I don’t know why, but this weekend lemmy.ml has been swarmed by Reddit-brained turbolibs. Some broke out their June 2023 alt accounts to vote brigade.

II. TO INVESTIGATE A PROBLEM IS TO SOLVE IT

You can’t solve a problem? Well, get down and investigate the present facts and its past history! When you have investigated the problem thoroughly, you will know how to solve it. Conclusions invariably come after investigation, and not before. Only a blockhead cudgels his brains on his own, or together with a group, to “find solution” or “evolve an idea” without making any investigation. It must be stressed that this cannot possibly lead to any effective solution or any good idea. In other words, he is bound to arrive at a wrong solution and a wrong idea.

There are not a few comrades doing inspection work, as well as guerrilla leaders and cadres newly in office, who like to make political pronouncements the moment they arrive at a place and who strut about, criticizing this and condemning that when they have only seen the surface of things or minor details. Such purely subjective nonsensical talk is indeed detestable. These people are bound to make a mess of things, lose the confidence of the masses and prove incapable of solving any problem at all.

When they come across difficult problems, quite a number of people in leading positions simply heave a sigh without being able to solve them. They lose patience and ask to be transferred on the ground that they “have not the ability and cannot do the job”; These are cowards’ words. Just get moving on your two legs, go the rounds of every section placed under your charge and "inquire into everything’’ as Confucius did, and then you will be able to solve the problems, however little is your ability; for although your head may be empty before you go out of doors, it will be empty no longer when you return but will contain all sorts of material necessary for the solution of the problems, and that is how problems are solved. Must you go out of doors? Not necessarily. You can call a fact-finding meeting of people familiar with the situation in order to get at the source of what you call a difficult problem and come to know how it stands now, and then it will be easy to solve your difficult problem.

Investigation may be likened to the long months of pregnancy, and solving a problem to the day of birth. To investigate a problem is, indeed, to solve it.

VII. THE TECHNIQUE OF INVESTlGATION

1. Hold fact-finding meetings and undertake investigation through discussions.

This is the only way to get near the truth, the only way to draw conclusions. It is easy to commit mistakes if you do not hold fact-finding meetings for investigation through discussions but simply rely on one individual relating his own experience. You cannot possibly draw more or less correct conclusions at such meetings if you put questions casually instead of raising key-questions for discussion.

2. What kind of people should attend the fact-finding meetings?

They should be people well acquainted with social and economic conditions. As far as age is concerned, older people are best, because they are rich in experience and not only know what is going on but understand the causes and effects. Young people with experience of struggle should also be included, because they have progressive ideas and sharp eyes. As far as occupation is concerned, there should be workers, peasants, merchants, intellectuals, and occasionally soldiers, and sometimes even vagrants. Naturally, when a particular subject is being looked into, those who have nothing to do with it need not be present. For example, workers, peasants and students need not attend when commerce is the subject of investigation.

3. Which is better, a large fact-finding meeting or a small one?

That depends on the investigator’s ability to conduct a meeting. If he is good at it, a meeting of as many as a dozen or even twenty or more people can be called. A large meeting has its advantages; from the answers you get fairly accurate statistics (e. g., in finding out the percentage of poor peasants in the total peasant population) and fairly correct conclusions (e.g., in finding out whether equal or differentiated land redistribution is better ). Of course, it has its disadvantages too; unless you are skillful in conducting meetings, you will find it difficult to keep order. So the number of people attending a meeting depends on the competence of the investigator. However, the minimum is three, or otherwise the information obtained will be too limited to correspond to the real situation.

4. Prepare a detailed outline for the investigation.

A detailed outline should be prepared beforehand, and the investigator should ask questions according to the outline, with those present at the meeting giving their answers. Any points which are unclear or doubtful should be put up for discussion. The detailed outline should include main subjects and sub-headings and also detailed items. For instance, taking commerce as a main subject, it can have such sub-headings as cloth, grain, other necessities and medicinal herbs; again, under cloth, there can be such detailed items as calico, homespun and silk and satin.

