CPGB-ML? The video would be more aply titled “Trans Agenda or Class reductionism?” ayy lmao

lemmygrad itself seems to be blocked in mainland China. if that doesn’t convince our friends on lemmygrad that there’s something wrong with the way China censors internet, I don’t know what will

It’s probably a blanket ban on ml domains. Regardless, China is free to block whichever sites they want and I don’t see us addressing a petition to the CPC asking for Lemmygrad to be unblocked lol. Maybe they have a form that makes it easy, maybe not, but I don’t think it’s worth doing the procedure while Lemmygrad is still so small. Also if Chinese comrades joined most of us could not even speak to them lol. But that’s not a official admin opinion, just my own.

I’m just confused by the way lemmygrad’s users avoid criticizing china even when it deserves it.

We just haven’t seen anything objectionable so far 🤷‍♂️

That’s really great to hear. Next you will catch yourself saying DPRK instead of North Korea without realising it lol.

For news sources you can try the official state media, KCNA http://kcna.kp/, or the aggregator https://kcnawatch.org, which takes news from the various media channels the DPRK has (I’m not sure, but I certainly hope they are just a mirror and don’t add their own spin). But it’s news meant for the people of the DPRK, so you might have a hard time understanding them. They’re published in English, they’re just very topical.

Otherwise personally I’m gonna start reading Kim Il Sung when I can. A defector (who wants to go back to the DPRK) in the Loyal citizens of Pyongyang documentary said Kim Il Sung was a great general and leader, so much so that even the Japanese praise him in their military reports – and, you know, Japan had colonised and was in the process of depopulating Korea, so that says a lot about him that they would acknowledge him.

Co-ops, even worker-owned, still operate in a capitalist system and therefore are fully integrate into it. They affect capitalism and capitalism affects them. More precisely for the topic here, coops make money because profit exists somewhere else, in other businesses. Capital reproduces itself, Marx talks about this in Value Price and Profit in ways I am not able to lol. In effect coops reproduce capital and capitalism, because they also depend on private capital to survive (in a capitalist economy).

Capitalism in itself is not negative at all

Capitalism has underlying contradictions that it cannot resolve. Climate change is just one of them that took off recently, but any marxist analysis of capitalism could have predicted that the climate would get worse under capitalism, even before we started noticing its effect. On the one hand you have a system predicated on infinite growth year after year, on the other you have a single planet with finite resources. At some point it’s gotta collapse.

This is just one of the big contradictions of capitalism (contradictions being two diametrically opposed things that could not exist without one another).

One other big thing we see with capitalism is that Marx was right about the tendency for the rate of profit to fall. This graph is repeated throughout all late-stage capitalist societies:

Rate of profit falls because we are more and more productive through innovations, most technological. Therefore it costs less time (not money, not yet) to produce the same thing. Because profit can only come from human labour, with time the same amount of labour produces more things. But the capitalist still had to invest in the machines. Thus the ratio of profit to investment dwindles (which is the rate of investment), and less profit is made overall. What happens in a capitalist system when the line reaches 0? When there is no more profit to be made, because we produce stuff instantly and with minimal effort? This is our dream, but it is the nightmare of capitalists.

That’s why we need socialism. Capitalism is unsustainable and has reached its peak. Sure it was great to grow productive forces, and it’s the best system so far (edit: before we had socialism, because the USSR, China and Cuba enriched people much faster than capitalism did) that enriched people (compared to primitive society or feudalism). But now it’s past its prime, it did what it had to do. And just like slavery and feudalism, it has to be replaced by something better.

TikTok is actually the foreign app! China uses Douyin, from the same people. I’m not sure how it’s regimented in China as I’ve never used it, it would be interesting to ask someone who knows about this.

But it’s a real criticism that can be made. Certainly we uphold China as socialist, but also see their contradiction with the capitalist world order where they have had to integrate not only the mercantile logic, but everything that comes from it: alienation, new fleeting products on new markets, and thus people spend their evenings infinitely scrolling Tiktok or Douyin after work.

Profit only exists because there is exploitation. Workers are paid less than they produce, and the surplus is taken by the capitalist on virtue of owning the company. This is a mathematical observation and I don’t know anyone who has been able to debunk it.

Therefore capitalism cannot be the fair exchange of goods and services.

All the time, everywhere. Things don’t move up organically anymore (if they ever did). Anything that becomes popular enough in the world was paid for, and worked on 8 hours a day by teams of people to make sure you get that content delivered to you.

