Yes it’s true China has a lot of surveillance. That’s like saying China has cops or criminals. Well the west also has cops and surveillance. If your interlocutor is trying to use the existence of such a thing in China as evidence it’s bad and they don’t also at least think the west is equally bad then they’re a hypocrite. It ceases to be a point of any real relevance because it’s not a distinction, there’s no daylight between China and the west on this, if one wants to take the anarchist path and claim all states are this way and thus we must abolish the state that’s honest at least and somewhat consistent, what isn’t honest is using a trait common among western states not frequently associated with propaganda and a propagandized image of human rights violations, surveillance and using it to bash China as uniquely evil.

It’s dishonest in the extreme. Everything China does has been done by the west (usually Britain or the US) first. CCTV cameras everywhere? London had very high coverage long before China had them anywhere but critical areas. Cell tracking tech? Guarantee the US has it deployed first and more widespread.

But that doesn’t fit the narrative of China being exceptionally bad. China is usually a step behind the west.

Another day, another curious question from a person known for them.

We’ve been discussing Russia’s situation and the war for years now here. Given the west’s response to Ukraine, given the amount of troops Russia has committed to Ukraine already, given how long this war has gone on and will likely continue to go on with western support before Russia achieves victory.

Do you think they should have just nuked the Fins and Swedes to take them out of the picture? Used some imaginary lever they have called “crash nordic economies”. What pressure and what ability do they have to stop them other than military force in a full on invasion that they don’t have the troops for? And which would put them in a direct conflict with NATO and fully realize and cement the idea in Europe that Russia is expansionist and aggressive and must be put down no matter what.

Now the better question is why did they allow the baltics to join NATO? Why didn’t they draw the line sooner and stop the expansion eastward? And the answer is Putin is a naive liberal, Russia was very weak after the collapse of the USSR and frankly they couldn’t afford and still couldn’t afford to get into a full war with NATO. He believed in Minsk, he was a sucker who resisted the reality because he wanted to avoid conflict. Yes in a magical scenario where Russia’s economy didn’t matter, where they’d fully implemented war communism and could conscript tens of millions of willing, eager to fight and die Russians they could probably beat the Europeans bloody senseless and mess up the face of the US pretty bad but that’s not the reality. That hasn’t been a reality since the 1980s when the USSR existed.

I mean you’re getting into liberal fantasy land of Asiatic hordes and Russia just being able to conjure up huge armies to wage war on the entire west and defeat them. To say nothing of the liberal nature of Russia’s leaders meaning they don’t want this and have always wanted integration and cooperation for profit and only begrudgingly at the last hour finally realized the threat and took action against Ukraine. And even now it shows Putin is a compromising guy. He hates doing this, he doesn’t like fighting the west and he has delusions of them compromising sooner or later that I think are hurting the overall strategic vision for Ukraine by the Russian military. He still thinks after this is over that after a bit of time he can go back to selling Europe gas and oil and slowly re-integrating. Some Russian thinkers declare the door to the west is closed and Russia has started to pivot to the east but they really don’t want to, the leadership like Putin wants to believe they can get back in with Europe.

Lol.

I don’t disagree but many people possess it for various reasons such as pseudo-anonymity, doing crime, etc.

I was just illustrating that prolewiki has a ton of ways of getting your money to them.

https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/ProleWiki:Donate

https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/ProleWiki:Donate#Donation_methods

You can donate directly via several means, plus buy merch which Prolewiki gets a small cut of. They also offer crypto donation options.

Donate to prolewiki instead. It doesn’t have a founder who is ensures moderation adheres to western CIA standards and propaganda.

It doesn’t matter.

It is a FACT that Iran has murdered many communists, especially in the aftermath of the successful Islamic revolution when they were solidifying power but also afterwards I’m sure.

It is a fact that Iran is run by reactionary socially backwards forces.

And it is a fact that it is never-the-less an important part of the international anti-imperialist bloc.

