Absolute slop coming out of that mouth

How is this even legal?

Can some one here tell me how this is even legal?

Saw this argument in the form of a drawing making fun of leftists on Instagram, I see this argument a lot and am tired of seeing it overall

What should I expect? How do I realistically navigate this class knowing that there will be stupid shit said inside of it? I don’t want to be argumentative or combative, but I really struggle when people say dumb shit

Thx guys, wish me luck

What is wring with Trump? Why does Trump and the far right what to rename Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario?

I don’t understand why Trump wants to rename Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario? By doing this why?

What is next the far right is going changed the map and rename more things?

Genuine question from a leftist-theory perspective: if the United States were fundamentally transformed or no longer existed as the dominant political and military power in its current form especially if a movement were able to democratically vote out the existing government and take full control how would that new society realistically prepare itself to confront a geopolitical bloc involving Russia, China, and North Korea?
If the goal is to dismantle American imperialism and create some kind of leftist utopia, what is the actual strategy for dealing with other states that possess nuclear weapons, enormous militaries, and major economic and geopolitical influence? At what point does rejecting U.S. hegemony collide with the practical need for national defense and collective security?

I worked front line support at a (Canadian) health insurance company for a few years while paying for University.

Once I graduated from my degree, I stayed at the company, moved into a different role and now I’ve been offered a role as manager in AI governance.
As part of the job, I’d be ‘building guardrails’, pushing for public safety, algorithmic fairness, data privacy, and worker protections, preventing corporations from running completely unchecked.

Do you view leftists taking these roles as harm reduction and necessary acceleration/oversight, or is it ultimately an exercise in hypocrisy and co-optation? Would love to hear your perspective, as I’m a little torn. I want to get a temperature check from this community on the ethics of a left-leaning individual working in AI Governance.

For context: Canadian private health insurers operate primarily as supplemental/extended health coverage (covering expenses not covered by the public/free healthcare system - ie drug, dental, vision, paramedical services like massage/physio etc.). Knowing how the company operates, I generally don’t perceive it as an evil company per se. For-profit, sure, but they’re not looking for ways to deny claims. Matter of fact, they’re constantly adding medications and provider types to their eligibility lists. I’ve seen first-hand the very positive impact the company has had on people. Anyway, I digress.

Thanks!!

The more I talk to military folks on here the more I have felt like I despise them. People who were in Iraq and Afghanistan, who were just hired muscle, gloat about it as if they did something big, as if they were some big savior. But then in the next breath they admit that they did all that, including taking part in invasion, civilian murders for a paycheck. I know I am generalizing here but it's something I have felt for a while.

Would you like to take immediate actions to meet the people's immediate needs? Improve the material conditions of the working class in your community? Prepare your neighbors to engage in a sustained, successful, revolutionary, national general strike?

You can do it!

All Power to the People!

❤️✊️❤️

My take is that broader conceptions of compassionate politics tend to make for the most viable reform outcomes (and that gatekeepers are generally antisocial parasites). I suspect I will be banned for this post, but, well, prove me correct if so

In documenting the conditions of the working class in England, Engels describes a strata of the working class elevated above the rest of the working class, within both the US:

There were two circumstances which for a long time prevented the unavoidable consequences of the Capitalist system from showing themselves in the full glare of day in America. These were the easy access to the ownership of cheap land, and the influx of immigration. They allowed, for many years, the great mass of the native American population to “retire” in early manhood from wage-labor and to become farmers, dealers, or employers of labor, while the hard work for wages, the position of a proletarian for life, mostly fell to the lot of immigrants. But America has outgrown this early stage. The boundless backwoods have disappeared, and the still more boundless prairies are fast and faster passing from the hands of the Nation and the States into those of private owners. The great safety-valve against the formation of a permanent proletarian class has practically ceased to act.

