Last thread: >>983378
Why did the Soviet Union annex Moldova but not Romania, eventually at least? Might as well have gone all out and annexed all Romanian-speaking lands.
>>14148Before where you'd, say, ask a neighbor to help you fix your car, now you take it to a shop. A worker doesn't have time to teach himself plumbing, or doesn't own property and so doesn't do it himself anyway, so he has to pay a plumber. When someone needs their kids watched, they don't leave them with a neighbor or relative, but with a daycare or babysitting service they have to pay for.
Basically exactly what it sounds like, that social relations have been reduced to transactions in place of human relationships.
>>14152Again, the purpose of getting a degree even then wasn't to find employment. It started to turn into that around that time with all the GIs returning home and using the GI Bill to go to college and university, but outside of really specialized fields you didn't need a degree, hell, you didn't even need a high school diploma, to get a job. That's why they were called entry level positions, because they were intended (in theory) for you to enter there and work your way up. Getting a degree wasn't job training, it was to show that you were educated and had a versatile background of information and experience. The expectation was that you would be trained to do the job your employer wanted you to do.
And even now, getting a job isn't the point of getting a degree, but to put you into debt. A degree is a slave collar showing that you're a) obedient and b) loaded with debt, two things that are highly valuable to employers because you're less likely to fuck around if you're staring down the barrel of $100,000 in student loans.
You can see this in the sort of ads companies put out for entry level workers. They want you to have a degree, but in what it doesn't matter as long as its a bachelors, ie, is sufficiently expensive. If you want to teach English in Japan or China, you can as long as you have a bachelors degree. It doesn't have to be in Japanese, or Chinese, or English, or Teaching, or anything relevant to teaching a language in a foreign country. It just has to be a bachelors degree, because it's not the degree that's important, but the leverage you come packaged with that gives your employer a reasonable assumption that you'll take what crumbs you're offered because you need the fucking money.
Degrees were never about getting employment. The sort of people that got degrees before WW2 were well to do enough not to have to worry about that shit. They aren't even about that now. There are more kids now with degrees than ever before, and it isn't doing them very much good at all, but then it was never intended to.
>>14133I'm politically confused. I kinda lean right(so i've been told) I just support freedom as long as you don't harm another person. I support gays because i'm into that stuff but i don't like people grooming kids. I'm on the fence on abortion because I think that is a life but i lean towards it's ultimately the woman's choice to do what ever she want's.
I have the communist manifesto and mein kampf and i don't think i like either. is there any baby step leftist literature you could recommend?
Please help me
Anon
>>7325>What would be /leftypol/'s refutation on how right-wingers interpret the Tragedy of the Commons?That the originator of the "theory" just made it up, first of all.
https://climateandcapitalism.com/2008/08/25/debunking-the-tragedy-of-the-commons/Second, we have real world examples, documentary evidence of what happens when people have some sort of common means of subsistence, and that's to come up with rules to try and maintain it and care for it. The only time we see the sort of hyper exploitation-unto-destruction that the "Tragedy of the Commons" imagines is when common resources are made private.
The commons functioned well for literally thousands of years, and only disappeared because they were legislated out of existence and the excess people either a) exterminated, b) imprisoned/executed, c) forced into cities when industrialization began to hit, or d) deported them to the colonies if possible, or otherwise "encouraged" to leave.
>>48145>I have no idea what roll he played in the down fall of Yugoslavia, though.me neither, and would like to know. So I'm asking this question now.
>>14168We'll see how that goes then.
>>7351Section 230 protects ISPs and websites from civil liability for the stuff that's posted on them, or for removing illegal content. That is to say, Comcast can't be sued for libel or whatever because you wrote that George Bush is a serial cocksucker on your personal blog and someone accessed it over their network, because they aren't the publisher of that information, they just own the infrastructure it is transferred over.
This also prevents ISPs and websites from having to censor or approve all content that is uploaded on or through them. Without this protection, ISPs and websites are liable for everything they host and distribute. It's why moot didn't go to jail because some faggots made terrorist threads on 4chan.
Related to the effort to remove section 230 is a bill called SISEA.
https://www.xbiz.com/docs/news/256391_SasseMerkleyDEC2020.pdfThe purpose of this bill is supposedly to put a stop to sexual exploitation via "revenge porn" or coerced porn or whatever. It also essentially seeks to install a new regime of intensified internet moderation and censorship. While the text of the bill seems to be oriented towards pornographic sites, in effect it would require the screening of all visual content uploaded to a website to check if it's a) pornographic and b) no one in it is on their "does not consent" list. It also imposes fines for websites that receive complaints that they're hosting porn against the wishes of the person in that image or whatever if they don't take it down within 2 hours of the complaint being received.
The purpose of both of these is to monitor what is being posted on the internet, by whom, when, and where.
