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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • Fun etymological fact: very long ago, tyranny used to refer to an autocratic leader that issued a debt jubilee, generally in response to a peasant uprising. A debt jubilee is where most or all debts are declared invalid, a clean debt slate for society, and was generally necessary to keep society functioning. The mini revolution that appointed the tyrant would be short-lived and the prior systen would more or less remain in place, just with cancelled debts.




  • Socialism is always about recreating a ruling class: it is to make the working class into the ruling class.

    There is no practical alternative to this. Imagine trying the only way: to immediately end class relations. You’ve won the revolution. Your ideological brethren are in power and the Great Workers’ Council is going forward with your plan. How are you going to force people to end class relations? Won’t it require a state? Who is enforcing the end of relations? If someone buys up an extra-big plot of land and starts charging tenants rent, reinventing semi-feudal relations, who is going to stop them? And what are you going to do about the bourgeoisie who still exist, especially those overseas, and are working against you to reopen your country for exploitation?

    All of these basic realities require a state. And you cannot simply end all class relations instantaneously, as the wider public will not all agree with you ideologically. Unless you plan extreme forms of oppression for the entire population, you will need to deal with the remnants of various class relations in various forms, engaging, ideally, in a process that will whittle them away. That entire process will be recreating a ruling class, i.e. the working class, to impose this process on the other classes.


  • TheOubliette@lemmy.mltoMemes@lemmy.mlAmericans and socialism
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    1 month ago

    Socialism is not about the government’s size. Socialists, particularly Marxists, emphasize using the state and nationalization after proletarian revolution to reflect the working class’ interests and build socialism, but the size of the state itself is not what makes something socialist, both because (1) socialists seek to eventually end the state itself once productive forces and consciousness are sufficiently advanced and (2) capitalist states can also have large governments, generally to serve the interests of the ruling class, albeit sometimes in a roundabout way.


  • TheOubliette@lemmy.mltoMemes@lemmy.mlAmericans and socialism
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    1 month ago

    Socialism is about making the working class the ruling class. It is explicitly about oppressing the bourgeois class, which is itself the current ruling class oppressing the working (and other) classes. The idea is to take the means of production and run it for ourselves rather than the profit of a class defined by merely owning factories, buildings, tools, etc.

    The cartoon may be confused.




  • It is very difficult to run an email provider and not get banned by the others. Google, Microsoft, and Apple control the US market, for example. If they decide your domain is spam, you suddenly can’t email anyone with a Gmail or Hotmail or Apple account. Avoiding getting banned means you have to regulate your own outgoing emails very carefully, rate-limit them just right, and yet also build up a reputation of trustworthiness by sending a lot of emails that don’t get marked as spam.

    The only privacy-secure way to do your email would be DIY but this risks getting banned like… all the time.

    Personally, I recommend having your own domain and setting up MX records to a reliable email provider that is not one of the big ones and ideally offers some kind of theoretical inbox protection (please note that they could always still read everything if they just copied all incoming messages to another database as well).

    Email is itself not very secure. You can use GPG to make it better but most people won’t know how to receive your messages or send secure ones. For security, I recommend using a dedicated e2e chat service or in-person communication.