Welcome again to everybody. Make yourself at home. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is the weekly discussion thread.
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☭ Theory discussion group on /c/theory@lemmygrad.ml
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In the most recent attempt of the media to shit talk our party, they are now calling us a cult. Why? Because some of our party members are leaving.
The people leaving are upset mostly because of the rules we have in place. Rules which they are informed about before working their way up the ranks. Rules like having the give a part of your salary to the party in order to keep a wage that is similar to that of the average worker.
People then get elected into positions of power in city councils and whatnot and, as you can guess, their wage increases significantly. They see thousands of euros and they suddenly feel like not donating a part anymore and turn independent. It happens.
You get heavily informed beforehand. You have talks, the party will make a calculation, they will check your entire social support system to see if you will not get into financial trouble. And yet people leave and blame us for… having principles. Also, apart from getting into positions where you can get elected, you are not forced to do this. You can just be an active member without donating your wage. No hard feelings.
Expand the hiatus screed
P.S. I post better on this network than I ever have on Twitter, and I constantly get “ratio’d” - whenever I post something that took me 1000 hours to find I just get shrugs. However this instance in particular has over time displayed that it is the only place that can have a serious discussion about music or books, so you are unlikely to get rid of me. If anyone bears a grudge, just know that permagrudges encourage actual alt abuse not open profile swapping, as well as removing any social barrier to crashing out again constantly, forever. Just look next door
Just kidding I know it’s federation issues people on third instances don’t even get half of these. It has nothing to do with the multiple groups of threadiverse admins openly maintaining user blacklists. Nobody would ever bot a site where there are zero barriers to it whatsoever. I’m not paranoid. You’re paranoid that I might be. Seek help. I don’t want Twitter or Rednote likes. i want Lemmygrad and Weibo likes. i have standards. Stingy bastards
Yes I know I can just go get 380 likes by /r/antiwork posting in /c/memes@lemmy.ml
That’s degrading and we all know it
[2026-04-28] @secondbyfarce (the hank hill char avi guy jonnysocialism is always posting with): ACP leadership Chris Helali works for an international business law firm specializing in protecting multinational corporations and banks. the party is literally run by the foot soldiers of the international bourgeois
[2] @/CDMorlock do you support your party being ran by the foot soldiers of FIRE?
Lmao the second one took me a moment, like, wait that’s right this is a grave sin against their variant of Hudsonianism. more pertinently, not recognizing this as CIA behavior is bot/historical illiterate behavior. I thought I had all the lore on this guy, republican Brace Belden if you will, but no, there’s more. Beasts all over the shop
I am not sure if this is the right place for the general discussion thread, but…
I read Bordiga: trash (denounces Stalin and Stalin’s idea that commodity production can exist under socialism)
I read Hoxha: trash, but slightly less so (they uphold Stalin, but call post-Stalin USSR fascist and imperialist…?)
I think Saymaz’s book discussion thread would be more likely to get an in-depth response but there’s no reason not to do both with slightly different focus, site’s cozy enough.
Also I wanted to say “they got you too huh” the fucking Telegram memes from the evil NATO-sexuals in their ideology chats got me with Bordiga… Pandemic made me insane
Read Samir Amin.
Hmm? Did you read Bordiga? Also, why should I read Samir Amin?
