Thought the 3D was overhyped and fairly pointless, though still one of the better 3D movies. Story entirely forgettable, honestly don’t remember anything. Only watched it once during its cinema run back then and have no push the watch the new one either

Overall mostly a marketing ploy by Big-3D imo

they probably figured it was about time to ruin Star Wars

They did that a while ago lol

Geopolitical Economy Hour

Hate that name change…no recall value at all.

But excellent suggestion. Thought about Michael Hudson too when setting up this post, but nothing specific came to mind. This is exactly it. Richard Wolff did quite a few espidodes last years on the topic too now that I’m thinking about it

Thanks comrade!

This is great, cheers comrade!

I’ve read Wage Labour and Capital a while ago as well as Value, Price and Profit and while essential reading, I don’t think it’s sufficient for me to really talk about inflation on a seminar-level. Capital - don’t really have the time for it for this deep dive and I wanna read it as part of a group

Forget food for a moment, my damn garbage bill went up 25% for this year.

Feels like utilities almost tripled over the past 1.5 years. 20% for food also seems way too low. I track my shopping cost fairly well and on average I’m paying like 50% more than before the war.

“I think the 3% offer is sign of respect to the public sector workers.”

It’s effectively a paycut of at least 5% lol. But I guess succdems being succdems.

most large unions striking and asking for a 10% raise to cover inflation (haha as if)

This is based as though. At least verdi is becoming much more combative compared to most unions docile stance last year. And even 10% is effectively just to balance out inflation, not a real raise.

God damn that G7 trajectory is wild. How did they fuck up their win in the Cold War that much?

Just listening to some good ol’ Creedence and it’s wild anti-war songs at those times of contradictions were ever allowed to get that big. Even wilder is capitalism’s ability to rob things like protest art of all their meaning via commodification and even twist their original meaning into their exact antithesis. Fortunate Son is a literal war song now lol

Still, says something about even liberal democracy and society that we haven’t even gotten that over the past 2 decades

Not only that, it’s such a strange niche issue young radlibs copied from Yankee Twitter, because they’re totally separated from the tangible, material struggles of the average working class woman.

There’s so many real issues they could’ve talked about that women still face or are facing increasingly. They could’ve talked about the effects the fucked up Covid response had on women in particular, how remote work and inflation have heightened double exploitation, how women have been forced to give up their jobs to become housewives again, how they’re forced to stay in abusive household. They could’ve talked about free kindergardens to alleviate this issue, hell they could’ve talked about the struggles and exploitation Ukrainian (refugee) women face currently. They could’ve talked about the horrific misery imposed upon Afghan women by our government and on and on…

But they talked about Rojava…and sex work by styling themselves revolutionary wh*res.

It’s fucking shameful. I know heaps of real feminists - in name and/or praxis - young and old. Some of them have been fighting the struggle in the peace movement, womens movement, unions and socialist orgs since the late 60s. Real, revolutionary women. These are the kinds of people you should see at rallys like that. But you don’t, because at best they’d laugh about this bougie shit, at worst they’d feel insulted.

Fucking whack

Didn’t even realize there was a community for that lol. Could be helpful to revive it though. I feel like that’s one of the most tangible things this medium could be used for to aid real life work

Cheers comrade, extremely helpful stuff. Guess looking to advertisement strategies is kinda obvious, but still good to have it written down like that.

If you got some resources so I could help myself, that’d be awesome.

As for specific help - I don’t wanna be too specific for privacy reasons, still thanks heaps for the offer. Current most pressing work is a flyer for a peace-movement rally against weapon-supplies to Ukraine. If you got some general ideas lying around, I’d be glad to hear them. 😊

Luckily the West, Europe in particular, has an unending supply of refugees that could, will and are used to undercut the domestic labour market to offset losses from insourcing.

