which country is it?

I’m more of an abolish the police type. The police, of course, being this very specific institution with which we live that serves as the armed guards of capitalism.

“Keep the peace” as seen in this meme implies several things, one of them being that keeping the peace is keeping order, and order is what the oppressing class decides it to be. Order, in capitalism, is when you evict tenants peacefully – when they accept the decision and don’t fight back. Order is when unpaid workers go through expensive and lengthy legal battles to claim their wages while bills keep piling up, because seizing the factory is unorderly. Order means that if the police beats you up, you are not allowed to fight back – this is the only profession in the world that is allowed to do that.

In the USSR, police was not allowed to search any person or property in public without witnesses. They would ask people around if they could watch the search. If there was no one, then they wouldn’t pull a search. Already we can see that with different class relations we have different social relations, which lead to a different institution of the “police” – which is therefore not the police, it’s something different that is not exactly what we think of, in capitalism, when we say police. In fact, they weren’t even called police. They were called the militia which does imply a military nature (which also implies different, stricter laws applying to them!) but it also implies they are sourced from civilian volunteers.

There’s the difference between abolish and defund the police. One is revolutionary, the other is reformist.

Depends why they’re ex-cops tbh

That police page looks fascist from the name and pic lol.

If they tried this “WE ARE the only thing standing between order and anarchy” in Europe they’d be flamed so bad there would be consequences (if only minor, like someone being fired at most. I don’t want to pretend we have our police in check). It’s seriously mind-boggling how blatant cops are with their words in the US when you read them from an outsider’s perspective.

It could also be useful on prolewiki, maybe in the essays section. My main gripe with mediawiki software is it’s actually really hard to find information unless you know exactly what you’re looking for. But definitely we could host it externally (not necessarily on prolewiki if you don’t want to or it’s impractical), since lemmy doesn’t yet have features for permanent, unmoving content

There are no custom emojis on lemmy yet, so please accept this smug seal instead

Communist parties meet the problems of the proletariat right where they are, and show them the alternative there. This has led to success in growing popularity towards communism where it has been tried.

We meet people where there is injustice and agitate them for action. We don’t hijack the movement or take charge of it as if we know better, we go in there and offer solutions. If we offer the right solutions, the affected people will follow them. And because we know what we’re talking about, this is how we show people the effectiveness of our praxis and get them results against their grievances. This is something that’s only achievable through a party and collective effort.

But practice is only one part of the contradiction, theory is the other. Without theory, there cannot be effective practice. Without practice, what good is theory? For theory, you should reasonably read everything you can get your hands on from Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao. There are other cool theorists like Gramsci, Luxemburg, Michael Parenti, Vijay Prashad… and many others I’m forgetting right now. I’m just name dropping them in case you weren’t aware of them and want to look them up.

I also recommend prolewiki https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/ProleWiki:Main_page since, well, I’m on the team lol. But it’s a wiki that was made exactly for situations like yours.

I’m not American but ok.

edit: also, let’s be honest, lmao at your superiority complex.

Hating Krushev
MLs 🤝 Maoists

You fell into the trap of the establishment; the idea that the only people who can do anything in politics are politicians – with all the consequences that apply (careerism, opportunism…).

There are many organisations that do work on the ground and while their scope is more limited than governmental programs due to lack of funds and power, they are still doing something to change it. Our own activism as communists, no matter the country, is doing something to change the political system. That’s not to speak of other programs in the meantime, such as offering free health check ups to people who can’t afford health insurance, or soup kitchens for the homeless.

AOC passes for a slimy snake because she promises one thing, supposedly fights for it for some time, and then when it inevitably fails, she says “oh sorry better luck next time though!”. And we rarely hear about it again. While Trump was President, she decried the concentration camps at the border. Now that Biden, her party, is at the helm… they’re suddenly overflow facilities. She did criticize them again, but on Twitter. What is she doing on the ground?

The overarching problem we have to point out here is that it’s impossible to change the system from the inside. If that was the case, that State would be terrible at self-preservation, wouldn’t it? I’m unaware of any state in history that let itself be reformed fundamentally.

