#state socialism

[probablyasocialecologist]

The first thing you’ll notice — perhaps helped by a translation app, as tourists and monolingual English speakers are not among Familjny’s usual clientele — is that the food is outrageously cheap. Once you’ve worked out what dishes you want, you queue up to a little niche. You ask here for what you want, and you’ll be given a bit of paper. You take this to a larger niche, from which you can see the kitchen, and you give it to a uniformed staff member, who would usually be middle-aged or older. They will dollop the particular parts of your meal onto your plate. Then you sit down, and you eat it, and when you’ve finished, you put the plate and your cutlery onto a rack — there is nothing so servile as waiting staff. There are some drawbacks to this system, to be sure. I have only once or twice been in a milk bar that had a toilet, and because at lunchtime especially there are always a lot of people queueing, you are not encouraged to linger. You eat, and then you go home or back to work — but you’ll have been able to have a decent three-course meal of soup, a main course, and a slice of cake for the equivalent of, at the very most, £5, in a country where the cost of living is almost comparable to Britain’s.

[...]

In Poland, the milk bar idea has been dated by some to the late nineteenth century, when the bulk of Poland, including Warsaw, was under Tsarist Russian occupation. Milk bars would offer locally produced food to benefit Polish farmers, and there would be no alcohol to cloud the minds of Polish workers, and also, importantly, little meat, which would make the food both cheaper and healthier. But nearly every milk bar in Poland was opened between 1945 and 1989, becoming the local example of a subgenre of cheap communal eating facilities built and encouraged by state socialist governments; what distinguishes it today is the fact that it still endures, for reasons which are complicated and surprising. Communal eating was regarded as being of crucial importance by Bolshevik thinkers from the start. Partly, this was a consequence of their pioneering feminism. Both for Lenin and for explicitly liberationist thinkers like Alexandra Kollontai, one of the central tasks of the revolutionary government that seized power in October 1917 was to free working-class women from ‘kitchen slavery’, as exemplified in the St Petersburg’s textile industry, which saw women work in factories all day and then go home and cook (and clean) for their menfolk. Early plans were highly ambitious, and they were integrated with avant-garde architecture and urban design; a few remnants of this programme survive in the larger cities of Russia, and Ukraine in particular. When researching a book on Soviet architecture in the 2010s, I went looking for a few of these, and the results were often sad to behold. In St Petersburg — then Leningrad — at the end of the 1920s, a team of architects, some of whom had worked with Vladimir Tatlin on his famous unbuilt twisting tower in tribute to the Third International, were charged with designing communal kitchens in the factory districts of the city. All three of them survive, but they have been turned into dodgy nightclubs, cheap malls, or worse: the finest of the group, a fabulous, dynamic, futuristic building, in the Narvskaya Zastava district, had been subdivided into little units by, among others, McDonalds. In Moscow meanwhile, enormous Constructivist bakeries were built around the city. One of the largest of them, Bakery Plant No. 5, was turned into a museum of Constructivism in 2022; the year, that is, of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a vainglorious nationalist slaughter that would have horrified the socialist modernists behind these buildings. In the 1920s, housing was sometimes built in such a way as to encourage its inhabitants to eat collectively. In Moscow’s experimental Narkomfin Communal House, duplex apartments were connected by a walkway to a restaurant, a library, a nursery, and a gym, with a roof garden on top; inside the flats, kitchens were either tiny or, in the ‘fully collectivised’ apartments, absent entirely, with the assumption that you could always eat in, or take your food from, the communal restaurant. For its Constructivist architect Moisei Ginzburg, this would liberate women residents entirely from the assumption — unavoidable in the early twentieth century — that they would be cooking the dinner. But in the Stalin era, Soviet food culture became much more hierarchical. These dreams of vast avant-garde dining halls serviced by streamlined, automated processes and administered by happy class-conscious workers were replaced with, at the top, a series of luxury restaurants for the nomenklatura; at the bottom, factory canteens; and, in between, the stolovaya — a network of public dining halls across the country, expanded especially in the more egalitarian Khrushchev era, during which period modernist glass box cafes also appeared in the larger urban centres, as a return to the 1920s dreams of automated communal luxury.

17 February 2025

[bluepecanpie]

as a retrospective, occupy wall street was the endpoint of the kind of ‘horizontalist’ politics that was popularized with the anti-globalization movement. the involvement of adbusters in establishing the initial ows is more than enough to show us how direct this influence is. underpinning the anti-globalization movement in the global north was a reliance on the framework consecrated by liberalism, and idealist notions that democracy had been distorted from its optimal function by the presence of trans-national corporations bypassing the power of the state. the idea that in the first instance, the state is an instrument of class power - specifically the power of the bourgeoisie, in the capitalist epoch.

occupy’s failure, is the shared failure of that anti-globalization movement, and in between - that of the arab spring, which had seemingly exhausted imagination for another kind of social modality other than one informed by neoliberalism - islamist or not. even the anti-globalization movement came to fore as a sort of post-cold war rebuke of state socialism and the vanguardist politics used to set it up, only to fumble once confronted with the hard power of the state and especially great power conflicts - in a way that ‘actual existing socialist’ states could not do. the occupy movement also forgoed the kind of deep organising that could actually build class consciousness and galvanise the working class into making demands.

i’m not saying that the occupy movement was bad, or counterproductive: it politicized a generation of people, and broke out of this anhedonic, apathetic morose typical of atomised subjects under neoliberalism. I’m just saying that it was no threat to the ruling class, to any corporations, to anyone wearing the robes of institutional power. pro-ows assessment would rather we think how well ows spread and that was the real victory, like there wasn’t a demand for the neoliberal epoch - whether it was explicity stated or otherwise.