5. Personal participation.

Everyone with responsibility for giving leadership — from the chairman of the township government to the chairman of the central government, from the detachment leader to the commander-in-chief, from the secretary of a Party branch to the general secretary — must personally undertake investigation into the specific social and economic conditions and not merely rely on reading reports. For investigation and reading reports are two entirely different things.

6. Probe deeply.

Anyone new to investigation work should make one or two thorough investigations in order to gain full knowledge of a particular place (say, a village or a town) of a particular problem (say, the problem of grain or currency). Deep probing into a particular place or problem will make future investigation of other places or problems easier.

7. Make your own notes.

The investigator should not only preside at fact-finding meetings and give proper guidance to those present but should also make his own notes and record the results himself. To have others do it for him is no good.

They never post to lemmy.ml anymore, because almost a year ago I called them out and banned them. Even though they were unbanned 10 months and have created new accounts since, they know better than to post there.

Has hotznplotzn gotten a new username?

Not that I know of. Every once in a while I check the communities they frequent to see if a new account has become active.

africa@baraza.africa
australia@aussie.zone
britishcolumbia@lemmy.ca
buyeuropean@feddit.uk
canada@lemmy.ca
china@sopuli.xyz
climate@slrpnk.net
cybersecurity@sh.itjust.works
dach@feddit.org
earthscience@mander.xyz
economy@lemmy.world
electriccars@lemmy.ca
electricvehicles@slrpnk.net
europe@feddit.org
europe@lemmy.dbzer0.com
evs@feddit.uk
globalnews@lemmy.zip
humanrights@lemmy.sdf.org
medicine@mander.xyz
podcasts@feddit.org
russia@sopuli.xyz
science@mander.xyz
technology@lemmy.world
technology@lemmy.zip
technology@slrpnk.net
unitedkingdom@feddit.uk
usa@midwest.social
world@lemmy.world
world@quokk.au
worldnews@lemmy.sdf.org

I noticed Sepia creating new accounts on other instances, though.

Those other Sepia@ accounts were created in 2023 and haven’t been used.

At this point it must be that the mods of these communities know what’s going on and choose to host them in spite of it—or because of it 🇺🇸🇮🇱🇪🇺

They just hate AI, for whatever varied reasons, and don’t care to talk about it. They don’t have to like it, and they don’t owe anyone an explanation, so whatareyagonnado. I wouldn’t bother engaging, and I’d steer clear of communities that especially hate it. AFAIK dbzer0 is the only instance that’s explicitly pro-AI images.

Land acknowledgement is another example of what philosopher Hans-Georg Moeller calls “guilt pride.”

• 📺 Guilt Pride: A German Vanity Project Conquering the World
• More academic freedom in Macau than Germany, philosopher says

China recently announced a mega gold deposit. Have they been hiding these in their back pocket and are just punking us now?

Yup, that’s Gramscian hegemonic “common sense.” Everyone takes it as given, so there’s no need to provide supporting evidence or elaborate at all. To you and me they’re unfounded claims, but to them…

Truisms are a different thing; what these sound like are unfounded claims. They sound like Western liberal—and even Western Marxist—Gramscian common sense, requiring no evidence. Why he’s doing this, I can’t be sure, but I know you can sell way more English-language books if they denounce past & present AES states.

The burden of proof is on the claimant, not on you. Demand a receipt.

With that said, bourgeois intellectuals generally live off of bourgeois largess. Intellectual class traitors like Engels and Mao are exceptions to the rule. There are scarce few Marxist-Leninist in the halls of bourgeois institutions.

Any definition lacking class analysis is garbage, and that’s most of them.

Gabriel Rockhill:

• Fascism: Now You See It, Now You Don’t!
• Liberalism and Fascism: Partners in Crime
• The U.S. Did Not Defeat Fascism in WWII, It Discreetly Internationalized It

TBF there are infinitely more anarchist LARPers than actual anarchist.

