GenZhou

the NIEO as like a plan by the UN, i have no idea what it is and its effects.

This time we're reading chapters 4 and 5 of Capital Volume 1. Participation welcome at any time, not just on the weekend of week 10, either in this thread or in our Matrix room (see this post for instructions on how to join)

I have to deal with liberals asking about this and i gotta say i don't know enough to be sure about my answer

Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya was born on this day in 1869.

Do you know about Krupskaya's legacy beyond being “Lenin’s wife”?

Krupskaya’s early involvement in Marxist student societies gave her an understanding of the struggles and injustices of working-class people. She dedicated almost 50 years to the party and revolutionary transformation of society.

Krupskaya played a vital role in organizing the underground conspiratorial network supporting the Bolsheviks during the lead-up to the 1917 Revolution, coordinating secret Bolshevik organizers throughout the Russian Empire.

After the revolution succeeded, Krupskaya was instrumental in organizing the Soviet education and library systems after the revolution. Her pedagogical legacy encompassed all aspects of education policy, including teacher training, adult education, and eradicating illiteracy.

Her work in education policy improved the lives of millions of people and ensured that the principles of socialism were instilled in the next generation.

Despite being often minimized as simply Lenin’s wife, her partnership with Lenin was important, but her efforts and contributions to the Marxist-Leninist cause were revolutionary in their own right.

Source: @redstreamnet on YouTube

What does finance capitalism serve? When look at the progress of original capitalism, when compared to feudalism especially, there were some clear long term benefits. But what has the capitalism of the neoliberal era done?

Doesn't the existance of the US and UK in the neoliberal era for so many years just mean that we found a way to be fascist while maintaining the liberal-democratic order and bourgeois freedoms?

Or could a modern socialist state wield the teaching of financial capitalism in a progressive manner that can be seized for the benefit of the people without such a socialist state being imperialist or engaging in un-fair or un-equal exchange across borders?

This time we're reading the rest of chapter 3 of Capital Volume 1. Participation welcome at any time, not just on the weekend of week 8, either in this thread or in our Matrix room (see this post for instructions on how to join)

Hope you don't mind me posting this older video but i've been re-reading some theory again and i find it can be helpful to have such discussions of the material to listen to in order to more deeply grasp a subject. This particular topic of Marxism and the National Question is a relevant one in light of conflicts that are currently going on, and i find it useful in establishing clarity about facts that are obfuscated by liberal and also Zionist propaganda with regards to what is and isn't a nation and what this entails.

Recently had a friendly discussions regarding whether it was useful for Brazilian parties to buy into the (settler) notion of a "Brazilian Nation", but from a leftist lens.

Being from a peripheral region, I tend to disagree with this perspective, but I couldn't properly articulate whether it'd at least be an useful tool or not. He also didn't seem very theoretically advanced, basing his perspective on the (kinda racist) notion of regional "underdevelopment" rather than "dependent capitalism".

Since the text is from even before the Revolution, I wonder if there are other interesting texts building on Stalin's perspective or critiquing it fairly from a Marxist position.

Anybody know some?

Edit: elaborating some more, Stalin defines a nation as requiring a common language, territory, and economic integration.

To me, in Brazil all of those three feel like technicalities, as

• the Portuguese language in Brazil is incredibly diverse throughout the country (specially due to various indigenous and African influences);
• the territory is very vast and mostly disconnected regarding population centres (for example, there's no rail between even the litoranean capitals, and only a couple roads for the Amazon capitals);
• and the economy is structured around an industrial centre in the southern regions, and mostly extractive economies everywhere else (that either export to the southern regions or to foreign countries).
  • This means that the regions aren't "underdeveloped", just that they're developed around extracting value for either the global imperial core or the national industrial core.

for ex discrimination against the russian language and whatnot

i realize i don't have any actual list that comes to mind of what these people do to the russian peoples. Not that they haven't, i do in fact remember knowing shit they've did, but i guess im looking around for concrete stuff.

any links directly to evidence or just wider recommendations is good

I was conflicted about whether to post this here or in Shit Reactionaries Say because this is a somewhat schizophrenic piece.

On the one hand it accurately describes the dysfunctional, corrupt oligarchy that Rome had become by the time that Julius Caesar came onto the scene, as well as giving a rough outline of how it got there. In doing so the author juxtaposes that historical reality with the idealized narrative which this BBC production is trying to portray of a well functioning democratic republic ruined by one nefarious populist.

The piece thus correctly exposes the propaganda and the historical myth-making surrounding this topic and the obvious parallels which the liberal media is trying to draw between the Roman republic and modern liberal democracies (in particular the US which for a long time has seen itself as a modern Rome).