As to why:
The internet has been absolutely integral in disrupting American imperialism over the past 20 years. It was an indispensable tool during the Arab Spring and other protests as a means of coordination and spreading information. It was essential in revealing the US's wrongdoing abroad, as well as the huge disparities in living standards between the US and parts of the EU. It played a major part in the meteoric rise of Bernie Sanders, and among people under 40 is the primary method of both communication and information sharing. It also allows for simultaneous, global communication for virtually nothing. Without the internet and these protections, the revelations brought by Edward Snowden and Wikileaks would not have been possible. The internet disrupted the old corporate domination of mass media and helped to democratize everything from journalism to science to politics. It also threatens the massive media empires in other ways, like facilitating piracy, or providing alternatives to corporate published media.
For these and other reasons, the internet as we have known it all our lives is a massive thorn in the side of the bourgeoisie. They don't like that their secrets keep getting posted on it. They don't like that their property is being shared over it FOR FREE. They don't like that it gives people alternatives to their propaganda. They don't like that the disruptive effect the internet can have on the business scene. From the point of view of the bourgeoisie, there is nothing about the internet that is good for them as things stand now.
It's no real secret that the US is angling to try and get its increasingly restive population under control, as well as start a war with Russia, Iran, and/or China in as near a future as possible. Depending on the metrics you look at, China has already eclipsed the US in several respects and has reached parity in several others. Since WW2, the US has relied on its overwhelming technological superiority and industrial capacity to fight its dominance as its
ultima ratio. The linchpin in this since even before WW2 has been its massive fleet. It relies on its aircraft carriers to project its power around the world. It relies on its nuclear submarines to hold the nuclear dagger to the world's throat.
Now, not only is China reaching parity with the US technologically (and arguably surpassing them industrially), both it and Russia have developed a counter to the US's carriers in the form of hypersonic cruise missiles, to which the US currently has no countermeasure. The US fleet is expensive and aging and their recent moves at updating and replacing them have produced mixed results at best. It takes years and billions of dollars to build a new ACC, while cruise missiles can be mass produced relatively cheaply, and all it takes is one in the right spot to send that expensive ship to the bottom. In short, the window through which the US can be reasonably assured of victory (according to its calculations) is closing faster with every passing day.
While they might seem as unrelated as possible, the US's drive to war and these moves at censoring the internet are directly related. They've spent years building the infrastructure and invested many billions of dollars in monitoring the internet and trying to shape or influence discussion on it. The US doesn't want their citizens to be able to educate themselves with alternate news/propaganda sources, much less Russian, Chinese, or Iranian sources. It also doesn't want them to access information like Hillary Clinton's emails or the Snowden Files. It especially wants to put a stop to websites like /leftypol/ and chapo, or at the very least keep them under the strictest surveillance, especially after last summer's protests/riots.
If I had to guess, that would probably be what freaked the bourgeoisie out the most: seeing the poors out in the street fighting the police and setting up their own autonomous zones. The bourgeoisie want to nip
that right in the fucking bud, and either frustrate any further activity or strictly monitor everyone involved in it.
tl;dr: to control the proletariat and facilitate their drive towards war to maintain their hegemony and the supremacy of the bourgeoisie
>>14180A distinction should be made, there are trotskyists in the western sense as in communist parties that uphold Trotsky as a important theorist for some reason. Those range from being full on glowies and schizos to just believing wrong things about history.
Then there's what official USSR historiography calls trotskyists, which are just people who organized around their goal of taking down Stalin, with no unified ideology (there were both rightists and ultralefts) not all of them bet on Trotsky but it's a shorthand.
>>14143a bit too restrictive, lumpen proles are "unproductive adult in working condition" : so neets, homeless, unlucky guy out of a job, police, most criminals, (not dealers, but thugs, pimps, burglars, grifters, thiefs, etc)
they usually have no direct interest in communist actions/revolutions as they're not workers able to strike and benefit from it, and big fish in the mafia are usually well integrated with porkie (and were often used as tools against organizing worker for various anti communist interests).
>>14154for abortion, great philosophical argument that doesnt deny right to live to the foetus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Defense_of_Abortion>>14166he has interesting analysis, and have great meme potential, isn't a complete retard or a liberal. But he is definitely a philosopher first, many will very often disagree on his pop culture and political analysis, and he suck at geopolitics (as do most). still interesting
>>52396just remember that space and dollars are faggot and our vanguard of jannies led us here for the better.
>>14200 (me)
>>14201 (me)
Think about it English is an international lingua franca
Why should we pander to provincial USano concerns and brain worms in our use of it?
tankieTankie >>14205I've found plenty of books at my local used book stores.
Alternatively, ask your local library to purchase specific texts. Generally speaking, libraries have funds available for purchasing books that usually don't get used up because, well, people generally don't know that, or use their local library.
Literally everyone wins from you doing this. Your library gets its budget justified by local engagement, other people have potential access to revolutionary material, and you get to read whatever you want F O R F R E E. Even if you absolutely have to have your own copy, you should still request shit through your local library, because then you get to check out alternate translations and so forth on their dime and not yours.
>>14200It makes people mad because it takes the whole Black Lives Matter thing and says "ignore that".
I think you're letting ideology color your judgements, here.
