Install Temple OS on your mom’s desktop

While that specific scenario is unlikely, I do hope that Plaid Cymru and the Scottish National Party succeed in dissolving the UK

had to escape Venezuela after Maduro took power

they’d become rich under the old system

… They didn’t flee from Chavez? What’s the timeline here?

Venezuelan communes and participatory democracy is flourishing. In addition, massive social programs have been implemented, focusing on housing, food security, and poverty eradication

I think this really needs to be stressed. Venezuela is a country building Socialism. Maduro and the PSUV is in power because of a genuinely incredible mass movement of communes, neighborhood committees, and other organs of grassroots democracy. This is qualitatively different from say, any of the Gulf oil monarchies

I highly recommend the books Building The Commune: Radical Democracy in Venezuela, and Commune or Nothing: Venezuela’s Communal Movement and Its Socialist Project, for a look at these aspects of Venezuelan politics, because it’s often papered over in discussions about the country.

Marxist does not get to exclusively define what imperialism is

Marxism isn’t the only analytical lens out there, no. But the people you’re arguing with are working with that definition, which is why I took the time to clarify. Thank you for appreciating my effort post though lol

The Marxist definition of imperialism is more specific than just “big country invade small country”.

In, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism Lenin lays out five aspects of what makes Imperialism:

1. the concentration of production and capital has developed to such a high stage that it has created monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life;

2. the merging of bank capital with industrial capital, and the creation, on the basis of this “finance capital”, of a financial oligarchy;

3. the export of capital as distinguished from the export of commodities acquires exceptional importance;

4. the formation of international monopolist capitalist associations which share the world among themselves, and

5. the territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist powers is completed. Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.

The question of “Is Russia Imperialist” isn’t a moral one, it’s a technical one. So if Russia were do to something that we all agree is morally reprehensible, that’s a separate concern from whether Russia is imperialist.

The technicality revolves around whether Russia has developed an oligarchy of Financial Capital, such that its invasion of Ukraine or other flexes of its influence, perpetuates the export of Russian finance capital around the world.

As it stands now, I don’t think that’s currently the case, but with Marxism being a dialectal philosophy, I do wonder if this war will accelerate that merging of Bank and industrial capital that Lenin discusses. It’s a Bourgeois states, and there’s financial capital in there somewhere that absolutely has an interest in forming a Russian imperialism.

So when people say “Russia isn’t Imperialist”, this is what’s being referred to. You can take it or leave it, but it’s worth getting into the weeds a bit, so we aren’t all talking passed each other

The only Libertarians I fuck with are Libertarian Socialists. Otherwise, Ayn Rand types are cringe as hell

As someone who hasn’t been in a Best Buy in over 15 years… What the fuck do they sell then?

As an ML, I’m quite fond of other leftists, thank you very much.

While we might have our disagreements, some of them quite stark, I still get along with my Trotskyist or Anarchist friends, and their struggles are also my struggle. I might disagree with how they’re going about it, but that’s what critical support is for.

Trotsky’s take on the peasantry was wrong af though

Remember when Covid happened, and suddenly every normie was using Zoom, instead of existing, well-established platforms?

All leftists are my comrades!

Except for those damn Trostskyists!

Who am I?

an entirely new language

Esperanto gang, rise up!

Wouldn’t a better joke be Tito? Nationalism was explicitly banned in Yugoslavia, whereas various left-wing nationalisms were cultivated in the USSR. Differing positions on the national question were part of what led to the Yugo-Soviet split

Except he immediately started mocking Platner, and talking about how ass backwards his story is the minute the tatto thing came out, and rightfully so because that shit’s crazy.

You don’t have to like the guy, but if this is “glazing” then words just don’t mean anything anymore.

don’t make me tap the sign

It literally is. Human beings aren’t listening to this music. The huge numbers are coming from bots.

The AI slop bros are making the Dead Internet theory real, to artificially inflate their value.

All my apes, Juche

I know capitalism is evil and all that jazz, but the Japanese consumer electronics boom was so sick

The little ice age also coincided with, and exacerbated, various crises within feudalism, that eventually led to its collapse, and replacement with a different political -economic system.

Just a little fun fact, unrelated to anything currently ongoing in the world