For those who have not studied Roman history this is worth a read to realize how liberal propagandists employ historical revisionism to justify the present day status quo and demonize any person or party with a "populist" agenda.

On the other hand the author, being a reactionary, halfway through the piece suddenly starts to advocate for Great Man Theory*, not realizing that by doing so he is doing the same but in reverse as the liberals who scapegoat figures like Julius Caesar for developments which were really the result of the contradictions of the system itself (as the piece says: the crisis created Caesar, not vice versa).

Ultimately i decided to post this here because most of the piece is actually fairly informative, while the part where it advocates for the idolizing of "great men" is an illustration of the kind of nonsense that results when you do not understand or when you reject dialectical and historical materialism.

All that being said, if you are interested in reading about this period of history from a leftist and materialist perspective i would strongly suggest you read Michael Parenti's "The Assassination of Julius Caesar" instead.

*[It has been pointed out to me that this particular passage is more ambiguous than i initially thought, and not everyone interprets it as actually advocating for GMT]

This time we're reading chapter 2 and roughly a third of chapter 3 (until but not including section 2B) of Capital Volume 1. Participation welcome at any time, not just on the weekend of week 6, either in this thread or in our Matrix room (see this post for instructions on how to join). A few questions will probably be posted here on the aforementioned Saturday/Sunday for those who prefer that kind of structure

Cross-post from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/3427923

Despite the obvious liberal, pro-Western slant and a pronounced anti-Soviet bias, this article actually does a good job of painting a vivid picture of what Russia is like these days.

It is interesting to see the various contradictions (capitalist but with socialist nostalgia, simultaneously coexisting communist sympathies with imperial Russian ones, etc.) that us Marxist-Leninists have been pointing out for some time in the abstract take concrete form in the anecdotes from the author's month long trip.

What seems to baffle these western reporters most, even more than Russia's resillience to sanctions, or its defiant insistence on protecting its sovereignty and its own culture, is the revival of pro-Soviet and pro-Stalin sentiments. He points out with great shock how he finds that communists are getting elected to political office and how they have busts and statues of Lenin and Stalin.

He refuses to understand this phenomenon of Soviet revivalism even when someone tells him very directly that the 90s, which the West consider the ideal period in Russia, a supposed golden age of liberalism, actually was the worst in living memory for most Russians today:

Andrei, a twenty-four-year-old electrical engineer who was visiting from Moscow with three friends, spontaneously told me of Stalin that “he was a winner.” We were in front of an original military map of the Soviet counteroffensive. “For us young people, Stalin is number one. We must fight evil like during the Great Patriotic War.” Did any negative associations come to mind? “They say a lot of things, but what matters is the results,” he said. “I think there were more deaths in the Nineties with the gang wars and alcohol. That was our first experience with democracy—the worst period of our history.”

The author is of course a bit of a drama queen and hilariously tries to make himself look like some brave undercover agent in a totalitarian dystopia, pointing out how he used VPN to hide his searches and encrypted his communications... as if anyone actually cared. But this is sort of thing is to be expected, they are writing for a western audience that wants this sort of fluff.

And if we start to analyze a bit more carefully the way he structured the article it is fairly obvious what he is trying to do. When you read the quotes he gives of the people he interviewed you get the pretty clear impression that he tries simultaneously to portray Russians as hopeless, downtrodden and oppressed (the liberal ones) but also bloodthirsty brainwashed fanatics (the nationalistic ones).

Even so i do recommend giving this a read, it's an interesting piece.

I saw a video recently of a racist brit being rude to a group of Chinese people filming a video. One thing weird caught me though, the Chinese lady who made the video took offense to him calling the Chinese flag communist, in the video she says that communist is a controversial and rude term in China and this confused me as its literally ran by a communist party. So what gives? Is communist a negative term there?

I've seen mentions of companies like Meta silencing leftist voices, and specially now Palestinian ones. I've also noticed the recent banning of lots of leftist accounts on twitter.

It's rather obvious that these corporations collude with each other and the State Department to silence dissenting speech, but I'd like to read some comprehensive resource on the evidence on this, so I could better educate others on the more tangible harms of Big Techs.

Obviously the search engine ain't helping. Anybody have some big sources on this?

