cfgaussian @ cfgaussian @lemmygrad.ml

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3 yr. ago

it weren't western weapons that made the Black Sea unsafe for the Russian Navy

Not true. What little success they had there was due to British naval drones. Those worked for a while until Russia adapted. Now you hardly ever hear of success anymore.

Ukranian drones did it.

Again, technically not the case. Most of them are Chinese, the Ukrainians just strap explosive shells on them.

the war on the actual frontline has become drone-heavy

Drones play a large and vital role but they have not and cannot replace the role of conventional artillery. In fact the most effective use of drones in this conflict has been as artillery spotters. The reason why Ukraine relies on kamikaze drones to such an asymmetrical extent is because they have little else left by now. It is done out of necessity, not because it is the optimal thing to do.

Further, there is a certain inherent bias in OSINT toward overestimating the impact of drones on the battlefield due to the fact that they come with their own video footage whereas an artillery shell does not film as it flies toward a target.

Ukraine started this war with their pants down

Not really. Ukraine had the largest and best equipped military of any European country except for Russia at the start of this conflict. They were involved in an active conflict since 2014, had tens of thousands of soldiers already deployed and large swathes of the eastern front heavily fortified, and they had been receiving training from NATO for years as well as weapons.

Then they were further pumped full with all remaining Warsaw pact equipment that could be scrounged up (which was actually a very large amount) when the conflict began.

and indeed if it weren't for western systems and ammunition they would've lost it long ago

This is true.

at the same time they've been building up their own military production and becoming more and more independent

Quite the opposite. Ukraine began this war with far more of a military industry than it has now. It lost almost all of it to Russian strikes, and what is left are almost exclusively small scale decentralized production which can only produce small weapons (drones first and foremost) and ammunition but nothing on the scale of tanks, artillery systems, air defense systems, etc.

Ukraine is now more dependent on western supplies than it has ever been, and not just in the military sphere. Its entire government is being kept afloat by US and European money which pays the salaries of virtually everyone in the Ukrainian government. It even imports energy. Functionally Ukraine's economy is dead.

Lol. If we didn't do that then we would get accused of not including our sources. But i get your point, sometimes we can tend to be overly thorough.

I view this as being a bit like mathematics. The things we say make sense to someone who is already versed in the subject but for someone who doesn't already understand or agree with certain concepts or ideas we don't necessarily want to rehash arguments that were already laid out in works a hundred years prior so we just refer back to those in the same way that when you do modern mathematics you don't need to repeat proofs that were already done in the 19th century. You can just take those theorems as given and if you are really interested in how they were derived you can still go back to the original literature and read up on it.

Of course you can still engage with and understand the more advanced arguments even without going all the way back to the basics but then you need to accept certain things as axiomatic, because it would take too much time to go back and explain them every time.

Let's say for instance that we are talking about imperialism. To clarify what exactly we mean when we talk about imperialism we may briefly give the Leninist definition of imperialism. You can either accept that this is the definition or you can ask why. Why is it defined that way and why does it make sense? Well for that you would have to go and read Lenin's work on Imperialism. Which in turn references but does not necessarily thoroughly explain certain concepts about the nature of capitalism that were worked out earlier by Marx.

You see, you can either choose to go down this rabbit hole and invest the time it takes to really go to the basics and build up from there, or you can take it as given that this has already been worked out and you can try and understand how we apply it to the modern day, which saves time and is more practical. Neither is wrong, it just depends on your personal interest.

