gonna be posting a bunch of quotes in this thread that I want to preserve. you are welcome to post critiques of a given pasta, just remember I don't 100% agree with all of these (only most) but consider them information worth saving. proposed edits will be considered
CONTENT WARNING: there's going to be mentions of imperial atrocities in here, including SA and torture.
As we say on the show over and over again the atomic unit of propaganda is not lies, it's emphasis.
Citations Needed Ep 113: Hollywood and Anti-Muslim Racism (Part I) — Action and Adventure Schlock
in 2016 before the Xinjiang disinformation campaign, western media was praising France for their new program of sending muslims to "deradicalization centers": https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/france-to-open-first-of-12-deradicalization-centers-for-at-risk-youths/2016/09/14/d596d7fe-7a78-11e6-8064-c1ddc8a724bb_story.html [archive]
it was a big failure by the fall of 2017: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/09/france-jihad-deradicalization-macron/540699/
another article on it: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/france-fights-terror-with-re-education-camps-plan-7wg9vrrgd
"I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn, the more you kill and burn the better it will please me. I want all persons killed who are capable of bearing arms in actual hostilities against the United States," General Jacob H. Smith said.
Since it was a popular belief among the Americans serving in the Philippines that native males were born with bolos in their hands, Major Littleton "Tony" Waller asked, "I would like to know the limit of age to respect, sir."
"Ten years", Smith said.
"Persons of ten years and older are those designated as being capable of bearing arms?"
"Yes." Smith confirmed his instructions a second time.
The reason we “defend authoritarian dictators” is because we want to defend the accomplishments of really existing socialism, and other people’s false or exaggerated beliefs about those “dictators” almost always get in the way — it’s not tankies but normies who commit the synecdoche of reducing all of really existing socialism to Stalin and Mao. Those accomplishments include raising standards of living, achieving unprecedented income equality, massive gains in women’s rights and the position of women vis-a-vis men, defeating the Nazis, raising life expectancy, ending illiteracy, putting an end to periodic famines, inspiring and providing material aid to decolonizing movements (e.g. Vietnam, China, South Africa, Burkina Faso, Indonesia), which scared the West into conceding civil rights and the welfare state. These were greater strides in the direction of abolishing capitalism than any other society has ever made. These are the gains that are so important to insist on, against the CIA/Trotskyist/ultraleft consensus that the Soviet Union was basically an evil empire and Stalin a deranged butcher.
There's an interesting one [detail] that we saw very recently in a secret report from the State Department. I want to tell you about this one so you can reflect on it. That secret report made this point: That Grenada is different than Cuba and Nicaragua, and the Grenada revolution is, in one sense, “even worse,” using their language “than the Cuban and Nicaraguan revolutions, because the people of Grenada and the leadership of Grenada speak English, and therefore can communicate directly with the people of the United States.”
I can see from your applause, sisters and brothers, that you agree with the report, but I want to tell you what that same report also said. It said: “That [this] also makes us [Grenada] very dangerous. The people of Grenada and the leadership of Grenada are predominantly black.” They said that “95% of our [Grenada’s] population is black.” and they have correct statistics. And if we have 95% of predominantly African origin of our country, then “we can have a dangerous appeal to 30,000,000 black people in the United States.”
—Maurice Bishop Speaks, 29m30s
(cw: sectarianism)
Anarchists like to put themselves on the same side as socialists, yet anarchism is fundamentally is not a socialist ideology. Socialism is based on the socialization of production, which is something anarchists reject. They are very individualist and view society as oppressive to the individual and want to break up society into small independent units.
A wide gulf separates socialism from anarchism, and it is in vain that the agents-provocateurs of the secret police and the news paper lackeys of reactionary governments pretend that this gulf does not exist. The philosophy of the anarchists is bourgeois philosophy turned inside out. Their individualistic theories and their individualistic ideal are the very opposite of socialism. Their views express, not the future of bourgeois society, which is striding with irresistible force towards the socialisation of labour, but the present and even the past of that society, the domination of blind chance over the scattered and isolated small, producer.
—Vladimir Lenin, Socialism and Anarchism
Anarchists are more concerned with morality than actual concrete reality. They have the liberal mindset that the political and economic system is merely a reflection of the beliefs and ideas of that society and has no connection to the society's material conditions, and therefore to change a political or economic system, all that is necessary is changing people's ideas.
Because of this, they think building a utopia merely requires imagining that utopia in your head and convincing everyone else of it, and by extension, any country that has failed to achieve a utopia has only done so due to a moral failing on their part. They think the reason every single socialist experiment failed to achieve some imagined utopia is because of moral corruption, that the leadership was just evil and immoral.
They extend this idea not to just the leaders of those countries, but anyone who supports those countries. If you defend any actually-existing socialist country, they will assume you must only do so because you are morally inferior, they will accuse you of being an "evil tankie" and whatever other insult they can imagine to try and attack your character, rather than your arguments, because in their mind, they don't believe you believe what you believe due to good arguments. They believe you believe what you believe due to a moral failing.
Let's stop talking in generalities and take a look at a very concrete example: economics. Going back to Smith's LTV, we understand how capitalist economies are capable of, to some degree, balancing resources to convert the supply into the goods and services demanded, and how market pressures push companies into buying and selling roughly at cost of production. A planned economy can also balance resources because, in principle, they would have access to the information and computational power needed to directly calculate costs of production and allocate resources efficiently to achieve similar, and with sufficient infrastructure and technology, even better, results.
Many anarchists will propose some economic system outside of markets and economic planning, what they call the "gift economy". They don't propose this system because they arrived at it objectively through a rigorous analysis of the development of capitalism as Marxists arrive at their understanding, no, they propose it because it sounds morally good to them.
