Lol

I cannot stop laughing at the idea that socialism ignores humanity’s highest spiritual ideal: owning yachts.

Just a hunch here, gop. But I think being 14 and married to a gross older man or dying in a mining accident is a bigger threat to a child than hearing about trans people.

Children. Too young to know that they're trans. Too young to know that they're asexual. Too young to hear that gay people exists. Too young to listen to drag performers read books to them.

Not to young to be exploited in an 8 to 5 40 hour work week. Not to young to pay income taxes. Not too young to sign their life away to a job they hate. Not too young to be verbally abused by their employer. Not too young to risk their life in a dangerous job. Not to young to permanently harm their body by sitting at the computer 8 hours a day. (Which has permanent health affects)

---

European Employers "Work 40 hrs a week"

European workers "Then we don't want to work."

European employers "Fine. 30 hrs."

American Employers. "Work 40 hrs a week"

American Workers "Then we don't want to work"

American Employers "Then your children will have to work"

-fae

"[M]any people with chronic and debilitating conditions are more vulnerable than they were before the pandemic began. The policies that protected them during the pandemic’s height are gone—and yet SARS-CoV-2 is still here, adding to the dangers they face. The losses have been written off, Bortko told me: Cases of long COVID in Madison County have been dismissed as products of 'risk factors' that don’t apply to others; deaths, too, have been met with a shrug of 'Oh, they were old; they were unhealthy.' If, this winter, COVID sickens or kills more people who are older, more people who are immunocompromised, more people of color, more essential and low-income workers, more people in rural communities, 'there will be no press coverage,' Hlatshwayo Davis said. Americans already expect that members of these groups will die."

"COVID still kills roughly as many Americans every week as died on 9/11. It is on track to kill at least 100,000 a year—triple the typical toll of the flu. Despite gross undercounting, more than 50,000 infections are being recorded every day. The CDC estimates that 19 million adults have long COVID. Things have undoubtedly improved since the peak of the crisis, but calling the pandemic 'over' is like calling a fight 'finished' because your opponent is punching you in the ribs instead of the face."

The Grad Student Shuffle- Christ Fleming

It’s testament to how slanted our education and media is against anti-capitalist and anti-statist measures that any act of violence, regardless of its scale, is taken as proof of the invalidity of those measures as a whole.

Not to in any way reduce what the Ukrainians endured under the Soviet regime, but the British Raj had close to the equivalent of a Holodomor every 17.5 years. Less than a generation, another 2-5 million starved to death. Yet, somehow, that’s not evidence that English parliamentary democracy is a flawed system.

The fact that Hitler’s rise to power was actively enabled by conservative parties under the late Weimar Republic isn’t framed as evidence that Germany shouldn’t have given liberal democracy another go.

Colonial states such as the USA and Canada are -rightfully- condemned for their history of mistreatment of indigenous peoples and the part they played in the slave trade, and the United States is rightfully condemned for its historical interference in sovereign governments to push the interests of corporations.

But to suggest, perhaps, that liberal representative democracy does not sufficiently serve us, that these issues cannot be resolved through reform alone, that revolutionary action is necessary? It must be dismissed immediately. We wouldn’t want to get violent, would we?

My professor today: Were gonna talk about ethics in technology. Picking strawberries is extremely difficult and damaging labor for workers. But what if we could automate that process?  Obviously this would be a great thing for anyone who buys strawberries as the price would go down! but what about the single mom who picked strawberries and now has no job? Makes you think doesn’t it? Clearly there is no other option here. Either the worker toils to get rich people strawberries or she and her children starve and die. this is the only ethical issue i can see in this example :)

OR WE COULD HAVE COMMUNISM [or at very least socialism] WOW WHO WOULD HAVE GUESSED THAT AUTOMATION IS A FUCKING GOOD THING SHUT THE FUCK UP. 8) 

anon wrote: I once took a job picking strawberries, they paid $2 an hour. A single mother wouldn’t even be able to support herself with this kind of job. Professors are so out of touch with reality

friendly reminder:

money is a social construct.

capitalists, people get fucking bored if they do nothing, believe me we don’t need death as a motivation to entertain ourselves with inventing new technology, creating art, making music, building unique homes, creating better infrastructure. 

Believe it or not, people have interests, and people would love to do what they have interests in, they just get burnt out having to do it to fucking survive, or never having the opportunity to interact with their interest because they were never given the means or the support to curate their interest.

People don’t stagnate. It’s literally a mental illness when all you can do is lie in bed doing nothing, and if we had better medical assistance for all even more people could find joy in life doing what they love. Doing what entertains themselves.

