GenZedong

L'chaim Marx

Welcome again to everybody. Make yourself at home. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is the weekly discussion thread.

☭ Matrix homeserver and space
☭ Theory discussion group on /c/theory@lemmygrad.ml
☭ Find theory on ProleWiki, marxists.org, Anna's Archive, libgen

If you have money to spare, consider supporting Lemmy development

Hello comrades,

I have started a new project to counter CIA propaganda about the DPRK and PRC. I was planning on just publishing it as a book but I decided instead to release it as I go, chapter by chapter, in the form of a podcast and substack article. Once all episodes are released I'll publish the whole thing as an ebook and print book.

The first episode is about democracy, and covers liberal 'democracy' in America, Tiananmen Square, and the Korean War. I also explain how democratic centralism and the electoral systems in the DPRK and PRC work.

Episode two will come out in a couple weeks and will be about propaganda.

Let me know what you think. Releasing it piece by piece is also a good way to get feedback as I go.

You can find the Youtube version or other podcast platforms linked in the substack article.

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/7779595

Surprisingly enough, a famous Soviet spacecraft from Venus to Earth!

Action, meet Consequences

Proxy wars are shaping the 21st century — Ukraine, #Gaza, #Lebanon, Taiwan — all are battlegrounds for larger powers.

Context:TIk history used to be a ww2 history channel who gradually slid into Libertarian lunacy. In one video on British logistics he said it'd be better if soldiers bought their own equipment and competed for resources like ammo and such. I reccomended Fredda's video on him

I mean, I don't really hate Lincoln. WEB Du Bois seemed to have a fair respecr for him. But still, not as good as some others

(Also I used to fucking like ataturk goddamn why does turkey suck so much I tried so hard to like them. [It's still Istanbul though {cause it's nobodies business except the turks}])

(Also Also it's robespierre behind the W there.)

Wang Jingxi, hero of labor, at the Daqing oil field

Following Estonia's declaration of independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, the country engaged in a fast-paced neoliberal transition to secure its alliance with the West. Simultaneously, the newly independent state decided to exclude the 500,000 Soviet migrants living in Estonia from its citizenry, thereby making a third of its population stateless. The aim of this article is to explore how the three political projects of independent Estonia – that is, creating and maintaining the ethnonationalist citizenship regime, the country's neoliberal transition and Estonia's Westward integration through a “Return to Europe” – have converged, mutually reinforced each other, and become irrevocably intertwined. To this end, the article traces the historical, material and discursive production of statelessness in Estonia. The initial exclusion of Soviet migrants from citizenship was justified on the basis of “restoring” Estonia to its pre-USSR demographic composition. While many left, those who stayed have been treated as a disposable population and face a disproportionally high incarceration rate. This article contributes to the literature on the intersections between ethnonationalism and neoliberalism by demonstrating how the continued mistreatment of the stateless in Estonia has been justified through neoliberal rationality, which casts the domain of the political into an economic register through the valorisation of individual responsibility. We further show how the emergence of neoliberalism has been linked with Orientalist narratives that simultaneously framed the country's economic reforms and ethnonationalist citizenship regime. As such, the Estonian post-independence experience demonstrates how neoliberalism is inherently compatible with ethnonationalist policies, especially when mediated through Orientalist logics.

• Karl Patrick Norberg writes in 2023, King's College London.

death to 🇺🇸 as always

I keep having them reccomended to me and wanted to know if any likeminded people here have had any interaction with them, especially her one about gender. I'm sure she's a liberal but is her work still any good? (Also how much about math do I need to know to actually understand her works, or not be duped by Gell-mann amnesia)?

Everyone here knows the Parenti quote referenced in the title by now.

"During the Cold War, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence."

That is to say, if the Soviet Union does something bad, that's bad. If the Soviet Union does something good, that's also bad. "Communism is evil" is an implicit truism Americans and westerners carry with them everywhere.

Parenti was writing for the audience of late 20th century America, before the maturation of the internet. Now, in the 21st century, we still see this thinking (or lack thereof) applied against the PRC, the DPRK, Cuba, and even modern Russia. Even so, it has changed with the times and the media technology available.

For most of the 20th century, there was a relative dearth of information. You only got your news from television broadcast or even radio if not newspaper, meaning geography and language constituted a significant limitation to the information you could even theoretically receive. There are no such barriers anymore. The world wide web lives up to its name, and google will translate anything for you with the click of a button. Forums also allow distant people who would have never met thirty years ago to talk to each other in real time about subjects never discussed in a person-to-person setting, often with a metaphorical crowd of onlookers. Now, there's too much information to make sense of, too many different perspectives, coming from everywhere.