It is a fact that there is no near term hopes for a communist revolution in Iran, that if the current regime were to be overthrown that it would be by pro-US, pro-west compradors who’d sell out the people, sell out the region, and do their utmost to help the west destroy BRICS and the new emerging multipolarity. Thus that the best we can hope for is continued weakening of the US, of the zionist settler outpost occupying Palestine, and continuing growth of the power of China and Russia and that as that progresses there might be space for weakening of the grip reactionaries have on Iran over time.

There’s no particular reason to mourn the dead president of Iran. He was no progressive force and from what I’ve read was from the more conservative elements of the government. Neither is there reason to celebrate his death, which has not materially changed anything important. It won’t lead to better women’s rights or gay rights or tolerance of communists in Iran. He was but one part of a larger and entrenched state.

Any historical examples of this actually working? Especially since the break-up of the USSR? China’s strategy directly precludes them ever coming to save your ass against the US for example. That strategy could change but I don’t see that happening before the 2030s at the earliest.

It takes more than just being on the same side to launch into a direct war with the US over some friendship. The USSR never did it, they at most offered support, weapons, some pilots and aircraft and turned things into wars where the US directly fought their proxies but they avoided direct conflict with the US because of the risk of escalation to immediate nuclear war. In the case of Korea with China’s help they eked out a stalemate and denied them a victory. In the case of Vietnam they won, but at a terrible cost, the US invaded and did atrocities and butchered and dumped toxic forever chemicals all over their country in addition to traditional munitions and mines which kill people to this day.

Nukes aren’t about just winning, you can win without nukes, they’re about dissuading the invaders from coming and butchering your people in the first place, from subjecting your people to years, decades of hardship, to destroying your means of production and plunging your people into misery, disease, starvation, poverty, etc.

It’s all well and good to have friends who will give you some weapons and maybe lend you some pilots, doesn’t save your people from starving when the Americans take out your crop production. Doesn’t save them from misery and poverty and deprivation during the war and for years after because they’ve destroyed all your industry and infrastructure and killed and maimed so many young people.

Also nukes are not an “acquire as needed” thing as very few countries have done so successfully. It’s not like China just handed the DPRK some nuclear weapons or the complete schematics, they had to build them themselves and it took many years. If the day comes when you need nukes fast because the US is saber-rattling and talking of an invasion, you won’t have the time to get them. You’ll either already have them and they’ll do no more than rattle the saber or you won’t have them and they’ll bomb the shit out of you and take away your ability to get them. Once the US eye of Sauron is on your country, if you try to get nukes and they notice (they will), they have a strong incentive to bomb the shit out of you to prevent it and punish you as an example to others.

Sanctions are a separate topic in defense. Yes you need alliances to weather them, no such alliances had no real possibility of existing before the present escalation against Russia and before that increasing escalation against China with sanctions. And such alliances again do not protect against direct intervention if the US wishes to go there. Increasingly they may find themselves unable to do that with any luck but in the past it was not the case and there is no guarantee they won’t be able to again in future. Nukes and alliances are shields against two separate things IMO. Both have a role to play if you want to guarantee the US can’t attack you successfully.

I guess what i was trying to say was that all capitalists have imperialist aspirations and/or capitalism eventually leads to imperialism

In capitalism broadly, not necessarily in individual states. Weaker states and every state is a weaker state in the face of the historically unprecedented US hegemony may never be able to achieve that at least as long as the stronger state and its hegemony are intact (things which may take decades to really crumble).

Remember, these things are historical processes guided by material reality. Constrained by it too. The US couldn’t become the hegemon it was before WW2 without using a lot of force against other European powers, but after WW2 it assumed the mantle more or less peacefully.

Please do, I’ve linked other sources in my main reply in this thread but the article itself has some good discussion.

