this is the correct analysis:

https://theintercept.com/2017/01/06/underwhelming-intel-report-shows-need-for-congressional-investigation-of-dnc-hack/

no. stop. the evidence is in front of you. he's asking for $10 billion dollars, without any sort of serious costing. all professional estimates suggest it's going to cost more like ten times that to build an actual wall.

if he was serious, he would be staffing a committee to figure out how much it's going to cost - to start. obviously? but, he's not. because he's not serious.

10 billion dollars sounds like a lot of money to you or i. in the context of the american budget, it isn't. and all it's going to actually succeed in building - after many years of delays and waste, no doubt - is what i've described.

you can call him incompetent if you want, but in this case you're actually being deceived.

so, how is this going to work? what are they going to do?

i'd expect a kind of swiss cheese of border upgrades. they'll build a very small amount of wall in a very strategic location to allow for a photo op. and, trump will certainly keep telling you that he's building a wall, and then claim he succeeded in it, too.

kind of like "mission accomplished" in iraq....

then, ten years later, they'll do public opinion polling and 40%+ of people will think he built a wall.

it's not the cost that's the problem.

fwiw, i would support deficit spending for infrastructure projects. if they're going to build it, i'd prefer they build it with public funds than private funds.

so, not only is that not why they're not building it, but it's also not a reason i'd oppose it. it's actually a reason i'd support it; if you ignore the context of the scenario, it would actually be good for the economy.

the reason they're not building it is that it would cut off the flow of cheap migrant labour, which would be disastrous for the surrounding agricultural industries.

the banks that control donald trump don't want a wall. they want a porous border that is easy to get across - for the people they want to allow across.

there are just a lot of very stupid people out there that fell for a lot of very obviously contrived nonsense.

nobody's paying for the wall because they're not building it.