blends personal habit with age-old practices, highlighting a contrast between traditional relief and the escalating reality of intense heatwaves.

This sounds AI generated.

Rimworld definitely belongs in this picture.

Chiming in to say this appears to be a quote from David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs.

I’m not saying that imperialist aggression didn’t / doesn’t contribute to the collapse of socialist states - it most certainly does - I’m saying campists tend to get tunnel vision and think that it’s the only reason they fail. Cuba has actually been quite successful at enduring in spite of imperialist aggression, and I think there’s a lot of benefit in asking what it is they are doing better than past socialist states. In my opinion the answer lies in the fact that their governmental structure is far more horizontal in comparison to other attempts at socialism such as the USSR, and that has resulted in policy that is far more responsive to the specific material needs of local communities within Cuba. Contrast the USSR in which the pseudoscientific beliefs of a central authority figure turned what could have been a brief and localized food shortage into a full-blown famine spanning the entire union.

With regard to China being state capitalist, I skimmed the essay you linked well enough to see that it does not address the anarchist critique of state “socialism,” namely that state ownership does not truly constitute collective ownership because the state is a hierarchical institution that centralizes decision-making power in such a way that the will of the people affected is often ignored. Don’t get me wrong, I acknowledge the undeniable successes and advantages of central planning when compared to the neoliberal method of not planning at all beyond the fiscal quarter, but those are not the only options. I believe that horizontal planning is superior to both, and is the only way for an economy to be truly socialist in character. Examples of this being done can even be found in the revolutions that created the USSR and the PRC before they seized state power. It’s also not a discrete binary; there is a spectrum between totalitarian dictatorship and full horizontalism, and the projects which are most successful tend to veer towards the latter rather than the former.

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How does this make sense in response to a meme showing that I support Palestine? I know y’all love to use rule 1 to censor people for “bigotry” but at least put some effort into making it plausible.

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I also do yardwork, snow removal, maintenance, and I pay out of my ass when anything breaks because I have an obligation to provide for my tenant and I take that seriously.

You’re right, it is the system that is the problem. The relationship between you and your tenant is unequal. There is nothing forcing you to do right by your tenant by performing all of that maintenance work because you have not entered into an equal agreement with your tenant. You could stop doing all those things and your tenant would have no recourse because they aren’t paying you to perform any service, they are paying you for the privilege of staying in your property. You may feel that you have an obligation to do those things but you aren’t actually obligated by law, and that’s a problem.

This is what makes capitalism so insidious. The incentives it creates drive otherwise well-intentioned people to make immoral decisions.

He initially set out to prove Charles Darwin’s assertion that competition is the law of the Jungle and ended up discovering the opposite, and that’s why he wrote Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. It was intended to be a refutation of Charles Darwin’s work.

I’m responding to the meme which presents learning and critique as separate and mutually exclusive. In order to learn from something you have to critique it, and if you believe that China is not perfect then you know this and should agree with me.

There’s also another thing you’re doing that I see MLs do all the time, which is posit that Chinese socialism is uniquely suited to China and that it must be implemented differently in other places. While I do agree that this is the case, I often see MLs use this argument to excuse flaws in the implementation of socialism in China as necessary alterations required due to the particular conditions and historical circumstances in which it was created.

IMO there were many wrong turns and mistakes that China made in its socialist transition that have had lasting negative consequences, and though they can often be explained by China’s particular conditions and historical circumstances, that doesn’t excuse them.

Learning and critique are the same thing. If you look at China and go “this is perfect in every way and we should copy it,” then you aren’t actually learning anything at all. In my experience MLs don’t get angry with anarchists and others critical of China because they don’t learn from Chinese socialism, but because they don’t like the conclusions they’ve made.

They’re in the wrong program then, that skill is more useful for business majors.

The person asking the McDonald’s AI how to reverse a linked list in Python is almost certainly an undergrad in a programming 101 course, so this was definitely quicker for them (although they didn’t learn anything).

I think it important to distinguish between a free trade market, which should be largely unregulated. People should be able to buy and sell goods on an open market.

Capital markets, or ownership and control of wealth should be heavily regulated.

Huh, what’s interesting about this is that you’ve basically arrived at a communist/anarchist idea on your own, but are describing it using Libertarian / Neoliberal Capitalist terminology. You’re describing different types of property and saying that one type should be regulated and the other type shouldn’t. Anti-capitalists distinguish between private property (the means of production privately owned and involved in an economic enterprise employing wage labor (i.e. factories, offices, farms)) and personal property (consumer goods or goods produced by an individual (i.e. books, art, jewelry)), and believe that the former should be abolished (or one could say regulated to require collective ownership of such property by the workers) while the latter should be unregulated or lightly regulated.

In short, you’ve independently come to the same conclusion that anarchists and communists came to, but are describing it in a strange way.

Can someone provide some sources for that 35k number? It’s just too outlandish for me to accept it so easily. Iran is an authoritarian theocratic dictatorship but atrocity propaganda is still a very real thing that western media does to justify foreign interventions. Both can be true; the Iranian regime can be murdering its citizens and the western reporting can be fluffing the numbers to manufacture consent for the war.

The SDF is still around defending AANES in one of the most conflict-ridden regions of the world. They call themselves Democratic Confederalists rather than anarchists, but they are the nearest long-standing polity to anarchist ideals.

The main benefit of capitalism is the free market that it establishes. But it requires regulation to prevent control being centralizes by private oligarchs.

The “free market” and regulations are mutually exclusive. You can’t have both, unless you consider a “free market” to exist on a spectrum between no regulations and maximum regulations and draw an arbitrary line between free and not free.

Communism has the same problem of central control of capital and markets, but in their case, its state connected oligarchs.

This is an issue with vanguardist marxism-leninism, not necessarily communism. I understand that this is the ideological strain of communism that people - especially Americans - are most familiar with for historical reasons, but there are many other strains that oppose centralized command and control economies, preferring more federal and democratic or consensus-based systems. In fact, the Bolsheviks initially rallied around the slogan “all power to the soviets.” Soviets are workers’ councils - the primary decision-making bodies and drivers of the Russian revolution - and they operated independently, freely associating with one another by choice. It was only after the revolution succeeded in siezing the state that the soviets were dissolved and replaced with “one big soviet” which was loyal to Lenin. It was briefly still somewhat decentralized and democratic (at least relative to what came before) until Stalin came to power and rapidly centralized the economic and political structure of the soviet union.

If we could have the free market without the incentives to centralize wealth and control, I would be very interested.

What exactly do you mean by “free market?” If we go by the conventional definition of a free market (capitalism without any regulations or checks of any kind) then what you’re asking for here is fundamentally impossible. The economic system of capitalism is one that creates the incentives to centralize wealth and control by allowing - and then enforcing - private ownership of the means of production.

That wasn’t democratic socialism, it was social democracy. Seems like a small difference but the impact is huge. Democratic socialism eschews capitalism entirely while social democracy preserves capitalism with heavy regulation. Boomers didn’t grow up in the solution, they grew up with the symptoms of the disease being treated, but it was no cure. Because the underlying causes of inequality were not addressed they eventually overcame and reversed the regulations designed to keep them in check. We should learn from the mistake and go beyond half measures next time.