People don't understand how I form an opinion of different countries in the world.

I always give much more weight to a country's behaviour outside its borders — its conduct on the world stage — than I do to its internal affairs.

Why? A most logical reason. Foreign countries' external behaviour affects me; foreign countries' internal affairs don't.

When I say I despise and loathe the United States, this has nothing to do with how it runs itself. I don't give a hoot about Reagan, Bush and Trump's tax breaks for the rich, about their gutting of social welfare spending, their overfilling of the prisons, about poverty, inequality, bad cops, the dominance of mega-corporations, the ban on abortions in some states, the 50-year failure to achieve any kind of gun control, the school shootings, the gangs, out-of-control violent crime, the crumbling infrastructure, or anything else that makes America look bad from the inside.

All these things are bad, of course, and ought to be concerning to intelligent Americans — and make me realize that the US is no model for the rest of the world to follow. But at the end of the day, none of this affects me. I've never set foot in the US, and I never intend to. These things are enough for me to go, “Hmm.” But they certainly don't make me hate or even dislike the United States. These things only affect Americans. They can run their country however they see fit. They're the only ones paying for it. Putting it another way, what do I care how my buddy spends his money? Whether he invests it and donates to cancer research or blows it all on hookers and crack, it's his own damn money.

What I notice about the United States is its foreign policy. You bet your ass I notice its foreign policy. I'm from the Middle East. That means Iraq. Iran. Libya. Syria. Yemen. Afghanistan. Palestine. Seven holocausts in a couple of decades, all with one thing in common. What could that one thing be?

That thing that so generously supplied us with hijacked elections, propped-up dictators and absolute monarchs, multiple invasions on false pretexts, deaths in the millions, destruction of our states, subsequent civil wars and terrorist insurgencies, strangulation through brutal sanctions… All enveloped in the vomit-inducing NONSTOP preachy moralizing rhetoric of American leaders, and in the RACISM that seems to characterize every single American from the President of the United States to some Yankee janitor on Quora, both of whom call us “shithole countries" and the like. Hey, 'muricans. You already killed or caused the deaths of about 1.5 million human beings in Iraq, so what's a little name-calling? Might as well add some insult to injury, right?

An eloquent Iraqi friend of mine put it in the best way possible. I'll protect his privacy of course, but this is what he said:

As an Iraqi, living in Iraq, I can assure you that the US has brought us nothing but pain and agony. Approximately 1M dead from the 2003 invasion, 500k (mostly children) dead from the criminal sanctions against us, sanctions that prevented the entry of food and medicine. At the end of all this, Iraq, with a population of roughly 40M, has about 5M orphans. They destabilised my country, sold us to the Iranians, butchered my people and ruined the good name of my nation. The amount of Iraqi blood spilled with no consequence, at the hands of terrorist groups (such as ISIS, which were essentially created by the US) or at the hands of militia, makes me feel nothing but a deep hatred towards this horrific monstrosity of a country. They call us savages and yet choose to ignore which country is the cradle of civilization, and which country is responsible for tens of millions of deaths each decade.

I have that statement on the best authority: an Iraqi. I always like to get my information from the most primary source.

(Whadayathink so far, 'muricans? Still gonna call me Wumao? I must be pretty passionate about the Middle East for a Chinese spy, huh?) 😂

Then of course I got to heavy reading. And I found out the United States did the same thing in Latin America. And Africa. And Vietnam. Pretty much everywhere but Europe and Australia (fellow whitey-land). Well, even Australia experienced a regime change operation in 1975 — when the CIA helped eliminate PM Gough Whitlam — but that's small potatoes compared to the rest, huh? The point is, almost everywhere on earth, brutal military aggression, political puppeteering, despicable clandestine chaos, economic strangulation, unpunished crimes against humanity, etc. all have a name. And that name is the United States of America.

Tell me anything that's majorly wrong with the world, and I can usually find the Yankee fingerprints on it. I can usually trace it back to the country that appointed itself ruler of the world.

THAT is why I despise and loathe the United States. BINGO. It's got nothing to do with how y'all run your country. It's got everything to do with the tragedy and brutality you inflict on the rest of mankind.

~ ~ ~

Now I'm sure you're wondering what my point is. You're wondering when I'm gonna answer the question. And I'm sure some brainiac here is gonna accuse me of “whataboutism.”

So here you go.

I apply the same principle when evaluating China. Zero fucks given about internal affairs, and all fucks given about external behaviour.

Now you hear me loud and clear:

I don't give a FLYING FUCK about the Great Chinese Famine, the Great Leap Forward, or the Cultural Revolution.

I could micro-analyze all of these events and show you how the propagandist and self-worshiping Western narrative diverges completely from reality (especially the reported death-toll!!), but this answer's long enough, and these details are outside the point.

Whatever Chairman Mao did wrong, he did wrong to his own people and nobody else. These things didn't happen to me. They didn't happen to you or any human outside China. They happened to the Chinese and the Chinese are in the NUMBER ONE POSITION to evaluate Mao's legacy and criticize him, demonize him, abolish him, or rehabilitate and honour him.

That's their business. That's their right. Who am I to tell the Chinese, “Oh no, you're wrong. Mao did this and that to you. You should hate him”?

Do you imagine I or you know more about China than the Chinese? This is their country. They inhabit it. They lived through these times, or were born to those who lived through them. Mao was the founder of their state. Socialism with Chinese characteristics, the Long March, victory in the Civil War, victory over the Japanese, foundation of the People's Republic, getting China through most years of the Western blockade and Cold War, giving America the message not to fuck with China during its invasions of Korea and Vietnam — Mao did it all. Mao did all the heavy lifting. Deng Xiaoping got to govern a safe, peaceful, united, independent, coherent and viable China only because of Chairman Mao. Deng got the easy part.

Of course, Mao made errors. Of course he was a much better general and strategist than he was an economist. Of course you could even argue that by the Cultural Revolution in 1966 he had grown a bit Trumpian and unfit in the head and cruel. Personally I think he should've stepped down from office on a high note in the late 1950s. His legacy would've been flawless. But was he a mindless tyrant? Was he a sadistic mass murderer? NO! He was the father of the nation. He wouldn't have been able to do that if he had been some maniac.

And of course, you’ve got to appreciate that for the Chinese, Mao's legacy is very complicated. You probably just click on some tweet from Melissa Chan saying, Mao did this! Mao did that! Mao Hitler! But the Chinese have a thousand-fold the knowledge and experience of Mao that you have. They have a great deal of good to take in with some amount of bad. And in the end, however they judge him, THAT IS THEIR PREROGATIVE AND NOT YOURS.

So that is what I think of China based on its internal affairs. Again, not that it matters.

~ ~ ~

Now, what do I think of China based on its external behaviour?

It scores 100 out of 100.

Where are the invasions? The sanctions and economic warfare? The political interference? The fugly imperialism and supremacism? The unpunished war crimes? The preaching and insufferable lying and hypocrisy? The victim nations in shambles? The dead bodies? Where's all that American good stuff?

Nowhere. All I see is bridges, railroads, cities, ports and 5G networks. The stuff that the real Nazi Germany (the United States) warns us means China plans to become the new Nazi Germany.

Are you kidding me? China's an amateur at being an “evil empire.” Piss off, China. You're not even close. America's not the gold standard, it's the Hope Diamond standard. It's practically won every Oscar and every Nobel Prize for being an evil empire.

You don't really think I'm stupid enough to blame China for covid, do you? Hello, 1918 influenza epidemic. Out of Haskell County, Kansas, and exported to Europe and the world by Yankee troops. 50–100 million dead. The deadliest pandemic in history. “Made" in the USA (I say “made" because countries don't make pandemics, bacteria and viruses do).

You don't really think I'm stupid enough to believe Uncle Satan about the Uyghur “Genocide" either, do you? Hello, Saddam's WMDs. When the fuck are you gonna find these WMDs? A million people had to die for them. But you barely noticed in California or Texas or wherever. Ridin' your ATVs, watching Monday night football, and laughing with Sean Hannity, not at him.

And after the hell on earth that you've turned my home region into — which you haven't recognized, apologized for, paid reparations for, put any of your politicians or generals or soldiers in prison for — why do you have your hearts up your sleeves for “oppressed" Muslims all of a sudden? Did baby angel Jesus suddenly fly by you and shoot some arrow of soul-searching? C'mon. I'd have to be 9 years old and still watching Sesame Street to believe you on that one!

~ ~ ~

I judge China based on its external behaviour. I judge China based on its role and conduct in the world. The things that affect me and all non-Chinese. And so far, apart from what Uncle Satan is screaming at me day and night (fuck that asshole), China's effect has either only been good, or it's been nothing at all. That's the way I like my countries: No news or good news. I like China because when invasions, sanctions, bombings, civil wars, or evil in general happen, it ain't China's fingerprints I keep finding. It's Yankee fingerprints.

And I like China because when clueless, asinine, or thuggish remarks about my home region or culture are made here, I never look at the author’s name and find out it’s “Hong Li" or “Jackie Chan.” It's usually Rusty Brian McYankee something-or-other.

That's all I have to say for tonight. If ya made it this far, thanks and good on you!

Update — ER, lemme put this here so I don't have a cell in Guantanamo with my name on it someday:

I am not a terrorist or extremist of any kind. I'm an ex-Muslim atheist. I'm just a regular civilian guy practising my freedom of thought, belief, opinion, and expression via media communication, as promised by Article 2(b) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. I've never been to the United States and I happily owe it no allegiance. I am not in the pay of any individual, organization, or government. I do NOT condone violence or illegal conduct of any kind. My views on the United States, however extremely negative and condemnatory, are peacefully communicated factual observations and protected speech. If I can be a peaceful Klansman or neo-Nazi according to American law, then why can't I peacefully discuss America's horrific role in the world? And if you feel that even a single sentence in my posts is misinformation or propaganda, I will defend it (with words and evidence of course) to the letter. I'm no lawyer but to the best of my knowledge, anti-Americanism and emotional writing are not a crime.

No one here defends landlords. No one here debates my right to exist. No one here makes me question my faith in humanity.

I love you all. Every last stinky fed here. Never change.

Content Warnings: this post contains discussions of hypothetical gun violence and brief mentions of police and fascism.

I recently encountered an anarchist critique of On Authority called The Problems With On Authority. Originally, I intended this response to be a writing exercise in rhetoric and argument construction, but I'm actually really pleased with it and decided to share it. Critique is welcome; this is after all a practice piece. Additionally, please let me know if there's a more appropriate place to put this; I'm not really familiar with this platform.

I should note that I have not written this as a critique of anarchist thought in general, just a critique of The Problems With On Authority. However, being that this is a response to a critique of Engels' critique of (certain) anarchists, I can see how it may read that way.

Introduction

The author's critiques of Engels are, as I show below, evidence of a significant misunderstanding of what Engels is talking about, and in places actually serve to prove him right. I'd encourage anyone reading this to first read both On Authority and The Problems With On Authority. Both are fairly short, and you'll get a better sense of context for my critiques (though I do use quotations of both texts where appropriate). Plus, On Authority is a great read.

I've structured my response to broadly follow the structure of the original critique, though I do jump around in a few places. Again, I use quotations from both texts where I can to give context for my response.

Main Points in The Problems With On Authority

These are the main critiques that I'll be responding to. Each of these correlates, in order, with the Problem headers in the text.

1. Force is separate from authority.
2. In Engels' analysis of organizations as authority, he failed to make distinct the top-down organization of capitalist enterprises from voluntary, democratic workplaces under a socialist mode of production, which due to their democratic nature are not organized in a way that utilizes authority.
3. Authority is generated by obedience.
4. Authority is never necessary and should be rejected/combated at all times.
5. Authority, as it is defined by the author, is alone what serves to maintain capitalism.

In On Authority, Engels defines authority this way:

"Authority, in the sense in which the word is used here, means: the imposition of the will of another upon ours; on the other hand, authority presupposes subordination."

And in The Problems With On Authority, the author comes to the following definition:

"As an anarchist who rejects all authority, this is what I mean when I use the word, and from this point on when I say “authority” I am referring only to the authority granted by unquestioning obedience."

I state this now as the critique doesn't give its full definition until the third Problem section, but I will be addressing parts of it ahead of that section. Ultimately, the author seems to construct a vastly different definition than the one Engels uses, with the apparent result that they can both take a wholly anti-authority stance while still agreeing for use cases for authority as it is defined by Engels. I find that their definition is wholly incomplete and, if used as-is, has some implications I'll address below.

Authority as a Generated Force

I refer throughout my rebuttal to the generation of authority-- that is, the phenomenon by which some action or quality grants a party authority over another party. I use this model as a rhetorical device as I think it serves very well to demonstrate why the critique's re-defining of authority is incorrect and to explore the implications of that definition. I specify this because I see this model as a natural outgrowth of that definition, and it is not a model I have explored or interrogated outside of this context, and therefore it is not a model I necessarily subscribe to.

Problem One: Authority as Force

In this section, the author claims that (some anarchists) do not define force as authority (or as either a component or sub-type of authority), and that Engels, in failing to understand this, has misrepresented anarchists in their total rejection of authority as also rejecting the use of any and all force in revolutionary pursuits.

As from the outset they have rejected Engels' definition, I'll explore the ramifications of their definition (that authority comes from/is generated by blind obedience) here. They contrast blind obedience with obedience in the context of the subordinator doing what they have been instructed to do because it is in their own self-interest. However, they also discuss the subordinator who has considered the obedience, and finding it against their own self-interest, obeys anyway:

"And if an obedient subject does come to an understanding of their own desires while remaining obedient to authority, their own obedience prevents them from expressing themselves to that authority."

This is a failure to understand why someone might knowingly act outside their own best interests (which I'll address further on), but it also leaves us with some fascinating implications. This text and others use violence in self-defense as an example of justified force without authority, so I'll use that scenario as well.

Say that someone has pointed a gun at me and told me to give them my wallet. If I obey them, under this definition of authority without force, we're presented with three absurd scenarios:

1. I give them my wallet because it serves my own self interest of not getting shot, and this person holds no authority over me.
2. I give them my wallet not because they'll shoot me if I don't but because I am blindly obeying, and there is authority generated by my blind obedience and not by the (threatened) force of the gun.
3. I give this person my wallet not because they'll shoot me if I don't and not because I haven't considered that it's not in my best interest to do so-- I am doing what I have been told, knowing it's not in my best interest to do so, despite apparently no other reason to do so, and there is still authority, generated by my obedience alone (thus apparently putting me in power in this scenario).

All of these scenarios are ridiculous. The will of this person is being imposed on me by threat of force. They have a kind of authority in this moment, and it is solely from the gun-- I would have no reason to give someone my wallet if there were no (explicit or implicit) threat of violence.

The author goes on to state that some anarchists do consider (correctly) force to be authority, but those anarchists believe that only unjustifiable authority is unacceptable. They use this to doubly refute Engels; either force is not authority, and so anarchists do not out of hand reject force, or force is authority, but some anarchists do not out of hand reject all authority. Being that the author is arguing the first position, which we've demonstrated is an unfounded one, and that Engels specifically agrees with the second point, the critique that Engels makes still stands. If anyone has a critique of On Authority from the other perspective, I'd actually really like to hear it.

"If the autonomists confined themselves to saying that the social organisation of the future would restrict authority solely to the limits within which the conditions of production render it inevitable, we could understand each other..."