He’s a good entry point for normies, but he’s no ML. In terms of solutions, he’ll bring up co-ops, for instance. But I’ve never heard him significantly disparage any AES state, and I think that’s a huge plus. He’s often seen with Michael Hudson, who is a much better economist and doesn’t sugar-coat things as much, making him a good next step for normies on their journey, though he’s not explicitly ML, either. Radhika Desai is also great.

(I do have another quibble with Wolff.)

Watching Mearsheimer’s EU parliamentary address two weeks ago was cathartic. 100 minutes of tough love, with no punches pulled. https://mearsheimer.substack.com/p/my-talk-at-the-european-parliament

There’s an auto-generated PDF version: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Library:The_CIA's_Shining_Path:_Political_Warfare

Click on “•••” and then “Printable version.”

Sometimes for web pages I use SingleFile to archive it offline browser reading.

American Duganist Party

Someone tell me how this isn’t an LLM bot: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/9908349/7381810

There’s a scene in A Clockwork Orange of me watching sports. It involves eye drops.

You haven’t explained how he’s betrayed the revolution nor how the movement could have done better given the cards they were dealt. A big problem with Western leftists’ plans are their prefigurative politics. “Be the change you want to see in the world” doesn’t cut it while the world is significantly controlled by imperialist states. Until those capitalist states are dispensed with, socialist states don’t have the luxury of prefiguration, or they go the way of Allende’s Chile.

A (long) excerpt from Michael Parenti’s Blackshirts and Reds, Anticommunism & Wonderland:

But a real socialism, it is argued, would be controlled by the workers themselves through direct participation instead of being run by Leninists, Stalinists, Castroites, or other ill-willed, power-hungry, bureaucratic cabals of evil men who betray revolutions. Unfortunately, this “pure socialism” view is ahistorical and nonfalsifiable; it cannot be tested against the actualities of history. It compares an ideal against an imperfect reality, and the reality comes off a poor second. It imagines what socialism would be like in a world far better than this one, where no strong state structure or security force is required, where none of the value produced by workers needs to be expropriated to rebuild society and defend it from invasion and internal sabotage.

The pure socialists’ ideological anticipations remain untainted by existing practice. They do not explain how the manifold functions of a revolutionary society would be organized, how external attack and internal sabotage would be thwarted, how bureaucracy would be avoided, scarce resources allocated, policy differences settled, priorities set, and production and distribution conducted. Instead, they offer vague statements about how the workers themselves will directly own and control the means of production and will arrive at their own solutions through creative struggle. No surprise then that the pure socialists support every revolution except the ones that succeed.

The pure socialists had a vision of a new society that would create and be created by new people, a society so transformed in its fundaments as to leave little opportunity for wrongful acts, corruption, and criminal abuses of state power. There would be no bureaucracy or self-interested coteries, no ruthless conflicts or hurtful decisions. When the reality proves different and more difficult, some on the Left proceed to condemn the real thing and announce that they “feel betrayed” by this or that revolution.

The pure socialists see socialism as an ideal that was tarnished by communist venality, duplicity, and power cravings. The pure socialists oppose the Soviet model but offer little evidence to demonstrate that other paths could have been taken, that other models of socialism — not created from one’s imagination but developed through actual historical experience — could have taken hold and worked better. Was an open, pluralistic, democratic socialism actually possible at this historic juncture? The historical evidence would suggest it was not. As the political philosopher Carl Shames argued:

How do [the left critics] know that the fundamental problem was the “nature” of the ruling [revolutionary] parties rather than, say, the global concentration of capital that is destroying all independent economies and putting an end to national sovereignty everywhere? And to the extent that it was, where did this “nature” come from? Was this “nature” disembodied, disconnected from the fabric of the society itself, from the social relations impacting on it? … Thousands of examples could be found in which the centralization of power was a necessary choice in securing and protecting socialist relations. In my observation [of existing communist societies], the positive of “socialism” and the negative of “bureaucracy, authoritarianism and tyranny” interpenetrated in virtually every sphere of life.

