Hey, y’all, how do you feel about the Three Body Problem? Am I the only one who read it as a damn-near-love-letter to modern Socialism with Chinese Characteristics?

TLDR: Ask Salvador Allende. Oh, wait, you can’t. You could ask Miguel Diaz-Canel instead, but he’ll probably tell you that it doesn’t work that way.

The dictatorship of the bourgeoisie isn’t homogeneous. No political system is. There’s factions, there’s push and pull, there are adaptations to reality, and there are failures to do so. And like any other political system, it’ll only rally and act in lockstep if there’s a threat to the whole. A threat to every faction at once, usually through a threat to the whole system itself. In the case of the DotB, socialism/communism/worker rule is that threat.

In a nutshell. The reason that reformism doesn’t work is because, no matter what flavor of DotB you have, the entire purpose of the system is to keep wealth flowing to the top. Parliamentarism, presidentialism, junta, monarchy, electoral technocracy, what have you, doesn’t matter. Capitalist government exists for the purpose of keeping the relations of capital. Trying to use a tool of capitalism enforcement and maintenance, refined to the nth degree by capitalism, is trying to sail a lighthouse, or to teach a dog to sing. It literally can’t do the thing you want it to do. Attempting to twist it into a tool of the DotP would break it - I say would because, before you can even break it, it will slice your hand open.

When we say capitalism is entrenched, the DotB is both the biggest shovel and the best trench. The entire incentive system in modern governance makes it so that most people working in it have a vested interest in it doing what it’s doing. Both by (more commonly in the past) bribing the technical operators of bureaucracy, and by (always) placing beneficiaries of the system in decision making positions. Trying to get a DotB to cooperate with a socialist project leads to every level of governance has its interests threatened. And that’s on top of the bourgeoisie itself being threatened. And so the system will fight for its own survival, both at the systemic level (unjust laws, lawfare, opposition mechanics) and at the individual level (people simply not doing what the DotP project would want them to do).

Infiltration from the government from the top doesn’t work because individuals within the system have every incentive to keep the apparatus as is. Infiltration from the bottom (mostly) doesn’t work because the state apparatus prunes itself of elements that don’t fit the incentive system, or neutralizes those elements when it can’t prune them.

When it comes to DotB government infiltration, it either happens at almost every level at the same time, or it doesn’t work. History teaches us that toppling the government as a structure (aka revolution) is easier, and has a better success rate, than trying to win multiple elections at several levels plus replacing bureaucrats plus coopting enforcers and military branches all at the same time. Naturally, this is an oversimplification - doing any of those things is good. I’m open to examples to the contrary, but the point is, doing those things only leads to actual long term success if the leverage gained is used to topple the government. If socialists just sit on one or two victories inside the apparatus, or try to leverage those into more power within the apparatus, they get pushed out or neutered sooner or later, and the position is lost.

Any and all corrections by comrades are welcome. I’m not that well read.

Anyone who’s willing to fail this far back into the progression of scientific Socialism is unserious. I appreciate OP’s effort to debunk this pile of shit, because my answer would have been, “you are an undereducated imbecile carrying water for the enemy”.

How does Lula handle the military?

By not handling it, as we have seen from the two or three near misses that the Republic and its civilian rule had in the last fifteen years. More below.

The near coup that Bolsonaro botched didn’t come out of the blue sky. The whole spiraling debacle that was the end of the Rousseff presidency, the Weimar speedrun that was the Temer presidency, and the rise of the far right all taught us that the Brazilian state apparatus is coopted at every single level. Any top down attempt to move the country away from the imperial order will be corroded from within. The Judiciary did, with Operation Car Wash. The legislature did, with their “coalition presidentialism” (which was a spin-off of Lula’s attempt to bribe the DotB from within, the mensalão).

Ultimately, the army is the failsafe: the last tool for the owner class to course correct. But just that. One more tool. In every instance, the military coups failed not because of the military’s love of civilian presidential democracy, or because of any secret leaning towards the left. It failed because the military was disunited. The internal neoliberal faction decided that the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze; it wasn’t worth it to topple the system because the threat to the bourgeoisie wasn’t real. And they were right. Lula’s internal policy swing to collaborationism and his progression towards center-right fiscal conservatism is both proof and consequence. He knows the system will not allow him to change it, and being a reformist, he simply takes the system as far as it’ll willingly go.

Ultimately, that is how Lula deals with the army: by presenting himself as an inoffensive alternative among the bourgeoisie’s buffet of stooges. His gentle guiding of the apparatus to the left here and there is less disruptive to the owner class than the radical, coup prone, christofascist adjacent far-right project. Thus, he is allowed to stay. And Brazil gets another four year round of bourgeois electoralism.

TLDR: Blanquism doesn’t work. Changing the person on top doesn’t change the people in real power. True change only comes from revolution.

Fucken beautiful

To quote a classic XKCD. Emphasis mine.

Public Service Announcement: The Right to Free Speech means the government can’t arrest you for what you say. It doesn’t mean that anyone else has to listen to your bullshit, or host you while you share it. The 1st Amendment doesn’t shield you from criticism or consequences.