This makes control of information by governments, corporations and police forces extremely difficult. For every person decrying the barbarity of Hamas, the five genocides conducted simultaneously by the evil Chinese Commie Party, Putin's unprompted aggression in Ukraine, etc, there are naysayers in the comments, alternative media outlets contesting these claims, "Russian trolls" in your twitter feed, and so on. Twentieth-century unfalsifiable orthodoxy requires a set of shared data to act upon. Now, we don't have that.

So you want to demonize the Chinese communists, but it's increasingly difficult to persuade anyone of anything, at least consistently. You can trick HBO viewers into buying into Uighur genocide as quickly as they bought HBO, sure, but what about all the people who aren't idiots? In my observations, "unfalsifiable orthodoxy" now resembles splattering paint over a canvas randomly and seeing what emerges from the chaos. It relies less on objective events and more on the preexisting anticommunism embedded in the American political consciousness, and the possibility of something bad happening rather than the possibility of something that happened being bad.

I once argued with a redditor while browsing a gardening subreddit. Someone made a post claiming they were shipped "mysterious" seeds of unknown species, package said they were from China, didn't remember ordering them. Said redditor posted a comment, claiming it was a Chinese bioweapon designed to destroy the Usonian ecosystem. I asked him to give evidence, and they cited the police response to the then-recent Hong Kong riots.

Bill Maher, a couple months back, called China "the new Islam," saying "the left" "couldn't be honest about them." He went on to claim that Covid-19 was a bioweapon cooked up in a lab. Evidence? "China does some bad things!"

It is not anymore "USSR bad, therefore the thing they did (objectively) was bad in some way." It is now "China bad, therefore China did something bad. If there's no evidence of anything happening, it's being hidden." This bad thing that China did can itself become evidence of a different bad thing China also did. "What do you mean no Chinese bioweapon? Hong Kong! Uighurs!"

Eventually, it becomes impossible to dissuade someone of any claim about China's atrocities, because it's embedded in a dozen other falsehoods assumed true themselves based on other unproven accusations. It's fractal, identical all the way down forever.

The need for actual data has been conveniently boiled away. China could have performed any act of villainy simply because it seems like the kind of thing they might do. Since they could have, and since it seems like they would do it if they could, they did. What did they do? Something. Anything at all. There are no wrong answers.

So be watchful of people doing this, note it when it happens. I don't know how to stop them from doing it. Sometimes listening to liberals feels like talking to cultists.

May he rest in piss.

Hello and welcome to the Weekly discussion thread, the most honored tradition of our group. Please take a seat, I have plenty of folding chairs to go arround.

• Matrix homeserver and space
  ◦ Theory discussion group now on Lemmygrad
• Find theory on ProleWiki, marxists.org, Anna's Archive, libgen

Named after Choe Hyon, who resisted the fascist Japanese

From the 1950s onward, lobotomy began to be abandoned,[9] first in the Soviet Union,[10] where the procedure immediately garnered extensive criticism and was not widely employed, before being banned in December 1950,[11]

It us said that the Stalin administration's Ws were so numerous that they couldn't keep track of them all. Many of these Ws were lost in transportation, had to be exported or were left rotting in the fields and there was a huge overcapacity of Ws. The Soviet citizens kept begging the government to reduce W production, but the administration paid them no heed.

Ive seen both reccomended as a proper formulation of genuine political economy textbooks that are more than the theoretical writings like Kapital and such. However I wanted to get a second opinion since I don't see these resources talked about that much and I'm unsure if there is a better fit for a more modern audience (me), or how much they overlap/compliment each other.

What I typed up in my original Reddit post:

I'm trying to use pictures and footage in a way that's not copyright infringement. I'm trying to take a note from Hbomberguy here. But of course, that may be impossible, I'm just not sure. Maybe it's a high bar. Do YouTubers often check or give credit in their pictures?

I'm trying make sure I don't get into trouble and remain ethical, take the moral path, so to speak. I have sources, at least. Maybe not full citations, but I talk about my sources in my book reviews. But the pictures and slides confuse me. Is there a way to cite them or do I just take them from Google images or some stock photo and use them? What about screenshoting some?

What about using footage or footage from other YouTubers? Stock footage? Or footage from another YouTube channel, like historical footage or black-and-white footage? Or, say, you wanted to use a gaming stream footage? I'm trying to cover my bases here.

I'm just trying to not get in trouble and remain respectful.

What are the ethics here?

Sorry, dumb questions, I know, but I feel that a clear answer is needed and Reddit gives me answers better than Google searches, though I am using those.

I didn't get as many answers as I would've liked. I'm also looking for resources for stock imagery or footage or music. In addition, anything else I need. Maybe a website with free images? I don't know, but anything I might be missing.

Cheers!

I am looking through Googel and Bing on this topic so I'm still doing my own research; this is just in case I've missed anything.