Barx

joined 5 months ago
[–] Barx@hexbear.net 1 points 45 minutes ago

lmao they are amazing

[–] Barx@hexbear.net 1 points 1 hour ago

This is the problem with internet Bolsheviks you envision yourself as Central Committe members in 1949 at the height of the glory of the Soviet Union

I set my conditions for engaging and you seem uninterested in honoring them. Namely, that you reply to what I actually say and not go off in straw men instead, which is clearly just a pattern of dishonest guessed-at sectarian insults.

Please do your best to engage in good faith and in a comradely way.

[–] Barx@hexbear.net 5 points 11 hours ago

A powerful way to get people to be receptive is to get them to like you and consider you a font of wisdom. This does not require pushing them, just being available and usually correct and a person they enjoy spending time with. I would recommend honoring their wishes and reading more so that you're ready when questions do come down the pipeline.

Also you don't need to convince them all by yourself as a first step. You could try to get them involved in events they would find worthwhile instead and let the radicalization happen socially. If they are borderline anarcho-syndicalist then maybe they'd want to support a picket line, for example. Maybe there are people looking for help on projects your friend would find interesting.

[–] Barx@hexbear.net 7 points 11 hours ago

Hell yeah.

Cook them extra long to get softer hummus. If you are very dedicated to getting a perfect texture also remove the skins once cooked.

[–] Barx@hexbear.net 8 points 21 hours ago

Mao had the means and ability but chose not to out of respect for the mass line.

[–] Barx@hexbear.net 7 points 21 hours ago

YOUR BODY BETRAYS YOUR PROBLEMATIC HOT TAKE

[–] Barx@hexbear.net 4 points 21 hours ago (2 children)

"just as bad" as whom?

I am referencing your knee-jerk "both sides" rhetoric that pops up instead of even acknowledging the point I've made.

and which "false histories"

The ones I have already corrected you on, such as the Black Army "overperforming". It performed as well as any guerilla group under circumstances favorable to guerillas of the time, i.e. with sufficient support from the peasantry. Given how dramatically it ultimately failed, and its many faults, this is really a romantic characterization that doesn't do justice to anyone involved. Did they really overperform? How well "should" they have performed? Such ahistorical romantic characterizations, along with backstabbing narratives, are the main theme of "anti-Marxist" mythologies among self-proclaimed Western anarchists.

[–] Barx@hexbear.net 3 points 22 hours ago (4 children)

How many of these peasants were voluntarily taxed? How was that bayonette any different than the one weilded by Tsar Nicholas II? Was it because it was Red?

I'm unaware of anyone that is voluntarily taxed.

However, this is going in an oddly sectarian direction whete you are missing the point being made to go for a "both sides" attack. This is actually doing the thing my point is criticizing. Why do the Bolsheviks have to be "just as bad" in order for you to acknowledge falee histories? When did I suggest this was the kind of discussion I was having?

If you can trim your responses to a recognition of what I am actually saying instead of getting angry at the partisan in your head and projecting them onto me, I will continue engaging. Otherwise, I am not interested in feeding into this or playing around with your straw men.

[–] Barx@hexbear.net 5 points 23 hours ago (6 children)

I'm sorry like the Bolsheviks or the Whites didn't steal from peasants?

I am responding to your point about the Black Army "overperforming". They did well as a guerilla army with peasant support. They failed utterly when they left areas without peasant support and then instead depended on stealing from the peasants. They had weak to nonexistent supply lines beyond a peasant network in Eastern Ukraine and entirely alienated the cities that capitulated quickly to the Whites and openly accepted the Reds with almost no fighting. These are just the realities of their military successes and failures.

The Bolsheviks did not make their army reliant on the ad hoc theft from peasants. They instituted quotas and taxes to feed the cities and soldiers. Once they adopted a taxation model, conflict with peasants more or less disappeared, they just opposed early war communism's heavy handedness. The Bolsheviks used proper supply lines and it is unsurprising that they beat The Black Army who constantly formed and dissolved in response to pressures.

The Bolsheviks and the Whites literally stole people from the villages to fight in their armies under threat. Real you join our battalion or weremoved and murder your women while you watch then we kill you type shit. The Black Army was the only actual all-volunteer self defense force.

