I am pro

my dream is EU institutions leaving brussels and the parliament remade into a cultural center or something

good luck with everything!

meee

Nerds in the Belgian gov apparently

“how a revolution happens” is not something you figure out on your own. it is “figured out” by the practice of a revolutionary workers party

sure, but we have no way of knowing what will be the context / needs of a future revolution. as others have said, you could look into soviet history, maybe something like the Cheka (чрезвычайная комиссия - emergency commission) that was tasked with preventing a counter revolution (it went through like 5 or 6 iterations). there were also Worker Peasant Militias that came from the Red Guards.

From what I’ve seen most modern socialist theory focuses on police abolition. Is that something you are looking for?

to me it becomes more clear if you think of in terms of ownership of means of production and class interests that arise from that. because petite bourgeois own their businesses, they will always be on the side of private property rights and against workers (small businesses also notoriously have atrocious working conditions). so it doesn’t even matter to me if they have the potential to become big businesses / conglomerates.

with that said, sometimes petite / national bourgeoisie can have a progressive character in certain contexts, but I would say definitely not in the US.

if the ladder is “ownership of means of production” then it sort of works.

if jeremy corbyn was french and had a party

agreed as always with cfg and yog on everything. my two cents:

She then brought up the recent BRICS forum on traditional values, as this was evidence of Russia’s obsession wth so-called traditional values.

“traditional values” in russia is a very interesting topic to me because its so weird. it is the (sort of) ideology of the russian state, everything that they do is explained in some way as to advance “traditional values” (which are never clearly defined btw). this ideology is used both on domestic and international level. domestically, traditional value are the reasoning behind anti-lgbt laws etc. internationally, traditional values are the reason to confront the west (where the west has “lost” its traditional values). the russian state weirdly projects this onto other global south nations and think that the global south likes russia because of the traditional values (and not because of soviet diplomatic legacy). its quite incoherent, but would be fascinating to study how a post-soviet ideology is constructed.

on Pussy Riot, it is actually a great example of west’s rainbow imperialism, see cfgs comment. Would be good for your paper i think.

She said that people don’t personally care much about LGBT because of the war. Is this true? I have seen the polls and people have an overwhelmingly negative perception but maybe that doesn’t matter because they are more focused on Ukraine.

on this, it is quite complicated i would say. on one hand there is the mentality that lgbt=west=bad (which sort of makes sense because lgbt people tend to be more pro west, making this weird cyclical logic), so most people are negative about it. on the other hand i’ve experienced quite a few “live and let live” attitudes where people don’t really care about what other people do (with the big asterisk that queerness is not overt/public).

but my professor wants to argue that the economy was not as bad as to cause the collapse, the cause was the national question.

to me the party question is still more important. the unique nature of the soviet state was that the only unifying factor (“the central government”) was the communist party. so when the party started to dissolve, so did the unity between the republics. + the CPSU kind of gave up on the national question after the war, which also caused the issue of there not being a party line on how to deal with nationalism by the 1980s. also of course i second everything that cfg noted!

The Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) never came to fruition.

this is actually not true. the CIS did become a thing. maybe not in the form that Gorby imagined but still, it exists to this day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_of_Independent_States

That is where the lecture ended. Next socialism class will be continuing the lecture and a discussion about My Perestroika. I have given my brief opinions on it in the comments of a previous post, the next post will be about what my fellow students had to say. I also did office hours and a lot as said.

excited fot this!

P.S. a small note on location names, for Nagorno-Karabakh the locally preferred local term is Artsakh (although it doesn’t exist anymore as a republic, but just in case you run into the term), and for Transnistria it is Pridnestrovie.

i love love love July Rain and Courier

another +1 for obisidian. used it for years with no complaints

happy anniversary of the october revolution!

ive been manifesting gov collapse since summer 2024

the bolsheviks became a faction of RSDLP in 1903 and only formally split in 1912-1914. The split mainly occurred because of opportunism / petite bourgeois tendencies in the ranks of the mensheviks. if they stayed as one party the opportunism would surely have doomed the revolution.

I wrote a comment on that recently

https://lemmygrad.ml/post/9435144/7150002

I wouldn’t be surprised tbh. I don’t revere his economic analysis or anything. It’s just hard to find anyone at all working on economic planning theory.