it’s fucking wild to see people in the imperial core (as The Lorax here has in their bio) criticize China for not standing up enough against the empire. that’s literally our job in the imperial core!

i really need everyone to internalize that “free speech zones”, like most of the oppressive shit that Trump has been doing, is not a brand new thing. i remember these were very strictly implemented against the anti-war demonstrations during the W years (which i think is where the meme started).

you need to remember that the Kennedys are catholic. this explains a great deal about the entire family, the least of which is how many of them there are.

in case anyone is confused by this, actual employee owned businesses make their employees into petite bourgeoisie, which fundamentally does not threaten capitalist power, and can instead be used as a pull yourself up by the bootstraps feel-good story to further fragment worker power.

yes, phones have ip addresses, but the cell phone network is not going to open their firewall for your phone to receive incoming connections, in much the same way as the cgnat in the blurb you quoted there works. if your internet plan does that, hosting a server is pretty much impossible.

you are going to have issues getting 2 phones to directly establish a connection between them due to the way that cell networks set up their firewalls. even on private wifi that would require some network config effort that a lot of people will not be able to do.

https://redsails.org/china-has-billionaires/

framing this as a new thing is incredibly dishonest. these kinds of schedules have been a fact of life in large portions of the tech industry for my entire career, especially in startups.

there have been many variations, including styles very reminicent of the confederate battle flag

you have hit upon one of the theoretically most challenging parts of marxism. the relationship between use values (what you are just calling value here, meaning the practical use that people get out of a commodity) and exchange value (usually represented as the usual monetary price you purchase it for in the market) has been a common criticism of marxism since Capital was published. my advice is to ignore it at least until you are thoroughly grounded in the basics and possibly far longer than that unless you feel particularly drawn to the issue. for day to day organizing it is not something that will come up.

many papers and dissertations have been written by people far smarter than me (and probably you, too) on this, so once you have read Capital and the other marxist basics there will be plenty of material for you to engage with on all sides of the debate. for example, i have had this piece on redsails in my bookmarks for few years.

they are being organized largely by the 50501 movement, which is heavily connected with the democrats. they are trying to rally the progressive base that was turned off by Biden and then Harris by pointing at the bad things that Trump is doing. socialist groups attend to try to radicalize people who are starting to be disenchanted by the dems.

i mean, it probably varies substantially by branch, but i know my local branch does a lot of community organizing and outreach type events and is very active in protests and such. if there is one near you, i really recommend reaching out and seeing what they have going on.

Haz Al-Din cooked up this theory that the real proletariat is farm owners.

amazing, they’re literally reconstructing the jeffersonian mythology of the yeoman farmer, updated to the modern day and cloaked in misused marxist terminology

that’s impossible, since it requires some degree of expertise, which is literally inconceivable for these people. in their view, anyone positioning themselves as having a rare (or sometimes just slightly uncommon) skill is actively trying to defraud you by making you pay them to do something that would be easy for you to do yourself. i think this evolved out of a devaluing of “low skill” jobs. eventually it was used as a criticism of Pollock-style modern art, you know, the “i could paint that” thing. the fact that it has become a general criticism of any professional category is deeply funny to me.

yeah, they’re running short on munitions right now (what with arming fascists in ukraine and israel for the last few years), so that’s all they could spare right now.

mainstream political discourse in america is almost entirely based on vibes. every once in a while reality will intrude to make everyone talk about something that matters in somewhat reasonable terms, but that is always short lived. once you abstract that kind of ungrounded discussion through fiction and try to discuss that fiction at if it actually happened, it becomes no better than noise. this is a prime example of that.

the only way to discuss art in a meaningful way, especially politically, is to talk about what it is says (or is trying to say) about the real world that we live in. i think it’s fairly uncontroversial to say that the interpretation that star wars invites you to make in the text is that the old republic is essentially a liberal democracy that gets overthrown by fascists. it’s a very liberal take on how that happens (through lies and treachery rather than openly calling for it), but that’s to be expected from art made by a liberal society.

i’m sure some of them will realize they were mislead and change their ways, but the vast majority of them will stop thinking about it for a few years, then when forced to confront it will say they always opposed intervention, just like they did with the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions.

here is the (unfortunately short) prolewiki article on revisionism, of which right deviation is one type. beyond the reformism example given there, the most common kind of right deviation i usually see is tailist bigotry, which includes things like promoting implicit racism or homophobia because “that’s just what people believe around here, and we need to connect with them where they are at”.

The term “globalist” is nonsense, there is no such thing, that is why i left that part out. It’s a word used by people who are not versed in Marxist theory and don’t understand that what they are describing as “globalism” is merely a manifestation of capitalist imperialism as described by Lenin.

Of course “globalist” is a nonsense term, but we can still recognize that anti-semitic conspiracies use it and see that the specific tweet that you linked to is trying to frame Stalin’s criticism of capitalism in terms of that anti-semitic conspiracy, which fundamentally undercuts the Marxist analysis that it is based on.

This “guilt by association”/“attack the messenger” thing is tedious, it’s purity-fetishist and it prevents us from taking valuable contributions wherever we find them. If you are secure enough in your own ideological position you shouldn’t be bothered by who else is saying the same thing.

I also try to read widely. It’s a good thing to do and one I strongly recommend at every opportunity. However, that doesn’t insulate you from criticism of the things you share, and certainly doesn’t excuse sharing anti-semitic conspiracy theories, which this is. It takes work to incorporate the useful parts of other ideologies into a Marxist analysis, and downplaying the bigotries of your sources is precisely the wrong way to do that.

Pointing out the fact that Trump is a Zionist and will act in the interests of Zionists is not one of those bad takes. Does the validity of a point depend on who is making it?

I fundamentally disagree with your reading of that tweet. Saying that Netanyahu is Trump’s master is very explicitly the “Jews control everything” conspiracy theory. This has been a key part of patsoc messaging around Israel the last couple of years and huge part of them trying to insert right-deviation into otherwise Marxist orgs.