The problem is, a gift economy fundamentally has no way to balance resources. If I could take whatever I want without expectation of returning sufficient materials, you would inevitably have huge shortages in the economy.
Shortages are avoided in market systems by requiring direct recuperation of cost upon consumption (payment), while centrally planned systems may recuperate cost immediately, but since they are centrally planned, resources from one sector can be allocated towards another, i.e. health care could be provided free at the point of service but funded by another sector of the economy, and it would balance out, because planning is centralized and able to do such a thing.
A gift economy lacks both of these features. It has no planning capabilities nor any market capabilities to regulate consumption of resources. It's not that economic calculation can't be done, it's that in a gift economy, economic calculation never even takes place. Once you begin to introduce any sort of mechanism for economic calculation, you inevitably end up with either a market system or a planned economy. The only way economic calculation could be done away with entirely is if we had a post-scarcity society, i.e. the conditions to achieve full communism, which obviously doesn't exist.
Of course, this is just one example. Anarchists believe in many things and not all believe in gift economies, but it's an example of something many anarchists fundamentally believe in purely on moral grounds despite it being nonsense economically.
Anarchism is fundamentally based in decentralization which plenty of Marxists such as Friedrich Engels and Che Guevara already criticized this concept as nonsensical and pointed out how decentralized production is the basis for capitalism and will inevitably return to capitalism.
Anarchism is an incredibly self-contradictory ideology that fundamentally is based in morality without any concerns for concrete reality. It's concerned with trying to force reality to fit into an idealized utopia rather than deriving answers from concrete reality itself. Political and economic systems are not in our heads, they're in the real, material world, and they have to operate and maintain complex social relations and modes of production. You can't build a political and economic system based on morality any more than you can build a smartphone based on morality.
by zhenli真理
Ask an American older than 35 if East Germany was good or bad. Nearly all of them will say "bad"; and if you ask them why, most will probably say "well they shot people trying to cross over the Berlin wall!"
Okay. In the 28 years the wall was up, 140 people were killed trying to cross it. Not great of course, but this is what most Americans give the GDR a blanket indictment for.
For perspective, the CIA blew up a boat in the harbor of Havana that was carrying guns to the Cubans after the revolution. This explosion killed over 100 people. Ask Americans if THAT was ok, and I'm sure they'll justify it with "muh DoMiNo ThEoRy!!!"
Of course there's countless other American actions with much higher body counts, just trying to think of one of a similar to scope to what we indict other countries for.
The constitution only exists as a pretext for the reactionary Supreme Court to strike down any victories achieved by the people who are foolish enough to play the bourgeoisie’s game by the bourgeoisie’s rules. You will notice that, in practice, constitutionality is never an impediment to state oppression, and throughout the vast majority of the constitutional republic’s history the Supreme Court has had no issue shit-canning the limited victories of the people by using the most contrived interpretations of its rather simple language imaginable.
Liberals venerate the Supreme Court because for a very short time in its history it rendered decisions like Brown v. Board and Roe v. Wade, but if you zoom the camera out a little bit, this short period is a clear aberration to the status quo of busting unions, returning slaves to their masters, and permitting the practice of eugenics and internment.
Frederick Douglass, arguing for unity among black and white laborers in 1883, said that “experience teaches us that there may be a slavery of wages only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go down with the other.”
The critique of wage slavery was then taken up by anarchists, socialists, and labor radicals of various stripes, who railed against the capitalist labor market and organized for a multiracial struggle against the owners of capital. Lucy Parsons, born a slave and later a widely known anarchist, declared in one of her most famous speeches:
How many of the wage class, as a class, are there who can avoid obeying the commands of the master (employing) class, as a class? Not many, are there? Then are you not slaves to the money power as much as were the black slaves to the Southern slaveholders? Then we ask you again: What are you going to do about it? You had the ballot then. Could you have voted away black slavery? You know you could not because the slaveholders would not hear of such a thing for the same reason you can’t vote yourselves out of wage-slavery.
from https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/01/wage-slavery-bernie-sanders-labor
Whether a country is a democracy or not depends on whether its people are really the masters of the country. If the people are awakened only for voting but enter a dormant period soon after, if they are given a song and dance during campaigning but have no say after the election, or if they are favored during canvassing but are left out in the cold after the election, such a democracy is not a true democracy.
TBD: determine source of this alternate translation, I believe it is from a press release about the 2021 conference where Xi Jinping gave this speech
Marxism-Leninism can never be legitimized and Stalin can never be seen as a revolutionary hero— this is what all left-anticommunists and intelligence services agree on.
Because Marxism-Leninism has been adaptable and agile enough to build socialism in Russia, Eastern Europe, Cuba, Korea, Vietnam, Laos and China.
This is despite the fact in Russia— where the descendants of the people who lived under Stalin lived— see Stalin as a better figure than Lenin and routinely rate him the best Russian leader and currently have a 70% approval rating of him.
Even today statues of Stalin are going up all over Russia.
Because Lenin died in the mid 1920s after World War, Civil war and all capitalist invasion and then a famine in 1921 was the start of reconstruction of Soviet industry. When Lenin died Russia was still a very miserable and war torn place.
Whereas Stalin led the Soviet Union during Socialist construction which (from the memoirs of working people) was like a groundswell of human liberation and flowering.
The truth is if Lenin had lived instead and made the necessary decisions to ensure Soviet survival (collectivisation, smashing the fifth column in the 1930s) then they'd hate Lenin today as much as they did Stalin because bourgeois propaganda would've been levelled at Lenin instead.