>>14207It actually Esperanto for American
>>14208Most people being offended didn't care when Fergasson protesters were being assassinated under the Obama years and won't care in the slightest about black lives mattering under Biden
It's not about black lives, never was. Iraqi lives matter, Yemeni lives matter, Somali lives matter
Ethiopian lives matter since that's probably who the USanos will be killing next
Stop letting Amerikkka colonise your minds
tankieTankie >>14223I don't mean like "oh we should just not reproduce anymore", I mean
"wipe them all out".
>>14230We don't have the capacity to craft such high functioning, high IQ retardation. She's a product of the US in many ways.
>>14231concrete labor is the actual labor that is done to make things. eg. the activities involved with making shoes or chairs.
abstract labor is just "labor" in the abstract. you can't equate concrete labor of making chairs with the concrete labor of making shoes. They are entirely different. In the realm of abstract labor, they are the same "quality", ie. "labor in the abstract".
Thus making this equation intelligible in a market:
2 chairs = 1 shoe
>>14232It's a library that contains different media.
>>14252Iirc it was the express wish of many powerful members of the liberal powers in the lead up to WWII that Hitler would be useful tools in destroying socialism and the USSR. The problem was that Hitler had ambitions beyond their aims, as he threatened their empire (i.e. it got out of hand and became a short term "greater threat" than the USSR).
Of course, this analysis is overstated. There were elements in the FDR administration for instance that actively sought cooperation between the USSR and USA, to a certain extent. A sort of one world two systems kind of approach – managerial keynsianism and state socialism working together for world stability. These people were always pretty marginal though.
>>78700 Chairman Gonzalez admitted and took responsibility for the massacre of Lucanamera in which women, children and civilians were all massacred.
"In the face of reactionary military actions… we responded with a devastating action: Lucanamarca. Neither they nor we have forgotten it, to be sure, because they got an answer that they didn’t imagine possible. More than 80 were annihilated, that is the truth. And we say openly that there were excesses, as was analyzed in 1983. But everything in life has two aspects. Our task was to deal a devastating blow in order to put them in check, to make them understand that it was not going to be so easy. On some occasions, like that one, it was the Central Leadership itself that planned the action and gave instructions. That’s how it was. In that case, the principal thing is that we dealt them a devastating blow, and we checked them and they understood that they were dealing with a different kind of people’s fighters, that we weren’t the same as those they had fought before. This is what they understood. The excesses are the negative aspect… If we were to give the masses a lot of restrictions, requirements and prohibitions, it would mean that deep down we didn’t want the waters to overflow. And what we needed was for the waters to overflow, to let the flood rage, because we know that when a river floods its banks it causes devastation, but then it returns to its riverbed…. [T]he main point was to make them understand that we were a hard nut to crack, and that we were ready for anything, anything."
>>81345http://www.defenddemocracy.press/yeltsin-shelled-russian-parliament-25-years-ago-u-s-praised-superb-handling/>According to Ambassador Thomas Pickering, Yeltsin sent Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev to notify four key Western ambassadors about his intention to dissolve the Parliament and call for new elections (Document 4). In Clinton’s first phone call to Yeltsin immediately after the latter issued Decree 1400, dissolving Parliament and setting a date for early elections and a constitutional referendum, the U.S. president expressed his full support and accepted Yeltsin’s assurances that there would be no bloodshed and the reform would move faster now that there would be no obstacles. U.S. support for Yeltsin remained unwavering all through the confrontation and after the Russian President issued the order to storm the parliament (after initial violence on the part of the opposition).
>On the morning of October 4, Muscovites awakened to the awful sight of the burning Parliament building—the White House they had defended against the putsch in August 1991, where Yeltsin had stood on a tank and led the democratic forces. On October 5, the day after the bloodshed, Clinton called Yeltsin and congratulated him for his handling of the situation; he did not ask about the loss of life. Even stronger support was expressed by Secretary of State Warren Christopher, while visiting in mid-October, who practically lauded Yeltsin for his actions during the crisis. Documents show that the Clinton administration saw no alternatives to Yeltsin and was prepared to support him no matter what.Found with
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=yeltsin+clinton+%22october+1993%22This search
Can you specify what sort of thing you're looking for and I might be able to find it
tankieTankie >>14261No.
A while ago I looked through Wages of Destruction and a few other books (iirc), none of which spoke much about bank policy let alone said that the Nazis banned usury.
Someone on the Axishistory forum asked this same question and the evidence provided by the users, such as interest rates, indicates that they didn't:
https://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=212326As one of the users said:
>Several points of the 25 point programs were conveniently forgotten once Hitler seized powerThis is, therefore, not remotely surprising given that, for example, people such as the Rockefellers helped to facilitate international trade during the war, and that the Nazi leadership reprivatized its banks.
>>14262Thank you for the answer. Also,
>Pilots were given instructions not to hit factories in Germany that were owned by U.S. firms.That's fucking crazy
>>14263Not him: I would be skeptical of that claim as phrased. WW2 Aerial bombing was still at the level where only something like 20% of bombs landed within 1000ft of their target and it wasn't unheard of to bomb the wrong city entirely
(Not saying it it's entirely untrue, as there was similar fuckery at the start of WW2 - at one point during the early phases of the war the British rejected bombing German factories on the grounds that they were private property - but it seems more likely that US factories were never specifically targeted, since pilots would have had difficulty specifically avoiding them.)
