u/haevow

I say this as an American, Ive always liked history, but for whatever reason (maybe it was the way it was taught in class??) I have always hated general US history. I know the basic overview of what happened but that’s just becuase I’ve heard it so many times it’s hard not to have remembered it. I will admit though, I love Black American history, especially in the 20th century, but I’m also a leftist so it’s kinda obvious that would resonate with me lmao.

edit: thank you everyone for yalls recommendations!

There’s been a rise of fake scamming posts on Reddit and other platforms where people pretend to be Gazans in distress asking people to donate to fundrasiers.

If you’re going to donate to any fundrasiers to help individua Palestinians please make sure that they are not fabricated posts.

The quickest way you can do this is reverse image search via google and check the source of any photo. You can also be vigilant by only trusting posts that have photos of people holding up papers with their Reddit username, a common method of verfying someone is who they say they are.

You could also just prefer to donate to a general Palestinian relief fund rather than to individual users.

If any mods are reading, please make new rules to properly vet any posts claiming to be Palestinians in search of funds.

What i ultimately find interesting is why posts like this exist. If people had enough money to live, we would see less people trying to scam people by exploiting important historical-poltical current events.

Many people on this sub seem to be constantly debating about what Democratic Socialism is, and how it differs from Social Democracy. I have come today, and speak for all Mods, to clear some things up and set some ground rules here. 

We must remember that socialism specifically refers to an economic model in where workers (the proletariat) determine social and economic organization rather than capitalists (the bourgeoisie). This is the main socialist goal. 

It also seeks out to abolish exploitive class relations, supress wage labor, and abolish market dependency.

Market dependence is when people must enter market relations to obtaintheir needs for reproduction. Food, shelter, etc. Market dependence is the differentiator between capitalist markets and non-capitalist markets.

If you do not fufill this basic imperative, the belief in a worker or collectivly owned economy, you are not a socialist. 

Worker ownership can come in many different forms. Some socialists belive in a decentralized system where workers own their individual firms. This is a cooperative economy refered to as Autogestion, self management or worker cooperatism.

Other socialists belive in social ownership where economic questions are democratically voted on by all citizens in regional councils. This is called council communism and its most famous example were the Soviets.

What Social Democracy aims to do is provide a strong welfare state with more bargaining power for workers. What differentiates it from Social Liberalism (the classic European welfare state) is a few core principles. 

The biggest, and most important, is the fact that Social Democracy gives labor far more institutional power than a regular welfare state. Union density is higher, sectoral bargaining institutions exist, and many firms have workers councils or worker co-determination.

Why is this not socialism? Becuase giving labor more power does not touch the underlying problem: private ownership of the means of production. Socialists believe in worker ownership, Social Democratics, even at their most radical, only belive in codetermination at most. 

Socialists fundamentally reject this distinction between capital and labor. Those who do the work should control it too. 

So, what is Democratic Socialism? 

Democratic Socialism is a pathway towards collective ownership that works to challenge pre-existing institutions from the inside to deliver a socialized economy. 

Along the way, many Democratic Socialists belive in offering progressive material wins, like affordability and social benefits, to increase faith in collective bargaining and social responsibility. 

The core goal of Democratic Socialism is a socialist economy. This cannot be forgotten, and we need more than just a couple politicians in office to win it. We must do the slow work on the ground, organize with our communities, and inspire socialist consciousness in our Comrades. This part doesn’t change, regardless of whether you’re team Democratic or Revolution. 

I find many Democratic Socialists haven’t read much theory. If you need some direction, here’s a DemSoc reading list.

State, Power, Socialism by Nicos Poulantzas. One of the most sophisticated accounts of a democratic road to socialism. Can be pretty intimidating for new comers, but if youre up for the challenge pick it up!

The Socialist Manifesto by Bhashkar Sunkara (though you also should read the Communist Manifesto too) 

Strategy for Labor by André Groz. Short political pamphlet on undermining Capitalist structures from within

Socialism: Past and Future by Micheal Harrington (founder of DSA)

Marx’s work goes without saying. However if you haven’t already, read Wage Labor and Capital and Value Price and Profit in that order. It will familiarize you with Marx’s basic economic theory.

If you need help reading theory, don’t forget there are many free guides online to help you make sense of them.

And of course, do not brush off ‘revolutionary‘ socialist theories like Lenin too. There’s still a lot of important nuggets to be extracted from there. I especially recommend Gramsci.

