Welcome again to everybody! Make yourself at home. Have a seat in the overpriced, sweat-infused Razer™ gaming chair over there. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is our weekly discussion thread!
We have our own Matrix homeserver at https://genzedong.org, and a Matrix space; see this thread for more information.
Short reading list for new MLs here. To find theory (and other books), you can use z-lib, libgen, or Sci-Hub (for scientific articles). If an article is unavailable, try the Wayback Machine.
i enjoy this website tbh. everyone is friendly and its much nicer than reddit
It really is. Just shows how much of a toxic shithole Reddit is.
Props to everyone here for keeping it respectful and fun 🫡
Just finished day one of a two day marxist introduction course our party offers to new members. Never got one myself for some reason.
It was interesting to see new members with lots of question starting to understand marxism. One guy was brave enough to say we need some form of capitalism in order for innovation to exist. He got, respectfully, educated by more advanced marxists lol.
How was the second day?
Pretty cool. A lot of talk went into explaining what a marxist party is and how it’s different from other parties, and also into how our party is organized with our action groups and campaigns at people’s places of work. Plus we had a lesson in antifascism lol. That’s always good.
Reddit moment
Wow, that’s some seething
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Why wouldn’t it? It hosts a plethora of misogynistic content. As well as racist content and all sorts of vile shit
Incel, white, racist, superiority complex
Ticks all the boxes
From Yahoo news on 29 Jan:
The UK is braced for even more strike action in the coming weeks, with teachers, rail workers, university staff, and civil servants among just some of those staging walkouts.
1 February is arguably one of the worst days affected, with 70,000 staff from 150 universities striking, along with 100,000 civil servants, workers from 14 train operators, and eligible members of the National Education Union (NEU).
The government is still not taking the desired action by unions, and this pattern of events could continue for months.
Wonder if they’ll start shooting protesters soon
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👌👌👌👌👌
Obama be like, “Only one Nobel peace prize? You have forced me to go THERMONUCLEAR! (On middle eastern children.)”
It’s so frustrating interacting with mainstream trans communities. The amount of political naïveté, or sometimes outright anticommunist or imperialist trash you have to deal with from people who really should know better.
I’m just so frustrated, with one person in particular who is friends with an employee at Raytheon, loves to talk like one of those pro-Nazi ‘military analysis’ twitter folks about the US’s war in the Ukraine - including using slurs to describe Russians (very cool coming from a member of a marginalized group that has quite a lot of slurs directed at us). And even now complained about a “Stalin-shill” who was trying to argue that air travel should use metric instead of imperial measurements. I mean… wtf does someone being a communist have to do with their promotion of metric?
Maybe that’s what they think anti-imperialist means?
I honestly have a feeling that many trans idpol activists being in the labor aristocracy and blindly pandering to imperialist talking points drives many would-be comrades into the patsoc camp
tbf I have no idea what this lass does, beyond wasting time on discord.
And while I get what you’re saying, I have zero patience for patsocs who see trans people parroting imperialist lies; but somehow don’t care about all the cishet white men who massively outnumber us and who mostly originate those lies. I think a lot of them just want an excuse not to confront their bigotry.
A suitcase with a human torso was found a few days ago in a garage box belonging to a big housing project in my city. The arms, legs and head are still missing.
Immediately fingers were pointed at the Moroccan minorities and drug related problems that the city is dealing with (a homicide is not out of the ordinary).
Police have now determined that it is a female torso and they suspect is from a woman doing sex work, which happened a lot in the garage boxes underneath the building.
It sucks because this type of murder can oftentimes be a sign of some very disturbed individual going around. That, and femicide is already a big problem in this country, one which our party keeps fighting against. I hope that whoever did this can be caught soon. Sad to see yet another woman killed and to see racists having a field day again.
why even bother with reddit
Myes because I guess GLORIOUS MURICAN ™ AI has no such problems, eh? Except…
From personal experience: typing “the most beautiful woman in the world” into Midjourney prompt produces an image of a white, specifically European looking woman. Typing “beautiful alien woman”, however, gives the portrait African facial features. No racism here, nosireebob.
Based BaiduGPT
Can someone help me understand Lavenderism from a historical context? I keep trying to research it and it appears to be a single-person project that is attempting to build a whole new metaphysics and spirituality from whole cloth.
That’s exactly what it is. I am teaching people how to gain supernatural powers, defending spiritual philosophies from anti-proletarian ideas, and venerating comrades as heroes such as Ho Chi Min or Mao Zedong. If you are wondering what kind of stuff Lavenderism is based on, you could say it is a mix of Ancestor Worship, New Age Spirituality, and Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought.
I am very surprised to see my religious group mentioned in this community tbh. I try to keep all the spirituality stuff in my own community because if I say to the average secular communist person I have occult powers or I opened my third eye they are not going to want to hear about it. I know it works though because people tell me I have otherworldly energies and they think I am familiar despite me never having met them before. You can feel free to ask me about Lavenderism or these things but I am not sure the people of Genzedong want me to talk about Lavenderism in this community or they might think I am silly.
Just want to say that although I’m skeptical as MLs usually should be, I appreciate your good faith non-prosetylizing approach and enjoy many of the stories you share.
I think philosophy and spirituality are personal interests of study for many of us, even if they don’t apparently directly influence our scientific socialist worldviews.
@SmokingDeer@lemmygrad.ml Tagging in case you’re interested in sharing.
Thanks for letting me know.
