The YPG are the largest armed faction of the SDF, they’ve been working with the US for a while to steal Syria’s oil but this is a new level of yikes

More anarchist concentration camps.

Has the fastfetch dev ever mentioned why they use the infinity symbol? Don’t want to find out later on that it’s a dogwhistle.

The positions are elected by a vote at the supreme soviet assembly, those positions are elected by the soviets (councils) below the assembly, and those are elected by the soviets below that, and so on down to the lowest level where the local constituents vote.

In the party it’s generally considered a “duty” though, especially among those that participated in the revolution like Stalin who treated loyalty to the organisation, self-sacrifice and subordination to it as a significant and necessary part of what made the revolution succeed. Thousands of people literally sacrificing their whole lives for the goal.

As such, Stalin wouldn’t break a decision of the assembly just as he wouldn’t want anyone else to. If they said they still needed him in his post he did his duty and stayed despite not wanting to.

He largely held equal powers to everyone else on the Council of Ministers, the position of Chairman didn’t have special powers. The General Secretary role of the party was invented by Lenin with the intention of it being used to break opposition in the party (perform purges). Once Stalin had successfully performed his purges and prevented split in the country/civil-war he saw the position as having completed its purpose and wanted rid of it, he didn’t like the cult of personality around himself and wanted people to view the government in a collective capacity rather than an individual leader kind of way. That’s obviously not what ended up being the perception though. Lots of hero worship got in the way.

Voices: Correct! Vote!

Rykov: There is a proposal to vote.

Voices: Yes, yes!

Rykov: We are voting. Who is for comrade Stalin’s proposal to abolish the post of General Secretary? Who is opposed? Who abstains? Noone.

October 16, 1952 (http://soviethistory.msu.edu/1954-2/succession-to-stalin/succession-to-stalin-texts/stalin-on-enlarging-the-central-committee/):

This article was taken from the Russian newspaper Glasnost devoted to the 120th Anniversary of Stalin’s birth, was the last speech at the CC [Central Committee] CPSU [Communist Party of the Soviet Union] before Stalin died. The text was being published for the very first time in the Soviet Union…

…MOLOTOV – [Glasnost -] coming to the speaker’s tribune completely admits his mistakes before the CC, but he stated that he is and will always be a faithful disciple of Stalin.

STALIN – (interrupting Molotov) This is nonsense. I have no students at all. We are all students of the great Lenin.

[Glasnost -] Stalin suggested that they continue the agenda point by point and elect comrades into different committees of state.

With no Politburo, there is now elected a Presidium of the CC CPSU in the enlarged CC and in the Secretariat of the CC CPSU altogether 36 members.

In the new list of those elected are all members of the old Politbiuro – except that of comrade A. A. Andreev who, as everyone knows now is unfortunately completely deaf and thus can not function.

VOICE FROM THE FLOOR – We need to elect comrade Stalin as the General Secretary of the CC CPSU and Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR.

STALIN – No! I am asking that you relieve me of the two posts!

MALENKOV – coming to the tribune: Comrades! We should all unanimously ask comrade Stalin, our leader and our teacher, to be again the General Secretary of the CC CPSU.

Same attempt (A. I. Mgeladze, Stalin. Kakim ia ego znal. Strannitsy nedavnogo poshlogo. p. 118):

At the first Plenum of the CC [Central Committee] of the CPSU [Communist Party of the Soviet Union] called after the XIX Congress of the Party (I had been elected member of the CC and took part in the work of this Plenum), Stalin really did present the question of General Secretary of the CC CPSU, or of the post of Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR. He referred to his age, overwork, said that other cadres had cropped up and there were people to replace him, for example, N.I. Bulganin could be appointed as Chairman of the Council of Ministers, but the CC members did not grant his request, all insisted that comrade Stalin remain at both positions.

His sentence isn’t wrong. Stalin did try to resign multiple times (four actually). When his fourth resignation was rejected by the party he then attempted to abolish his own position entirely.

Here are some of the documented ones:

May 1924, 23-31 (Marxist Internet Archive, “The Trotskyist Opposition Before and Now”) ( https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1927/10/23.htm#1)

It is said that in that “will” [Lenin’s Testament - ZB] Comrade Lenin suggested to the congress that in view of Stalin’s “rudeness” it should consider the question of putting another comrade in Stalin’s place as General Secretary. That is quite true. Yes, comrades, I am rude to those who grossly and perfidiously wreck and split the Party. I have never concealed this and do not conceal it now. Perhaps some mildness is needed in the treatment of splitters, but I am a bad hand at that. At the very first meeting of the plenum of the Central Committee after the Thirteenth Congress [Undefined date of this attempt, however, within the Thirteenth Congress and thus anywhere within the 23rd to the 31st - ZB] I asked the plenum of the Central Committee to release me from my duties as General Secretary. The congress itself discussed this question. It was discussed by each delegation separately, and all the delegations unanimously, including Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev, obliged Stalin to remain at his post.

