In a conversation with AfD leader Alice Weidel on X, Musk concurred with her assertion that Adolf Hitler was a communist and pushed disinformation about migrants coming into the US.
It is often said that Anarchists bow, on the matter of boots, to the authority of the bootmaker. But, truth be told: If they make shoddy shoes, no we don’t. Good managers don’t order people around, they organise. They are servants to the collective project.
every single decision
Strawman. I don’t care how the shoemaker affixes the sole, what matters is that it makes sense in the context of the end-product being a shoe that fits. I may not be able to figure out how to construct a good shoe, but I can judge the result by virtue of having feet. It’s the same with management. One problem tankies, particularly of the so common Yankee persuasion, have I think is that corporate culture is so utterly broken in America that they can’t even imagine working under good management. Thus you get the slave thinking that the only way out is for themselves to become the master, and then history repeats. The master/slave dialectic is already a diagnosis, building onto it, also as inversion, just further neurosis.
Well, since you insist on distorting history,
You can deny the power inversion the Bolsheviks caused all you want, how the selection for council positions was done such that an on-paper bottom-up organisation became in practice a top-down one, but it won’t change the actual history. The purpose of the system is what it does and what the Bolshevik counter-revolution did was to put people like Stalin and Beria into power, riding on the back of the easily abusable power relations that Lenin created, which I grant at least had ideals. The same power relations which, after the dissolution of the USSR, allowed banditry to fill the power vacuum.
You genuinely believe if you change the name of something, you change it materially. Your admission that there needs to be management is an admission of authority’s necessity in controlled contexts. To trust the bootmaking factory to be safe, have controlled QA, to be practicing safe environmental practices, all aspects of mass industry require at some level administration and management. The QA worker must have a backed authority to halt production of boots with toxic materials, the safety workers must have the authority to ensure proper lock-out tag-out is followed, the maintenance workers must be able to have authority to halt production to fix machinery.
Describe how a smart phone would be made in Anarchism, and you’ll find you need some form of authority and administration to ensure safety, quality, and coordination of logistics.
It is not that Marxists simply can’t imagine a better society. Marxists understand that Capitalist production evolved the way it did, and when you cut out non-productive labor it did so to maximize profits along highly complex production methods. What needs to change is the method of ownership and direction, rather than being at the whim and for the profits of few individuals, production can be owned and run by all for all.
As for the USSR, as you say, the purpose of a system is what it does. It doubled life expectancy from the 30s to the 70s, over tripled literacy rates to be higher than 99%, ended famine, dramatically lowered wealth disparity while improving median wages, democratized the economy, rapidly expanded housing, supported national liberation movements in countries like Palestine, Algeria, Cuba, China, and more. They provided free, high quality education and healthcare. Their presence on the world stage, combined with working class organization internally, was the driving force beyond the major expansions in social safety nets in the 20th century, and after the dissolution of the USSR these have been withering.
No, you don’t have to be a Marxist if you don’t want to be. No, the USSR was not perfect, and no Marxist claims it to be either. Marxists simply claim that the USSR was the world’s first Socialist state, and as such the very real working class victories were due to the working people that built them. I’m going to go ahead and link Blackshirts and Reds again so if you want to read a history book written after the soviet archives opened up, you can.
It is often said that Anarchists bow, on the matter of boots, to the authority of the bootmaker. But, truth be told: If they make shoddy shoes, no we don’t. Good managers don’t order people around, they organise. They are servants to the collective project.
Strawman. I don’t care how the shoemaker affixes the sole, what matters is that it makes sense in the context of the end-product being a shoe that fits. I may not be able to figure out how to construct a good shoe, but I can judge the result by virtue of having feet. It’s the same with management. One problem tankies, particularly of the so common Yankee persuasion, have I think is that corporate culture is so utterly broken in America that they can’t even imagine working under good management. Thus you get the slave thinking that the only way out is for themselves to become the master, and then history repeats. The master/slave dialectic is already a diagnosis, building onto it, also as inversion, just further neurosis.
You can deny the power inversion the Bolsheviks caused all you want, how the selection for council positions was done such that an on-paper bottom-up organisation became in practice a top-down one, but it won’t change the actual history. The purpose of the system is what it does and what the Bolshevik counter-revolution did was to put people like Stalin and Beria into power, riding on the back of the easily abusable power relations that Lenin created, which I grant at least had ideals. The same power relations which, after the dissolution of the USSR, allowed banditry to fill the power vacuum.
You genuinely believe if you change the name of something, you change it materially. Your admission that there needs to be management is an admission of authority’s necessity in controlled contexts. To trust the bootmaking factory to be safe, have controlled QA, to be practicing safe environmental practices, all aspects of mass industry require at some level administration and management. The QA worker must have a backed authority to halt production of boots with toxic materials, the safety workers must have the authority to ensure proper lock-out tag-out is followed, the maintenance workers must be able to have authority to halt production to fix machinery.
Describe how a smart phone would be made in Anarchism, and you’ll find you need some form of authority and administration to ensure safety, quality, and coordination of logistics.
It is not that Marxists simply can’t imagine a better society. Marxists understand that Capitalist production evolved the way it did, and when you cut out non-productive labor it did so to maximize profits along highly complex production methods. What needs to change is the method of ownership and direction, rather than being at the whim and for the profits of few individuals, production can be owned and run by all for all.
As for the USSR, as you say, the purpose of a system is what it does. It doubled life expectancy from the 30s to the 70s, over tripled literacy rates to be higher than 99%, ended famine, dramatically lowered wealth disparity while improving median wages, democratized the economy, rapidly expanded housing, supported national liberation movements in countries like Palestine, Algeria, Cuba, China, and more. They provided free, high quality education and healthcare. Their presence on the world stage, combined with working class organization internally, was the driving force beyond the major expansions in social safety nets in the 20th century, and after the dissolution of the USSR these have been withering.
No, you don’t have to be a Marxist if you don’t want to be. No, the USSR was not perfect, and no Marxist claims it to be either. Marxists simply claim that the USSR was the world’s first Socialist state, and as such the very real working class victories were due to the working people that built them. I’m going to go ahead and link Blackshirts and Reds again so if you want to read a history book written after the soviet archives opened up, you can.