Which is why they pushed the faked "Lenin's Testament" for almost a century. As if Trotsky (a guy that joined the Bolshevik party a few months before the Oct Revolution) was usurped by evil Stalin who stole the Communist crown off Lenin's head.
Instead, of you know, like having a vote on who the leader should be as you would expect in a Communist party and what was done.
It's why Trotsky was hailed as the "true bolshevik" by Hearst press— which was run by a fascist William Randolph Hearst who spent the entire time making shit up about the Soviet Union and providing Goering and Mussolini columns in his newspapers.
credit to u/JoeysStainlessSteel
They plunder, they slaughter, and they steal: this they call empire, and where they make a wasteland, they call it peace.
—Tacitus
This is from a mother whose 14-month-old child was separated from her and from the father. They were reunited after 85 days. She wrote- "The child continued to cry when we got home and would hold on to my leg and would not let me go. When I took off his clothes, he was full of dirt and lice. It seemed like they had not bathed him the 85 days he was away from us."
She went on to say that she had thought, her child being so young, he wouldn't have really significant effects from the separation. But when she was reunited with him, she's worried that now actually he is really feeling and has changed because of the separation.
🌏 👩🏼🚀 🔫 👩🏼🚀 always has been
the American people are simultaneously the most propagandized people on earth, and yet believe themselves to be more immune to propaganda than any other group of people on earth. This monumental achievement of tyranny over the people can be attributed to the privatization of media. By making sure media is packaged under several different "brand names" like Fox, MSNBC, CNN, ABC, AT&T, Viacom, CBS, Walt Disney, etc. it ensures that the consumer of American propaganda believes themselves to be a curator of diverse sources which disagree with each other. But in reality these sources are neither diverse, since they are traceable to a handful of media monpolies which themselves receive a significant bulk of their non-investigative information from the US State Department, nor are they in any disagreement when it comes to the details most useful to American foreign policy and intelligence objectives. They are all state propaganda masquerading as independent media. Conservatives and liberals, imagining themselves to be opposites, vote for a single capitalist party masquerading as two opposition parties, and they drink media from the same trough, only slight hints of biased flavor has been added to satisfy their instincts. Both Fox and MSNBC will engage in pro-war propaganda, but one will do so with a xenophobic and fascist glee, while the other will appeal to the so-called humanitarian instincts of the liberal. Between these two extremes, which are not extremes at all, are a litany of "centrist" outlets that mix fascist glee with pseudo-humanitarianism.
Men vanish from earth leaving behind them the furrows they have ploughed. I see the furrow Lenin left sown with the unshatterable seed of a new life for mankind, and cast deep below the rolling tides of storm and lightning, mighty crops for the ages to reap.
—Helen Keller, The Spirit of Lenin
racism is both capitalism's answer to why oppressed populations experience worse outcomes due to their material conditions and its justification for that oppression. if you ended racism magically without changing the material conditions, class-unconscious people will immediately start searching for an answer to explain those material disparities. if those material disparities benefit them, they will want a racist explanation instead of one that indicts their privilege.
Biological war waged by the US against Cuba
—1962: A US intelligence agent is known to have given several thousand dollars to a Canadian to introduce a disease infecting Cuban sea-turtles.
—1965: A plastic balloon descends on a farm in Santiago de las Vegas. When it hits the ground it expels a white dust that spreads to cane plantation which is later destroyed.
—1968: A foreign specialist working for an international agency is expelled after he is confirmed to have introduced a virus affecting coffee crops.
—1970: The US is caught seeding clouds over Cuba in an attempt to affect the sugar harvest. The project was part of a larger research plan called "The Cooling" which was intended to devise ways of manipulating the weather for political reasons.
—1971: African swine fever is introduced. The Cubans claim that the container transporting the virus came from Fort Gullick, a US military base in the Panama Canal Zone. Those involved in this attack have since testified to their part. The entire pig population of Cuba had to be slaughtered.
—1977: Cane smut is detected in Pilón, eastern Cuba. The disease had never been known in Cuba until this date.
—1978: A previously unknown variety Blue mould hits the sugar crops causing losses of approximately 344 million pesos.
—1978: Sugar cane rust affects a new variety of cane imported from Barbados. As a result 1.35 million tonnes of sugar are lost.
—1979-80: Two different strains of African swine fever are discovered emanating from distinct areas of contamination. 300,00 pigs are slaughtered.
—1981: A previously unknown Bovine skin disease erupts affecting young cows and bullocks throughout the island.
—1981: A sudden outbreak of haemorrhagic dengue fever affects 350,000 people. 158 people, including children, die from the disease. The disease is later discovered to be exactly the same strain of the disease which caused an outbreak in New Guinea in 1924 but no others in the world except the Cuban case. The outbreak had three initial breeding grounds in Cienfuegos and Camagüey, all very close to international air corridors. Just prior to the outbreak it was discovered that the entire personnel at the Guantanamo naval base had been vaccinated against dengue. As a result there was not a single case of the disease in the base.
—1981: Haemorraghic conjunctivitis caused by the Enterovirus 70 strain spreads throughout the island. The Pan American Health Organisation is baffled because this strain had never been seen in the entire hemisphere before.
—1982: The US magazine Covert Action, August 6, 1982, suggests the dengue outbreak might have been a CIA plot.
—1984: Eduardo Arocena, a counter-revolutionary of Cuban origin and head of the Omega-7 terrorist organisation, stands trial in the US accused of the murder of Felix Garcia Rodriguez, a Cuban diplomat to the UN. Arocena confesses to having introduced 'germs' into Cuba as part of the US biological war against Cuba. He affirms that the dengue outbreak was introduced by terrorist groups into the island.