To boil it down though without even getting into Lenin and more complex discussion (which you should look into), a simple heuristic is this: How are they acting? What are they doing? Are they plundering like the west is? Joining them? Doing so separately or are they opportunistically selling to the anti-imperialist bloc which regardless of motives (inability to sell to imperialists and forced to sell to non-imperialists) means they’re helping them. Their UN vote record while not perfect (neither is China’s) has far more skepticism and vetoes in recent years of US attempts to use the UN to justify aggression against victims of imperialism and the anti-imperialist bloc. Who are their friends? Their friends are the resistance, their friends are historical victims of imperialism. Their enemies are the imperialists. The capitalist who sells us weapons for the revolution will be the last one we take to face justice simply because they are of use to us and helping us even if out of greed. Intent here does not matter, results do. And the results are Russia has been a steadfast friend of many countries the US has tried to isolate. They’ve gone to bat at the UN for them, they’ve sold them arms, they’ve done many things diplomatically and otherwise to assist them.

Russia’s bourgeoisie found themselves in the 90s in a world with a sprawling hegemonic capitalist empire built off the corpses of centuries of European colonialism which it had inherited after WW2 and the dividing of the world. They had no where to go, they couldn’t go colonize Africa, they were too weak and the French, British, Americans wouldn’t have allowed it. They couldn’t colonize the Americas or Asia. They found themselves in a position dictated by the currents of history, by choices made by others and had to make do. This forced them into our corner. They tried, oh they tried to get in with the US, to be buddy-buddy, to be friends, to in the early 2000s support the US at the UN so they’d let them into NATO and they could be part of that capitalist world order but the US said no. They were rejected, kicked to the curb, marked for elimination so they could be carved up. As Blinken said if you’re not at the table you’re on the menu, Russia was not allowed a seat at the table, it was very much on the menu, its vast resources and people desired to be plundered, their government and bourgeoisie suppressed and strangled with most of the profit taken for the west.

Wrong. It does not meet Lenin’s definition of imperialist and importantly in action and practice we can see it clearly aids and acts de-facto as an anti-imperialist counterweight to the US-led NATO imperialist order.

https://mronline.org/2019/01/02/is-russia-imperialist/

It gets a bit tiresome going over this so many times so excuse the short answer.

https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Russia https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Imperialism

https://mronline.org/2019/01/02/is-russia-imperialist/

The short of it is, no. Russia is NOT imperialist. It does not fit Lenin’s criteria.

It tried to join the imperialist bloc of western NATO nations after the fall of the USSR several times but was rebuffed and rejected bluntly. It then tried coexistence, integration and as we can see that has all fallen apart.

Throughout the post-soviet period Russia has maintained friendship with nations of the global south including China, Cuba, Venezuela, and other members of the group of resisting nations to western hegemony and imperialism including Iran.

Russia acts as a counter-weight to western imperialism. It is by action anti-imperialist. This was not its choice but the consequence of historical realities and choices made by the west as well as its own choices.

Russia is in fact a victim of the ruling imperialist bloc’s violence and attempts to destroy it and subjugate it’s peoples.

Russian capitalists have no choice but to be part of this alliance against imperialism. It’s either that or be destroyed and made either very junior partners with a tiny share of the plunder or liquidated entirely as a class by the western bourgeoisie in favor of their nation being split up and ruled by various comprador types.

A thread from Genzhou (archived) on this: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/232591

Historical and material realities are not the same is what it boils down to.

The superstructure has changed which is part of it. End of history myth of the 90s, the idea that it’s only a matter of time until communist nations collapse, the feeling it has been discredited with the collapse of the USSR. The successful propaganda that paints China as a communist state but defines that as just authoritarianism and brutal exploitation of workers, that paints an image of China not as even a fake workers paradise where all are starving equally except the politiburo like the USSR but a land of slave labor, sweat shops, etc. So unlike the USSR there is this general feeling among the west that China is not a good place for workers, that it is really only a few steps removed from the imaged hell of the DPRK (North Korea) where everyone as all westerners know is interned in giant rock-breaking camps and works 18 hours a day before being fed some grass and dirt.

China opened up, they allowed the western bourgeoisie to move their Means of Production there and reap massive profits, they unlike the USSR allowed their people to be exploited in order to develop their productive forces. So the capitalists here point to that and say “well at least you’re not a Chinese sweatshop worker” while counting their profits. So there is a strange dependency and relationship of trade and profit there that the USSR never had with the west.

