yeah the labor movement fell into a pattern of black and white thinking that made them easy to shatter after the Harlan Couty War. it all culminated in union workers needing to organize, and ultimately unionize, against their old unions. in large part that movement was why the political establishment reacted with Thatcher and Reagan

it shouldn’t be hard to figure this out. the problem isn’t who runs the prisons, it’s that the prisons exist. anywhere you have people held against their will, you have risk for abuse because freedom of movement is a human trait. imprisonment is one of several steps on the road of dehumanization.

there’s also the issue that China’s current government conducts itself in a manner that is Han-supremacist. minority groups in china are not treated with equal dignity. my deeper critique of all this spirals out into a discussion about how capitalist and imperial structures have to be orthogonally opposed rather than strictly directly opposed because when you always say the opposite of something else you become predictable and easy to manipulate, but just what i’ve said is fine for now

i got lost in this thread and thought you were saying anarchists were liberals. nevermind

liberal from an economic sense or a philosophical sense? there’s a difference

we are not savage brutes who shoot at anything that moves. we are survivalists who shoot what we must to eat in lean times. an armadillo is a terrible animal to shoot because their meat when cooked is not edible except for for the truly desperate.

what this changes is the nature of the roadkill in our mountains and valleys, and this also is a symptom of our entire bioregion dying to mistreatment and mismanagement by a society who sees the trees and rivers we depend on for life itself and see only timber and fossil fuels

the prolific OP posters in this community mostly only comment on theis own posts

I am making no critiques of the USSR in this statement. I am critiquing an approach I see leftists take with modern colonial-imperialist regimes that aren’t the United States today. If I want to overthrow the imperial powers of today, I have to do so by helping the people resisting their oppressors where ever they are, even if their oppressors oppose my oppressors. The people can only ever free themselves, they can never be freed by an external force. If I am going to call myself anti-imperial, I am going to act and speak in support of people resisting oppression be that a genocide in Latin America, Sudan, the Congo, or Palestine.

say what you will about Leon Trotsky, but the man knew what he was about when it came to the approach of the third camp rebellion. none of us can be free of our imperial overlords if all we do is switch from one capitalist structure to another with a different coat of paint. socialism without international solidarity for the working class isn’t socialism at all. it’s just politics as sports with a new coat of paint

that’s the thing! we will never know how south america would have developed without european influence. would the people there have reformed their society and abolished the death penalty? we can’t say. but we can say for sure that we installed a system that has been durable for 600+ years that relies heavily on death squads to make sure the gold, bananas, coffee, and tea keep flowing south to north. we also don’t know what movements and ideas were destroyed there because Spain and Portugal treated the Americas as a monolith. catholic missionaries have also been extremely selective in what tales become preserved to help create analagous structures between other religions and christianity, and what tales that didn’t fit with that that we’ve lost forever

Genocide…

no, graham platner specifically. who as i was alluding to supports ending one genocide but continuing others. as a politician, he is inherently compromised. we the people have to dedicate ourselves to going further, to ending all genocides

What was even the argument you were making‽

that electoral politics are more distraction than anything. getting out and getting active where you are makes it easier for the grand scale geopolitics to improve

Reads localized.

intentionally. think global, act local

Assuming this is your thesis. Why aren’t you already demolishing CUMBERLAND COUNTY JAIL Portland, ME 04102 (ADP 64) & TWO BRIDGES REGIONAL JAIL Wiscasset, ME 04578 (ADP 4)?

because i am not in maine. i am in coalition with people who are acting in resistance there and i support their efforts, just as they support our efforts to abolish the for profit prison labor super max down here in the appalachian mountains

i’m hoping this is just because they’re on a hot streak of posting things like the tianamen square incident never happened, or that the most consistent senator to vote against israel is a zionist (which may or not be fair since i can only think of one politician who actively denounces the existence of an israeli state apparatus AND doesn’t support any form of genocide but she’s in congress)

then again a WHOLE lot of people not in maine all feel the need to chime in and have an opinion on Graham Platner and loving or hating him is the Great Purity Test of the Moment. my rule is that if i get drug into a conversation about Graham Platner, that means it’s time to go do something useful instead (today i’m taking supplies up to a UMWA solar kiln to help combat the water crisis in WV).

