purpleworm [none/use name]

Thank you for being understanding about my error.

As for your point about the global government I’d agree eventually. It’s just so far off it’s like what form does that even take? It’s hard to know what we’ll be doing after capitalism period. I’m more focused on just ending imperialism and opening the way to whatever future comes next.

Yeah, I think it can be okay to idly speculate, but my point in mentioning it isn’t that we need to be drafting utopian blueprints and fitting things to those designs, but that while we should focus on what’s before us we should be conscious of the continuous process in a broader sense and not cause ourselves trouble by arguing along excessively or too fundamentally nationalist lines (the USSR’s struggle with the national question also demonstrates somewhat more immediate significance to this question) when the fundamental goal is the liberation of humanity and giving national sovereignty primacy over human welfare can and has had negative consequences.

I do think there will always be a need for localism

There will always be a need for governance at several different levels of governance going down, functionally, to the level of individual apartment complexes and workshops, but the only people who think centralism or a world government means that one politburo in the communist global capitol of Kerala will feed a bunch of data to some servers and have arguments among themselves and then hand down orders that include informing you, personally, “how many nails you need to make each hour of shifts this long on these days” are the Stalinists that exist in the fantasies of Austrian school fanatics. Each level of government has its own level of specificity, with the highest organ being responsible for only very broad issues and what it is uniquely able to administer in terms of coordinating entities that are otherwise their own subdivisions (in consultation with those entities, the equivalents of federations or whatever).

I really just think we need to be accelerating imperial collapse. That is step 1 of any future plan. And yeah there will probably be a lot of chaos and fascism and reactionary stuff too. But we’ll get through it.

This is dangerously in error. Accelerating the defeat of imperial projects like the war in Iran makes sense, and that incidentally will hasten the collapse of the empire (and already has hastened it), but hastening that collapse for its own sake is only helping fascists who will then cause an inconceivable volume of death and destruction both domestically and abroad. We should be imperial defeatists, but beyond that our goal should be to construct socialist movements to be more effective opposition once that collapse takes place to put down whatever neo-neo-Nazis take over the semi-dead empire and presumably try to literally destroy the world in nuclear hellfire or whatever. Accelerationism is a bad ideology, and if anything the empire collapsing more slowly (insofar as that can happen while still being undermined in its aggressions) is more beneficial to us, because it collapsing very soon is basically the best case scenario from the point of view of the avowed Nazis who are much more equipped to fight than all the socialists are.

I would say that if it’s not practical, it’s not pragmatism, it’s just conservatism.

I think that I misread CyborbMarx’s comment, so my bad. My position is that national sovereignty is fine for the purpose of anti-colonialism but that ultimately what is required, and what there should be preparation for from an early stage, is a global socialist democracy rather than a bunch of independent nation states communes, and some people lean to heavily on the nationalism thing in a manner that, if taken seriously, would inevitably lead to reactionaries taking power in several of those not nation states.

But again, I was talking about this due to a misreading, so I’m not attributing that position to you here, just explaining what I was talking about.

Edit: Oh I see the confusion. Poor choice of wording on my part lmao

Got it, sorry if I jumped on you too much, I just see a lot of people who actually do say what the initial wording looked like to me. I basically agree with everything you said here.

I answer that question in the text immediately following what you quoted.

You misunderstood me. I meant Cuba taking Gitmo by force. Not handing it off to them. They do not need our permission to take their land back.

This is moralistic grandstanding. If Cuba wants gitmo back, it’s very unlikely to accomplish that goal without the destruction of the US either by revolution or it simply becoming an impotent failed state, neither of which Cuba can do on its own. The US would sooner burn the entire island down. You’re surely going to reply “that’s what I went on to say in the same comment” but then what is this?

When I said domestic fascists, I didn’t mean domestic to us, I meant domestic to the liberated territories (which is why I mentioned Ukrainian fascists and not Russian fascists).

Eh, that seems to be what Hawaiian separatists want and whatever path towards Hawaiian republicanism should be decided by Hawaiians. Obviously, I don’t think monarchies should exist anywhere.