This is ahistorical, The Black Army also used coercion, but they did so ad hoc rather than to establish a stsnding army, famously using the misleading term, "voluntary mobilization" to declare the age range of able-bodied men that could not refuse service when called upon. Towards the end of their project, when such mobilizations were needed, trust and support from the peasants began breaking down because of this and related attempts at control.

This is a consequence of top down vs bottom up thinking. Literally see the part of my post about how the second industrial revolution created this mess to begin with. The city model is literally based in expropriation of the country-side from time immemorial and the second industrial revolution only made cities worse and more dependent.

That is not about bottom-up vs. top-down thinking at all, it is about class and subclass interests. A commune expropriating from starving city workers is not "bottom up", it is actually a fairly authoritarian theft carried out using relative material wealth and self-sufficiency. And it would have led to a self-destructice system, it was a key weakness predicated on a romantic chauvinism, of serving the people from whom they largely emerged and found support and then needing a left-sounding way to justiy the mistreatment of workers.

The city model is literally based in expropriation of the country-side from time immemorial

The city model has always depended on agriculture but the extent to which it involved expropriation is something that has varied substantially historically. There is a degree to which Western chauvinist just-so stories try to generalize the violences of Western Europe as all-encompassing truths, missing the variety of humsn organization that has occurred under similar circumstance. Ironically, the observation I hust shared is common among anarchist historians and anthropologists.

and the second industrial revolution only made cities worse and more dependent

Yes, city workers were dependent on food from peasants. And Makhnovschina's strategy was to hang them out to dry, to have their communes become theoretically insular and autonomous. But of course this was contradicted by the necessity of their frequent thefts from the cities. It was a romanticization, not a full reality. The peasants were also dependent on the cities for industrial goods and weaponry, they just wouldn't die of starvation and malnutrition as quickly as the city workers. They would have been overrun by the White Army in a few years without an industrial base.

The Bolsheviks bathed the country sides with blood, and sure they had to, but lets not pretend there was some grand greater good, it's because the Bolsheviks had nothing to actually offer the country side.

There was, of course, a grand greater good of feeding industrial workers and soldiers, securing an industrial base to fight off the rest of Europe, and the continued functioning of society in general past short-sighted views of a non-sustainable commune.

Furthermore lets cut the bullshit okay? This is just devolving into a typical argument cycle and I'm just going to end it here. Whenever this line of argumentation comes up people who cannot understand or admit to the faults of the Bolsheviks (and I'm not saying Makhnovischa was faultless here at all), are all trying really fucking hard not to say "It was OUR PROPERTY." All you're arguing about is who rightfully owned those things that the Black Armies took are we not?

Actually I was speaking of the material reasons the Black Army had military successes in some ways and not others and how they did not find a realistic synthesis of peasant and worker interests and that this led to a direct conflict with Bolsheviks for material reasons, not just old stories about theoretical disputes and the various other romantic mythologies of "backstabbing", which is what ignorany online "anarchists" obssess over.

To be honest, I think I was very clear on that.

We can talk about the negatives of how each army and society conducted itself, but I'm not going to have a typical black-red rules lawyering property dispute with you. It's pointless, stupid, and unbecoming. I don't believe in private property.

If the topic is sectarian "anarchism" you should expect to hear critiques of sectarian "anarchism". Endlessly rehashing a false understanding of Marxist "betrayals" is a fundamental element of sectarian "anarchism".

[–] Barx@hexbear.net 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Intel has gone full bean counter mode, they are financialized around the world and back again trying to coast on legacy systems and monopoly power. They pocketed the CHIPS Act cash, mostly turning it into financial shenanigans rather than productive capacity.

In theory they could turn it around but it's difficult to know how precarious their operation is, it jist has all the warning signs that it could be taken out by vultures.

[–] Barx@hexbear.net 4 points 1 day ago

A cup of coffee with high quakity beans is around 30 cents per cup in materials in the US. If emplotees average 2 cups per day for an 8 hour workday it amounts to around an 8 cents per hour raise.

Of course, companies also believe that coffee improves productivity, so it us usually factored in as a cost-saving measure by the nerds controlling production. It's only one you get yo self-defeating bourgeois dictator levels of petty that anyone starts to even care about somehow cutting coffee costs.

[–] Barx@hexbear.net 3 points 1 day ago

smdh where us the biweekly pizza party?

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