I’m saving this comment for when the coal supplies run low.

Currently I don’t have any disposable income, but if I manage to get my shit together this year I probably would contribute a little bit. I find your posts really useful, and I hope they keep coming and are properly archived for future reference.

An embodiment of Latin centre-left Catholicism. Not a real comrade, but progressive in issues that aren’t key to the Church. Preaches love and peace which, although with its contradictions, is consistent enough to denounce the greatest atrocities out our time. A “live and let live” Pope, for better or for worse.

Given the Church’s role as a reactionary cudgel over the past 200 years, and specifically during the Cold War, he was a breath of fresh air. Can’t wait for some out of touch European to start telling third worlders how to pray the proper German way again.

Happy Lenin day!

This is probably not you’re asking for, but (MLM) People’s History of Ideas is a pretty good deep dive into the Chinese revolution.

Besides that, there’s the RevLeft Radio episode on him and Red Pen on the revolution (it’s pretty harsh on the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution).

Brazil is distancing itself from China at such a fast pace that some analysts are predicting it’ll leave BRICS after a right wing victory in the next election.

Do you have any idea how many more people China has compared to Vietnam?

Yes, 14 times. I’m not saying it is going to be easy or that it’ll be concentrated on a single country like it was with China. In fact, I believe that some fragmentation will be optimal to prevent China 2 from just doing what China did.

The USA is looking for lebensraum.

The US doesn’t need Lebensraum because they already have colonies and barely any national industry. Incorporating Canada and subduing Mexico for geopolitical reasons aren’t incompatible with trying to replace China in the international division of labour.

Surplus value must be extracted from somewhere, and although Mexico and Canada have their industries it’ll not be enough and too close to home to be too heavy handed.

That’s not even considering how ideologically communist Vietnam is.

China, Vietnam and the USSR were all nominally communists when Kissinger was playing the three of them against each other. The superstructure follows the base, and unless both countries integrate their economies or at least make SolidNet into a proper successor to the Third International, I won’t hold my breath. Right now the CPV is already negotiating zero tariffs with the US.

The only countries I would seriously bet on staying with China are Venezuela, Iran, Russia, the DPRK and Cuba, and possibly the AES. And that’s just because they are so economically desintegrated from the world economy that they have nothing to lose and everything to gain, for both their proletariat and (if it exists) their bourgeoisie.

Online debate tribunes are cool as fuck and I love that my organisation has one. I don’t have enough energy to contribute to the discussion on a national scale, but it’s fantastic to be able to read so many writings from comrades in order to better refine the line both at the base and at the top. Democratic centralism is the best organisational methodology even in the slogan: “freedom of criticism, unity of action”.

“Memes” aren’t a thing that exist anymore. People don’t get attached to some specific formulation of words because they are memorable/funny/interesting. These words are just repeated by content mills because recommendation systems have latched on to them as important keywords, and the cycle repeats itself. Nobody actually really cared about the fake “orange cat” concept, it was just perpetuated by a bunch of funny cat videos having the words “orange cat” in it and is now part of social media SEO. Now every post about some colour of cat has to include the words “orange cat”.

The internet is dead, and Mark Zuckerberg killed it.

I think I just walked like 10 kilometres just by walking in circles in my living room. Don’t do coffee, kids.

This is the reason I commented on the other thread about “On Protracted People’s War” and how it talks seemingly similar conditions but take very different stances. One is written from the perspective of revolutionaries on a reactionary country waging a war that is principally imperialist in character, the other from the perspective of a reactionary country defending from such a war.

The war in Ukraine is somewhere in-between, as there will be sectors of the Russia bourgeoisie that benefit from this war, but it also weakens the global hegemon (I disagree that we already have a multipolar world). On the other hand, it assures some measure of self determination for the peoples of Donbas and Ukraine.

From a very distant and somewhat ignorant perspective, (actual) revolutionary communists in Russia should not defend the overthrow of the Russian bourgeois state as an immediate objective (but a long term one). But they should have advocate for the immediate overthrow of the Ukrainian regime and, controversially, non-antagonistic autonomy from the Russian state and socialist restoration for the Donbas and Luhansk.

Lizzy’s still in a box.

My reading of it is that Trump will indeed bluster and say random shit whenever given a microphone, which will be milked by all corporate newsmedia but does not necessarily translate into policy, but at least during his first presidency the stuff that actually got enacted had some kind of class interest behind it.

So building an actual brick wall was pointless, but ICE arresting immigrants at random was very useful for silencing the hyperexploited migrant workers. Same thing with withholding arms to Ukraine back then for domestic political goals, it also aligned with Trump openly trying to reduce tensions with Russia. There were many other such cases of random bullshit being used to push policy that upheld some class interests. I don’t think he is smart and is playing 4D chess, but back then he must have had actual imperialist strategists trying to make do with whatever strange thing he said this week. Which, when it worked, Qanon folks would retroactively use to believe Trump was a genius.

This time though, I’m starting to believe the actual strategists are long gone and all they have is sycophants and other rich fucks disconnected from reality. Trump is loose to do whatever he wants, and so we get flip flopping tariffs, Greenland annexation and other such Yankee nonsense. He is the personification of USAmerican imperialist cultural superstructure.

I would add “On Protracted War”, even though it was already chosen a while back, as they work together very well. Haven’t read the earlier “On Guerrilla Warfare” but sounds cool too.

Took a massive break from work and organising due to burnout. Couldn’t sleep at all at night. Now I’m back to work and as soon as I get home all I think of is getting going straight to bed.

Polygon’s “How Call of Duty turned war into a circus” is also pretty good.

Unless you have investigated a problem, you will be deprived of the right to speak on it. Isn’t that too harsh? Not in the least. When you have not probed into a problem, into the present facts and its past history, and know nothing of its essentials, whatever you say about it will undoubtedly be nonsense. Talking nonsense solves no problems, as everyone knows, so why is it unjust to deprive you of the right to speak?

The interface is reddit-like, you must click the small image to view it properly. Not being logged in has nothing to do with it.

Trudeau dropped another nice effect of the Trump tariffs. When applied to economies that produce stuff in Canada or Europe, some companies may fail and be bought by US corpos. I don’t know if that would nullify the tariffs for them, but the US will them be able to turn around and proclaim “more jobs for US companies” despite those still operating abroad. Besides that, it’s monopoly capital doing it’s favourite thing.

“Phraseology” is a really cool sounding word that will immediately identify any communist saying it when used disparagingly.

In other news, Nazis win Nazi Germany’s election again for the 22nd time.