glimmer_twin [he/him]

  • 21 Posts
  • 29 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: July 26th, 2020

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  • Haitian rev? It opens up avenues to compare and contrast with the French and maybe even American revs, the French doing their bourgeois revolution then immediately turning round and trying to keep the Haitians as slaves and slapping them with “reparations” for successfully freeing themselves.

    (Edit: bonus of this is nobody can come back at you calling you a dirty commie or mark you down because you call out the US for teaming up with nazis in Central America or whatever. Nobody is gonna say “umm actually the Haitians should’ve stayed as slaves”)















  • 17 screenshots of text and never answers or even considers the key question. We all know why China pivoted toward capitalist development, the question is when or if it will ever pivot back.

    2nd screenshot:

    you can only…. If you already have developed industry

    China has a well developed industrial economy. It’s been developing for half a century and has no sign of stopping. How developed does it need to be before you stop doing capitalism? How long will it take?

    The first four screens aren’t exactly new information. It’s the justification used by the USSR in enacting the NEP. Y’know, the NEP that lasted less than a decade? China is well into the 4th decade of marketisation and there are no indications that it’s likely to change anytime soon - private ownership and inequality are expanding in China, not contracting.

    The second half of the post, sure, I don’t think China is imperialist either (yet?). But the first half of the post is just a lot of words for “we’re building productive forces bro trust us bro we’re doing communism any second now bro” which is an argument we’ve all heard a thousand times.














  • There is a lot of controversy around “Lenin’s last testament” which you mention. Besides, as much as I enjoy Lenin why should he get to arbitrarily pick his successor in between having strokes lol.

    Their ideological differences aside, by all accounts Trotsky was and always had been a huge asshole with a superiority complex (not to say he wasn’t actually a very intelligent guy, but y’know how some people are assholes about it?), and Stalin was just better at schmoozing people. So when it came down to it, he was better at politicking his way into power, while Trotsky would alienate people.

    Now, after Trotsky was no longer involved in running the USSR, my personal thought are that he basically just became dogmatically against whatever was happening in Russia under Stalin, because of personal grievance. And keep in mind that it’s much easier to sit on the sidelines, criticising everything, than to be involved in the actual running of a nation trying to establish socialism for the first time.

    There’s also a materialist argument to be made that if the power struggle had gone the other way, and Stalin got exiled, things in the USSR would have gone pretty similarly under Trotsky - or that someone else would have taken over earlier than 1953, because, again, everyone personally thought Trotsky was an asshole who was annoying to work with, lol.

    This isn’t to say everything Trotsky ever did is poison, and that he should be completely disregarded. He has some good writings, and we’re talking about a guy who led the Petrograd Soviet and then the Red Army during the civil war. He was definitely smart and a true revolutionary. But I think after his ousting from power he became very embittered (perhaps understandably), and became the kind of socialist we criticise today, sitting on the sidelines in a capitalist country and constantly attacking AES.

    TROTSKYISTS on the other hand are pretty insufferable lmao, because you can pretty much discard the first half of my previous paragraph, and just apply the second half to them.