[troythecatfish]

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

Glinda really had an entire musical number expounding on the theme of "success in life is not about being highly qualified or even competent, but manipulating people's superficial perception of you." and then she went into POLITICS. truly the #girlboss representation the world has earned

[fresh-snow]

[muffinlevelchicanery]

[genuinelyshallow]

We will not forget those who supported Palestine. You are in our prayers❤️

[mysharona1987]

The most haunting YouTube comment I have ever seen.

[read-marx-and-lenin]

[Link to tweet]

[totallynotcensorship]

GREAT NEWS

turkey halted trade with israel.

for context: trade between the two was worth 6.8 Billion dollars in 2023

KEEP SPEAKING, KEEP PROTESTING. push for your government to also cut ties with israel. this is what we need

[probablyasocialecologist]

A system prioritising the overcoming of low levels of material wellbeing and productivity levels, and usually coming out of peasant patriarchal societies and often also colonial oppression (among other major disadvantages), all the while being militarily invaded and/or besieged, creates conditions not exactly conducive to the development of egalitarian social structures and environmentally constructive impacts. In these historical conditions it is a marvel that there were any successes in improving standards of living, raising environmental standards, engaging in reforestation, reducing or preventing waste, pre-empting consumerism, developing recycling programmes and attaining high volumes of recycling, improving access to education, providing free and universal health care, guaranteeing full employment and job security and even setting up lasting conservation areas, among other major feats. Add to this the development of cutting-edge social practices and policies like gender parity efforts in Burkina Faso, reconciliation and pacification methods (even if fraught with violence) in Mozambique, revolutionary applications of agronomy in Guinea Bissau and the Cabo Verde Islands and world-renowned successes in space, biomedical, health, conservation, engineering, ecology and biotechnology research and applications in the USSR, Cuba and the PRC, and the record is even more impressive.

Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro, Socialist States and the Environment: Lessons for Eco-Socialist Futures

[pumpacti0n]

"(Anarchist) Economic policy, like all policy, is crafted by the entire community in face-to-face relationships working towards the common good. This turns the economy into an aspect of public affairs, which means it cannot become the self-serving enterprise that it is under capitalism and even under communism as state control of the economy inevitably tends toward its working for the State itself rather than for the people."

"Jesus And The Abolitionists", Terry J. Stokes

[technofeudalism]

every single comment on this post has been nuked by reddit.

per what reddit mods have said, they are apparently cracking down on anything glorifying Luigi Mangione or "promoting violence".

so we're absolutely clear on reddit's opinion of "promoting violence":

r/CombatFootage, which regularly shares high definition, extremely graphic war footage, including drones dropping grenades on prone soldiers in Ukraine/Russia and people having limbs being blown off by explosions, has 1,761,375 subscribers. It is one of the top 500 subreddits by subscribers and in the Top 60 NSFW subreddits.

The Columbine Shooters have a subreddit for discussing the Columbine Killers and their families with over 33,000 members. It has been active since May 5th, 2020.

The Sandy Hook shooter has a subreddit dedicated to discussing him with 3,551 members. Here are some of the posts, in addition to pictures of him as a child. It has been active since December 3rd, 2021. he is also described by a mod of the subreddit as "not a pedophile, but an ephebophile."

The Pennsylvania Weis Markets shooter has a subreddit dedicated to discussing him with 500~ members. It has been active since April 15th, 2022.

The Apalachee High School shooter has a subreddit dedicated to discussing him with 260~ users. It was created the day of the shooting, September 4th, 2024.

if you dig through the frequent contributors to these subreddits, you will find that the vast amount of crossover from the users occurs in communities such as r/teenagers, r/highschool, r/roblox and a wide variety of subreddits dedicated to self harm, severe mental health struggles and other mass killers or topics related to them. totally normal stuff that reddit allows.

this is without seeking out all of the alt-right rat nests that have buried themselves underneath somewhat innocuous-looking community names pushing dog whistles and avoiding overt calls for violence.

every last one of these social media platforms, including the one that we are on, overtly allows glorification and deification of the most notorious, mentally unwell, violent, extremist mass killers in modern history. but if you show any kind of approval of what Luigi Mangione is accused of doing, you are censored not in days, but hours.

i sincerely hope this opens the eyes of people who previously didn't see the forest for the trees. this is what is meant by “they got you fighting a culture war to stop you fighting a class war.” not that our cultures aren't significant or that we don't have differences, but that ultimately, the divide among us lies in wealth, not in skin color.

as long as the "poors" are killing each other, there's no reason for alarm or concern. it's only when the roles are reversed that we see action taken or examples made of people like Luigi Mangione.

[troythecatfish]

This measure, if passed in Senate, would make it illegal for the US State Department to cite genocide statistics.

In other words, illegal to do its job.

[enjymemink]

Thank you Yemen 🇾🇪

Despite being one of the poorest countries in the world, they showed more empathy than those so-called civilized developed countries.

[fresh-snow]

Full video

The sadness and despair in those eyes...

There are no innocent soldiers in iof, including the women. I've seen female soldiers laughing and dancing at the misery of Palestinian people and doing heinous acts just like their male counterparts.