"Oh, beware the Moscow Gold!"
Yes, it's also the guy who takes advice from the spirit of his dead dog. I'm not kidding.
I know a couple of liberals who L.O.V.E. to cite Du Bois around that would be pretty shocked by this quote.
If liberals knew how fucking "tankie" some of their idols really were they would completely melt.
Well, I'm Brazilian so I can tell you: they'll do it as many times as we allow them.
Since the 90s we had at least three neoliberal waves in Brazil with mass privatization and austerity measures, punctuated by center-left periods of "it's ok to enrich banks but let's at least guarantee that people can eat" periods.
Dude, I'm going to show you how to get rich with this simple trick:
step 1: find a dependent capitalist country and destabilize its government
step 2: find a way to destroy it's public infrastructure. Just coopt a local comprador class and defund everything, but if all else fails just start a war.
And so on.
It's ripe for some good old neoliberal shock therapy and mass privatization.
In Brazil we call that "lapada seca". I don't think I know how to translate the spirit of it, but literally it's something like "dry slap".
You say that when someone got slapped so hard you can feel the pain from afar.
Dê a ordem, camarada! <3
I used to be a left leaning socdem during my early years until early adulthood. My parents had been militant in communist orgs against the military dictatorship in Brazil in the 70s so I was very proud of the that story, which helped build this left leaning tendency. But most former communists had gone socdem in Brazil after the 90s.
I took a firm liberal dive during post-grad studies and after I began working, influenced by economic literature and also by work environment ideology. That was exacerbated by the failures our socdem government. I was still kind of "left liberal" and respectful of my family's history, but I tended to be the "progressive on social issues, conservative on economics" kind of liberal.
Until we elected an actual fascist here in Brazil.
That started unraveling a mental process that started questioning everything. My belief in liberal institutions took a hit, than electoral bourgeois democracy, than all the bullshit in economics started unraveling. I finally realized that what bugged me about liberal economics was the complete disregard for political processes. Fetishizing the technical aspects without taking into account the political processes behind them, which completely turn the theory upside down.
I went back to reading Marx ann Lenin again and... here I am.
Ah yes, the vast fields of tea plants that grow in Yorkshire...
On this date, 50 years ago, we learned what happens when an advanced workers led project reaches power through elections in bourgeois democracy.
We learned how the bourgeoisie takes back control when there is no revolutionary organization ready to fight back.
They will kill us, they will torture us and they will create an economic devastation to make sure we don't try again.
There's no alternative. It's revolution or death, socialism or barbarism.
TODAY I'LL DRINK TO THAT!