Even if you don’t end up agreeing, at least you challenged yourself to think through a new perspective, which is one of the most important skills any socialist must possess.

hey, I’m learning French mainly through CI and I think I’m ready to jump into native content. do yall have an recs for easier native channels. Preferably vlog channels but anything is fine

I see many people complaining about recent progressive wins without genuinely realizing the opening this has given socialists to brin people even further left than Medicade for all.

Millions of Americans are waking up to the fact that this system isn’t natural, and a better life is possible. When people get small progressive wins they start to get hungry for more, they get impatient and demand more once they realize that they can. It’s the Tocqueville Paradox or whatever (apologies for citing a liberal 🙏)

Even small, progressive reforms can make way for larger social changes. But complaining and moaning about DSA politicians wont take magically organize the masses feeling real desperation right now for a fundemental restructuring.

From my perspective as a queer man, most of what gets produced in MLM spaces/for MLM men tends to be openly sexual in a fun way. It’s very upbeat and ‘pop-y‘. While WLW tends to produce more ‘deeper’, poetic and emotional media. Sure, this is a generalization but it’s not really somthing that you can ignore

I assume there’s some kind of historical reason as to why this is

As the FLN, Algeria’s militant revolutionary party, scrambled to consolidate power and prevent a civil war, the newly liberated Algerian population took it upon themselves to construct a post-colonial economy from the bottom up, denouncing capitalism as incompatible with the nationalist project.

Algerian independence left the country economically desolate. In the span of a couple months, Pied Noirs, Algerian born French colons, fled the country, fearing a ‘Muslim regime’ and leaving behind factories, farmland, business and housing. Algeria was left without a professional and managerial class, without doctors, teachers or technicians. Little did they know that 132 years of French landowners buying up Algerian soil would fertilize the seeds for socialism.

The germs of Algerian socialism were fueled by a genuine belief that an Algerian capitalist class, following in the footsteps of the French, ought not to emerge, and that economic liberation and social liberation were one in the same project. This, alongside the FLN’s relative preoccupation, constituted the pre-conditions for a grassroots spontaneous socialist experiment. Algerian workers seized and populated abandoned property and began controlling them through autogestion councils, a decentralized form of worker-ownership and self-management similar to that of Yugoslavia. The direct democracy system that was born wasn't perfect, but it was the start of another “Third-Way” alternative to liberal capitalism and bureaucratic state solutions.

Swiftly after consolidating power, the first Prime Minister Ahmed Ben Bella didn't wait to legalize and promote worker autogestion with the March Decrees of 1963. Calling for the seizure of all remaining European property that wasn't yet autogested, he redistributed them back to the hands of Algerian workers as autogested firms. General assemblies assumed highest power, with delegates being voted in handling day-to-day business. This propagation of the authentic self-management socialism by the State was met with radical enthusiasm.

Ben Bella denounced private ownership saying that “as long as Algerian soil was still in the hands of the big land-owners, whether French or Algerian, the words ‘independence' and ‘revolution' made no sense”.

Algerian socialism inspired and drew in Marxist visionaries from all over the world who began to feel disillusioned with the Soviet model. They embarked in droves into Algiers, nicknamed Pied Rouges by locals, in hopes of forming the socialist utopia they envisioned, with lush mountains and the Mediterranean sea as an idyllic backdrop.

The bottom-up socialist experiment was short lived. It was dismantled by Boumedine, who replaced Ben Bella after a military coup. He condemned worker autogestion and set forth the death of ‘Verbal Socialism’. He put in place a centralized, planned socialist model. Workers that had previously managed their workplaces reported feeling like “a cog in the socialist machine” under Boumediene’s state socialist system.

—-

If yall enjoyed this mini-history lesson let me know! Algerian history is incredibly underrated, and should be more widely studied in socialist spaces. There’s so much

If yall want I can also make a post on Boumedine’s socialism as that’s where most material improvments came.

Hey guys, I was wondering if yall had any recs for books on Yugoslavia

Hey, I’m a socialist and wanted to know why you socdems decided social democracy was a more desirable political ideology over socialism.

Leave all reasons why in the comments. I promise I won’t judge, but I do need this for somthing I’m working on so do be as detailed as possible!

edit:

Thank you for all yalls comments so far.

I am trying to understand why socdems choose social democracy over socialism to better create strategy that works in moving people leftward, how to talk to socdems as socialists and how to best work with them. My methods are based on Gramscian strategy. 

I say this as a 100% ”socialize the means of production“ socialist.

Innovation under central planning is only good when it specifically involves a large, specific major goal that you can just pour money and reaserch into. Take space travel, as a major example. Scientific research is another great one. The internet and GPS both came out of a centralized government project.

So I’m not in anyway arguing that innovation is impossible under a centralized model. But it’s the kind of innovation that matters that isn’t. Innovation of consumer goods.