The section concludes with this:

"I personally am in the camp that does not consider force to be a kind of authority, as we have a perfectly good word to describe force without having to use “authority” and so confuse force with other kinds of human action."

There are authorities without force-- different types or sources of authority do exist-- but divorcing force from authority entirely is incorrect, especially as it relates to systemic force as we'll see later on. Sub-categories exist for a reason and are perfectly useful here.

Problem Two: Authority as Organization

Here the author asserts that:

"Engels talks about solving these problems entirely in the language of imposition, and dismisses any proposed alternative out of hand as nothing but wordplay."

Followed by this quote from Engels:

"When I submitted arguments like these to the most rabid anti-authoritarians, the only answer they were able to give me was the following: Yes, that’s true, but there it is not the case of authority which we confer on our delegates, but of a commission entrusted! These gentlemen think that when they have changed the names of things they have changed the things themselves. This is how these profound thinkers mock at the whole world."

As we have established, and as the author is aware, Engels uses the language of imposition because that is how he has defined authority. We're already aware of the author's complaints with parts of this definition; however, at no point in this text does the author offer an alternative definition in the purpose or use of authority, only in the generation of it, so I will continue to use that part of the definition from Engels.

This entire section is regarding the example that Engels gives of an individual will necessarily being subordinated in a production context to the will of others. The author says here that Engels didn't consider ways you could make decisions about production other than a manager being appointed from above. He did, though:

"The workers must, therefore, first come to an understanding on the hours of work..." And: "Thereafter particular questions arise in each room and at every moment concerning the mode of production, distribution of material, etc., which must be settled by decision of a delegate placed at the head of each branch of labour or, if possible, by a majority vote..."

He has not stated in what manner a delegate has been selected, though I certainly have never worked somewhere where my manager was a delegate to a sort of manager council making decisions together, so I'm inclined to think that he's not referring to managers under capitalism here. Nevermind the fact that he states in the quote they used that the preferred method of decision is by majority vote among the workers.

The wordplay bit is a reference to this line:

"These gentlemen think that when they have changed the names of things they have changed the things themselves." Given what we've seen and will continue to see in their definition-crafting (it seems to me that on a topic like this you wouldn't want to wait to define your most basic term until the fourth section, which is why Engels defined it in the second paragraph) I feel comfortable saying Engels is right here.

The author goes on:

"In the bottom up form of organisation, procedures and specialist roles are only possible if they are built on accommodation and compromise between those involved."

I agree with this idea-- and-- it's important to recognize the power and authority that comes with specialist positions. Have you ever worked somewhere where someone was allowed to get away with things others weren't because they were respected in their field or because they were the only one who had certain vital knowledge or skills? Granted that we presently live under a capitalist mode of production, but problems don't just go away under socialism without deliberate work, and refusing to name power so you can justify it while remaining 'anti-authority' doesn't make it go away. In fact, that kind of attitude contributes to the broken stair issue in organizing, where an individual is a known problem for one reason or another in an organization, but the issue is never addressed due to the person's skills, influence, or connections. In a bottom-up form of organization, people would still need the will to remove or resolve a problem in order to actually do so-- letting problems lie to keep the peace or because resolution would be complicated is one of Mao's definitions of liberalism if I remember correctly, and combatting that problem behavior and the liberalism that perpetuates it requires naming both.

Consider the democratic workplace: everyone votes to take a certain action, and by whatever democratic processes have been laid out, the majority vote is followed. From here, those who had the dissenting vote have two choices: submit to the majority, and in so doing submit to the authority of the majority-- which they have consented to by their joining the workplace, but which does here still have power over them, or leave-- validating the authority of the majority in their demonstration that they can't act within the workplace but outside that authority (presuming that there are measures in place to address workers who try to do so). Now consider my job in a capitalist system: I have no say in who my manager is or in what decisions they make. If my manager makes a decision that I disagree with, I have two options: I can submit to the decision, submitting to an authority I did not choose, or I can leave. These scenarios aren't identical in that the authority is conferred in different ways, but they are both types of authority. In the democratic workplace the authority is that of the workers over their collective labor power, but it is also authority over the dissenting individual if there's not strong enough dissent to change the outcome, and ultimately the decision is the same: submit or leave (of course I recognize that the consequences of leaving your job would be different under a different mode of production, but that doesn't negate my point).

A final point in this section-- the author says this about Engels:

"...he says that delegation makes no difference regarding the level of imposition a worker faces within an organisation."

He absolutely does not say that. In fact, before the spinning mill example, he refers to authority "changing its form". Again, there are different degrees and types of authority, and I doubt that Engels would disagree with that, but less authority is not no authority.

Problem Three: Authority as Obedience

It's here that our critic finally supplies their definition of authority (or at least its source; as I've said, nowhere in this text do they define what, in practice, authority is):

"As an anarchist who rejects all authority, this is what I mean when I use the word, and from this point on when I say “authority” I am referring only to the authority granted by unquestioning obedience."

I discussed what this means in terms of the realities of decision-making by the subordinated person; here I'd like to discuss how this implicates the working class in their own subordination and the relation of (systemic) force to (systemic) authority.

A common throughline you'll see in some socialist texts (particularly those written by the intelligentsia) is the idea that the working class is, in so many words, stupid. The working class does not know they're oppressed, they don't know they're those who clothe and feed society but not those who benefit from that work.

The working class knows. The problem isn't that they haven't figured it out, it's that, through alienation, lack of proper education, and virulent anticommunist propaganda, they are (not all, but many) lacking the correct analytical framework to take their understanding of their circumstances and turn it to action and organization.

This is to say, the idea that unquestioning obedience confers authority is incorrect because the people who live and work under that authority broadly know it's bullshit.

The text goes on to mention that, even if someone questions that authority but still takes the action, the result is the same. However, authority is not conferred if you take an action recommended to you if "you understand that following their instructions is in your own best interest." This is where systemic force comes in.

If my manager tells me to do something I disagree with, I can tell them no. Depending on the instruction and our relationship, this could open a dialogue, but it likely won't. If I continue to refuse, if I have a disciplinary history, or if my boss just doesn't like me, I'm now out of a job. My boss has exercised authority, and I am now subject to no more of it (except that ongoing authority that keeps me out of work with that company and, if they give bad references, other companies). But my boss didn't need to use force; the implicit (and often explicit) force of capitalism is here. If I don't have enough in savings and can't get a new job fast enough, I'm going to get behind on bills. If my friends and family can't support me, I'm going to be evicted-- forcefully. Without submission to my boss's authority, I am now at the mercy of the violence of the system.

So I know my boss has told me to do something which contradicts my will, and I'm going to do it anyway. This can be both against and in line with my self-interest: against, if the instruction contradicts my will or threatens my well-being (perhaps in the context of workplace safety issues), and in line with, in that it is in my self-interest to remain employed. And if it is in line with my self-interests for that reason, it's only because of the threat of force that exists: thus, authority granted by force causes me to act against my interests knowingly.

This section gives a definition of authority which puts the responsibility and in fact power of generating authority in the hands of those who must submit to it-- blaming the working class for their own exploitation and ignoring, as we have removed force from our definition, the violence which keeps us exploited.

This point also fails as a historical analysis: if blind obedience alone generates authority, where did the current conditions come from? How did we come to have obedience to capitalist authority if obedience generates that authority to which we must then become obedient? Did some proto-capitalist arrive one day, start giving out orders to serfs, and find themself perfectly obedient proto-proles? Or is it possible, perhaps, that specific material conditions gave rise to capitalism as we know it, among them the taking by the bourgeoise state power (and its related force) from the feudal lords before them? Perhaps then blind obedience is also what sustained (and apparently created) feudal authority.

One additional point I find notable in this section is the reference to any society which has authority as being an inherently class society (ignoring the incorrect analysis that an authoritative relationship is inherently a class one-- I've worked in plenty of places where my manager, who held direct authority over me and my continued employment there, was working class, and had no different a relationship to the means of production than I). Later we will see how the author views revolution, and that view leads me to assume (and this is an assumption only, but one I see as founded in the author's attitudes towards Marxism-Leninism and revolutions) that this perhaps includes the dictatorship of the proletariat, part of the transition from capitalism to socialism and then, eventually, communism.

On that, I have only to say: yes, the dictatorship of the proletariat is a class-based society. No theory I've seen has ever claimed otherwise, because that's the point. But as the state (far transformed from its bourgeois capitalist form) would be run by the workers and their directly elected and recallable representatives, the class being repressed becomes the bourgeoise. They complained about being told to read 'On Authority;' now I'll tell them to read State and Revolution.

Problem Four: Authority as Necessity

I feel I've discussed already the points in this section, so I don't have much to say here, only that it seems evident to me that Engels understands the different types of and uses for authority, and is even quite explicit that all unnecessary authority should be done away with. The author seems determined to define authority in a way that is completely divorced from Engels' use so then they can berate him from the position of that definition and not the one Engels was talking about. As we've seen, the author accepts use cases for authority under Engels' definition-- they simply don't count those necessary uses as uses of authority.

Again, State and Revolution is a good explainer on this point and what it means to wield state power in a proletarian state.

Problem Five: Obscuring Social Relations

This section makes some assumptions about force and what's involved in maintaining capitalism that are incorrect. It refers back to that idea of obedience generating authority-- which does not explain how that authoritative relationship that's generating the authority came to be.

As I mentioned in my work example, force does not have to be directly applied to me to be a coercing force. The systems under capitalism, increasing with industry as we are further and further alienated from the products of our labor, serve as implicit forces. Without a job, I won't have money; without money, I can't access food, shelter, medical care, and other basic necessities. Trying to access those without money may result in that threat of force, namely the police, becoming a very material authority.

As the text points out, a unified working class can overcome this force with their own. The author again states that it is a curated obedience that prevents this, but again a lack of organization and analytical framework is a better explanation here. Workers understand on their own they are exploited; no one knows on their own how to bring about the end of that exploitation. Even those who do understand are nothing without organization; being a communist doesn't make my bills go away while the working class remains unorganized.

In discussing revolution, the author implies that the dissolution of the state will precede revolution, which will begin after the collapse of capitalist society has already occurred:

"However, a failure of state and capitalist authority is one of the key elements in a revolutionary situation that could lead to socialism. But there need to be a body of people already practiced in socialist, and thus necessarily anti-authoritarian, institutional forms and the cultural norms that support them, to present an alternative to simply rebuilding authoritarian institutions."

This is both ahistorical and implies, frighteningly, that the author believes that workers will simply have to suffer fascism-- as we know it is capitalism in crisis-- before they can hope to move towards socialism. Further notable, as the author imagines socialist organizations picking up the pieces after the failure of a state which has been backed into a corner by its own unsustainability and made to overuse force to cling onto diminishing authority, it should be stated that the first group any fascist government seeks to exterminate is the left broadly: labor organizers, socialists, communists. These organizations may well not exist to rebuild, and if they do, it would be in a greatly diminished capacity and certainly without the power/resources to do so.

It should be evident that, for a great number of reasons, it is in the interest of any socialist project to prevent fascism, not to hope to outlast it.

The author also implies issues with the use of a vanguard party; for a third time, State and Revolution discusses this more in-depth than I can here, and there are many decades of work since to address the issue.

Other Anarchist Definitions of Authority

In writing this critique I searched for other places that anarchists have defined authority to see if they supported this text, and found two I found notable enough to mention. The first, from Bakunin's What Is Authority, asserts that authority is wrong when it is imposed from without, and without the ability to deny it, but acknowledges the existence of and even potential benefits of certain authorities, such as that generated by expertise. As I addressed the issue of imposition under Problem Two, I won't rehash it here.

The second I found notable was from a deleted Reddit user who used the force/self-defense example to say that, in killing someone to defend yourself you do not become an authority over them. I bring this up because The Problems With On Authority uses that same example and extrapolates it to revolution. I have issues with the equivocation of having/using authority and being an authority, but my primary issue is that extrapolation: in a revolution, even insofar as a revolution is an act of the self-defense of the working class, the revolutionary class as a whole (and individuals as representatives of that class) would absolutely be authorities over another group: the other classes, namely the bourgeoisie.

Conclusions

This critique fails entirely to disprove anything Engels wrote in On Authority. We can revisit their main points to see this:

1. Force is separate from authority. But we know that it isn't, and in fact is a great generator of authority.
2. In Engels' analysis of organizations as authority, he failed to make distinct the top-down organization of capitalist enterprises from voluntary, democratic workplaces under a socialist mode of production, which due to their democratic nature are not organized in a way that utilizes authority. But Engels did make this distinction, and still there is authority-- obscuring it by renaming doesn't make it disappear.
3. Authority is generated by obedience. This theory fails to explain how the current conditions of obedience came about if authority, from obedience, is necessary to create obedience. Further, this idea blames the working class for their own conditions.
4. Authority is never necessary and should be rejected/combated at all times. The author themself refuted this when they stated that some anarchists use the definition that Engels does, and we've further refuted it in demonstrating that the author's definition is incomplete at best. The author also agrees with use cases for force, which as we have seen either is or is a generator of authority.
5. Authority, as it is defined by the author, is alone what serves to maintain capitalism. And again disproven via systematic force and the threats thereof. As in point three, a conclusion that must be drawn from this is a very paradoxical understanding of history, wherein the blind obedience of the working class must have given rise to the conditions which allow for the existence of that working class.

This critique defines authority (or at least the sources of it) away to a fine point, then dismisses all uses of that type of authority (which is in itself an unsatisfactory source of authority) as wrong. At the same time they acknowledge valid use cases for authority as Engels has defined it, such as revolution as an act of self-defense.

As Engels said:

"These gentlemen think that when they have changed the names of things they have changed the things themselves."

And his final point says it well:

"Therefore, either one of two things: either the anti-authoritarians don't know what they're talking about, in which case they are creating nothing but confusion; or they do know, and in that case they are betraying the movement of the proletariat. In either case they serve the reaction."

The 3 tenets goes as follows:

Anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism, and anti-reaction

1. Anti-capitalism:

We are against the large landholders, industrialists, and financiers, otherwise known as capitalists, who own everything in our society, through private property, and suck on our surplus value through rent, profit, and interest en masse, and go so far as to bust labor unions, decrease real wages through lobbying economic policy and so on.

Their dominance lies in the fact that they control the economy in this way, and thus shape society, government, culture, and many other social forces and institutions... Thus they, the capitalists, are the economic base and the things they control, the superstructure, as a broad front of rentier classes...

Edited:

This is not even including "unequal exchange" or resource and labor extraction in the Global South, which has been ongoing for hundreds of years, now developed from colonialism to neo-colonialism, which has the support of compradors and other allied reactionary local economic interests, such as Pakistani feudal dynasties.

Let alone its resulting political policies that accelerate it such as austerity policies, privatization, IMF restructuring programs, higher interest rates, et monetary policy

This not only wreaks economic, social, and environmental damage in the 3rd world's economic sovereignty and self-suffiency, but effectively decrease the potential of labor and welfare's struggle for better conditions in the imperial core, such as for real wages and pensions, and employment, due to offshoring of labor, if not property to countries like India et Indonesia, which overall causes the de-industrialization of the west, at the cost of both working classes of the Global North (the West) and Global South (3rd world)

Note: despite this, there is a material stake of the Global North's working class, upon this exploitation, due to its promise of fulfilling their needs, if not some temporary luxury... nonetheless, this is a sunk-cost ideology promoted by the ruling class

Our results indicate that most of the North’s excess consumption (58% of it) is sustained by net appropriation from the global South; without this appropriation, material use in high-income nations would be much closer to the sustainable level.

