Roderic Day @RodericDay

I don't think that moronic pundit this post is addressing deserves a response. But I think everyone should be able to explain our current status quo in approximately this way whenever they get a chance to.

Thanos Angelopoulos @Th_Angelopoulos

2 days ago

.@KonstantinKisin, you told us your IQ is "significantly above average". Disappointing to see you not using it to learn the basics of the very tradition you claim to refute. You say the anti-capitalist left accepts Messi's wealth but rages at Bezos's because leftists "literally

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.@KonstantinKisin, you told us your IQ is "significantly above average". Disappointing to see you not using it to learn the basics of the very tradition you claim to refute. You say the anti-capitalist left accepts Messi's wealth but rages at Bezos's because leftists "literally don't understand wealth creation". The distinction your framing needs us not to notice is between labour income and capital income. Messi sells his own labour; his wealth is a return on his personal performance. Bezos's wealth is a claim on the surplus generated by hundreds of thousands of other people's labour, mediated through equity ownership. Who sells labour, who owns capital. That is the axis. It has a measurable signature. US CEO pay: 21 times the average worker in 1965, 281 times in 2024. Worker productivity grew 80.5% from 1978 to 2024; CEO pay grew 1,094% (EPI, 2025). CEOs were paid 2.6 times the top 0.1% of earners in the late 1970s; by 2023, 7.5 times. Median FTSE 100 CEO pay hit £4.58m in 2024/25, 122 times the median UK full-time worker (High Pay Centre, 2025). Now here is where you reveal you have never read the tradition you claim to refute. You say the left has "no framework for understanding" executive wealth. The left has had a framework for analysing wealth stratification within the working class itself since Engels coined the term "aristocracy of labour" in the 1880s; developed across the entire Marxist and anarchist traditions. The left does not "accept" Messi's wealth uncritically. It analyses the conditions that produce it: commodification of sport, winner-take-all market structures, concentration of broadcasting revenue, and the way the spectacle industry channels enormous sums to a tiny apex while those who build the stadiums and clean the arenas earn a fraction. Henderson's own post gestures at exactly this when he notes arena cleaners make 100,000 times less than Swift, and treats it as a gotcha in his tweet instead of expanding it in the structural critique that already is. Then the line that gives your argument away: "They think there is a fixed amount of money and the only thing a business does is split it unfairly". Nobody serious argues this. The actual claim, backed by every number above, is that pay for those who own capital has decoupled from productivity and from almost everyone else's pay for 5 decades. That is measurable. It is not envy. Understanding how wealth gets created and understanding who captures it are two different questions. You collapsed them into one so the second never has to get asked. For someone who claims to have a significantly above-average IQ, that is a significantly below-average argument. Sources: EPI, CEO Pay (2025): epi.org/publication/ce… High Pay Centre (2025): highpaycentre.org/ceo-pay-in-the…

Konstantin Kisin @KonstantinKisin

2 days ago

This is because the anti-capitalist left is not actually against people being crazy rich. They're against certain types of people being crazy rich. Artists and athletes make sense to them because they've played music and sports and because their success can be explained by

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@cowboyparable It's amusing that you'd think this exchange has shaken me even a little bit. I gave you several chances to try to not sound like a clueless scolding scenester, and you dodged every one of them. Concerningly, probably out of ineptitude? Feel free to ask your friends for comment!

Here's a personal take as a fairly academic/ intellectual/ bougie person: It annoys me how some phonies romanticize "the worker" or "the indigenous", but then when an *actual* indigenous worker rises to power, like Stalin (see also: Evo), people whine about their "rough edges."

꒰ • ༝ • ꒱ @emunenetism

3 days ago

it's quite easy to understand why many people had a thing for stalin. he was pretty charming

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@cowboyparable I have been as polite and clear with you as I can. I don't think we use language the same way.

@cowboyparable I think you have a non-standard definition. Indigenous means "Originally of a place." For example, "Potatoes are indigenous to Peru." Politically we add a twist: it only refers to oppressed peoples, i.e. no "indigenous to France." But China, Georgia, etc. do qualify.

@cowboyparable Instead of saying bombastic things like "I refuse to believe…" you should simply provide your definition and list what makes each of those figures indigenous or not.

@cowboyparable I'm simply trying to understand you. Please define "indigenous" in the context of revolutionary figures, and give me a good example of who counts and who doesn't. For example, among these: - Mao Zedong - Ho Chi Minh - Bhagat Singh - Ghassan Kanafani - Amílcar Cabral

@cowboyparable I want to know who you consider indigenous and who you do not consider indigenous. I am open to whatever you're suggesting here, but my issue is that it's not even clear what the suggestion *is*. As I've said, Stalin and Mao fit my definition of "indigenous" very well.

@RichardCovetous "Bring up" does not mean "positively bring up". It just means "bring up".

@RichardCovetous You… never see anarchists bring up Stalin? We definitely interact with different anarchists. I don't know what else to say!

@RichardCovetous Your anarchist, etc. community speaks of Stalin in intellectually respectful terms? Can you show me?

@RuSuureBoutThat @JayStrickland6 Losurdo's book on Stalin is a good start. Or if you want to eschew balance and read something that is not a "balanced take" but a full-on lionine defense, Ludo Martens's is great too. Oh, and read the three interviews with Stalin up on RS.

@cowboyparable I'm open to hearing you out here, but I think the issue you're raising is more obvious in matter and implications to you than it is to me. I've referred to Stalin and Mao as anti-colonial leaders for a while now. Do you have some reference list of who counts as what?

@JayStrickland6 After you study any historical period with even a bit of seriousness this glib accusation loses all of its shock value.

@cowboyparable Georgia was a colony of the Russian Empire.

I have my criticisms of Stalin. And of Trotsky. And of Marx! But I also enjoy highlighting their positives! Why recur to belittling cheap caricatures, when the real people who existed were so complex and interesting?

Trots, Lefts, Anarchists, and Ultras have this ugly habit of not speaking in terms of "I disagree with Stalin" or "I disagree with Chavez", but rather with a petulant kind of "Stalin/Chavez was too dumb and ill-read to grasp XYZ, which I easily do!" And I find it repulsive.

If you want masses to join any pursuit you need to offer something that is relevant to their daily life. Even orgs that initially appear "idea"-centered offer something real. e.g. Trotskyist orgs provide a smug sense of superiority, churches provide palliative peace of mind.

Some US organizations with quite poor theoretical lines seem to instinctively understand this better than "more principled" folks. Many who in the past might have supported the DNC or GOP no longer feel that they fit in there, so the DSA and ACP offer community to such strays.

One well-intentioned example of "idealist thinking" very prevalent in society concerns education. A common belief is that "improving education" is the key to solving social problems. The implicit model here is: ??? --> Teachers --[Ideas]--> Students --[Actions]--> Reality