One thing centralized planning **absolutely ** cannot make is goods that consumers didn’t know they needed or wanted. Again, like I mentioned above centralized planning is amazing when you a have a specific goal you can just pour money and resourses into. That doesn’t work for genuinly novel ideas.

It cannot account for niche needs that have a small market but an important one. Disabled people especially need certain tools designed for them in mind that 99% of people think is useless becuase they don’t need it.

techically this isn’t a socialism v capitalism thing but still thought yall would have things to say

I personally believe in the idea, best theorized by Poulantzas in his later work, that the State, while not a neutral tool, is a social relation, and thus a site of class struggle.

It is first not self-evident just by looking at it that the bourgeoise, acting out of (by what is assumed to be) purely economic interest, would choose this specific formation of the state. What does the bourgeoise have to gain from a national-popular system, in where people’s relationship to the state is through citizenship, whether that be formal, ethnic or civil, rather than the class based relationships we see in previous systems. What do the bourgoise gain from impelemting genuine democratic institutions, where all citizens get one vote.

Univeral citizenship as the primary relation to the state is a genuinely strange thing for a class-conscious bourgeoise to have produced out of pure economic interest. What citizenship does is create a political subject that is defined explicitly not by their position in production.
In fact, universal citizen was historically produced by class struggle. It was brought into existence on terrain the brourgeoise didnt fully control.

We also must touch on social benefits and labor protections. The instrumentalist position cannot explain social security, redistributive systems, universal healthcare etc etc. Most Marxists would agree that social benefits are expressions of class struggle. Marx himself stated that a subsistence wage is socially and morally detirmed and a direct expression of class struggle.

If states were political dominons of one clsss over another, by what mechanisms is class struggle able to express itself at the level of politics, producing what we today experience as social benefits? You *could* argue that they are consessions of the ruling class to maintain legitimacy and control, and in many specifc cases you wouldn’t be wrong per se. But that proves my point none the less. The ruling class conceeding to the struggle of the subordinate classes assumes there was territory to be conceded in the first place. That its a site of class struggle.

And even if they were just consessions to maintain legitimacy, at some point mateiral conditions have their own consequences, regardless of intent. But also, if social benefits were purley functional concessions by a class that retained full contol, there would be no reason for neoliberal rollback. You’d expect them to be stable and adjusted only as needed for legitimacy.

Now, of course, this doesn’t mean the state is neutral or captured, as I mentioned in the beginning. But we cannot ignore the fact that the state takes a form that is, often times, frustrating for a class conscious owning class.

I personally believe in the idea, best theorized by Poulantzas in his later work, that the State, while not a neutral tool, is a social relation, and thus a site of class struggle.

It is first not self-evident just by looking at it that the bourgeoise, acting out of (by what is assumed to be) purely economic interest, would choose this specific formation of the state. What does the bourgeoise have to gain from a national-popular system, in where people’s relationship to the state is through citizenship, whether that be formal, ethnic or civil, rather than the class based relationships we see in previous systems. What do the bourgoise gain from impelemting genuine democratic institutions, where all citizens get one vote.

Univeral citizenship as the primary relation to the state is a genuinely strange thing for a class-conscious bourgeoise to have produced out of pure economic interest. What citizenship does is create a political subject that is defined explicitly not by their position in production.
In fact, universal citizen was historically produced by class struggle. It was brought into existence on terrain the brourgeoise didnt fully control.

We also must touch on social benefits and labor protections. The instrumentalist position cannot explain social security, redistributive systems, universal healthcare etc etc. Most Marxists would agree that social benefits are expressions of class struggle. Marx himself stated that a subsistence wage is socially and morally detirmed and a direct expression of class struggle.

If states were political dominons of one clsss over another, by what mechanisms is class struggle able to express itself at the level of politics, producing what we today experience as social benefits? You *could* argue that they are consessions of the ruling class to maintain legitimacy and control, and in many specifc cases you wouldn’t be wrong per se. But that proves my point none the less. The ruling class conceeding to the struggle of the subordinate classes assumes there was territory to be conceded in the first place. That its a site of class struggle.

And even if they were just consessions to maintain legitimacy, at some point mateiral conditions have their own consequences, regardless of intent. But also, if social benefits were purley functional concessions by a class that retained full contol, there would be no reason for neoliberal rollback. You’d expect them to be stable and adjusted only as needed for legitimacy.

Now, of course, this doesn’t mean the state is neutral or captured, as I mentioned in the beginning. But we cannot ignore the fact that the state takes a form that is, often times, frustrating for a class conscious owning class.