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Comments 83

British imperialism as it is today and the worst ever capitalist crisis

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How France is on a Daily Basis Draining the Blood Out of Africa to Feed Itself

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*Permanently Deleted*
  • I'm going to have to respectfully disagree with you on this. That may be the case in most of the rest of the Russian economy but at least as far as the military industrial sector (as well as parts of the extractive industries, most notably oil and gas) is concerned, Russia's is state owned to a significant degree and functions more like China's (which is not to say that it is like it was in the USSR as China itself follows a more mixed economic model than the strictly command economy of the Soviet Union) than like the US and Europe's.

  • What is bottom line marxism for you?
  • Anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism are a must. You can be either without being Marxist but you can't be Marxist without being both. In addition the world view of a Marxist must be informed by dialectical materialism.

  • *Permanently Deleted*
  • The thing with western arms production is that the fundamental model hasn't changed, it's a privatized neoliberal profit driven one and as such there are inherent limitations to how much and how fast the production rates can be increased no matter how much political will there exists to ramp things up.

    They are incapable of competing with the war industrial capacity of Russia let alone China and they are incapable of changing this because they cannot change their hyper-financialized economic model.

  • Why Operation Z is a victory for class struggle: it’s shrunk the imperial sphere’s extractive reach
  • I think the mood in Russia is very anti-fascist right now since they are literally fighting Nazis again. Anti-fascist and anti-imperialist groups like the communists have gained more traction and popularity as a result. The only way that Russia makes a turn toward fascism is if they lose the conflict with NATO in Ukraine which would create a lot of instability and revanchism in Russia. But right now Russia is winning.

    Europe on the other hand has chosen to side with Nazis and is itself turning more and more fascist in both its rhetoric and its actions. And it will get worse because conditions in Europe will only continue to decline as the US siphons off Europe's prosperity to keep its own from sliding. There will also be huge resentment about losing their proxy war with Russia.

    The bright side of all this is that even as Europe devolves into barbarism their power globally will be crippled and they will no longer have the ability to harm and keep down the global south. And even the US which will only survive due to cannibalizing Europe will be greatly diminished in its reach. The rest of the world will move on, they will build development and prosperity and will rise alongside China.

  • What is our stance on mods?
  • The point of Bundles is that they are an early game discount version of shulkers. Once you get shulkers you don't need bundles anymore. But shulkers are super end game. And making ender chests requires you to go to the nether which you can't do until you get diamonds. I appreciate having something in the super early game that fulfils a similar function of inventory compacting.

  • Does China really have sanctions on the DPRK? If so, why?
  • They comply with UN sanctions. Unfortunately these are very hard to reverse and it is hard for China to continue to credibly championing the UN and international law as opposed to the West's "rules based order" without abiding by UN resolutions. Much of the global south is still being regularly blackmailed and pressured by the US into voting the way the US wants them to in the UN. Over time this will slowly change as the US grows weaker and the global south stronger and more independent, and then these unjust and absurd sanctions will be lifted because most of the world has no issues with the DPRK.

  • Is is it wrong for me to hate anarchists?
  • Wrong in what sense? Morally? I don't know how an emotion can be morally wrong. Practically? Probably yes, it just seems like a waste of your emotional energies. I don't think anarchists are important enough to warrant thinking about so much and having such intense emotions about. I don't see how it is productive. Righteous anger can be a very useful motivator, sure, but i think it is better directed against institutions and people with real power, not larpy kids.

    I mean at the end of the day what is the point of hating anarchists? Besides, there are some of them who do fairly good work in organizing and anti-fascist action. Why hate someone that you may want or need to work together with on occasion? Of course they are going to have their cringe moments sometimes, and when they do and they turn out to be incorrigibly annoying you just shake your head at them in disappointment like the children they are and move on.

  • is this community pro Tankie?
  • I had to consider whether to even bother to respond to this because it contains so many thoroughly debunked anti-China propaganda talking points, including pro-terrorist apologia, that there is a high chance this is just another troll who is trying to throw out as much bullshit as possible and see what sticks. However in the interest of educating newer comrades who have not encountered these vile distortions of reality before and are confused i will say a few things:

    1. China is NOT an ethnostate. It is not a state of and for the Han ethnicity. China is a multi-ethnic, pluralistic nation with many national minorities and religions. China strives for harmony between all ethnic and religious groups within its borders. Tibet is and has been for hundreds of years a historic and integral part of China. The Tibetan people are no less part of the Chinese nation than any other ethnic group in China. The same goes for all of the other regions that were mentioned. The people of these regions see themselves as Chinese. The so-called "independence movements" for these regions exist almost exclusively outside of China and are highly astroturfed and propped up by the West, financed by CIA cutouts like the NED and composed largely of a mix of religious extremists, criminals who were marginalized from Chinese society, and disgruntled anti-communist diaspora (such as former landlords and other such types of people that Cubans would call "gusanos") that have not lived in China for generations.

