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Joined 25 days ago
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Cake day: August 25th, 2024

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  • I’d like to put out a fuller response, but I’d rather have fully posted the OP.

    I think Hazan put out a similar idea for how he’d want to build the ACP, but I think he’s oversimplified things and hasn’t identified the flaws, even at a minimum stage. I think the ACP, in general, is not qualified for his business plan of having party cells operate as enterprises, and it’ll rapidly go down the sink for that reason.


    As for your criticism concerning capitalist opposition, the simple way to do it is simply to publicly list the POE / industrial cooperatives (but not the party itself) once the business is viable, taking care to maintain worker / party control, but allow the bourgeoisie to buy stakes.

    It’s Dengist insofar as that’s how Deng and China succeeded; capitalists will sell you the rope that will hang them, if they think it’ll make them a quick buck. If, say, Blackrock and/or Goldman own a 30% stake, you essentially have cover from elements of the capitalist system, because they want to protect their investment.


    As an addendum, part of the idea is simply to have a lopsided incentives structure (in at least some of the firms within Red Zaibatsu) such that the business HAS to be Marxist in order to function. To cut to the chase, the level of labor discipline and pay is such that you won’t work at a Red Zaibatsu-held firm unless you were ideologically committed, and if these firms somehow lose their Marxist character, it simply no longer makes sense to work at such a company.

    It’s what I’d bring up as to how Huawei works (Huawei is abusive insofar as its prospective long-term employees are expected to sign a strivers’ contract pledging dedication to the firm, which includes being assignable across the planet as the company sees fit, and working extremely long hours. Note that Huawei is still a worker’s cooperative with profit sharing).

    The ideological commitment to socialism, in my view, is the competitive advantage that allows “vanguard-type” (not all Party-held firms are vanguard-type) firms to defeat their capitalist competitors, and if you destroy the system of worker and party ownership while capitalists are invested, well, you just forced Goldman / Blackrock to take a huge haircut on their investment, because the company is no longer competitive. That protects the Party-owned economy from the wider capitalist system.







  • farmer_of_song@lemmygrad.mlOPtoComradeship // Freechat@lemmygrad.mlLeftypol evac
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    24 days ago

    Warning: link filled with very offensive material (regarding Gaza)

    https://leftychan.net/b/res/154243.html

    What’s the use of leftychan if it’s just as bad as leftypol?

    Sigh, and apparently a NAFO troll recently killed himself, ex-infantry (not sure if he had MOS changed to psyops afterwards). The rumor was that he was sexually accosting an underage girl, got reported, and well…

    But I can’t find any substantiation or investigation of the rumor, and I can’t ask on Leftypol because it’s no longer under friendly control (now we’re getting people calling materialist dialectics stupid).

    Would have been a fun scoop though if he was still working professionally, had his designation changed to psyops, AND was sexually harassing minors.


  • Not going through the WSJ comments, but it’s obvious how the problems with China’s approach will be dealt with should push come to shove after you’ve gone through the article.

    China is a Communist state running a capitalist simulacra. The highest stage of capitalism is imperialism, and the highest stage of simulated capitalism is simulated imperialism.

    If the trade barriers come up, for a lot of goods, China can effectively just increase military spending (currently at 1.3% of GDP official, or 1.7% according to SIPRI, compare 3%, 3.3%, and 6.8%, depending on who you trust, in the United States) to absorb excess capacity.

    The problem with a lot of our concerns (genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, the mutual slaughter in Ukraine) is that the Chinese, in both cases, can get off their asses and intervene more aggressively. But they don’t, because they have trade ties with the West and still need to grow their economy. If a new Iron Curtain were to form, however, there’d be nothing stopping them from taking a harsh anti-Western position geopolitically.

    Simulated imperialism essentially comes down to the anti-Western bloc having sufficient power to say: stop, this is stupid, or stop, this is obscene, and the West actually has to sit down and listen because it no longer has monopoly control of the world’s hard and financial power.

    A second factor is capital goods (commodities used for production) exports. If China is cut off from the West through direct trade, there are a bunch of non-aligned countries that can import low-cost Chinese capital goods, then export the results to Western consumers at lower prices than if the West were to sell the capital goods themselves.

    Where these two things essentially combine is in greentech: this isn’t often mentioned in Western media, but the cost of Chinese battery storage is down to 5.6 cents per watt, or an effective cost of 2-3 cents per kWh generated. Chinese solar installed costs, at the largest scales, is currently about 20 cents per watt, which translates to half a cent or 1 cent per kWh of raw electricity.

    Or, in other words, batt + solar is cheaper than frackgas or coal for new power generation. This essentially comes down to a neoconservative excuse to force countries off American frackgas or Western nuclear and make them buy solar + batt.




  • farmer_of_song@lemmygrad.mlOPtoComradeship // Freechat@lemmygrad.mlLeftypol evac
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    25 days ago

    Leftypol and CSAM is more an issue of Leftypol being immersed in chan culture, where dumping CSAM is a common troll, and the fact that Leftypol’s moderation staff is rarely active. Not only can CSAM exist for way too long, anti-semitic material can take hours before moderation responds.

    And yeah, the pro-NATO posters doing the raid had moderator support, so to me, it’s support for your hypothesis that the thing is a government honeytrap.



  • I’m up to Chapter 4, after having preread Chapter 14 (last chapter).

    TBH, honestly, it sounds like the cultural DNA of the United States is extremely diseased (being based on bourgeois settlers living off enslaved Africans on land expropriated from Amerindians in a most brutal fashion, and having voted, similar to the current Israelis, for a monster). I wonder if having done a decent course in Marxist American studies would have saved the Soviet leadership from attempting to negotiate with the Americans, and when that failed, to have the Soviets commit suicide in an attempt to bring peace.

    I mean, I’m mildly familiar with other histories of demographic expansion, but you can draw a straight line from the genocide of Amerindians to modern American imperialism. Some things never change.


  • Transpeople should be socially accepted and supported.

    Settlers; any suggestion for a particular reading strategy? As a soon-to-be-former Leftypoler, I’m way too familiar with a pessimistic view to history, so the notion of Americans dehumanizing, decimating, and displacing Amerindians is a bit trite. What elements should I focus on to expand my understanding? The psychology of colonialism, like the self-defense mechanisms settlers used to consider themselves human despite the violence they inflicted on other human beings? The seguing of violence: how by dehumanizing and committing atrocities on others, the inhibitions against violence on one’s own ingroup was reduced? The anatomy of moderate defeat: how humanists tried and failed to stem the tide of their less humane countrymen, and were ostracized in turn for opposing “progress”?

    Ah:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlers:_The_Mythology_of_the_White_Proletariat

    Looks way more interesting (IIRC I had confused it for some other history of American colonization), and the questions I have for reading it (i.e, psychology and sociology of a labor aristocracy) are better.

    Edit 2:

    This is very, very good.

    https://readsettlers.org/ch1.html

    Ah, I’ll keep my reading to myself, was aiming to lurk anyways.