Cowbee

Then I'm confused at why you replied to my comment asking why you said it's okay to shit on Stalin on a Marxist-Leninist community. The implication is that MLs are anti-Stalin, but the general consensus hangs around the CPC's evaluation (given first by Mao) that Stalin was about 70% good, 30% bad.

That's awful, I'm sorry to hear that. Unfortunately, a lot of trade union history is marred by racism and exclusionary rhetoric, even if the more unified and anti-bigotry organizations have had far more success historically.

I didn't say the USSR didn't doctor photographs to remove purged members. In my reply to your upper level comment, I explained why the purges were necessary and elaborated on their context. Nothing I said in that comment is counter to reality, I even brought sources.

What helped me most, from floating around various liberal viewpoints to coming to Marxism-Leninism, was actually working in an industrial environment.

I think we should make the same argument against banks, leasing, and other highly financialized capital.

Some people need a gentle hand, others need a slap on the wrist. For those who have already licensed themselves away from changing their minds through logic, refutation, or general dialogue, an open mind comes from personal, deteriorating conditions and the desire to learn how to escape them. All the patience in the world isn't enough for some people until the right conditions are met.

The joint leadership of the peasantry and the proletariat as the ruling classes of the USSR. The peasantry are symbolized with the sickle, the proletariat, the hammer. The H&S is used as a symbol for socialism, communism, Marxism-Leninism, etc.

You're confused on 2 primary accounts:

1. That I am saying we can accomplish better, more equitable housing within capitalism. I'm a communist, I want socialism, and that's the first step towards communism. I am not pointing out exploitation and a solution to it as some actionable goal within capitalism, but to point to the fact that a better world is possible, and we get there through revolution.

2. There has never been a society where people could not work to get better housing. Not in the USSR, with the famous soviet housing, not anywhere. Public housing does not mean all housing is the same, just that fewer people go without. Further, your wages are being taken from you, in socialism that isn't a problem, so you won't have to put in a decade of renting to get something nicer.

The landlord was still exploiting you and taking a ton of the wages you keep, which are already being stolen from through capitalist exploitation. If you prefer renting, then it would be a much better system to have publicly owned housing that isn't run to make a profit, or even with the expectation that cheap or free housing is a social cost.

Then I think you should reread @[email protected]'s comments with that understanding. We all agree that management is a necessary part of the social production process, but that it is ownership that entitles people to stealing from the working class.

Oh, I was accidentally right then, haha. Does that make me double wrong? 😅

Essay? Article? Don't know what the word for it is, excerpt is wrong though now that I think about it.