>>14264a 20 year war so that arms factories could make a few bux? skkkrt
Theyre gonna keep doing drone strikes at the behest of the hapless liberal government in Kabul, the Taliban has reat control
>>14278That's related to class, in a way of hating the poor. Frankly, after giving some thought about it, yeah it would be counterproductive in the reputation of any government employ full eugenics (ableism if you ask me). What could be done is a more subtle approach, like offering social bonuses for vasectomies or simply supporting more the right to abortion and the importance of avoiding babies with clear mental deficiencies.
I say this because last month I went to some orphanage for mentally disabled boys and it was tragic (mamaged by the catholic church, hopefully they are not molested) and well the pain of seeing the human condition as that endured.
>>14284It depends on how it happens. If it shocks the system it could cause economic trouble. If it's done as a gradual reduction of global military spending, it would be positive for the economy.
>>14285It's not as simple as the military keeps resources cheap. The switch away from imperial domination would change technical development and change the demand for resources as well.
>>14297"politics" is not zero sum. Society is synergistic.
>>94499booo
>>14298hahaha wtf
>>14303Retweeting Anita Sarkeesian is fighting a culture war from 2014 lol
Not the poster that posted the screenshot
who probably responded to himself complaining about muh redditors to import his stupidpol reddit culture war >>14312None of these "costs" the capitalist anything as the "money" to pay all these "costs" will come from the fact that the worker will work to earn said money which then the capitalist will give for things he has to according to the law.
>The point, imbecile, is that it costs more money for a capitalist to hire 2 workers part-time than 1 worker full-time for a particular jobWrong again. It depends on the situation it is not always true.
I also read the answrs and when they misleading I must call them out.
yugoslaviaYugoslavia >>14312>The point, imbecile, is that it costs more money for a capitalist to hire 2 workers part-time than 1 worker full-time for a particular job.Yet everywhere in retail we see the former not the latter. Part time employees: don't need their healthcare paid for (in the US and similar countries), and they are flexible. In normal circumstances, part timers can be squeezed and forced into working whenever is convenient for the business, if things are especially busy you can put both part timers on practically a full time schedule, yet if things are slow you can cut their hours down to a minimum in a way you can't do with a fulltime salaried employee. Obviously the ultimate form of contract (for the bourg) is the zero-hours one or even better, the 'gig economy', where you don't have to give anyone any work when they're not needed, and in the latter case, they have to pay all their own costs too.
>>14335a reference to Sancho Panza from Don Quixote perhaps?
Though, considering Marx hated Stirner, I don't why that would be?
I'm not that well acquainted with the book since I only half-understood it in Burger Spanish class, but Stirner being Sancho seems like it would be more positive than negative.
Unless there's some other cultural reference to another Sancho that I just don't understand at all either there.
>>14335sancho pansa from don Quixote
>>14334no, material conditions are the real existing circumstances in which the world and its people are - it's from the mode of production to living conditions to climate etc.
aging first started in Japan and you can see where the rest of the "global west" is heading; but before anything like this goes full way the climate catastrophe will force billions from the global "south" to flee and it will be like a mass migration (similar to what europe witnessed fomr 4th to 9th century, but on a global scale)
yugoslaviaYugoslavia >>14350Venezuela is embargoed, so can't participate in international trade. Since Venezuela isn't 100 % self sustaining, they still need imports for stuff they don't make, but since the embargo makes this impossible, they lack these things.
Their state companies are also sanctioned and unable to do business so there is a connection with the private sector which is too alive, but completely killing it would only worsen the situation.
yugoslaviaYugoslavia Was reading this journal. Not completely finished but it goes through a somewhat material history of rotoscoping and abstracts some ideology from it. To find some meaning of things such as commodity fetishism I had to go through some other journals and opinion pieces and pining that the child is capable of making the same decisions as people and that the fetishization of commodities is drilled into children by the simple fact that there is no way of communicating the labor and other things done to fully produce the toy itself. The isolation of labor yadda yadda. I’ll read Capital in its entirety soon
But it just got me thinking of the uncanny valley effect. It’s interesting to think the reason why people really are uncomfortable with CGI that “display” the uncanny valley effect is that it rips them from the “ideology” of commodity fetishism itself. It makes them aware that human labor was put into making the thing with the uncanny valley effect. Of course their view of the labor is usually negative, but it’s an interesting way of “scaring” people into “class consciousness”, as when uncanny valley is discussed, it’s seems the people immediately demean and ridicule the effort put into it.
But I’m a theorylet who’s still learning. I could be saying pure bullshit. Especially with my casual switching of is and oughts. But I digress.
Are there any other topics that usually lead to discussion of the labor production of a commodity that (You) notice or observe?
Here is the journal in question, although you need a specific school address to access it for free:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1746847718799416>>14357Just finished reading the journal, and their conclusion from uncanny was the same as mine. Funny.
