What does that have to do with the internal collapse of the USSR?

you’ve still not made any actual assertions. “The internal collapse of the USSR” makes it seem like you’re gesturing toward having some actual knowledge, which you’re refusing to disclose, instead making smug assertions that this hidden vague knowledge that you refuse to declare means you’re right. So, what does “the internal collapse of the USSR” actually mean to you? What are you imagining (the pictures and words in your brain) when you say “the internal collapse of the USSR,” and what were the causes in your opinion for whatever you’re imagining?

It doesn’t seem like you actually know what you’re talking about, because you’re desperately avoiding making real substantive statements in any of these comments, instead throwing tantrums when pressed on what you actually think. Tell us your actual positions, without petulant ‘McCarthy-if-he-was-a-redditor’ tantrums, or otherwise stop pretending to have any.

But we both know that’s not why it collapsed.

okay, then tell us why you think it collapsed? These vague insinuations and gesturing don’t prove your point, they make it seem like you’re unsure of the basis of your own assertions.

Edit: And for the record, the first ever experiment of a modern socialist country in history, with no earlier examples to work off of, succumbing to a series of both external and internal contradictions doesn’t say anything concretely about the viability of socialism as a whole. In fact, their massively successful strides toward constructing new relations of society, and the betterment of living standards for the vast masses of its people, and the provided security of housing, employment, nutrition, community, and healthcare which was established after fully collectivizing and industrializing (industrializing in 1/10 of the time it took the west to industrialize, without the fundamental basis of primitive accumulation through global colonialism, settler-colonialism, genocide, chattel slavery, child labor, aggressive wars, and malthusian sanitation practices that under-girded the western industrial revolution; and doing so after suffering such destruction in WWI and the civil and counter-revolutionary-interventionist war no less) proves there are extremely strong cases for it being a model of success to learn from and build off of, while learning from its shortcomings and mistakes.

Cases in point:

• These NATO Generals Had Unusual Backgrounds: They Served in the Third Reich
• When the CIA Bankrolled a Nazi Spy Chief
• (Said spy chief and his organization)
• Documents: CIA concealed Nazi war criminals
• Revealed: How the CIA protected Nazi murderers
• How [CIA-hired] Nazi butcher Klaus Barbie helped kill Che Guevara and unleash global cocaine scourge
• CIA ORGANIZED SECRET ARMY IN WESTERN EUROPE
• How Nazi Billionaires Thrived in Postwar Germany
• Loyal to their Class, Unhinged from Democracy [US political economic elite connections with German Industrialists & Nazis]
• Revealed: How Israel Turned Nazi War Criminals Into Mossad Agents

There’s a long and ongoing history of this; for the US, UK, and Israel.

• [DECLASSIFIED] - CIA INVOLVEMENT IN UKRAINIAN NATIONALISM
• {2014: Ukraine crisis: Transcript of leaked Nuland-Pyatt call [where they hand-picked new regime; Oleh Tyahnybok is Nazi leader of Svoboda party]
• [2014:] How the far-right took top posts in Ukraine’s power vacuum
• [2014:] TORCH-LIT MARCH IN KIEV BY UKRAINE’S RIGHT-WING SVOBODA PARTY - BBC NEWS
• [2016:] Congress Has Removed a Ban on Funding Neo-Nazis From Its Year-End Spending Bill
• [2018:] Israel is arming neo-Nazis in Ukraine
• [2018:] Ukrainian neo-Nazi C14, known for racist and homophobic attacks, gets public funding for ‘patriotic education’
• [2018:] Ukrainian Militia Behind Brutal Romany Attacks [Nazi group ‘C-14’] Getting State Funds
• [2019:] The Russians and Ukrainians [operating out of Ukraine] Translating the Christchurch Shooter’s Manifesto
• [2019:] How to Mainstream Neo-Nazis: A Lesson from Ukraine’s New Government
• [2019:] MASS Neo-Nazi Marches in Ukraine today to honour Stepan Bandera
• [2020:] Nationalist marchers [including Tyahnybok’s Svoboda] in Kyiv say Ukraine is under ‘occupation’ by ‘Jewish clan’
• [2021:] Like, Share, Recruit: How a White-Supremacist Militia Uses Facebook to Radicalize and Train New Members

