People want to have it both ways.

Hexbear user checking in to let you all know you rock and have very good comms that I find super informative

Hi comrades,

This winter I intent to dress fully punk. (I love the culture surrounding punk) I have plenty of experience printing my own T-Shirts with stencils, patches etc. But now I want to upgrade my leather and denim jacket with studs, cuz this would look cool af.

No the issue is, that I don't have a lot of money (fuck earning less than minimum wage). So I will have to order studs from Ali Express. I need basic studs.

The question I have now is, what studs would you recommend, and how many. I wanna play around a bit and make cool things.

The picture is my current denim jacket. It looks way cooler opened

There is this youtube channel called "rational animation" that is full of libaral brainrot. This one video being a prime example.

The ousing liberalism and idealism in this channel has been bothering me for a while and I've been wanting to ask your opinions and criticisms of it.

So, Leftypol supposedly had a hard drive crash, but on Getchan, the admins admitted that Moffintosh (Moffin'?) was Zankaria (board developer).

As far as I'm concerned, Leftypol was a glowtrap the entire time. (There are rumors about lemmygrad as well, but tbh, Moffin actively tried to force a pro-NATO / anti-Chinese and anti-Russian point of view with what seemed to have been NAFO.

https://getchan.net/GET/res/103743.html#103800

Ultimately, I have some ideas for alternatives, but I'm not yet able to permanently cut ties with the West, so I can't implement yet.

The biggest trick the bourgeoisie pull on the working class is convincing the working class that it doesn't exist.

The second biggest trick the bourgeoisie pull is convincing us that everything we make, all the culture we do, all the progress we make, is somehow owned by them.

Even many of us fall victim to this thinking. But, just because capitalism now has to pay lip service to feminism, native struggles, queer identity, and oppressed nationalities does not mean we have lost.

They have convinced some of us, and we often convince ourselves, that once the ruling class start paying lip service to our struggle and use our language that the struggle is lost. They said this in the Roman Empire.

The Roman Empire was convinced that the contradictions both internal and external would relax and that they could simply make all the barbarians Roman. The Empire would last forever because any rebels could be co-opted and made into Romans. But one day Alaric the Goth did not get a military promotion and the Western half of the Empire fell forever.

Do not let capitalism tell you that because it bottles up your identity to sell it back to you that you've lost.

Also, what is the evidence that the War in Donbass was an act of genocide on the part of Ukraine, and that Ukraine had provoked Russia? Once again, I am asking in good faith, I am merely looking for the truth.

I know what critical means in critical support, but I'm curious what Russia's motivations are here if true.

Telgraph claiming this: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/07/04/taliban-trusted-ally-against-terrorists-putin/

I've decided to abandon the culture war entirely because it's just insanity. We've now hit a point where we're arguing pasteurized milk - yes, milk that was boiled and filtered several times - is healthier than potentially contaminated milk.

Thoughts on this book?

Thoughts on The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit?

I might watch The Rings of Power but I've heard mixed things on it. What do you all think of it?

Mostly though: I'm hoping that some people here can expand on what I'm reading so far.

'Cause honestly, I do like what I'm reading, I do, and that's because I genuinely like the mythological tone that the world-building takes. And Numenor as an "Atlantis" is a fine way to do things, but honestly, I doubt they'll be able to do much with it in whatever Amazon property they decide to make of it (which, I mean, is fine). I wonder if there are other shows or serials besides The Rings of Power that are coming out? Either way: I really like the beginning and how everything started with music and song.

Your thoughts?

• Gang of Four - Entertainment!
• Gang of Four - songs of the free
• Tilt - Self titled
• B.G.S. - SOLO
• Slowdive - Pygmalion
• Slowdive - Souvlaki
• Молчат Дома - Этажи
• Молчат Дома - С Крыши Наших
• Chernikovskaya Hata - Randevu EP
• The Ocean Blue - Curelean
• The Ocean Blue - Self Titled

I might post links to the albums later.