I've been using Citation Hunt recently and (searching for communist-related pages) came across this claim in the Soviet Union section of the page "Abortion under communism":

In 1920, Soviet Russia became the first modern country to legalize abortion.[18] In 1933, during the Stalin era, views changed. In the Congress of Kiev in 1932, abortion was criticized for decreasing the country's birth rate. Abortion was finally banned in 1933[citation needed]. The number of officially recorded abortions dropped sharply from 1.9 million in 1935 to 570,000 in 1937, but began to climb just two years later, reaching 755,000 in 1939.[19] On November 23, 1955, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, under Nikita Khrushchev, liberalized abortion restrictions.[20]

I'm now down a rabbit hole for the bolded sentences. After some cursory searching, I found a reference to Kate Millett's Sexual Politics, which contains the following:

At the Congress of Kiev in 1932 abortion was decried for innumerable reasons, all of which came down to authoritarian state interest in forcing women to bear children, explained as population policy (the birth rate had boomed after the revolution and now a slight decline was interpreted as catastrophic). There was much cant about "preserving the race," "humanity dying out," "morality collapsing," and so forth. The other prevailing rationale was based on an equally authoritarian distaste over the fact women now enjoyed the control of their bodies; functionaries fussed that women were no longer ashamed of abortion and now "considered it their legal right."^40^ — Millett, Kate. 2016. Sexual Politics. p. 172. New York: Columbia University Press.

That footnote? ^40^ Quoted in Reich, The Sexual Revolution, op. cit., p. 206. The speaker is Stroganov. Finally, an answer!

...except Reich is quoting a Dr. Kirilov. And Kirilov is given no introduction or context by Reich; he only appears in the index for the pages his quote takes up:

. . . We regard the interruption of the first pregnancy as particularly dangerous in terms of the Woman's possible subsequent sterility. We therefore consider it our duty to prevent the mother from aborting and, at the same time, to ascertain why she wants an abortion. But we find in the answers scarcely anything about an inner struggle and search; in 70 percent of the cases the reason given is a '"love that failed." A brief comment such as ''He left me," "I left him," and toward the end some scornful remark about "him" or herself: "What kind of a man is he anyway?" In the women's answers we almost never find an indication of a germinating family as the initial unit of society.

Not free love as a protest against old bourgeois family marriage, not free love as an unconscious selection of eugenics, but a frivolous feeling culminating in the decision: to the hospital! Unbridled haste to surrender the grown young body, as a result of the transition to new, not yet crystallized forms that have arisen out of the sexual chaos! . . . I have to compare work in the field of abortion with the extermination of the first-born in ancient Egypt who had to die because of the sins of their fathers who devastated man and society. This kind of abortion must be suppressed as a socially negative, misshapen phenomenon of life. It must be replaced by a persistent effort to enlighten. A change in psychological mood, in the sense of recognizing motherhood as a social function, is absolutely mandatory. . . . Conclusions:

Criminal abortion is an evil practice based on the awareness that abortion is legal. . . .

Social abortion often wrongly protects the distorted caricature of sexual problems and new forms of life which have not yet crystallized It blocks the road to motherhood and often diminishes the woman's success in public life. Therefore it is alien to true communal living. Abortion seems to be a mass means of destroying a new generation. It does not have the inherent intention of serving mother and community and is therefore alien to the dear goals of protecting maternal health. . . . [Emphasis added.] — Reich, Wilhelm. 1974. pp.207–8. The Sexual Revolution: Toward a Self-Regulating Character Structure. Translated by Therese Pol. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

I feel like I'm losing it. Does anyone know who Stroganov is? Or Dr. Kirilov? Or any information on the Congress of Kiev in 1932? Everything keeps coming back to Wikipedia or the Millet quote.

Discussion in the Matrix reading group (see this post for instructions on how to join) Saturday/Sunday of week 4, and anyone who'd rather discuss the text here can do so instead (a few questions will be posted here as well)

If anyone wants a reminder on the weekend for this and/or future discussions, mention it in the comments

More specifically his “The Creation of Value by Living Labour”

I read someone online scoff - at least the digital version of scoffing - at Stalin for his Lassallean tendency. What does that mean?

While reading Lenin, he quoted Lassalle to introduce his work What is to be Done?, so I figured there must be a connection with the early Bolsheviks and this socialist.

I stumbled upon the Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist)'s articles about immigration, and to me they have a whiff of nationalism and fascism. Links:

• Why the employers love rising immigration
• Migration continues to rise
• Open door to study in Britain
• A new meeting they have scheduled "Mass immigration – war on the working class"

Their point seems to be that immigration is bad because it brings down the conditions and wages of british workers, and can be used to break strikes, for example the doctors strike. That it degrades the quality of public services like housing, healthcare etc. etc. In the description of the meeting, they say "how should we respond?"

To me this just sounds like EDL (English Defence League, rightwing nationalists) rhetoric. I feel like a better approach is to understand the part that this historically imperalist nation plays and has played, and to have sympathy with those immigrants who come here only to end up superexploited, instead of appealing to nationality and only worrying about british workers. Maybe I am being idealist? not sure.

Any thoughts? Immigration is a pretty big deal in british politics, and I would like to hear some other marxist viewpoints