soft [she/her]

  • 3 Posts
  • 247 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 9th, 2022

help-circle





  • Err wait, apparently I'm just subconsciously regurgitating VIL so I might as well have quoted him:

    The fundamental law of revolution, which has been confirmed by all revolutions and especially by all three Russian revolutions in the twentieth century, is as follows: for a revolution to take place it is not enough for the exploited and oppressed masses to realise the impossibility of living in the old way, and demand changes; for a revolution to take place it is essential that the exploiters should not be able to live and rule in the old way. It is only when the “lower classes” do not want to live in the old way and the “upper classes” cannot carry on in the old way that the revolution can triumph. This truth can be expressed in other words: revolution is impossible without a nation-wide crisis (affecting both the exploited and the exploiters). It follows that, for a revolution to take place, it is essential, first, that a majority of the workers (or at least a majority of the class-conscious, thinking, and politically active workers) should fully realise that revolution is necessary, and that they should be prepared to die for it; second, that the ruling classes should be going through a governmental crisis, which draws even the most backward masses into politics (symptomatic of any genuine revolution is a rapid, tenfold and even hundredfold increase in the size of the working and oppressed masses—hitherto apathetic—who are capable of waging the political struggle), weakens the government, and makes it possible for the revolutionaries to rapidly overthrow it.



  • This is a good comment but I would say that the requirements for revolution at least aren't a complete enigma.

    The masses attempt violent change only when the conditions of their everyday lives become intolerable. This action is successful only when the existing system of exploitation has become too weak to defend itself. There were instances of violent labor insurrection in the children-in-coal-mines era of American history, but the forces of reaction were too strong and just pulverized them.

    The bourgeois have been very good at parsimoniously doling out just enough reform and just enough treats to just enough people in order to keep everything under control. This is where Marxism comes in. Pretty much the only hope of Marxists anymore is the TRPF. If not for imperialism, the imperialist countries would never have made it this long without everything grinding to a halt as Marx predicted. But they can force their way into new markets and more profitably extract resources at gunpoint. The ability to export misery onto the rest of the world, and to maintain control there by dumping enormous investment into guns and bombs and propaganda and comprador liberals' police, allows the imperialist nations to hold out at home indefinitely.

    I've been thinking lately that neoliberalism might be their undoing. To the extent that they're successful in financializing and integrating and "levelling," they're just running out the clock in terms of places they can stuff human misery and get away with it. Even if we have to wait until the entire capitalist world has been democracied in the skull so many times that four billion people have Disney+ subscriptions, there's no outrunning the TRPF forever and the whole sordid system will just go down together. Fascism scares me though. Fascism can't really exist without war, and the whole Marxian formula for the end of capitalism kind of falls apart if the capitalists can just keep destroying the world and finding new profits in the rebuilding...







  • Grrrrrrrr, so face-meltingly jelly :owl-pissed:

    Still it's nice to have some reassurance that things could still work out eventually, even if it is years down the line when I'm an Old. Well, all right. What can I do but keep on keeping on, and turn up the :soviet-bottom: to 11 and hope that being a doormat compensates somehow.



  • soft [she/her]tothe_dunk_tankOur plan is working!
    ·
    2 years ago

    If you need a gemologist with a literal laboratory to tell whether a diamond or pearl are grown in a lab then "fake" stuff has the exact same utility for jewelry. Folx, nobody's coming up to you with a loupe and a microscope asking to examine your necklace to determine if it looks nice on you!





  • I still don't understand how hypersonic anti-ship missiles don't just immediately end the viability of all surface ships. I mean even against regular subsonic missiles, anti-missile systems seemed very sketchy to me. CIWS is a security blanket that would get torn to shreds in actual combat with a peer that could overwhelm it. Intercepting with missiles of your own is really difficult and unreliable- even shooting down missiles on perfectly predictable ballistic trajectories with generous advance notice is fearsomely hard and US systems don't exactly have a flawless test record. And sure enough that Russian cruiser went down in the Black Sea to just a couple of Ukrainian ASMs despite being packed to the gills with supposedly state-of-the-art tech. And hypersonics? As far as I know the US doesn't even have radar that can track those. So how is the entire US pacific fleet not headed straight for the bottom on day one of a hot war?

    The only answers I've ever seen for this are:

    1. "It's hard to find and target a ship in the wide open ocean if we shoot down their satellites first." Um okay I guess, but it still can't be great to just sink immediately if an enemy ship or recon drone ever spots you, ever.

    2. "Lazerzzzzz! Maybe? Someday? Idk." Wow so how many percentage points of GDP do you need for building useless ships until this speculative directed energy tech someday materializes?

    Am I missing something? Cause I'm unqualified too and it seems like I must be missing something. If surface ships are donezo then why is the PLAN still building carriers?