You’re typing out the words “lol” and “I’m literally laughing out loud” on a keyboard or phone, cognitive dissonance carefully avoided, hoping that by repeating yourself and ignoring what has been said to you, you can get away from this conversation purely on vibes.

You are running away and trying to taunt in bad faith while doing it. Go ahead, bravely run away, nobody is stopping you.

Coward

You mean the tiny group that served some free meals in a few cities and got wiped out by the police?

I mean the communists that organized within black communities, fed children, protected their communities from racist cops, and did so well enough that they were targeted not just by the local police but by the FBI and other parts of the “national security” apparatus, including Reagan. Their former members are still often active and passing down valuable lessons to young people just learning, which you could also be if you learned to have some humility and honesty.

Note how far we have drifted from the things I’ve actually said, as you do not have actual convictions you can defend, just lazy reactionary talking points to help you avoid thinking challenging thoughts.

The one that had a leader [Eldrige Cleaver] who considered rape as a political act?

Rape can very much be a political act. US soldiers doing so systematically in Vietnam, for example.

But every political formation will have individuals with wrong opinions or worse. And if you are organizing with the marginalized, you will be organizing with ex-cons. I’m not sure what you think is accomplished by this tidbit. Cleaver was quite open about this part of his past and renounced it.

Later in this comment you refer to Obama. How many children did Obama kill with a stroke of the pen and a cynical line and how does this compare to the viplences of a teenage Cleaver? How much has Obama renounced and how many years did he serve in prison for the act?

Meanwhile Obama’s ACA gave health coverage to 45 million people.

The ACA is primarily an individual mandate to buy a massively overpriced product from the insurance industry. It also included a limited Medicaid expansion that was quickly eaten up by inflation and wage growth (but not real wage growth). Insurance costs still rose, just less quickly than they were otherwise expected to. This is what you consider to be a major material win? Slightly slower rates of growth in picking workers’ pockets? What an amazing gift!

I’ll stick with the people who actually get things done.

What do you mean stick with? What part do you play in any of that? The ACA was a response to uncontrolled spiraling of healthcare costs that, among other things, make US workers entirely uncompetitive and only serves to create debt. The ACA was a Republican plan that forces people to buy companies’ products. You are not the force at work here and you are not on any team aside from the exploited.

Whete do you factor into any of that?

You ever heard of the Black Panthers?

HTS and those in their orbit are derived from ISIS and similar groups, itself drawing radicalized fighters from around the world to do heinous things to people. And in Syria/Iraq, funded by the US to destabilize inconvenient governments. Like that of Assad.

It is not entirely surprising that fellow imperialist attack dogs are not first on their list to attack. They are also trying to court “the international community” (OECD) by privatizing (read: scrapping for parts) industry and services. Going after Israel would disrupt that angle. But attacking countries and people that the US has already been helping kill? No worries of retaliation from the “international community”.

The British

Do you think you’re doing something else?

Yes, we should definitely not have something like Sweden or the old New Deal.

I think you need to refamiliarize yourself with what I said, as this is not it.

We should let children grow up in poverty, let old people suffer, and let the planet burn while we sit around discussing Trotsky and the Second International in hopes that the revolution will come.

I said something that is the exact opposite of sitting around, actually. Do your best to read a little more carefully before sharing opinions.

iirc de La Cruz got less than 100,000 votes.

And?

Great quote and book!

Socialism is always about recreating a ruling class: it is to make the working class into the ruling class.

There is no practical alternative to this. Imagine trying the only way: to immediately end class relations. You’ve won the revolution. Your ideological brethren are in power and the Great Workers’ Council is going forward with your plan. How are you going to force people to end class relations? Won’t it require a state? Who is enforcing the end of relations? If someone buys up an extra-big plot of land and starts charging tenants rent, reinventing semi-feudal relations, who is going to stop them? And what are you going to do about the bourgeoisie who still exist, especially those overseas, and are working against you to reopen your country for exploitation?

All of these basic realities require a state. And you cannot simply end all class relations instantaneously, as the wider public will not all agree with you ideologically. Unless you plan extreme forms of oppression for the entire population, you will need to deal with the remnants of various class relations in various forms, engaging, ideally, in a process that will whittle them away. That entire process will be recreating a ruling class, i.e. the working class, to impose this process on the other classes.