—1984: An outbreak of dysentery causes the death of 18 children in Guantánamo province. Investigators pin down the start of the outbreak to two workers who had participated in a festive activity inside the Guantánamo naval base. The disease was again of a type previously unknown in Cuba.
—1985: An infectious bronchitis poultry virus seriously disrupts egg production.
—1989: Ulcerative mammillitis in dairy cattle caused by a herpes virus spreads throughout the island affecting milk yields.
—1990: Black sigatoka, infects banana plantations throughout the island. Once again the disease had been hitherto unknown on the island. The disease appeared precisely as Cuba began to put plans into action to start intensive banana production.
—1991: Acariasis disease which affects bees is discovered, just as Cuban honey starts to be exported.
—1991: 30,000 tobacco seedlings are discovered to be 15 per cent infected with fusorio which once in the soil means tobacco production has to be halted for three years.
—1992: Black plant louse which carries a citrus disease known as tristeza (sadness) is discovered.
—1994: Citric sapper blight is found in Pinar del Rio and Camagüey.
—1993: 122,135 rabbits have to be slaughtered after an outbreak of a viral disease.
—1995: February 10. A camera case in the luggage of a visiting US scientist is found to contain four small test tubes of a biological substance. On examination it is discovered to be the citric tristeza virus.
—1995: Coffee borer discovered in Granma province. Losses of 80 per cent were attributed to it and considerable resources had to be spent on containing it.
—1996: Varroasis, another bee disease is diagnosed in three apiaries in Matanzas. Previously unknown in Cuba, this disease is the worst of all affecting honey production.
—1996: Thrips Palmi attack in Matanzas by State Department plane.
—2018: New Dengue Fever epidemic in Cuba
Bullshit dude, bullshit. I once ate a tray of 24 assorted muffins: blueberry, lemon poppy-seed, cranberry apple, banana nut, even bran. Large muffins too, like you'd buy at the bakery, not grocery store mini-muffins. I ate the first five or six out of hunger, and the next dozen I can only attribute to gluttony, but the last half dozen were devoured by determination alone. A part of me wanted to stop— I was full, the muffins had become repulsive, and there was a disconcerting pressure in my chest. The other, stronger part of me knew that if I gave up on that muffin platter I would admit limitation. A limited man can rationalize his every weakness, turn away from every challenge, live his life within the narrow confines of comfort; that's not how I live my life. But I digress. It took six days for my bowels to move, and when they did I shat a monolithic muffin block so wide it could not be flushed, so dense it would not dissolve with repeated flushing, and so heavy it took two hands to lift. The measure of anxiety, pain, pride and love is indescribable, so don't tell me I don't understand childbirth.
WILL: By the way, Bret Stephens was once on stage at a synagogue in New York City at some big sponsored event, uh, I forget... probably some institution that he works for as a fellow for, where they interviewed Sheldon Adelson on stage, and Sheldon Adelson said— on stage— that we should preemptively nuke Iran! They said like "well, wouldn't that be a massive war crime?"— of course Bret Stephens didn't say that, he clammed up real fucking quick. He didn't say shit... and Sheldon Adelson said "well, just bomb the desert as a warning. No one lives there."
FELIX: <laughing> Oh my god, what a great country.
MATT: There's nothing like a warning shot of massive radiation just going into your fucking town.
WILL: Stephens sat there like a mute and said nothing, because guess what— he agrees with him!
MATT: Of course. The only thing that's good about Sheldon Adelson and his horrible influence on politics, is that— when I want to feel better about how horrible everything is, I just think back to 2016, and I just think of how many sponge baths Ted Cruz gave him. Thinking the whole time, "it's worth it, you're gonna be president." Getting under the crevices, getting under the tit meat, thinking "it's gonna be ok, you're gonna be president". Going under those gargoyle-taloned feet of his, going between each one with the sponge, and thinking "you're gonna be president, this is all gonna be fine when you're taking that fucking oath of office."
FELIX: Don't you love when you're giving Sheldon Adelson a bath and like a— you know, make sort of an oval between your index finger and your thumb— uhh, a flake of skin that size comes off, and his wife looks at you, and without saying anything you know that she wants you to eat it like a chip?
MATT: Just the moment when you're spit-shining a mole the size of a hubcap, and thinking about being president.
FELIX: I love when you're washing his big mole and you scrub hard enough that you see eyes and a mouth come out, and it looks at you and it says "Jerusalem is the capital."
First we must study how colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism; and we must show that each time a head is cut off or an eye put out in Vietnam and in France they accept the fact, each time a little girl is raped and in France they accept the fact, each time a Madagascan is tortured and in France they accept the fact, civilization acquires another dead weight, a universal regression takes place, a gangrene sets in, a center of infection begins to spread; and that at the end of all these treaties that have been violated, all these lies that have been propagated, all these punitive expeditions that have been tolerated, all these prisoners who have been tied up and interrogated, all these patriots who have been tortured, at the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged, all the boastfulness that has been displayed, a poison has been instilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but surely, the continent proceeds toward savagery.
And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific reverse shock: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers around the racks invent, refine, discuss.
People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: “How strange! But never mind— it’s Nazism, it will pass!” And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, but the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack.
Yes, it would be worthwhile to study clinically, in detail, the steps taken by Hitler and Hitlerism and to reveal to the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century that without his being aware of it, he has a Hitler inside him, that Hitler inhabits him, that Hitler is his demon, that if he rails against him, he is being inconsistent and that, at bottom, what he cannot forgive Hitler for is not crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the 'coolies' of India, and the 'n***ers' of Africa.