Let’s not even forget the KKKringe-ass use of 733tspeak

Wait what? Leet is making a comeback? I thought people forgot that had even existed some time after ~2010

As for tiktok in general - have you ever had someone use it in the same room as you unmuted? It’s terrifying how that stuff fries your brain. Constant switches between loudass music, weird AI voices, people talking every other second is just infuriating and people subject themselves to this for hours at a time

Ok honestly the Yanks have totally lost the plot. Like wtf are they even trying to do at this point?

The reason why Russian momentum stopped after Severodonetsk was not so much to do with losses but with contracts for a lot of the professional soldiers expiring and not being renewed.

We don’t really know that’s the case. Same reason has been given for the Kharkiv debacle which happened months later. It might be the whole reason or at least part of it. It is notable though that the Chechens and LPR soldiers that played a huge part in that offensive all but stopped showing up in any major offensive way after that. The Russian regulars and VDV involved too - some of them definitely went to Kherson I’d say. Nonetheless the only fighting force involved in that battle that demonstrated offensive capabilities after Severodonetsk was Wagner.

I also have no idea what kind of losses Wagner have taken but […] they can’t be too bad.

I very much doubt that. Heavy losses on Wagners side have been acknowledged by everyone. Wagner and Prigozhin himself, Russian commentators and channels all say this is the case, because there’s no way they don’t have heavy losses. I mean, we’ve seen the pictures. They’ve been leading constant, heavy assault operations against mostly urban, heavily fortified and mined areas for almost 9 months now. There’s simply no way any force could go through this without heavy losses. The ratio might be skewed (it almost definitely is), but it’d be very surprising if they could fight another prologed urban battle like this. It’s one thing to close this out, a different beast to start something like Bakhmut all over again.

the Soledar collapse […] is indication that things have gotten really quite desperate for Ukraine in terms of the overall logistical and manpower situation

It could mean that, it could also not. Russia’s pullback from Kherson didn’t mean that and the fall Severodonetsk didn’t mean that for Ukraine. I don’t buy these projections anymore either way. We don’t know if these retreats are routs or orderly, if they’re worth it for them or not. Interpreting has just led to false predictions in the past.

The advances that have happened so far from the Russian side have not been the result of any big planned offensives but of opportunistic pushes at the occasional weak point.

We don’t know though if that’s their choice or if they simply lack the strength to do any sweeping moves though. They have tried much more than opportunistic probing in Ugledar eg and they’ve suffered massive losses there. In the push recently and the storming of Pavlovka some months ago they themselves acknowledged “hundreds” of losses among the marines there daily during offensive actions.

Russia is advancing due to their overwhelming superiority in artillery volumes that prepare the ground beforehand

Very much true, what’s interesting though is reports of shell shortages have popped up recently on all parts of the front afaik. Definitely at Bakhmut, Kremenaya and iirc even around Ugledar. Now we don’t know if that means a reduction from 50 to 40k shells a day or how big that shortage is, but there is something going on here. Still outgunning the Ukrainians, but we don’t know by how much.

But we won’t know for sure until much later after the fact, the fog of war is just too thick right now

100%. I just don’t buy into the big copes, rationalizations and hopes for big, sweeping offensives from either side anymore. Predictions and interpretations have proved pretty futile so far, I’m done with them, especially the optimistic ones.

Pretty much

Wonder how and if they’ll pull out. Apparently the largest part of the professional force has been withdrawn/replaced by TDF units already. Still, an encirclement of thousands of them would be horrible for them.

Will also be interesting to see how much offensive potential Russia has left after this. Wagner should be mostly spent after 6+ months of this butchery. Could be like Severodonetsk after which Chechens, LPR and RAF in that part of the front were mostly spent.

It is, but I think it’s highly unlikely to find people keen for war in any conflict past a certain early euphoria. As propagandized as the Ukrainian people have been these past months and years, I still doubt your average Ukrainian is keen to die a miserable, horrible death in some trench somewhere in Donbass if they can avoid it - no more than the average Russian is.

Them being pulled of the streets could be an indicator of waning morale, but imo it’s plausible that it’s mostly for logistical reasons. It’s just easier to grab someone from the gym, than for some central authority to reach them via their postal address.