So, what's a potential solution?

'If we stop diverting 130 cents of every new dollar generated to the rentier class, we can afford to obey a moral mandate to bring economic activity back home, which creates a rising tide for wages and living conditions." ' - @[email protected]

2. Anti-imperialism,

We are against the dominant west, which is led by the U.S.A, with its military and economic domination of the world, especially the latter upon the Global South, who has hoisted regime change efforts, through the CIA's puppets, such as the USAID and NED, and other western-allied 'NGOs', with its puppetted anti-communist pro-western lib and con politicians, if not junta military collaborators, who come in the form of the EU, NATO, and the Quad...

Edited: This is the raison d'etre for national liberation forces, if not critically-supported anti-western lesser-dominant yet powerful forces who've been demonized with atrocity propaganda, like the People's Republic of China, if not modern-day Russia, the latter of whom has mainly been anti-western by opportunity and circumstance

For general notes on imperialism: https://thetricontinental.org/studies-on-contemporary-dilemmas-4-hyper-imperialism/

3. Anti-reaction,

We are against those who oppress LGBTQ+ people, fetishize and humiliate People-of-Color and ethnic minorities, and uphold many hierarchies that justify the economic base of reaction, to make itself look natural and immutable...

tl;dr:

If you oppose at least two of these, you ain't left....

If the Dems lose to Trump they need to be mocked relentlessly. Imagine losing to Trump.

Trump

Your party was so unappealing that it lost to Trump.

Not only did your party reach across the isle to work with the ghouls that supported Trump they broke every promise they made, continued Trump's messed up boarder camp, neglected COVID (millions dead) and funded genocide in Gaza.

They were so disgusting that people don't even want to vote anymore.

Do they realise how easy it should be to beat Trump? The only reason they could be this incompetent is because they want to be.

Because in the end they want the same thing as Trump and the Republicans want, and will not protect us from their fascist policies.

Let me know if there are any more suggestions. Regarding certain role changes, please suggest a way to make the changes accessible. I'm not going to add any more walls of text, so the changes should be user friendly and understandable without the text.

Before 14-03-2024 7AM

Before 13-03-2024 11AM

Original

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/1944839

For Marx, substance is synonymous with content.

Chapter 12 of I. I. Rubin’s Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value meticulously investigates the question of content and form, as used by Marx in his theory of value.

Due to his materialist philosophy, Marx adopted what the layman might call a scientific attitude for theorizing about society. This means starting from empirical phenomena, and through analysis (contemplation), developing concepts (categories) which are implied by the phenomena. In short, one starts from concrete forms to discover their underlying, abstract content. This duality of form and content is found throughout Marx’s work, but originates in the theory of Hegel.

As the names imply, form is an accidental or external presentation of content. Just as carbon (content) may variously take the form of either diamond or graphite, so too may content in Marx’s theory take on various forms depending on the circumstances. Therefore, a scientific investigation which moves only from form to content is inadequate, as discovering a form’s content does not uncover the conditions under which the content takes that form. It is necessary to move in the reverse direction, from the abstract substance back to the concrete form.

In volume 1 of Das Kapital, Marx identifies labor as the substance or content of value. But value itself can take on various forms, namely the manifold use-values or useful products of labor. This includes the money-commodity. The fact that all commodities share this common content of value makes them commensurable or exchangeable, since — and Marx quotes Aristotle on this — quantities may only be compared between objects of like quality.

Exchange therefore implies that it is not any labor which forms value, but only abstract social labor. When commodities A and B are exchanged at a given ratio, their concrete and qualitatively different labors are necessarily regarded abstractly as a common kind of labor, in order for their quantities to be commensurable.

So Marx’s investigation takes two paths in succession. The importance of these two paths was first noted by I. I. Rubin at least as early as 1927:

1. Form to content. Empirical phenomena, forms visible in everyday life, are analyzed through contemplation, in order to theorize about their content, or their inner logic. This path, claims Marx, is as far as earlier political economists ever got. He considers David Ricardo to have discovered the content of value, labor; but he never figured out what kind of labor forms value.^1,2,3,4^
2. Content to form. Path 1 gives us the starting abstract concept, and now we have to consider the concept in itself, and see how, and under what conditions, that content emerges in the particular forms we observed at the start of Path 1. Along this path we discover that it is not any kind of labor which forms value, but abstract social labor, labor which has been validated as social, in a definite magnitude, by and through the act of exchange.

---

Footnotes

1. “Political Economy has indeed analysed, however incompletely, value and its magnitude, and has discovered what lies beneath these forms. But it has never once asked the question why labour is represented by the value of its product and labour time by the magnitude of that value.” — Das Kapital volume 1 chapter 1.
2. “The insufficiency of Ricardo’s analysis of the magnitude of value, and his analysis is by far the best, will appear from the 3rd and 4th books of this work. As regards value in general, it is the weak point of the classical school of Political Economy that it nowhere expressly and with full consciousness, distinguishes between labour, as it appears in the value of a product, and the same labour, as it appears in the use value of that product.” — Ibid.
3. “It is one of the chief failings of classical economy that it has never succeeded, by means of its analysis of commodities, and, in particular, of their value, in discovering that form under which value becomes exchange value. Even Adam Smith and Ricardo, the best representatives of the school, treat the form of value as a thing of no importance, as having no connection with the inherent nature of commodities. The reason for this is not solely because their attention is entirely absorbed in the analysis of the magnitude of value. It lies deeper. The value form of the product of labour is not only the most abstract, but is also the most universal form, taken by the product in bourgeois production, and stamps that production as a particular species of social production, and thereby gives it its special historical character. If then we treat this mode of production as one eternally fixed by Nature for every state of society, we necessarily overlook that which is the differentia specifica of the value form, and consequently of the commodity form, and of its further developments, money form, capital form, &c. We consequently find that economists, who are thoroughly agreed as to labour time being the measure of the magnitude of value, have the most strange and contradictory ideas of money, the perfected form of the general equivalent.” — Ibid.
4. “In order that the commodities may be measured according to the quantity of labour embodied in them—and the measure of the quantity of labour is time—the different kinds of labour contained in the different commodities must be reduced to uniform, simple labour, average labour, ordinary, unskilled labour. Only then can the amount of labour embodied in them be measured according to a common measure, according to time. The labour must be qualitatively equal so that its differences become merely quantitative, merely differences of magnitude. This reduction to simple, average labour is not, however, the only determinant of the quality of this labour to which as a unity the values of the commodities are reduced. That the quantity of labour embodied in a commodity is the quantity socially necessary for its production—the labour-time being thus necessary labour-time—is a definition which concerns only the magnitude of value. But the labour which constitutes the substance of value is not only uniform, simple, average labour; it is the labour of a private individual represented in a definite product. However, the product as value must be the embodiment of social labour and, as such, be directly convertible from one use-value into all others. (The particular use-value in which labour is directly represented is irrelevant so that it can be converted from one form into another.) Thus the labour of individuals has to be directly represented as its opposite, sociallabour; this transformed labour is, as its immediate opposite, abstract, general labour, which is therefore represented in a general equivalent, only by its alienation does individual labour manifest itself as its opposite.” — Theories of Surplus Value, Chapter 20; bold added to emphasize the critical importance of path 2 from my answer, for finding that “determinant of the quality of labor”, i.e. for identifying what kind of labor forms value.

If you've read anything about how the CIA treats its enemies (hell, sometimes even its friends) it becomes clear that the imperial core uses nihilism, hopelessness, vice and fear to wear people down and break them. Make them tired, paralyzed, or even drive them to do the worst. That is the pathetic, slimy nature of our unfit rulers.

Remember to never give in to hopelessness. They want you to lay down and die. They want you accept your fate like a broken horse.

Fuck that shit. Never stop bucking your rider off. I believe in you.

Every time you live, every time you reject cruelty, every time you try to do right, they lose.

What is the defining characteristic of post-apocalyptic American science fiction? The thing that, by the creator's measure, marks it as a fallen world? I'd argue that it's a lack of police.

It's the transformation of the entire world into the frontier, or rather, the frontier as viewed by settler-colonists: the few civilized towns, safe havens primarily distinguished by the presence of police, beset on all sides by unreasoning killers that spawn from the desolate wilderness. In real life, it was the continent's indigenous population that was portrayed this way; in American post-apocalyptic science fiction, it's drug-addled raiders, cannibals, mutants, inferior people with inferior weapons who produce nothing of value, but nonetheless pose a threat by their sheer numbers and utter depravity. Or perhaps the story takes place in a crumbling ruin of a city, where the fear of lawlessness manifests in a vision of street gangs as imagined by anyone ignorant enough to believe that old chain email that claims "gangs initiate new members by driving with headlights off at night, then killing anyone who flashes them."

You know Fallout raiders? The guys who kill and rob because they're bad and evil, and mindlessly charge into your gunfire until they're all dead, without ever considering retreat or surrender? That's the basic idea.

It's a conservative, Hobbesian view of human nature, and so it's right at home in American culture. It's also a way to avoid grappling with the reality that fascism is capitalism in decay - that as conditions in a capitalist society like America deteriorate, the police and military won't vanish but will instead only get more cruel and vicious. After all, as people get worse off, they will get more desperate and violent, creating the excuse for ever-increasing state repression, an ever-intensifying reaping of the poor for the sake of the rich. Those on top will spill oceans of blood to ensure that even as the pie shrinks, their piece doesn't. In the end, that's your best candidate for raiders: the hollow shell of a state so degraded and honed for violence that it's incapable of doing anything but killing and robbing the people in its borders, carried out by those with vast stockpiles of guns, ammunition, armored vehicles, and fuel. Once supply chains collapse to the point that the state can't even maintain its armed forces, it's not hard to imagine things going full Thirty Years War, with roving gangs of soldiers and cops sustaining themselves by hopping from town to town like locusts, stripping each bare before moving on to the next.

Obviously, this doesn't apply to all American post-apocalyptic science fiction, but it's common enough that I think it warrants discussion.

I was looking up economic data on the former Eastern Bloc and came across this table on the Statista website. Let’s unpack this a bit, shall we?

This chart compares GDP per capita of various Eastern Bloc countries versus the European Union at three different points: 1950, 1989, and 2000. GDP is an incredibly flawed metric for measuring an economy. It is tailor-made to make capitalist, imperialist economies look better and to make exploited and socialist economies look worse; so already, by comparing GDP figures we are spotting the capitalist countries a bunch of points. For more information on the flaws of GDP, check out John Smith’s Imperialism in the 21st Century. And of course, GDP per capita completely ignores how income and wealth are distributed within a country. In a more equal country (like the USSR), the median person will have a much higher standard of living than the median person in a country with the same GDP per capita but is much more unequal (like the USA). GDP per capita doesn’t mean much if a small number of people hold all the wealth.

I’m not sure how much useful information we can take away from comparing the changes from 1950 to 1989. Some of the communist countries improve versus the EU, some do worse, and some (USSR) basically tread water. Given how much larger the Soviet economy was compared to the others, I’ll make a couple notes here. The period 1950-1989 means you have only about 6 years of the more “Stalinist” economy and then 33 years of the economy after Khrushchev’s “reforms”. So this data says, despite the economic problems that occurred under Khrushchev and Brezhnev, the USSR still held their own against the EU. Further, the 1989 end point feels a bit like cheating. At that point Gorbachev’s death drive was in full swing. I suspect if you chose say 1985 or even 1986, the USSR comparison point might actually have been higher than in 1989, again despite all the problems that were going on in the Soviet economy. But then again, the 1989 data point only further reinforces how bad things would get. According to Growth Crystal, GDP growth from 1956-1991 was still 4.9%.

The comparison between 1989 and 2000 is truly staggering to wrap your head around. Every country except Poland sees a massive decline in GDP per capita relative to the EU (and not like things really improve much in Poland, they more or less hold steady). In the span of just 11 years, for the USSR this comparison goes from 49% to 24%! And remember, that 49% is already a little “deflated” in that it includes a lot of Gorby’s fuck ups. This incredible drop in GDP also does not show the incredible amount of human suffering tied to that drop - over a million lives lost, countless others broken and destroyed.

Now, a liberal who’s going through this may say sure, the 90s were rough. But that was just some necessary structural adjustment in the transition from inefficient socialism to efficient capitalism. And sure, 2000 was now 24 years ago and that is a lot of time. But also according to Growth Crystal (ibid), economic growth in Russia since 1999 has been 3.8% per year. That’s… fine. But not exactly world-beating. Importantly, when comparing “what might have been”, you have to take into account the economic collapse of the 90s that was entirely due to capitalism. I did some very rough math, and the total average annual rate of economic growth in the USSR (using the Russian Federation as a proxy post-1991) since the fall of the USSR has been around 1%. That’s about as bad as a country can possibly be over a sustained period of time.

I think this last point is very important. Libs will compare the present-day situation in the former Eastern Bloc to what it was in 1991, as if they would be frozen in time from that point on. But that is far from what could be reasonably expected had the USSR not collapsed. Yes, even before Gorbachev, the USSR had some serious problems in the economy. You know who also has problems in their economy? Literally every country. There’s no economy out there that just runs perfect - capitalist, socialist, and everything in between. The US has problems. The EU has problems. Even China has problems.

What those countries don’t always have is leadership (hey, let’s not pin all of this on Gorbachev alone) that through some combination of incompetency, corruption, and misguided ideals that takes dramatic steps to wreck their own economy. So let’s come up with a very conservative, plausible alternate path for the USSR post-1985 or so.

Really, we just have to assume Gorby doesn’t get a chance to screw things up. But let’s assume instead, Soviet leadership in the late 80s just does some very basic course correcting. Like, a lot of the problems can still be not totally addressed. But assume leadership does get some of the “low-hanging fruit” like accomplishing some anti-corruption initiatives and adopting some tech-driven solutions to economic planning. Just enough to stabilize things a bit.

In this scenario, all that the Soviet Union has to do is beat that ~1% economic growth figure, and then the people of the former USSR are better off today if the USSR never collapsed. This is such a low bar to clear, I don’t see how the USSR doesn’t achieve this. It’s frankly sandbagging to assume a socialist country that achieved solid economic growth for decades even in bad times couldn’t see 2-3% growth over 30-35 years. Even if you’re a lib and think a socialist economy is fundamentally flawed, you can’t reasonably think this scenario would not likely be achieved. Personally, I think had the USSR survived, they would have eventually stabilized by following a more Dengist path or going all-in on cybernetic central planning once the power of computing was fully realized. Either way, the Soviet economy eventually stabilizes.

And it bears repeating, we’re just talking about per capita GDP. Even if alternate universe USSR only saw 1% growth and overall the economies of the two Russias were the same, communist Russia will have a much more equal distribution of wealth, meaning the average worker is much better off under socialism even under the same aggregate outcome.

Of course, it’s not just about economic growth. Had the USSR not been murdered, all the human suffering that occurred in the 90s could have been avoided. None of this had to happen. Even if you think socialism is flawed and even if the USSR didn’t fix all of their problems, the present world is a worse world than if socialism in the Eastern Bloc was not murdered (and it most definitely did not die of natural causes, it was murdered).

