Questions about Lemmygrad's view on Ukraine
Eight hundred MILLION people LIFTED OUT OF POVERTY, this farmer's reaction is priceless. MUST WATCH!!!!
Mr. Xi ✔️
"Being degenerate losers is just part of our culture" -- motto of fascists and right-wingers everywhere.
r*ping kids to own the commies
The Great Recession also forced the CCP to reassess the model it would structure its financial system around. The crisis revealed a more volatile and risky face of Western banking. Leading government-affiliated scholars became increasingly skeptical of a market approach to finance, which they saw as driving financial instability in the United States and Europe.
"Seeking truth from facts," as Deng himself said.
These policy choices have led to a financial system with more immunity to the problems facing the United States and Europe... But that protection comes with its own costs.
Every single time, lol
Gonna go ahead and say it, the Molotov-Ribbentropp pact was unironically a good thing given the circumstances (Britain and France both refusing to enter into an anti-fascist alliance with the USSR). A master stroke of diplomacy that forstalled the inevitable and gave the Soviet Union time to develop and arm.
It also let the Soviet Union take back territory that had been stolen during the Polish-Soviet war and save a big chunk of Poland from Nazi rule.
If I had a nickel for every time I heard some American conservative claim that "Canada is communist," I would be rich enough to be hanging out in prison with some Chinese billionaire.
Yeah, and he also weaponized the weaponization of weaponization of weaponization. (Continue or don't continue as you see fit).
Putin weaponized the weaponization of weaponization.
Thanks, am flattered! In absolute fairness though, the people in charge have a much more thorough knowledge of Juche than I do. I'm just a student, those people are scholars.
The critique is that classical Marxism-Leninism treats humanity as object, not as subject. That is, there is in humanity an interior principle from which the social movement ultimately derives; this principle, described as "independence" or "Chajusong" is socially-created, and while conditioned by material forces, is not wholly reducible to them. Thus man is the subject of history, in that history is created -- originated -- by the masses; Marxism-Leninism fails to recognize this, and instead treats human progress solely as the result or "object" of external economic and social forces. In other words, Marxism-Leninism mistakes the conditions of the thing for the thing itself.
The creators of Marxism set as their main task overcoming the idealistic and metaphysical view of social history which served to justify the reactionary exploiting system and applying the materialistic and dialectical principles to the field of social history; they clarified that society, like nature, exists objectively and it changes and develops according according to the general law governing the material world. They however failed to elucidate the essential differences between the movement of nature and social movement and the law inherent in the socio-historical movement. The new era implies that the most important requirement for making the view of social history of the working class perfect, is to clarify the law peculiar to the social-historical movement whose motive force is the working masses. This historic task was fulfilled with credit by the Juche philosophy.
The Juche philosophy, by applying to social history the philosophical principle that man is the master of everything and decides everything, gave a fresh light to the principle that the masses are the motive force of history, and the socio-historical movement is an independent, creative, and conscious movement of the masses.
-- Kim Jong-Il, On Some Problems of the Ideological Foundation of Socialism, 1990
Though the Juche Idea does not replace Marxism-Leninism, it is nevertheless distinct:
In explaining and propagating the Juche philosophy we do not need to convince people that the Juche philosophy is a new development of Marxist materialist dialectics. It is true that our Party has not taken a dogmatic approach to Marxist materialistic dialectics but analyzed it from the point of view of Juche and has given new explanations to a number of problems. However, some development of materialism and dialectics dose not constitute the basic content of the Juche philosophy.
The Juche philosophy is an original philosophy which has been evolved in systematized with its own principles. The historic contribution made by the Juche philosophy to the development of philosophical thoughts lies not in its advancement of Marxist materialistic dialectics, but in its clarification of new philosophical principles centered on man.
Kim Jong-Il, "The Juche Idea is an Original Revolutionary Philosophy," 1996
The necessity of "going beyond" Marxism-Leninism does not arise because the conclusions of Marxism-Leninism regarding dialectical and historical materialism are somehow erroneous. Rather, the necessity arises because "pure" Marxism-Leninism, though able to analyze contradictions and successfully foment revolution, is unequal to the task of actually building a communist society; "we do not see it as a perfect communist revolutionary theory of the working class." ("On Some Problems of the Ideological Foundation of Socialism.") Juche sits on Marxism-Leninism as on a foundation or base; or perhaps better, it sublates Marxism-Leninism in a new synthesis, in which idealism and materialism no longer contradict each other.
Man is neither a purely spiritual being nor a simple biological being. Man is a social being who lives and acts in social relationships. The fact that man is a social being is the major quality which distinguishes him from other biological beings.
Kim Jong-Il, "Socialism is a Science," 1992
Failure to recognize that the masses are the subject rather than the object of history, says Kim, ultimately leads to the restoration of capital:
Because he is independent, creative and conscious, man is the most precious and powerful being. Man is the only master and remaker of the world. Nothing in the world is more precious or powerful than man.
However, bourgeois reactionaries do not regard man as the most precious being, but as a means for material production and an insignificant being who possesses only labour power, which is bought and sold as a commodity. They also consider him a powerless being dominated by money, not as a powerful being who shapes his destiny through his own efforts. The betrayers of socialism are restoring capitalism and eliminating all the popular policies established by socialism. They regard unemployment and poverty as means for pressurizing people, in order to force them to compete, and in order to increase labour intensity. They grovel at the feet of imperialists, expecting "aid" and "cooperation" from Western capitalist countries, instead of believing in the strength of their people. All this is due to their reactionary bourgeois view of man.
-- Ibid
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Somebody pointed out to me that their NAFO-OFAN looks like NATO OnlyFans. I have since been unable to unsee it.