And just for fun, and just in case

• Ukraine Channel 24 – Host Calls for Genocide Against Russians! (16.3.2022)
  here’s [PROOF from their own source’s “apology” lol]
• “To fight, kill, fulfill the tasks of the West” - “Bandera Readings” in Kiev, Ukraine [by C-14 leader Yehvan Karas]

The “middle class” never existed. The “middle class” is an invented wedge to split the working class and try to turn segments of itself, against itself. It has no material basis. It is the ‘myth of upward mobility under capitalism’ distilled into a propaganda phrase to obscure the dualistic and antagonistic class relations in capitalist society between the PROPERTIED and UNPROPERTIED (those who own capital and those who do not), and the contradictions and conflicts therein.

It is false consciousness; personified by and in the ‘middle manager’ who is PROPERTYLESS (proletarian), but paid more and promised the “opportunity of more to come” to align themselves with the interests of the PROPERTIED, and take on the role of a low-level overseer – to function as both a compliance enforcer and a mediative focus-dulling pain-sponge standing in the middle of, and soaking up the conflict between, the ONLY REAL TWO CLASSES IN CAPITALIST SOCIETY: The Worker, and the Capitalist.

“Middle class” is liberal sleight-of-hand in its core and conception, and a term to be derided and discarded in all use, except as a magnifying glass to show the ways capitalism distorts and deceives about the real nature of its own properties and relations; and how the ruling class generates and contributes to the development of false consciousness through their reframing of production’s own characteristics, in order to reify into political “identities” to be captured and capitalized upon those roles which naturally manifest out of the laws of functional industrial-productive logistics, ie. the need for ‘managers’ to administrate complex or large-scale productive and distributive tasks. This serves double roles in the laws of colonial and imperial relations in places like the USA, as this distinction is also in practice highly racialized and rooted in the ongoing historical unfolding of these basal-and-superstructural systems of exploitation.

Make note of the conspicuous absences and obfuscations when duopolist-exploiter X or Y says they “fight for the middle class;” that they are not fighting for you or me in the working class, but pandering to those “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” that they’ve bought off enough or otherwise tricked into this false consciousness, to give them their ever-shrinking electoral margins they require and fight each other over so they don’t have to pay any mind to the working class masses who make up the majority; because they in reality work for the big bourgeois, the capitalists, and the petty-bourgeois “small business tyrants” who think of themselves as capitalists — all at the expense of the working class domestically and abroad.

America can’t stop tons of drugs and weapons getting delivered into America every day

who is it that you think built and began that whole project?

C A P I T A L I S T I N N O V A T I O N

and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gehlen_Organization
and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sunrise_(World_War_II)
and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip
and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Gladio
and https://www.historynet.com/these-nato-generals-had-unusual-backgrounds-they-served-in-the-third-reich/
and https://www.redstreetjournal.com/p/cia1
and… yknow i’d be easier to name the nazis that the US intelligence and military didn’t hire. which some were instead by MI6 and Mossad, like the pioneer of the gas vans Walter Rauff [Archived]
And for good measure: just a few of the industrialists and political elite of the US capitalist class who financed and were deeply connected with the Nazis and the German capitalist class for whom fascism were the anti-communist market-seizing attack dogs. (“first they came for the communists…”)

“typical Hamas press”

CNN

deeply unserious individual

No, neolibs have figured out how to placate segments of the (ever-shrinking) petty bourgeois and defeatist windbags (like you’ve allowed yourself to become in saying these things, but can still self-criticize and grow from), who lack or otherwise benefit from not having an active dialectical consideration of the circumstances before us — in the bare-faced exposure of the sharpened contradictions between mass political movements in society; here between the reactionary bourgeois establishment and its allies, and the advancing of progressive segments and theirs; which itself in the arena of parliamentary and protest politics, and how the media reports on it, are significant representations of wider political trends.

