...and if you do, hoooooo boy. I hope you like a coup, because you are going to get a coup.... or sanctions... or a blockade... or all three.

Namely, capitalism.

Worker unions bad, police unions enforcing corporate-aligned government rules good.

Is there? There are hundreds of giant worker co ops here in brazil, and I know multiple people who live in amarchist communities in the wooxds. Most of them don't last very long, but they do try, and then stop on theirbown accord.

BTW, a giant worker co op named Aurora was responaible for slave like conditions in one of their many grape farms.

But try!!!, dont use the difficulty as an excuse

Okay but they weren't communist about it, so it doesnt count. Stop whining Ireland.

Pepridge Farm remembers

This assigns too much legitimacy to the position. The working class are not capitalists because we have no capital with which to commit legal theft through property law or pay thugs to enforce those laws with violence.

The working class under capitalism are beholden to systems they often do not understand, cannot exercise agency within, and are actively stymied from prospering under.

Capitalism dehumanizes even those who support it. Those who support it are conditioned to reflexively demonize alternative systems. To rise above this culturally ingrained propaganda and advocate for alternatives requires seeing capitalism for what it is.

Alternative systems are to them what the bogeyman is to children.

to us

To all of us including them.

Every single attempt at establishing a communist society was fought tooth and nail every step of the way by capitalists. By any means necessary.

Thats like saying monarchy works because all republics were destroyed by monarchies

I actually came here to defend Marc’s clever rhet.: one of these people paid a Nazi to a status symbol. One of is still using capitalist means to aggregate solidarity.

I love a good quote with source! Isn’t the actual figure highly disputed?

Shoot James Brady in the back?

Gonna throw in "Debt: First 5000 Years" by Graeber if anyone wants even more historical perspective on how it came to be.

hey thanks for the suggestion. I also suggest the amazing book Kicking Away The Ladder by Ha Joon Chang.

What an utterly shitty take.

The Soviet Union was the world's first socialist state. They in fact did the absolute opposite of what the US is doing now. The Soviet Union helped liberate colonies around the world, supporting revolutions in countries like Algeria and Cuba, which earned them the ire and sanctions from the capitalist bloc.

The US Empire is imperialist, bank and industrial capital merged to form finance capital long ago, and this has centered the US economy around capital export and expropriation of wealth from the global south. It's no coincidence that the African socialists of the 20th century, like Kwame Nkrumah, turned to the Soviet Union for support in industrializing.

there are people around who think Soviet Union still IS communist. (Or at least Russia, but it's all the same!)

I don't understand this comment. The Soviet Union was a socialist project that failed to create a stateless classless moneyless society, but did plenty of things to advance the position of workers. What exactly is the US doing now that is similar to the Soviet Union?

I was explicitly taught as a child that communism was a self-destructive framework of ideas that threatens our future prosperity. For this reason we won’t be studying the ideology but instead study the harmful effects such as famines.

And that’s as far as I understood it for more than a decade.

They didn't do that in your school? I tought that was standard practice.

What an odd thing to say. Is that the bar you think we need to clear?

Neither were a threat to the biosphere

No one ever even implied that they were.

The obvious answer to your question is "not in frame".