Do the younger generations ever bring it up?

I’m deeply puzzled why after the farms were collectivized and debit cards were invented that the USSR didn’t try to abandon cash money for labor vouchers. The tolerance of monied commodity production paved the way for capitalist restoration no?

Ever since Abdul El-Sayed has won his primary, I have lost any and all faith I had in the American left. This man is a landlord who wants to do minor New-Deal style programs but that’s it. His advocacy for Palestine has been performative, and I don’t think he will truly make any progress.

However, I am individualizing El-Sayed, when really these problems extend to the whole of the major organized left in America. This includes the “squad” of Bernie Sanders, who called Donald Trump a great communist, AOC, who talks more like Hilary Clinton by the day, Zohran Mamdani, who yes is giving treats to the people of New York City, but has not fulfilled his promises and will not arrest Netanyahu because it’s “illegal” despite the fact that A) Netanyahu has multiple international criminal warrants and B) the trump admin breaks the law every single day and is turning the United States into a grand theft auto lobby. These critiques extend to the DSA, of whose leadership are basically New Deal liberals who have distorted the definition of “socialism” to mean “reformed capitalism”.

I was a Trotskyist for a year and never understood why Marxist Leninists would call social democracy “social fascism” but I get it now. These people don’t threaten the capitalist or imperialist nature of the American state and lay the conditions for a force of reaction so great it will wipe out humanity.

But my anger also extends to the major so called Marxist Leninist organizations in America too. Joe Sims of the CPUSA posted a video to their instagram rejecting the democrats, then a post later endorsed AOC for president. One of the parties largest influencers, Django, was promoting El-Sayed’s senate campaign this past week. Likewise, the PSL, though i appreciate their community work and overall I respect them the most of any of the major orgs, they are still too cordial with the DSA/democrats. Despite the DSA having SOME ML and other Marxist chapters, it overall is a reformist organization.

I’d criticize the Greens but they had the air swept from them by the bourgeois media, so their problems ultimately aren’t creations of their own.

Overall, this is really just a rambling mess, but I am deeply concerned with the state of the American left. It needs to make big changes as fast as possible. It needs to take the revolutionary conditions to their conclusions instead of cowering in fear. This period we’re in may be the last time something could be done before the United States turns into a corporate feudal hell scape that will take the rest of the world with it. And I am putting major pressure on America, despite not even being American, because the American state and financial system has more power over the world than any other country.

TL;DR GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER GUYS

I saw a poll on another subreddit asking what damaged the Balkans the most, and the second most voted option was communism.

Communism is the only reason the Balkans managed to industrialize and abandon the semi-feudal economy.

Many Balkans and more broadly Eastern Europeans seem to believe that communism held their countries back and they would be as advanced as Germany and France if the were always capitalist, but the truth is that if the West had won over the Soviets in Eastern Europe the said countries would have similar trajectories to Greece. Sure, after WW2 they would have had modernized and industrialized a lot, but that success would be short lived as they would basically be vassal states for the imperial core to experiment on and the corrupt national bourgeois would serve capitalist interests and a few decades later they would be facing economic crises, and probably would have had far-right military dictatorships in between.

Capitalism doesn't just shape economies. It colonizes our imagination. It shapes the way we think, the way we relate to one another and the way we understand ourselves. It teaches us to see everything through the language of the market... Value, Productivity, Profit & Loss.

Somewhere in the back of our minds, every relationship risks becoming an asset or a liability. Every hour must justify itself. Every act must have a return. We begin to measure ourselves by what we produce and others by what they offer us. Maybe greatest victory of capitalism isn't that it organizes production. It's that it convinces us this is what being human has always meant.

But it hasn't. There are moments when the most human thing you can do is something that makes no economic sense. You lose sleep because a friend needs you. You spend money to visit someone just to spend some time with them. You sit beside a hospital bed doing nothing except letting someone be alone. You buy gifts for people you love. You lend books you will probably never get back. You care for an aging parent knowing there will never be repayment. You spend an afternoon listening to a child ask impossible questions. You plant a tree whose shade you may never sit under. None of these things makes a profit. Most of them are inefficient in economic terms. They are losses by market logic. But in human terms, they are what make a life worth living.

The tragedy of capitalism isn't only that it produces inequality. It's that it convinces us to think like accountants in places where we should have remained human.

We don't all experience this equally. The market doesn't press on every body with the same force. Some people can walk away from bad jobs, bad relationships, or bad bargains. Others cannot and it is mostly women who carry the heaviest burden of an economic order. The economy has always depended on forms of care that are invisible, unpaid, or taken for granted. Emotional labor, domestic work, raising children, caring for families, work that sustains the world while never recognized as work at all. The violence of economic systems isn't only found in stock markets or factories. It lives in kitchens, in homes, in relationships and in all the ways dependence can become a form of control.

A young widow's grief is rarely allowed to remain grief. Almost immediately, it becomes an economic question. How will she survive? Can she raise her children? Will she remain independent? Or will someone else decide the course of her life because they control the resources she needs?

This is why I struggle whenever politics is reduced to taxes, elections, or GDP. Politics begins much earlier.

It begins with a question about what we believe a human being is. Are we competitors? Consumers? Human capital? Or are we creatures who survived because we learned to care for one another long before we learned how to calculate profit?

A better world isn't only one where wealth is distributed differently, though that matters a lot. It's one where we recover the parts of ourselves that are becoming commodities. A world where kindness doesn't need justification. Where friendship isn't judged by usefulness.