    2. There is NO such thing "East Turkestan", that is a made up name that separatists and terrorists who are seeking the breakup of China use to refer to China's Xinjiang province. The use of this term is strong indication that one is dealing with a fanatical anti-China ideologue who sympathizes with ETIM terrorists, a group trained by Al Qaeda and ISIS in Syria under programs designed by western intelligence agencies to wage a campaign of terror and violent separatism in China. The exact same kind of campaign was waged by the CIA in the 1950s to try and incite violent separatism in Tibet and it too failed.

    3. China does NOT "force minorities to abandon their language and culture", in fact this lie is so perverse it is a complete inversion of reality. China does the exact opposite, it celebrates and protects BY LAW minority cultures and languages. It has extensive affirmative action programs for national minorities from economic benefits and tax breaks to cheaper or free education and preferential priority in a vast number of economic and social programs (including, when that the policy was still in effect, being exempt from the One Child Policy). Minority provinces in China use at least two official languages, oftentimes even more, and the minority languages are represented even on China's currency. There is education in minority languages as well as the national language, the latter being highly beneficial for minorities to efficiently integrate into the national economy and have the same opportunities as everyone else.

    4. A country cannot invade itself. China's Taiwan is an integral part of China. This is internationally recognized by not only the UN but all major nations (including the US), as well as both the government of the PRC and the government of Taiwan province. The existence of an autonomous government in Taiwan is nothing more than an artifact of the civil war, and it has only existed for as long as it has due to malicious US interference. The complete reunification of China, besides being the inevitable trajectory of history, is solely an internal Chinese matter which outside forces have no business interfering in.

    5. There is no such thing as the "CCP", the official designation of China's ruling party is the CPC, the Communist Party of China. The erroneous abbreviation is commonly used by racist sinophobes as an insult to the Chinese nation. Conflating China with "the CCP" and attributing the actions of China's government to the supposed intentions of "the CCP" is part and parcel of the strategy of delegitimizing in the collective consciousness of the victims of the West's anti-China propaganda the legitimate government of the People's Republic of China.

    6. The claim that China wants complete control of the South China sea is a baseless lie. China has made no such claims. Whatever minor disputes exist between the nations which border the South China Sea (and these exist also between the other nations there, just as they occasionally appear almost anywhere around the world where different nations border the same body of water) are for these countries to resolve between themselves and are no business of any nations foreign to the region. One thing that must be clear however is that China will not allow the US to militarize the South China Sea and thereby threaten their national security.

    7. Communists support proletarian democracy. We do not believe that we can achieve our goals through bourgeois elections because this is a system designed by and for the bourgeoisie that is intrinsically hostile to the interests of the working class. "Electoralism" is a strategy that has proven to be inadequate and insufficient for advancing and protecting the interests of the working class. However we are not opposed to the concept of elections. Both the PRC and the USSR have/had elections. They are/were proletarian democracies. The problem is that there is a huge amount of ignorance about how these systems actually work/worked.

    8. Communists support national liberation and self-determination. We do not support bourgeois nationalism and astroturfed "independence" movements that are designed to weaken, break up and balkanize the adversaries of imperialism for easier subjugation and plunder. There is strength in the unity of peoples. The imperialists have a vested interest in undermining that unity because divided people are easier to control. By no objective measure can it be claimed that the working class of the former Soviet Socialist Republics or of Yugoslavia, both now divided, are better off today. The only ones who benefited were the national bourgeoisie and the western imperialists who plundered and subjugated the disunited peoples of those former socialist states. The working class of these states instead got fratricidal wars, brutal neoliberal austerity, and comprador puppet regimes.

    9. "Authoritarianism" is a spook. It is a meaningless accusation. All exercise of collective or state power is "authoritarian". The imposition of the democratic will of the majority over a minority is "authoritarian". So-called "liberal democracies" are no less and in many cases far more "authoritarian" than socialist states. In this case the authority is that of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie imposed by the violence of the bourgeois state upon the working class. Communists seek to invert this relationship and impose upon the bourgeoisie the authority of the working class - that is the vast majority of the population and the class which actually produces value through its labor as opposed to parasitically stealing it from others - through the instrument of the proletarian state.