And that is the great thing I hold against pseudo-humanism: that for too long it has diminished the rights of man, that its concept of those rights has been— and still is— narrow and fragmentary, incomplete and biased and, all things considered, sordidly racist.
I have talked a good deal about Hitler. Because he deserves it: he makes it possible to see things on a large scale and to grasp the fact that capitalist society, at its present stage, is incapable of establishing a concept of the rights of all men, just as it has proved incapable of establishing a system of individual ethics. Whether one likes it or not, at the end of the blind alley that is Europe, I mean the Europe of Adenauer, Schuman, Bidault, and a few others, there is Hitler. At the end of capitalism, which is eager to outlive its day, there is Hitler. At the end of formal humanism and philosophic renunciation, there is Hitler.
—Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism
On a level plain, simple mounds look like hills; and the insipid flatness of our present bourgeoisie is to be measured by the altitude of its great intellects.
spoiler
directed against John Stuart Mill, the English philosopher and social reformer, in Das Kapital, Vol. 1, Chap. 16 (1867), after having demolished one of Mill's arguments
boycotts are a useful tool in concert with an organized political movement (like BDS or a union of striking workers) but can be ultimately counterproductive on their own:
In short, a strong belief that ethical consumption will lead to ethical practices is not warranted – purchasing as voting is a weak feedback mechanism at best and there are other actors who are able to influence the system. The danger, however, comes in believing that this mechanism can make substantial political change. Ethical consumption gives the individual the illusion of contributing to progress; of “doing their part” by making purchasing decisions. This illusion can detract, and probably has detracted, from trying to put forward an avowedly political agenda that seeks to mobilise people collectively to make the changes they support. Instead, it individualises ethics, it individualises politics and it reaffirms us as consumers rather than citizens – it is a part of the profit-maximising, pathologically-externalising neoliberal market system that has caused many of the problems ethical consumerism seeks to alleviate, rather than being an alternative.
Why do the anti-authoritarians not confine themselves to crying out against political authority, the state? All Socialists are agreed that the political state, and with it political authority, will disappear as a result of the coming social revolution, that is, that public functions will lose their political character and will be transformed into the simple administrative functions of watching over the true interests of society. But the anti-authoritarians demand that the political state be abolished at one stroke, even before the social conditions that gave birth to it have been destroyed. They demand that the first act of the social revolution shall be the abolition of authority. Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon— authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough? Therefore, either one of two things: either the anti-authoritarians don't know what they're talking about, in which case they are creating nothing but confusion; or they do know, and in that case they are betraying the movement of the proletariat. In either case they serve the reaction.
—Frederick Engels, On Authority
There were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.
―Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
The Universe raged about him in its death throes.
Communists do not fight for personal military power (they must in no circumstances do that, and let no one ever again follow the example of Zhang Guotao, but they must fight for military power for the Party, for military power for the people. As a national war of resistance is going on, we must also fight for military power for the nation. Where there is naivete on the question of military power, nothing whatsoever can be achieved. It is very difficult for the labouring people, who have been deceived and intimidated by the reactionary ruling classes for thousands of years, to awaken to the importance of having guns in their own hands. Now that Japanese imperialist oppression and the nation-wide resistance to it have pushed our labouring people into the arena of war, Communists should prove themselves the most politically conscious leaders in this war. Every Communist must grasp the truth, "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun." Our principle is that the Party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the Party. Yet, having guns, we can create Party organizations, as witness the powerful Party organizations which the Eighth Route Army has created in northern China. We can also create cadres, create schools, create culture, create mass movements. Everything in Yenan has been created by having guns. All things grow out of the barrel of a gun. According to the Marxist theory of the state, the army is the chief component of state power. Whoever wants to seize and retain state power must have a strong army. Some people ridicule us as advocates of the "omnipotence of war". Yes, we are advocates of the omnipotence of revolutionary war; that is good, not bad, it is Marxist. The guns of the Russian Communist Party created socialism. We shall create a democratic republic. Experience in the class struggle in the era of imperialism teaches us that it is only by the power of the gun that the working class and the labouring masses can defeat the armed bourgeoisie and landlords; in this sense we may say that only with guns can the whole world be transformed. We are advocates of the abolition of war, we do not want war; but war can only be abolished through war, and in order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to take up the gun.
—Mao Zedong, Selected Works, Problems of War and Strategy (1938)
Deaths Under Communism vs. Capitalism | Matt Christman as a guest on Pod Damn America
Libby Watson said it best:
Carlson, making his trademark “watching two dogs in full 69 at a distance” face,
A Marxist understanding of capitalism leads to anti-imperialism. Anti-imperialism is understood by detractors as a simple rhetorical dressing over simplistic heuristics like “reflexive anti-americanism,” “history repeats itself,” and “the military-industrial complex needs contracts,” but all of these are reductive. Marxists understand that human political leadership in the imperial periphery, whether enlightened or tyrannical, will only be antagonized by empire for one single possible reason: it is getting in the way of market penetration. This is phrased succinctly by Kevin Dooley when criticizing Noam Chomsky’s support for a military alliance between the Kurds and the USA in Syria: “The difference between [Chomsky’s] position and a hard-line anti-imperialist position isn’t tactical. What he’s arguing is simply a violation of anti-imperialist principles based on a fundamentally different understanding of what can drive the empire to act in the world.” [16]
The accusation that anti-imperialists are unconcerned with human rights deserves a sharp rebuke. The USA was born of slavery and genocide, dropped atomic bombs as a matter of political brinkmanship, imported Nazi scientists and installed war criminals like Klaus Barbie and Nobusuke Kishi around the world to defend and advance anti-communist positions [17], and enthusiastically supports gruesome butcherers today. Simply put, Capital has destroyed innumerable countries and murdered hundreds of millions directly and indirectly. It is precisely a concern for the rights of humans that should make one immediately skeptical of any humanitarian posturing by Capital. Anti-imperialism not only means support for the important pro-social projects of states like Cuba, Vietnam, and China; it also means critical support for non-socialist states such as Iran and Russia. Critical support acknowledges that, though instituting various indefensible policies, enemies of empire are not being antagonized because of said policies. The only thing that can drive empire to act in the world is capital accumulation.
