Rosa Astra @morganastra@witches.town

ugh i am having a really hard time keeping a reasonable sleep schedule this week :(

@ticky it's weird to me when some online things squash whitespace and effectively enforce that you can only put one space between sentences. it's a weird editorial restriction

same as hell, Seven

@szam when did i say anything about stalin?

@Concerned_Catgirl it's not really clear what your goal is in this conversation other than just haranguing me ad nauseum for reasons that appear to have no basis in any of the things i said, so i think we should stop having it

@Concerned_Catgirl i mean there's not really such thing as an unbiased news outlet, but also that is an essay written by a human individual that happens to be hosted on telesur. i have absolutely no reason to believe she doesn't mean exactly what she says

@Concerned_Catgirl this article, by a lesbian who has spent a lot of time in Cuba, discusses the current situation for queers in Cuba and the historical context https://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/Looking-at-Cubas-LGBTQ-Revolution-Through-an-Objective-Lens-20161204-0018.html

@Concerned_Catgirl yeah, they did, that was an atrocity. they also stopped doing it, explicitly acknowledged that it was an atrocity, and have taken significant strides toward dismantling the homophobia and transphobia that remain in Cuban society as a relic of its colonization.

for context, at the same time and even significantly after, the US was rounding up queers by the van load and sending them off to be tortured in prison. it was an awful time to be queer in most of the world.

@Concerned_Catgirl have you read Rainbow Solidarity in Defense of Cuba? it's a collection of essays by Leslie Feinberg (who also wrote Stone Butch Blues and was one of the pioneers of the modern transgender movement) that address the complicated intersections of gender, sexuality, and class. It's really good, I highly recommend it https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6712775-rainbow-solidarity-in-defense-of-cuba

@ambyrb the ultimate goal of every communist, including the ones who are described as "statist", is a world without oppressive classes and thus without the need for a state to manage the conflict they create. but actually abolishing class is surely a very long project, and the question of how to achieve the end goal is an important one if we intend to ever actually do it

@ambyrb a state is a tool, like a hammer or a gun or a spacecraft. it can be used for good or for harm, the important question is who controls it.

@floi yeah i like it a lot, of all the strains of anarchism syndicalism is the one i find most compelling, and before i started intentionally refusing to identify with any political tendency more specific than "communist" i would have considered myself a syndicalist.

however, while syndicalism provides a compelling vision of a transition to a socialist society in the absence of adversity, the only way it seems possible for it to significantly restructure the material conditions to the point of interrupting the reproduction of capitalism is if it creates a quasi-state, and then you have something only different from soviet socialism on technicalities

and let's be honest - they never achieved communism or even necessarily a particularly advanced stage of socialism. but the USSR in the 60s and 70s did provide a high standard of living to its working class. better in many ways than the US did to its at the time, despite the US being much wealthier (and of course the condition of the working class in the US has deteriorated dramatically since then).

to look to the present day, Cuba isn't close to perfect either, and they don't claim to be, but if the whole world were like Cuba we would be a lot better off than we are today. that would be a world order with a plausible trajectory toward communism.

i used to believe that anarchism was a realistic way to achieve those goals, but the more i read anarchist literature and talk and organize with anarchists the more convinced i become that anarchism itself is hopelessly utopian and does not provide a credible way to get from here to full anarchism/communism.

at the same time i have found that M-Lism and Maoism provide an incredibly useful analytical framework and have also been the guiding ideologies of nearly all of the successful socialist movements we have witnessed in the real world. even if i have serious critiques of most of socialist movements, its observable effectiveness has to count for something

that was supposed to say "in other words i am a communist. i would support..."

i just want liberation for everyone, access to their share of the material abundance our world provides, and most importantly to always have food and medical care and a decent place to live. and i want us to explore the stars. in other words i would support whatever political tendency i thought could most plausibly attain those things, and that is obviously some kind of socialism, but i am not sure which right now. that is why i am in the DSA - it is one of the few leftist political organizations with the humility to not claim it has all the answers but which does have a credible vision for forward progress toward socialism.

@abgd yeah, it is definitely utopian, as i find anarchism often tends to be. which isn't a problem necessarily, but it's a bit disappointing to me because i want to actually live in a socialist world and explore the stars, not just talk about it

@phessler yeah, which is why i said "that actually brings up a good point" and then started talking about the engineering projects necessary to do science

@abgd in order to work together effectively wouldn't they all have to make a commitment to each other to actually stick it out throughout the project? if your highly specialized avionics equipment shop drops out in the middle of building an interplanetary starship you can't exactly just drop in a replacement