I wasn’t serious, the lasagna man thing amused me… I feel a connection to Garfield the cat. Went in looking for shit to ridicule but figured I ought to come back when I got smarter. Never did. I didn’t get much out of reading Fundamentals of Marxist Orientation because I wasn’t really dping hist mat then, I was just obsessed with the cold war.Deeply neurotic about mind control. I think realizing they faked aliens to scare people & tried to use religious terror spoopy style in SEA woke me up to the CIA’s exaggeration of their success with MK which can mostly be summed up with SERE. Well that’s reductive, but also that has nothing to do with anything I’m just doing my weekly blunt to not go crazy yet, so mooving on
Samir Amin, well where to start. Start with Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins if you haven’t already. Read Ruy Mauro Marini’s Dialectics of Dependency. Short but rigorous take notes. Read this https://monthlyreview.org/articles/the-new-imperialist-structure/
Monthly Review is so hit-or-miss, a year before this they were publishing a loving memorandum for Bertrand Russell that literally said nobody would deny Stalin was an ebil dictator. O’ve been cherrypicking their archives too much… I thought the slop was contained to the newswire which just feels like Foster’s reposts… Aaaargjh
Only People Make Their Own History is a good survey of his work which can be roughly split into the study of the origins of capitalism as a mode pf production by the consumption of tributary modes of production in West Asia + China + Subcontinent, & the study of modern imperialism & how it instrumentalizes but is also destabilized by colonialism, how feudal elements persist in the global periphery. Gets into the details of how the west hoards technology & profits from laying waste to resource-rich places where they want people in squalor, in strategically marginal areas for transnational corporations they want to basically not exist lmao.
If that gets you interested, go for Eurocentrism (which really rips into the foundations of western philosophy, anthropology, history etc, if you are all reading Losurdo & Rockhill’s books, this is a must, I have found more like it: Back to Marx, as well as A Deep Plough by Zhang Yibing, groundbreaking shit).
Maldevelopment is depressing but also essential for understanding how subimperialism works, how India works, how apartheid South Africa worked.
Russia & the Long Transition from Capitalism to Socialism is a good intermediate one that gets into the nit & grit of how the USSR was mired in developmentalism & the periphery fell behind (building pseudo-autarky where the USSR serves as a kind of filter between the west & its allies was insufficient). He is clear that the USSR was dismantled… He argues the soviet mode of production persisted post-destruction, proving its durability & the nature of the betrayal. I am looking for more like it. Nobody listens to me because I’m too impatient on here bruh you can find them for sure
Brb lemmygrad
I am listening :)
Thank you for all the recommendations (though the one about the tributary mode of production… I read a criticism of that, but this is not really the place for me to criticize it, yes?). The Eurocentrism one sounds fascinating, though.
I now understand my work was going easy on me for the past couple years. This is seriously making me question The Projects. It’s The Projects or a baby dawg. Fuck me. I wish I could have Tom Sawyered someone into talking about this shit. Aaaaaaaa
What the hell is that app jfc.
The children will speculate upon the Feastables I suppose
I’ve been working on this pamphlet for the last couple weeks
I also got an e-ink reader and I love it so far. So much easier than dragging around a big book. I also find it comfortable to hold, so I can change seating positions more when I read. Reading PDFs or long webpages on a computer has always been a bit exhausting for me so it’s nice to get it on another type of display
I think I get Russia’s strategy [war of attrition to deplete western arms and Ukranian manpower] but even with that I had assumed we were going to see a larger push into Ukraine as spring began
From what i can see – and various commentators on both the Ukrainian and Russian sides agree – the push has already begun. The pattern looks almost identical to what happened in previous years: a lull of around two months in February and March, followed by a slow-rolling offensive that starts gradually in the mid to late spring, picks up speed in the summer and peaks in early to mid autumn.
Of course it’s not 100% guaranteed that this pattern will hold, the Russian General Staff may always change things up, but so far the pattern has been that each year the progress made is greater than the previous year, with lower losses for the Russian side than the previous year and higher losses for the Ukrainian side, which reflects the increasingly dire attrition of Ukrainian manpower and other resources. It is also a function of Ukraine’s loss of its most heavily fortified areas and after each Russian offensive being forced to fall back to defensive lines that are less fortified than the last, having had less time and resources to build them up.
Right now Russia is basically on the doorstep of the final fortified agglomeration in the Donbass around the cities of Slavyansk* and Kramatorsk, they are advancing westward toward the Dnieper in the Zaporozhye region, and they are widening the buffer zone in the Sumy and Kharkov regions. Could they suddenly decide that they want to go faster? Sure. But i wouldn’t bet on it. It wouldn’t be consistent with what we have observed so far from the Russian side.