August 15 is Liberation Day in Korea. #OTD in 1945, 35 years of Japanese colonialism came to an end.
Over 75 years later, Korea remains divided and occupied. To understand why, we have to look at what happened from 1945-1950 on both sides of the 38th parallel.
Liberal economics is not a science but based on bad philosophy and assumptions about human psychology, dreamt up by "economists" with no background in psychology nor based on any empirical research, which have never been demonstrated in practice. Not only aren't they demonstrated, but they build mathematical models on top of these assumptions, but if the assumptions are meaningless, all the models are meaningless.
If you point this out, they will tell you, "sure, these assumptions aren't literally true, but they're just approximate." But in any rigorous science, if you approximate something, you're expected to calculate your error bars, so you can have an idea of just how approximate it is. If you don't, then for all you know, the error bars can be so big it has no relation to the real world. No liberal economist can tell you any way to actually determine how inaccurate their assumptions are, so you end up with a lot of maths, but none of it points back to anything real.
Conveniently, though, their maths just so happen to always work out to prove the conclusions they started with: free markets are inherently good, state controls are inherently bad. They have never updated their theories after witnessing their complete failure in eastern Europe, they in fact try to rewrite history to pretend like it was state controls that destroyed Russia's economy and free market anarchy that saved China's, which, as this video shows, the most basic overview of the facts shows to be the exact opposite of what happened.
from https://np.reddit.com/r/Sino/comments/v8n50b/how_china_actually_got_rich_by_the_gravel/ibrgh7h/
In the 1860s, The Economist stood nearly alone among liberal opinion in Britain in supporting the Confederacy against the Union, all in the name of access to cheap Southern “Blood Cotton” [...] and fear of higher tariffs if the North triumphed. “The Economist was unusual,” writes an historian of English public opinion at the time; “Other journals still regarded slavery as a greater evil than restrictive trade practices.”
from https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/economist-has-slavery-problem/
Because, after all, we must resign ourselves to the inevitable and say to ourselves, once and for all, that the bourgeoisie is condemned to become every day more snarling, more openly ferocious, more shameless, more summarily barbarous; that it is an implacable law that every decadent class finds itself turned into a receptacle into which there flow all the dirty waters of history; that it is a universal law that before it disappears, every class must first disgrace itself completely, on all fronts, and that it is with their heads buried in the dunghill that dying societies utter their swan songs.
—Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism
The kind of socialism under which everybody would get the same pay, an equal quantity of meat and an equal quantity of bread, would wear the same clothes and receive the same goods in the same quantities — such a socialism is unknown to Marxism.
All that Marxism says is that until classes have been finally abolished and until labor has been transformed from a means of subsistence into the prime want of man, into voluntary labor for society, people will be paid for their labor according to the work performed. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his work.” Such is the Marxist formula of socialism, i.e., the formula of the first stage of communism, the first stage of communist society.
Only at the higher stage of communism, only in its higher phase, will each one, working according to his ability, be recompensed for his work according to his needs. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”
It is quite clear that people’s needs vary and will continue to vary under socialism. Socialism has never denied that people differ in their tastes, and in the quantity and quality of their needs. Read how Marx criticized Stirner for his leaning towards equalitarianism; read Marx’s criticism of the Gotha Programme of 1875; read the subsequent works of Marx, Engels and Lenin, and you will see how sharply they attack equalitarianism. Equalitarianism owes its origin to the individual peasant type of mentality, the psychology of share and share alike, the psychology of primitive peasant “communism.” Equalitarianism has nothing in common with Marxist socialism. Only people who are unacquainted with Marxism can have the primitive notion that the Russian Bolsheviks want to pool all wealth and then share it out equally. That is the notion of people who have nothing in common with Marxism. That is how such people as the primitive “communists” of the time of Cromwell and the French Revolution pictured communism to themselves. But Marxism and the Russian Bolsheviks have nothing in common with such equalitarian “communists.”
Whiteness is also an imaginary concept and a figment of the racist imagination, of course, but that doesn’t make it any less real, or deadly; whiteness is a thing because people insist that it is, and use force and violence to make it so. Whiteness is a thing because white supremacists needed a name for their violent subjugation of others, and so they gave it one. In this way, whiteness is a uniquely virulent and pathological form of social identity. It cannot survive its loss of supremacy; it cannot abide competition or mixture or “impurity.” Created by racial slavery and given a second wind by European imperialism, whiteness depends on the violent subordination of all others. Celebrate your Irish heritage if you must, or your Pennsylvania Dutch grandparents; that has nothing to do with the whiteness that names me, now, but which (partially) excluded my Irish and German ancestors when they came to this nation. Irish and Pennsylvania Dutch can and will survive incorporation into a multi-ethnic nation, but it is the sine qua non of whiteness that it cannot and will not. Inextricable from racial subordination, whiteness has no other content at all: whiteness is what’s left in the melting pot after everything else has been burned away. Without that xenophobic fire, it has no meaning, no substance, no fundamental.