China’s foreign policy is also not like the USSR. The USSR’s policy was more aggressive, more interested in antagonizing the west, trying to export revolution, etc whereas China is more conciliatory.

China’s “successes” are hidden by propaganda. There’s no Sputnik moment here, no shock and terror that “the reds have the bomb too”. There is the established feel of US hegemony and unipolarity which people accept as given along with the end of history whereas at the end of WW2 the US was just cemented its status as leader of the capitalist world and the UK didn’t formally lose its status and prestige until the Suez crisis more than a decade later. It was a time of uncertainty and shifting powers.

At the end of WW2 European empires were put under the US boot. In exchange for invading from the west and preventing the Red Army from liberating western Europe they came under US control and the US sphere, their means of production destroyed but their colonies intact, their labor now cheap. This surplus of profits allowed enough excess for the bourgeoisie to feel comfortable incentivizing the western imperial core proletariat with good union jobs, benefits, even social democracy in those nations too close to the USSR.

One must also remember Europe was felt to be in danger. Gladio was undertaken because of a sense of a real threat. Most of the resistance movement in western Europe had been socialist in nature, they were still popular so concessions had to be made. Where concessions weren’t enough or not feasible dictatorships were installed such as Greece.

And one must remember the declining rate of profit. After WW2 lots of the MoP had been destroyed, a kind of reset for the decline, there has been no similar reset in the half century since.

Local, whatever sort is default because I trust the devs and like living dangerously.

Tarkovsky movies. I’d say Stalker at the top though the others are quite good as well.

Man with a Movie Camera is an early documentary showing some cities in the Soviet Union, it’s silent but really well scored and entrancing I think.

Come and See is a haunting war film that goes through the trials and tribulations of a young man and his village as the Nazis act out barbarities.

The Cranes are Flying is a celebrated Soviet drama/romance/war film.

Battleship Potemkin and Strike! are Sergei Eisenstein films, silent about respectively the mutiny on the Potempkin which was a pivotal moment in Russia’s revolutionary history while Strike! is a dramatic telling of a worker’s strike and the resultant actions by the bourgeoisie, military, petite bourgeoisie, etc. Both striking innovative uses of cinematic techniques now common-place and taken for granted such as Eisenstein’s montage technique.

The Ascent is another great Soviet war film, about two partisans that leave their group and though they face many foes they end up taking a journey into their very souls.

Snow Queen (1957) is an alright adaptation of Hans Christian Anderson’s story. But the animation must be pretty good. It’s reported none other than Hayao Miyazaki, the head and creative mind of Studio Ghibli fame said he was depressed early in his career and considering giving up animation given the state of things with Disney when he saw this film at a union meeting and it gave him new hope and new drive.

If you’d like Sci-Fi then “Planet of Storms”/Planeta Bur from 1962 might be interesting. Super high production it isn’t, it never-the-less shows an interesting Soviet slant on things. Along those lines “Nebo Zovyot” is another sci-fi soviet film that’s interesting.

You really, really cannot throw together dating apps and hook-ups with pornography and prostitution. These are not the same thing.

There’s something to be said about atomization of society and others have already kind of said it here with regards to the modern hook-up culture via apps. I think there’s something to be said about the dehumanization inherent in swiping through a gallery of people’s pictures and picking one out to fuck for the weekend like some other object. It resembles strongly the shopping experience so I suppose I can see something to discuss there, it reduces intimacy in a way to just another form of browsing appearances, labels, and marketing of self (like the shopping aisle it’s so busy and so full of options one is incentivized not to spend more than a few seconds, a minute at most on any particular offering before moving on to the one beside it) and this situation is created by the lack of societal bonds and interaction outside of work and school. In a way with pornography culture there’s perhaps an intersection there towards the attitudes but I don’t feel confident enough to talk about it. As to prostitution and pornography, those are of course without a doubt commodification of the female body and form and cannot exist under communism.

Well you could save the webpage if you just want to archive it locally. Print it to pdf using any major web browser or on Firefox use the take screenshot right click feature to capture the whole page. I tend to create PDFs myself.

