Se [Fabiano] aprendesse qualquer coisa, necessitaria aprender mais, e nunca ficaria satisfeito.

Hans Asperger was a Nazi collaborator.

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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • You don’t need to look very far for evidence of Boulos being against the coup. I suppose you refer to this article referring to the movement against the world cup, due to the harm it caused to the working class that had to be displaced or explored for the creation of the stadiums to entertain a gringo audience. It was also during an ascension of the PSOL as the left opposition right after the Luciana Genro campaign. Boulos has now become an avid defender of the PT, which is an abandonment of whatever leftwing commitment he had back then.

    That was not a pro-coup movement, and the fact that what was supposed to be a class conciliation government couldn’t reconcile the tensions there is a failure of the PT. Claiming moral superiority by abstaining from another battleground for class struggle and letting it get taken over by the right is not a good look for the PCO.

    Tendencies in the PSOL range from mildly pro imperialist to rabidly pro imperialist.

    At least put an effort in your critique to discern how they are pro-imperialist. Most range from social-democratic to Trotskyist which, I agree, often side with imperialism.

    A fair number are what patsocs would call “identitarian”, which means that they focus on racial, gender, and ethnic class issues and oppressions. Some are even left-liberal with a focus on minority entrepreneurship. The first has revolutionary potential, the second indeed co-opt important struggles for the sake of maintaining imperialism.

    pstu is not trotskyist, they are morenists

    The only true Trotskyists are Trotsky himself and Mercader’s ice axe. \s

    I’m not going to defend Trotskyists again, with their obsession for splitting and calling themselves the only Marxists for “ideological purity”, rather than doing any actual praxis in a revolutionary direction. That’s just fighting over the title of “reactionary pseudo-revolutionaries with a newspaper”, and if the PSTU and Moreno don’t fit the bill, good for them. It is a confused and moribund dead-end ideology, and the fact that the PSTU often falls into a somewhat more effective anarcho-sindicalist strategy is good enough evidence for that.

    As for the last point, both the Revolutions of 1905 and February 1917 had broad support from liberals, reformists, nationalists, Mensheviks, revisionists and even foreign bourgeois observers. It doesn’t mean those weren’t fights worth fighting for.


  • PSOL has tendencies that range from social-liberal, to “orthodox” Marxist, to Trotskyist to Marxist-Leninist. They even have tendencies that are inspired by the “Arab Spring”. It’s not advisable to be reductionist against them, specially since their broad range of tendencies is usually why they excel electorally but have a hard time getting anything done. (As opposed to parties that follow democratic centralism). They did not side against Dilma in the coup, and in fact voted unanimously in her defense and were even more dedicated in the “Fora Temer” campaigns than the PT itself.

    PSTU is Trotskyist so I won’t defend them too much, they tend to fall into left-communism a lot, but they at least have a strong presence in workers unions and are usually the first on the ground for, for example, primary and secondary school teachers’ strikes. They did go against Dilma, in their typical ultra left fashion, demanding that the entire government be toppled. Not that any Marxist should be surprised when bourgeois democracy is undemocratic, though.

    I suppose it should go without saying on a primarily Marxist-Leninist instance that Trotskyist or Trotskyist-adjacent parties like these two or the PCO aren’t going to receive much uncritical support, though at least they make themselves present and join forces in critical struggles like this one.


  • I didn’t link to a Portuguese source because this thread was for the gringo friends, but this movement has been growing for too long for one to confuse their ignorance for it “coming out of the blue”. Now let me attempt to correct the record in English for the sake of the internationals.

    Here’s a short article from PCBR talking about the historical construction of this movement.

    Summing the history up “shortly” in English, one of the strongest demands from both the PCB (pre-split Brazilian Communist Party, Marxist-Leninist) and the PSTU (United Socialist Worker’s Party, Trotskyist) since at least the June Protests in 2013. Due to the first having some serious organisational problems with their leadership (which led to the split) and the second being fairly small (and Trotskyist, I guess), neither managed to fully oppose the government from the left and materialise this demand.

    After the pandemic, with work/life balance dynamics being brought into question, given both the absurd rise of informal work (more than half the “employed” population is informal) and the indignation from workers in the “service” economy from bearing the brunt of the pandemic without any perspective of increase in quality of life from the new “leftist” government, wildcat labour movements started forming from the workers themselves. This includes the fight for better legislation regarding delivery and “rideshare” app workers’ pay and benefits, and for the reduction of the maximum legal workweek.

