gotta justify capitalism as meritocracy somehow

no, handing the imperial core to the fascists will not help the global proletariat.

Before the imperial core can do anything good for the rest of the world, socialists need to be in charge of the imperial core. We get there by organizing workers here with the promise of improving their material conditions. Otherwise, we’ll lack the numbers and class consciousness to overcome the crumbling empire’s inevitable fascist death spasm.

Artist is Richard Pace https://bsky.app/profile/rpace.bsky.social/post/3kuq5uim2fz2h

I really fucking hope she doesn’t have kids

“The world”

before you praise America or Europe, remember where that wealth comes from

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095937802200005X

Unequal exchange theory posits that economic growth in the “advanced economies” of the global North relies on a large net appropriation of resources and labour from the global South, extracted through price differentials in international trade. Past attempts to estimate the scale and value of this drain have faced a number of conceptual and empirical limitations, and have been unable to capture the upstream resources and labour embodied in traded goods. Here we use environmental input-output data and footprint analysis to quantify the physical scale of net appropriation from the South in terms of embodied resources and labour over the period 1990 to 2015. We then represent the value of appropriated resources in terms of prevailing market prices. Our results show that in 2015 the North net appropriated from the South 12 billion tons of embodied raw material equivalents, 822 million hectares of embodied land, 21 exajoules of embodied energy, and 188 million person-years of embodied labour, worth $10.8 trillion in Northern prices – enough to end extreme poverty 70 times over. Over the whole period, drain from the South totalled $242 trillion (constant 2010 USD). This drain represents a significant windfall for the global North, equivalent to a quarter of Northern GDP. For comparison, we also report drain in global average prices. Using this method, we find that the South’s losses due to unequal exchange outstrip their total aid receipts over the period by a factor of 30. Our analysis confirms that unequal exchange is a significant driver of global inequality, uneven development, and ecological breakdown.

Russia is communist

I’ve been in school too long. I have good things to think about but no time to think about them.

the more we’re defederated, the less we’re able to defend ourselves when a meme like this gets blasted across the fediverse.

Also Tainanmen. Athough fatal clashes did occur on Chang’An avenue and elsewhere in the city, in which hundreds of civilians and a smaller number of soldiers died, witness testimony from numerous western journalists and diplomats and student organizers themselves who were in the square all night, has indicated that no one died in Tiananmen itself. A Spanish news crew even filmed crowds of students walking out of the square at the end of the night. The Tiananmen Square Massacre is a stunning example of a “big lie repeated often enough.”

The first link is a comprehensive article. I can link more on request.

our only defense is not getting divided, which is why this stuff scares me, seeing how easy it is.

I’m optimistic though, I think the red scare stuff is harder in real life, when people are in a real situation with other real people instead of alone at a screen.

on further thought, I’ll just add that I think we’re both defending ourselves and then taking each others’ defenses as attacks to defend against, and it’s a vicious cycle.

I still feel hurt over db0’s two posts tbh. It’s not even the meme, it’s the witch-hunt feeling of that meme being broadcast across all of lemmy to a receptive audience we cannot talk to.

I’m sorry I stressed you out and put you on the defensive. I actually felt the same way. I don’t think either of us intended it. From one communist to another, I hope there are no lasting hard feelings.

make wild accusations about people that want to disengage to bait them back in to defend themselves

ok.

afaik hexbear unanimously hates Gonzalo, which is throwing me off trying to interpret this comment. not being snarky

I didn’t mean to come off that aggressive. But in my own defense, you already told me, earlier in this exact comment chain, that you disagreed with the meme, so I figured it was obvious I was not accusing you of agreeing with it. That was my whole point: you shouldn’t equate hexbear venom in the comments under that meme with our normal, unprovoked behavior or act like you might get the same venom for whatever innocuous shit you would say. That’s still demonizing us.

I expanded both threads and ctrl-f’d your name, after you stressed the point. Everyone was civil with you. Maybe one person was a little stern. My comment with the image wasn’t even there yet when you gestured vaguely at hexbear and said “Well… this kinda shit.” What shit? The obvious interpretation was that you were referring to the very conspicuous hexbear dogpile against /u/db0’s meme and not to some lukewarm responses you got offscreen buried in the comments.

I was drafting a conciliatory response when I saw this comment. I still apologize for how my earlier comment came off. I was not saying that meme represented your feelings. I was emphasizing that it didn’t, and pointing out how inflammatory something has to be for hexbear to come down on it this hard.

[Picture of people being massacred in a pool of their own blood] — “modern online MLs will do this to you in the future if you believe their lies, do not trust them!”

it’s all in good fun though, right tankies I would totally organize with in real life?

take what you give

who broadcast a meme to all of lemmy arguing that modern MLs are treacherous murderers who must be defeated in real life?

I don’t know much about the Hungarian uprising. If the Soviet response was unjustified and draconian when they could have worked something out, that’s fucked up.

Do you have any reading recommendations?

You said “…Well, this kinda shit” and I pointed out what “this kinda shit” was in response to