Kpop only became a world phenomenon after gangnam style. Even after that though it was still kinda niche. Then they recruited talent, made supergroups, made BTS, and now are sending them to the USA. Now Kpop and Korean fashion is even bigger than before, and most teens do either one of the two (either listen to Kpop or get inspired by Korean fashion).

I sincerely don’t believe there is such a thing as organic, or inert if you prefer, popularity. Even “organic” SEO takes human labour and effort.

Probably not, considering China is fighting against letting people be “no-lives”, that spend all their free time on a computer.

People are defending the firewall on Lemmygrad, the original instance and a communist one.

China is not obligated to let Facebook or Twitter operate in their country. And when you see how these companies operate honestly they made the right call. There was a time around 15 years ago when nobody knew what Facebook was and we lived just fine. I don’t really see how Facebook connects me to the world (especially as China offers their own solution) when all I see there are boomers, anti vaxxers, click bait videos, and an algorithm designed to make me spend more and more time there.

It’s still a totalitarian regime that’s done some real fucked up things.

Don’t worry, they still have a long ways to go before they reach the level of the US.

Their ban shows up in the main modlog (from the front page) 5 months ago, but just says “troll”

@muad_dibber@lemmygrad.ml hey is something broken on lemmygrad? This user shows up as banned on my end but is able to comment? Thought I’d report if it’s a bug.

WaPo is owned by Bezos but I still can’t think the juxtaposition of the picture and title weren’t deliberate lmao.

Winnie: the “meme” started some 5-6 years ago after a picture of Xi Jinping walking with Obama was posted next to a picture of Winnie the pooh and Tiger walking next to each other in a similar way. That was on Chinese social media. Some years later, Amerikan netizens got wind of it somehow and started using the meme as well, but they thought it was because Winnie the Pooh was banned in China (because of the previous meme on social media that they thought criticized Xi). What actually happened was that China places quotas on foreign films imported every year, and the 2018 Cristopher Robin movie didn’t make it. You can go on aliexpress or other local online shops and get all the Winnie the Pooh stuff you want.

Yes, there is a racist component to it because of the colour of Xi’s skin.

Tiananmen: In 1989, Deng started introducing reforms to promote China’s economic growth. Some of those reforms included a liberalisation of the economy and gave some powers to business owners. This didn’t sit well with Maoists or students, who started protesting. Soon the protests were co-opted by anticommunists who probably had ties to regime change organisations. I can’t prove it directly, but for example here is Chai Ling hoping that the government will kill the students in the next few days while she admits she will not be at the square during that time. You will notice her incredible acting job. Then she left to the US, married a Republican politician, and has a net worth higher than 1 million dollars. Let’s just say if I was employed by the NED or CIA I would not miss this occasion for anything in the world. If I was not involved by the time Chai Ling got into it with her pro-regime change speech, at this stage it was basically handed to me on a silver platter.

Because if these students were actually “pro-democracy” (a meaningless term) as the liberal medial likes to parrot, then they should have loved Deng’s reforms.

The Chinese government does not deny anything happened. First of all because there were too many people involved and it would be impossible to deny it (this is a conspiracy theory libs love, that the Chinese government is both powerful and threatening enough that it can censor anything it wants and people don’t speak out in fear, but also incompetent enough to spend money and effort on frivolous, impossible projects). You can go on gov.cn and access the report that was made by the State Council. Unfortunately I never remember which report it is exactly (this is all for the month of June), but they talk about the “massacre”. Except it wasn’t a massacre.

According to the Chinese government, 300 people died on June 4th. Most of those casualties were PLA soldiers.

PLA troops were deployed without weapons and were lynched and burned by the students protesting there. Later their vehicles were set on fire and some soldiers died from not being able to exit the vehicle. This was the catalyst that forced the PLA to empty the square. By this point most of non regime change protesters had left the square. The “massacre” (it wasn’t a massacre, but certainly there were civilian casualties) actually took place outside the square.

There’s also the famous cable by a British diplomat in HK which cannot be corroborated by any other witness. It’s from his cable that we get the famous story of machine gun nests perched on top of buildings so they could mow down fleeing students, or the shock story of tanks running over people and then soldiers washing the remains down the drains (as if they would contaminate their sewers like that lol). Like I said it’s a huge incident involving many people, there were many foreign journalists covering the story as well. None of them have ever talked about machine gun fire or tanks purposely running over people.

There is a reason libs won’t let this incident die. Can you name any other ~minor incident (relatively, compared to what the US has done in Iraq or Afghanistan, or what Israel does in Palestine) that gets talked about that much? And not only gets talked about, but gets talked about so wrongly?

