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Cake day: June 27th, 2023

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  • You cannot arrive at a true communist state through violent revolution.

    It’s possible that what you say is true but Marx himself in poverty of philosophy thought you couldn’t arrive without it.

    I guess my overall point is that Marx was a man of his time with similar failings and sensibilities of men of his time - amongst other things he was homophobic, he was considering people in groups wholesale in a way that’s rather distasteful, and in a way that allowed later supposed followers to use these writings to fuck over whole populations.

    I’m not sure why people are rising up to whitewash these things - they don’t negate the other insights anymore than Newton’s insane occult obsession negates calculus or the theory of gravity.



  • what

    I’m not sure what you had trouble grasping - I explained the thought in detail in the paragraph following.

    And if I quote him saying the same things about the peasant class

    I don’t see how making the same horrible comments about another whole class of people counteracts the horrible comment about others.

    “Your honour, and if I show that my client stole from other shops, not just the one he is being prosecuted for, wouldn’t you concede that that negates the theft from this shop?”


  • First I think what he wrote goes beyond them lacking the revolutionary potential and specifically being an active obstacle - I think the words were “significant counterrevolutionary force” and “more likely to sell out to reactionary intrigues”.

    But either way, to be honest I don’t see a functional difference between Marx’s beliefs and every implementation of the communist manifesto known to date.

    That is, it doesn’t matter what he wrote or believed in his heart of hearts if it can be interpreted in such broad strokes as to allow the implementation of the dear leader mindset with his writings as a touchstone without fail.

    And it doesn’t matter what he thought should be done with the lumpen elements if he thought of them as less than, disgusting, parasitical, and even objecting to the cause, (his writings certainly show disgust in my opinion) - true believers to the cause will see them (as they have) as obstacles and will do whatever needs to be done to remove them - as they have.


  • Well - here’s the thing with “lacking revolutionary potential” and a dear-leader mindset… anyone dear leader deems lacking is labeled lumpen and thrown to the furthest gulag or has their rights removed and confined.

    Eg in Stalinist Russia certain groups like the Roma, Crimean Tatars, Chechens, Koreans or homosexuals were labeled as such wholesale.

    In modern times the Uighurs need reeducation etc.


  • But he did write quite extensively on Lumpenproletariat.

    vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged convicts, runaway galley slaves, swindlers, charlatans, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, procurers, brothel keepers, porters, intellectuals, organ grinders, rag-pickers, knife-grinders, tinkers, beggars; in short, the entirely undefined, disintegrating mass, thrown hither and yon, which the French call la bohème.

    That is quite a few groups he considered subhuman, where half the ‘cleansing’ operations under communism have derived their theoretical excuses from.








  • In which case how does a community of that scale operate without a rule enforcement arm?

    Will there be environmental laws? Traffic laws? Food safety? Defence? Adjudication of differences?

    How does it work?

    Will someone be issuing driving licenses based on competence? Who’s going to check if I don’t have one?

    If I don’t have the sense to drive properly or secure a dangerous load, or I drive drunk or I keep running people over or running red lights who is going to stop me?

    If I assault or murder someone is it vendetta rules? What if someone accuses me of that but I haven’t done it - who figures out what happened? Are there investigators? Who’s going to stop me? Or defend me?



  • I’m not sure there will ever be a society that doesn’t require adjustment.

    Anarchocommunism - I see. In my mind seems like a theoretical construct, a temporary situation that would quickly shift to something else either by internal or external forces, a construct similar to libertarianism.

    And indeed historically this has been the case.

    This “small communities” construct is also pretty unhealthy if you ever had any experience in small communities as I have.

    Your neighbours are your oppressors and you theirs.

    Societal norms of dress, sexual preference and everything else, are enforced by societal shame, isolation, expulsion and occasional beatings in extreme cases. The rumour mill would whip up neighbours into all kinds of idiocy. They know everything about you and you about them.

    Anyone that has lived the village life that had any sense couldn’t get out of there fast enough and into the anonymity of a large city where the people didn’t police each other but if needed was the protection of an independent and dispassionate (from interpersonal animus) arbiter that mostly left them alone.






  • Unlike other chat services Telegram has a “social” aspect and search capabilities for locating public discussion channels.

    Furthermore E2EE is optional and most people don’t turn it on and is certainly not on in public channels.

    While techies are freaking out about an attack on encryption the articles I’ve read so far don’t mention anything about encryption or otherwise it seems that French police is concerned about moderation or attempts at moderation of those public channels, that Telegram specifically refuses to moderate.

    Perhaps this will be an attack on encryption by stealth but at this point that’s not what it looks like.

    As a personal anecdote when I installed Telegram a few years ago and searched for my city’s name the top 20 results where channels offering to sell you heroin - which I thought was so blatant as to be certain it was police sting operations - but who knows.