I'm sorry in advance for spelling and grammar errors, I am not the best writer. [CW: use of the word 'insane' here is about outdated medical norms.]

We always hear about how the West values "freedom" and "the individual" but what does the reality of living under capitalism actually show us?

Freedom of expression:

In the West, we are told we are all free individuals who can express ourselves in any way we choose. But any artist can tell you just how crushing creating under capitalism is. The ruling class (those who employ and pay artists, investors, producers, executives, etc) call the shots, not the artists themselves. Profit is the motive, and they want a safe bet. Forcing artists to "play it safe" stifles creativity. Without the freedom to break boundaries into new horizons, and without the freedom to express themselves (rather they are forced to try and express the desires of a nebulous and fickle "market"), art becomes stale and hollow. People often use the term "soulless" to describe particularly capitalist art, which is an accurate description in my opinion. If art is the perspective and soul of the artist that is shared with the world, art that is made for the market becomes like a fake smile in that respect. Hollow. Some art is still outright banned for theocratic reasons, such as recent book bannings in the US. Thankfully the human drive to create persists, but art under capitalism struggles to be truly free as it claims.

And what of other forms of self-expression? Common anti-communist propaganda depicts people under communist rule as wearing identical grey uniforms, unable to express themselves through fashion (despite all evidence proving otherwise). And what about fashion in the West? From a young age, most countries require people to wear uniforms to even go to school. Even in countries that don't require school uniforms, once they go to work, 'lower class' workers are forced to wear embarrassing uniforms and name tags, and people all rush through business districts wearing near identical suits, drab and colorless. Even in your own time, looking too 'strange' or 'different' is subtly discouraged, whether it is harder to find a job if you have tattoos, or being socially policed for being too outside the norm. If you have hair too long or short from your assigned gender, or if you have brightly colored hair, or if you wear clothing that is not 'normal' for your assigned lot in life, be prepared to be mocked for "trying to be special", not exactly the talk of a free people. It wasn't too long ago that such social deviation was deemed 'insane' and such people were inflicted with cruel forms of outdated therapy or institutionalized. And this isn't even going into what people who are not white male cishets still go through to this very day.

Transport:

Americans like to say that the car is a symbol of freedom. Unlike a train which is on a set track and filled with other people, a car is yours to go wherever you want, your way. But what is driving in America actually like? In reality, it's millions of cars trapped on a freeway, going a predetermined way set by a road, surrounded by others. Only unlike a train, you can't socialize, and each car is spewing tons more waste per person than a well-maintained train system ever could. If we look at the reality of what is happening, these expensive death traps are anything but free. Anyone stuck in a traffic jam could tell you that if they were being honest.

Work:

In no place is the idea that capitalist societies are free more laughable than in the workplace. The average person living in a capitalist society will spend most of their waking life working to enrich the ruling class. They do so in an environment that can only be described as an authoritarian dictatorship of strict rules, hierarchy, and restriction of autonomy. Many workers are not even allowed to speak freely. Some are given scripts to follow. It is not uncommon for retail workers to be forbidden to even sit. Even failing to force a smile in the presence of customers can be punished. All under penalty of losing their jobs and potential poverty.

The Capitalist Surveillance State:

Interestingly, mass surveillance was once considered something unique to so-called 'authoritarian communist' countries, yet privacy is under far worse conditions in the West. Slowly but surely, capitalist countries have become a panopticon, where no one quite knows when they are being watched. Because there is no space where some kind of device isn't collecting their information. In our world where everyone requires a phone that doubles as a monitoring device in their pocket to take part in daily life, it's hard to imagine that even CCTV was once controversial here. However, it went ahead anyway, as petty theft was used (as it often is) to justify its implementation. After all, in a capitalist society, the private property of the wealthy is more important than the rights of the common people. Now, everything from online activity, location, photos, and even biometrics are all combined to create a profile of each person. Consent isn't even possible in such a case, as the devices of others can even provide information. To avoid it would to become a hermit. People have become numb to this, and any questioning is either met with weak resignment to their powerlessness to stop it, or a declaration that "I don't care if Google knows my search history, at least it's not the government."

Unfortunately, under capitalism the government does not lose power, it merely privatizes it. In a way, corporations are the government. They donate, they lobby, they treaten to remove donations or sue if their demands are not met. Under capitalism, business is the government, and their geopolitical and domestic motives are not in the best interest of the people. It's in the interest of profit. The personal data of civilians can and already has been traded back and fourth between government and corporation, to be used against protests or organization that threatens the ruling class.

Frighteningly, all of these are normalized to the point that a lot of people do not question it, and if they do, are too afraid to fight it.

That is the state of freedom and individuality in a capitalist society.

On Oct 7th numerous instances of 'Hannibal Directive' have been made evident. The most extensive casualties are due to 28 attack helicopters ("Apache") emptying their full complement of weapons ("shoot everything") and re-arming through the course of the morning hours of that day. Other known incidents have been reported of tanks firing on homes known to have hostages inside under orders from command. There are also reports of drone operators firing at vehicles and other targets that likely had hostages contained within. This list of links focuses mostly on the evidence of the helicopter attacks.

What is the Hannibal Directive?

"the name of a controversial procedure that was used by Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) until 2016 to prevent the capture of Israeli soldiers by enemy forces. According to one version, it says that "the kidnapping must be stopped by all means, even at the price of striking and harming our own forces."[2] It was introduced in 1986, after a number of abductions of IDF soldiers in Lebanon and subsequent controversial prisoner exchanges. The full text of the directive was never published, and until 2003, Israeli military censorship forbade any discussion of the subject in the press."

TL;DR: A policy of killing hostages instead of allowing them to be taken alive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannibal_Directive

Israel Killed Hostages on October 7th, Al Jazeera Doc Shows
Novara Media coverage of new Al Jazeera Doc about civilian casualties by Israeli forces including clips and commentary runtime: 24:08
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mArZ60k9EEo

"How Israel Merked its Own Civilians on October 7"
This video essay does a really good job of tying together the various bits of information collected in this post into a concise narrative. runtime: 12:35
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCjTki-OgKQ

Israeli army ordered mass Hannibal Directive on 7 Oct: Media
An investigation from Israel's leading newspaper indicates Israel deliberately killed many of its own civilians and soldiers during Hamas' Operation Al-Aqsa Flood to prevent them being taken captive back to Gaza
https://new.thecradle.co/articles-id/18512

Shielding US Public From Israeli Reports of Friendly Fire on October 7
Since October, the Israeli press has uncovered damning evidence showing that an untold number of the Israeli victims during the October 7 Hamas attack were in fact killed by the IDF response. https://fair.org/home/shielding-us-public-from-israeli-reports-of-friendly-fire-on-october-7/

Israeli HQ ordered troops to shoot Israeli captives on 7 October
pretty solid overview of Helicopter, Drone and Tank attacks on hostages
https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/asa-winstanley/israeli-hq-ordered-troops-shoot-israeli-captives-7-october

How Israeli forces trapped and killed ravers at the Nova Festival
New evidence points to Israeli security forces, not Hamas, for causing the most fatalities at the music festival - civilian deaths that were then utilized to justify Tel Aviv's Gaza genocide.
https://new.thecradle.co/articles/how-israeli-forces-trapped-and-killed-ravers-at-the-nova-festival

AP News video
Israeli rave survivors return to look for cars after Oct. 7 Hamas attack
Hundreds of scorched and destroyed cars have been moved from the Nova music festival after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack. Almost a month later, some survivors return to look for their vehicles to reflect and make sense of what happened.
This shows the scale of the helicopter attacks, as HAMAS had no capabilities to do this type of damage.
https://apnews.com/video/israel-hamas-war-israel-hamas-war-and-unrest-assault-1c3a2dd42dbb4f58a1ce29c431d080da

Daily Mail - official youtube channel (CW: Deaths)
Israel Apache helicopters strike Hamas targets with chain gun and missiles
posted Oct 16, 2023 #dailymail #israel #hamasattack
Here is direct video evidence of helicopter attacks on civilian vehicles, pedestrians, etc with no clear discrimination of targets.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkNYB0DayKo

We Blew Up Israeli Houses on Oct. 7, Says Israeli Colonel
AN AIR FORCE COLONEL has said that Israeli airstrikes may have intentionally killed Israeli captives rather than let them be taken to Gaza. Speaking in Hebrew about the airstrikes, Colonel Nof Erez told a Haaretz podcast in November, that “the Hannibal Directive was apparently applied” and that Oct. 7 “was a mass Hannibal.”
An extensive article collecting details of helicopter, drone and tank attacks on hostages that day.
https://www.wrmea.org/israel-palestine/we-blew-up-israeli-houses-on-oct.-7-says-israeli-colonel.html

The Electronic Intifada youtube channel and blog
"Mass Hannibal" — We killed Israelis on 7 October, says Israeli air force colonel
An air force colonel has said that Israeli airstrikes may have intentionally killed Israeli captives rather than let them be taken to Gaza.
Speaking in Hebrew about the airstrikes, Colonel Nof Erez told a Haaretz podcast in November, that “the Hannibal Directive was apparently applied” and that 7 October “was a mass Hannibal.”
The colonel confirms that the helicopters killed hostages and civilians indiscriminately during the chaos of that day.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r63nmfbIUBA https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/asa-winstanley/we-blew-israeli-houses-7-october-says-israeli-colonel

Friendly fire may have killed their relatives on Oct. 7. These Israeli families want answers now
Relatives of civilians killed at a kibbutz in southern Israel during the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas are demanding the military immediately investigate signs that some may have been killed by Israeli security forces as they battled militants holding hostages
AP article that covers the incidents of tank attacks on homes with hostages inside being investigated.
https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-hostages-investigation-friendly-fire-3b6fdd4592957340b32a8ee71505b8e9

Lately I’ve been seeing posters here express some form of the sentiment that Hexbear has fallen from its previous heights of glory and now we post amongst the ruins of greatness. This is not a response to anyone in particular, and I don’t want to call anyone out. In fact, it seems to be a normal human tendency to romanticize the past. But I’ve been here since the beginning and want to provide an alternate view.

1. Hexbear just isn’t like it used to be.

This is one I am particularly suspicious of, since people started posting this after the site had been around for a couple of months. Before that they posted about how chapo.chat wasn’t like the old chapotraphouse subreddit. If the good ol’ days ever existed, they always seem to have been just prior to the current moment. If anything the site culture and vibe have been remarkably consistent since its inception, for better or worse. Faces have changed, people have come and gone and sometimes come back again, but Hexbear remains.

2. People used to be nice here and treat each other as comrades. Now there is just a culture of shallow dunks.

Seriously? Be for real. I’m not going to deny that we love a good dunk around here, but let’s not pretend that this is a new phenomenon. It’s a big part of the culture around here that predates the site and even arguably even the subreddit. You can be free to like it or not, criticize it or not, say its productive or not, but its definitely not a new development. There’s always been a lot of love and mutual support, but also a lot of vicious arguments intracommunity arguments here. If anything I think there’s less of this now. The early posters would laugh at what passes for a struggle session around here these days. The VCJ struggle session seemed at the time like it might legitimately end the entire site.

3. This site had the potential to be a place for organizing and building something rather than just posting.

This one is an interesting counterfactual. From the beginning there was no clear agreement on what the ultimate purpose of the site would be, and there were definitely people who saw the site as having revolutionary potential. There were also people who saw it as a place to hang out and shitpost among comrades and were skeptical of its potential for organizing. Over time, I think it’s become clear that we’re closer to the latter than the former. I’m okay with that, personally, but more than that I think it’s worth considering why despite having a lot of smart, determined people on the site, organizing never really materialized, or if it ever had that potential in the first place.

4. People used to post effort posts and stuff and now its just a bunch of shitposting.

It’s always been mostly shitposting. This is one of my first comments on this site. It’s hard to say if there really used to be more effort posts or not, but what’s stopping you from writing an effort post if you feel like Hexbear needs more of them? I’m doing it right now, and so can you.

One thing that really has changed is that we used to have more comrades actively working on developing the site. Hopefully more people will step up to do that (not me though because I can’t code).

In conclusion, Hexbear is mostly, for better or worse, as it always has been. Enjoy your time here without worrying about whether it measures up to some imagined glorious past. If there’s something you feel is lacking, step up and contribute it. This site is nothing more or less than the sum of our contributions.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/1517140

Lukács’s work set off a firestorm among Western left theorists seeking to accommodate themselves to the new American imperium. In 1963, George Lichtheim, a self-styled socialist operating within the general tradition of Western Marxism while virulently opposed to Soviet Marxism, wrote an article for Encounter Magazine, then covertly funded by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), in which he vehemently attacked The Destruction of Reason and other works by Lukács. Lichtheim accused Lukács of generating an “intellectual disaster” with his analysis of the historical shift from reason to unreason within European philosophy and literature, and the relation of this to the rise of fascism and the new imperialism under U.S. global hegemony.

This was not the first time, of course, that Lukács had been subjected to such strong condemnations by figures associated with Western Marxism. Theodor Adorno, one of the dominant theorists of the Frankfurt School, attacked Lukács in 1958 when the latter was still under house arrest for supporting the 1956 revolution in Hungary. Writing in Der Monat, a journal created by the occupying U.S. Army and funded by the CIA, Adorno charged Lukács with being “reductive” and “undialectical,” writing like a “Cultural Commissar,” and with being “paralysed from the outset by the consciousness of his own impotence.”

However, the 1963 attack on Lukács by Lichtheim in Encounter took on an added significance due to its absolute condemnation of Lukács’s The Destruction of Reason. In this work, Lukács had charted the relation of philosophical irrationalism—which first emerged on the European Continent, particularly in Germany, with the defeat of the 1848 revolutions, and that became a dominant force near the end of the century—to the rise of the imperialist stage of capitalism. For Lukács, irrationalism, including its ultimate coalescence with Nazism, was no fortuitous development, but rather a product of capitalism itself. Lichtheim responded by charging Lukács with having committed an “intellectual crime” in illegitimately drawing a connection between philosophical irrationalism (associated with such thinkers as Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, Georges Sorel, Oswald Spengler, Martin Heidegger, and Carl Schmitt) and the rise of Adolf Hitler.

Lukács provocatively started his book by saying “the subject matter which presents itself to us is Germany’s path to Hitler in the sphere of philosophy.” But his critique was in fact much broader, seeing irrationalism as related to the imperialist stage of capitalism more generally. Hence, what most outraged Lukács’s critics in the West in the early 1960s was his suggestion that the problem of the destruction of reason had not vanished with the historic defeat of fascism, but that it was continuing to nurture reactionary tendencies, if more covertly, in the new Cold War era dominated by the U.S. imperium. “Franz Kafka’s nightmares,” Lichtheim charged, were treated by Lukács as evidence of “‘the diabolical character of the world of modern capitalism,'” now represented by the United States. Yet, Lukács’s argument in this respect was impossible to refute. Thus, he wrote, in terms still meaningful today:

In contrast to Germany, the U.S.A. had a constitution which was democratic from the start. And its ruling class managed, particularly during the imperialist era, to have the democratic forms so effectively preserved that by democratically legal means, it achieved a dictatorship of monopoly capitalism at least as firm as that which Hitler set up with tyrannic procedures. This smoothly functioning democracy, so-called, was created by the Presidential prerogative, the Supreme Court’s authority in constitutional questions, the finance monopoly over the Press, radio, etc., electioneering costs, which successfully prevented really democratic parties from springing up beside the two parties of monopoly capitalism, and lastly the use of terroristic devices (the lynching system). And this democracy could, in substance, realize everything sought by Hitler without needing to break with democracy formally. In addition, there was the incomparably broader and more solid economic basis of monopoly capitalism.

