anti-idpol action

Yes as somebody with correct opinions 98% of the time I should write a book

Yes and now probably Rojava is going to get slaughtered by Erdogan

Yes he fucking is, as is every bourgeois politician, including putin. And don’t forget the gratitude HTS expressed towards the Zionists. The Syrian revolution had an immense progressive potential in 2011-13 but nowadays I’m just glad the war is over but at the same time I’m concerned about what happens next to Kurds, since HTS also had a substantial backing from the genocidal irredentist Ankara government.

Your wishes don’t come true from shooting stars, they come true from shooting tsars

Wow you’re such a master of sophistry and purveyor of strawman arguments! I told myself to not to venture anymore into this thread but I wanted to read other comments and was too taken aback by your ingenious reasoning: dripping with sarcasm, devoid of substance, and utterly unmoored from reality.

You reduce centuries of historical struggle to a juvenile caricature of violence as if proponents of revolutionary change are advocating bar brawls over policy disputes. Congratulations, you’ve managed to completely miss the point and simultaneously belittle the historical sacrifices of countless movements that fought for the very freedoms you enjoy today.

Let’s start with your dismissal of violence as a foundation for human society. “Mutually beneficial coexistence” and “strong democratic rule of law,” you say? Cute. But how exactly do you think those came about? Did kings one day wake up and declare, “Let’s dissolve feudalism in favor of liberal democracy because it’s the right thing to do”? No, those changes were wrested from their cold, greedy hands by uprisings, revolutions, and organized struggles.

• The Magna Carta? Signed because the barons threatened King John with rebellion.
• The abolition of slavery? Achieved only after countless slave revolts and a bloody Civil War in the United States.
• The right to vote? Fought for by suffragettes who faced violent repression.
• Labor rights? Achieved after decades of strikes, riots, and blood spilled in clashes with private militias and police forces.

Your idyllic “coexistence” is not a natural state of humanity but a negotiated truce born from the fear of revolutionary upheaval.

Jefferson’s statement about the “tree of liberty” needing the blood of patriots and tyrants was not a call to violence for violence’s sake. It was an acknowledgment of the historical truth: oppressive systems do not voluntarily cede power. Pretending that systemic change can occur without disrupting the status quo is like believing you can dismantle a factory while it’s still running without turning off the machines.

When despots—be they monarchs or capitalists—cling to power, they do so with violence. You see it in the police repression of labor strikes, the brutal crackdowns on colonial uprisings, and the militarized responses to civil rights protests. The violence of the oppressed is not the instigator but the response to the entrenched violence of the ruling class.

You mockingly equate violence with fixing mundane issues like car troubles and crop failures. How clever! But let’s reframe this nonsense for clarity. Violence in the context of systemic change is not some crude hammer smashing individual problems; it’s the lever that dislodges entrenched structures of oppression. To illustrate with a few examples:

• The American Revolution: Would you prefer the colonists had petitioned King George a few more times instead of taking up arms? Maybe they could have voted him out? Oh, wait—no ballots for them.
• The French Revolution: Should the starving masses of France have just “coexisted” with the aristocracy while bread prices skyrocketed and their children died? Perhaps a sternly worded letter to Louis XVI would have sufficed?
• The Civil Rights Movement: Even nonviolent actions like sit-ins and marches faced brutal violence from the state. Without the threat of unrest, would the Civil Rights Act have passed? Doubtful.

Your whimsical alternatives ignore the brutal reality of oppression: power concedes nothing without a fight.

You extol the virtues of specialization, rule of law, and coexistence as if these are unassailable constants of human civilization. But under capitalism, these “pillars” are subverted to serve profit, not people.

• Specialization? Great, but under capitalism, it’s turned into alienation, where workers are cogs in a machine, disconnected from the fruits of their labor.
• Democratic rule of law? Lovely idea, except it’s a veneer covering the reality of class domination. Laws are written by and for the ruling class, and enforcement disproportionately targets the poor and marginalized.
• Minimization of harm? Tell that to the victims of imperialist wars, sweatshop labor, and environmental destruction—harm inflicted not by revolutionary movements but by the very system you implicitly defend.