What could I do? Desert my post? That is not in my nature; I have never deserted any post, and I have no right to do so, for that would be desertion. As I have already said before, I am not a free agent, and when the Party imposes an obligation upon me, I must obey.

A year later I again put in a request to the plenum to release me, but I was again obliged to remain at my post.

What else could I do?

August 19, 1924 (Grover Furr, Khrushchev Lied, p. 244):

To the Plenum of the CC [Central Committee] RCP [Russian Communist Party]

One and a half years of working in the Politburo with comrades Zinoviev and Kamanev after the retirement and then the death of Lenin have made perfectly clear to me the impossibility of honest, sincere political work with these comrades within the framework of one small collective. In view of which, I request to be considered as having resigned from the Pol[itcal] Buro of the CC.

I request a medical leave for about two months.

At the expiration of this period I request to be sent to Turukhansk region or to the Iakutsk oblast’, or to somewhere abroad in any kind of work that will attract little attention.

I would ask the Plenum to decide all these questions in my absence and without explanations from my side, because I consider it harmful for our work to give explanations aside from those remarks that I have already made in the first paragraph of this letter.

I would ask comrade Kuibyshev to distribute copies of this letter to the members of the CC.

With com[munist] greet[ings], J. Stalin.

December 27, 1926 (Grover Furr, Khrushchev Lied, p. 244):

To the Plenum of the CC [Central Committee] (to comrade Rykov). I ask that I be relieved of the post of GenSec [General Secretary] of the CC. I declare that I can work no longer in this position, I do not have the strength to work any more in this position. J. Stalin.

December 19, 1927 (Grover Furr, Khrushchev Lied, p. 245) (https://livrozilla.com/doc/796199/pelo-socialismo):

Stalin: Comrades! For three years [Suggesting there could be more resignation attempts unbeknownst to me - ZB] I have been asking the CC [Central Committee] to free me from the obligations of General Secretary of the CC. Each time the Plenum has refused me. I admit that until recently conditions did not exist such that the Party had need of me in this post as a person more or less severe, one who acted as a certain kind of antidote to the dangers posed by the Opposition. I admit that this necessity existed, despite comrade Lenin’s well-known letter [Lenin’s Testament - ZB], to keep me at the post of General Secretary. But these conditions exist no longer. They have vanished, since the Opposition is now smashed. It seems that the Opposition has never before suffered such a defeat since they have not only been smashed, but have been expelled from the Party. It follows that now no bases exist any longer that could be considered correct when the Plenum refused to honor my request and free me of the duties of General Secretary. Meanwhile you have comrade Lenin’s directive which we are obliged to consider and which, in my opinion, it is necessary to put into effect. I admit that the Party was compelled to disregard this directive until recently, compelled by well-known conditions of inter-Party development. But I repeat that these conditions have now vanished and it is time, in my view, to take comrade Lenin’s directive to the leadership. Therefore I request the Plenum to free me of the post of General Secretary of the Central Committee. I assure you, comrades, that the Party can only gain from doing this.

Dogadov: Vote without discussion.

Vorshilov: I propose we reject the announcement we just heard.

Rykov: We will vote without discsussion…We vote now on Stalin’s proposal that he be freed from the General Secretaryship. Who is for this proposal? Who is against? Who abstains? One.

The proposal of comrade Stalin is rejected with one abstention.

Stalin: Then I introduce another proposal. Perhaps the CC [Central Committee] will consider it expedient to abolish the position of General Secretary. In our Party’s history there have been times when no such post existed.

Voroshilov: We had Lenin with us then.

Stalin: We had no post of General Secretary before the 10th Congress.

Voice: Until the 11th Congress.

Stalin: Yes, it seems that until the 11th Congress we did not have this position. That was before Lenin stopped working. If Lenin concluded that it was necessary to put forward the question of founding the position of General Secretary, then I assume he was prompted by the special circumstances that appeared with us before the 10th Congress, when a more or less strong, well-organized Opposition within the Party was founded. But now we proceed to the abolition of this position. Many people associate a conception of some kind of special rights of the General Secretary with this position. I must say from my experience, and comrades will confirm this, that there ought not to be any special rights distinguishing the General Secretary from the rights of other members of the Secretariat.

Voice: And the duties?