    10. We do not oppose the "right to protest", we oppose the notion that the enemies of the proletariat should have the right to undertake subversive and hostile activities with the purpose of sabotaging or overthrowing socialist societies for the benefit of parasitic capitalists and foreign imperialists seeking to restore the working class to its former subjugation. But tell me, where is the right of the working class to protest its subjugation under capitalism? Only insofar as no real threat is posed is this ever allowed, but when the power and wealth of capital is threatened the working class is immediately faced with brutal repression by police, the guard dogs of capital. And where is the right to protest the warmongering imperialist policies of the West today? Doing so in the West today gets you branded a Russian/Chinese collaborator, and in many European states you can even get sent to prison for merely speaking out against their vile war propaganda. Exposing the lies and crimes of the US war machine oftentimes gets you imprisoned and tortured if not outright killed.

    11. We do not "revere" either the PRC or the USSR, we simply see them as examples of how things can be done better than they are under capitalism and "liberal democracy". There are always things to improve on and as communists we will always try to engage critically and analyze what can be improved or done better. The CPC is the prime example of this. They have spent a great deal of time learning from the mistakes of the CPSU and have achieved great success as a result. Their historic and undeniable achievements are precisely why the imperialists fear and hate them so much, why they invest so much effort into disseminating and convincing you of these talking points that you parrot here. Because by being a positive role model for others around the world of what a country can build for its people using a model radically different than neo-colonialism and neoliberal parasitism, China, like the USSR before it, poses an existential threat to parasitic capital and the West's global empire of misery, death and destruction.

    12. Simply repeating the magic words "authoritarian" and "authoritarianism" adds nothing of substance to your argument. There is nothing more inherently "authoritarian" about what socialist states do and have done than what any "liberal democracy" does on a regular basis. Go read Friedrich Engels' short essay "On Authority". Socialism is the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat, nothing more, nothing less.

    And no, we don't support "the rights of Palestinians" because that is too vague and too liberal a formulation. We support the total and complete liberation of all of Palestine - from the river to the sea! - from the genocidal, racist and illegal settler colonial occupation.

  • Two questions and a small update
  • Whitelist for sure. The easiest way to vet people is to require PMs from applicants and look at how long they have been on Lemmygrad for. Trolls are likely to be new accounts with very little to no history of posts/comments. If you want to let in people from outside the Lemmygrad community they should be vouched for by an older member.

    Updating to 1.20 should be ok. There were no major changes to world gen and the update seems stable.

  • is this community pro Tankie?
  • "Tankie" is a meaningless term. The PRC has a system that is right for China. Attempts to copy-paste a system that was designed for different historical and material conditions than your own will produce suboptimal results. Every country needs to arrive at a solution to the problem of building socialism that is built on a solid dialectical materialist analysis and adapted to their particular circumstances.

  • Logs from the latest greifing
  • Clearly it was a poor decision to have that command be useable by anyone. It should be exclusive to the server's mods so that images can be vetted.

    If that is not possible or not within your skill set to do then it may be wise to just switch the plugin off altogether until a safe solution can be found.

  • Logs from the latest greifing
  • You really need to prevent people without OP rights from being able to give commands to the server. Can't allow just anyone to be able to upload images. Need much stronger anti-griefing protections. Was considering joining for a while but i'm sorry to say this looks amateurishly managed at the moment. Luckily the troll was an amateur too, you got away easy this time. Could have been much worse, could even have gotten the server admin into legal trouble if they uploaded illegal materials. Communists need to take OpSec seriously.

  • Can Belarus be considered an AES nation? Probably not but according to this thread it's about as close as it gets in Europe.

    Memes aside, of course any support from communists has to be highly critical in this case because there are some very pronounced reactionary tendencies there...

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    Is this for real? Is there just no end to China's basedness?

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    Leftist Infighting: A community dedicated to allowing leftists to vent their frustrations @lemmygrad.ml cfgaussian @lemmygrad.ml
    open.substack.com “Red-Brown alliance” smear is used to attack both Russia’s military operation, & the united front against NATO

    In our time of liberal fascism, where the Biden administration is indicting communists for doing anti-imperialist work while trying to use the RESTRICT act to codify this practice, the main “Red-Brown alliance” is the one between the liberal fascists and the “Marxists” who tail them. Our equivalents...