Yet AOC sells that illusion, that she’s the only chance the common people have at being heard, when in reality she has very little pull… and she remains a socdem. Whenever there is talk of abolishing capitalism, she’ll be first on the frontlines to stop anything from being done in that regard.

Her “tax the rich” dress sounds fake. The slogan is eat the rich, yet for an elected official, that is apparently too edgy to wear to an exclusive, bourgeois event. So it becomes whitewashed under capitalism, and just merely becomes “tax the rich”. The original message is: abolish the bourgeoisie, which supposes a revolution, which supposes communism. The watered down message is literally: more taxes, which supposes legislation, which supposes the fight is on the congress floor, where AOC has had very little success in her years there. But I’m sure the rich people at the Met gala were shaking in their boots when they saw her dress lol.

But it did achieve one thing. Just like the concentration camp remarks, it created controversy and put her in the media spotlight. The takeaway should be that her adventurist experiment did not yield any results (there is still no healthcare, there is still no real covid stimulus program, there is still unaffordable housing) and should be abandoned. But she entertains the hope that a better world is possible. In the meantime, while she keeps achieving nothing, she expects workers to keep toiling at their poverty wage, fuelled by the far possibility that maybe one day they’ll get something from AOC. What a great instrument of the democratic party she is, to be able to quell any and all movement to the revolutionary left with just one media controversy.

She looks 14, it’s really weird how these apps make people younger and younger.

I’ve heard that as well, and maybe if you go to China people will call themselves Maoist (though there have been “crackdowns” on maoist groups in China as they were subversive). In the English sphere, if someone calls themselves Maoist, chances are they’re a Gonzaloid.

edit: though I’m translating a book (with generous comrades helping out) exposing the shining path from a peruvian perspective and the author consistently calls their ideology Marxism-Leninism-Maoism and, I don’t think, makes references to “Maoism” itself.

Lol, probably downvoted because they said he did nothing wrong and even they can’t deny the lunacamarca massacre

Watch as the MSM tries to spin this in a bad light after years of “being fat is a sign of wealth and trustworthiness in north korea” lmao

he looks like an entirely different person, how did he lose the weight so fast?

edit: oh it’s edited, this was the actual picture

Later on they will wonder why these countries are making their own social media platforms.

Responses calling them out get instantly banned x)

I’ve dmed you!

Maoism was invented by Gonzalo himself, and therefore is inseparable from his person.

Mao Zedong Thought is certainly something else entirely, integrating the contributions of Mao to Marxism-Leninism and understanding their specific character that made them applicable to China at the time, NOT universally. Also bear in mind the CIA distributed copies of the little red book in south american universities to exacerbate the sino-soviet split.

Gonzalo was more akin to Pol Pot than Lenin, despite what white Gonzaloites on Twitter may say (though many of them also like Pol Pot, so). In Peru, he enjoyed so much popular support that people voted for Castillo in this year’s elections! But I guess Maoists will defend it as saying that the SP did not participate in elections… and that they actively prevented people from voting in elections, sometimes with violence.

There is not a shred of dialectical analysis to be found in Gonzalo’s weird little cult, that was so centred around him it died the moment he was arrested. r/communism mods are in the wrong here and I’ve seen some of this stuff too. They’ll ban you if you say anything bad against him. I’m not sure if it’s because of left unity concerns or if they actually like Gonzalo, but this is what being online too much does to you I guess.

I am actually in the process of translating a book exposing SP and I can add you in to the project if you want, the book’s already in English and we’re formatting it now.

Just based off the “excesses” the SL admits to having committed, I wonder how they ever expected to gain mass support. They turned towards the peasant class (marginalised communities in Peru, mostly natives) by instilling fear instead of recruiting them.

Abu Obeyda, spokesman for the al-Qassam Brigades, held a press conference earlier today. In it, he declared that future prisoner exchange deals between Hamas and the occupier would include the 4 recaptured fighters.

He also comforted the people of Jenin, by saying they are not left alone. While vague, this clearly means Hamas is willing and ready to help militarily – most likely through rocket barrages, as I don’t think they have a presence in the West Bank.

The press conference was followed by a rocket launched from Gaza towards the zionist entity.