The tendency of the Capitalist system towards the ultimate splitting-up of society into two classes, a few millionaires on the one hand, and a great mass of mere wage-workers on the other, this tendency, though constantly crossed and counteracted by other social agencies, works nowhere with greater force than in America; and the result has been the production of a class of native American wage-workers [note: not first nations, but rather in reference to the first settlers], who form, indeed, the aristocracy of the wage-working class as compared with the immigrants, but who become conscious more and more every day of their solidarity with the latter and who feel all the more acutely their present condemnation to life-long wage-toil, because they still remember the bygone days, when it was comparatively easy to rise to a higher social level.

And in England:

A permanent improvement can be recognised for two ‘protected’ sections only of the working-class. Firstly, the factory hands. The fixing by Act of Parliament of their working-day within relatively rational limits has restored their physical constitution and endowed them with a moral superiority, enhanced by their local concentration. They are undoubtedly better off than before 1848. The best proof is that, out of ten strikes they make, nine are provoked by the manufacturers in their own interests, as the only means of securing a reduced production. You can never get the masters to agree to work ‘short time,’ let manufactured goods be ever so unsaleable; but get the work-people to strike, and the masters shut their factories to a man.

“Secondly, the great Trades’ Unions. They are the organisations of those trades in which the labour of grown-up men predominates, or is alone applicable. Here the competition neither of women and children nor of machinery has so far weakened their organised strength. The engineers, the carpenters and joiners, the bricklayers, are each of them a power, to that extent that, as in the case of the bricklayers and bricklayers’ labourers, they can even successfully resist the introduction of machinery. That their condition has remarkably improved since 1848 there can be no doubt, and the best proof of this is in the fact that for more than fifteen years not only have their employers been with them, but they with their employers, upon exceedingly good terms. They form an aristocracy among the working-class; they have succeeded in enforcing for themselves a relatively comfortable position, and they accept it as final. They are the model working-men of Messrs. Leone Levi & Giffen, and they are very nice people indeed nowadays to deal with, for any sensible capitalist in particular and for the whole capitalist class in general

What I consider far more important than this momentary fashion among bourgeois circles of affecting a mild dilution of Socialism, and even more than the actual progress Socialism has made in England generally, that is the revival of the East End of London. That immense haunt of misery is no longer the stagnant pool it was six years ago. It has shaken off its torpid despair, has returned to life, and has become the home of what is called the “New Unionism,” that is to say, of the organisation of the great mass of “unskilled” workers. This organisation may to a great extent adopt the form of the old Unions of “skilled” workers but it is essentially different in character. The old Unions preserve the traditions of the time when they were founded, and look upon the wages system as a once-for-all established, final fact, which they at best can modify in the interest of their members. The new Unions were founded at a time when the faith in the eternity of the wages system was severely shaken; their founders and promoters were Socialists either consciously or by feeling; the masses, whose adhesion gave them strength, were rough, neglected, looked down upon by the working-class aristocracy; but they had this immense advantage, that their minds were virgin soil, entirely free from the inherited “respectable” bourgeois prejudices which hampered the brains of the better situated “old” Unionists. And thus we see now these new Unions taking the lead of the working-class movement generally, and more and more taking in tow the rich and proud “old” Unions.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/condition-working-class-england.pdf

Lenin then further expands on the role of the labour aristocracy by noting the relationships formed between the bourgeois class and the labour aristocracy:

Obviously, out of such enormous superprofits (since they are obtained over and above the profits which capitalists squeeze out of the workers of their “own” country) it is possible to bribe the labour leaders and the upper stratum of the labour aristocracy. And that is just what the capitalists of the “advanced” countries are doing: they are bribing them in a thousand different ways, direct and indirect, overt and covert. This stratum of workers-turned-bourgeois, or the labour aristocracy, who are quite philistine in their mode of life, in the size of their earnings and in their entire outlook, is the principal prop of the Second International, and in our days, the principal social (not military) prop of the bourgeoisie.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/imperialism.pdf

Lenin also doesn't mention this, but the labour aristocracy will also be persecuted if they don't comply. The nature of being a labour aristocrat means that they don't 'have nothing to lose but their chains'.