This is why “white genocide” actually does have a meaning beyond “racial integration.” If you take away a white person’s ability to live as the undisputed master of the universe—to take his own experience as normal and privileged, and to presume all others to be debased copies of his own primary existence—then you take away his whiteness.
from Buffalo Skulls
the War of 1812 was pushed in the same way as the Iraq invasion: with "they will welcome us as liberators"
President James Madison was intrigued by the analysis of Major General Henry Dearborn that in the event of war, Canada would be easy pickings — even that an invasion would be welcomed by the Canadians. [source]
Since the emancipation of the Negroes, the distinction between the two parties has been diminishing. The fight between these two parties has been mainly over the height of customs duties. Their fight has not had any serious importance for the mass of the people. The people have been deceived and diverted from their vital interests by means of spectacular and meaningless duels between the two bourgeois parties.
—Lenin, The Results and Significance of the U.S. Presidential Elections, 1912
Citation Needed Episode 91: It's Time to Retire the Term "Middle Class"
The term “middle class” is used so much by pundits and politicians, it could easily be the Free Space in any political rhetoric Bingo card. After all, who’s opposed to strengthening, widening, and protecting the “middle class”? Like “democracy,” “freedom,” and “human rights”, “middle class” is an unimpeachable, unassailable label that evokes warm feelings and a sense of collective morality.
But the term itself, always slippery and changing based on context, has evolved from a vague aspiration marked by safety, a nice home, and a white picket fence into something more sinister, racially-coded, and deliberately obscuring. The middle class isn’t about concrete, material positive rights of good housing and economic security––it’s a capitalist carrot hovering over our heads telling us such things are possible if we Only Work Harder. More than anything, it's a way for politicians to gesture towards populism without the messiness of mentioning––much less centering––the poor and poverty.
The strength of Marx’s critique is that in its breadth of disciplinary and historical scope, it managed to identify how the hydra of market economy comes to dominate its operators, how Capital rules in the domains of both production and ideology, and how via the notion of “self-interest” it diffuses responsibility for its crimes in an incredibly elegant way. The social planning and hierarchical organizational structures humans have built to fight Capital stand out as alien when contrasted with the naturalized discipline imposed by the market in the “free world,” however ruthless. Getting over the misconception that these structures are unnecessary allows us to begin learning from the experience of comrades around the world, both in and out of power.
To defeat Capital, we must understand how it works, so we can exploit its weaknesses. As Huey Newton put it: “You cannot oppose a system such as this without opposing it with organization that’s even more extremely disciplined and dedicated than the structure you’re opposing.” An understanding of capitalism’s inner dynamics, coupled with careful and broad study of the real history of class struggle, will enable us to fight to free humanity from domination by Capital from within the imperial core. Nothing less than this will do.
Now consider these excerpts from the aforementioned Guardian article:
For a reliable benchmark about the power of the party in China, you only need to listen to wealthy entrepreneurs hold forth on politics. These otherwise all-powerful CEOs go to abject lengths to praise the party. To take a few companies listed in a single article in the South China Morning Post, Richard Liu of e-commerce group JD.com predicted communism would be realised in his generation and all commercial entities would be nationalised. Xu Jiayin of Evergrande Group, one of China’s largest property developers, said that everything the company possessed was given by the party and he was proud to be the party secretary of his company. Liang Wengen of Sany Heavy Industry, which builds earthmovers, went even further, saying his life belonged to the party. [14]
Just as the lack of dignity of American workers isn’t merely superficial, but symptomatic, the same is true of the lack of dignity of Chinese capitalists. The periodic execution of corrupt capitalists and the humiliation of Jack Ma matter. Chauvinistic “Left” intellectuals may dismiss them as performative, but Western capitalists accustomed to impunity understand the threat loud and clear. The dignity or indignity experienced by different classes testifies more to the class character of a state than musings about its leaders’ sincerity.
liberals adore non-violent resistance because it poses no threat to the status quo (protecting their material privilege) yet it allows them to feel absolved
—Kwame Ture
under the dictatorship of capital, elections are an individualist consumer ritual that allows liberals to assuage guilt over their complicity and diverts energy away from collective action
Friendly reminder the first mobile phone was invented between 1954 and 1957 by Soviet scientist Leonid Kupriyanovich.
It was the basis for the world's first 0G mobile network, "Altai", which was built in 1963 and available in large cities all across the USSR by 1965. It is still in use to this day.
In the 70s and 80s emergent satellite technology revolutionized mobile communication and forever changed the world as we know it. The first satellite, "Sputnik", was designed, manufactured, and launched in the USSR in 1957.
My phone was manufactured in China, and connects to a 5G mobile network running exclusively on Chinese equipment despite the fact it presents a known national security threat because Western manufacturers can't even replicate the technology.
Capitalism only exists in the 21st century because American capitalists got rich enough selling toaster ovens and clunkmobiles to a WW2 devastated Western Europe to fund a ridiculous war machine over-powered enough to spread mayhem throughout the world as a means to an end of propping up its bloated corpse for a little while. That system is falling apart now and will collapse in on itself before the end of this century. It's already falling behind.
Some people think that the bourgeoisie adopted “pacifism” and “democracy” not because it was compelled to do so, but voluntarily, of its own free choice, so to speak. And it is assumed that, having defeated the working class in decisive battles (Italy, Germany), the bourgeoisie felt that it was the victor and could now afford to adopt “democracy.” In other words, while the decisive battles were in progress, the bourgeoisie needed a fighting organisation, needed fascism; but now that the proletariat is defeated, the bourgeoisie no longer needs fascism and can afford to use “democracy” instead, as a better method of consolidating its victory. Hence, the conclusion is drawn that, the rule of the bourgeoisie has become consolidated, that the “era of pacifism” will be a prolonged one, and that the revolution in Europe has been pigeonholed.