Based mom
So my opinion on the whole "patriotic socialist" thing is that it's basically a few good insights stretched far beyond what they can reasonably support. Haz and Maupin, to their credit, saw something that nobody else in the American left was really cognizant of: namely, that since the 1970s there has been a confluence of Trotskyism with orthodox Marxist-Leninism, so that a whole lot of "tankiesm" in the US is actually revisionist. (Sam Marcy and the Workers' World Party, who tried to downplay the differences between Trotskyism and the historical practice of actually existing socialist states, is a big reason for this shift). Thus, a whole lot of American communists actually hold, consciously or unconsciously, that Europe and the US are where genuine revolution actually happens; socialist countries on the peripheries are to be supported because they are, under the calculus of liberalism, "underprivileged," not because they represent a genuine path forward for humanity. This is basic dilution of Leninist thought.
However, having recognized this, CPI, Infrared etc. made the leap of assuming that the entire American left from McCarthyism onward was unsalvageable, and that the only way forward was to adopt tactics used by the CPUSA during the 1930s. (Because of their emphasis on Black nationhood and building parallel political infrastructure, the Black Panthers are often regarded by patsocs as a successor to the 1930s CPUSA). Thus you get the current reworking of "Socialism is 20th Century Americanism," and other attempts to create a left-wing American nationalism -- the idea being that since it almost worked before, it has a good chance of working now. I've said before, and will say it again, that I'm convinced neither Haz nor Maupin is really sincere in their patriotism. Certain things they let slip from time to time betray it: Maupin listing the crimes of the American government, Haz stating that it was during the War on Terror that he recognized the true nihilistic essence of American culture, etc. It's a tactic, and not necessarily a good one.
I used to follow Haz somewhat -- for all his faults, he does have a first-rate philosophical mind, with takes on Hegel that at least used to be illuminating -- and the Luna Oi thing goes rather far back. It's based on the idea that, because of its anti-China stance, modern Vietnam is a revisionist country, as demonstrated by its position as "aggressor" during the Sino-Vietnamese war. It's a little silly, but to be fair the official position of the Chinese government regarding the war is basically similar.
Of course it gets shameful when infrared orbiters -- I saw this once on stream -- start mocking the relative level of development in Hanoi vs. Beijing, and saying things like "most developed revisionist country."
Last year Russian troops captured an Azov base, and the pictures released showed, along with the usual swastika mugs, flags, etc., several laptops with Rick and Morty stickers
Washington has always been terrified of Russia and Germany becoming economically integrated with each other.
Imperialism, as we Marxists understand it, is not simply territorial expansion -- which latter, furthermore, does not really describe Russia's actions in Crimea and the Donbass. What happened is that regions which are historically Russian broke from Ukraine after the 2014 coup, and Russia moved in both to secure its interests and to protect ethnic Russians (plus other minorities) from genocide. Normally one should oppose one state meddling in another's sovereignty, and as socialists who are opposed to the ultraleft line of "abolish all nations immediately," we do. But materially, any revolution -- and the Maidan was a revolution -- abolishes the basic set of premises and understandings (what liberals call the "social contract") on which a particular nation is built, and these must be reestablished by force. This is why nearly every revolution in history, the Russian revolution included, was followed by territorial adjustments. Hence, if the Ukrainian junta is unable to establish control over the Donbass and Crimea, these regions are materially speaking not part of the current Ukrainian state.
(The analogous situation, in other words, is not the US invading Iraq. It would be if the central government in Washington were toppled by some sort of coup, and in the chaos which followed, majority-Hispanic regions of Texas and Southern California decided to join Mexico. Mexico sending troops into these regions of the now-weakened United States in order to secure its own interests would not be a violation of US sovereignty -- for US sovereignty in these regions would only exist to the extent it could be defended by force).
Now for imperialism. Imperialism, again as we Marxists understand it, is related to empire as capital is related to capitalism. Capital in itself is neutral; it exists in socialist states as well as capitalist ones. Capitalism, however is an economic system which works to benefit a private capital-owning class; which means production organized not for human need but for profit, i.e., the profit of certain private individuals. Similarly, empires have existed throughout history, and there is a sense in which even the Soviet Union or the People's Republic of China could be neutrally described as "an empire." But imperialism, as Marxists define it, is an economic system based on the possession (legally or de facto) of economic dependencies, which are deliberately kept poor and underdeveloped. This is the relation between the US and Haiti, the US and Iraq, and yes, the US and Ukraine. It is not the relation subsisting between Russia and regions like Crimea or the Donbass or Chechnya.
It is important to understand that imperialism is not about intent, but material reality; it is not, in other words, as the liberals define it, which is basically "military stuff with bad vibes." Imperialism, as an economic system, is a feature of highly developed capitalist economies, which modern Russia is not. An imperialist nation must, almost of necessity, export not commodities but capital; it must have a highly developed financial sector to facilitate this; very often, it has itself become deindustrialized, i.e., it has located most of its industrial production elsewhere. Russia, which primarily exports raw materials, is clearly not a nation of this kind.
Lastly, on the topic of Russia : well-meaning people will often wonder why we support Russia in this conflict, since the Russian Federation is clearly not the USSR. We acknowledge what happened in Russia in 1991, and admit it was a disaster for the Russian people and for the global socialist movement. However, the "Russia is capitalist" line is simplistic, in that it implies one can go from socialism back to full-fledged capitalism. This is not how things actually work: no nation can revert to a lower stage of production. If it loses the higher stage, it collapses into chaos, but it does not attain to a lower stage. Thus, the extent to which Russia is stable and prosperous is precisely the extent to which the Soviet economy, and its infrastructure and means of social organization, still exist; the extent to which it is stagnant and unstable is the degree to which it has been "re-capitalized" and its economy come under the domination of the West. For Russians and for all post-Soviet people, the choice really is "socialism or barbarism."