    For some context for the foreigners, the maximum legally allowed weekly workload is 44 hours in Brazil, which can be divided in 6 days of work with 1 mandatory rest day (hence, 6x1, usually split into five days of 8 work hours and one day of 4). We are paid monthly, not hourly, so an employer is legally allowed to demand all 44 hours paying only the minimum wage, though not allowed to pay less than the minimum wage for less hours.

    This Rick Azevedo guy accidentally went viral on TikTok for criticising this horribly outdated work scheme and decided to create a single-issue movement (“Life Beyond Work”, VAT) for an increase in mandatory rest days, which grew a lot organically with some support after the fact from leftist parties. The party linked above, PCBR (Revolutionary PCB), is what came out of the PCB split, in strong support for this demand among others but it is still in its restructuring phase.

    Last election Rick ran with PSOL (Partido Socialismo e Liberdade, “multiple tendencies” leftist party) for a municipal legislature as a single-issue candidate and got elected with significant voteshare despite almost no party support. Considering the horrible defeat by the electoralist left (including Lula’s party, the PT) this last election which abandoned labour issues in defense of an “united front against fascism” again, this was a major win for the movement.

    Now, a federal deputy (as in congresswoman) who is also from the PSOL, Erika Hilton, wrote a constitutional amendment that would reduce the work week to 4 days with 3 mandatory rest days, and maximum of 36 weekly hours. (Yes, this doesn’t make sense numerically and is probably so that parliamentary negotions they can back down to 5 work days and 2 rest days.)

    After this was announced, both the VAT movement and the radical left parties coalesced around this amendment, calling for national protests, broad agitprop activities and naming and shaming deputies and parties who go against the proposal. Every radical left party with the bare minimum of material analysis is taking this as the pressure point to attack against the right in the government and for building broad support, but obviously each in their own framework for praxis.

    And to finally respond to your comment, this is sadly a conquest by the working class despite the leftist organisations, who are mostly hopping in at the last second. There are right wingers being forced to support this because 1) there are lots of working class right wingers who are aware of their exploitation at some level, and 2) in order to mobilise the bases, rightwing politicians often co-op class struggles aesthetically (fascists in general, Bolsonaro as an example), and some leftist orgd are intentionally abusing this to force their hand into supporting the cause or risk being shown as a farce. The same applies for corporate media conglomerates. And of course, 3) it’s an opportunity to weaken the Lula government if they don’t also support the amendment, which is an okay sacrifice from the left as they intend to position themselves as left opposition.

    So I wouldn’t say this is strange, in fact it’s been fairly predictable so far.

    Edit to add: I forgot to mention the PCR/UP, a different Marxist-Leninist party with a strong base in the urban periphery, was also involved in getting the VAT movement viral and is going into this struggle with full force.






  • We’re also using AI internally to improve our coding processes, which is boosting productivity and efficiency. Today, more than a quarter of all new code at Google is generated by AI, then reviewed and accepted by engineers. This helps our engineers do more and move faster.

    When text editors automatically create templates for boilerplate, that’s AI.

    Source


  • albigutoGenZedongDid Bush do 9/11?
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    18 days ago

    Adding to all other comments, a lot of the suspicious Bush administration’s immediate reaction (i.e. PATRIOT act) can be understood as them being always ready for whatever calamity in order to justify either invasion or neoliberal “reforms”.

    Naomi Klein (liberal) goes into detail in her book (Shock Doctrine) about what she calls “Disaster Capitalism” and how a lot of effort is put into laying down the groundwork, both legally and ideologically, for whenever crises make them possible, besides constantly agitating for chaos which can lead to said crises.

    She has a documentary which summarises her book, if you want a peek. You can easily draw parallels between the events she describes and what’s happening now in Argentina, Ukraine and Ecuador, among others.

    Now, with regards to what motivates this conspiracy theory: it’s a patriotic distraction. As US citizen lives are treated by US society as inherently more important, portraying Bush as a traitor is an attractive pitfall to fall into, whitewashing the constant crimes of the US, internally and abroad, as the acts of “a bad president”. Even if Bush had personally pushed a button to launch missiles at the WTC, it would not be even remotely close to the social murder caused by his administration, or any other admin before or after.






  • Quando eu usava Signal ele era cheio de bugs e bem ruim de usar (também não considero “seguro” assim como os outros 2, mas isso é outro rolê). Mas a realidade é que eu não uso whatsapp pra conversar com amigos, uso pra trabalho que envolve estar disponível pra atender umas 900 pessoas em qualquer momento. Convencer esse tanto de gente pra mudar pra outra coisa seria um inferno, então telegram pelo menos tem o benéfico de já ter gente lá.