    “Red-Brown alliance” smear is used to attack both Russia’s military operation, & the united front against NATO
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    Leftist Infighting: A community dedicated to allowing leftists to vent their frustrations @lemmygrad.ml cfgaussian @lemmygrad.ml
    open.substack.com Purity fetishism: why much of the left has attacked Rage Against the War Machine & Cornel West’s campaign

    Amid the escalations in our class conflict the Ukraine war has brought, the question that the communist movement has increasingly come to be battling over is: can we advance all the parts of our cause, while working with ideological elements that don’t share each of these ideas? Can we remain princi...

    Purity fetishism: why much of the left has attacked Rage Against the War Machine & Cornel West’s campaign
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    Why capitalism is inherently imperialist: Class struggle at the international level

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    Introducing 'The East is Still Red - Chinese socialism in the 21st century'

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    Origins of debt: Michael Hudson reveals how financial oligarchies in Greece & Rome shaped our world

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    Just a small collection of vintage artwork celebrating the CPC and the Chinese Revolution

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    Leftist Infighting: A community dedicated to allowing leftists to vent their frustrations @lemmygrad.ml cfgaussian @lemmygrad.ml
    open.substack.com To be “respectable” in the online left is to be imperialism-compatible. Being a serious Marxist requires breaking from it.

    There’s a difference between what’s best for gaining popularity within online “left” spaces, and what’s best for advancing the revolutionary struggle. It’s not hard to notice this problem, the members of the left-wing video essay community “Breadtube” have repeatedly observed how there’s an issue wi...

    To be “respectable” in the online left is to be imperialism-compatible. Being a serious Marxist requires breaking from it.
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    sputnikglobe.com Pepe Escobar: US Empire of Debt Headed for Collapse

    Prof. Michael Hudson’s new book, The Collapse of Antiquity: Greece and Rome as Civilization’s Oligarchic Turning Point” is a seminal event in this Year of Living Dangerously when, to paraphrase Gramsci, the old geopolitical and geoeconomic...

    Pepe Escobar: US Empire of Debt Headed for Collapse

    Prof. Hudson’s main thesis is absolutely devastating: he sets out to prove that economic/financial practices in Ancient Greece and Rome – the pillars of Western Civilization – set the stage for what is happening today right in front of our eyes: an empire reduced to a rentier economy, collapsing from within.

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    simplicius76.substack.com A History of Russian Innovation

    On this historic date of May 9th, join me in taking a leisurely stroll through the history of Russian achievement.

    A History of Russian Innovation
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    Economics and Empires

    bmanalysis.substack.com Economics and Empires 4

    Strategic Considerations about Developments in Asia

    Economics and Empires 4
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    Leftist Infighting: A community dedicated to allowing leftists to vent their frustrations @lemmygrad.ml cfgaussian @lemmygrad.ml
    open.substack.com Left sectarian attacks on Rage Against the War Machine enabled the indictments of black communists

    Image from Tampa Bay TimesThanks for reading Rainer’s Newsletter! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. When Marxists Speak Out wrote their recent May Day statement The Escalation of the World War Danger and the Need for a New Communist International

    Left sectarian attacks on Rage Against the War Machine enabled the indictments of black communists
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    Looking for informed critiques and discussions of these articles by comrades with knowledge of WW2 military history

    bigserge.substack.com Apocalypse: Operation Barbarossa

    The History of Battle: Maneuver, Part 11

    Apocalypse: Operation Barbarossa

    https://bigserge.substack.com/p/soviet-operational-art-troubled-beginnings

    These two essays appear well researched and there is a lot that they get right, but they are clearly written from an anti-communist point of view, and the author especially seems to have it out for Stalin.

    First off the positives, they sort of debunk a few popular myths about the Great Patriotic War that are widespread in western historiography. One being that Stalin was not expecting the war and was totally surprised by the invasion (though the author still tries to have it both ways and say Stalin still prepared insufficiently or inadequately). Another being that the Germans only lost due to the Russian winter and Hitler's meddling.

    However, even while doing that the author reinforces a number of other myths such as the claim that the "Stalinist" purges were responsible for the poor performance of the Red Army at the start of the war, implying that a reason behind some of the more notable defeats of the Red Army was that Stalin placed incompetent sycophants in charge, and the notion that the Marxist-Leninist ideology of the Bolsheviks got in the way of military expediency.

    In particular, as is usually the case with anti-communist military historians, this author seems to idolize Tukhachevsky (and as with all who are infatuated with Prussian military prowess they compare him to another of their idols, Moltke) almost to the point of worship and completely discounts the possibility that the accusations against him were legitimate. This even though in almost the same sentence he admits that the officer class due to its historical upper class makeup was a breeding ground for counter-revolutionary sentiments and activity.