The US government already does that. It controls US based social media. If you don't live in the US you should want your government to control the social media you use because at least that way you can have a say in that control via the (nominally) democratic control you exert over your own government. Either way someone controls it. By not having digital sovereignty your country is just handing the control over your information space to a foreign government which can then use it to shape your opinions and views to their advantage instead of yours.

but you won't get censored for criticising the Government... I guess unless you are an American criticizing Israel

Or if you are a British journalist speaking out against genocide, in which case you get arrested on terrorism charges

Or if you are in Germany and hold a conference discussing said genocide, in which case the police raids you and shuts you down

Or if you are a European journalist documenting an inconvenient truth from the "wrong side", in which case you get your bank account seized and face criminal charges and are banned from entering the EU

Or if you are in the Baltics celebrating Europe's victory over the Nazis and singing songs the government doesn't like, in which case you get arrested, fined and possibly jailed

Freedom of speech in the West amounts to you being free to shout into the void, and only so long as it doesn't change anything or threaten the ruling establishment and its political agenda. As long as your speech is entirely ineffectual and can be ignored by those in power then you can scream as loud as you want. As soon as your speech is a real threat to the agenda of the ruling class you are quickly shut down and made an example of with extreme prejudice.

You are functionally not allowed to challenge the official government position in the West either. In European countries the government outright bans candidates from standing in elections if they are anti-EU or anti-NATO, and you are threatened with fines or even jail time for disagreeing with the official narrative on Ukraine conflict. On certain issues, namely those that actually matter, there is only one accepted position, and deviation results in you being branded a terrorist, traitor, Hamas sympathizer, Russian agent, etc.

The West is just as if not more authoritarian than China. China is just more honest about their censorship.

A very good essay in terms of the ideas it conveys but unfortunately poorly written, very inaccessible on account of its overly pretentious language. Even most academically educated leftists are going to struggle to read a piece like this. This is the exactly the kind of language that we should not be using if we want to write for a broad audience. It comes across as the author trying to show off how many complex words they know and how many references to history and philosophy they can pack in without explaining any of them. It comes off elitist and off-putting. 9/10 for content, 1/10 for style.

someone in the comments is claiming that this guy is not a mercenary because he is a member of the UAF's foreign legion

Irrelevant. All foreign fighters choosing to involve themselves in this conflict are mercenaries as far as Russia and the Russian justice system are concerned. They have repeatedly said this and have warned how they treat mercenaries. If you still go it's a case of FAFO.

Because this isn't 2022, territorial reality has changed, the deal Russia was offering back then is no longer on the table, it's gone forever and not coming back.

The new regions are part of Russia according to the Russian constitution and will not be given up, and even in 2022 Russia would not have accepted Ukraine in any European military alliance, when the whole reason for this war is that a militarized and hostile Ukraine is unacceptable to Russia's security. And Europe has chosen to be intractably hostile to Russia for the time being.

This won't change even if the US disappears out of Europe entirely, and the deal Russia is willing to offer will keep getting worse for Ukraine the longer this goes on.

Doesn't sound at all crazy when you know how Albanian organized crime has been used since the 1990s by the empire to stir trouble in various places in the world, and not just in the Balkans. Same with the Georgian mafia btw. Lot of people don't know how deep this rabbit hole goes.

Yes, but even if none of that was true it would still be the right thing to do. We shouldn't have to justify humanitarian social policies by their national economic benefits.

Which is why i don't like this type of argument. What happens when you run into a policy to help people that doesn't have economic upsides, that is a drain on the national economy? By using this argument for morally correct social policies that happen to benefit the economy, you pre-emptively capitulate on those that don't. What about policies supporting disabled people, for instance? Should they only be enacted so long as said disabled people can contribute to the national economy? A slippery slope towards eugenics...

Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh

Even wealthy proles would substantially and materially benefit from the overhaul capitalism. Thus, class consciousness would and should reasonably lead them to support socialism. That is the point.

Except sometimes they wouldn't. There are people who nominally earn their income as employees who would absolutely earn less and have less privileges and "treats" under socialism. They are not a majority but they exist.

I'm not claiming this analysis is new. Of course the labor aristocracy also existed in Marx's time. And i'm not just referring to how the working class in the imperial core broadly benefits from the exploitation of the global proletariat. I'm taking about people who even compared to the majority of the working class in the imperial core, are much more well off. These are typically the intelligentsia, highly skilled professionals, and a small portion of artists who get very lucky. As a result they are extremely individualistic and perceive things like unions or collective bargaining as dragging them down, because they are (or think they are) sufficiently irreplaceable to be able to negotiate better contracts individually. Whether or not this is actually the case is another matter, but this is how they perceive their material interests.

