Traffic on the single bridge that links Russia to Moscow-annexed Crimea and serves as a key supply route for the Kremlin’s forces in the war with Ukraine came to a standstill on Monday after one of its sections was blown up, killing a couple and wounding their daughter.
The RBC Ukraine news agency reported that explosions were heard on the bridge, with Russian military bloggers reporting two strikes.
RBC Ukraine and another Ukrainian news outlet Ukrainska Pravda said the attack was planned jointly by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) and the Ukrainian navy, and involved sea drones.
This is not true in France, Portugal, Spain, Greece, Norway or Austria where communists have significant presence in governance and rapidly rising support. I agree with you that we’re struggling elsewhere on the continent, for the most part. I think the generalisation is unfair given these aren’t exactly unimportant countries. Are you American? This topic is much more interesting and would be way less hostile than it has been up to now between us.
Not those kinds of communists. GUE/NGL parties range in self-identification from communist to democratic socialist and are indeed quite large and established, even if they don’t have huge electoral successes in many countries. S&D is generally way more popular, socdems of various intensities. GUE/NGL is proportionally strongest in Greece, Cyprus, Portugal and Ireland (at least by EU election results I can’t be arsed to go through national ones). They’re not the kind of party who would stage a coup and then falsify elections.
The splinter groups I was talking about are the like of the German MLDP who get less than 0.1%, compared to Die Linke which isn’t unaccustomed to double-digit results. Best MLDP result ever was 0.4% in the 2006 Sachsen-Anhalt state elections. Which, of course, fits into their ideology, they believe that capitalism can only be overcome by a revolution and its vanguard. You know the type, in fact I think you’re deeply familiar with it. Occasionally they manage to get a seat on the municipal level. They don’t have a group in the European Parliament because they don’t get in.
I’m not actually referring to this bunch, although they’re certainly one you could. I am referring mainly to national results. I think however that your measurement comes from “election results” whereas this is misleading with regards to communist activities in any given country. Take france for example where you could measure the activity of communists by the results of the PCF. This however is not the sum of communist activity or strategy in the country. The vast majority of Melenchon supporters would be communists if the soft option did not exist. Most of us are revolutionaries in one breath and democratic socialists in another. It entirely depends on the circumstances. I live in Britain, I firmly believe revolution is the only path to socialism, does that mean I’m a revolutionary in the british conditions though? Fuck no it doesn’t there is no chance of a revolution right now. Thus my activity takes place through other channels and work, in the trade union movement and in electoral groups.
Germany is a huge problem right now there is a massive swing rightwards occurring. The socdem to fascist pipeline was in full swing in the recent election. You’re correct that the left has collapsed there. I do caution against over using electoral results as a measure of communist activities though, none of us believe in electoralism as a pathway to socialism so activity in the electoral system is more about recruitment, spreading socialist education and generally used as a sort of thermometer for the trend of things.
Oh I don’t doubt it. The thing is: The ilk I was referring to don’t do democratic socialism even when living in democracies. They may not boycott elections but they’re not really trying to win them, either, the motivation just isn’t there because they don’t believe it could achieve anything.
2/3rd of AfD voters don’t agree with the party platform. And not just in the “haven’t read it” sense but right-out “yeah I don’t like them this is a protest vote fuck all those Wessis in Berlin” type of deal. And the east being full of open Nazis isn’t exactly new, neither is them infiltrating civil society there the trouble is, and was, since the 90s, that the GDR had no civil society to speak of because politics was something the party did. What we see right now is a combination of protest voters having tried all other parties and are now left with the AfD (and still don’t get that if they want a party that shares their ideas, they should bloody fund one) and of the far-right getting bold (which will likely mean they’ll overplay their hand), all in enabling circumstances that have been in place for at least a decade. Oh, Russian disinfo whipping the conspiracy crowd right from “corona dictatorship” into “climate dictatorship”. We didn’t have that for long that’s relatively new.
The percentage of people with a closed right-extremist world view is actually larger in the west than in the east, yet election results are the exact opposite. Open Nazism is rarer in the west because Antifa, while not necessarily larger, has a way easier time drawing upon wider civil society so the Nazis keep their head down. There’s xenophobia and feelings of disenfranchisement in the east, the AfD plays into it, and if Wagenknecht ever gets around to actually founding her party she’ll scoop those votes straight up. “Unemployed before refugees” and “trans rights are human rights but fuck neopronouns” is by and large about as far as you need to go to calm those waters, a thing Die Linke never managed to do. Oh, and having selective expropriation of means of production in the programme won’t hurt. Going all-out would not be popular but targeted initiatives, completely different matter.
