it's.... so..... LONG!
...is what she said. Anyway. Moving on, and gratuitously cropping the discussion just so we're manageable going forwards (if I don't comment, assume the default answer is a chin-rubbing nod and a gentle "Hmm," but in like a sophisticated way, befitting the srs naychur of Spam threads)
Communists and Anarchists partook in part during the Spanish Civil War in the thirties and among the Republican ranks held considerable sway and actually administrated their own land. I have heard in cases they were more productive in their use of land and labor than before and George Orwell has written positively about the revolutionary egalitarian spirit found in Anarchist Spain at the time, calling it the mystique that attracts men to Socialism in the first place.
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More recently we have post-Bookchin groups like the Zapatistas in Southern Mexico advocating for absolute horizontal democracy among the population there and the Rojava Kurds asking very much the same
Basque finally surrendered its last arms, and Spain is cool now I guess, but for the record, Spanish revolutionaries didn't stay cool forever. Granted, all I really learned of the Spanish Civil War came from Pan's Labyrinth, and at least in that depiction the government wasn't exactly cool either. I can find absolutely nothing negative to post about the Zapatistas, and as much as I generally appreciate Kurdish efforts to blast away at nasty people in the middle east, apparently lots of Kurdish groups are themselves terror networks and it's goddamn impossible for me to separate all the who's from all the other who's over yonder. Confuzzling. Anyway. I only commented to throw some more gas on that 'revolution fetish' catchphrase I pseudo-invented in the previous post, primarily because romanticizing the nobility of any one particular quasi-terrorist struggle is inherently dangerous. I'm sure Spanish anarchocommunists were generally sweet from (at a minimum) a few perspectives -- just saying.
Tito's major flaw though would probably have been his penchant for allowing greater and great autonomy among the constituent nations of Yugoslavia and/or a failure to ensure a stable government for after his passing and failure to negate nearly an entire region's history of animosity towards one another.
Yeah Yugoslavia didn't really, ah, break that whole genocidal mold we were worrying about, in the end.... But you're certainly (implicitly?) correct that it's pretty unfair to lay THIS PARTICULAR mass-slaughter wholly at the feet of communism.
To tackle this: good for you. However, it doesn't do much to change the fact there's a wealth shift going on in this country. Peter Temin of MIT has released a study on this, here's an article. And here's another. The basic idea is we're falling apart fast, and as he's even quoted:
“America is not only reverting to developing-country status, it is increasingly ripe for serious social turmoil that has not been seen in generations.”
Real quick -- people have been arguing that since about 1782, so let's not put too much stock in the fear-mongering.
And while the area around a new mall has repaved the highway to make it first world, Detroit, Baltimore, Appalachia, and Newark are falling apart as the eyes and interests of the nation leave them behind because now they got to spend on the fashionable coast where the middle class are going. [+some more snipped stuff, but let's highlight this part first and then seamlessly flow]
NOTABLY: cities run by leftists are also the ones falling apart and/or literally shooting themselves and/or burning themselves down while packed into a warehouse because they can't afford their own inflated rent and/or rioting about the damage in the city while damaging their city. Texas, Salt Lake City, Colorado Springs.... they're doing just fine. Which of course begs the (admittedly pretty partisan) question, why the
fuck would we listen to the other guy here? Ya know? I mean that's harsh, yeah, but.... come on now. The world's orange-est capitalist took power 100 days ago and the industry in these old manufacturing towns
has been on a non-stop skyrocket ever since, slowing only when rumors began to swirl that he was't going to deregulate quite as much as people thought he might. Who left who behind again? The Rust Belt made their opinions on the matter quite clear, much to the chagrin of -- well, basically everybody else in the world. My own stated perspective aside, I'm taking their word for it.
To answer the end question first: my primary concern over the course of things is letting such a small group of people have such control over our lives, and to without necessary input of labor by the consuming body of the population enjoy a quality of life in excess of the rest of us. This may either lead to a sort of hardcore Swedish-”Socialism” by necessity with living wages granted to every individual irregardless of activity, or we riot and everything goes full post-Rome as Vilage doesn't want to happen in his life-time.