But even more importantly, Linklater’s rotoscoping draws attention to its own production:
[The rotoscope] brings a heightened illusion of realism to an animated scene, but it simultaneously also makes the viewer even more aware that the scene is animated by drawing attention to the ability of the animated image (and rotoscoped animation in particular) to draw out and accentuate some of the fissures and contradictions of material reality. (Fore, 2007: 122)
leading to a challenge to the ideology of the viewer:
[The rotosope’s] defiant move not only forces the viewer to question her understanding of the ‘real’ space of the studio, but also revise her understanding of the physics and phenomenology of the animated body. (Klein, 2000: 51)
>>14365He got well known for examining ideology via Lacanian/Marxist lenses and provided a critique of Althusser "Ideological State Apparatuses". Besides that he did few very good films, sniffed a lot, wrote few more books.
But I believe his legacy is "sublime object of ideology"
>>14282I mean you could declare yourself a communist and it's as easy as that, really. But familiarizing yourself with the foundational works of Marxist theory shouldn't take too long. Although reading stuff that applies that theory to real-world situations is also recommended. Either way it's pretty hard to turn into a lib or reactionary if
you understand the world in Marxist terms
>>14287most of the myths in the West surrounding the Germans in WW2 come from the generals we rehabilitated in order to build the West German state, many of whom were hardly less innocent than their SS counterparts.
>>14317the way I see it most of these "radicals" are no different than the lifestylists, hippies, punks, etc that just wanted to rebel against a vaguely defined "system". even if they put a hammer and sickle in their bio I guarantee you most have no idea what they are talking about.
>>14393I have no idea, I guess the country would have to be big enough to be largely self-sufficient, having enough domestic production to survive embargo and encirclement.
China could absolutely start incorporating computerized planning and make a transition. But will they ever? I am doubtful.
>>14394Also, if R&S or another actually revolutionary, non-electoral, non-shithead ML party ended up destroying the US in 50 years and building Socialism there, that would be a great place to do economic planning (although not sure how that would work alongside decolonization) and the anti-communist boomer retirees would see good manufacturing jobs come back.
kindof funny to imagine anti-communist people's reactions when the jobs that got offshored because of capitalism came back under lower stage communism
>>14410There's a lot of information on Leftypedia, for example this page:
https://leftypedia.org/wiki/List_of_atrocities_committed_by_the_United_StatesFor specific lies about particular subjects just go to the page on it.
>>14418They are creating a service people want to consume. They are using tools to create videos and tools (the platform itself) to post the videos.
Ytube is like any other type of media that makes money by selling add space.
>>14420Could have to do with the ocassional hostility these groups have against the state apparatus (such as killing cops) but ofc it doesn't justify supporting them, for the reason you say and also because organized crime works in the same way as any other bourgeois entity works, except the violence is much more explicity, direct, and less subtle.
This is why shoving hobos, pimp-owned prostitutes, etc, with mafia bosses into one big social class as "lumpen" is very misleading, since they all have different material interests. This is why I believe the term lumpenbourgeoisie works well for organized crime.
>>14454To 1943
don't quote me just of my head from what I saw yesterday so he'd be the old him but still tesla
>>14469The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalitization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off. Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine runaway. As markets learn to manufacture intelligence, politics modernizes, upgrades paranoia, and tries to get a grip. The body count climbs through a series of globewars. Emergent Planetary Commercium trashes the Holy Roman Empire, the Napoleonic Continental System, the Second and Third Reich, and the Soviet International, cranking-up world disorder through compressing phases. Deregulation and the state arms-race each other into cyberspace. By the time soft-engineering slithers out of its box into yours, human security is lurching into crisis. Cloning, lateral genodata transfer, transversal replication, and cyberotics, flood in amongst a relapse onto bacterial sex. Neo-China arrives from the future. Hypersynthetic drugs click into digital voodoo. Retro-disease. Nanospasm.
>>14475The tests claiming the shroud dates back to (on average, of course) 33 BC were done in Italy in 2013.
Then I guess a forensic scientist tried to replicate the bloodstain himself, and concluded it was impossible in 2018.
Right now, it's regarded as an icon, not a relic.
You can see it in Turin, not the Vatican.
All signs point to bs. Perhaps you should remind them of the other Carney tricks the Catholic church plays on it's own congregation
>>14480>reform always workslol
>If reform fails then why do social democratic countries exist?Point to them.
>How have these socdem reforms not been resetted? More likely than not, they already have. The US is a primary example of virtually every reform won in the early 20th century being clawed back. IMF and World Bank loans have clauses for repealing socialistic reforms baked right in. The UK government has been trying to kill their national healthcare system for decades.
>Also lets take austria for example, what if it has a revolution, what stops the USA to drone strike the shit out of it and neighbouring countries to invade it and install a fascist, taking as justification the violence of the revolution? A better example is any given country in South America that voted for a left of center president only to get couped. Guatemala, Chile, Brasil, they all went the "reform" route and got military dictatorships, ethnic cleansing, and unrestrained violence for their trouble.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2002/05/horm-m17.html
> A revolution seems impossible nowadays Because you're ignorant.