In these circumstances, irrationalism and the “piling up of cynical contempt for humanity,” Lukács insisted, was “the necessary ideological consequence of the structure and potential influence of American imperialism.” This shocking claim that there was a continuity in the relation of imperialism and irrationalism extending over the course of an entire century, from late nineteenth-century Europe, through fascism, and continuing in the new NATO imperium dominated by the United States, was strongly rejected at the time by many of those associated with the Western Marxist philosophical tradition. It was this, then, more than anything else, that led to the almost complete disavowal of Lukács’s later work (after his 1923 History and Class Consciousness) by left thinkers working in conjunction with the new post-Second World War liberalism.

Nevertheless, The Destruction of Reason was not subject to a systematic critique by those who opposed it, which would have meant confronting the crucial issues it raised. Instead, it was dismissed vituperatively out of hand by the Western left as constituting a “deliberate perversion of the truth,” a “700-page diatribe,” and a “Stalinist tract.” As one commentator has recently noted, “its reception could be summarized by a few death sentences” issued against it by leading Western Marxists.

A GLOWING ENDORSEMENT!!!

IF YOU READ THIS FAR YOU ARE OBLIGED!!!!!

Georg Lukacs - The Destruction of Reason-Penguin Random House LLC (Publisher Services) (2021).epub

0.9 MB https://files.catbox.moe/w2jp94.epub

Still, there was no denying the scale of the undertaking represented by The Destruction of Reason as a critique of the main traditions of Western irrationalism by the world’s then most esteemed Marxist philosopher. Rather than treating the various irrationalist systems of thought of the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries as if they had simply fallen from the sky, Lukács related them to the historical and material developments from which they emerged. Here, his argument relied ultimately on V. I. Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. Irrationalism was, therefore, identified, as in Lenin, principally with historical-material conditions of the age of monopoly capitalism, the dividing up of the entire world between the great powers, and the geopolitical struggles over hegemony and spheres of influence. This was manifested in an economic-colonial rivalry between various capitalist states, coloring the entire historical context in which the new imperialist stage of capitalism emerged.

Today this fundamental material reality in many ways persists, but it has been so modified under the U.S. global imperium that a new phase of late imperialism can be said to have arisen, dating back to the end of the Second World War, merging immediately into the Cold War, and perpetuated, following a brief interregnum, in the New Cold War of today. Late imperialism in this sense corresponds chronologically with the end of the Second World War, the emergence of the nuclear age, and the beginning of the Anthropocene Epoch in geological history, which marked the advent of the planetary ecological crisis. The consolidation of global monopoly capital (more recently monopoly-finance capital), and the struggle by the United States—backed by the collective imperialism of the triad of the United States/Canada, Europe, and Japan—for global supremacy in a unipolar world all correspond to this phase of late imperialism.

For the Western left itself, the history of late imperialism has been primarily marked by the defeat of the revolts of 1968, followed by the demise of Soviet-type societies after 1989, which had as one of its primary consequences the collapse of Western social democracy. These events placed the Western left as a whole in a weakened position, ultimately defined by its general subordination to broad parameters of the imperialist project centered in the United States and its refusal to align with the anti-imperialist struggle, thus guaranteeing its revolutionary irrelevance.

read the rest

This past week a post was made by autismdragon criticizing a Spanish meme calling out those who hypocritically denounce reformism and social democracy/democratic socialism in the United States or Europe but are ardent supporters of Latin American reformism and social democracy. within this post I and several Latin American comrades criticized this position from my our perspectives as abandoning revolution and being conciliatory to capitalists and capitalism in our countries. during this conversation I offhandedly mentioned that Honduras is also a western nation, a belief commonly held here, much to the chagrin of the general userbase who found the concept of any Latin American country being western preposterous. A comrade from Brazil, Apolonio, decided to make a separate post to expand on this topic in more detail and help explain the Latin American position so that people can understand where we are coming from. I was banned for 3 days for being a white supremacist for believing my country is western and Apolonio was bullied off the platform and went on to delete their account and every message they have ever made. its within this hostile atmosphere that I am going to analyze the oppositional view and its origins and analyze the chauvinistic attitude toward the predominant Latin American perspective.

1. The Beliefs Of The Userbase

User Dirt_Possum says

The way I've always thought of it is that "Western" is just an informal way of saying Imperial Core. That it's all a matter of who is doing imperialism to whom, who is benefiting from imperialism and who is being exploited by it. That it's not a matter of culture, language, etc., and is only a matter of race and racism because it's racist reasoning and racist justification at the heart of imperialism

and SeventyTwoTrillion says

"Western" and "imperial core" are synonymous to me, too, and thus Honduras is not in the imperial core and I assume is in the periphery

while sooper_dooper_roofer adds

This whole debate is pointless because "Western" is just another weasel word, a euphemism, a dogwhistle, for "White". The point was to make it sound softer and tamer, and the fact that this debate even exists, means they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. "The White World" sounds awkward and racist to the POC across the globe, but "The Western World" sounds soft and tame and inclusive--mission accomplished!

and autismdragon themself who made the original post says

For me, "the west", "the imperial core", and "the global north" are very close to being synonymous in how i understand them. But maybe they shouldnt be. This is why i usually use imperial core though, since it seems the most specific.

finally to end with we have supafuzz saying

The white bourgeois insistence on 'cultural westernism' or whatever in these countries is just aspiration to the Imperial core that they ain't in

viewing all these different statements combined, none of which are being detracted by other people as being blatantly wrong and all being surrounded by a conversation about the definition of white and whiteness it is safe to assume that for the community there is no nuanced difference between all these different terminologies and they are not defined in significantly different ways. The West is the Imperial Core is White is The Global North is each other. Western Culture is not a defined set of beliefs, values, culture, religion, or anything else that can be viewed concretely but viewed holistically as just what white people do. This is a racial categorizational view of the world or a racially reductionized view that begs us to ask the question of what is white or more importantly who is white.

on the topic of eastern europeans we have Egon who says

Croatia, while being perceived as a "white" country most certainly is not perceived as western. Polish people, Czech people, Croatians, these people are not treated as equals when they come into "western" European countries. There is immense racism against them. You should hear how people speak of old "east block" countries.

and yet this seems contradictory to what has been established beforehand about western and white being synonymous. thankfully, in the past this sort of contradiction was found and rectified by categorizing eastern europeans in their own subracial category called the alpine race. This categorization allowed for the continued differentiation of eastern europeans in their own group while still allowing them to be caucasian which was the fancy term for white in the past.

on the topic of southern europeans we have sooper_dooper_roofer adding

Italian was considered a different racial category from northern European as late as the 1980s, I've seen it on official job applications. Italians also just look different in a way which doesn't exist for Irish Polish or even Russian people. They're darker, and they look more proximal to Arabs or Mexicans depending on who you ask. only from the (visibly darker pigmented) European periphery of Spain

or TupamarosShakur who says

However I think another point is that "the west" doesn't apply to even Spain, I mean not really. There is of course the racial component that someone touched on, where Italians, southern Europeans, are not considered white

from this we can see that southern europeans are both included and disincluded from whiteness with the added fact that unlike eastern europeans, or the alpine race as it would've been called, southern europeans are significantly more tan than the real whites. thankfully this problem was also rectified with the sub-racial categorization of the Mediterranean race. this subracial categorization also conveniently solved the next problem on the list; Latin America.

sooper_dooper_roofer explains extensively through talking about admixture within latin american communities saying

that's like 90% of Latin America or 75% of South America. They're not white, they're admixed with Europeans. Just like Black Americans are. I know a lot of you think you're white because you're lighter skinned than black people. Arabs and lighter skinned Indians also think that a lot of the time. They're not. Almost everyone in Northern Europe and Anglo America can tell the difference and tbh even Argentinians don't really look that white to me on average.

America is technically mixed race, but the average white American is 98.5% white (and western european to boot), unlike any "white" person in any Latin country where even the least mixed people are still 20% Native admixed

Latinos are basically only half white (from a darker than average white country like Spain), that means that Latinos are not Western

while Egon talks similar with

The argument that a lot of Italians went to Brazil, and so the place is "white" is funny to me too. Italians were still treated like an exotic "other" up to the late 90's lol.

within these arguments we can see that Latin Americans are made up of Mediterraneans and natives and since Mediterraneans aren't truly white either you end up with non whites and ergo non westerns. this also contains an age old classic The One Drop Rule. Since all Latin Americans are considered to have at least one drop of non-white in them they're all tainted to be non-white while since the united states is made up of English and Germans mixing with Italians or other Caucasians this has a purifying effect creating real whites.

to further expand we have JohnBrownNote saying

yeah japan is sometimes part of "the west" but it's not western. i mentioned in another comment that this is perhaps an opposite to the latam situation.

or supafuzz taking even further saying

I'd also argue Japan is more "western" than, say, Colombia in most cultural ways too. Full internalization of Western art, music, and most importantly political and governance structures, which are sort of a superficial veneer in most of Latam.

this comes from an old trope that japan is honourary aryan and that the japanese are special enough to be allowed in an anglo-japanese alliance. this further highlights the underlying racial aspect of this since anyone can very plainly see that very little about japan is culturally similar to western european countries and ties into the final point

in a little bonus 420stalin69 concludes with

I think of latam as having a western layer in the upper and more white classes that exploit a non-western majority.

this highlights the well established in other comments belief in white inherently being successful and dominant. those within latin american societies which are rich and do well obviously have to be white in the same way japan must be atleast honourary white in order to explain their similar success despite being asian. this also explains why the west is also the richest place on earth due to their dominance

now what does this all add up towards? this forum fundamentally believes in Anglo-Saxonism or Nordicism which is an outdated racialist ideology that divides the world into differing Caucasian races who predominantly inhabit different countries of which the Nordic race is the endangered and superior one destined to lead the other white races to greatness. the origin of the Nordic race comes from the Germanic tribes which went on to conquer across Europe and create Germany, The United Kingdom, France, and other countries. In fact, the only significant difference between Nordicists and the people on Hexbear seems to be the belief that white people are bad. This explains the incongruence of ideology between Latin Americans on the forum and the non-Latin American majority. Within Latin America Nordicism is not at all popular and those who espouse it are mentally tied together with the Nazis of Germany in the 30s.

2. Credibility of Those Beliefs

Now I was under the impression that after ww2 racialism was entirely discredited within academia and inside any groups in society who matter but evidently with the rise of neo-nazism, white identitarianism, and apparently this forum its an ideology that makes intuitive sense for some and has grand explanations for others. keeping in line with the talk of admixture some people have done before I am going to start by saying there is no such thing as races and its a concept that makes no sense whatsoever biologically.

https://www.eupedia.com/europe/autosomal_maps_dodecad.shtml

you can see in these simple autosomal admixture maps that genetic diversity is the rule and not the exception when it comes to Europe even within these countries that are labeled as "true white". the United Kingdom, Germany, Netherlands, and France do not have their entire population share any haplogroup which could be used as the basis of this racial theory and the majorities in the UK share with Ireland, France share with Spain, Germany share with Poland haplogroups that they don't share with other "true whites". this is also entirely ignoring the fact that hapolgroups from outside Europe is found in abundance within Europe. The lack of scientific rigor for race is precisely why in South Africa they did not follow this ideology but instead used the Pencil Test to gauge who was and wasn't white. now the only defense for why the need to adopt crazy racialist theory always amounts to "well a lot of people believe this stuff is true so we need to too" which apparently is true for nordicism but isn't true for the belief that communism is evil or that lowering taxes is good. conveniently, too, no singular person or group is ever pointed to as holding these beliefs its always an amorphous "everyone". well, as a counterfactual to this apparent majority who all think that western culture and civilization is just white I will point to the two most well known authors on Western Civilization. Oswald Spengler who wrote The Decline of the West in 1918 which popularized talk of western civilization and gave it universal terminology said in volume 2 page 46

But that which distinguished Faustian man, even then, from the man of any other Culture was his irrepressible urge into distance. It was this, in the last resort, that killed and even annihilated the Mexican and Peruvian Culture — the unparalleled drive that was ready for service in any and every domain... the relation between this forceful young Civilization and the still remaining old ones — is that it covers them, all alike, with ever-thickening layers of West-European-American life-forms under which, slowly, the ancient native form disappears.

This aligns with Spengler's view of Western Civilization not being defined in racial terms, he was actually ardently opposed to the racists of his time and believed a "race" was a population united in outlook not ethnicity or dna and believed that mesoamerican culture was overthrown and replaced with western culture to join western civilization. Samuel Huntington who wrote the foremost modern book on Western Civilization, Clash of Civilizations, writes on page 45 a simple description of Western Civilization as

Western. Western civilization is usually dated as emerging about A.D. 700 or 800. It is generally viewed by scholars as having three major components, in Europe, North America, and Latin America.

more specifically regarding Latin America he says

Latin America could be considered either a subcivilization within Western civilization or a separate civilization closely affiliated with the West and divided as to whether it belongs in the West.

This underpins his disbelief in race being the objective definer of western civilization. this in fact highlights the widely accepted belief within academia, since I sau it once again racialism is no longer the vogue in academia, that other factors such as culture define whether or not someone is within western civilization not race.

3. Why it Matters

Some at this point may believe its fine to have outdated racialist concepts considered reactionary in the early 20th century and that they help explain the world very well despite being demonstrably false. I say that this theory ironically orientalizes Latin Americans, papers over the realities and differences in our specific countries, and promotes chauvanistic and paternalistic thinking towards Latin Americans. Latin American society was born from western conquerers and is defined in this and is not defined in whatever "brownness" that is prescribed onto us by foreigners. when a latino talks to another latino from another country its through a european language, spanish or portuguese, not through a native language. this language, spanish or portuguese is our native language which may not mean much to americans who have no concept of knowing more than one language but it makes a great deal more difference when your family, government, friends, and workplace all speak and express themselves and their identity through that language than when you have to use your second language, which you're usually not very good at, to negotiate through society as a foreigner or other. we act in a fashion mimicking the mannerisms brought to us by conquers from long ago and believe in ourselves in a way brought to us by these same conquerers. and finally many of us can trace our lineage very recently from elsewhere and may not have any kind of genetic connection to natives. plenty of chinese, italian, german, or in my particular case arab immigrants moved to our countries very recently. I can very easily trace my family leaving palestine in 1922 but nobody in my own country would deny my latinness since we're not racist in that way. even further, people talk about being hatecrimed immediately upon stepping foot in rural united states, which I have done and can say I am not dead and nobody cared quite as much as it was made out to me, yet you can literally say the same thing about mexicans hatecriming hondurans upon entering mexico and deporting them or mention the fact that the majority of border patrol in the united states is latinos themselves. fundamentally, the theory just does not understand latin america which is why its there is an issue and why it needs to be done away with.

You will never see a more disgusting place than YouTube. An algorithm that pushes the most disgusting content like gore and trauma and the comment section of even the most benign video will have some chud shitting on feminists or whatever with a million updoots. Absolute shithole of a content farm website.