And by not thinking before speaking, and engaging in this liberal and reactionary rhetoric you actively stand in the way of building communism and working class momentum more than Macron does, and you are perpetrating the same “keeping people unaware” that you say the media is. I don’t think you should trust what it “sounds like” to you, because I don’t think you’ve given serious thought to any of this. How does the media “keep the majority unaware” when we’re, all of us even outside of France, hearing about and talking about it?

And “Things aren’t bad enough” for what? For an immediate revolution and dragging Macron to the guillotine right here and now, like we’re remotely in a stage of things in material reality where that’s what you think “building the communist movement” is? In what way is that, to you, a reasonable framework to analyze the current material conditions and consequences for communists and how to orient within them? And how is it not just unthoughtful and inattentive idealist tripe completely disconnected from the material reality and trajectories that currently exist, and which only serves to justify sitting on your hands and telling others to sit on their hands because you’re waiting for… What, exactly? Some utopian revolutionary miracle to pop into existence on its own out of thin air and awake the placated masses (of which surely you’re not a part?)? Revolution is built; and its building takes dedicated and active long-term political engagement among the progressive elements of society with communists, even if not yet in the position to dominate its most visible “official” leadership channels, still always at the forefront of the struggle as members of the most politically advanced segment of the working class.

How do you expect to create revolutionaries before having them even come to recognize revolution as, not only an option, but a necessity; which can only be done through these kinds of lived political experiences highlighting and vindicating through agitation and propaganda the correct analyses of the communists, that bourgeois parliament will not and can not be the instrument to achieve their aims?

You’re contributing to and advocating placation. Your “it’s hopeless why bother” attitude is the “copium” (internet-poisoned term), which serves nothing but to take (and worse, try to further in others’ minds) a lazy capitulation into your own placation. Comrade it is not only wrong, but it is intolerable opportunism. It is a reactionary and defeatist attitude, and is not in any way a cogent recognition of the reality — which is that the amount of rage and disaffection over this in the masses of the working class left-wing (and even just ‘not right-wing’) populace of France, which were able to mobilize as they did to get such results to compel these self-exposing acts in the ruling class, spills visibly through even the bourgeois-media articles about it. You have to close your eyes and plug your ears to not hear mention of the anger, frustration, exasperation, and that’s just what they do mention. I guarantee they couldn’t and wouldn’t be scratching the surface of those masses that aren’t being interviewed who harbor more severe sentiments or would, with proper political education, having experienced this. Many of even the petty-bourgeois reformist leaders of these parties are calling for obstruction and protest as less motivated, more opportunist, and bourgeois-aligned representatives of their much-more pissed off bases who carry much greater potential.

I’ve worked with and organized alongside US communists that became communists out of their experiences and disaffection over how the DNC and Democrat Clinton campaign undermined and slandered Bernie Sanders and his supporters in that grassroots groundswell. And Bernie and that whole experience was milquetoast and petty compared to this, and had more comprehensive targeted propaganda. And still it made many communists, some of whom have contributed more as more capable Marxists than even I had managed at the time, to elevating the consciousness of the working class and movement-building in their communities, instilling communist political understandings, analytical methodologies of theory and practice, and organizational principles in action around peoples lived material realities and experiences at the hands of the system.

People are pissed, and more than you allow yourself to recognize have, by the reality of the situation and living this political experience, come to or are primed but haven’t-yet-been politically educated to understand and advocate, some of the first and most important recognitions, conclusions, and emotions toward bourgeois politicians and their system, and of its bourgeois class character, inherent and unchangeable without smashing it and putting in its place a proletarian dictatorship to maintain power against the these-and-worse bourgeois machinations and reactions.

