GarbageShoot

You were so much nicer to me before, but in my process of trying to look up that butterchurn thing, all I found was an argument that you had with Barx 12 days ago, where you had a tone much more like you have here. I'm not sure what I did to deserve it. Also I still want a source on the butterchurn thing.

In 2024 it's on its face ridiculous to attempt to segregate farm labor from industrial labor

I would consider farm labor in a modern state like the US to be proletarian. This should be obvious. It's a backward country in many ways, but the relations of production are not medieval.

rather than advocate for labor solidarity,

Even if they [modern American rural workers] were peasants, or we were talking about an industrializing nation in the modern day that actually does have something like a medieval peasantry alongside a proletariat, I would advocate for solidarity among the working classes against the owning classes. Nothing I said contradicted that. You underestimate how specific a criticism I was making, just because I support one of Lenin's premises in a defective argument does not mean I support every premise, every inference, and every conclusion. You're shadowboxing.

that's exactly how I know you're writing apologia.

It turns out you don't.

Under Leninism peasants are not proletarians. Let me underline that. Under Leninism anyone who worked on a farm was not a worker in the communist sense.

This is just a silly thing for you to say. "Proletarian" does not mean the same thing as "worker," it refers to someone who is reliant on selling their labor for wages. Peasants and proletarians are both workers, and it's a basic feature of the development of (e.g. European) capitalism that there were successive stages of owning and working classes.

I really don't think the butter-churn benchmark was representative of Leninist theory about divisions in the peasantry* (which is not me saying that they didn't make catastrophic errors). It feels to me like saying "People engaged in ritual cannibalism during the Cultural Revolution" as a way of characterizing the CR. Yes, such a thing did happen as far as I can tell, but it's not like it was a national issue or part of Mao's doctrine, it was a bizarre thing that took hold among certain factions in a certain region during a period of upheaval.

Obviously, Mao handled the peasant question much better, it's probably what he is given the most credit for, but he does something similar in his ""cosmology"" in terms of dividing the peasantry into three major types, (poor, middle, rich) and aligning himself fundamentally with the poor while accepting collaboration with the middle, making distinctions about "well-to-do middle peasants" and so on. Here's an example from Stalin. This is not to say Lenin and Stalin did not make grave errors, I repeat that they did, but when you were sneering about a ""cosmology,"" you were failing to explain these differences against Mao.

Lastly, I admit that Trotsky was more honest before his exile, but I really question using him as a source for criticizing Stalin when he would historically go on to do any anticommunist thing he had to in order to attack Stalin. I don't think you need to go and get, idk, some troubled journal entry from Molotov, your point is made, I just think speaking of Trotsky as though he's credible is, uh, fraught.

*Edit: I reread your post and it seems to be suggesting that the butter-churn thing actually came from Moscow. Is that so?

kulaks became a targeted class

Turns out communists target classes. Weren't they extremely explicit about this? And the pearl-clutching libs then say that "every domestic enemy of the state was called a kulak"

Or do you mean, like, they were all explicitly targeted with death as the only allowable outcome rather than the dissolution of there class? (a number of them were killed either way, of course)

It seems like it would be more satisfying to use an insult that you don't need to self-censor

We have a lot in common. In my case it's a whole bunch of things including some attention problem, depression, and just generally being poorly socialized.

For just a moment I thought it was a different "at ground zero" song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t039p6xqutU

I am surprised King Gizzard hasn't made one, or maybe they did recently, I haven't really kept up. Then again, they already have that track about a cyborg exploding with vomit that consumes the universe, so it would probably be a step down. Pink Floyd almost has one, but it's on the horizon.

Chapo did an excellent interview with Norman Finkelstein a while ago where Norm points out the Early Life section of Putin's Wikipedia page:

Putin's birth was preceded by the deaths of two brothers: Albert, born in the 1930s, died in infancy, and Viktor, born in 1940, died of diphtheria and starvation in 1942 during the Siege of Leningrad by Nazi Germany's forces in World War II.[29][30]

Putin's mother was a factory worker, and his father was a conscript in the Soviet Navy, serving in the submarine fleet in the early 1930s. During the early stage of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, his father served in the destruction battalion of the NKVD.[31][32][33] Later, he was transferred to the regular army and was severely wounded in 1942.[34] Putin's maternal grandmother was killed by the German occupiers of Tver region in 1941, and his maternal uncles disappeared on the Eastern Front during World War II.[35]

He infers from this that Putin seems to have grown up in the shadow of the ravages of the Nazi invasion of the USSR, which notoriously went how it went in part because Stalin underestimated how quickly the Nazis would attack. He took a passive approach despite the Nazis being on his doorstep and something like 20 million Soviet civilians died for it.

This isn't to lay very much blame on Stalin, I don't know enough about the situation to do so, but it does lend itself to the lesson that when scratched liberals are right there, existentially threatening you, you don't just wait for them to pull the trigger.

Norm put it much better than I could have. I believe it's buried somewhere in this episode: https://soundcloud.com/chapo-trap-house/718-the-view-feat-norman-finkelstein-32823 which is mostly about other things.

To their credit, I think the Principles of Communism thing is partially meant as a floodgate, since the devs really do believe in their project and want to avoid over-centralization from everyone defaulting to one instance. They know many people will go "What the hell? No!" and go somewhere else and that's exactly the point. I'd be surprised if they really thought it would get almost anyone to engage with Marxism with the prompt, especially since you can copy the first sentence of the text and not read anything else (and even just reading it is not engaging with it). I think it's more like a little joke.

Also, copying a sentence of your choice to a pamphlet is not a pledge and I think it's silly to view it that way. If it helps, iirc, one of the sentences that appears is "No." and they will accept that as an answer.

But assuming this was "promoting an ideology directly," would you find it less sketchy for an instance to promote ideology indirectly? Because if you aren't directly doing ideology, that just means you are indirectly doing it (sometimes very deliberately). Personally, I appreciate transparency.

Yeah, because they are all part of their respective instances and those instances (de)federate with each other. ml and ee are both good for that purpose. My own instance is bad for that purpose, but after spending some time on a more mainstream instance, I decided this was better for my mental health.

I think the superiority is incidental. It feels to me like being a Dem is their way if Doing The Right Thing, they just follow the rules and feel self-assured, so when someone comes along who doesn't Do The Right Thing, they are outraged and revolted by this challenge to the thing that makes them feel assured.

nor is it to "de-Nazify" Ukraine

I think they do want to do this, since the Nazis are extremely hostile to Russia, so it's crushing the opposition. Obviously this is pretty different from the historical de-Nazification efforts whose corpse Putin cynically puppets as cover for his actions.

If there are meaningful factions of Greater Russia Nazis in Ukraine, he'd obviously be fine with those as he is fine with them in Russia.