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TODAY I'LL DRINK TO THAT!

"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.

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.

100% agreed, comrade.

That's where we can converge. Thank you.

That's a fair point, but... Well, that's what the Leninist party organization is for. To forge this revolutionary spirit on the advanced members of the working classes and then spreading this through the class.

It will not come naturally. Class consciousness doesn't come from nowhere. We can't complain that there isn't class consciousness without actually building organizations to foment it. We need more Lenin in this conversation.

Edit:

Sorry for editing but this is an important point. As Marxists we shouldn't rely on idealism but on the material conditions for something to happen, right?

This discourse "people aren't ready for the hardships of revolution" is idealist. It pressuposes that metaphysical conditions and ideas ("being ready for the revolution") are the movers of history. As Marxists that's not what we believe. We believe that material conditions are the movers of history.

So we ask ourselves: what material conditions make people apt for revolutionary action? And we work to bring about those conditions.

That's the Leninism in "Marxism-Leninism"!!!! That's one of the great contribution of Lenin (not the only one, of course): the first steps on the theory of revolutionary organization.

That's what frustrates me about the phrase in the title. We have a lot of past theory and practice to apply for that problem. Granted: I didn't listen to the podcast. Maybe that's what he talks about later. But I think the phrase as it's written is a disservice.