Just because the masses aren’t immediately fulfilling your idealist projections of what you unrealistically ‘require’ of them to “prove” to you personally that this is a progressive development for the communists (which is opportunist — rather than trying to engage actively as the most politically advanced segment of the working class to make and lead people to the proper conclusions, you are tailing behind mass movements among and as a member of the least advanced, soaking blankets to throw on the advancing segments in the most critically significant and educational moments); like they’re not immediately revolting and dragging Macron to the guillotine over this when that’s not the phase that things are in doesn’t mean that this is not a progressive development for the communists. I strongly suggest you consider all of this and correct these opportunist and defeatist attitudes, which are misaligned with reality and run counter to progress.

because nothing seems to be working.

This is an inspiring sign for communists. No reason for pessimism. A large mobilization of masses of engaged politically active workers in a state where the masses still largely believe in parliamentarism; who formed sprawling coalitions into a large left national upswelling that also made international headlines, now have themselves and onlookers been shown, better than any propaganda alone ever could, why bourgeois liberal democracy is an impediment to progress rather than a channel for it; and that the Liberals will side with the fascists to keep the left from getting an inch. This has made more communists than you probably realize. Especially if your communists have been reading their Lenin and agitating on this point, which probably a lot of workers didn’t even need much agitation to expect this because of the state of things and how just… unbearably awful Macron is in every way

…
It is a good day friend. Communism will win, and these liberal politicians are helping it do so. Don’t let the systems and their media and propaganda make you believe otherwise in their lies. They’re trying to convince you of your own defeat because of the implications if you don’t believe you have been, and instead realize they’re selling you the rope they will be hanged with; and you push harder in smarter ways that they can’t keep up with, using connections built in these mass movements and coalitions which invariably have radical new elements that just need drawn together.

You’re ahead of them in this. They’ve, in a very real dialectical way, undermined liberal democracy and created more enemies to the capitalist systems and institutions than they made allies, by their own blunders in being incapable of conceding anything to intelligently reify socialists back into feckless parliamentary legitimization of bourgeois democracy, and their failures to navigate contradictions in ways that aren’t so short-sighted to look absolutely villainous to huge swathes of the population (and internationally, because this was a large enough movement to make headlines around the world; with a knock-on effect for the international proles who see parallels). Macron’s so scared of radical politics he’s making them everywhere he steps.

I’m hoping the Communists in France have been reading their Lenin. I can’t think of a better gift Macron could have given the communists. “Left-Wing” Communism, an Infantile Disorder

…
This has stripped more and more active and engaged and hopeful people of their illusions about bourgeois democracy than even bernie-clinton 2016 nonsense. Which even that created a lot of communists; and that was relatively milquetoast compared to this huge national mobilization and upswell and coalition movement which was big enough to make international headlines no less. If the French communists have been reading their Lenin and agitating on this stuff even before it happened (as you said, very predictable) then the communist movement has gained 10x more than any eurosocialist thinks “the left” lost.

I suggest Rosa Luxemburg’s Reform or Revolution to break people out first, less scary than Lenin, and a I think a “woman’s touch” does a thing for peoples minds under patriarchal norms, with the assumption that they’re somehow less capable of all of the things they’re afraid of. It was critical in my political education when I was starting off grabbing from everywhere to see what gripped the road I saw us flying down (Conquest of Bread sucked, never read more ‘kum-ba-ya’ utopian idealist tripe in my life, and I could tell that having barely even read much Marx at that point); and Reform or Revolution is more focused on dismantling the single topic. From there, once the reader are forced to mull on that reform will never save us, haunted by their discomfort and spurred by the sprouting seeds of their discontent the only logical next step is to try to find out “okay, well then what is to be done?”

But you have to give a background lesson first if the book/site of it you send them doesn’t explain in the preface, the whole thing that in the context of her book “Social-democrat” meant socialists in general; both revolutionary and the Bernstien-type ‘voting in socialism through reform’ revisonists; because this was in like 1900, before the failure of the second international and resultant split of the communists. It’s only after all of that and the 3rd international and the betrayal of Rosa and the communist KPD by the reformists that that the “social democrats” came to be understood as we know them today, reformist welfare liberals (which, incidentally, thoroughly and undeniably vindicates Luxemburg, Lenin and the Bolsheviks, et al and their criticisms of reformism).