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/5599990

A new browser with a "new engine" apparently ("that being chromium, gecko and webkit" according to one comment).

Your overall thoughts on it? The video is less than 20 minutes so far. Looks 'ight so far too, afaik. But I'm no expert.

Belgium is working towards new laws regarding sex work, making the workers eligeble for pensions, healthcare plans, contracts and overall more legal status. This was done in corporation with sex workers, orgs surrounding sex work and my place of work, the Union.

Now, I worked with former sex workers and human trafficking victims myself and I am aware of their struggles. I am not going to outright deny their right to fight for improvement.

What bugs me is the normalization of an industry that is heavily, and I mean very heavily, infested with human rights abuses. For every one empowered sexworker there are a thousand human trafficking victims. Giving them a pension is not helping in the slightest.

And then there is the whole thing of tying things like unemployment benefits to you wanting to look for work. Here in Belgium your benefits can be cut as soon as you refuse a job that is offered to you through government instances. What if we further legitimize sex work and you refuse a sex worker position? There have been caes already of the instances offering unemployed actresses porn jobs, so why not offer them sex workers contracts? And why not cut their benefits of they refuse a fitting job? Right?

And everyone is so happy about it. As if the whole industry is one collective of happy people doing a fun job instead of the horror it is.

Sorry for ranting but fuck me what a mess

like the title says.

it’s for the last week so got a bit until then. covers science and racial capitalism. really loving the course rn.

also i talked about marx w base/superstructure and the prof loved that!

just some unstructured thoughts. very happy so wanted to share

I'm trying to figure out what to think or do here. This may be just a vent.

I have three friends, each opposed to Marxism-Leninism. Two of them live in Russia and one of them is from a family that immigrated to America from China, and has been to China. They each hold negative views of China, Russia, and the USSR. My Chinese friend and one of my Russian friends are anarchists. My other Russian friend is an authcom, but not a "tankie" or "Stalinist". They're each queer and disabled as I am, and I would sell my life for any and all of them (which means less than it sounds, I'm not confident that I may live much longer). I, however, am a white American who has never left my continent. To them, I'd be a westen tankie, and I've heard a couple of other Russians complain about "western tankies" before.

It got me thinking if they think that we, in the US, practice our own form of "American Exceptionalism" by talking about our country as though it's worse than all others, including the ones wronging them. I put "American Exceptionalism" in quotes because the fact that the US is the worst country by a large margin isn't up for debate. I just wonder if we have some sort of privilege. That critically supporting a place like Russia comes easier to us because we don't live in it, as two of my friends do. Do I tell them that they must support their queerphobic country against us? It's the right move, yes. Easy for me to say. But convincing them of that is something I can't attempt without risk to their mental health.

The first, the anarchist, supports Ukraine and believes that Putin is targeting it out of a power-hungry desire for expansion. They believe they may have lost a friend in Kiev. While I worry about their own safety every day. We're both on social security, yet I'm not sure how long mine will last or the country sustaining it, meanwhile Russia's swelling public sector probably means good thing for those on social security there. The point is, I don't think I'm in any position to talk to them about this.

Both Russians harbor hatred against what they call the "genocidal regime", the USSR, because their ancestors faced antisemitism from Soviet officials, which seems to have occurred. I could tell them that antisemitism was everywhere, but it'd feel like a slap in the face. I was never the victim of it. I don't doubt I could know more about the USSR and the actual policies than they do much like someone from South Africa who studies Canadian history could know more about the subject than an average resident of Canada or how a doctor may know more about my body than I do, but I'm from the country where people expect us to barge in and tell foreigners what's actually what and how things work.

My Chinese friend... they're abused by their mother, whom they call a Chinese Nationalist. The thing is, my friend condemns the Uyghur genocide and those who deny it exists. Including their mother. ...When I was very young, I believed in Santa Claus. My highly abusive dad didn't. He was right on this issue, and I was wrong. Sometimes it's like that. But being a progressive and accepting that your abuser is correct on a vital issue that you were dead certain of is a bitter pill to swallow.