    Without going into too much detail my main issue here is that the author criticizes certain Soviet generals or the political leadership for "mistakes" that are only really visible as such with the benefit of hindsight. It is easy to say what someone should have done when you know how things turned out. It is easy to claim that someone else would have or could have done better, but we don't know that do we? To give two examples from the articles:

    Firstly the criticism of Stalin insufficiently preparing for the German invasion: The author correctly points out how outmatched the Soviets were initially and how the Germans intended primarily to completely destroy the Soviet armies. Yet he still criticizes the fact that the Red Army was not deployed in sufficient force right at the border. But if the Soviets had really mobilized all their forces and deployed them in full readiness along the border, one, would that not have been used by the Nazis as justification for attacking, claiming that the Soviets were themselves preparing to attack, and two, would that not just have resulted in more of the Soviet forces being wiped out in the initial attack?

    Was it not arguably better to keep the forces more dispersed in the interior to be able to draw the enemy deeper in while bleeding them, taking advantage of the size of the Soviet Union like Russia did against Napoleon?

    Secondly the way Timoshenko's defeat at Kharkov is treated: Here again it is explained clearly beforehand that there was insufficient information and that the planning of the operation was rational but that it just so happened that the Germans were also preparing their own operation around the same time and place. The author contrasts the "indecisiveness" of the Soviet general with the supposed decisive aggressiveness of the Germans. But really the deciding factor was poor timing. If the timing had been reversed and the Germans had attacked first who is to say they would not have been also caught in a blunder by the Soviet forces preparing their own attack.

    What is the point of all this "would've, could've, should've" (or monday-morning-quarterbacking as the Americans say) when we don't know whether someone else would have done any better or if it would have gone differently were the situation reversed? Is it only to once again portray someone who was close to Stalin as incompetent and claim that someone who was removed in the purges would have done better?

    I am not saying that no mistakes at all were made or that Stalin was perfect, but i do find it very annoying to see such poor logic in otherwise fairly objective and historically accurate texts. It is ironic that someone who recognizes that the German military had the tendency of blaming their own mistakes (and crimes of course with the "clean Wehrmacht" myth) on the political leadership, that the same person can't see how the Russian side is doing the same by trying to blame Stalin and communism for all the various problems and stumbles during the war.

    It is also shocking how completely the possibility of fascist collaborators and counter-revolutionary factions in the higher ranks of the Red Army is discounted. You know what's worse than having an inexperienced officer corps at the beginning of a major war? Having an officer corps that is riddled with fifth columnists who for political reasons will sabotage the war effort, surrender when they should fight, or even side with the enemy instead.

    I won't get into the nonsense the author spouts about how the Soviet collective farms were supposedly so bad that if the Nazis had abolished them they would have won the support of the population, or other anti-communist garbage like calling Stalin a dictator, portraying the the Soviet regime as totalitarian or the NKVD as able to completely tyrannize the entire population into submission, etc. We all know that's bullshit. I want this to mainly be a discussion about the military history.

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    Lenin is Always with You

    m.youtube.com [Soviet Union] Lenin is Always with You [English Translation]

    Lenin is Always With You is a tribute to Lenin himself. Lenin was a great man with great ideas but history has since slandered his name. Lenin made many acco...

    [Soviet Union] Lenin is Always with You [English Translation]

    Lenin is always alive, Lenin is always with you - In woes, in hope and in joy. Lenin is in your springtime, In every happy day, Lenin is within you and me

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    V.I. Lenin - "Imperialism and the Split in Socialism"

    A highly relevant text still to this day that teaches us firstly what imperialism is and what it is not, secondly how it is used to bribe the imperial core's proletariat, and thirdly, how opportunists support a pro-imperialist agenda "from the left".

    Keep these lessons in mind as the imperial core heightens its belligerence against Russia and China while the opportunist elements of the western left spread false narratives about the supposed "imperialism" of these countries.

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    redsails.org Masses, Elites, and Rebels: The Theory of “Brainwashing”

    I’ve become very skeptical of the concept of “brainwashing.” Over the past few months this skepticism has boiled over into open and explicit disagreement with even well-meaning pushers within the Marxist-Leninist corner. I often find it difficult to explain concisely why it is…

    Masses, Elites, and Rebels: The Theory of “Brainwashing”
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    China's Space Program Is Out Of Control

    Despite the shamelessly clickbaity title and the eye-rollingly cringy clips of westoids and westoid media losing their minds over China surpassing them, this is actually a pretty good video and the comments on this channel tend to be generally on the pro-China side.

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