either way, posting pro or against platner is an easy way to get engagement right now. the thing i would remind people is that electoralism can only ever help you avoid the worst possible outcome. no politician who makes it far enough into the system to become a senator of all things will ever do anything so disruptive to the system to be worthy of praise. if you’re in Maine, assess is he would be better or worse than your current senator, Susan Collins. vote based on that. no more no less.

if you are outside of maine and you’re pro-platner, let me remind you that John Fetterman’s staff have all said he had a streak like what we’re seeing from him before his stroke. the stroke just made his conservative bad brain more obvious. Platner denounces the genocide in Gaza, yes, but he also supports increased military spending and the continued existence of ICE and the police state. we don’t have to talk about his tattoos or his texts to find he’s not someone to idolize, worship, or want to discuss.

stop blindly supporting politicians just because they “practice working class politics” but also probably stop discussing what the media apparatus wants you to focus on. out in the streets, no one is talking about him. we’re talking about Delaney Hall. we’re talking about the administration releasing a list of “terrorists” and it’s the most fucking gentle comedians and educatonrs you ever heard of. we’re talking about unionizing our workplaces. the only people talking about graham platner are 24 hour news channels and the chronically online.

if you are thinking about graham platner, go outside. meet your neighbors. look for problems in your community that need community oriented solutions. wherever you are in your life, there is something more useful for you to be doing than platnerposting. even reading a schlock book like the dungeon crawler carl series will be a more productive way to live your life than platnerposting

moving goalposts is their whole thing

/disengage

i firmly believe that the workers need to own the means of production to all be fed. it’s like… the very most core thing to my beliefs from growing up in a deeply impoverished community. but since you so firmly believe i act in bad faith i’m going to have to recommend we disengage as this conversation cannot ever lead anywhere productive.

just to build on this a little further, disillusioned people are more attracted to the familiar than something that requires more internal effort to change. in my observations many of the most adament ML/Stalinist adherents are more supportive of imperial structures with a liberatory aesthetic than they are of structures that are truly challenging to their named enemies. ML/Stalinist thought offers a form of resistance to capitalist structures that doesn’t require as much internal change than anarchism, zapatismo, or trotskyism.

what i find interesting though, and that i’m still examining, is that self reported MLs have a tendency to announce that ML/Stalinism/Maoism is the movement of the global south even though leftist movements in the global south tend to hew much more closely to anarchism and trotsyism with a little bit of maoism mixed in. i haven’t fully drawn a conclusion yet, but i think a form of confirmation bias is at play. they’ve divided in their heads the world into East vs West with East being the great global protector of South. they think themselves, as all people do, the good guys. so they look for things in the global south that confirms their perception that they’re the good guys rather than examining how leftist movements in the global south differ greatly from the ML model of vanguard revolution

Still. It speaks to that no matter how much they try to prop up the coal industry for the sake of making the people with the broad form deeds rich, the future will be centered on abundant energy from the sun.

the electoral college and a federal government made up of the states rather than of the people along with simple plurality voting sometimes and majority voting others are, mathematically, the least power you can give people while still issuing a ballot. a binary party system is just a unitary party system where the final votes for the party leadership is more visible.

“The people only have those rights which i allow them to have” — Dr DOOM

i’d structure it so the tutorial gives the impression you’re supposed to oppress your people but make it so the win conditions are easier to achieve if you don’t union bust

Urbek plays with this a little but certainly not to the degree i think you’re envisioning. you can implement policies that give you short term economic boosts but they almost always come with long term disadvantages. meanwhile you can also plan for long term prosperity in your city but that requires more patience.

i think i perceive what you’re describing as being more like Anno, Banished, or Timberborn but with short term incentives to overwork your workers and long term incentives to not. i think that might actually wind up hewing pretty close to dwarf fortress or gnomoria, just with some slightly different interactions

it’s not latin america’s fault latin america is a mess. latin america was much more stable before european colonization destroyed the social structures and societal infrastructure that had developed there for milenia. the fact we even call it “latin” “america” when those are both european constructs from the peninsula of italy should tell you something