Conan? The Podcaster?!?

I started reading "What is to be Done" but I couldn't understand it due to all the references to different people and parties and magazines. No context.

Lmao.

Think on it comrade.

Peace.

Remove the plank from thine own eye...

Can you provide a resource for understanding the dynamics of class consciousness in Russia prior to the revolution? /Genq

100% agree.

I will be taking a break from all social media for Lent.

Blessings, friends.

We don't live in an industrial capitalist society. No Communist movement has successfully overthrown a society like ours. Maybe that means something wrt the need for class consciousness. Idk.

I think there is somewhat more class consciousness, and it's growing in some groups. But, by and large, the exploited workers are not aware of themselves as such. Or, to say it better, are not able to connect their exploitation to the political-economy.

Absolutely agree, those that left who were sympathetic were systematically silenced in the west. I meant people who didn't leave the USSR, but lived there during it. It's important to understand that the USSR was good at some things and very bad at other things. People suffered under the USSR.

In addition, it can also be true that the fall of the Soviet Union and subsequent neoliberalism has been a bad thing for the majority of former Soviet states. We have to deal with reality, not idealism.

You didn't answer my question. I have many dear friends who grew up in the Soviet Union. I myself grew up in the "nice" housing and infrastructure of the Soviet Union. Two things can be true at the same time. The Soviet Union did good things, they also did bad things.

How do you suppose we have Communism in the US when there's no, or very little, class consciousness?

Have you ever talked to anyone who lived in the Soviet Union?

Gram Parsons - In My Hour Of Darkness YouTube video by scarecrow3666

youtu.be/ERhhkjqDGsA?...

Aretha Franklin - Precious Lord, Take My Hand / You've Got a Friend (Official Audio) YouTube video by Aretha Franklin

youtu.be/Xafvxac-b20?...

I cannot believe my life lasted long enough for computers to stop being fun.

That whips. Where did you get it?

Sorry to ask this in a reply, but I'm curious. Being new to the ELCA and only having a Wikipedia familiarity with the LCMS... How do you square the circle of the conservative doctrines of the LCMS with being a leftist, progressive Christian? If you want to DM me, we can talk there and I'll delete.

My desires become your desires. We tend to each other like we're tending a garden. Do flowers possess a right to sunlight? Do trees possess a right to be pruned? I don't know. But I want them to be fulfilled, to flourish, grow, and become beautiful.

What we own, what we possess, is that which we are responsibile for. What we are responsibile for is how our actions affect others. In the same way I am responsible for you, you are also responsible for me. You own me. I own you. We possess each other.

Rights become abstractions. Power defines relationships. The moral dance becomes a march. (In other words, possession becomes *dispossession*)

When possession is defined by control, by power, any rights I may possesses exist within myself. Responsibility is dislodged from it's natural place connecting selfs with others.

Responsibility has another crucial aspect: It exist only where a subject and an object collide. It implies action, cause, effect, consequence. In the physics of morality, where subjects and objects dance, responsibility is how these things act on one another, responsibility is like gravity.

The point is: we possess ourselves because we are *responsibile* for ourselves.

If I sleepwalk to my car and drive it into another person's living room, when I wake up, I still am responsible for what happened. In so far as we are responsibile for what we do, that responsibility implies ownership of one's self, regardless of whether we actually control ourselves.

But let's follow this trail a little further: a consequence, leading back to an action, leading back to a person. That person, whether or not they are in control of themselves, is still *responsible* for the consequences of their actions.

The difficulty of that kind of thinking is assignment of responsibility for actions. "The Devil made me do it" doesn't pass the blame anymore than "I was just doing what I was told" doesn't.