If you’re yelled at, boycotted, have your show canceled, or get banned from an Internet community, your free speech rights aren’t being violated. It’s just that the people listening think you’re an asshole, and they’re showing you the door.

Most common Burkinabe W

It’s the whole “gallant in victory, valiant in defeat” bullshit. It makes sense when war is a sport for rich people, nothing else. We are in the receiving end of a war is extermination. FUCK CIVILITY. Terroristic in defeat, “we make no excuses for our terror” in victory.

LIBERAL FOLKS.

If you think a settler colonial ethnostate whose opinion of your existence is overwhelmingly negative due to their politics (Zionist nazifascism) is your friend, it is because of imperial propaganda.

Then, I say, try going through what’s being done to Gazans, I’m trying to see a social experiment play out.

I’ll even set a GoFundMe to test this social experiment. The money will be used to buy 100% ethical, fair trade, Israel-built cattle cars. Here, I’ll help you in.

Proof positive that there’s no amount of watering down of the Democrat “resistance” that the Republicans will accept.

Top level D’s know that, just as they know their entire raison d’etre is to serve as a lightning rod for discontent and as an off ramp for revolutionary potential. But… One of the few good things that ground level Democrats could do is to point out that this pathetic shit buttons gets them the same pushback they would get from ten thousand billboards saying “KILL EVERY SINGLE REPUBLICAN WITHOUT EXCEPTION” and “TORTURE THE ENTIRE FAMILIES OF GOP REPS TO DEATH”, which means any attempt to meet the fascists in the middle comes from a position of agreement with them.

Class interests trump all other interests. They won’t make a headline anytime soon, though, because it’s not news.

Respectfully…

In the case that you describe with your father, and in the case of many compatible-left folks who fizzle out in the imperial core, the truth is so simple it’s kind of pedestrian.

Many are pushed left due to having a basic capacity to see and hear the world around them. The injustice and oppression of the system are extremely patent, and when they’re young and haven’t been exposed to as much propaganda simply by virtue of not being around it long enough, they gravitate towards whatever flavor of “left” is seen as acceptable.

Then, some time goes by. They don’t know a lot, but they see what they see. The left failing to gain headway. The discourse being what it is. The propaganda framing everything for them in a way that makes superficial sense. And they drift.

Parliamentary politics are especially attractive to those who have the “politics as a lifestyle” approach, because “all ideas can be heard”. Plus, their material interests are more likely to align with the system, the more wealth they have.

Very simply put: it seems to me that your father was unprincipled. Don’t get me wrong. He sounds like a genuine, good person. But it really seems that his understanding of the positions he claims to hold were, and are, paper thin. And thus, so is his commitment.

Based on what you’re saying, he never learned enough to truly understand the position he claimed to hold. He was an anarchist because he saw the injustice of the system, and the cool kids who had something to say on the topic called themselves anarchists. He didn’t learn enough to either move beyond that, or to really entrench himself. He “joined anarchism” based on vibes, and when the vibes changed, he followed them where the machine guided him.

Among a ton of other reasons, this is why we bang on about reading theory so much. For all that our hearts burn with the injustice and cruelty of it all, for all that we are committed to the cause of the working class… If we don’t understand what’s going on, if we don’t keep learning until we have a real grasp on how the system does what it does and why it is what it is, at some point we’ll be led astray.

Thank you for this. I needed some hope today.

I could be wrong, but the fact that he’s confessed makes it so that the news sources don’t have the usual liability issues that require the use of “alleged”.

Many criticize them

Well, “many” are liberals.

I know I should feel sorry for the farmers - the epitome of working class indispensables - but the fact that they voted Trump makes me see red so deep it almost turns to black. Of course I know voting blue would have been no improvement of note, but Trump is the ultimate signifier of Fascist cruelty. I know they’re rubes, that they were conned by the Republican machine. But I can’t look away from the fact that the very reason they have been conned, the reason the Republican party appealed to them in the first place, is that they are the most abominable, abject kind of racist fascist verminous filth possible.

I know I’m wrong, comrades. But I cannot help it. I do not celebrate the takeover of worker-owned land by a mega corporation. I abhor it. But I do celebrate the suffering of the farmers. The destruction of their entire way of life, the losses imposed on them, the destitution and penury they’re being cast into. I cherish it, in the same way I cherish the things that were done by the Soviets to Nazi collaborators, because that is what they are. And if I were to say what I think they deserve, what I genuinely and wholeheartedly wish upon them, I’d probably get banned from here.

Here’s a question to those comrades who know better than I do. How do I reconcile that? How do I reframe my observation of them and what’s happening to them, in order to better sympathize with the plight of a fellow worker?

Exactly… how does a socialist, communist or anarchist think revolution will happen?

“Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution?” etc. etc. It’s all intellectual entertainment, and pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking, and lifestyle identitarianism with those types. They might as well be playing SimCity.

Lenin’s insight tells us, the revolutionary society is a direct child of the revolution process. Thinking about a socialist future without focusing on an actual process that takes us there is utopianism. That is what makes “leftists” unserious.