[Sexism] I was just watching a wholesome video of a rooster protecting the flock from a hawk, and the highest comment was like "Hurr duurrr I bet this triggers feminists seeing hens run in fear while the rooster takes charge."

Bruh, no, what is triggering is how illiterate misogynists are about the animal world. Imagine choosing hens as your proof that women are weak. Hens, the gender of chickens that also attack predators regularly. Hens, the gender of chickens that are where scientists came up with the term 'Alpha'. Hens, the gender of chickens that can literally change their gender.

link because I'm not a lib, this person deserves bullying tbh but I doubt it's worth wasting time on

And then, to top it all off, in the recommendeds was a thumbnail of a real picture of a squirrel gored up after being shot with a pellet gun, with the title "Watch this before YouTube deletes it"

So yeah, youtube is fucked up trash.

Yes, I love having my zoology class completely interrupted and derailed to do an assignment on something completely unrelated to the class, it's very smart forcing this bullshit into classes that it doesn't make sense for instead of making it an elective for people who need it.

I love being groomed to prove my worth to capital by researching and compiling a list of skills based on the random whims of the employer class. I love being forced to read and reference very totally academic and serious reports like "The New Work Order Series" that present findings like "Young Australians are currently working more jobs than ever before but they're also underemployed despite being more skilled than ever before." and then they somehow make the dumbass conclusion that "Our young people are not prepared for work." Oh yes, it's always the fault of us workers, isn't it? It couldn't be the fault of employers not doing their part. Nope. I'm sure that reading a bunch of LinkedIn profiles and writing an assignment up proving that I understand what employers want will make their demands less unreasonable. I love that I'm essentially paying employers to propagandize at me. I love that this complete joke of an assessment, written by some HR goon, gets to push its way, unearned, into the same realm as a field of science that has undergone centuries of rigorous peer review.

This shit, which has nothing to do with Zoology, is worth 10% of my mark for Zoology. I had to do a similar one halfway through Chemistry.

Fuckng bullshit propaganda I am going to screm

Requesting a c/rant because AAAAAAAA

A lot of this is taken from a paywalled substack article by Evan Reif who also writes for Covert Action magazine. Evan Reif wrote several exposés of nazism and antisemitism in Ukraine, NATO, the EU, and the United States, for Covert Action magazine, so I view him as trustworthy on the subject of zionism, and not coming from a place of concealed antisemitism.

Warning: Reif's article has photos of historical pogroms and genocides

https://ddgeopolitics.substack.com/p/the-fascist-zion?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2

---

Israel is a genocidal settler-colonial apartheid state set up by the European and North American powers to colonize the middle east. Even early zionists like Theodor Herzl understood Israel in these explicitly settler-colonial terms. Here is Herzl speaking in the 1800s, when Palestine was still Ottoman territory:

If His Majesty the Sultan were to give us Palestine, we could offer to resolve Turkey’s finances. For Europe, we would form part of a bulwark against Asia there, we would serve as the advance post of civilisation against barbarism.

So Theodor Herzel felt not only that European people were entitled to Palestine over the people already living there (including Ottoman Jews), but that the presence of "civilized" Europeans in Israel would form a "bulwark" (forward operating base(offensive, not defensive)) against Asia, which entire continent Herzl racistly characterized as "barbaric."

Herzl was born on May 2 nd , 1860 in Budapest, Hungary to a family of German speaking assimilated Jews. His father, Jakob, was a wealthy businessman and the young Theodor was expected to enter politics or engineering by his parents. In a sense, he did not disappoint, as Herzl was destined to become the father of political Zionism. While Herzl never saw his Jewish state during his lifetime, his ideology remains so influential that even today he is considered the father of Israel.

Herzl’s birthday is a holiday in Israel, his grave is a national monument, the organization he founded is still active today and the largest mountain in the country was re-named in his honor. It is not an exaggeration to say that Herzl and his ideology remain central to Zionism.

As a young man, Herzl was a fanatic Germanophile. He believed that if Jews simply tried hard enough, they could become “Germanized” and shake off what he called “shameful Jewish characteristics.” Herzl viewed German culture and language as inherently superior to that of the reviled working-class Yiddish speaking Jews. At first, he believed that Jews should be Germanized, arguing that Eastern European Jews were so "savage" and backwards that they must learn the very concepts of beauty and nobility by studying the works of authors like Goethe and Shakespeare. He initially envisioned his Zion as a German colony, and waxed poetic about importing German culture to the orient. However, as time went on, Herzl increasingly started to believe that Jews could not and should not assimilate into Europe, and the only solution to the “Jewish question” was the complete removal of all Jews from Europe. If all of this sounds anti-Semitic, that is because it is. Herzl’s Zionism is fundamentally based in antisemitic notions about Jewish incompatibility with gentile society. Herzl dedicated the rest of his life to his goal of a Jewish state. In 1897, he founded the World Zionist Organization, a big tent coalition of Zionists dedicated to creating a Jewish state by any means necessary. As time went on, and the "Labor" Zionist wings were increasingly persecuted by Herzl, the organization moved farther and farther to the right. Given what Herzl believed in, this is understandable. Unlike the Zionists of today, who must pretend to have some respect for the charade known as international law, Herzl was quite open about his plans.

In the view of Herzl, Israel was explicitly a colonial project, and he toured the capitals of Europe trying to drum up support and funding for his cause. Herzl cast a wide net, he was not terribly concerned with who supported him, or why. He gladly worked with some of the most extreme antisemites on earth. After many attempts to get a meeting with Tsar Nicholas II by promising to solve Russia’s “Jewish problem”, Herzl finally got a letter saying Russia would support hisproposed deportation of the Jews. He kept it for the rest of his life, treating it as one of his most prized possessions.

At the same time, Tsarist forces were carrying out reactionary pogroms all throughout the so-called Pale of Settlement, the home of most of Europe’s Jews. In 1903, the same year Herzl was in correspondence with the Tsar, over seven hundred pogroms took place in Ukraine and Moldova alone resulting in the murder of thousands of Jews. In many cases, the pogroms were incited by the Tsar’s secret police and in others the guilty were simply granted clemency by the government. Herzl knew all of this, and his continued support of the Tsarist government was controversial even inside his own movement.

In the end, it was all for nothing. The Tsar did not keep his word and Herzl was perfectly willing to sacrifice thousands of Jews in exchange for empty promises. Sadly, the genocidal tendencies inside Zionism would only accelerate as the movement grew. The Tsar wasn’t the only one who used Herzl as a tool. Starting in 1896, Herzl actively worked with the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II. After a meeting with the Sultan’s advisors in the Levant to discuss strategy, Herzl threw his support behind the Armenian Genocide, a crime so vile it had cut off the Ottomans from European loans. Herzl believed that he could jump in to fill that gap, offering to pay off the empire’s increasing debts using funds raised from European Zionists in exchange for permission to start a colony in Palestine.

Although he found almost no support even inside the World Zionist Council, Herzl spent 5 years touring Europe, speaking, raising funds and writing articles in support of Turkey’s extermination of the Armenian people. Herzl cast the crumbling empire as a historical ally of the Jews and one they should support. He called the Ottomans civilized and decent people, justified in their actions due to the allegedly backwards and violent ways of the subhuman Armenians. He was even awarded a medal by the Grand Vizier in Istanbul, in commemoration of his loyal service to the Ottoman Empire.

In 1901, Herzl finally got his long-awaited meeting with the Sultan, who rejected his proposal out of hand. Once again, Herzl was perfectly willing to sacrifice thousands of lives for words on paper. Today, Herzl’s "civilized" slaughter is viewed as an act of genocide by all credible historians and groups as diverse as the United Nations, the United States Government, the European Union, the Anti-Defamation League, and the World Jewish Congress, who specifically called it “the blueprint of the Holocaust.” With his options dwindling, Herzl even turned to Cecil Rhodes, the openly white supremacist founder of the unrecognized apartheid state of Rhodesia to ask for his advice and blessing to colonize Palestine. Although his efforts amounted to nothing, the ideological connections remained, and the state of Israel became a close ally of Rhodesia. At one point, Israel was one of the only countries willing to sell weapons and licenses to its fellow apartheid states. Israel even collaborated with apartheid South Africa on its nuclear program, a direct violation of international law which was never punished.

"You are being invited to help make history. It doesn’t involve Africa, but a piece of Asia Minor; not Englishmen but Jews... How, then, do I happen to turn to you since this is an out-of-the-way matter for you? How indeed? Because it is something colonial" - Herzl in a letter to Cecil Rhodes

At best, Herzl represents the sort of reactionary, callous “realpolitik” that the state of Israel still embraces today. At worst, he was a genocidal racist willing to support even the vilest crimes toadvance his movement. When the rest of his actions are considered, it appears the latter is much more likely. Herzl’s actions are those of a man who did not just sit idly by and watch genocide happen, but rather those of a man who viewed the genocide as a cornerstone of his ideology. The simple reality is Theodor Herzl was a reactionary antisemite who openly called for the extermination of the Jews of Europe while simultaneously calling for the colonization of Palestine by European Jews. He viewed both of these ends as codependent upon each other.

While this sounds contradictory, this is only because most people have simply accepted the historical premises of the Zionist movement without question due to decades of well-funded propaganda.

Herzl’s antisemitism was rooted first in a deep, intense classism. In order to understand this fully, we need some historical background. Herzl was a German speaking assimilated Jew from a wealthy merchant family. He did not experience any of the hardship which defined the interaction between Jews and Gentiles in Europe. Rather, Herzl’s family willingly sold out their fellow Jews for money and status, using the poor Yiddish speaking Jews as a sort of human shield to protect themselves from the predictions of their German allies. When it came time to create his “Jewish” state, Herzl sought to portray himself and his handful of wealthy allies as “the good ones” while the rest of the Jews were little more than vermin to be exterminated.

The vast majority of the Europe’s Jewry were Yiddish speaking workers and peasants who were restricted by law from entering most professions to keep them poor and easily exploited. The Yiddish Jews had been expelled from all their previous homes in Europe and were eventually chased into the eastern part of what was then the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, but today is part of seven countries, mostly Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus.

The commonwealth was much friendlier to Jews than most of its European counterparts, and so the region was quickly settled by Jews fleeing oppression elsewhere. After Poland was defeated and partitioned in 1791, most of this territory and the people living there came under the control of the violently antisemitic Russian Empire.

Tsarina Catherine’s regime had recently conquered former Ottoman territories in Crimea and the Black Sea region. These lands were combined with the recent acquisitions from Poland to form what became known as the Pale of Settlement. Jews were allowed to settle and do business in this land, but nowhere else in the empire. All other Russian Jews were violently expelled from their homes and sent to settle the Pale. The plan was that the Jews would serve as a buffer against Ottoman expansion while keeping them away from the Orthodox heartland of the Russian Empire.

Their lives were not easy, as the Pale of Settlement was more of a trap than a gift. Jews were not allowed to own land inside the Pale, meaning that to live and do business they had to rent fromgentiles. They were also kept at first from the major urban centers of Kiev, Sevastopol and Yalta, forcing them into agricultural work in rural areas. In practice, the system was slavery in all but name. Jews were often forced to buy or rent tools at usurious prices to work land that did not belong to them, thereby keeping them permanently bound in debt. This was the origin of the Kulak, a parasitic class of peasant landlords which emerged specifically to exploit Jews and siphon off their wealth into the coffers of the Tsar.

Despite all this, a strong Yiddish speaking Jewish culture existed in the Pale. They had a long, rich heritage, maintaining their own traditions and culture even in the face of centuries of violent repression. They refused to assimilate as Herzl’s family had, remaining proudly and defiantly Jewish. It was these people, the so-called “Ostjuden”, in whom Herzl saw all the lies of antisemites made flesh.

Herzl even borrowed their language. In 1897 he released an unhinged antisemitic rant entitled “Mauschel” (a German racial slur so vile I will not translate it), where he branded the long suffering Ostjuden with the same irons their tormentors had. To Herzl, the Mauschel was everything he was not. His type of Jew was the only real Jew, while the Mauschel was nothing more than vermin.

The Mauschel was simultaneously lazy and greedy. The (rich, assimilated) Jew was hard working and charitable. The Mauschel was stupid and backwards, while the Jew was educated and cultured. The Mauschel was “something unspeakably vile” while the Jew was upright and upstanding. Most importantly, the Mauschel was a weak and pathetic creature who had meekly gone to the slaughter, while Herzl’s Jew was a mighty warrior who would never submit.

The only problem is, Herzl’s new Jewish man was not real. The Ostjuden were, and at a population of around five million, they constituted 40% of the world’s Jews and around 80% of Europe’s. Therefore, to call for the extermination of the so-called Mauschel was to call for the extermination of the Jews. Herzl’s ideology assumes that everything antisemites said about Jews is true, and the only solution is their complete extermination. Just like the fascists that would come after him, he sought to create a new type of man, the so called “Israeli” from the ashes of the old.

Herzl particularly despised Yiddish, the diaspora language of the Ostjuden. At first, he favored its replacement with German, then the modern reconstructed Hebrew. Since Herzl was a classist first, he viewed Yiddish and its speakers as being inherently uncivilized and inferior, once again finding himself in alignment with his fellow antisemites.

Regardless of what antisemites believe, Yiddish was and is a vibrant, living language with a rich history tied intrinsically to the history of its many speakers. The history of Yiddish very much is the history of the Jews. For centuries, the Yiddish was the voice of the masses of Jews, rather than elites such as Herzl. It was in Yiddish, not Hebrew or German which the Jewish people recorded their hopes and dreams, reflected on their joy and sorrow and more importantly, resisted continued efforts from the European powers to break their culture via assimilation. Yiddish has a long history, a vast corpus of work and like the Jews themselves, it is no lesser for its roots.

Herzl had an interesting plan for the destruction of the Jews, he wanted to sell them out to antisemites to fund his operations. Not only would this liquidate the property of the Jews of Europe, but their deaths could then be used as propaganda for the Zionist movement. This would, of course, constitute an act of genocide, but for Herzl that was a small price to pay to create his promised land. This strategy of collaboration to fan the flames of antisemitism and thereby spur immigration to Israel has remained a cornerstone of Israeli policy, as has the violent hatred of any Jews who do not conform to Herzl’s particular idea of what an “Israelite” should be. Herzl said, quote:

It would be excellent idea to call in respectable, accredited anti-Semites as liquidators of property. To the people they would vouch for the fact that we do not want to bring about the impoverishment of the countries we leave. The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies.

While Herzl died in 1904, his antisemitism outlived him. The state founded with his ideology has remained a violently anti-semetic state. The Zionists who came after Herzl took his antisemitic ideology to it’s logical extreme. One of the greatest ironies of the Zionist movement is that despite basing their entire existence on the Holocaust, the Zionists of the time were enthusiastic supporters of Adolf Hitler and his final solution to the same Ostjuden “problem” Herzl decried.

When the Nazis came to power in Germany and began their long planned and promised extermination of the Jews, in full view of the world and it’s people, Zionists the world over viewed the Nazi regime as the vindication of their ideology. Now, there was finally a European leader who preached the same vile antisemitic doctrine as Herzl. As their goals regarding the extermination of the Ostjuden were aligned, most Zionists actively supported the Nazis. Even the “mainstream” Haganah movement actively collaborated with Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Holocaust. Not only did they negotiate with Hitler to achieve Herzl’s dream of deporting the Jews, but some of them also even took up arms in support of the Reich.