The point i'm trying to make is that you are discounting the impact that lifestyle and social (not economic) class has on a person's perception of their own material interests. It's easy to say "they just need class consciousness" but it is very hard to get people to have class consciousness when their lived experience has more in common with that of a capitalist than of the average worker (sometimes they are even better off than most petty bourgeois).

If you refuse to understand this you will be perpetually disappointed and wonder why time and again people who in theory are supposed to be working class according to their relation to the means of production, consistently act against their own class interest and reliably side with capital instead.

Like, i'm sorry, but you're just not going to get someone who makes a six figure salary support a communist party or socialist revolution (at least not until the momentum of the revolution has grown to a point where not supporting it would be dangerous, at which point some of the petty bourgeoisie and labor aristocracy may switch sides). If you think otherwise you really need to get out more, learn how people in that income bracket think and how they align politically.

Technically yes, but in practice it's not that simple. The term labor aristocracy exists for a reason. A minority segment of the working class can be bribed to sufficiently align their material interests with those of capital. On a personal level you can really observe a shift in the mentality of someone who reaches a certain level of wealth, even if they are still technically workers, when their lived experience diverges so much form that of the average working class person, when their material interest becomes tied to maintaining that level of wealth, when the people they surround themselves with are also within the same elevated social strata. They begin to develop a real petty bourgeois mentality that aligns with their non-working class social and material conditions, regardless of how they earn their income.

I know the relation-to-means-of-production purists don't want to hear this but this is a real psychological and social phenomenon that we do ourselves a disservice to discount. It's because this is not always understood that some Marxists get confused as to why so much of the western working class is as reactionary as it is, but you cannot get the full picture just by looking at class in the strictest orthodox Marxist definition alone.

How is this any different from those cringe MAGA merch peddlers? Really does feel like all these liberals are just blue MAGA.

To speak about more or less exploitative in this context doesn't really make sense. They're all part of the same system. Just because one country plays "bad cop" and the other "good cop" doesn't change the fact that they're working together to further the same goal, of exploitation, resource extraction and unequal trade. European social democracy relies on the brute strength of American imperialism to clear the way and maintain the global system in which they operate.

Unbelievable how shameless they are in trying to rewrite history. Do these people think that their readers were born yesterday?

I agree. I have been following them for a while now and i think their content makes for excellent propaganda and agitation material for the anti-fascist and anti-imperialist cause, especially in Europe. Only thing is you just have to ignore their bad China takes. It's unfortunate but we have to take situational allies where we can find them.

Never let a price gouging pretext go to waste.

Never throw away the spoon.

That's the idea. Anti-imperialist accounts get banned all the time there, a thread can just disappear. Takes a little more effort to copy paste everything but it's safer this way.

There is a page in history when the worker first fought back When the might of exploitation at last began to crack In farm and field and factory, in workshop, mine and mill A flame was lit, a beacon bright, that flame is burning still

Connolly was there, Connolly was there Bold, brave, undaunted, James Connolly was there

William Martin Murphy and his Dublin millionaires Tried bribery and corruption, hypocrisy and prayers To smash the Transport Union, their scabs they did enlist But all their graft was shattered by a scarlet iron fist

For Connolly was there, Connolly was there Bold, brave, undaunted, James Connolly was there

When the bosses tried to sweat the lads way down in Glasgow's Clyde A voice like rolling thunder, soon shook them in their stride In Liverpool and Belfast where the workers lived in hell James Connoly rose and gave them hope, the truth to you i'll tell

And Connolly was there, Connolly was there Bold, brave, undaunted, James Connolly was there

Oh Irishmen the day will come when workers one and all Will rise up from their bended knees and rally to the call Throw out the bosses' tyranny and shout from shore to shore For a working man's republic and for freedom evermore

Connolly will be there, Connolly will be there Bold, brave, undaunted, James Connolly will be there