Or any number of things in-between, or nothing. Teach a man to fish and he'll drink on weekends, give a man a living basic income and he'll eat forever. Give a man a 105" UHDTV and he'll forget he's supposed to eat. Inequality only matters in a context of scarcity. You walk past some untold number of Starbucks mugs every day, and even if you're not currently holding a starbucks mug yourself, it's simply not a big deal -- of course, if you're on a life raft in the middle of the ocean and the other guy is holding a snicker's bar, that's worth killing for.
The point being this: in a distant future where work is no longer required for production, even first-world problems are (logically and presumably) as rare as an actual genocide. Case in point -- nobody goes to war for control of emojis. You can already have as many emojis as you need, want, or accidentally utilize. Scarcity of emojis does not exist. The concept of struggling over them is ludicrous (at least it should be, I'm sure there's a guy). In the future we're talking about, basically everything is as readily available as emojis. I'll grant you that capitalism isn't prepared to deal with that -- sure. Communism DAMNED SURE isn't ready either; nobody is. It just so happens that Capitalism is taking us there, and for the life of me I can't think of a reason we should stop. Shit man that's gonna be awesome.
....and I started going forwards and realized you addressed some of that, but fuckit, we're doing long srs posts in spam now, this am me srs face.
But we could still fulfil certain conditions of communism by way of workers control of the means of production with some adaptation.
...but like, why? We're in the garden of Eden, arguing over who gets to name the apple. Just fucking take some, have a bushel, call them Krauttestes if you want.
But this argues that reward is necessary for something to become better. But the recent trend towards opensource/open access software and hardware. While perhaps it may not survive a nuclear blast, Easton LaChapelle's open-source prosthetic hand is totally open and free to tinker with on your own time. Just like the code for the internet. It's not going to be massive an noticeable sweeping change like with what you would get for getting a DARPA grant, the method of open sourcing effectively means that the product will be gradually improved over time, and in the spirit of open source may even become part of the product for free for the next guy.
I absolutely get what you're saying -- it's just that
this is so radically and empirically inferior to
this. And I'm not, like, super patient about the gradually-improved-over-time process for like my actual limbs. I say that with the utmost respect and appreciation for all you small-arms dealers out there -- you're doing an awesome thing, and I hope someone's paying you lots of money to do it. Just.... you know. We've had, what, all of human history to figure out prosthetics? Then in the last fifteen years we started throwing actual money at it, and went from hooks and strings to fucking Evangelion in a decade. As the interested party, I'm going with money on this one.
It would be argued that disability in east and west traveled on much the same course so attempting to compare the two is a strained effort because it's comparing something from the 40's or 70's to today.
I mean compare it to the similar period east/west counterparts. Capitalism generated wealth and Meemaw got to eat Chef Boyardi from her microwave oven. Communism generated poverty and Babushka got buried in a mass grave with political dissidents (assuming she hadn't been executed by the state for wearing glasses).
At consistently below 50% of the population participating in elections at all, it might be said that government in the US has a very low mandate to even exist.
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It would be supposed then that if the country's democratic process has become dysfunctional, then action is needed.
Dysfunctional is a strong word. For all we know, American politics is just boring (preposterous suggestion after last year, I know). Nonparticipation is only an issue if it's compulsory, and in the US it's only compulsory in the case of convicted felons. I'd hardly call that a crisis. In short: let's not spend too much effort trying to straighten the horns on a bull here. Maybe they SHOULD be curved.
Violence if [sic -- "isn't," I think] preferable, but of the actions it's one that produces results, it's just the political management after and how the pre-existing structure of the previous state is managed to conduct what ends are needed.
I'm jumbled a bit. Sounds like what you're saying is essentially that the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots. My meme-level response is that Communism doesn't equal liberty and AntiFa ain't patriots -- flesh that out in your mind, what I'm driving at is Franklin, Jefferson, Washington, et al
agonized over the decision to go to war with England -- not out of cowardice or their inability to be effective, but out of wisdom. More frequently than the proponents of glorious revolution would care to admit, the goons running around cracking skulls are just that -- goons.