>always ends up with millions of unnecessary deaths which wouldn't happen with reform. Lol as opposed to the millions of unnecessary deaths that will happen while we wait for your piddling "reforms?" People have been fighting for reforms in the us for decades now and it's gotten them nowhere. If they pass a reform at the local level, it's superceded at the state level. If they pass reform at the state level, it's superceded at the federal level. Reformers that are lucky enough to somehow make it to the federal level end up marginalized and co opted or intimidated and humiliated by the other branches of the bourgeois political system.
Revolution is the only answer because reforms don't work. As long as the bourgeoisie exist they'll make minor reforms as necessary and then claw them back over time. The entire system that allows them to exist has to be replaced.
>>14481>>14482>>14483Chill out retard.
>>14484>Point to them.Nordic countries? Germany?
>More likely than not, they already have. The US is a primary example of virtually every reform won in the early 20th century being clawed back. IMF and World Bank loans have clauses for repealing socialistic reforms baked right in. The UK government has been trying to kill their national healthcare system for decades. Not everyone lives in the US and UK man. In Germany there have been reforms since weimar times and they've not been resetted.
Reform has a much higher chance in working than a bloody revolution
>A better example is any given country in South America that voted for a left of center president only to get couped. Guatemala, Chile, Brasil, they all went the "reform" route and got military dictatorships, ethnic cleansing, and unrestrained violence for their trouble.Reformed governments are far less likely to be invaded due to them doing it democratically and slowly taxing away the rich and promoting worker owned businesses.
When was the last revolution since the fall of the USSR? They just don't have the backing they used to have.
What stops the USA from literally drone striking and bombing the country to death? The UN, China?
Btw I am not a reformist, those are just reformist arguments I wanted to have answers for.
>>14487>Nordic countries? Germany?lol at the nords and lol at germany, as if Germany hasn't been succumbing to neoliberalism since reunification.
>Not everyone lives in the US and UK man. It doesn't matter which part you live in happens to be called, you live under capitalism.
>Reform has a much higher chance in working than a bloody revolution"Working" at what exactly? Germans and Nords aren't any closer to escaping the endless misery of wage slavery, and the price of those "reforms" is the destruction of Libya, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc, etc. Your beloved dem soc utopia is built on the corpses of workers in more heavily exploited countries.
>Reformed governments are far less likely to be invaded due to them doing it democratically and slowly taxing away the rich and promoting worker owned businesses.Meanwhile, in reality, it doesn't fucking matter if changes come from peaceful reform governments or turbulent revolutions, because you'll get fucked with either way. Jair Bolsenaro was installed after the us helped fabricate charges against the previous leftist president. The same thing happened in Honduras, courtesy of Obama's state department. Evo Morales was forced to flee his country sure to another coup attempt by the Trump administration that was also trying to install a neoliberal puppet in Venezuela.
>When was the last revolution since the fall of the USSR? Venezuela? The Arab Spring?
>What stops the USA from literally drone striking and bombing the country to death? Virtually nothing except a strong, well armed nation state. The past thirty years are a litany of illegal US adventurism that has killed millions. Their bases in Syria are totally illegal, and no one is stopping them. Now they seem to be trying to sidestep the whole messy issue of illegally invading and occupying other countries by outsourcing it to private interests.
>>14492the book is Reading Capital Politically by Harry Cleaver.
Honestly, the frustrating part is not that I have to read Hegel. The frustrating part seems to be the author’s insistence to cite and give evidence of Marx and Engel’s logic. They seem to be well read. However, this most critical claim is astonishingly barren with references. I’m assuming the author expects us to have a background of Hegel, but the contrast between providing context and examples from Marx and Engels and the critical claim to reject dialectics is stark. So stark that even generally un-critical me had alarm bells going off. It brought intense doubt to the claim especially because it was empty. I’m not finished with the book, but I’ll keep reading. Just generally want a quick answer to the Hegel’s real being “existence” or “logic”.
>>14459Well Hoxha spent a good deal criticizing the USSR and China for "abandoning" proletarian internationalism, he also fought nationalists from Albania during WWII. I doubt he happened to be an ethnonationalist all along.
>about what he thought on Albanian identity and it sounds like ethnonationalism.Can you source me on this?
>>14495It's not. The memery about "though" is probably some goonshit and the thought behind it is this: It looks bad to have nothing to say in response to an opponent's argument. It looks
so bad that even a canned meme response to some
detail of what the opponent said is preferable. It follows that you should build up an arsenal of weak meme shit responses as a fallback strategy. Building up a huge arsenal of weak meme shit responses is tedious, so let's search for a few that you can often bring up in many situations. "Though" is a fairly common word. At the moment, doing the meme just looks retarded. But doing it more will lead to acceptance, at least in the places where it gets spammed, and then it will work. A similar fallback (and one that already works) is "rent free".
If you try anything like that in real life or a video conference remember to smirk like a cocaine-crazy yuppie sex pest time traveler from the 80s.
>>14509Socialists were the social reformers attempting to deal with changes brought by changes in political economy before Marxy Marx and the International Bunch came along. Marx and Engels assumed the term Communists to distinguish their political program. Generally socialism is taken as the transitional stage or stages between full capitalism (now) and full communism (the future when all previously existing conditions become impossible).