We must oppose relativism. In the UK, at least at one point, Marxist parties rejected trans people like myself, while anarchist and social democratic groups were more welcoming. That doesn't mean, by any means, that the latter groups had better positions on economics or class than the former. But what would I say back then to a fellow trans individual who had faced abuse from Marxists?

I messaged someone about this before and they said the best thing I could do would be to perhaps leave well enough alone. Converting isn't my job. There are plenty of MLs in the global south perhaps better equipped to handle anarchists in the global south than I. But whenever they insult "tankies", they insult those in the global south who principally oppose the US and it makes me sad. And it sucks because they're very dear friends to me. So I'm in an awkward position. Has anyone else been in such a position before? There was a post before about someone with a classmate from China who believed US propaganda.

Her teachers are having the kids read (at least a portion of) "An Indigenous People's History of the United States."

I was dumbfounded when she told me this because I've heard all the disappointing things my kids have been taught through the years. This is an eighth grade middle school US history class being taught in the US and this book isn't in the official state curriculum. When my oldest went through this grade, she was never given this assignment, so it also seems to be a new change.

After my 8th grader and I had talked about her being disappointed in her class so far and wanting to know more about the interesting parts of US history, I'd planned to get this book and Zinn's "A People's History of the United States" for her to read.

Seems like the teachers were ahead of me this time. What a pleasant change of pace! I'll have to thank the two teachers responsible for this curriculum.

I am switching from Jerboa for a couple of reasons:

1. I can't see up votes and downvotes.
2. O can't make communities over here

"Comrades, come rally! The last fight let us face! The Internationale unites the human race!"

Comrades, after a bit of digestion, I think this should be promulgated and publicized, if at least for discussion purposes.

The international Communist movement is not in good shape. We are facing the combined crisis of failed revolutions, liberal subversion, aging parties, and mounting fascism, and traditional Communist praxis no longer offers a solution to the need for a global socialist revolution.

To solve these crises, I introduce the notion of Dengist revolution and Communist Zaibatsu as a solution, using Party-owned industrial cooperatives as a mechanism for global Communist subversion, with the end goal of abolishing capitalism simply by out-competing the capitalists and ultimately buying them out.

As for replacement Praxis, I suggest embracing Stakhanovitism, looking to encourage existing Communist parties to go into business, as well as for new start-ups to seek a worker cooperative model and aim to be party-owned.

Examples to learn from would be the Japanese Communist Party's influential newspaper, which earns the JCP 110 million USD a year, Mondragon, a European industrial cooperative with more than 60,000 workers, Haier, a Chinese SOE known for its radical organizational structure and exceptional growth, and Huawei, technically a worker's cooperative but generally so successful that the United States levied sanctions on it.

Here are the problems of existing Communist praxis.

The Soviet Union has fallen, and the Chinese have gone Dengist. There is no longer a serious and viable base of Actually Existing Socialism to support, nor can the Soviets continue to fund foreign Communist Parties.

Consequently, Communist parties are no longer vibrant and powerful in much of the world. Worker's revolution simply does not succeed; most parties are in incipient stages globally, and are essentially doomed to stillbirth.

Illegal action, as with the Japanese Red Army, or the Japanese Red Army faction may make the news for a couple of years, but the forces of reaction generally track down the members, then jail or kill them.

Unionizing action, in much of the world, simply does not get that far, and it can easily be subverted by social democracy increasing government subsidies and protections to workers.

The electoral strategy does not work. The actual Communist Parties with electoral dominance got their way through an insurgency (the Nepalese), or simply by being there after the fall of the Soviet Union (the Mongolians).

The Japanese Communist Party, as an example, is graying and aging, and its representation in the Japanese Diet is on a long-term decline.

The remaining two options are either to wait for the downfall of capitalism on its own accord (late-stage capitalism theory), or to hope the Chinese somehow bail Communism out.