Stalin: And there are no more duties than other members of the Secretariat have. I see it this way; There’s the Politburo, the highest organ of the CC; there’s the Secretariat, the executive organ consisting of five persons, and all these five members of the Secretariat are equal. That’s the way the work has been carried out in practice, and the General Secretary has not had any special rights or obligations. The result, therefore, is that the position of General Secretary, in the sense of special rights, has never existed with us in practice, there has been only a collegium called the Secretariat of the CC. I do not know why we need to keep this dead position any longer. I don’t even mention the fact that this position, called General Secretary, has occasioned in some places a series of distortions. At the same time that at the top no special rights or duties are associated with the position of General Secretary, in some places there have been some distortions, and in all the oblasts there is now a struggle over that position among comrades who call themselves secretaries, for example, in the national CCs. Quite a few General Secretaries have developed, and with them in the localities special rights have been associated. Why is this necessary?

Shmidt: We can dismiss them in the localities.

Stalin: I think the Party would benefit if we did away with the post of General Secretary, and that would give me the chance to be free from this post. This would be all the easier to do since according to the Party’s constitution there is no post of General Secretary.

Rykov: I propose not to give comrade Stalin the possibility of being free from this position. As concerns the General Secretaries in the oblast and local organs, that should be changed, but without changing the situation in the CC. The position of General Secretary was created by the proposal of Vladimir Il’ich. In all the time since, during Vladimir Il’ich’s life and since, this position has justified itself politically and completely in both the organizational and political sense. In the creation of this organ and in naming comrade Stalin to the post of General Secretary the whole Opposition also took part, all those whom we have now expelled from the Party. That is how completely without doubt it was for everyone in the Party (whether the position of General Secretary was needed and who should be the General Secretary). By which has been exhausted, in my opinion, both the question of the “testament” (for that point has been decided) and exhausted by the Opposition at the same time just as it has been decided by us as well. The whole Party knows this. What has changed now after the 15th Congress and why is it necessary to set aside the position of General Secretary.

Stalin: The Opposition has been smashed.

(A long discussion followed, after which:)

[continued in reply]

The USSR was a dictatorship

No it wasn’t. This is propaganda. Even the CIA admits that it is propaganda in this document:

https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80-00810A006000360009-0.pdf

Democracy under socialism is simply structured differently. You need to study it properly.

Several countries that you support today still use a system very much like this. Cuba and Vietnam for example. A solid video on Cuban democracy is here: https://youtu.be/2aMsi-A56ds

All the socialist countries built on this system.

Have you actually read it yet?

Honestly a lot more deserved it over footbinding being absolutely fucking vile but then you’d be at like half the population.

I can’t conceive the land not belonging to someone, no.

This is just basically like saying “I do not know anything about history”.

The land used to be called “the commons”. It was owned by nobody. It was everyone’s land.

It was taken over by a system called Enclosure, in which the common land was stolen from the people and “Enclosed” by a small few people who took over.

I have no idea why he has such a following. Is it because he tore the whole system down? Is it because he wrote some essays? China didn’t start developing until years after Mao left office.

The average lifespan in China was 33 when Mao launched the revolution. It rose DURING the revolution, during civil war conditions simulteously alongside a literal fascist exterminationist invasion by the Japanese. The life expectancy during this period rose despite war because the communists were improving the conditions of the people immediately.

The life expectancy upon Mao’s death was 64. It rose further after his death.

Life expectancy does not rise when people’s lives are getting worse. He certainly made some mistakes, but you are making an utterly fatal mistake here by looking at “x number of people died” in isolation instead of looking at it in comparison to what existed before.

And if none of that is enough for you I leave you with this:

It has been estimated that, by the 19th century, 40–50% of all Chinese women may have had bound feet, rising to almost 100% in upper-class Han Chinese women.

The ending of footbinding alone justifies Mao as a positive thing all by itself. Without ever having to discuss literally anything else. It was a horrific practice. There’s plenty more to use as justification, but footbinding by itself is singlehandedly enough to justify it all.

Yeah you get what I mean about her being THE child killer here lol.

Even the average person would’ve fucking killed her given the chance. This is Breivik. He’s a monster and someone absolutely would try and have him given the chance.

Being a child killer among other people that have committed murders but still have some principles is usually not good. Not to mention being like THE child killer in Norway not just any child killer.

I’m British, THE child killer here would’ve been Myra Hindley, would I have killed her in prison? Yes. Yes I would. I’m pretty sure there’s some fairly rough guys in there that would not take kindly to a person that slaughtered 69 kids one by one by one at a fucking summer camp.

So many good future socialists died that day. I completely guarantee someone kills the fucker if he is mixed in with everyone.

Not really sure why you think Norwegians are ontologically predisposed to not want to kill child mass murderers tbh.

Chatgpt is just Cortana with better marketing. AI isn’t smart, it’s just algorithms producing a facsimile of language via pattern heatmaps. What was Cortana if not just an earlier version of the same thing?

““AI”” is all a techbro marketing bubble. Will burst and move on eventually.

Like holy shit we had the autofill feature in Photoshop ages and ages ago and that’s just doing what the “intelligent” image generators do. We didn’t call it AI back then. All marketing for what amounts to just some interesting algorithms.