We should also talk about “Tank man”, because it’s the photo that gets shared around the most. You can see the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeFzeNAHEhU, it’s not a secret. The tanks were leaving the square after the night of June 4th, and this guy was preventing them from leaving. Look at the restraint showed by the column of tanks – they don’t threaten him, they don’t try to run him over. They even let him climb onto one and talk to the crew inside. Are we supposed to believe these soldiers were just, a few hours earlier, indiscriminately firing at protesters?

Haha, well, I should have named the essay how to handle police, as we also delve into the rights citizens have when being detained or interrogated. Not sure if it’s possible to rename the page on the mediawiki platform, unless i delete this one and create a new page with the updated title.

From the Stalin text that was linked, the conclusion one comes to after it is that anarchists want no state, and Marxists do. They are very clear about that.

What will happen then after the revolution? We will form a state, they will say it’s oppressive (the people are not happier when they are beaten by the people’s stick, to quote an antisemite), and then they’ll fight against us. This will be the second phase of the revolution.

My other issues with anarchism are that it’s never really worked out as a solution. It was seen as a possible avenue for Korean liberation from Japan, and they all died for it. it was seen as a possible avenue for self profit in Makhnovia, while there was a USSR led by Lenin next to it. It was apparently tried in China, now Xi is calling them out in a speech. Now anarchists try to claim the Zapatistas (who have said that they see not anarchist) just because the zapatistas have seen some success (and we wish them all the best).

The other issue is they have no solutions. Sometimes people in my party ask them “okay you’ve seized power, what do you do?” or “how do you provide Healthcare in an anarchist commune?” and they have no idea. They have at most vague possibilities, like “the people will organise themselves to provide Healthcare” but that’s not an answer - - you could say the same about private Healthcare. We have solutions, we can take them step by step. If I’m ever in the revolution, I don’t want anarchists to hijack it and mess it up.

Yes, China is socialist. Nothing new here.

And the only reason Fujimori is running is to avoid prison as she is under investigation for fraud right now.

Can I get a death to Amerika in chat?

Criticalresist warns of Obama’s war crimes.

This confirms to me that all anarchists are ultimately primitivists.

Edit: tell you what though, I will expand on my meme answer. Anarchists really make themselves look like they only care about destroying things. This essay reminds me of the “myth of left unity” essay posted on the same site by some cringe illegalist, who upheld the Hadza people as the best of anarchism today (a tribe of hunter-gatherers). To some extent I believe many of them simply have a disdain for authority in general or a chip on their shoulder and this turns into an ideology that gives them the moral backing for their opinions (and who has chips in their shoulder? The petite bourgeoisie). It’s not just the state that’s bad, it’s social structures. Inventions. Discoveries. Essentially in this essay, books may not be inherently bad, but literacy is. But without literacy there are no books. So ultimately, books are bad. This is their reasoning.

We come back to socialism or barbarism. Anarchists would like to destroy everything and hope to do it right this time around. But who else, aside from them, want to smash everything around them (my argument being: how are you going to get people onboard anarchism if you tell them everything they care about must go)? We got hospitals. I don’t want to destroy hospitals or their capacity to provide treatment. We got schools. I don’t want to destroy schools or their capacity to provide education. This capacity to provide a service implies social relations at play. An individual can drive a bus and pick people up, but it takes division of labour and planning (more social relations) to make the driver useful (in the sense that his labour is performed efficiently).

What bothered me specifically in this essay was the mention of learning to fish or gather edible plants. Incidentally this anarchist is making the same mistake Proudhon did, which is to only take one side of production and ignore the social relations that govern it. If you are talking about labour, you are talking about division of labour. Yet you can only sustain yourself and your family if you learn to fish like I imagine it (I’m guessing we’re talking about rod fishing, and not working aboard a huge trawler vessel).

So what will we do in an anarchist society? Well, first, you have to destroy all social relations that brought us to the present day, because they are inherently bad. Then you teach people how to fish. Then they fish for themselves and their family. Meanwhile nobody is making MRI machines, nobody is driving buses, because there are no social relations to make these possible. Then 100 years down the line we reinvent writing and books. And perhaps in another 100 years we will discover feudalism!

Incidentally if the writer wanted to criticize education, there are very good marxist analyses of education throughout history and in the present day, and we are in fact (in the imperial core, which is the richest part of the world) in a highly contradictory time right now, as we need people to be more and more educated but also can’t take the time to actually educate them.