Marx has been blunted and made tame and by those who haven’t read him.

You might say they have “Turned Marx Into A Common Liberal”

at the same time as ever more nuclear brinksmanship against Russia at the expense of who knows how many hundred thousands people on and between both ‘sides’ of the shitshow in Ukraine. THIS is the “damage control” candidate in the US?

lmfao I’m voting PSL fuck all of these people. Democrats going around congress twice to shovel as many guns and bombs as they can hoping Israel finishes off Gaza before the elections, Trump only being different in that he’s open about the same; Palestinians have said both candidates and parties are the same for them, and they’ve been the same for us.

1. That’s not what entryism is. Entryism isn’t “voting democrat candidates who support xyz in primaries.” Entryism is infiltrating an organization’s membership with communists(or what have you), with the intent to change the basic proportional makeup of its membership ranks, and so change its interior political composition, and so its exterior action.

2. Entryism is explicitly and categorically denounced by every serious ML as having proven historically and politically ineffective at best, and actively counterproductive and opportunist at worst and most common by far; and has been in explicit terms criticized as such for a century. Saying “Surely you’ve heard of entryism?” to Marxists is like saying “Surely you’ve heard of filling masks with lavender to keep away the miasma?” to an epidemiologist.

3. The point mentioned in #2 is by a factor of 100 extra true for an organization like the democratic party, which is (just like the Republican party) a monstrous behemoth of leagues of multi-generational dynastic establishment careerist ghouls, thieves, racketeers, and murderers from multi-billionaire elite university family empires; whose entire operations are financed, advised, organized, and run by and for the richest imperialists in the world, with uncountable streams of both open channel money and dark money from private billionaires, banks, industrial monopolies (fossil fuels, pharma, agribusiness, etc.), arms dealers, conglomerate Super PACS, shady Think-tanks and “NGOs,” and the Israel lobby. Obama’s cabinet was hand-picked by Citigroup. Biden has appointed all the most heinous neocons and war criminals he could find, even bringing back convicted massacrists like Elliot Abrams; and hiring the most corrupt people he could find, such as a Chevron lawyer who defended the destruction of the Amazon and poisoning of Indigenous people to head his Environmental executive. All while outflanking the Republicans on the right of many issues including immigration.

**

The Democrats actively benefit just like the Republicans from hyper-restricted 2-corporate-party system, proven by them, currently as we speak, sending out leagues of dark-money Super-PAC-financed lawyers to every state they can to try to purge 3rd parties off the ballots; actively killing democracy. This is their goal and interest, because it is the goal and interest of their donors. They have no interest in a different or better world and never will. Even someone as milquetoast as Bernie ran into endless smears and obstruction and undermining and got nowhere and has capitulated more and more to the right wing by hitching his boat to this circus. The liberal darlings “the squad” have each capitulated or even become active careerists and attack-dogs for the establishment imperialists against alternatives and progressives, barring Ilhan Omar who has faced endless shit and isolation even from the rest of that coward group of “progressive” dems, to say nothing of the establishment that actually runs the show with their army of equally-careerist factory-stamped liberal interns at their beck and call, pipelined from upscale colleges with PoliSci degrees to do whatever bidding they want.

The Democrats are not going to change for anyone but their donors and have proven it for decades; and they are structurally incapable of being budged internally toward anything remotely resembling democracy or socialism. Entryism to the democratic party is beyond a dead end. It would It would be more effective and principled to vote third party and continually elevate a working class party (Like the PSL) and visibly starve the democrats of votes for their failures and betrayals and making it known that is the reason; which would force a political reorientation of the democrats if they ever want power again. This necessary reorientation is impossible within the Democratic party structures, so the ruling class would have to figure out to desperately float a reformist “labor party” or “progressive party” to capture people being funneled to the PSL socialists, and this reformist party would receive an influx of the less-far-right careerist liberals from the Democrats fleeing to the new party “like rats from a sinking ship;” while the Republicans and remaining establishment Democrats proper inevitably join together in a coalition like David Lloyd George’s Conservative-Liberal coalition, or like Macron’s doing with the fascists in France. It’s not even much of a leap for them compared to the existent state of things — they’ve already been converging for decades and most of us have already come to feel the effects of it.