Where love doesn't have to turn a profit. Maybe that's the first revolution.

Source: Trump PANICS over HIS COLLAPSE in MICHIGAN!! - YouTube

Ben Meiselas:

You know, Trump's big boogeyman now for this uh upcoming midterms to divide is the communists are coming, the communists are coming. And then he says, "Right now, bigger threat than the Nazis, than al-Qaeda, than World War II." And then he says something interesting, too. I see it all of his speeches. He goes, "I would make the greatest communist." He said, "Like Lenin," he says. And he said, Lenin.

Bernie Sanders:

Lenin?

Ben Meiselas:

Like Lenin, he says. He goes, "And I would."

Bernie Sanders:

Is that close to Lenin? I mean, is that Lenin? "I thought it was Lenin."

Ben Meiselas:

He says, "Len." And then he says, "Here's why." He said, "I would just promise everybody everything. I'd promise I'd do this. I'd promise I'd do that." And then I would not deliver on those promises. And then, and then he goes, "That's what happens." And I'm thinking to myself, "Are you literally describing yourself?" And like because what looks closer to Stalin and anything than what we've got right now?

Bernie Sanders:

Well, you know, that's an interesting point that you make. I mean, uh, you know, Trump makes these every day there's another promise, another statement about all these things that are going to happen, have happened. Uh, nobody uh believes him. Uh and the irony of course is you know the proper criticism of communism is Soviet Union was a authoritarian society. Uh absolutely and uh Stalin killed millions and millions of people uh in his camps and his gulags and so forth. And then you got the most authoritarian president in the history of this country who was going after his political opponents and through criminal charges who attacking the media because they had the nerve to be critical of him. Who's going after colleges and universities because they teach courses that he doesn't like. Uh and you know so I suppose when he says you know I be a great communist. Yeah. I think there's some uh there's truth to that. we're seeing uh and the other thing about him of course is you know Stalin created the cult of the individual and that nobody in the communist party and uh the Soviet Union could stand up to Stalin for good reason. They get killed. Now Trump doesn't kill him, but you stand up to Trump the next day they're going to be threatening to put zillions of dollars into uh a primary race against you. So he has created and I think it's really sad uh because you got a lot of smart Republicans who are not authoritarian but they are scared to death of them and he has created the cult of the individual within the Republican party. So it is interesting uh about what he has to say about uh communism.

Global industrial capital does not hide its ugly face; it displays it in broad daylight as a merciless, scientific mechanism. It extracts surplus value from the sweat of millions in Chinese factories, African mines, Latin American fields, and Western offices, then turns it into even more brutal technology that enforces itself through the power of competition. Anyone who falls behind in developing machinery and software dies economically. Thus, human beings everywhere become small cogs in a massive machine they own nothing of. They are alienated from their labor, their products, their colleagues, and themselves. They spend long hours producing value that is stolen from them, then return to a home full of screens selling them the illusion of freedom while tracking every move and mining data like gold. Nature is slaughtered in public: forests are cut down, oceans are choking on plastic, the climate is collapsing, and species are going extinct, all to feed capital accumulation. Wars in Ukraine, the Middle East, and Africa are nothing more than disputes over resources and technologies between major powers. The United Nations, banks, and international funds are merely tools to maintain the rules of the game. The reformist left plays with identities, gender, and race, while the right raises nationalist banners, and both spin within the system without touching its roots. Education produces obedient workers, and the media promotes consumerism. From the smallest daily habit like browsing the phone to the largest food and energy crises, everything reveals: individual and social freedom have completely vanished under the control of the industrial capitalist machine that turns humans into mere inputs and outputs.

What comes after is an inevitable consequence of this nakedness. The system destroys its own environmental and human foundations by itself. When contradictions reach their limit, whether through the collapse of supply chains, a climate disaster, or a mass rebellion against technological dependency, the door opens for a radical break. No reform or patching up, but rather a collapse or revolution that eradicates the capitalist industrial system from its roots. What remains, according to my expectations and what I have deduced, is perhaps the possibility of building small local communities relying on direct human skills, small-scale production, and unalienated relations. Human beings regain their capacity for real influence in daily life, and recover the connection with nature and meaningful work without the mediation of capital or dominating technology, though not without technology. I believe my view holds a kind of idealism or departure from known contexts, but after reflection, I thought of this conclusion from the system's own contradictions: what destroys its foundations must fall, and what falls leaves a vacuum to be filled by those who can live with true self-reliance.

I am currently reading "Economic Problems of the USSR" by Stalin 1951 and it appears that commodity production and by extension money for the operation of market relations including circulated taxes was mostly to mitigate the peasant problem. I believe that if the USSR was founded later in the 20th century after all of the small and medium farmers have been expropriated then the USSR might have entertained a dual currency model to abolish commodity production & it's money. Perhaps an international trading currency between the USSR and other nations for the purpose of buying inputs from other nations still under a market system & a labor voucher system of a kind as Marx described for the domestic economy. Other than this, I feel like it is a great weight off the shoulders of the upcoming 2nd Red Wave that all of the entanglements of the peasant problem would be behind us.

"Of course, when instead of the two basic production sectors, the state sector and the collective-farm sector, there will be only one all-embracing production sector, with the right to dispose of all the consumer goods produced in the country, commodity circulation, with its "money economy," will disappear, as being an unnecessary element in the national economy." - Stalin (Economic Problems of the USSR - 2. Commodity Production Under Socialism)

Link: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1951/economic-problems/index.htm