From this, we can establish two facts about the labour aristocracy:

1. A labour aristocracy is formed when workers gain power through organizing in the form of unions or guilds, through being an established strata of the proletariat, or though market forces.

2. The bourgois will essentially bribe the labour aristocracy to sway their organizations towards perpetuating capitalism, typically through some sort of reformism (social democracy).

A more modern example is the formation of a labour aristocracy within the tech sector. But this wasn't formed through organizing or through being an established strata. Rather, it was formed through market forces where excess demand had promoted people within this profession to have excess bargaining power without unionizing. Recently we have seen these tech-bros have been brought into the fold of reaction, as this libertarian had documented:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLPrNSFLb2U

A less modern example is Mao's class analysis of China, detailing the stratification of classes. Though understanding this stratification, he was able to bring in more allies to support the revolution. But he didn't achieve victory until Japanese occupation and KMT incompetence had led the middle and upper bourgeoisie to support communism.

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_1.htm

Going back to modernity, we see the various forms of the labour aristocracy documented in Sakai's Settlers. Though his conclusion of instilling a national character to socialist movements to segregate labour aristocrats is a bit problematic, his analysis and overview of how a labour aristocracy would act is solid.

https://readsettlers.org/settlers.pdf

We can then apply the concept of a labour aristocracy to celebrities like Taylor Swift. She is unique in that she was able to own the music she produces. And subsequently, we can see that she was brought into the fold.

https://divergelegal.com/blog/the-taylor-swift-story

How does socialism, then address the labour aristocracy?

Though providing a common access to means of production through the abolition of private property. In layman's terms, the abolition of private property would equalize opportunity, regardless of ability and circumstance.

Got banned for reminding people the Wagner group exists and they're pro Russia nazis

Even ignoring the USSR stuff, like, even mentioning what Putin has done to these two groups gets an insta-ban. And of course there’s never an explanation of why.

I think protecting and defending indigenous people is vital to socialism. I think decolonizing is going to be an important step in establishing socialism.

Why does Reddit have to suck so much sometimes? lol. One second I’m getting called a tankie and the next I’m being banned for not being sufficiently pro Russian enough. Harrumph.

Many recognize that anti-capitalism is a core aspect of Leftism, but is that all you understand? Consider opposing colonialism and imperialism, or supporting internationalism and collectivism. Do you see the bigger picture of interconnected struggle—realizing that your freedom is linked to our collective freedom?

The working class and most vulnerable of the world but even in the richest and most developed nations have been facing a horrific cost of living crisis/quality of life crisis for some time now.

Even on foundational elements like housing and food...

Alongside this a sphere of reactionary/regressive lowest common denominator style populism kept being fostered and fostered by some of the worlds most Ultra Rich Powerful Predatory Bad Actors of varying disgusting types...

Now the world faces a POTUS who is a stereotypical snake oil salesman.

Now the world faces a White House administration that is full on con-artist grifters.

Many of us know that we are currently in an "Everything Bubble". The divide of Wall Street and Main Street is at extreme horrendous levels.

No one knows when this is all going to come crashing down but the reality all of us know is that Trump & His Cronies are planting countless seeds in countless fronts that are going to make the Affordability Of Life Crisis much much much much worse down the road.

As a progressive/leftist voting is really many times just about choosing your opposition.

Having the worst of the worst of Fascists, Oligarchs, Multinational Business Lobbies, Powerful & Predatory Industries/Tycoons, and the general Corporatocracy in power all at once is a Death Cult for the working class and most vulnerable.

We all need to develop networking and solidarity movements not just domestically but internationally. With these types in power things are going to continue to get much darker, dystopian, and depressing. Especially closer and closer to election periods.

Like the title says. Id like books about their impact, especially them funding various populist movements and their destructive impact on democracy. Essentially books that dive into how evil they are. Any out there?