This assumption is absolutely wrong.
Firstly, it is not true that fascism is only the fighting organisation of the bourgeoisie. Fascism is not only a military-technical category. Fascism is the bourgeoisie’s fighting organisation that relies on the active support of Social-Democracy. Social-Democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism. There is no ground for assuming that the fighting organisation of the bourgeoisie can achieve decisive successes in battles, or in governing the country, without the active support of Social-Democracy. There is just as little ground for thinking that Social-Democracy can achieve decisive successes in battles, or in governing the country, without the active support of the fighting organisation of the bourgeoisie. These organisations do not negate, but supplement each other. They are not antipodes, they are twins. Fascism is an informal political bloc of these two chief organisations; a bloc, which arose in the circumstances of the post-war crisis of imperialism, and which is intended for combating the proletarian revolution. The bourgeoisie cannot retain power without such a bloc. It would therefore be a mistake to think that “pacifism” signifies the liquidation of fascism. In the present situation, “pacifism” is the strengthening of fascism with its moderate, Social-Democratic wing pushed into the forefront.
Secondly, it is not true that the decisive battles have already been fought, that the proletariat was defeated in these battles, and that bourgeois rule has been consolidated as a consequence. There have been no decisive battles as yet, if only for the reason that there have not been any mass, genuinely Bolshevik parties, capable of leading the proletariat to dictatorship. Without such parties, decisive battles for dictatorship are impossible under the conditions of imperialism. The decisive battles in the West still lie ahead. There have been only the first serious attacks, which were repulsed by the bourgeoisie; the first serious trial of strength, which showed that the proletariat is not yet strong enough to overthrow the bourgeoisie, but that the bourgeoisie is already unable to discount the proletariat. And precisely because the bourgeoisie is already unable to force the working class to its knees, it was compelled to renounce frontal attacks, to make a detour, to agree to a compromise, to resort to “democratic pacifism.”
Lastly, it is also not true that “pacifism” is a sign of the strength and not of the weakness of the bourgeoisie, that “pacifism” should result in consolidating the power of the bourgeoisie and in postponing the revolution for an indefinite period. Present-day pacifism signifies the advent to power, direct or indirect, of the parties of the Second International. But what does the advent to power of the parties of the Second International mean? It means their inevitable self-exposure as lackeys of imperialism, as traitors to the proletariat, for the governmental activity of these parties can have only one result: their political bankruptcy, the growth of contradictions within these parties, their disintegration, their decay. But the disintegration of these parties will inevitably lead to the disintegration of the rule of the bourgeoisie, for the parties of the Second International are props of imperialism. Would the bourgeoisie have undertaken this risky experiment with pacifism if it had not been compelled to do so; would it have done so of its own free will? Of course, not! This is the second time that the bourgeoisie is undertaking the experiment with pacifism since the end of the imperialist war. The first experiment was made immediately after the war, when it seemed that revolution was knocking at the door. The second experiment is being undertaken now, after Poincaré’s and Curzon’s risky experiments. Who would dare deny that imperialism will have to pay dearly for this swinging of the bourgeoisie from pacifism to rabid imperialism and back again, that this is pushing vast masses of workers out of their habitual philistine rut, that it is drawing the most backward sections of the proletariat into politics and is helping to revolutionise them? Of course, “democratic pacifism” is not yet the Kerensky regime, for the Kerensky regime implies dual power, the collapse of bourgeois power and the coming into being of the foundations of proletarian power. But, there can scarcely be any doubt that pacifism signifies the immense awakening of the masses, the fact that the masses are being drawn into politics; that pacifism is shaking bourgeois rule and preparing the ground for revolutionary upheavals. And precisely for this reason pacifism is bound to lead not to the strengthening, but to the weakening of bourgeois rule, not to the postponement of the revolution for an indefinite period, but to its acceleration.
It does not, of course, follow that pacifism is not a serious danger to the revolution. Pacifism serves to sap the foundations of bourgeois rule, it is creating favourable conditions for the revolution; but it can have these results only against the will of the “pacifists” and “democrats” themselves, only if the Communist Parties vigorously expose the imperialist and counter-revolutionary nature of the pacifist-democratic rule of Herriot and MacDonald. As for what the pacifists and democrats want, as for the policy of the imperialists, they have only one aim in resorting to pacifism: to dupe the masses with high-sounding phrases about peace in order to prepare for a new war; to dazzle the masses with the brilliance of “democracy” in order to consolidate the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie; to stun the masses with clamour about the “sovereign” rights of nations and states in order the more successfully to prepare for intervention in China, for slaughter in Afghanistan and in the Sudan, for the dismemberment of Persia; to fool the masses with highfaluting talk about “friendly” relations with the Soviet Union, about various “treaties” with the Soviet government, in order to establish still closer relations with the counter-revolutionary conspirators who have been kicked out of Russia, with the aim of bandit operations in Byelorussia, the Ukraine and Georgia. The bourgeoisie needs pacifism as a camouflage. This camouflage constitutes the chief danger of pacifism. Whether the bourgeoisie will succeed in its aim of fooling the people depends upon the vigour with which the Communist Parties in the West and in the East expose the bourgeoisie, upon their ability to tear the mask from the imperialists in pacifist clothing. There is no doubt that events and practice will work in favour of the Communists in this respect by exposing the discrepancy between the pacifist words and the imperialist deeds of the democratic servitors of capital. It is the duty of the Communists to keep pace with events and ruthlessly to expose every step, every act of service to imperialism and betrayal of the proletariat committed by the parties of the Second International.
from Concerning the International Situation (1924) by J.V. Stalin
A place for preserving our history. 😤