My feed on mobile was just a wall of their posts, I scrolled and scrolled and it was 95% their stuff. I don’t mind a little dunking on reactionaries now and again or a little venting but fuck, I hope this was a one-off or we get some more posting volume in other communities to space these out. Because if this became an everyday thing I’d either have to block the community !shitreactionariessay or the user and I’d rather not do either.

As mentioned by Yogthos, Putin has decreed due to repeated use of long-range western weapons for terror attacks on civilians they need a buffer zone.

I think at this point the 3 eastern secessionist territories that have formally joined Russia are going to be part of Russia, that’s simply off the table. What Putin is now threatening is to seize more of the country. I believe he is doing this because it may actually be necessary and also in an attempt to give them something to bargain over with the west and the Ukraine in negotiations. Basically a threat, that they’ve already lost these territories and are not getting them back, that’s off the table but if they don’t come to the table, be reasonable, meet Russia’s original demands then they will lose a lot more but if they are willing to meet them Russia will almost certainly guarantee the territorial integrity of Ukraine minus the break-away regions part of Russia already legally and of course Crimea.

Things are getting interesting again because I read the EU money for $50billion of money for weapons and such for the Ukraine has cleared and honestly I do expect Biden to give the Republicans enough of a sweetheart deal on the border that they agree to his package for Ukraine. He might have to settle for a watered down version that only gives them enough funding to last through part of the rest of his term but I believe he’ll get them something even if he has to personally go to the Mexican border and bayonet a child on camera. Then again there is a chance, slim but growing that Trump pressures the congressional Republicans not to give him a thing because they want to use the border thing as a talking point for their base and giving him a win in any way waters down that talking point.

The ball has been in the west’s court for some time as to what happens. Russia has to stay the course though there are more and less ideal end-games and short of a coup in Ukraine against the western puppets the less desireable end-state is more likely. Europe is talking of war and it seems like they are genuinely gearing up to throw themselves at Russia within 4-5 years after they’ve had time to replenish and re-arm themselves. The US may actually push them into this as their Ukraine plan and sanctions have failed to take Russia out and they want Russia out of the picture for their confrontation with China. Maybe they have Europe attack Russia and weaken and drain them and they in turn gather their Asian pawns and instigate over Taiwan and attack China or maybe it’s just taking out Europe as a competitor and possible partner for China/Russia while also suicide-running and counting on taking out at least Russia for a time with them.

If you can get a good job writing closed source software that gives you a decent quality of life and gives you the free-time to contribute to some open source projects outside of work I think you’ll still do good for FOSS. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good.

At the end of the day we have to be realistic with ourselves about the world we find ourselves in and the limits of the power of an individual in it. Starving for the sake of some imagined purity or living a lower quality of life isn’t Marxist. As long as you’re not directly abetting the imperialism machine by working for some ghoulish NATO defense contractor I don’t think you have that much to feel badly about.

That said there’s things like programming around helping coordinate mass transit and provide info to travelers. Programming for industrial machinery including especially in areas not related to manufacturing of goods like power, utilities, and though that’s pretty specialized if you can get your foot in the door you have a fairly interesting skill-set. Government jobs for government agencies are also an option.

There are companies that write open source software that isn’t free to companies (e.g. they charge for use when used as part of a profitable enterprise or sell support packages to large enterprises) but they aren’t that great in number and to get in the door you’ve a better chance if you have something on your resume already which means unfortunately working for a for-profit, usually closed source company.

Hypocrisy is good and well for the idealist to worry about. The realist however cares more about feeding the children, feeding themselves and doing what they can with what they have. There is in the FOSS movement a certain idealism among many that think via free computing they can free humanity when in reality you must via revolution free humanity to free computing. FOSS is a rebel insurrection against capitalism but not one that can ever change the superstructure or base in any meaningful way on their own.

Never forget under capital you are forced under duress to sell your labor, it is not your fault, you are not a bad person for doing so and for doing so under conditions less than ideal for people who uphold a way of doing things you find philosophically repugnant.

So try, try to find something that fits these ideals but if you cannot, do not feel too badly.