Rebranded Cortana?

Destined to fail.

Stop with the “one of us europeans” bollocks.

I’m from europe and this post is 100% accurate.

There is literally no “ad hominem” in that entire fucking comment, telling you that you don’t know about something (ignorance) is not ad hominem, dickhead. If you’re going to do reddit-tier debate-pervert shit to deliberately keep yourself in ignorance of factual information and stop yourself from ever learning anything then at least get your fucking debate-pervert shit correct.

This comment is ad hominem. Loser.

It’s not just an “ML position”, in fact it’s not an ML position at all and there is no ML party with that position. Your attempts to frame it as one are sus.

People are going to continue starting this shit. It’s up to hexbear to not make it end up…well, like this.

You. You’re the “people”. You are saying “I’m going to do this more”.

Really don’t be surprised when this completely derails into hostility and destroys any kind of positive relationship you attempted to build. Anyway I’m disengaging now. Please don’t call me back in here.

I think everyone looks fucking ridiculous. You, me, everyone. There is never and there has never been a single sectarian argument where everyone involved did not look like a clown.

Which is precisely why people should not even start that shit.

The right does split like the left. Hell, sometimes they’re straight up shooting each other.

Extremely rarely, although that is what is occurring in Spain right now.

Look, everyone has their own experiences. I know plenty of anarchists who won’t even go near MLs because of how extremely traitorous they are right now. You don’t come where I come from. You don’t know my experiences. Some anarchists mistrusts MLs with very good reasons and that’s fine. And it’s also fine to shitpost about it in an anarchist forum without having half of hexbear come in like a rampage of sealions.

The people for left-unity are going to feel attacked by anti-left-unity posting. This is just a fact.

When people feel attacked the result of that shouldn’t really be that surprising, should it? Especially when the spread of that rhetoric would actively harm hexbear. People are going to be protective of something they see as integral to the only space on the internet that they feel safe.

I think the problem here is that this “shitposting” comes off as… Completely anti collaboration?

That’s why it’s a problem. Maybe you’re in favour of collaboration. But do younger anarchists realise that? Does the general bulk of the numbers realise that? Or is this kind of posting actually working entirely against the left overall because it splits us? Because a significant portion of people genuinely take it to heart and believe it. How many spaces actively purge marxists now because of “aaaaaa tankies”? That’s occurring because of this kind of propaganda. Is it helping anyone? Fuck no it’s not. Look at every single lemmy community where we’ve been purged, are they better? They’re far right shit holes even if there’s a handful of people trying to change that, they’re utterly dominated by the worst people.

If the right split like the left does we’d be in power in half of europe.

No. There fundamentally is not.

This space is not “pretend” while the offline world is “real”. The people here are real people (I hope lmao) and the emotions people have here are real.

One day we will all be thrown into our own very real resistance. Are you willing to die for it? I am. I’ve said many times that I will die in bed an old lady in a currently non-existent socialist state or I will die in the fighting to bring it about.

We post here and have some fun and argue and do all sorts of shit in our off time. But in our on time? A lot of us are genuinely active in political orgs. Here in the UK it might be resisting landlord evictions through Acorn, performing party work or shutting down weapons factories through Palestine Action. Do you think sectarianism would benefit orgs like Palestine Action shutting down zionist weapons factories? Whose principle need is BODIES willing to get on rooftops and smash up these buildings and get arrested? Does reducing the pool of people that would join that org benefit them in any way by being sectarians? Does it matter whether someone on the roof of an israeli weapons factory waves a black flag or a red flag? Of course it doesn’t. And the people who try to flare up sectarian bullshit anywhere are rightfully shouted down or expelled because all they are functionally doing by punching left is weakening those orgs and their ability to do praxis.

That doesn’t change online. The number of people who actually transfer from the online space to offline organising is directly tied to the sectarian bullshit that occurs. There are dumbass marxists that refuse to take part at certain orgs because of some anarchist sectarian bullshit and there are dumbass anarchists that refuse to take part in some socialist led things because of sectarian bullshit.

If I saw anyone at the march in London this weekend say a single fucking word about sectarian shit I would have punched them in the face.

This shit hurts the left. There is no case for it benefiting the left in any way.

One day we will all be in an existential armed struggle ourselves. Really consider the priorities. There is no benefit to any of this shit, and in fact it risks harming support for Palestine. I assume you’re not anti-Palestine, even though you won’t state it. If you can support Palestinian resistance despite Hamas, you can support marxist-leninists despite sectarian disagreement, and you already are doing just that by supporting Palestine. Not to mention that almost every single fucking pro Palestine march currently happening is being organised by the “tankies” you’re currently railing against.

Oh and just in case - anyone that doesn’t support Palestine deserves a brick to the back of the head.