cfgaussian @ cfgaussian @lemmygrad.ml

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3 yr. ago

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

[This comment is also very good:]

China was able to maintain sovereign Party control while deploying market mechanisms within a planned framework.

Key was crushing the 1989 Tiananmen CIA/NGO-backed color revolution attempt and removing comprador infiltrators like Zhao Ziyang. This unlike the USSR, where the Party fragmented and capitulated to foreign-backed reformers.

The CPC then shrewdly built state-directed national champions, kept finance under Party command, and tightly controlled integration with global markets — avoiding the asset-stripping that ravaged post-Soviet Russia.

As for the USSR’s “autocracy”, for the most part — including its errors — seems like a reactive posture shaped by postwar encirclement and the imperative to defend against relentless imperialist pressure.

China, in contrast, leveraged its split with the USSR to gain controlled access to Western capital — a strategic move that fueled development without surrendering sovereignty.

Google has also become extremely censored, like to an absurd degree. Search anything on a remotely political current topic and all you will get is pure propaganda from western media, governments and think tanks. It is virtually impossible to find anything else. They just won't show it to you. You have to use Yandex.

Nobody should ever hope for nukes to be used... There is no such thing as a perfect air/missile defense.

That's very interesting info, thank you!

Still, the youth unemployment rate around 16% is scary.

Is it? What does that even mean? Who are they counting? Are they counting full time students as unemployed? What age group are they looking at? Because frankly i don't think it's that unusual for young people to go into the workforce fairly late nowadays, especially if they still live with their parents and still go to school.

Taking quotes out of context is a very liberal thing to do.

🤮

Aw. That's kinda sad. Just a few months ago i was saying how it's crazy that Kola is still the deepest we ever got, so i was excited when i read the title. I thought let's go, finally a deeper hole. But then i saw it's in burger units not meters...

Then again, Kola was also not initially planned to be as deep as it ended up being. So there is still a chance once the project gets underway that they will just keep going to see how far they can get. 32k to 40k is not insignificant but it might be doable.

For comparison, the longest (non-vertical) drilled holes (oil wells) max out at 50k feet. 9 out of the 10 longest were made by Russia off the coast of Sakhalin. Drilling deep into the crust poses different challenges of course but maybe there's tech that's cross-applicable.

This gives me a lot of optimism. When the CPC officially adopts it as policy that's about the safest bet you can get that it's actually going to happen. If it was just Russia saying it i would be skeptical. The Russian Federation can be a bit fickle and prone to changing their minds on projects like this, yet another unfortunate result of a profit-driven capitalist system. But when China says it's going to do something, they are serious.