/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

>Soviet Archives

Reminder: There is no monolithic Soviet archives. It's an umbrella term usually to refer to the over a dozen central state archives in Moscow, which over the course of several mergers, acquisitions, and Renamings got the main previously classified government records and communist party records. Certain collections are open to the public. Other archives might be invitation only or by request of scholars. There are certain records that to this day are still classified, especially retaining to some of the operations of the Cheka, NKVD, and KGB are deemed to still be relevant to Russian national security and are usually within the FSB archives. The term could also include regional and local archives across the country and in other former Soviet countries. In the broadest sense it could even refer to archives completely outside the former Soviet Union, which have a Soviet documentary focus.

So just keep that in mind any time anyone refers to "the soviet archives" in a casual conversation. Maybe interrogate what they mean by that, regardless of whose "side" they appear to be on.

Any sufficiently advanced materialism is indistinguishable from idealism in the same way that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. From a materialist perspective, consciousness is not something separate from the physical world. It is what happens when matter becomes organized in sufficiently complex ways, especially in brains capable of memory, self-modeling, and recursive feedback. Conscious experience, in this view, emerges from physical processes rather than floating above them as a soul or independent substance.

Modern physics pushes this one step deeper. Matter itself is no longer understood as tiny solid objects at bottom, but as patterns or excitations in underlying fields, with these fields being a universally extant substrate that is present even in the vast cosmic voids between galaxies, where there is very little matter or energy. If consciousness comes from matter, and matter comes from these universal fields, then consciousness may ultimately depend on certain highly organized field dynamics. A brain would not contain some extra ingredient beyond physics; it would be a particular arrangement of the same substrate underlying matter itself that makes up everything else in the universe, including "empty" space.

The open question is whether consciousness is only a rare effect produced by very complex systems, or whether it reveals something more basic about reality itself. One possibility is that consciousness is just an emergent process, like liquidity emerging from molecules. Another is that experience is somehow woven into the fabric of the universe from the start, with minds being especially dense or sophisticated expressions of it. Physics does not settle that question yet, so the debate remains philosophical as much as scientific.

Religion and the supernatural is not needed here, the conclusion is that the ideal and the material are part of the same substrate, and the evolution of mind out of matter is built into physics itself, possibly as a deterministic inevitability. Speak with the fungi for more info.

Hezbollah drones limiting 80 percent of Israeli troop assaults in Lebanon
The report stated that anti-drone systems were being distributed to only a limited number of Israeli troops due to supply shortages, and that some military operations were not being carried out in daylight hours over fears of drone attacks. These drones have increasingly become a problem for Israel’s government, which has reportedly created a specialist task force, composed of military, defence and civilian experts, to develop systems to counter the threat. Israeli military intelligence sources told Kan that Hezbollah had moved away from a command and control structure, and was now operating guerrilla-style warfare.
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/hezbollah-drones-limiting-80-percent-israeli-troop-assaults-lebanon

'We don't know when the bulldozers will come': Palestinians fear expulsion in Khan al-Ahmar
The Bedouin village, home to around 300 Palestinians, lies in Area C of the occupied West Bank under full Israeli military control. Residents have for years endured repeated threats of demolition, violent settler attacks, and harassment by Israeli forces aimed at driving them off their land. Smotrich said he was coordinating with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli military to secure approval for the expulsion order, which would still require cabinet authorisation.
https://www.newarab.com/news/were-all-afraid-palestinians-khan-al-ahmar-fear-expulsion

Israeli police force Gaza flotilla activists to kneel with hands bound, video shows
The flotilla, having set sail from southern Turkey, was making a renewed attempt to deliver aid to war-shattered Gaza after earlier missions were also intercepted by Israel. Organisers say they aim to break Israel's blockade of Gaza by delivering humanitarian assistance, something aid bodies say is still in short supply despite a U.S.-brokered ceasefire between Israel and ​Hamas in place since October 2025 that includes guarantees of increased aid.
Post too long. Click here to view the full text.

a common naive misconception among the political left is that the ruling class don't care about the poor and the marginalized, but that's not true at all. they are very interested in these people - they hate them. they don't just turn their backs on them; they deliberately go out of their way to hurt them, they devote time and money and resources to keeping them poor and marginalized and preventing anyone else from helping them, they want them all to starve and suffer and die.

the ruling class are so wealthy and greedy now that they see the poor and marginalized as worse than useless. in a more quaint time they would enslave them and use them for cheap labor, but even that's not worth their time anymore. why enslave the poor and marginalized in your own country and deal with all the hassles of labor laws and minimum wages and strikes and lawsuits when you can just enslave people in some distant foreign land whom you can pay even less and never have to even see or think about, or just automate the labor with machines? in a more quaint time they would exploit their desperation and sell them worthless garbage at a markup but even that's not worth their time anymore. why scam nickels and dimes from the poor and marginalized when you could be scamming rich people like investors and managers and doctors and politicians, people who actually have money to spend?