*Historical “fun fact”: Slavyansk and Kramatorsk were among some of the main cities, alongside Donetsk, Lugansk, Mariupol, Kharkov and Odessa, where the 2014 “Russian Spring” uprising against the Maidan Nazi coup first began. All except for Donetsk and Lugansk were eventually crushed by the new Nazi regime’s forces when Russia refused to step in and defend them the way they defended the people of Crimea that same year. Therefore, in the eyes of many Russian people, it is symbolically important that they be liberated at some point.
🫵 You WILL have hope, comrade.
Thank you very much (though it was not directed towards me), I need the hope after reading Hoxha… oh my satan he is bad. I barely got into the introduction before seeing some awful “anti-revisionist” nonsense.
I’m not super pissy about this but I wish when people downvoted something they’d comment why they did that.
I mean sometimes it’s just obvious [i.e, if someone comes in and is like “Stalin ate my grandma with a comically big spoon so Ukraine should nuke Moscow” I’m not mad if you don’t reply to that], and I don’t mean literally every single person, but if there’s no negative/critical comments on a post receiving down votes it’s just not very helpful. Also it’s just good to hear opposing perspectives tbh.
I just downvoted your comment.
FAQ
What does this mean?
The amount of karma (points) on your comment and Reddit account has decreased by one. Why did you do this?
There are several reasons I may deem a comment to be unworthy of positive or neutral karma. These include, but are not limited to:
Rudeness towards other Redditors, Spreading incorrect information, Sarcasm not correctly flagged with a /s.Am I banned from the Reddit?
No - not yet. But you should refrain from making comments like this in the future. Otherwise I will be forced to issue an additional downvote, which may put your commenting and posting privileges in jeopardy. I don’t believe my comment deserved a downvote. Can you un-downvote it?
Sure, mistakes happen. But only in exceedingly rare circumstances will I undo a downvote. If you would like to issue an appeal, shoot me a private message explaining what I got wrong. I tend to respond to Reddit PMs within several minutes. Do note, however, that over 99.9% of downvote appeals are rejected, and yours is likely no exception.
How can I prevent this from happening in the future?
Accept the downvote and move on. But learn from this mistake: your behavior will not be tolerated on Reddit.com. I will continue to issue downvotes until you improve your conduct. Remember: Reddit is privilege, not a right
I genuinely got flashbanged by this since I haven’t been on that side of reddit in years
In all seriousness I agree, and I think hexbear getting rid of down votes was a good idea.
The irony in this getting down voted it a little funny to me
But honestly i think it’s fine, I don’t think there’s a good way to solve it really
voting systems for posts is an inherently garbage idea tbh
discourages responses & encourages echo chambers
The reddit design is inherently worse, in most ways, than the forums it replaced imo. I understand why lemmy copied it, but kinda wish there was a way to just go back to old-fashioned forums.
King’s Day in The Netherlands. Because we live in medieval times and are still a monarchy. Mostly an excuse for a day off and to get wasted. I never had anything with the monarchy even before my communism days. Probably because I am from the southern part of the country and we have our own different culture compared to most of the rest of the country above the big rivers.
It’s also the start of my last week at my job and I can’t wait until it’s over.
Forgot you live you in Holland. I hate the idea of a monarchy, honestly. The only people I see supporting them are monarchists who will never do anything to restore monarchy in the countries they live in (if they do not have them anymore) or attempt to “increase the power” of the monarchy (if they do still have them), so they just end up being conservative chumps who have a weird feudal fascination.
Have a great week, everyone! One foot in front of the other, keep advancing in your goals.
As always, communism will win.
I hope you all have a nice week :D
long live!
Thank you, comrade. I will be reading Hoxha!
You too Oppo!
I hope you have a nice week too! ((づ｡◕‿‿◕｡)づ
I started my reading journey again! I read a good bit of S:U&S by Engels and a surprisingly long preface for On War by Clauswitz.