Exposing to the world that she is actually part cat
Aw c’mon, dont give her redeeming qualities
Furiously checking every account’s join date to find the CriticalResist alt
Good! If nobody finds it I will be very disappointed.
It’s hard to find phisical theory in niche languages like Italian 😭 all the communist presses kinda died in the 70s 80s and I can only find the big stuff
What about Dominico Losurdo it Gramsci? Are these available? Or do you mean the big five?
It seems similar in Spanish, too. But maybe I just don’t know where to look. The difference seems to be that Anglo Marxists are sat in universities writing books, whereas the Spanish speaking Marxists in LatAm are too busy organising and doing praxis – only a few have time to write up their work and that might be later.
One benefit with English, which is actually a significant problem, is that the are loads of ‘academic’ Marxists, pumping out book after bookb and article after article. The problem is that the owners of the publishing industry print these works because on the whole the get in the way of revolution. The main messages are always qualified by anti-communist criticisms about Stalin, Mao, Castro, etc. There are some exceptions but unless you know who they are, you have to wade through ten+ works before you find one that is revolutionary. By that point the message is diluted. If it’s this kind of theory you can’t find in Italian, maybe you’re not missing out?
Apparently lemmy didn’t publish my comment, stil: Supply (and so price) varies from author to author.
Marx n engels is not uncommon, just bought all of das kapital for 15 euros
Lenin is really common
Stalin is hard to find
Mao is almost impossible to find, price reflects that (excepts sometimes at flea stores, where one can find the little red book for 1-2 euros)
All of gramsci’s works are in big supply
Losurdo is rare
The best deals are at flea markets and 2nd hand stores, the average book costs between 1 and 3 euros in person or on ebay between 3 and 15 euros.
Its really interesting the fact that most classics in English were printed in the USSR, you always learn something new!
It’s similar where I am, btw – I keep an eye out in second hand bookshops and book fairs for the good stuff.
Some ideas for finding tiny publishers…
Versobooks and Pluto Press re-publish some classics. In fact, it’s a bit annoying because they don’t always make it clear that they are publishing something that is out of copyright. Sometimes it’s also ‘filtered’ by a modern ‘radical’. An example of both problems in one is a collection of Mao’s essays taken from marxists.org and introduced by Zizek.
It’s still useful if you know what you’re looking for. Haymarket and Brill also publish some rarer classics, working with the Historical Materialism journal.
FYI versobooks has just started a new project of translating it’s major texts into Spanish under a Spanish-language wing. It’s a bigger market, but maybe there are plans to do the same for Italian. Just note that verso apparently refused to translate Losurdo’s book on Stalin into English (while translating most if not all his other make works) – if that reveals anything about verso’s politics and how it ‘guides’ the English corpus of leftwing thought.
There’s also Akal, which has published some verso books in Spanish. And Plutón Ediciones has published some Marxist work, like Politzer’s Principios Elementales de Filosofía. Maybe there are similar small Italian publishers that only have websites? It sounds like you’ve already checked and been disappointed, though.
El Viejo Topo did translate Losurdo’s book on Stalin into Spanish. Maybe they have an Italian partner, which does similar things?
Strangely, of all publishers, Penguin releases some Marxist classics. Don’t discount the big publishers when looking for some rarer works.
Apparently the most important and prestigious communist press in Italy “editori riuniti(reunited editors)” published a book called (and I translate) :stalinism and nazism: A comparison of dictatorships, this was the largest and best press in the 60s 70s and 80s and now became jacobin-level opportunism
Anyway sorry for the rant, its always painful to see a real one fall to opportunism
Oh shit.
Keep ranting! I don’t mind.
Stuff other than theory? I could write a das kapital with all of my rants but I will start with this: The Italian education system is the most reactionary in the world. My choice of school is very limited, either I continue going to this one I hate (graphical school, soubds good in theory but in practice is shit, like social democracy) Or i go to artistic school (I dont have the artistic abilities to go there) or I go go the agrarian school (waking up at 6am every morning ) and why so you may rightly ask? Because every other fucking school has (and get ready) LATIN!!! a language that no one speaks as a native, a dead language, and yet most high school paths have this class in it, for this small little fucking clause I’m excluded from most schools (Latin is extreeeemely difficult, just Google or dyckduckgo it) and get this, put your seatbelt on comrade because this one is very funny, you won’t stop laughing even tomorrow, the nearest school to me (I could basically jump ofd my window and be already in school) HAS FUCKING ANCIENT GREEEEEEK like comrade, we are not in Greece, no one speaks ancient greeck, anyway I’ll stop ranting and I hope I didn’t waste too much of your time
Honestly, I’m hear for it. It’s interesting hearing about Italy from someone who lives there.
That’s bizarre, though. What a strange choice of languages.
On the other hand… Marx read Latin and Greek, so you could go straight to his sources if you learned one of those. And you’d find it much easier to teach yourself the other romance languages if you had Latin under your belt.
How did you learn English? Is that taught in schools?
Did the update of the servers go well? Lemmygrad is being shit for me right now lol. Can’t open pictures anymore on browser, since the plus icon is gone. When I comment, I have to refresh to actually see what I posted.
Your are right comrade.
the same is happening to me . 🤣reset your settings, worked for me
LMAO THE DOWNVOTER IS BACK
Russia could build the biggest hydroelectric dam in the world with all the western Liberal tears
New PFP test
Emperor protect!
It’s a little hard to tell what it is without clicking on your profile
Dang. Does it at least look cool when you do?
I think it does
Thank you
