My wife is very rule oriented, she likes to understand what her place is, and make sure she is living up to the explicit and implicit (with a limit only of her vivid imagination) tasks in order to fulfill her role, as long as she understands the reason for the rule.

I am much more chaotic and didn’t give a fuck about rules for a long time because its all external and alienated. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve developed an ethics, not morality, that if anything is much stricter than what is “necessary.” But my own ethics have, to the best of my ability, good reasonable justifications, with a high standard for logical consistency and self growth and actualization, whereas I still see those externalized rules, especially the ones that seem to undergird the logic of private property, oppression, imperialism, patriarchy, racism; to still be external and alienating, if not just corrosive to the human spirit.

My ethics compel me to.do things that others wouldn’t dare, their morality compels them to do things that I can’t even comprehend. Its like no matter what the rules are, I’ll always find damn good reasons to be feisty. This of course plays beautifully into my afore mentioned rejection dysphoria which isn’t chronic but still acute; and comes on strong in moments of self assessment of just these dynamics.

Its almost like people are impossibly complicated, but maybe that’s just me

I’m an elder millennial, practically an x-er, so its my first time seeing some of these terms.

Some of this stuff, like time blindness, yeah I get that and am medicated for it. Hours just fall off for me. Rejection sensitive dysphoria? Yeah that’s another one I’ve identified in myself and others but didn’t know the term for. I can’t say I have it all the time but sometimes it can feel quite acute.

But justice sensitivity? Like, what does it even mean to be NT? It’s just going along and not giving a shit about anything except what is immediately in front of you? Is this why I feel like I don’t relate to a lot of people?do people just like not change in a conscious way, or even think? Why does the concept of justice even exist if it is only important to a minority of non NT people? I find this incredibly strange. And I say this as someone who probably is justice sensitive, so much so that politics is a big part of my life, but then most of my friends and non-work relations are as well.

You have to think about contradictions that occur, not like static things, when analyzing conflicts like this. The US military is strong, but they aren’t like completely cold blooded thugs. Some are, you’ll have that anywhere, but how revolutions are often won is the military breaks in half, and one side goes over to the revolutionary forces. See the people with the most like conscience (sorry its not very scientific here, but its the best word to describe), will defect first and early, which creates problems in the ranks with disunity and lowering morale. The generals and leaders will become extremely harsh on the military which just causes more defections as people start to escape their declining conditions, along with their conscience, which makes the leaders crack down harder – it creates a feedback loop that can fracture the entire military. Its happened many times. Turning a military against their own people is dangerous. It takes decades of otherizing and conditioning of the population to overwrite peoples basic humanity. Some people can be monstrous but some can’t resist their own conscience.

You never know what could happen, especially in the core. And as other people have said, the US military actually losing is always possible. Talk to anyone in the military with logistical or admin or leadership jobs, and a lot of times you won’t find the hyper jingoistic patriotism of the suburbs, you’ll find healthy skepticism and tactical flexibility. In other words, the military are always aware that they could lose, so why should we think any different?

It all comes down to organization, tactics, and strategy.

Who can definitely be defeated with numbers and organization

They have to keep a lot of it circulating. As it zips around the economy, it is used to purchase capital, which soaks up the value of workers labor power by converting it into commodities, sells those commodities on a market for a higher price, and then returns profit to the “owners” of the capital. This is how the rich get and stay richer.

Capitalism isn’t neutral, the system creates the rich and poor and delivers the value of worker labor power to the rich owners. The rich can’t control it any more than we can. They have their hand on the wheel through the state, which is just a mechanism that solves problems created by capitalism that can’t be exploited for profits, to violence. But they’re as ensnared by the system as we are. It robs them of their humanity the same it does ours.

We don’t overthrow capitalism to punish the rich, we do it to save everyone from it, and try to restore peoples humanity. The greed of the rich almost doesn’t matter, the system has a logic all its own.

The social system similar to what you describe, which is basically feudalism of nobles and serfs, has its own rules and arose out of its own conditions, like capitalism arose from the revolutionary overthrow of feudalism. Maybe capitalism will give way to some worse form of social relation, I suspect many people are working on that as we speak. But that’s why we have to fight and win for a better system

Socialism or barbarism!

Aaahhhh you went too far in the bit. Happens to everyone

Christian theology describes the joy that will come from watching people burn in hell.
Bear with me here:

