If I can’t share a Curly Wurly it’s not a revolution

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 6th, 2023

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  • A lot of words but not many sources here. So here’s a few:

    Marx defined socialism as: “…Socialized man, the associated producers, regulate their interchange with nature rationally, bring it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by some blind power; they accomplish their task with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most adequate to their human nature and most worthy of it. But it always remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human power, which is its own end, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can flourish only upon that realm of necessity as its basis.”

    — Capital III, translated by Ernest Untermann, Charles H. Kerr & Co., Chicago 1909, p. 954

    To understand Marx’s definitions you have to realise he was writing mostly in response to the Paris Commune uprising and therefore saw ‘communism’ as the practical application of a theory of socialism. However, the terms and their meaning were radically reshaped by Lenin, Mao and Stalin.

    — The Paris Commune: First Proletarian Dictatorship, Revolution, Vol. 3, No. 6, March 1978.

    In March 1918 the Bolshevik Party was renamed the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik) in order to distinguish it from Social Democratic parties in Russia and Europe and to separate the followers of Lenin from those affiliated with the nonrevolutionary Socialist International.

    https://www.britannica.com/place/Soviet-Union/Lenin-and-the-Bolsheviks



  • I spent nearly every dollar I had saved to live in London, and don’t think I’d ever seen such visible displays of wealth disparity once I got there. I got a good paying job but often struggled to save and pay all my bills.

    I got to live through the Brexit debate while living behind a chip shop in a poorer, multicultural neighbourhood and heard all the bullshit about immigration being directed at brown people while I worked there as an immigrant myself but because I was white I was largely accepted.

    I learned a new level of contempt for the pointless wealth of the monarchy and had to deal with a boss who was plainly bad at his job but because he had an OBE everyone around me worshipped him like he could do no wrong.

    I also worked for some very large companies and realised they aren’t anything special, just willing to exploit more people.




  • My first election out of high school I voted for a right wing candidate because that’s what my Dad voted for, but also because I was entrenched in Christian ideaology and patriarchal propoganda.

    After that I started paying a bit more attention to politics and slowly moved to the left with a few leaps along the way. Nowadays I find the Labor party of Aus to be about as conservative as I can stand. I can barely hide my disgust with anything to the right of them.

    Real life experience can be far more radicalising than any immature ideas you inherent in high school.

    Edit: My major leaps were: Having an employer illegally underpay me, seeing my friends lose ‘stable’ jobs in 2008, having a close friend come out as gay, leaving the church, volunteering with unhoused people, living in the UK, living in a rental controlled by a landlord with over 100 properties, and doing disaster relief work.