I don’t think it matters if 2 thirds of them don’t support the whole platform. What matters is simply that they supported them. It doesn’t matter that people here in Britain don’t support the whole platform of the tories, they still supported them on Brexit, enabling them to go ahead with the entire rest of their platform.
I’m not that familiar with Wagenknecht, is she what happens when the strasserite types of morons understand that nazis are bad but couldn’t explain to you why?
A good thing. Neopronouns are fine and good. People don’t understand them but that’s ok, eventually they will, assuming the right don’t manage to kill everyone first.
This was the landlords expropriation shit right? Did it ever actually get implemented or did it get snatched out from under the people through other means? I am betting on the latter.
Strasserite fuck no, she’s a card-carrying communist, always has been, joined Die Linke when it was still the SED. Masters in… philosophy, I guess, on Marx’ interpretation of Hegel. PhD in macroeconomics. If the GDR hadn’t fallen she’d probably sit in the central committee. Ceased to do Stalin apologia in the 90s, still does Russia apologia and has rather unhelpful Ukraine takes (“let’s just all stop shooting”, “ceasefire now”). Against a vaccine mandate but that only ever has been debated about in the abstract, anyway, definitely not a denier. Where she really breaks with the rest of Die Linke is the stuff I alluded to (with a bit of populist spin as she’d then also be bound to do it in her new party): The main beef she has with her party is over, as she puts it, Die Linke forgetting to advocate for the broad masses and instead fixating on (however justified) minority issues. See that as you will it’s certainly the exact perception people in the east have of the party.
I’m drawing the line at having a neutral pronoun anyone can use. I don’t mind one bit if some enthusiasts want to go all-out and have as many pronouns in a group as there are people but don’t expect me to keep track of all that I can barely remember names (faces and characters and histories, no issue, but names just don’t stick). It’s bad enough that Indo-European languages have gender-afflicted noun classes it’s a better idea to just get rid of them (or at least class distinctions between different groups of people1) than to explode the number of classes.
Or, to put it with Zizek: Why LGBTQ+ can’t we just all be +.
Oh no it went through. Berlin’s government is currently dragging its feet (CDU/SPD, both opposed the referendum) but they have to implement it.
1 Pun not intended but I’ll take it
This is the kind of stuff I’m alluding to. Maybe not strasserite, maybe nazbol-ey. Either way it’s not communist. There’s a significant segment of communists who have fallen rightwards through anti-idpol bollocks failing to understanding marxist intersectionality. They’ve mistakenly decided it all needs to be rejected for popular support rather than re-educating the population into recognising the intersectionality is a requirement for the broader masses to succeed, we simply don’t have the numbers otherwise in the new cosmopolitan societies that were constructed after nation-states ended and got built into the multicultural multi-racial cosmopolitan societies they are today.
I don’t think anyone wants you to keep tracks, just to acknowledge and respect it. It’s not really something that lgbt people came up with either, it has existed prior to the modern day and I’m willing to bet there’s at least one isolated group out there somewhere using some unusual shit. At the end of the day it’s just a way to describe their gender when “man” or “woman” doesn’t work for them. It’s pretty harmless and seems to particularly resonate with people that aren’t neurotypical so ehhhhhh it’s fine. Power to them really. I’m glad they’re happy. I don’t have neopronouns but it doesn’t affect me so you know.
I couldn’t care less what this socdem lib thinks. He was losing my attention with his rape obsession for years but he completely lost my attention when he started writing for the cia outlets like Radio Free. He’s not getting away with ignorance he knows what’s up.
When? Is there a timeline? If they’re dragging their feet they’re just looking for the circumstances necessary to drop it. When I saw this happen my immediate thought was “they’ll never ever implement that”. If they ever do I will be incredibly surprised.
…what? Intersectionality is like a late 80s concept.
How do you re-educate when the masses think you’re not interested in their success? How do you get people interested in other people’s issues if they think you’re shafting them?
There’s been a massive erosion of the social systems over here roughly starting in 2000 with Schröder, New Labour type of stuff, right after Kohl pushed through his neolib privatisation agenda, victims of which were among other things the complete industry of the GDR – factories were sold for pennies to western competition who then shut stuff down. It’s a double whammy.