Millions of Poles getting a collective erection thinking about them, everyone they know and love vaporizing in nuclear fire

Crazy how it took less than a year for these deluded drones to learn to love the bomb, to love the perspective of nuclear holocaust and mass death and suffering in the fires of a world war.

None of them stand to gain anything from this, but pain and loss and misery, yet they’e gleefully begging for salvation by nuclear fallout. Fucking disturbing

RWA had some interesting perspective on this recently that goes a bit against the narrative of “Ukraine is pulling people off the streets, because there’s nobody left”. Essentially what they said was that Ukraine is such a poorly centralized and governed state with a weak bureaucracy nobody knows how many people live in the country and where, the war and refugee situation only exaggerated this. Estimates of Ukrainian population before the war ranged between 30 and 40 mio, because afaik they haven’t been able to administer a census this century.

So the problem according to that isn’t so much that there’s nobody left physically, but that they’re struggling heavily to reach the people that are or should be there, if they even know these people exist. Hence the pulling people off the streets - they just can’t reach them any other way.

Vietnamese social imperialism

Jesus Christ

Damn that’s solid as. Even 16k is amazing compared to Germany (especially per capita), but another 10k in 2 years is crazy good progress - you love to see it.

We have 15 free healthcare clinics at the moment. The largest Union with 1.3 million members is starting to follow us on a lot of points. We have two municipalities in the country under our control, with good results.

That’s awesome, wish we had that kind of infrastructure and influence here. Our communist parties are struggling to stay relevant in any matter at all even in the big cities.

Nah, tagesschau article was just “China demands truce and peace talks” and these hilariously funny libs edited it to look like OP, because they just can’t help themselves but slander even a fucking call for peace with their racist yellow peril bs

Don’t forget Baerbock being a US think-tank creation, being both involved with the German Marshall Fund and Davos Young Global Leaders initiative.

Look like German fraternity caps

Well and good, that still doesn’t change anything in our day to day work and isn’t reliant on our ‘support’ - whatever that means - at all. These are just geopolitical, historical developments which we certainly have to position ourselves towards and which we have to understand. The thrust of the communist movement remains the same however, regardless of this conflict. Russia fighting or winning in Ukraine might create openings and favorable conditions for us as communists, but it doesn’t change who or how we fight. We still fight our domestic bourgeoisie, as we’ve done before this conflict and as we’ll do once it ends.

We can’t keep pretending that we’re “fighting” anything if we keep trying to work within their system and not reaching out for aid from our governments’ enemies.

What do you mean materially? Western communist parties should write endorsements to Putin and hope he’ll give us money or what? Like, that’s not going to happen and even if it would it’d just be right-opportunism on a geopolitical scale. And what do you mean by ‘work within their system’ that we shouldn’t be doing and what work outside the system should we be doing then?

Honestly I’m not sure what you’re even arguing for in concrete terms at all.

Yes, but we should do that irrespective of Russia. Our bourgeoisie was our enemy before this conflict and it will be our enemy after it. Fighting it has nothing to do with Russia at all. Comrades have been doing that for decades, in their workplaces, unions and communities.

What do you mean by ‘support’? Cheer for them online? Because I’d say that isn’t support and doesn’t matter in any way at all. Material support as in sending money, material or even manpower to Russia? No Western leftist organization has the resources for that anyway and it would be deeply wrong to dedicade any of the scarce resources we have to support a capitalist country’s government, no matter who it’s fighting, instead of the fight for our communites locally.

If you want to ‘support’ Russia, fight your domestic bourgeoisie. If you don’t want to support Russia, still fight your domestic bourgeoisie. All this nonsense about who to support in this conflict is a distraction from our real, main enemy, the one we can actually fight in our work places, schools, communities, etc.

Great comment actually. I mostly framed this in a personal and psychological context, but being on a communist board, it obviously makes sense to connect it to society more broadly.