The problem with the former option is that due to bourgeois control of bourgeois democracy, the degeneration of capitalism sees the rise of far-right parties (as in France, Germany, Italy), right-wing populists (the United States), and the terminal stage of capitalism is fascism, which often does a good job of suppressing Communist movements.

Praying to the Communist Party of China is fraught with its own risks. First, the Communist Party of China may not succeed. There are Western rumors that they managed to subvert the Chinese defense minister, there is strong Sinophobia in the West, the Chinese state and corporate sector is saddled with high levels of debt (around 120% of GDP in each, whereas 100% usually sets off alarm bells in capitalist democracies), and the Chinese are threatened by the most powerful and advanced military force on the planet.

Second, there is no guarantee that the CPC will bail you out. While the CPC claims to be Marxist, it has already embraced capitalism in the sense of Dengist reforms, and it's always had nationalist memetics.

Even if the Chinese win, you are not guaranteed that the Chinese, seeing the wreck of the West, won't behave in the same way as the Americans did to the fallen Soviet Union, and through malign neglect, allow the West to fester in fascism.

If the Chinese aren't guaranteed to save us from capitalism, what options do we still have?

Here is where I introduce the concept of Communist Zaibatsu and the Dengist Revolution, exhorting Western and international Communist parties to follow the CPC's lead in developing a modern, competitive, and powerful Communist nation-state.

The incredible thing is, you don't even need to seize the means of production, whether electorally or through other means.

To begin with, one oft-overlooked fact is how ridiculously rich the CPC is. The total level of assets managed by the Chinese central government and the localities is around the level of 40 trillion USD.

You heard right, the Communist Party of China owns 40 trillion dollars worth of stocks and companies.

The richest Communist Party in the West, the Japanese Communist Party, owns only 1.1 billion worth of companies, mainly its newspaper.

The total market capitalization of the New York Stock Exchange is only about 45 trillion. The total net wealth of all of America, haute bourgeoisie, petites, and workers alike, comes up to 120 trillion.

What I am exhorting you to do, then, is to make your own Communist parties rich. The essence of Dengist revolution, as opposed to Maoist (Protracted People's War) and Leninist (a coup against a weakened moderate state), is to control the means of production through capitalist mechanisms.

That is to say, if the wealth of Communist Parties in the West were a substantial percentage of total privately held wealth, Communist Parties could employ the exact same means bourgeois individuals and entities use to influence the levers of power.

This would allow Communist Parties to gradually manipulate the political system to favor their own firms, allowing further expansion of the co-op / party-owned enterprise model, with a goal of eventually just buying out some of the remaining capitalists and abolishing the rest.

The goal is that in 20 years, the POE sector of various Western countries comprises 1% of total production, in 30 years, 10%, and in 40 years, we will have abolished capitalism from the inside.

What then, are the means?

partial post (will get back to this later, but:

-Generate worker cooperatives that are substantially party owned to outcompete existing capitalist firms

-Most of the details would be in how to obtain market advantage and start outcompeting Porky

-As well as keeping the firms Marxist, where "unfair labor practices" are acceptable, where they are not

-How to design a socialist economy inside of a capitalist one

-How much it would cost for Communist parties to attempt such a project, what potential funding sources may be, etc

-Actual praxis of existing Communist workers)

Guess after that Viral 'Incident' he become Irrelevant and Forgotten By Everyone Today Lol, Good FUCKING Riddance.

EDIT : i am Terribly Sorry for posting that Pedo Pfp, I Didn't Meant to ruin Your eyes. I replace that with a Soyjak instead. Forgive me

Disclaimer: This may read bleak, but I'm not in a bleak state of mind. I will post a comment with my thought process behind it.

The Anti-Science Infantilization of the Modern Tech World

You get up and read the news. Halfway across the world are things happening you have no control over and if you put yourself out there and protest it, you get told to stop speaking when a politician is speaking.

