zedcell

Burnham will dance to the same Labour Together and Labour Friends of Israel tune, just like Starmer and Streeting. The person who stepped down for him was a parachuted Labour Together think tank leader, and Burnham has refused to call the genocide in Palestine a genocide. He has committed to the bizarre liberal "fiscal rules", he has committed to Shabana Mahmood's home office policies.

He will be the same shit with a slightly different fragrance.

If the film had a small budget it's not like the worker who took out a few months to work on it for $7000 has taken on much less risk than the writer or producer that chipped in $50,000. This is capitalist apologia. The risk the art lead had was if the movie flopped they might not get much work ever again, leaving them destitute and having to pick up work elsewhere. The same risk that someone who offered up a little seed capital to kick the project off.

Reform and Restore are having this exact kind of "purity testing" and splitting right now, but god forbid the left wants to hold people who govern on their behalf to account and scrutinise their public record and potential future behaviour. Starmer was just an accident after all, no way anyone could have predicted what happened following Labour's win by default.

It's bad to fight back against women soldiers, cops and security guards. With this one neat trick I will make all war and violence illegal and wrong.

I think this is a rosy view of what revolution looks like. Armed police won't simply all disarm on the eve of their pay drying up. There are committed fascists amongst their ranks that will fight back pay or no pay at the prospect of a proletarian revolution. To think we have no ideologically committed foes that might operate in opposition to their immediate material interests is to fall to mechanistic materialism.

The Chinese civil war was 30-40 years long with ebbs and flows in the strength of the communist aligned movement and the nationalist movement. Nothing just stopped because the red army took control of a given province.

How do you end the system of property without violence? Do you think the landlord will just give up their property? Is there any historical precedent for that?

Violence is necessary to gain and then maintain control of a proletarian state until the system of property is undone. Landlords that fight back will be subjected to violence, more often than not in retaliation by the directly affected members of the proletariat. The Soviets and the communist party of the USSR would often have to intervene in outbursts of revolutionary violence from the masses, ensuring it didn't go too far and directing it where it had the most impact. The terror following the Russian revolution was directly in response to the violence meted out against communists by the Tsarist forces, hanging landlords and the bourgeoisie responsible in the streets to make examples of them for killing communists.

Marx didn't live when huge numbers of workers in the imperial core were invested in the market either actively with their excess savings or passively in their pension. You cannot "appeal to Marx" for something that did not exist within his time. What did exist within his time were discussions between him and Engels about the frustrating lack of revolutionary activity within certain strata of the English working class, which clearly does have parallels to today's situation. Identifying that strata (I.e. the labour aristocracy) is an important task for contemporary Marxists.

I suppose Palestinians in the UK should also have the right to have the star of David removed from all public spaces due to its use on Israel's flag and the fact they're being genocided by Israel, if October 7th can now perpetually be used to censor everything related to Palestine and Palestinian culture.

Lawyers for Israel need to be stricken off and kicked out of the country the fucking lawfare abusing trolls.

De-commodified housing can just as easily be privatised, see the UK.

"Super fetch", how's that boot taste? Maybe it's a burnout prone job because they know 75% of what they do is acting as the bully boys of capital and the state, and they're full to the brim of racists and misogynists who don't make very good co-workers.

Cuba is a "tankie" state and the most principled groups in support of it against the genocidal American blockade are "tankies". You are advancing US imperialism by chatting nonsense about so-called tankies, doing the hard work of the red scare for your supposed enemies.

"All over the world, wherever there are capitalists, freedom of the press means freedom to buy up newspapers, to buy writers, to bribe, buy and fake “public opinion” for the benefit of the bourgeoisie."

-- Lenin, 1921 https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/aug/05.htm

Still as true today as when he wrote it.