Yeah, you’re right, my bad

deleted by creator

the map is far more accurate than it is not though

Come on, Yog, we can hold ourselves to a higher standard than this. It’d be so easy to just color in Vietnam and then you’d be set, but by posting it in its current form you are actively lying.

deleted by creator

Pokemon Sleep Forever

About diamat: Hmm I guess I never really understood the big deal about it, it just seems like the standard toolkit when trying to understand something.

If both are told to render them in plain language, a lot of the stated beliefs of a Marxist and a highly-secular liberal are going to be similar. From a certain perspective however, the Marxist seeks to take those truisms and push them to their logical extremes rather than just let them sit there as a meaningless token admission. Put a more palatable way, diamat and historical materialism are ways of taking the axioms that both parties (the Marxist and secular liberal) admit as being foundational to reality and systematize them. Vibes are not enough.

If you’re interested in writing on the necessity of this approach, see Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, which isn’t bandied about like a meme in the manner that his three most popular works are, but is very philosophically interesting.

If you want meme texts, this is also covered in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific and in Marx’s The German Ideology. As others have noted, these things are fundamental to the nature of Marxism as “scientific socialism”, so a shorter option is the very good essay This Ruthless Criticism of All That Exists: Marxism as Science, which I think also exists in an audio form if you want me to dig that up.

In my opinion, understanding Diamat from the get-go is important

I think it’s best to start with the history of socialist and political-theoretical ideas like Engels does so one can develop a gradual understanding and see how it fits within the landscape of political ideologies.

deleted by creator

I think the main things to understand are, first, that the SU was already mainly controlled by revisionists before Stalin even died, reducing Stalin to a borderline figurehead for revisionists to work under. Secondly, the Secret Speech included extensive deception in its accusations against Stalin and co., with a very long list of supposed crimes that were “not previously known” because they either didn’t happen at all or didn’t happen as Khrushchev depicted them, which contributed to making Stalin look monstrous and therefore make destalinization look appealing. Third, Khrushchev purged high-profile supporters of Stalin, most notably Beria, which really made it less viable and less appealing to oppose destalinization. Lastly he kind of did get pressured out of office eventually, not because of destalinization but for the adjacent reason that he just kind of didn’t know what he was doing, which is only to be expected from someone like him.

guy appears (who signed orders as well, mind you) saying no more purges, you can do whatever ;) and thus cements his power

Except destalinization also included purges

The one is not the other

Arendt is one of the more overrated authors in America short of the founders, but she has a point about how, when you are removed from the brutal nature of the violence, you can just sort of shuffle it into your day-to-day activities. Sure, you can certify the paperwork, it’s just letters on a screen. Hell, you can even administer the needle, as it’s not your job to concern yourself with his innocence or guilt, it’s your job to use this specific set of injections to kill him in a visually benign way. Separating arbiters from brutalizing and brutalizers from arbitration makes the flagrant injustice much more palatable to both parties.

It’s a completely healthy reaction to not want someone who seemingly destroyed an org in your new org. It would be ridiculous to let them in without, at the very least, serious scrutiny, or to just bar them altogether.

The real mistake is doing it when you’ve also swallowed potting soil and fertilizer. It’s kind of like eating baking soda and vinegar, if you understand my meaning.

We should be fighting against racial chauvinists of Marcus Garvey’s ilk, not going “haha . . . unless”.

No, it’s just the healthy response

It’s like, what are the actual implications of baristas doing “unproductive” labor? They’re attaching an emotional meaning to it, but unproductive for Marx only means that the labor does not reproduce capital, the M-C-M’ process is interrupted. So what’s the problem? That capitalism has bullshit jobs? That some people make minimum wage undeservedly?

But this is already ceding too much ground to their bunk analysis, because baristas are obviously productive labor. They make and serve coffee, meaning they are important in getting money out of the cafe (or whatever), the coffee beans, the coffee machines, etc., even if we totally discount the possibility of excess value being extracted from their labor and treat them like instruments of production. They’re part of the circuit, or they wouldn’t be employed!

Calling service economy work unproductive labor isn’t picking a weird corner of Marx’s writing, it’s completely misreading it.

My understanding is that peasants need to work land for subsistence while landlords just collect rent.

My point is that his mistakes were historically overstated by the Dengists as a pretext for right-deviation, and that’s the portrayal we, as communists, have mostly inherited.