As such you’re definitely right. The way “self-love” is defined currently can’t be separated from the society that defines it. This society being absurdly compartmentalized, individualistic, alienated, isolated and human relations to others and themselves being increasingly commodified makes a non-narcissistic understanding of it difficult as fuck. Any definition of self-love under capitalism will always be conducive to reinforce the cultural hegemony of liberalism. As such we will always struggle with the concept, because it can never be fully healthy and the question I asked is one that naturally follows from the contradictory definition we get.

However, there is genuinely a place where we have to love ourselves despite our human failures and flaws. We have to take care of ourselves, and make sure we are not completely open to exploitation from those who will walk all over us and use up every crumb we leave unprotected.

100%. We all have flaws, but we don’t all have to hate ourselves for them. That’s not to say we have to celebrate or excuse these flaws, but we can’t hate ourselves for them either, even just from a pragmatic pov. Hating ourselves for our flaws doesn’t help anyone (but maybe some bourgeois looking to profit from the resulting insecurity).

“Do not continue to run on a broken leg or you will never run again” is what I tell myself

Exactly right. There obviously is a line between self-abandonment/-sacrifice and self-absorbtion. That, I’d say, is healthy self-protection and born out of love. It’s out of respect for the self, for our own values and emerges from a belief that we are worthy of standing for our values, that we hold up to them, because we deserve to be that person. However for that to be healthy we need healthy values and that’s the crux of the matter. This deeply anti-social society teaches us anti-social values and actively tries to get us to not stand for social values and morals.

It’s just a sad state of things, one I’ve now witnessed a couple of times, that people start out deeply insecure, with no boundaries and no self-respect to enfroce them or to stand up for their values. They look for help to become healthier - to therapists, books, etc. And after working hard, sometimes for years, they come out the other side with a total disregard for their fellow human beings, because “self-love” or “self-protection”. As if the solution to the deep insecurity and powerlessness they used to feel in this society for commodifying and isolating them was to lean into it and treat other people as disposable commodities.

Ultimately though, definitiely as @TeezyZeezy said, something to be judged on a case by case basis.

Well who wouldn’t celebrate painful death and suffering of people, because they live in absurdly gerrymandered states so they can’t even realistically choose between the two parties of corporate ghouls?

Who’s making these maps? They seem to be based on geolocations, but they also always seem to be way ahead of other Russian and Western maps.

in this case, the most critical possible) and that one would extend the grace that suc

But that’s not happening in this case, is it? It’s just unironically and uncritically spreading Russian nationalist propaganda. Even in the most generous reading of this, how exactly is it a communists job ever in any way to post shit like this?

without investigating

What’s there to investigate? Self styled communists and edgelords licking RAF boots, because that’s somehow critical support?

And that’s ignoring all the other reactionary shit on that nazbol pipeline

Yeah definitely nothing more based to a communist than unironically licking the boots of a capitalist countrys army. Mega based and principled and 100% the way to raise class consciousness and agitate for peace among the Western working class.

This was posted with clear motive of trolling leftoids

lmao I swear bro it’s just trolling bro just heckin irony looool triggered much leftoid

Literally the same type of nonsense Vaushites push.

What you posted is based though

It’s terminally online cringe garbage. How any self respecting communist can repost stuff like this or take it seriously in any way at all is beyond me.

There’s a clear difference between analyzing the reasons for this war, the benefits a Russian victory might have and the terror a Russian defeat would bring and whatever abomination this bs is and the reddit brain needed to celebrate this or “z post”.

Gender may have biological predispositions, but it’s largely determined by historical conditions.

Not sure if this belongs here, but since a lot of people tend to say trans people are some kind of ‘disproval’ or breaking up of predominant gender-expression/-norms. But isn’t trans then much more a reaffirmation of whatever dominant historical gender-expression/-definition?

with F-35s and whatnot constantly circling it

lmao the picture of these billion dollar planes circling this balloon while an entire nation of 350mio is coping and seething below is just too hysterical. It’s such a beautiful, absurd allegory for the US as a state

I mean…fair point lol. At least people are calling it a weather balloon now if you can believe it

It’s only Feb, but this already has to be the dumbest story of the year

Geopolitical Economy Report? What happened to Multipolarista?