You go on a job website and submit an application, but you may not ever receive a rejection and if you do, you will likely receive no information on why your application was rejected and some other person's wasn't. Was it something you did? Was it nothing you did? You don't know.

You go on a dating app and try to match with people. If you're a man, you probably send out a lot of likes or messages that never get a response. Does your profile suck? Are you sending poor messages? You don't know. Maybe they're never getting seen in the first place. If you're a woman, you probably receive more likes and messages than you know what to do with and a lot of them are mean and objectifying. You did nothing to provoke this other than existing as a woman and no matter what you do on there, it keeps happening.

You go to the grocery store to get food to live on, but some product you used has been discontinued again. You have no idea why and have to figure out a replacement. Furthermore, some product whose prices you relied on as stable have gone drastically up. Meanwhile, you're being told the economy is doing well. No one ever consults you on any of these things or tells you why it's really happening. They just say it's inevitable and your lot in life. In fact, they may say it's for your own good.

You go to use your favorite product and it got a major update. A bunch of features you were relying on have changed. They say it's a better product this way and you should get used to it.

You hear on the news that it'll be time to vote again soon. This is the one time, around every four years, that they say your decisions and your opinions matter. And they're telling you that this time, like the last times, it's the most important decision, possibly ever. Where with everything else, you were told to deal with being helpless to the fate of opaque systems you're not allowed to understand or weigh in on, you're now being told it all comes down to you. You drum up some sense of duty in you and you go do it. It's done. You did your part. The results come out and things go back to being as they were before.

You get up and read the news. Halfway across the world are things happening you have no control over and if you put yourself out there and protest it, you get told to stop speaking when a politician is speaking.

You are discouraged from using scientific process and thought to navigate the world. Everywhere you turn, the mechanisms you're up against are hidden from you. Instead, you are told to use willpower, told to use attitude, told to think differently, and eventually the universe will come together for you. Meanwhile, the machine of exploitation turns on scientifically designed wheels. The overseers of colonization, the overseers of the global capitalist empire, use science to exploit and place layers of indirection upon the process so you can't see it.

You look in the mirror. You can only see yourself anymore. They'll give you a mirror so you can focus more on yourself. You see a failure looking back, a helpless abject figure. They tell you to blame yourself. You try to work on yourself to love yourself more and build yourself up, but you keep hitting invisible walls. No matter what you try to do differently, you're flying blind. And that too, they say, is your fault. It always comes back to you and can never be them.

They can take away every limb, deprive every sense you have, and still they will tell you it's your fault. A failure of willpower and attitude.

Portugal had its revolt against fascist Salazar in 1974. But how good are they doing, with the advent of the Chega party?

Title

I saw an ad for the RCA (revolutionary communists of America) on TikTok. What are they? From what I can gather on the mobile site, they do recommend readings from Marx and Lenin, but also from Trotsky, so what are they exactly?

Nothing like having the local monopoly cut your electricity, charge your household with YOUNG children an extra 400 dollars because of random, variable "back-charges" and "late-fees" because we didn't pay at SIX O FUCKING CLOCK IN THE MORNING ON THE DAY IT'S DUE AND WE HAVEN'T EVEN GOT OUR FUCKING DIRECT DEPOSIT YET.

(we get paid on the same day and they randomly decided to shut our electricity off earlier than usual despite normal payments; payment date changes from 30-31st sometimes and same with our checks.)

Of course, we asked for an extension two days before, just for ONE FUCKING DAY. They agreed! Guess they fucking forgot! Or they don't give a fuck!

Fuck these god damn fucking ghouls. Faceless, skinless walking pieces of soulless flesh that suck the resources out of every man, woman and child. They are fucking worth absolutely FUCK-ALL to this god damn world.

OH AND I HAD TO WAIT 43 HOURS FOR MY FUCKING POWER TO BE TURNED BACK ON. FUCK THESE GHOULS. MY ENTIRE FUCKING FRIDGE SPOILED.