In Venezuela, the 1% won yesterday-there's nothing else you can say.

[Ken Burch]

105. The ink has been spilled because Stalin's crimes

Have been unjustly used to demonize all forms of socialism, and, by extension, any effort to defend humane and compassionate values in any society at all.

There has been a despicable lie spread relentlessly over the past ninety-eight years now...the lie that ANY attempt to create a society run by any means other than greed and egotism, any effort to make a world in which all people are treated with dignity and respect and where no one lives in want and fear MUST end up replicating the Soviet Union under Stalin or Mao's China-that the only way to be free is to let the wealthy become more and more arrogant and demanding, and for everyone else to either just accept their lot or seek to change it solely by becoming a better selfish bastard than the existing selfish bastards.

It doesn't have to be that way.

And, in fact, we can't LET it be that way.

If we do, we're doomed as a planet.

If we are to survive, if life is to be, for the vast majority of the human race, anything on any higher level than eating, sleeping, reproducing and dying, we must keep alive the idea of running life on some sort of democratic cooperative model, because if we let that die, all we have left are "market values", and as the last thirty-four years prove, a world in which short-term gain for the few is the only model will inevitably become more and more brutal, unequal, environmentally unsustainable(capitalism will NEVER stop playing "Climate Chicken&quot and personally soul-crushing.


Much of the writing is about left critiques of where the USSR went wrong(for myself, it went off the rails when they crushed the Krondstadt Uprising in 1921, a rebellion led by Red Army soldiers and sailor on the military island of Krondstadt, which is in the harbor of St. Petersburg(or Leningrad, as it was called at the time. The soldiers and sailors were fighting to preserve the autonomy of the soviets(the workers councils, which originally operated democratically and actually reflected the will of the workers in those communities, before Lenin reduced them to being powerless "transmission handles" of Party control.)


A lot of us don't want to live in a world where nothing can ever really change for the better. And I don't want my grandchildren to get that world as our legacy to them.