Realistically speaking, what constitutes socialism is going to depend on the material circumstances of the place and people you're talking about as different social and economic requirements, industrial capability, technology, and so forth are going to be different, but there needs to be the abolition of private productive property, communal ownership of necessary resources, and the elimination of bourgeois property forms and relations. How these are achieved, to what extent, and what is necessary, depends on who you ask. There are many different theories on how this will look like and be implemented, council communism, soviets, labor unions, free associations, etc, etc, some which are more theoretical than others, and some which have achieved various levels of real world experience. The only thing we know for sure is that market socialists are wrong.
Is there some sort of compilation of Soviet/bolshevik/communist claims on numbers of repressed/killed/etc pre-1953? It's the hardest data to find, ffs, it's always relatively modern historians' data like Krivosheev's, but never the stuff people like Krivosheev seem to be bent on proving being wrong.
Say, Winter War -
http://heninen.net/sopimus/molotov1940.htmMolotov says finns mobilized 600k troops, 60k dead, 250k injured (who knows how many dead from injuries). Soviet side lost 49k dead, 159k wounded. This is pre-1953 data, alright. Also, mentions that Allies and Germany and Sweden sent Finland 350 planes, 1500 artillery, 6000 machineguns, 100k rifles, 650k grenades and so on. Britain was ready to send 100k large expeditionary army to Finland (during the war with Germany, no less), and France had it's own expedition ready at 26 February already. So, by Molotov's words, the Winter War was a total success, USSR managed to blitzkrieg Finland so fast that foreign powers couldn't respond in time. Say, look at this shit
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Uk5bY22RSE as a reference for troop movements and ignore stuff like "slaughtering Soviets in huge numbers" and compare that to Molotov's assessment of the war. It makes a lot of sense, isn't it?
So, is there a compilation like that? Any articles, any historians, anything at all? Speeches by Molotov, Stalin etc get immediately branded as "propaganda trying to hide losses" by retards who think that people like Stalin were ordinary bourgeois politicians trying to save face for the next election.
>>14533>How is indigenous land rights not blood and soil type idealismGenerally speaking it is.
>am I crazy for finding fault with this? No, it's pure reactionary libshit. It's one thing to kick someone out of a place they're currently inhabiting, but the Earth is the common property of everyone. Saying that "natives" have more rights to a place (especially based on their ancestors maybe having lived there x years ago) than "settlers" is deeply reactionary.
>>14533>How is indigenous land rights not blood and soil type idealism?It is. The reason why progressives don't recoil from slogans of that sort is that
nobody takes it seriously. It's purely performance. Some meeting of progressives starts with some formulaic claim how you all live on stolen land and then… nothing happens. The topic is changed, there is not even an attempt at some rhetorical bridge to whatever the next topic is and nobody gives a shit.
>>14535Yes
It's a 1994 (ish) article made by Russian researchers and an American professor
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2166597?seq=1Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-War Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence
J. Arch Getty, Gábor T. Rittersporn and Viktor N. Zemskov
>>14530copy paste into text editing program
save as .PDF
>>14547>mainstream historian paid by Russian Academy of Sciences, who got into the Sacred Archives and took out of their The True Data.It's the same shit as Krivosheev. Read a couple of interviews, it's literally the same shit - "how can you not trust the archives?!" Come on now, I am asking about stuff like this
http://heninen.net/sopimus/molotov1940.htm with Soviet losses (or gains) officially stated in publications made pre-1953
>>14554Fuck off, retard. You can googlle all the proofs yourself - from Katyn's poles being in military uniforms with money in their pockets (as opposed to gulag taking away all personal belongings and putting them into abox), and polish being shot with german bullets and german guns, to post-soviet documents being fake, and a lot of polish intellectuals supposedly shot there were alive and well in after-war Poland (fakers just written in random names in documents).
Now, scram
>>14555<Put forward a biggest lie possible, get an outrage>retreat a little and offer a lie somewhat smaller, get people start quoting you to counter the biggest liePsyop not even once
>>14556Oh, and while I am at it: 700k shot in 1937-38 is a completely fake number. Have you ever wondered why is that death sentences outweight gulag sentences so heavily? Because fakers don't have to proof that people shot existed! Gulags had data on prisoners there, and thus lies could be checked quite easily, but people shot? Lol'd, they just cease to exist! They evaporate! 1000 people shot per day for 2 years straight by NKVD, just think about it.
This is the same way how they fake WW2 Soviet losses, by the way - they cram all the losses into reinforcements, as in, Soviet divisions had insane turnover of people. You can't track it in any way, shape or form, you only have the average army size at various points in time. This way you can produce any amount of Soviet losses you need even if division size doesn't change throughout the year! Amazing.
>>14557It's fucking silly how far propaganda goes.So, I was playing Grisby's War in the East not a long time ago. Cranked difficulty down, playing as the Soviet Side, ok, don't do anything. Germans don't attack because they can't do anything, they don't do anything, and I still get 50k losses per turn (week or two? Don't remember already). Like, come on now. Why? Just flat 50k losses per week, every week, when there's no fighting happening, for no reason at all. Why do you even need to impose on Soviet side a 50k loss for statistics that don't matter in the game in any way, shape or form. Just…. why?