Your appeal to these ideals is as hollow as your argument.

le violence bad, peace good moral tailspinning

You frame violence as inherently immoral, but your selective moral outrage ignores the structural violence baked into capitalism. The daily grind of exploitation, poverty, and systemic inequality kills far more people than any revolution ever could.

• 8 million people die yearly from poverty-related causes under capitalism.
• The imperialist wars waged to secure resources for the capitalist system have claimed tens of millions of lives.
• Environmental collapse, driven by the profit motive, threatens the survival of humanity itself.

Revolutionary violence, by contrast, seeks to dismantle these systems of oppression and exploitation. It is not a love of violence but the recognition of necessity.

In conclusion

Your snarky deflections and idealistic appeals to a nonexistent utopia betray your deep misunderstanding of history and the nature of power. The world you describe—a harmonious democracy where disputes are settled through mutual benefit and rule of law—has never existed without the threat or use of force to make it so.

You ridicule the idea of revolution while sitting atop the very achievements that violence has secured: your rights, your freedoms, your comforts. To dismiss the utility of revolutionary struggle is to deny history itself, a luxury only afforded to those insulated from the realities of oppression.

You might enjoy your quips, but history won’t judge you for your wit. It will judge you for your cowardice.

trolley problem

USSR was a degenerate workers state, though the degeneration didn’t fully take hold until 1930s. The concept of socialism in one country was a revisionist drivel against which Lenin fought his entire life. The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 established soviets (worker and peasant councils) with direct democracy without privilege all over the country. it’s a shame that the political upheaval in the USSR didn’t go further and the calls to not only criticize Stalin but also Khrushchev didn’t materialize, as well as his plan to return at least some democracy to the party for which he got ousted.

ok dear agent, you cannot admit losing the discussion so you’ll just resort to namecalling, so vice versa 💅

the fuck are you talking about

I finally feel like agreeing with you here. Yes we need to build such a system. But it won’t be built by complacency and idle talk while the billionaires rob us in broad daylight. It requires struggle. The law is only an ideal but it’s interpretation and execution depends on the material reality whether you like it or not and that was recognized even by people you wouldn’t call materialists and who made great contributions to the modern philosophy of the law, such as Hegel.

Hegel also had this concept of Sittlichkeit, which is closely linked to the teleological interpretation of the law, namely that what matters is the intent and purpose of the laws and that the purpose of the law should be the greatest common good.

But that is just a beautiful vision that is not realisitically attainable in a system controlled by a tiny minority which can afford better lawyers, bribe the lawmakers and even the justice system at times, essentially to rig the system to fit their needs.

We do need a system that does not perpetuate violence against anyone. But that system is irreconcilable with class society where the antagonisms between the exploiters and the exploited will sooner or later lead to one eruption or another. Social peace is over. The question is how we secure a system truly fit for the needs of many against the attacks by the deposed few furious at the lost comforts attained at the expense of their fellow human beings with as little bloodshed as possible and establish a society where the antagonisms and stratification of yore are no longer relevant.

But before the working class firmly secures it’s power, it will have every right to defend itself, even if it involves such counterattacks for the suffering caused by the other party. Sitting idly and flinching at the very thought of violence will end to the same tragedies as those that happened in Chile in 1973 and in countless other places.

I dream a world where man
No other man will scorn,
Where love will bless the earth
And peace its paths adorn
I dream a world where all
Will know sweet freedom’s way,
Where greed no longer saps the soul
Nor avarice blights our day.
A world I dream where black or white,
Whatever race you be,
Will share the bounties of the earth
And every man is free,
Where wretchedness will hang its head
And joy, like a pearl,
Attends the needs of all mankind-
Of such I dream, my world!

