ProbablyKaffe

joined 2 years ago
[–] [email protected] 19 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

I don't have the book on hand but Jonathan Ross has calculations in the book China's Great Road that show China's labor terms of trade (how much labor-time does China give to trading partners vs how much does it receive, a ratio of 1 would mean equitable trade).

China from the 50s to the early 2000s had terms of trade <1 (net exporting labor) with nearly all countries, as China started as the poorest on earth per capita. China was giving other global south countries more labor than it consumed from them.

Starting in the 2000s China was taking in more labor from some countries in the GS than it received, but this can be due to the fact that China was able to keep a some of its own dead labor (MoP) due to its socialist economy (and socialist bloc trade), shifting more of its labor toward new domestic production because production in socially important sectors became less labor intense with automation. China is still net exploited by the Imperialist bloc.

However, China is not comfortable with this relationship, which is why it has been exporting capital to the poorest countries to free labor-time in the GS in sectors like Cobalt and Lithium that are extremely labor intense unless an Imperialist corp has coerced state, or has been allowed private, security over investments, i.e. only western owned mines are allowed heavy machinery. China is rather selling the machinery to the country instead of purchasing the rights to consume the resources directly as the West does. Some will think "but capital exports (in this case machinery, loans) are Imperialist", but you'll actually see even in Lenin's time that Imperialist states invested predominantly in trade partners bound by military pacts, the US exports mostly to other Imperialists bound through NATO, OCED, and defense pacts in TW, ROK, Japan, or if it's in the GS they ensure they are able to exercise sovereignty over purchased land from them.

This is not without contradictions. China's investments in the GS are often benefiting the existing anti-worker, anti-Indigenous, classes' interests. Such is the case in Latin America and many African states such as Congo. Again though, often the 3W state has to relocate people (not a pretty process, and is class warfare) to expropriate land because it is easier to take from their own citizens than from the Imperialist countries who bought or stole existing mines/factories/farms due to Colonialism.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 month ago

More like American Cracker Party

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Bandera was in Plast, then he later recruited from it in forming the OUN-B. The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church funded Plast, and also the SS Galicia Division having string ties with the OUN-B. Plast in the Diaspora remains connected the the UGCC and former SS members set up the scouts over in the US, CA, and AUS. Here they taught revisionist history and celebrated Bandera and whitewashing their actions. After the union fell, Plast veterans went back to Ukraine and took over main industries and state positions. After the coup in 2014 the state made Plast almost mandatory as an assimilation tool.

Proud past

The Ukrainian scouting movement known as Plast was formed in 1911 in Lviv. Throughout more than 100 years of its activity, Plast has endured various challenges: from world wars, when Plast scouts showed their endurance under extreme circumstances, to a period of underground activity when Plast was outlawed by the Polish state in 1930.

When the Soviet Union took control of Ukraine it banned the organization, but the Ukrainian diaspora revived Plast after World War II in different parts of the world: Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Argentina and others.

Plast was to eventually renew its activity in Ukraine in 1989. This year marks the 30th anniversary of the restored movement in their homeland. Today Plast has 10,000 members in Ukraine and thousands in nearly 20 countries – which makes it the largest Ukrainian youth movement in the world.

Among the famous Plast members were not only such historical figures as Stepan Bandera or Roman Shukhevych, recognized as heroes of the anti-Soviet nationalist uprising in Ukraine, but also economist and benefactor Bohdan Hawrylyshyn, former major archbishop of the Ukrainian Catholic Church Lubomyr Husar, and Canadian Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland.

...

Active position

Although Plast calls itself “non-political,” it has also never shied away from supporting Ukraine’s fight for independence or helping in its struggle to counter the Kremlin’s attempts to undermine Ukrainian sovereignty. Many Plast members took leading roles in the protests that became the 2014 EuroMaidan Revolution, and when ex-President Viktor Yanukovych’s special police forces shot and killed more than 100 protestors, Plast members were among the dead and wounded.

They also were among those joining the armed volunteer battalions in spring 2014 that fought against Russian-backed separatists. But for the diaspora, Plast often serves as a bridge between modern life and Ukrainian tradition and between their countries and Ukraine.

[–] [email protected] 49 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Once again I have a Chunka Luta book recommendation: Indigenous Paleolithic by Paulette Steeves

Archeology as a discipline in the West functions as a Colonial tool to deny the history of Indigenous peoples. The biggest example is the "Clovis First Theory" (debunked) that posits all Indigenous peoples of the Americas descend from migrations across the Bering Strait during the last glacial maxim. Archeologists who made their careers on this study have bullied and physically harmed opponents to their hypothesis. US settlers over and over have destroyed archeological sites intentionally (and many unintentional as well) and this has been used to deny how long people have been living in the western continents. (Another example is the "genetic testing" and other racism that posits European settlers are "more indigenous" than Arabic-speaking Palestinians).