Whereas back in the GDR you were not able to open your mouth without the Stasi taking notes and not able to run your mouth without the Stasi picking you off the street, if you didn’t you were guaranteed to be able to get a job, fund a family, have some vacations etc. economically the situation wasn’t great but you didn’t need to worry about falling through any cracks (as long as you kept your mouth shut). The GDR had no Lumpenproletariat. It’s the exact opposite right now. And people in the east are, rightly, blaming politicians for it. And now Die Linke appears to them to worry more about neopronouns than being demsocs or even socdems.
Sure you can do both, caring about one doesn’t really affect caring about the other – but you also have to avoid the above perception. Most of all, if you make progress in one area but not the other you might have to tone down those successes lest the perception be that you only fight for one.
As to the numbers game: For a majority you’ll need the masses. No two ways about it. A minority politics focus might win you activists, but not elections.
Not the schizo spectrum that’s for sure, trust me, I’d know. Autism spectrum, sure, when it comes to subjectivity they’re hyper-normies. Now I don’t mind y’all having prescriptive identities but you don’t have to be muppets about it.
I mean… you don’t have to to consider the point? Ok, here’s what Rosa Luxemburg said: Why LGBTQ+, why not just +?
Dragging their feet among other things included “we need studies, we need a framework law first, and we have to make sure that it’s even compatible with Berlin’s constitution” (the Berlin constitution, unlike the federal one, wasn’t explicitly written to be compatible with state capitalism, but in any case the federal one takes precedence), so they tasked an expert commission with figuring all that out. Said commission just recently reached its final verdict: No framework law needed, yep of course it’s constitutional, it’s probably even going to be cheap.
The government is constitutionally required to implement it, the referendum was legally binding. The rest is a matter of rule of law. If they refuse… well courts can hold them in contempt but that’s not going to do much. But it would cost them the next elections, or probably rather cause early elections because the SPD wouldn’t want to dig their heels in over this one. Or there can be another referendum, this time of the “this exact law shall now be in force” kind, not the “the senate shall legislate on this matter” one.
A third wave concept yes. The only issue with the liberal conception of it is that it does not include class as one of its methods of analysis. The intersection between a black trans woman creates different conditions to that of a white trans woman, but without class it creates an incomplete analysis. Class explains the difference in experience that creates for example the right wing trans bourgeoisie, who ultimately are insulated from the conditions that a poor working class trans person experiences and thus they politically lean towards protecting their class status even if it means supporting people who are hurting trans people. Marxist intersectionality simply adds in class to complete the picture and analyse groups correctly.
It’s a balancing act. Protecting the marginalised while also connecting the dots between class issues and their issues. The issue is that people go too far one way or the other, the groups that want to never defend the marginalised groups for fear of the outcome simply become reactionaries themselves. Although a controversial figure Stalin’s quote on antisemitism leading the working class into the jungle is just as relevant to all the various minority groups today.
Because it’s not about him. It’s about the LGBTQ+ people. This attitude reeks of the same “why can’t you just like be a little less this and a little more that”, which is something the various phobes and bigots (whether they realise it or not) have consistently levelled at lgbt people over the decades. They decide what they are, and how they like to present their community and identity. Zizek doing this shit just demonstrates he fundamentally doesn’t give a fuck about us, and that he would only like to make these groups politically more convenient for himself. On top of that there is the other issue, that lgbt people have for decades now had to exist in a “fuck you, we exist in public and that’s your problem not ours” attitude to public life and existence, attempts to make them adjust how they exist in public life are always going to be viewed as attacks when that is the cultural background of the community defending itself and its right to exist. That’s what “pride” is, a big fuck you we exist we’re proud of that and visible. Having people come in from outside and try to tell them to do it differently is… Not good. It’s out of touch. It shows he’s never really engaged properly in order to understand this group, how it got to where it is, why it defends itself so aggressively, etc etc.
I think they’ll take the election hit over implementing it. But we’ll see.
What happens after that? Who has the teeth to force its implementation? Anyone at all? Or can the courts do nothing more than “we find you in contempt” ? What actual repercussions does that have other than electoral? The bougies can play the electoral game and come out on top forever if there is no real way to force any of these parties into implementing it when they don’t want to do it. They could fuck around for years, and then throw it out in some crisis saying “it’s no longer viable because [excuse here]”. “It’s been too long”, “we have war now the conditions are different”, “there’s a famine from climate change occurring now”, “we have a water crisis”, “the war with china”. I can think of so many things that are just around the corner that could be used as excuses. As long as the ““punishment”” is only in the ballot box they could feasibly fuck around forever, if no alternative mechanisms of forcing it through exist.