But dreams are nothing without a clear and uncompromising strategy for making them a reality.

yes because those parasitic companies need to be expropriated without compensation and healthcare put under democratic control of the real stakeholders: frontilne medical workers and patients

everyone I don’t agree with is a tankie: an emotional child’s guide to political discussions online

Once again, your idea that violence leads to a “system where the strong kill the weak” is ironic because it perfectly describes capitalism. Under capitalism, the strong (the wealthy) already exploit and oppress the weak (workers and marginalized groups). Capitalism is a system of structural violence: people die of preventable diseases, starvation, imperialist wars and workplace accidents because profit is prioritized over human life. The strong kill the weak daily, but they often do it quietly, through markets and laws, not just the rifles and bayonets. And bayonet is a weapon with a worker at both ends.

I’ll reiterate with hope that you cease your baseless fearmongering: revolutionary forms of social organization, when properly rooted in democratic proletarian control, aim to abolish the conditions under which “the strong” exploit “the weak.” The dictatorship of the proletariat, as articulated by Marx and Engels, is not a tyranny of individuals but a transitional state where the working class wields power collectively to dismantle class hierarchies.

It is capitalism, not socialism, where the strong exploit the weak. In the present system, billionaires exploit the workers, devastate the planet, and use their power to crush resistance. What you fear is the inversion of this state of affairs: a society where the oppressed assert their collective strength to abolish oppression altogether.

Your apparent appeals to moralistic platitudes ignore the material realities of class society. Under capitalism, it is the ruling class that pits the poor against one another through systemic inequality, wage suppression, and imperialist wars. Revolutionary movements aim to unite the working class against their true enemies: the capitalist class.

To denounce revolutionary struggle while ignoring the daily violence of capitalism—poverty, police brutality, environmental destruction—is to tacitly side with the oppressors. Revolutionary action is not about chaos or “killing each other” but about dismantling the systems that perpetuate such violence.

Yes because if you don’t pay the taxes, armed men will come and put you in a prison where you’ll work for fucking dogshit, taxation is not chipping in some spare cash for a fundraiser like in some ancap wet dreams.

Oh and they’ll make damn sure you do not cheat on your taxes either, because the tax authorities in most countries have the prerogatives comparable to those of intel agencies, which means encroaching upon your privacy.

lesser evil

Jfc that narrow-minded idealist obsession with Trump. Trumpism cannot be defeated with lesser evilism when the lesser evil is basically also far right, only slightly more to the left and that is also dubious with all the war mongering, which Trump’s promise to put it to an end indisputably helped him secure a victory, alongside a slew of economic shortcomings affecting the working class (even though his solutions are no solutions at all)

(2/2)

A system where the faction with the most absolute and unquestioned loyalty wins fights and slaughters their intellectual betters.

This reeks of a bourgeois fear of the masses rising up to demand what’s rightfully theirs, of thinly veiled elitism and misunderstanding of the basics of class relations. No, it’s not blue vs white collars but people living off others’ toil and the toilers.

Who are these “intellectual betters”? Capitalist apologists? Corporate technocrats? The same people whose “brilliance” built a world teetering on ecological collapse? Spare us the melodrama. Revolutions don’t thrive on blind loyalty; they’re built on solidarity and the shared understanding that the status quo is unsustainable.

Your argument boils down to a defense of complacency: ballots over barricades, submission over struggle. You seem more afraid of the risks of change than the certainty of suffering under capitalism. But history teaches us that systemic change demands courage—not the cowardice of hoping billionaires and their henchmen will play nice. Keep clutching those ballots; the rest of us will be busy building a world where they aren’t needed to decide who gets to live with dignity.

(1/2)

Your comment reads like a manifesto for maintaining the status quo dressed up as pragmatic wisdom. It’s almost charming, in the same way, an infomercial about a “miracle” weight-loss pill is charming, assuming the audience hasn’t read the fine print. But let’s get to the real business of dismantling this labyrinth of myths you’ve built.

The number of people who ‘broke free from the defeatist disbelief in the possibility of upending the rule’ don’t have any impact on the system that creates and restrains billionaires.

Oh, so now we’re pretending that mass shifts in consciousness are irrelevant? History begs to differ. The abolition of feudalism, the rise of unions, civil rights movements—all were powered by collective awakenings. The Paris Commune was ridiculed as a blip, yet it shaped proletarian strategies worldwide. The suffragettes, who were once dismissed as a hysterical sideshow, rewrote the political landscape. Sure, individual enlightenment alone won’t topple billionaires—but dismissing the transformative potential of collective action? That’s some industrial-strength cynicism masquerading as “realism.”