One of the largest of such groups was a Zionist terrorist organization called “Lehi”, which was split from the slightly less radical Irgun by Avraham Stern in 1940. The split was caused byStern’s support of Hitler over the British, who ruled the mandate of Palestine at the time. Stern’s reasoning was simple. Hitler was an enemy of the “Mauschel”, not the Israelis. Lehi contacted the Nazis almost immediately after their formation. The two sides met in Beirut, where Lehi delivered a letter from Stern outlining his plans. He proposed that Lehi actively enter the war on the side of the Axis, saying “the German worldview and the true national aspirations of the Jewish people” were closely aligned.

“The establishment of the historical Jewish state on a totalitarian national basis, in an alliance relationship with the German Reich, is compatible with the preservation of German power.”-Avraham Stern

The Nazis ignored the letter, but that was not enough to dissuade either Lehi or Stern. Even with nothing in return, they still took up arms in support of the Reich, hoping that they could prove themselves worthy to their fellow fascists through propaganda of the deed.

Lehi embarked on a years long terrorist campaign, marked not only by assassinations and bombings (including a letter bombing campaign targeting the British government) but also the brutal depopulation of dozens of Palestinian settlements, perhaps an intentional echo to the violence their Nazi heroes inflicted on the Ostjuden in Europe. Although Stern died fighting for Hitler in 1942, the gang was not snuffed out until 1948. Despite the Israeli government’s public condemnation, most of Lehi was rolled into the security structures of the new state, where they formed the nucleus of the Mossad. One of Lehi’s senior commanders Yizhak Shamir would even serve as Israel’s 7th prime minister. It seems that Lehi’s ideology was not a problem for the mainstream Zionists, only their targets.

Sadly, the Israeli government’s violence towards Jews did not end there. With the fascists deputized into brutal secret police force to rival their heroes in the Gestapo, the so-called Jewish state still violently oppresses any Jew who does not fit their very particular ideal of what an “Israeli” should be.

As Zionists began to settle Palestine, they encountered an unexpected problem that threatened to derail their entire project. Namely, there were already Jews living there. The bedrock of the Zionist ideology is the idea that after the destruction of the Second Temple of Jerusalem in 70 CE, all the Jews either left or were expelled from the Levant, leading to over a millennium of wandering Europe in search of a new home. The reality is not so simple. While there was a mass expulsion of Jews, many of them remained in the Middle East. Of those, a great deal remained Jewish while others converted to different religions, such as Christianity or Islam, ironically making them Palestinian in the eyes of the fascist Israeli state.

When the Europeans began to settle Palestine, these so called “Mizrahi” Jews (a racial slur created by the antisemitic Zionists to describe them, while they referred to themselves simply as Jews) posed both a practical and an ideological problem for the fascists. Not only did they have land that the European settlers wanted, but their very existence was proof that Zionism was based on mythology rather than reality.

The response from the settlers was about what you would expect. Just like their idols in Germany, the Zionists put Jews into ghettos. This time, however, the Zionists were inspired not just by Herzl and Hitler, but by the antisemites who came before them.

The strategy regarding the Mizrahi is virtually identical to the strategy used by the Tsar to oppress and rob the Ostjuden with Herzl’s support. After the Palestinians were murdered or expelled, the fascists used Mizrahi as their shock troops, settling them by force into the newly stolen land. However, the Mizrahi were not allowed to own the land, only to live there. They were considered squatters under the euphemistic “Abandoned Property Law” and could therefore be extorted and evicted at will. This created a system wherein the European settlers could exploit a permanent Jewish underclass, thereby creating almost the same dynamics as existed inside the Pale of Settlement. While all of this was going on, the Europeans also embarked on policies of cultural genocide against their fellow Jews, stealing Mizrahi children to be raised by “civilized” Europeans. Despite the Zionist entity openly admitting to this policy, no action has been taken whatsoever.

None of this was accidental, it was simply the logical conclusion of an inherently antisemitic ideology. Policies of systematic discrimination towards the so-called Mizrahi Jews continue to this day. The racism against the original Jews by European settlers is so severe that Israeli schools were segregated by law until 2010.

As we can see, the Zionists are masters of projection. When they accuse their enemies of a crime, it is likely because they are doing the same thing, and simply assume their enemies are as brutal and racist as they are. Even when they accuse Hamas of supporting ISIS, they are speaking as a country who openly supported the Islamic state.

These policies have not changed, even today the Zionists are openly carrying out yet another genocide in Gaza. As always, they make no effort to hide their crimes, rather they brag and bluster endlessly about them. Today, rather than seeking the support of Adolf Hitler and Cecil Rhodes, their patrons are men like Joe Biden and Rishi Sunak. The core ideology of Zionism has not changed, only the language used to justify their crimes. Zionism has been a fascist ideology since it was invented by Theodor Herzl, and it remains one today.

The act of simply being mean to someone is not violence. The act of being called names and pejoratives is not violence. Cussing someone out is not violence. Being curt, angry, blunt, rude, mocking, sarcastic, taunting, smug, smarmy, condescending, patronizing, whatever is not violence. Being an asshole is not inherently the same as being violent.

If any of these things removed from context constitute violence, then the term violence is a thought-terminating cliche that lump-sums everything that makes people uncomfortable into one gray amorphous blob.

To utilize a term that can collapse hate crimes, genocide, colonization, imperialism: unspeakable atrocities into calling someone ignorant/privileged/bigoted/etc., mocking/clowning on someone, cussing someone out: just being mean/standoffish/rude/condescending, is to equate discomfort with harm, to flatten social relations, and to fundamentally terminate all thought about anything that causes enough discomfort.

I am not a linguistic prescriptivist. If you want to use violence to describe uncouth behavior, you are more-than-welcome to do so. What I'm trying to say with this is that, if you are to broaden the definition like this, it's harmful to you to use it as a term of any weight in discussions; you narrow your viewpoint and considerations based on how nice and polite people are to you, and reduce all anger, no matter it's righteousness, to an undue equivalence.

My personal definition of violence, and you're welcome to disagree with me, is harm that can be, or is, materially (as in, in reality) reinforced.

If you want an example of an actually violent form of communication: slurs. The point of a slur, as contrasted with a pejorative, is to remind the targeted individual of their place within society; of their 'inferiority', and subjugation. Thus, the function of a slur is an attempt at domination, reinforcement of hierarchy, and an implicit threat. The point of, say, the use of the N-word, is to remind the black people targeted by it that they are not safe within the person's vicinity, that they are seen as 'lesser', and to reinforce the social hierarchy of racism. A slur is a threat, and I'd categorize it as violence.

Violence is much more than just slurs, of course. However, I wanted to use slurs specifically for my point: What harm, in reality, does someone calling you an ignorant chucklefuck on an internet forum cause to you? Even in real life, if they called you that, what material harm would that imply?

I'm not saying people don't say worse here, we do, and I'm not here to debate individual instances of gray-areas you believe cross the line that you've experienced, but I've seen people on this network of forums lump pejoratives 'shithead', 'freak', 'nerd', 'dickbag', ‘asshole’, etc. into an all-encompassing violence, an attack, some form of harm. I ask again: what harm do these imply? Because a slur implies a threat. A pejorative is simply uncouth. Lump-summing the two neuters your capacity to analyze harm.

I just think it's a personal disservice to consider violence utilizing the aforementioned framework. At that point, it's a thought-terminating cliche. You kneecap your ability to understand the wide array of perspectives on this bright, beautiful earth if you dismiss all that are expressed with any form of mirth or edge.

Feel free to pick this apart, I'll leave it here. I've said my piece, and I remind you that I'm not here to talk about any anecdotes you might have for instances of behavior. I simply won't get into the weeds of it. It's not something I want to do with my finite time on this earth.

This is mostly a comment I made the other day that someone requested I post here. These are not really all my own words, bits and pieces bookmarked or stashed away that have been snipped and cut into a large post, mostly from now deleted reddit accounts so I couldn't credit them even if I tried.

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Anti-semitism was illegal in the soviet union and punishable with the death penalty.

Anti-Semitism

January 12, 1931

Reply to an Inquiry of the Jewish News Agency in the United States

In answer to your inquiry:

National and racial chauvinism is a vestige of the misanthropic customs characteristic of the period of cannibalism. Anti-semitism, as an extreme form of racial chauvinism, is the most dangerous vestige of cannibalism.

Anti-semitism is of advantage to the exploiters as a lightning conductor that deflects the blows aimed by the working people at capitalism. Anti-semitism is dangerous for the working people as being a false path that leads them off the right road and lands them in the jungle. Hence Communists, as consistent internationalists, cannot but be irreconcilable, sworn enemies of anti-semitism.

In the U.S.S.R. anti-semitism is punishable with the utmost severity of the law as a phenomenon deeply hostile to the Soviet system. Under U.S.S.R. law active anti-semites are liable to the death penalty.

J. Stalin

January 12, 1931

The soviets took in millions of jewish refugees when the US, Brits and others were rejecting them. The Soviet Union under Stalin also even created a Jewish autonomous Oblast as an alternative to Zionism.

Stalin was fighting with Jewish culture

There are for sure claims that Stalin was antisemitic, but claims are not evidence.

Some cite the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact as evidence, but only an absolute and deliberate misunderstanding of the armistice could reach this conclusion.

Notable are the following:

Regarding the identification of Jewish persons in publication, as per Van Ree's The Political Thought of Joseph Stalin

Why Mal’tsev, and then Rovinskii between brackets? What’s the matter here? How long will this continue …? If a man chose a literary pseudonym for himself, it’s his right…. But apparently someone is glad to emphasise that this person has a double surname, to emphasise that he is a Jew…. Why create anti-Semitism?

At the 15th Congress he made clear

that any traces of anti-Semitism, even among workers and in the party is an ‘evil’ that ‘must be combated, comrades, with all ruthlessness’

The constitution, which Stalin oversaw, indicated that the punishment for any Antisemitism could be quite harsh and in any case the attitude is illegal.

Materially, the Soviets were second to none in the rescue of Jews from the wrath of the nazis.

Russia Helped 1,750,000 Jews to Escape Nazis

Here too are some passages from The Soviets Expected It by Anna Louise Strong:

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If that's not enough for you let's go through some others in my bookmarks:

• You should also listen to the podcast the Minyan. It’s a podcast of communist Jews. In this episode, they talk about the alleged antisemitism of Stalin. Using resources and cross referencing, they are able to debunk pretty much all of these accusations.

• Another option is to look into the story of David Dragunsky, a Soviet Jewish war hero who was revered throughout the post-war era of the USSR, seen as a symbol of Jewish Antifascism and a large anti-war voice.

• There’s also the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, which ordered by Stalin was a group of Jewish cultural icons dedicated to bolstering anti-Nazi sentiment by raising the plague of antisemitism in Nazi Germany. For any comrades looking into this they should know in advance that this entity is usually spun in a really weird way by Western sources, so be weary of anti-communist biases around it. Sergei Eisenstein, Solomon Mikhoels, and other notable Soviet Jews were participants. The Western rhetoric around it was that it existed only to pretend that the USSR wasn’t antisemitic, but one, where else did this exist? And two, if the Communist Party didn’t want people to know about antisemitism, why make an organization that raises awareness of it?

• Stalin was revered among a significant amount of Jews at the time. Obviously the link is from an Israeli paper, so it has some lame takes.

• Most of the "soviet union is antisemitic" bullshit begins not in the 30s, not even in the 50s. The tension and campaign to spread this mostly began after 1967 and 1975. When Israel invaded the West Bank in 67, the USSR spoke out and officially condemned Zionism. It was at this point that Golda Meir started to decry antisemitism in the USSR. This furthered in 75 when the USSR passed a UN resolution that flatly said that Zionism is Racism, and Palestinians are engaging in a decolonial struggle. After this the “Free Soviet Jewry” campaign really took off. This is the same bullshit they still do today. You criticize Israel, you’re an antisemite. It's a disgusting smear tactic that started in 1967 with the USSR and has been used frequently ever since.

• Here’s a video of a Soviet Jew discussing how the USSR practiced “anti-antisemitism”.

Lastly, when Paul Robeson, a black american and Communist went to the USSR, he said it was the first time he felt like a full human being.

It is extremely difficult to believe that the USSR somehow made him feel this, but was also terrorizing it’s own Jewish population. That somehow the whole country was absent of racism for Paul as a black man but was also carrying out a terror campaign against Jews? At a time pre-civil rights in the US.

[Part 1]

Chapter six of the Socialist Constitution of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea lays out a fairly straightforward democratic (parliamentary) process whereby:

1. The Supreme People’s Assembly is the highest power in the DPRK, with meetings convened yearly or bi-yearly and national elections every five years (SPA member term five years), and is composed of elected workers/peasants (deputies), with the majority representing the Workers Party of Korea but with the Korean Social Democratic Party and Chondoist Chongu (religious) Party also present to a sufficient extent. The members are “elected on the principle of universal, equal and direct suffrage by secret ballot”, and have the authority to amend the constitution and introduce major laws.

2. The Standing Committee of the Supreme People’s Assembly consists of members whose term limit is also five years, they can convene meetings, handle day-to-day affairs of the SPA, and are elected by the SPA members.

3. The State Affairs Commission (completely accountable to the SPA), which functions as the representative of the state and handles regular state affairs, consists of a President (currently Kim Jong Un, hence the “supreme commander” title since he is the major representative of the state of the DPRK), the Vice President, and other members.

4. The Cabinet (member term limit of five years), has members elected by the SPA and handles day-to-day affairs of the state (SAC).

5. Local People’s Assemblies (covering multiple municipalities), which are made up of local worker’s deputies that are “elected on the principle of universal, equal and direct suffrage by secret ballot”, approve the local budget for the people's area which it represents. Regular sessions are held once or twice a year according to the Local People’s Committees which:

6. -Functions in the same relation to the LPAs that the SASPA functions to the SPA. Consists of members elected by the Local People’s Assemblies whose term is also no more than four years.

As in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, there is no campaign lobbying, and democracy extends to all levels (the Taean Work System functions along the same lines but is not relevant to the discussion). However, the Constitution, some have said, is another matter to reality. The Wikipedia page for “Elections in North Korea” states for example, “Voting against the official candidate, or refusing to vote at all, is considered an act of treason, and those who do face the loss of their jobs and housing, along with extra surveillance.”

This idea stated matter-of-factly is cited from an Al-Jazeera article titled “Foregon Result in North Korea’s Local Elections”, which relies completely on quotes from a total of two sources. Firstly, a reporter in the Republic of Korea, who has no inside knowledge of the country (he cites no actual evidence) and is forbidden by law from extolling the DPRK’s system[1]. Next, a ridiculous conjecture-filled rant from a so-called “expert on North Korea”. The retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel cites no evidence again and relies on nothing but his own imagination. The citation offers no actual person with the relevant knowledge and experience to prove their position, and it may be discarded very simply.

A Time Magazine article entitled, “North Korea Elections: A Sham Worth Studying” is equally baroque. The author writes, “voting is mandatory and there is one option on the ballot.” Of course, there is no available evidence that voting is mandatory except for the large voter turnout as compared to capitalist nations. Comparatively, Vietnam had an even higher voter turnout for its 2021 legislative election. The author makes reference to reported narratives in state media and yet does not provide the relevant links even though all NK state media is publicly accessible online. The above narrative attributed to two random speakers is now apparently a common thread among NK defector testimony, which has its own issues[2] (of course a citation to verify this would be too much to ask, as the article provides no citations whatsoever except for the relatively publicized execution of Jang Song-Thaek). Perhaps this constitutes “studying” to the author?