Socialism is not about the government’s size. Socialists, particularly Marxists, emphasize using the state and nationalization after proletarian revolution to reflect the working class’ interests and build socialism, but the size of the state itself is not what makes something socialist, both because (1) socialists seek to eventually end the state itself once productive forces and consciousness are sufficiently advanced and (2) capitalist states can also have large governments, generally to serve the interests of the ruling class, albeit sometimes in a roundabout way.

Socialism is about making the working class the ruling class. It is explicitly about oppressing the bourgeois class, which is itself the current ruling class oppressing the working (and other) classes. The idea is to take the means of production and run it for ourselves rather than the profit of a class defined by merely owning factories, buildings, tools, etc.

The cartoon may be confused.

It’s the opposite, actually.

The people who talk about “tax the rich” or the New Deal don’t actually do anything, they are armchair activists who have no real idea of how they would ever accomplish this outside of pretending the Democratic Party, which constantly opposes them and crushes such ideas, is the vehiclr, and the way to make it happen is complaining on the internet.

Communists know that actually addressing our collective problems is a much more difficult task, nothing less than the overthrow of capitalism, something that would need to survive attempts at cooption by liberal power structures like the aforementioned party. So we build from the ground up, educating one another and developing practice so that we can balance growth, education, and having impact through actions. We go to the meetings, we run the meetings, we teach one another, we organize the protests and marches, we build the strategic mutual aid events, we embed with workers’ spaces and unions, we embed with and build from within the marginalized so as to be of them. Communist organizing is adding a part-time job on top of your other obligations.

Norway is a capitalist country. It us an OECD hanger-on to the US-led imperialist world order.

I was going to follow up with a sick zinger but instead I’ll just be normal, ha.

It is important to grow the left, to turn it from like 100-1000 people in a given city into 5-10%. I can agree with that motivation, as can the vast majority of socialists. Our aim is revolution, that doesn’t happen from just a few reading groups, it has to become more.

The entire country already caters to the demo you mentioned. Everything is ready-made for them. Many orgs are dominated by them, such as the DSA. You should not write off straight white cis guys but they are consistently the hardest to reach because they are dismissive of others’ experiences with oppression and have been more shielded from capitalism’s worst in their country, but tend to feel very entitled to an opinion about it.

Centrism is the only described characteristic that is a chosen identity and it is a political tendency, if you can call it that. It’s a person with no political development whatsoever, they just vaguely cobble together an incoherent mishmash of common liberal and reactionary ideas that they can’t really defend but they call themselves an outsider as if that means something regarding someone whose political life can be summed up as, “sometimes votes”.

So what would it mean to try to boost efforts to recruit straight white cis dude centrists? Because the first things that would come to mind for me are usually called tailism by socialists and has a long track record of failure in the US in particular, where the US had a gargantuan labor movement that was entirely scuttled by liberal cooption and playing straight white cis dudes off of marginalized groups. There were entire unions that were segregated or disallowed black membership, for example. Those were the easiest to coopt into the red scare and, once they were used to out and isolate socialists, were then easily undermined and shrunk when their anticommunist government came for labor a couple decades later, having no radical core remsining and no material leverage.

Are you active in any socialist parties?

It is very difficult to run an email provider and not get banned by the others. Google, Microsoft, and Apple control the US market, for example. If they decide your domain is spam, you suddenly can’t email anyone with a Gmail or Hotmail or Apple account. Avoiding getting banned means you have to regulate your own outgoing emails very carefully, rate-limit them just right, and yet also build up a reputation of trustworthiness by sending a lot of emails that don’t get marked as spam.

The only privacy-secure way to do your email would be DIY but this risks getting banned like… all the time.

Personally, I recommend having your own domain and setting up MX records to a reliable email provider that is not one of the big ones and ideally offers some kind of theoretical inbox protection (please note that they could always still read everything if they just copied all incoming messages to another database as well).

Email is itself not very secure. You can use GPG to make it better but most people won’t know how to receive your messages or send secure ones. For security, I recommend using a dedicated e2e chat service or in-person communication.