Real change has to come from ballots. From pen on paper.

This Hallmark sentiment belongs on a motivational poster, not in a serious discussion about systemic change. Who controls the ballots? Capitalist elites, through gerrymandering, corporate media, voter suppression, and lobbying. Let’s talk specifics: Tsipras in Greece was democratically elected to resist austerity. What did ballots deliver? Betrayal. Ask the Greeks who were prevented by the banksters from withdrawing more than 50€ a day. Bernie Sanders inspired millions, only to capitulate to the Democrat machine with imperialist war criminals at the helm, because Democrats were never a party that served the working people. They had so many chances to e.g. codify abortion when they were in power, before Roe v Wade got struck down. Meanwhile, Corbyn faced a relentless smear campaign and sabotage from within Labour and now virtually all of the Labour left is purged and Sir Starmer happily approves more and more money being wasted on warfare while denying the possibility of renationalizing the water companies which have turned British rivers into one of the most polluted in Europe, because his narrow reformist mindset rejects the possibility of expropriation without compensation, even if it’s something so indusputably belonging to all, a common (outside_ the WEF and other ultra-rich psychopath meetings, of course).

The conclusion? Ballots are a tool wielded by the ruling class to manage dissent, not overthrow it.

If you utilize violence to the extent of permanent systemic change, you will absolutely have a worse system at the end of it.

Ohh the old pearl-clutching “violence begets chaos” trope. Conveniently ignores the systemic violence baked into capitalism: poverty, imperialist wars, environmental destruction, police brutality.

Over 100 million people displaced in the last year.

56 wars raging worldwide, the highest figure since WWII.

Nuclear warfare back in business after three decades.

Approx. 5-20 million people dying annually due to preventable causes

Revolutionary violence isn’t arbitrary carnage; it’s the oppressed defending themselves against the daily brutality of the ruling class. In fact, it is out of the fatigue with the incessant brutality, injustice and deprivation of the existing order that revolutions are born. Look at the revolutionary wave that followed after the Great Slaughter of WWI.

Capitalist states routinely murder and displace millions to maintain power. Revolutionary violence seeks to end that barbarism, not perpetuate it.

Take again the Russian Revolution—initially a relatively bloodless overthrow. More people got trampled over when the storming of Winter Palace was being reenacted 10 years later for a movie than during the actual event. The ensuing violence was primarily defensive, against counter-revolutionaries and imperialist invaders. Without the Red Army, the October Revolution would’ve been a footnote. If you don’t believe me, read Ten days that shook the world by John Reed.

Capitalism’s birth was hardly a bloodless affair—whether through the American or French Revolutions, Wars of the Three Kingdoms, La Conquista, Opium Wars, colonialism in Africa, India or Indonesia, it was drenched in violence. Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and freedom of the press. The civil war resulted in the death of roughly 2.5% of the U.S. population. During the Russian Civil War, about 0.7% of the population died, a large portion of which can be attributed to the White Terror. Yet, the Bolsheviks, despite the brutal conditions, attempted to minimize violence. They first sought to rely on agitation among intervention forces, and even amid famine, Lenin organized the largest international aid operation of its time, importing vast amounts of grain into the USSR between 1918 and 1921—much of it sabotaged by the Whites, Esery or kulaks. The mutinies within the foreign troops and the strikes and blockades organized in solidarity by French or British workers also contributed to the withdrawal of many of the Allied troops. Still, you wouldn’t think of questioning the legitimacy of the bourgeois-democratic revolutions or the U.S. Civil War, would you? And in fact, if not then rightly so. Beacause freedom is the recognition of necessity. They played their progressive role at their time, along with capitalism. But that potential is long gone and now capitalism is holding human potential back.