There are billions of people, there may be jobs that most people find undesirable, yet others find interesting. So to say there is a universal work that no person wants to do is a stretch, but besides the point. We can automate the vast majority of jobs people don’t want to do, and with equal access to unlimited education we can automate even more things people do not typically wish to do.

I’m literally paid SSI to survive, I need it because I am incredibly mentally ill, and incredibly disabled, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to work. I’m devastated that I can’t contribute to my community. Just because I get an income from the government to survive on doesn’t mean I want to lie around doing nothing, I want to do the opposite, I just need the resources to heal and get better so I can do things.

Allowing people basic necessities like house, food, income, water, medical care, transportation, doesn’t make people lazy, it allows them to follow their dreams and do what they have always wanted to do, instead of doing things with the threat of death behind their back, never fully putting their heart into it, because they never truly wanted to do it in the first place.

yes there are jobs most people dont want to do, but with universal education, we can automate these jobs, we can already automate the vast majority of them, face it, we can improve our society. 

The statement “no one who works 40 hours a week should starve” is the bare minimum of bullshit centrist ideology; the fact that it’s considered a relatively “out there” left-wing idea is absolutely wild. No one should starve, full stop. Especially with the material abundance we now sit upon. Full workers-control-production socialism now.

heres a cool idea: what if in 2017 tumblr commie kids gave up the creepy romanticization of the soviet union thing in favor of the aesthetics of american labor history–the haymarket riot, the pullman strike, the great railroad strike, emma goldman & yiddish socialism, woody guthrie, pete seeger, paul robeson, the iww and the 1912 textile workers’ strike, the ladies’ garment workers’ union, wpa murals, the american communist party, bread and roses, the union maid. that’s the Good Shit if yr looking for historical leftist culture imo

Seriously tho, kids. 

The USSR was a blood-soaked mess. A racist, anti-semitic, sexist blood-soaked mess at that. Do not repeat the sins of the Left of the 60s/etc by ignoring that. (Same goes for Maoist China, etc.) To ignore that is to literally piss on a truly appalling number of graves As an allegory, Animal Farm’s inaccuracies were that it’s not grim and horrific enough. The most conservative and hesitant and “well we don’t want to be hysterical about this” count of Stalin’s death toll, not including famine-victims, is 4 million; the one which, after various amounts of research, I find most convincing is about 20 million. Mao’s Great Leap Forward killed anywhere from 18 to 50 million, and we have literal footage of Tienamen, guys. 

This is not the good example you are looking for. Do not romanticise them. 

100% go back, as OP says, to the things that actually had good results (like a 40 hour work-week and basic human worker’s rights and shite) and did not do them over mountains of corpses. We have lots! They even included (gosh!) women! and queers! and people of colour/different ethnicities! They do all the things you want. 

These are your models. Not those bloody handed bastards over there. 

@dadhoc I can hear your socialist heart growing three sizes

As someone who is partially Ukrainian (a group that suffered very hard under the USSR) thank you so much. Holodomor was orchestrated by the USSR. 

Because guess what? Under USSR, there was a large man made famine. Under a system that supposedly was supposed to make sure everyone got their 3 meals equally. 

there’s a good reason most americans don’t know about the various socialist movements in their own country: they were at times really fucking effective. and not in a kill-20-million-people way. 

seriously, start with howard zinn and keep going. i’m all for more socialist labor movements, but let’s not do communist russia again, ever, ever, thanks. 

In 2015, “socialism” was the most searched word on the Merriam-Webster online dictionary.

The first Democratic Party debate, watched by 15 million people, began with a question to candidate Bernie Sanders about his identification as a democratic socialist.

“Socialism” and “capitalism” were also the most looked up words for the whole year of 2012, when the Republican Party focused its campaign on falsely accusing President Obama of being a socialist.

Clearly, a large section of the population has an openness to learn about socialism. In addition to that general sentiment of curiosity, more and more activists now denounce “the system,” and even name capitalism as an enemy alongside white supremacy and patriarchy.

And why wouldn’t they? The country’s richest 20 capitalists now possess more wealth than the bottom 194 million people!

We didn’t need documents to confirm what we knew, but it is always good to have concrete evidence. Now, will Shell be forced to pay sizable restitution to the Ogoni people and those in the surrounding areas? They have ruined ecosystems and the way of life for millions. How many Shell executives will be going to prison?

We didn’t need documents to confirm what we knew, but it is always good to have concrete evidence. Now, will Shell be forced to pay sizable restitution to the Ogoni people and those in the surrounding areas? They have ruined ecosystems and the way of life for millions. How many Shell executives will be going to prison?