But there are yet other spectacles: that final and everlasting day of judgement, that day that was not expected and was even laughed at by the nations, when the whole old world and all it gave birth to are consumed in one fire. What an ample breadth of sights there will be then! At which one shall I gaze in wonder? At which shall I laugh? At which rejoice? At which exult, when I see so many great kings who were proclaimed to have been taken up into heaven, groaning in the deepest darkness together with those who claimed to have witnessed their apotheosis and with Jove himself. And when I see those [provincial] governors, persecutors of the Lord’s name, melting in flames more savage than those with which they insolently raged against Christians! When I see those wise philosophers who persuaded their disciples that nothing was of any concern to God and who affirmed to them either that we have no souls or that our souls will not return to their original bodies! Now they are ashamed before those disciples, as they are burned together with them. Also the poets trembling before the tribunal not of Minos or of Radamanthus, but of the unexpected Christ! Then the tragic actors will be easier to hear because they will be in better voice [i.e. screaming even louder] in their own tragedy. Then the actors of pantomime will be easy to recognize, being much more nimble than usual because of the fire. Then the charioteer will be on view, all red in a wheel of flame and the athletes, thrown not in the gymnasia but into the fire. Unless even then I don’t want to see them [alive +], preferring to cast an insatiable gaze on those who raged against the Lord. ‘This is he’, I will say, ‘that son of a carpenter or prostitute [– Tertullian refers to the Jews from now on, as is shown by what follows and in particular by this well-known description of the mother of Jesus from the Talmud – ] that destroyer of the Sabbath, that Samaritan, that man who had a devil. He it is whom you bought from Judas, who was beaten with a reed and with fists, who was defiled with spit and had gall and vinegar to drink. He it is whom his disciples secretly took away so that it might be said that he had risen again, or whom the gardener removed so that his lettuces would not be harmed by the crowd of visitors.’ What praetor or consul or quaestor or priest will grant you from his largesse the chance of seeing and exulting in such things? And yet to some extent we have such things already through faith, made present in the imagining spirit. Furthermore what sorts of things are those which the eye has not seen nor the ear heard, and which have not come into the human heart? (1. Cor. 2, 9) I believe that they are more pleasing than the circus or both of the enclosures [first and fourth rank of seats, or, according to others, the comic and the tragic stages] or than any race-track.’ The material above in square brackets is Nietzsche’s addition to Tertullian’s text. At ‘[alive +]’ Nietzsche incorrectly reads ‘vivos’ (‘alive’) for ‘visos’ (‘seen’). 43 ‘By my faith’. – excerpt from Nietzsche, *On the Genealogy of Morals

What the fuck?

For Marxists, the state is the institution that tries to resolve, with violence, the contradictions that are inherent within class society. So when class society no longer exists, then violence is no longer necessary, hence the state is no longer necessary, hence “withering away”.

This isn’t an all or nothing situation, just a theory. The laws of uneven and combined development indicate that this withering would happen in different ways at different rates. this process wouldn’t even begin until the whole world has become some form of socialism, and the social relations governing society would be much progressed. Its hard to imagine how this would work compared to our current situation

I disagree, but I appreciate you walking back the anticommunism. Paul LeBlanc covers about every argument for Lenin’s “opportunism” in great detail, I would recommend Lenin and the Revolutionary Party for a good description of Leninism before 1921. If you mean Leninism like “Foundations of Leninism” then yeah I’ll join you in calling Stalin an opportunist. But not even Paul Averich, anarchist critic of the Bolsheviks and historian, was willing to lay the authoritarianism of the USSR at the feet of Lenin. But I don’t want to legislate the tragedies of 20th century socialism. I’ll study it, but there’s plenty of reasons to be skeptical.

I recently read a couple books by Cyril Smith who is pretty negative toward Lenin, and while I don’t really buy his premise, I think his emphasis on what was missing (an analysis on “sensuous human activity,” like in Theses on Feuerbach) from the Plekhanov-Leninist tendency of Marxism holds water.

If you want to discuss the history of the Russian revolution, I saved but didn’t post several paragraphs, but deleted them for the sake of brevity. Flattening the whole 100 years of Russian “socialist” history to highlight it’s worst abuses is just as intellectually lazy as flattening it to only highlight the best parts of it. I’m not going to apologise for Kronstadt or anything that came after, but the civil war period was horrible. And had the Bolsheviks not taken power, Kornilov or Kerensky would have, and instituted far more brutal oppression; if not just tried to restore the Tzar.

The organizing principles of the Bolsheviks and RSDLP should absolutely be studied leading up to Oct 1917, as well as Rosa Luxemburg, and Anton Pannekoek’s criticisms of Lenin.

But saying “firing squad” doesnt prove that communism leads to authoritarianism, although it references a time in history that was very brutal and oppressive. However, Its not as good of a criticism as you are capable of. I’m used to having discussions with people who probably aren’t critical enough of the Bolsheviks, so its refreshing to hear from you, in a way.

Communism is the struggle for a moneyless, stateless, classless society.

There’s no connection between a supposed ideology of communism, and authoritarianism. The “authoritarianism” arose as a result of material circumstances, not ideology. I’ve looked into the histories a lot and its very complicated. Not like you wouldn’t understand it, just that it can’t be reduced to a simple truism, cant be made succinct.

Let’s just say that the capitalists who hoard all the wealth and do nothing to earn millions and billions, who own the media and for whose benefit the state represents, aren’t too keen on movements that sometimes overthrow them. So it’s in their interests to paint socialism and communism in as bad a light as possible.

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