The pure socialists regularly blame the Left itself for every defeat it suffers. Their second-guessing is endless. So we hear that revolutionary struggles fail because their leaders wait too long or act too soon, are too timid or too impulsive, too stubborn or too easily swayed. We hear that revolutionary leaders are compromising or adventuristic, bureaucratic or opportunistic, rigidly organized or insufficiently organized, undemocratic or failing to provide strong leadership. But always the leaders fail because they do not put their trust in the “direct actions” of the workers, who apparently would withstand and overcome every adversity if only given the kind of leadership available from the left critic’s own groupuscule. Unfortunately, the critics seem unable to apply their own leadership genius to producing a successful revolutionary movement in their own country.

Tony Febbo questioned this blame-the-leadership syndrome of the pure socialists:

It occurs to me that when people as smart, different, dedicated and heroic as Lenin, Mao, Fidel Castro, Daniel Ortega, Ho Chi Minh and Robert Mugabe — and the millions of heroic people who followed and fought with them — all end up more or less in the same place, then something bigger is at work than who made what decision at what meeting. Or even what size houses they went home to after the meeting. …

These leaders weren’t in a vacuum. They were in a whirlwind. And the suction, the force, the power that was twirling them around has spun and left this globe mangled for more than 900 years. And to blame this or that theory or this or that leader is a simple-minded substitute for the kind of analysis that Marxists [should make].

To be sure, the pure socialists are not entirely without specific agendas for building the revolution. After the Sandinistas overthrew the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua, an ultra-left group in that country called for direct worker ownership of the factories. The armed workers would take control of production without benefit of managers, state planners, bureaucrats, or a formal military. While undeniably appealing, this worker syndicalism denies the necessities of state power. Under such an arrangement, the Nicaraguan revolution would not have lasted two months against the U.S.-sponsored counterrevolution that savaged the country. It would have been unable to mobilize enough resources to field an army, take security measures, or build and coordinate economic programs and human services on a national scale.

For a people’s revolution to survive, it must seize state power and use it to (a) break the stranglehold exercised by the owning class over the society’s institutions and resources, and (b) withstand the reactionary counterattack that is sure to come. The internal and external dangers a revolution faces necessitate a centralized state power that is not particularly to anyone’s liking, not in Soviet Russia in 1917, nor in Sandinista Nicaragua in 1980.

Engels offers an apposite account of an uprising in Spain in 1872 in which anarchists seized power in municipalities across the country. At first, the situation looked promising. The king had abdicated and the bourgeois government could muster but a few thousand ill-trained troops. Yet this ragtag force prevailed because it faced a thoroughly parochialized rebellion. “Each town proclaimed itself as a sovereign canton and set up a revolutionary committee (junta);” Engels writes. “[E]ach town acted on its own, declaring that the important thing was not cooperation with other towns but separation from them, thus precluding any possibility of a combined attack [against bourgeois forces].” It was “the fragmentation and isolation of the revolutionary forces which enabled the government troops to smash one revolt after the other.”

Decentralized parochial autonomy is the graveyard of insurgency — which may be one reason why there has never been a successful anarcho-syndicalist revolution. Ideally, it would be a fine thing to have only local, self-directed, worker participation, with minimal bureaucracy, police, and military. This probably would be the development of socialism, were socialism ever allowed to develop unhindered by counterrevolutionary subversion and attack.

One might recall how, in 1918-20, fourteen capitalist nations, including the United States, invaded Soviet Russia in a bloody but unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the revolutionary Bolshevik government. The years of foreign invasion and civil war did much to intensify the Bolsheviks’ siege psychology with its commitment to lockstep party unity and a repressive security apparatus.

The Venezuelan people elected him, dummy. Would you have preferred a US puppet like Guaidó or González? The only people who want him overthrown are temporarily embarrassed compradors.