the ruling class no longer see the poor and marginalized as cattle; they see them as vermin. cockroaches. a person of inadequate means and/or divergent characteristics is an insult to them, a vulgarity, a foul stench and an eyesore. they want these people gone, exterminated, to make room for people and things that actually matter. if you think this is hyperbole, ask yourself this: why do the ruling class fight so hard to destroy things like public healthcare and public education and welfare and food stamps and subsidized housing when they don't even pay taxes and these social programs don't cost them a dime? why are the ruling class investing billions of dollars into things like fertility drugs and in-vitro fertilization and genetic screening and incessantly catastrophizing about declining birth rates in privileged and affluent populations?

it's because they believe that human society is composed of winners and losers, and they want to live in a world of winners. the losers are in the way, they are dead weight, they are holding civilization back, burdening society with their losePost too long. Click here to view the full text.

Did we tried to establish communism the marxian way? Lets take Russia, China and Vietnam. They all got from feudalism to socialism without even putting down capitalism. Furthermore, if I remember correctly, the revolutions which took place in those country came from the intellectual class instead of the proletariat.
Please enlight me.

This is probably a very unpopular opinion but leftists should not oppose AI.

AI has the potential to make our lives easier as workers, but in the hands of capitalists, they will continue to extract our surplus value even as our productivity increases, exactly as happened during the Industrial Revolution. Instead of the workday being shortened, it grew longer, and under extremely harsh conditions.

We should use it to our advantage, create propaganda, videos, and information. Opposing it would be like workers in the last century refusing to use machines and instead wanting to make a revolution with picks and shovels.

Only when AI is in the hands of workers rather than the market will we be able to properly regulate its use.

anarchist here. so i have been thinking about this a lot lately. should we be doing things to literally "seize" the means of production by producing goods and services in our own homes (for those of us lucky enough to have homes), and then giving these goods and services to others (mainly people we know such as friends etc. but giving to strangers is based too) free of charge? a sort of underground gift-based economy, that is? obviously this cannot substitute entirely for collective workers' struggle and i don't think we should stop doing that. i do think that building an underground gift economy based on homemade goods could be very beneficial to the cause of liberation though. did you know that there are fruits and vegetables you can literally grow indoors?

the current right wing strategies

1. thinking magic is real thus circlejerking everything you can into an ergragore
   
   
2. waiting for a caesar to show up
   
   
3. refusing to come to terms with china being socialist and thinking hyper accelerating finance capital will defeat it
   

I have a hard time believing that any of us would care about capitalism if we had "made" it. Through bad circumstances, bad choices, bad relationships, lowly class origins, or disability, we have ended up here at the end of history. I can't help but think about what it's like to be a winner. How often do they think about us?

One common stereotype regarding today’s western atheists is that they are predominantly white, male, and from Christian backgrounds, and this demographic profile stands to this day based on the latest polls on the atheist community.

And as pointed out by people like Contrapoints, both the alt-right and the SJWs of the 2010s were products of the New Atheism movement, the bulk of its members being, once again, white males from Christian households.
So this begs the question: Did they leave because the churches weren’t racist enough following the adoption of the civil rights movement’s philosophy by most churches in the 1990s?

As polemical and farfetched as it sounds, I don’t necessarily think it’s improbable given the obvious demographic profile, the fact that the decline in Christianity (in America, Canada, and Australia at least) and rise of sub-cultures were heavily driven by young middle-class white people (especially white men) who left the churches, and that was back when the churches were at least nominally anti-racist following the decline of the white nationalist movement as a significant political bloc in both the north and the new south, as well as the fact that whilst elevatorgate did drive many young white atheist men into further reactionary politics (e.g., the “redpill”, incels, scientific racism, transphobia, etc…) the reactionary streak was there since the beginning as the “four horsemen” used bait-and-switch tactics in their writings to sell the message during the GWOT era: “You don’t need to be a fundamentalist Christian to support another crusade in Iraq”, as well as the universalist civilisational rhetoric. and that was long before the “horsemen” like Harris and Dawkins began to promote a particularist view of the west as it becomes clear that its hegemony is being challenged by nominally non-liberal countries like Russia and China.

There’s also the fact that Christianity in America and elsewhere in what made up old Christendom hasn’t gained any more followers outside of mass immigration as seen how churches across Europe and elsewhere in north America and Australia need to import priests to fill the roles of the clergy as white people there don’t wanna work in churches. While it can be argued that much of it is to do with how Christianity’s universalism is clashing with the increasing particularism of white people who only want Christianity if it affirms white identitarianism, that still wouldn’t support tPost too long. Click here to view the full text.