Clearly the end of minoritarian ruling classes like monarchies, and therefore the establishment of socialism, are not the basic thing that you are reasoning from, hence me saying nationalist distortion. We can talk about how making sure monarchies don’t exist anywhere should be accomplished in a stable, durable way, but what you said explicitly, directly cast having a monarchy as an acceptable end goal. Alliances of convenience with domestic nationalists for anti-colonial purposes can often make sense (see the CPC working with the KMT to remove Japanese colonizers), but we can’t let that distort into letting nationalist movements override socialism.

I mean, I envision the Indigenous nations of Canada and the US eventually forming a continental federation. But I think most people would think that a Communist Party of (non-Spanish speaking) North America would be silly right now.

I keep repeating “end goal,” but it seems to only register selectively. Communists in the US have little reason to be in a comintern because a comintern does not functionally exist and the US only has micro-parties that don’t really have business spearheading the foundation of one because they are too busy splitting, but that’s a very historically specific reason and conditions will change.

You’re ignoring the issue of domestic fascists in the controlled territories like the fascist movement in Ukraine, which repeatedly tried to carve out its own fiefdom.

Handing off gitmo to Cuba is totally irrelevant. Obviously that should happen, but it’s trivial to this issue.

There are arguments for supporting a kingdom of Hawaii against US colonialism, obviously, but to describe having a kingdom anywhere as an “end goal” is not defensible.

Do they just separate into their own party, so the Hawaiian branch of the CPUSA becomes the CPH? But if that’s the case, why not just have a CPH from day 1? Why go through the motions of being a Hawaiian branch of a US org only to then separate and become an independent org at an unspecified time?

Because Hawaii is deeply entangled with the US and however you want to label things, having their communists working in an organized, systematized fashion with the communists in the continental US is better for them.

But moreover, I think there are problems with appealing to “national sovereignty” not just on a basis for anticolonialism but as an end goal. I think this is a nationalist distortion of Marxism and we should be considering how to go beyond the model of atomized nation states, as the USSR tried and failed to. If you want to have communism, you can’t just have these huge bodies controlling natural resources with no accountability to anyone else, there needs to be an organizational level above them based on international opinion or they will just invent neo-neo-imperialism by leveraging their advantages against weaker entities.

I wouldn’t say “openly commits violence” is a necessary component at relatively early stages of the process. There needs to be a legal and an illegal side, and a weak organization openly committing violence cannot have a legal side.

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Not that it especially indicts the PSL or anything, but it does seem like a problem because they can still work privately to get other leaders on their side and basically do a coup.

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What to do if you want to organize in the US now? Join the DSA? Join the Democratic Party? FRSO?

This begs the question of PSL being discredited. They have not been.

I think that at some point recently that has been what leadership in Hezbollah said about its own policies, but in Gaza (as far as I’ve been able to find) it is not actually criminalized, but queer people also don’t have any sort of protection as social minorities and there’s obviously a lot of social stigma among some groups.

I don’t really see how one gets to “Hamas would be largely in favor of killing lesbians” except by accepting the racialized propaganda spread by Israel and its Zionist supporters that conflates Hamas with groups like ISIS. Maybe I’m wrong, I’m certainly not an expert on the issue, but the closest thing I saw to that had to do with Palestinians forming (or trying to form) relationships with IDF soldiers, which I think we can agree has a little more to it.

I agree with Wheaties that you could approximate it the way she describes, and also you could maybe bite the end off and use the rest to spit? But when I called the stories “ridiculous” I meant in the sense that they probably aren’t true, and I don’t believe the Zeno story is true.

I think it just has weird lighting.

If we’re just doing every ridiculous story from Ancient Greece, then surely we should include Zeno of Elea by various tellings pretending he wanted to tell a secret to his captor and biting his ear off, then biting his own tongue off to spit it at the captor, and then being ground to death in a giant mortar and pestle.

Also I know it wouldn’t work as well for the joke, but I still think it’s kind of weird to exclude Socrates from the list when, by the most influential telling, his was maybe the most famous suicide in world history in general, in competition with Hitler.

The 4chan folks do seem to be more about holding it up while the circle game is about putting it low

There was at least one time where a fascist mass shooter did it low at his court hearing or whatever it was.

I think it’s specifically for nu-atheist reasons.