Yllych [any]

  • 6 Posts
  • 163 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: September 6th, 2020

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  • It was definitely initiated from the top down I would say. But at the end of the day, whatever mass strikes, work actions, and army mutinies occured were not enough to stop Yeltsin and the west from dissolving the SU into what it is now.

    I don’t want to mean this as blaming the average Soviet citizen but the fact is; whether from apathy with the old system, or naive hope that westernising would bring prosperity, or being outgunned by Yeltsins military, they and their organisations were sadly unable to defend the Soviet republics. All communists need to take sober lessons here. If it is the first task of the workers’ party to instill a revolutionary spirit in the working class, the second and even harder one must be to convert that spirit into a mass commitment to the socialist project.















  • I don’t think it’s a secret that cobalt mining, or any mining really is exploitative of labour beyond normal wage relations. Plus the environmental cost is substantial as well. That is true enough, although like most real injustices this critique is ,for political reasons, aimed at former colonies rather than the more powerful governments that have the (stolen) wealth to actually create some kind of real solution.

    As for the coup attempt by Christian Malanga, to me it’s hard to tell how serious of an attempt at regime change that was by the US/UK simply because of how bad the attempt was. The impression I got was that the alphabet boys did not send their best, if they even bothered to get involved. Malanga and his group were quickly suppressed, Malanga himself was killed and his son imprisoned. As far as I know the only support he had was either among diaspora or western NGOs. So a total failure there. Malanga had ties to all sorts of western entities so it seems plausible he had at least a green light from some western backer to go ahead with the coup attempt with an implicit promise to be recognised upon success.

    My guess is that this was an incompetent or just plain lazy attempt at regime change symptomatic of a decline in state power compared to the 50s/60s. As for the online boycott campaign, without knowing more I would venture that’s maybe a 60/40 split between being created by naive libs vs from a suit filled board room somewhere.