>>14561First, 1000/24/60 == ~0.7 sentences served per minute, if you shoot all day long without pause.
Yeah, dude, first troikas spend 2 minutes on every person on a list for entire day long, then NKVD shoots a person every 2 minutes! Then Memorial foundation then tries to find corpses and never finds them, never did they find any people shooting ranges or any corpses. 700k dead - and none found anywhere!
And explanations of this shit is one funnier than other. Lubyanka having special sluisse to dump blood and gore into the river at night - how's that? Or using motorboats to turn corpses into fine dust? You know that mass graves attract animals, right? That animals will eat corpses and spread diseases all over the place, and for example nazis were using stuff to disinfect and to scare away animals poured onto mass graves? How do you maintain this rate of executions and keep it secret from the population? (Someone has to have that research of the impact of great purge on population saved, can't find it)
This whole stupidity hinges upon historians' authority, they prop up this nonsense with their names and degrees. Take it away, and noone will believe this shit.
>>14535Continuing my ranting.
Khruschev's 1956 speech
https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/115995.pdf?v=3c22b71b65bcbbe9fdfadead9419c995 at page ~6 Khruschev talks about "active defence".
Stalin's 1946 speech
https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/116179.pdf?v=a831b5c6a9ff133d9da25b37c013d691 at page ~8 Stalin talks about "active defence"
Any sources on what that doctrine actually entailed? Obviously, it's a strategy similar to what russians did to Napoleon with his numerical superiority.
>>14581he did.
that's why he was that isolated in the RSDWP.
>>14591>>14592Yeah that sounds right to me
>>14593I can point it out in the boards history. Thats how its always functioned. Never any of those things
>>14586 listed
>>14593Does 'the point' of the site have to be the official stated purpose, or how it is used? Those are two different questions with different answers.
For the first, read the sticky. The FAQ page will be launched within the week but for now that information is still in our manifesto.
>>163675 attachment 1 >>14595This, but it goes both ways. People can't dismiss your opinion for being a women or other minority if you don't tell them. Its a real
marketplace of ideas.
Whilst right now most nations are equipped to deal with forms of conventional terrorism, I have had some looming thoughts in my head that entire nations might be fucked if a group of really dedicated geniuses manage to cook up a superweapon in a basement or hell, even a small group of insurgents manage to, lets say steal a nuclear bomb.
About 5 years ago a small handful of south African thieves managed to sneak into a nuclear plant containing the remnants of the Apartheid nuclear program. Nothing of value was stolen but the site contained enough material to construct about 6 moderately sized nuclear bombs. The thieves were never caught. Imagine if they managed to get away with something, imagine the panic and later, the horror.
Nuclear terrorism is something that keeps me up at night, and its not even the only scenario like this. A single skilled hackerbro could shut off an entire cities electrical grid for a few hours, a few more dedicated people could destroy a few transformers and shut a whole city off for weeks. Imagine some bio terrorists get their hands on the last remaining vials of smallpox, or hell manage to cook up some new virus conventionally or with new technology that may come soon. I am personally shocked nothing like this has happened before, the US and the Soviets have managed to lose several nuclear warheads and like mentioned previously the last vials of smallpox. Most of this has never been found. What are the implications of this and what are other feasible ways to create/steak a superweapon? Fun fact, America usually transports its nuclear missiles in unescorted semi truck containers.
>>14604I saw what you did. Everybody saw it. We will not ignore it. I will screencap your post and remember it forever.
Do better.
>>14606>Why didn't the feudal lords become the bourgeoisieIn some cases they did, but generally speaking feudal landlords are limited in the sort of property they can own or income they can derive from it.
In England we do see a bourgeois-ification of the landlords as they enclose the commons (the land outside of their property used by the peasants) over the period from the 14th to 19th century. During that time also you also have conflicts like The Barons War on the continent where lower-level nobility fought with upper-level nobility, in part because the higher nobility needed their land for increased profits and they no longer needed a personal army etc.
>>14616There's a lot of stuff here:
https://leftypedia.org/wiki/CubaIf anything you can send over the individuals sources contained within this.
>>14629Those documents - and many others - are fakes. Every since Khruschev they were dropping fakes into the archives. Like, come on, they were writing memoirs for the soviet generals and mashals! Timoshenko had no memoirs, Voroshilov's memoirs were edited so hard there was no 30-50s in them, Stalin's full works were basically removed from all libraries, Budyonnyi similarly had everything he participated in past Civil War stripped away.
Everyone with a half a brain says that. "Secret Documents" is a running joke in Russia. Problem is, people joking aren't smart enough to expand on the concept. Come the fuck on - why WOULDN'T anticommunists put fakes into the archives? Rightoids are willing to go to great lengths to invent falsehoods to smear communists (and jews) with, and Black Book of Communism is one big lie - so, why WOULDN'T post-communist anti-communist Russia (and khruschevite USSR) do the same? Half of present day russian politicians were nationalists at one point, and Putin himself praises Solzhenitsyn, fuck, Solzhenitsyn is in russian schools alongside Dostoevsky and Chekhov.
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