“In November, 1946, North Korea held its first general elections, to approve or disapprove of what the provisional government had done. By this time there were three political parties: the North Korean Labor Party, which was by far the largest; the Chendoguo and the Democrats. These parties formed a ‘democratic front’ and put up a joint ticket, the ‘single-slate ticket’ so criticized in the west.

“I argued with the Koreans about it but they seemed to like their system. Ninety-nine per cent of them came out to vote, and everyone with whom I talked declared that there was no compulsion but they came because they wanted to. I discussed the question with a woman miner. ‘Did you vote in the general elections?’ I asked. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘The candidate was from our mine and a very good worker. Our mine put him up as [a] candidate.’ I explained the Western form of elections. What was the use of voting, I argued, if there was only one candidate. Her vote could change nothing. It would be a great shame for the candidate, she replied, if the people did not turn out in large numbers to vote for him. He would even fail [the] election unless at least half of the people turned out.

“… ‘We all knew the candidate. We all liked him, we all discussed him,’ she concluded. ‘The political parties held meetings in our mines and factories and found the people's choices. Then they got together and combined on the best one, and the people went out and chose him. I don't see what's wrong with this or why the Americans don't like it.’

“She paused and then added, with a touch of defiance. ‘I don't see what the Americans have to say about it, anyway!’ Voting technique was simple. There was a black box for ‘no’ and a white box for ‘yes.’ The voter was given a card, stamped with the electoral district; he went behind a screen and threw it into whichever box he chose. The cards were alike; nobody knew how he voted. Were any candidates black-balled? I learned that there were thirteen cases in the township elections in which candidates were turned down by being thrown into the black box. This fact, which westerners may approve as showing ‘freedom of voting,’ was regarded with shame by the Koreans since it meant that ‘the local parties had poorly judged the people's choice.’ In one case a candidate was elected but received eight hundred adverse votes, organized by a political opponent. He at once offered to resign, as he had ‘failed to receive the full confidence of the voters’; the three political parties all jointly urged him to accept the post. The Koreans are familiar with the competitive form of voting also. This was used in village elections and in many of the township elections in March, 1947. These elections were largely nonpartisan, nominations being made not by parties but in village meetings. Secret voting followed, choosing the village government from competing candidates” (Strong, 1949).[3]

This firsthand account illuminates firstly the process of the Democratic Front (DFRF) candidate selection which involved surveying and holding meetings among several worker groups that anyone could attend. Then the selected candidate who was chosen via said mass meetings would be voted in through a confirming election which verified the success of the mass assemblies and the work of the Democratic Front for the Reunification of the Fatherland (and thus you have political agitation phrases such as “let us all vote in agreement”).

Actual experience elucidating the obfuscated “one candidate” situation as a democratic centralist worker-oriented candidate selection process abruptly does away with the focus of the majority of the critiques from ignorant fools. For example, when Anna Louise Strong protests that the Korean woman’s vote could have no effect, the woman explains that if the candidate receives less than half of the voting pool, they are rejected and a new candidate selection process begins. Even though the Korean perspective is that a rejected candidate means a select failure of the DFRF mass meetings, candidate rejection in some cases does at the same time show that voting was not rigged in favor of what foreign opposition nations would denote as “party selected candidates.” That candidate rejection occurs much less often now only serves to demonstrate the increased effectiveness of the mass assemblies.

Very well, one might say, but we mustn’t forget that this account and subsequent ones took place prior to the Korean War. Isn’t it possible that a “shock” of that scale could transform the political process into something entirely different?

TikTok is an absolute opsec nightmare. I put together this short effort post to make sure y'all are staying safe. TikTok is a very useful tool for bringing short snippets of political theory to absolutely massive quantities of people, but like any tool, it needs to be used safely. By default, if you share a TikTok, including with link share, you are giving your handle to everyone who has the link.

But @aaro, why do I care?

By default, if someone has your tiktok handle, they can see your mutuals, your following/followed, and any linked accounts you have. This exposes (including but not limited to):

• rough geographic location if you have IRL mutuals who have bad opsec (assume that this is the case if you have any IRL mutuals at all) - e.g. you are mutuals with 5 of your high school friends, 4 of them have their Facebook accounts linked, and 3 of them have their hometown, graduating school, or current location public on their profile, a curious party might be able to take a guess at your location from this information
• Your political views based on your following list
• Comments you have made if the person after your deets is persistent

From easy to do and very important to harder to do and not as important, here are steps to keep your profile and links you share safe:

1. Profile > Upper right menu > Settings and Privacy > Privacy> Suggest your account to others > turn off People who open or send links to you. Really turn off all of these, this is the lowest of the low hanging fruit for privacy.
2. When you share a link on Tiktok by copying link, paste it in your web browser and go to it first. The link will turn from https://www.tiktok.com/t/{9 characters}/ to https://www.tiktok.com/@{username}/video/{19 numbers}{question mark and a bunch of other shit}. Delete everything including and after the question mark and leave behind the 19 numbers. The original form is a link unique to you when you share it and it's possible (but not obvious) to trace this back to your account. Once you resolve the link and delete the extra baggage, the tiktok is now anonymized.
3. If you don't want tiktok seeing anyone's IP address even, then take this new anonymized link, paste it into http://proxitok.herokuapp.com and set the dropdown to "TikTok URL" then hit go. The resulting link will be a truly 100% anonymized TikTok link. Think of this as https://nitter.net but for TikTok.

TikToks posted here should at least go through #2. Thanks for reading and stay safe comrades :cyber-lenin:

Neo-feudalism is Idealist: We are Witnessing the Re-proletarianization of the Labor Aristocracy Under Neocolonial Fascist Rule

There has been some amount of buzz about the idea of neofeudalism being what is happening to western economies under the rule of neoliberal capital. Feudalism was characterized by a relationship between serf and lord. The lord "protected" some region of land, and some peasants that worked that land for subsistence paid some amount of their food production to the lord as a rent. However, the feudal economy of Europe also depended on a class of artisans and traders that moved outside of this hierarchical feudal relationship to agricultural production of raw materials. The innovation of the bourgeois class was the ascription of a magical relationship between a person and some piece of property. Under this belief enclosures were enacted that directly led into the development of industrial capital. While we maintain this magical relationship in our laws and our relationships to each other, we will not be in a feudal economic arrangement. The rights of the renters are curtailed by the rights of the property owner in a way that they were not in the feudal economic arrangement.

Instead, we are witnessing something much more structurally complex than simply the reification of western commoners as renters. In particular in the us, the majority of workers never engaged in the kind of industrial capitalism that Marx observed in England and Germany. No more than 30% of the us workforce was ever employed in industrial roles. Instead, the most major change in us work has been a transition from agricultural work to various kinds of service and technical work. The capitalists have effectively transitioned these labor aristocratic roles into more proletarian service work that is poorer paying and more degrading. The majority of technical roles have transitioned from being industrially oriented towards being technologically oriented. What that means is that the superprofits of neocolonial exploitation of industrial and agricultural labor in the Global South are filtered down to many workers first into the myriad bullshit roles in marketing, advertising, and the almost infinite amount of technical support and infrastructure required to keep the capitalist internet structure chugging. The state largely exists to facilitate the barest amount of infrastructure required to keep the exploitation going. Thus, we see everyone in power always agree to the military budget while claiming that even the smallest amount of support for the least oppressed americans is unthinkable. that military budget is filtered outward in surprising ways: it goes to all the aerospace corporations, it goes to all the big tech companies, it goes to the science and engineering departments of major universities to develop new technologies that could potentially advantage military development, and it filters out from their to a huge web of industrial suppliers of technical components developed and manufactured throughout the first world by advanced fabrication plants.

The neoliberal solution to the capitalist crisis of western industrialism becoming unprofitable as Europe, the USSR, and China approached parity in industrial power was the guided de-industrialization of the imperial core into newly proletarian service class and an increasingly separate class of technical workers. The question is how well the people are going to accommodate these increasingly absurd and literally painful contradictions. Anyone watching for the fascist nature of this movement and its reactionary front that attempts to smooth the process via political violence and the increased exploitation of enslaved Black people, indigenous peoples, women, and now especially trans people. We are watching the material class contradictions spill out along other class lines that are deemed acceptable by the state. It's alright for the Proud Boys to square off against Antifa over whether white women should be treated as a natural resource, but what isn't acceptable is for the leftist group to fight the state on any front. It's certainly amusing that fascist thugs are being weighed as an acceptable political group to back in your war to reimpose the older class orders of gender and race to their pre-neoliberal state - they certainly don't have the same extreme mental traumas as a WWI veteran of the Somme, nor any of the seriousness. What isn't so funny is the distinctly colonial character of how this is all being carried out. Everyone is jostling over who gets to perform violence along the lines other than economic class because economic control is felt to be so deeply removed from accessibility. And perhaps that notion is true; the american state from its very beginning has never hesitated to assert itself over any organized attempt to oppose its economic hegemony, and the three-letter organizations largely exist for those ends to this day. Capitalist state-of-the-art criminal intelligence is about maintaining stability and ensuring the validity of private property rights, little more. The terminal crisis is almost certainly the difference between how China and the us react to some particularly catastrophic upwards fluctuation in climate related events. I don't think it's possible to predict how these contradictions will resolve themselves. The differences between different people in different regions from different backgrounds is so disparate, it's difficult to predict how these things resolve themselves when a terminal crisis presents itself.

It is important when we organize to understand that we are not living through neofeudalism. If we were, it might make sense to attempt to organize a peasant-petit bourgeois coalition to revolt over the contemporary equivalent to the Ancien regime. Recent protest movements have shown time and again that such a coalition has no teeth, there is no real material support pressing for such changes. Control over agricultural production and logistics seems particularly important in a us that is so deeply dependent on importing goods from the Global South. Even the technological production in the core is dependent on hugely expensive fabrication plants that are almost entirely located in Taiwan, South Korea, and China, and mining operations in the most deeply exploited parts of the global south. Remember that much of what is counted as production in the us is fundamentally an illusory production. People cannot continue to be petit bourgeois sympathisers and meaningfully oppose the rise of fascism. I'm not sure where else to go with this, but I don't think that neofeudalism is a good word for what's happening. It exaggerates the nature of the changes in a way that is meant to be inclusive of the professional classes that produce medicine and research and lawyering and technology along with the exploitation of the increasingly proletarianized service classes. These people do not have the same class interests and it is the major source of division between liberals and a nascent socialist movement. There are certainly empathizers on both sides, but for the most part, petit bourgeois sympathy is still very much the norm, and it's a problem.

Leftists are supposed to be anti-capitalists and anti-imperialists. The DPRK is one of the remaining actually socialist countries on this planet. They are sanctioned by the Global North–that is the global capitalist hegemony in the West–to a point of desperation. The people are living in harsh conditions not because of the Juche “regime”, but because of the atrocities by the United States and its satellite states.

Thinking that the DPRK is somehow a hereditary monarchy is simply ridiculous. It also means that you are furthering Western Capitalist propaganda.

If you believe in the lies of the capitalists, you are hardly a leftist. You are simply another chauvinist helping the cause of the bourgeoisie and Amerikan imperialism.

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Further reading:

The constitution of the DPRK: https://www.kfausa.org/dprk-constitution/

The reason for the support of the Kim family in the DPRK: https://www.visitthedprk.org/north-koreans-revere-kims-understanding-north-korean-leadership-objectively/

Myths & Misconceptions About North Korea, by a non-socialist creator: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhaHiht50AA

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Please open your eyes.

This thread will deal with myths and realities of People's korea, of the puppet illegal occupied bourgeoisie state of south korea, defectors, society, aggresion agains it, international relations, e.t.c .

This thread will be edited and updated regularly. If any of you comrades have some info not added, or think that some sections to this thread should be added, feel free to tag me.

Long live DPRK, long live the anti-imperialist struggle!

:kim-il-young:

Socialism and democracy in DPRK

There is a huge notion in the western left (obviously), that DPRK is not socialist, but a state capitalist fascist monarchy.

We know how the western left is mostly racist and chauvinist towards china, dprk, vietnam etc, as it was previously with USSR and the eastern bloc.

Most of this western left is still against the USSR, but at least marxist-leninists and many anti-imperialist anarchists acknowledge them today. Many western leftists still remain in the same position against china or DPRK, however. We will address those points below.

Democracy and socialism

• DPRK is a socialist country, and the party is designed to protect the workers and peasants, and to oversee the ultimate victory of socialism
• Socialism and democracy in DPRK
• Lalkar: The democratic structure of the DPRK
• Understanding DPRK in the light of the marxist tradition
• Mass protest in DPRK against UN propaganda
• Democracy: US vs DPRK
• Local elections in DPRK, 2019
• The parliamentary System of DPRK
• the taean work system
• The peoples Bomb!
• Elections in the juche state
• Something the developed countries would envy: DPRK's healthcare system
• korea resilient: Socialism in democratic korea
• Towards a concrete analysis of the DPRK
• The myth of the Kim dynasty
• Human rights in DPRK
• Politics of DPRK
• DPRK view on nationalism
• Bruce cumings on the North korean economy
• DPRK: A champion on the fight against climate change
• Juche in Nigeria
• "north korea medical care is one developed countries would envy" World health org
• The origin of DPRK
• disabled people in DPRK
• Socialism in Korea: A case study
• DPRK officials go to china to study reforms
• My socialist country - youtube video
• Why does the DPRK have nukes? Look at Libya. — if you need more examples, look up pictures of Muammar Gaddafi‘s mutilated corpse and the open air slave markets that now fill Libya’s cities.
• Parenti on DPRK

International solidarity and anti-imperialim of DPRK.

DPRK - Cuba relations

• A quick history of DPRK - cuba relations
• Korean propaganda poster of the 60s
• Miguel diaz canel and Kim jong un holding hands
• Cuba was one of the only nations which boycotted the 1988 seoul olympics for solidarity with DPRK.
• DPRK declared 3 days of national mourning for the death of Fidel Castro
• DPRK sent Hundreds of Weapons to Cuba during cold war without charging a cent

Black panthers connection

• Black panthers turned to DPRK for fight against US imperialism
• Juche in the US: Connections of Black panthers and DPRK

DPRK - Angola relations

• DPRK and Angola discuss public security cooperation
• DPRK assisted Angolan rebels in the fight against apartheid. 3000 korean soldiers and advisers were estimated to have fought in the side of the angolan people during the war
• Angola - DPRK relations considered excellent

DPRK - Syria relations

• Kim Jong un offers support to assad
• Kim jong un praising baath party in its 70 years work
• Bashar al-Assad thanks DPRK for its support of the syrian people
• DPRK special forces in Syria
• Syria supports dprk, condemns sactions

DPRK - Algeria relations

• Algeria defends ties to DPRK despite pressure from US
• DPRK and Algeria vow to grow stronger ties

DPRK for the Palestinian struggle

• DPRK arming palestinian liberation fighters for decades
• DPRK never recognized Israel. It stays loyal to the palestinian cause, and holds that every inch of israeli territory is illegal, and an imperialist satellite.

Part 2 in comments