Hoping to finish up Lenins Imperialism this week! I sort of feel like I’m missing some stuff because I haven’t gotten to reading Caoital Vol 2 and 3 yet, but hopefully I’ll see some connections when I do read them

Right folks, one Icelander made a joke about Hákarl so we’re not allowed to ferment or salt stuff anymore. Only frozen meat and vegetables in plastic bags from now on.

The tech bourgeoisie dream of a world where running AI will require massive constant capital. Thankfully, it seems that there is great potential for more efficient models instead

In the Soviet Union, excessive wage leveling, corruption and corrosion caused by the second economy and the failure to crack down on it, and a failure to maintain a living and vivid dialectical materialist science and living practice of constructive critique, in particular in regards to the CPSU and the party line, contributed to the reactionary character of these classes. After the revolution, doing better on these points will help keep these classes more loyal.

As for the revolution, the key is to secure the class power of the proletariat as expressed through mass organizations and the communist party and the proletarian state apparatus. New intelligensia etc. can be grown by public education. Political Commissars can ensure officers and the like stay in line during the revolutionary period. The key is to make opportunists conform to the revolution because it is in their best interest, and to weed out committed reactionaries and remove them from positions of power, and help them all grow past their false conciousness.

Hello comerades

I wanted to try to translate the Norwegian poem “Revolusjonens Røst” by Rudolf Nielsen to english for you because I quite like it. I’ve taken some liberties to try to make it a bit less akward than a literal translation, and also skipped trying to force it into a rhyming scheme to focus on the message. Here you go:

The Revolutions Voice

Give me the true and rising, the solid people of strength. Those who are patient and willful, and never in life will go wrong, And sell out my great purpose, instead fighting to death for it.

Give me the cool and the wise, who how I am real. Much more than many who say they believe, I need those who know. Nothing is more like words in sand, than promises of love to come.

Give me the bitter and spiteful, without fear in their hearts. Give me the godless and proud, without a taste for the ideal, but who will make a heaven here by their own class.

Give me the burning hearts, which never give way to doubt, who never give in to sorrow and fear and settle for mere rest, but meet every victory and defeat with the same invincible grin.

So give me the best of you, and I will give you all! No one will know how much we fought for untill we have truly won. We might just need to save our earth, the best among you are called.

Idealist nonsense … “there are no alternatives to capitalism” first of there has been for about one hundred and fifthy years through the writings of Marx and Engels . Secondly the stuff he talks about in the article are just vague ideas without, per own admission, an economic basis. These ideas aren’t alternatives to capitalism, at best they are just an attempt at distracting workers from marxism.

Hello Comrades. I felt a bit down while reading Socialism Betrayed and got an idea for a painting. It’s called “Andropov’s Burial”. I thought maybe some of you would like it.

Remember, comrades, history is on our side!

Go to Spain comrades is not great up here in the north :/

France and Germany are probably better options for trans healthcare too

It’s not just employment either. Trans people often have to pay for medical treatment out of pocket fully or partially. Even if you do have a well-paying job, many working class trans people will have to spend a large part of their wage financing medical treatment, often in combination with unsecured loans.

Great book overall, very enjoyable to read. I have some criticisms though.

• In terms of structure, it would have been good to bring up the facism point clearer again at the end to round things off, perhaps by pointing out the facist elements of everything discussed in the rest of the book.
• Denouncement of Stalin as a plain dictator severly lacks nuance AFAIK. So does implying that he had control of everything that happened in the Purges.
• Parenti claims that no computerized system could control a planned economy. This is a weak claim, because first of all it has never really been tried. Secondly, if anything the Soviets needed more and stricter state control/better control mechanism of the economy to curb the shadow economy and ensure proper rewards for efficiency - I don’t see how computerization could fail to help here. As a modern example, digital currencies such as even just bank cards could severly hamper the shadow economy because it could be implemented to be entirely transparent to investigation or automated oversight. Oversight, communication, logistics and planning support could be massively better than what Soviet planners had to work with.
• At one point he claims high-paid athletes are relatively speaking heavily exploited because they produce so much value for the club owners compared to lifetime pay. This makes no sense from a LTV perspective.
• Parenti seems to favor, at least in an ideal world, liberalization and desentralization of the economy in favor of the peasants and the petite bourgeoisie. Although this probably make sense in some situations as long as the DotP is enforced and other class interests are properly controlled, you can’t both support liberalization in the Soviet Union and oppose China post-Dengism. This seems clearly contradictory to me. It makea no sense to only support a national petite bourgeoise (which is the only possible implies distinction I can think of based on my reading), if you’re gonna have a free market why oppose influx of foreign capital and technology in a controlled manner or into lower strata of the economy?

One smaller point I really like though is him using the word Ecology instead of Environment. Environment implies something external to us, something surrounding us, something that could be replaced. I feel ecology makes it clearer that we are a part of it.

Capitalist societies are ruled by the bourgeoisie. Under the class rule of the bourgeoisie, the law is created to protect the interests of the bourgeoisie. Because liberals buy into bourgeois ideology, they support the rule of law over them. Essentially, they believe that the growth of obvious facism in the US, which has been present for over a hundred years as a major element of the United States, is an attempted coup by a minority of the bourgeoisie. In actually, the shift to naked facism is produced by a change in the material basis, namely the declining rate if profit and decline of the American Empire.

Therefore, the bourgeois law cannot stop facism, because bourgeois law will change to represent the interests of the increasingly facist bourgeoisie - liberals have an idealistic conception of law, where it is this ideal or holy thing imposing “democracy, freedom and human rights” on society, while in actuality it is just a tool for bourgeois class rule, which can be altered, replaced, or discarded whenever useful. They have this conception because they do not understand the material basis of laws, and because they are propagandized to believe in the ideals of the bourgeoisie. US facist also support the rule of facist laws, for the ideals of “order and supremacy”.

The fundamental flaw apart from not understanding the material basis of law, is that they do not understand the class character of facism, viewing it instead through a purely ideological lens as something evil and irrational for all segmens of the population (despite facism only occuring to serve the interests of the bourgeoisie). When this is understood, it is clear that the only way to prevent facism is to overthrow the bourgeoisie and establish the class rule of the proletariat, something the bourgeois liberal idealogues will never advocate for - instead they advocate for peaceful protests, voting, and the rule of law, i.e. obeying the class rule of the bourgeoisie as a way to “oppose” the bourgeoisie

I’m reading Socialism Betrayed now and taking notes to Blackshirts and Reds. Both a refreshing break before diving into capital vol 2 😅

It’s fun but as far as being a simulation of marxist economics it fails completely. It doesn’t treat commodities as physical entities but abstracts it as a “flow”, so it can’t really represent overproduction crisises, there is no real market uncertainty, etc. Also it suffers from the PDX game curse of running too damn slow 😭