Rosa Astra @morganastra@witches.town

the rituals we perform with our dead are sacred. when we honor our dead we reaffirm our humanity and our commitment to our community.

performing those rituals under a trans person's deadname is mockery and desecration. it stands opposed to everything that we are as humans

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

same as hell, Seven

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.

historically we've seen the most effective way to run a space program is with a centrally planned socialist economy, followed by a capitalist state running the space program in a centralized fashion but delegating some tasks to private firms. an anarchist space program would look dramatically different from those examples, presumably, and it's definitely not clear how it would work

that actually brings up a good point, I'm really curious (honestly, not antagonistically), to hear how anarchists propose an anarchist space program would work from the ground up, assuming current or plausible near-future levels of industrial automation and mining technology