And this way by elevating the PSL, a real working class party who have a broader picture for revolutionary change than limiting to parliamentary dog-and-pony shows against the richest most evil people on the planet, you’re actually helping the ground-up elevation of meaningful on-the-ground working class politics which speak to the 35-50% who are so disillusioned and disenfranchised by the lies and corruption and bloodthirst of the corporate-imperialist duopoly-of-exploiters that they don’t even vote — and activating them into actual meaningful political movement-building and action with a revolutionary long-term perspective, while forcing the establishment’s hand to intercede how it can, highlighting the contradictions and failures of the system. Instead of finding new ways to capitulate to it (which are actually the same ways people have been capitulating to it for a century).

Hot take here, but I’m pretty sure women who are being oppressed and having their social rights restricted by the Taliban are still able to enjoy more rights than women who have been blown up and murdered by anglo bombs.

Also, this is in Yemen, wtf you on about the Taliban for? You lost get over it smh. Do you not have enough genocides to support or something?

peace is when more war harder

the more war harder you war, the less putin you propaganda

That’s the cool part about the struggle against capitalism: Workers’ labor and consciousness of how it is used and and withheld is the single most powerful tool within this locus of control, as said labor is the very foundation of the economic system. And the most cost-and-time-effective and reliable acts within this locus to reasonably change circumstances such as better pay and conditions are also the most effective ways of challenging capital itself, like unionizing and organizing direct action with a wider group to support you and together shoulder the burden and the associated risks of daring to raise your head against your masters.

It works double as a prime tool for furthering class-consciousness and class-solidarity (which capitalists already have with each other when push comes to shove). Which then makes continuance of this, and the spreading of this knowledge, capability, inspiration to other shops even easier. From experience, this costs much less time, effort, and spirit, and is much better at solidifying and maintaining better conditions (and not just for yourself but for everyone), than hurling yourself individually into the carousel-blender of endless additional gig work while everyone else is also made to do that individually, forever, in isolation from each other and utter hope-death, which helps this all perpetuate itself.

I’ve seen it happen where just the mere fact of a union vote being filed and date set results in an instant pay raise among discussion from bosses of “We’re a family though! This will put others between us and things won’t stay friendly! MUH OPEN-DOOR POLICY!! BUT WHAT ABOUT UNION DUES!?!” Granted, I’ve also seen it where bosses just close down that shop-branch and reopen elsewhere (sometimes under a new name to avoid legal ramifications for blatant union-busting) because they’re so disgustingly rich and so scared of other branches catching wind and joining in, that it is deemed less costly than simply recognizing the will of their workers. So there is risk to be considered, hence the need to build awareness and solidarity among a wider organized group and in your community (and definitely also other branches/departments of your company, but with the care that it’s harder to know who to trust in the early stages than among direct coworkers. Punishment for union-advocacy may be illegal, that doesn’t mean the bosses won’t try to find ways to do it if they don’t think you’ve the support to make them pay for it).

But the defeatist and false, purely bourgeois-implanted notion that the only thing within one’s locus of control as a worker is to sell yourself HARDER and make capitalists RICHER in the race-to-the-bottom death-spiral of moribund capitalism is exactly how things get this bad and continue to for working people and oneself. Workers are in reality much more powerful (and more numerous) than the capitalists who require us. That is why they need us to think we have no other or better option, and poison the well to have us perpetuate our own and each others’ defeatism and compliance.

in short: Solidarity Forever

And it’s written in buzzfeed listicle format! Engels truly ahead of his time.