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Let’s step back and contextualize. The Russian Revolution, for all its flaws and tragic outcomes, was not a singular, isolated event floating in a vacuum of historical inevitability. It emerged out of unimaginable conditions: the ruins of Tsarist autocracy, a regime that was arguably one of the most backwards and repressive in Europe, compounded by the catastrophic toll of World War I, which had already thrown the region back decades in terms of development. The Bolsheviks inherited a situation of near-total collapse: famine, mass illiteracy, civil war, and an international blockade that strangled the new state at its infancy. To blame the USSR’s trajectory solely on Bolshevism or communism is to ignore this harrowing historical reality.

But there’s more to this story. Ask yourself why we don’t have multiple socialist success stories from the early 20th century. Why does history offer us no alternative points of reference? Let us turn to Germany, Austria, Italy, or Poland, where proletarian revolutions flickered between 1918 and 1924. The harsh truth is that the social democrats of the time, ideological forebears of today’s reformists, drowned these revolutions in blood. In Germany, the SPD actively collaborated with the Freikorps—proto-fascists, no less—to crush revolutionary uprisings like those of the Spartacists. The betrayal in Poland was no less devastating: under the leadership of a reactionary regime tied to German imperialism, Poland waged war against the fledgling Soviet state, attempting to reimpose the draconian terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.

These betrayals left the Soviet Union in complete isolation, surrounded by hostile capitalist powers eager for its destruction. Without the support of an international revolution, the USSR faced an impossible dilemma: build socialism in one country or perish. The resulting “Stalinist caricature” of socialism was as much a product of this isolation as it was of internal contradictions.

From the ashes of Tsarist oppression, the Soviet Union undertook a massive and unprecedented experiment in societal transformation. This was no small feat. Lenin himself repeatedly warned of the dangers of bureaucratization and made efforts to curtail the growth of the party and state apparatus. However, his health declined rapidly after 1922, and contrary to the reactionary trope of Lenin as a dictator, his influence waned with his incapacitation. By the time Stalin rose to power, the bureaucracy had grown into a powerful force that would shape the course of Soviet history.

Nonetheless, for nearly a decade, the USSR remained one of the most progressive societies in the world, even under unimaginably difficult circumstances. Consider this: while half of the so-called “land of the free” still languished under Jim Crow apartheid, the Soviet Union was rapidly urbanizing, eradicating illiteracy, and introducing women’s suffrage and workers’ rights in ways that were unprecedented for the time. This was a country transitioning from a predominantly peasant society to an industrial power in record time.

Yes, concessions were made to private property owners. Yes, the Stalinist obsession with quantity over quality—manifested in the chaotic implementation of the Five-Year Plans—led to inefficiencies and waste. But here’s the rub: even with its deformations, the Soviet economy achieved staggering feats. It not only survived but outpaced many capitalist economies during the Great Depression. By the late 1930s, it had transformed a feudal backwater into an industrialized powerhouse capable of withstanding and defeating the Wehrmacht, the most formidable military machine of its time. And this was after enduring one of the most devastating invasions in human history.

And let’s not ignore the strides made in education, healthcare, and gender equality. The USSR turned an overwhelmingly illiterate population into one of the most educated in the world. Women gained access to professions and education in ways that far outpaced their counterparts in the West. And while Stalin’s purges and bureaucratic authoritarianism gutted much of the early revolutionary spirit, the foundations laid by the October Revolution persisted in remarkable ways. Even amid the Stalinist counterrevolution, the USSR managed to rebuild itself at an astonishing rate after the destruction of World War II, without relying on the Marshall Plan.

In conclusion, the failure of the USSR was not an inherent failure of socialism but a tragedy born of historical contingency: isolation, betrayal, and the crushing weight of imperialist opposition. The same forces that scoff at the USSR today—bourgeois ideologues and their reformist allies—bear responsibility for sabotaging the international revolutions that might have prevented the Stalinist degeneration. To use the USSR as a strawman against socialism is intellectually lazy and historically dishonest. The real question isn’t whether the USSR “worked out” but whether the world’s workers were ever given a fair chance to build a socialist alternative in the first place. The answer, dear reformist, is no—because your ideological ancestors made damn sure of it.