This is once again, a projection onto China what the Whites have been doing all over the world.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Relevant snippet from Palo Alto:

Safiyo Mohamed immigrated from Somalia only three months before she started as a stower at an Amazon warehouse in Minnesota. After three days of training (only in English), she began emptying incoming boxes from the conveyor belt into boxes from which the pickers picked. The system had a strict quota: 2,600 items sorted for every 10-hour shift, or a consistent average of less than 14 seconds per object. To fit in any kind of break you had to go faster, so as a beginner, Safiyo tried to avoid taking any breaks. Still, after her first week, her manager told her she was too slow and made more mistakes than the acceptable number: one per shift, an inhuman error rate of .04 percent. What help she got concerning strategies for improvement came from the other Somali workers who filled the warehouse. (As in the Hoover-era gold mines, white English-speaking managers boss groups of nonwhite workers, whose ethnic composition depends on the location; in Minnesota’s Twin Cities, a high proportion of them are East African immigrants.) “After my shift, I couldn’t even cook for myself. I barely had the energy to take a shower and often went to bed with an empty stomach,” Mohamed recalled in an essay about her experience for Sahan Journal. “I had nightmares about getting fired, disrupting the little sleep I was getting. They treated me and every other warehouse worker like a machine, not a human.” Feeling like she had no other way to support her family, Safiyo lasted longer than most, 30 months. In Amazon’s numbers, she turns up as an unqualified success. That’s how it’s supposed to work; that’s how Amazon came to dominate retail and how Jeff Bezos became the world’s richest man.

A detailed 2020 investigation found that Amazon’s warehouse workers have a serious-injury rate nearly twice the warehouse industry average. And the more robotized the distribution center, the higher the injury rate. “If you’ve got robots that are moving product faster and workers have to then lift or move those products faster, there’ll be increased injuries,” an Occupational Safety and Health Administration inspecting physician with experience in the company’s facilities told reporters. Racing to catch up with machines rigged to run hot hurts people. Efficiency causes injuries, which is another way of saying that, for Amazon, injuries are efficient. Amazon’s delivery must be very efficient, because drivers get injured even more—a lot more. And unlike warehouse workers, Amazon delivery drivers don’t technically work for Amazon, even if they’re wearing Amazon uniforms delivering Amazon packages in their Amazon vans following Amazon’s directions to Amazon customers.

For most of its existence, Amazon got its packages to customers’ doors just as everyone else does, contracting with the U.S. Postal Service or the big private shippers UPS and DHL for the dreaded “last mile” delivery. But as part of Operation Dragon Boat, the company planned to bring shipping inside the Amazon tent, or at least next to it. Driving trucks around is dangerous—for drivers, for the other people on the road, and for the legally liable employers. Trucks kill people, especially when you drive fast. Amazon drivers, unsurprisingly, have to drive fast if they want to keep their jobs, and their trucks do kill people. But when it comes time to hold someone responsible, Amazon is nowhere to be found. Patricia Callahan’s 2019 investigation for ProPublica and the New York Times couldn’t establish exactly how many deaths Amazon drivers were responsible for because they are all contractors, hired through the Delivery Service Partner program.

Amazon has absurd injury rates while they get a lot of great press for their "automation", but what such "automation" is actually doing is setting a dangerous pace for the human bodies. With such high turnover and higher than local average wages, Amazon is able to pace workers at inhuman speeds, to their body's breaking point, because each individual worker is an expiring commodity to them.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

PSL is a departure of WWP which itself split from a formal Trotskyist sect. They don't drop Trotskyism in essence just that they are more open to advances made by Stalin.

Trotskyist tendencies remain in PSL with a focus on majoritarianism, treating the "industrial proletariat" as the revolutionary vehicle in the Imperialist states, and placing "workers revolution" above national liberation movements.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Alt-right is dead (in the US) and they were just (petty) Bourgeois intelligentsia coat tailing Trump's settler populism. The most successful pivot from those politics are the christo-fash "groypers". In the end Alt-righters were just Liberal elites opportunistically trying gain leverage against their own class competition with Trump's populism but are dorky snobs who clearly despise Trump's poorer voters.

I agree that both the settler-populist and Christo-Fash groups are going to be further agitated.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago

puts on conspiracy hat: inb4 shooter is Uke agent

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago

You're already underselling the level of crosstalk between US white labor unions and the KKK. The St Louis "Soviet" formed a lynch mob during WW1.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

Yeah colleges were heavily subsidized and California had one of the largest public systems in the country. That system also gave Bobby Seale and Huey Newton an education so it's not a coincidence that 1969 was when college prices started to spiral.

The colleges themselves are racketeers, I recommend Palo Alto by Malcolm Harris who writes about the creation of Stanford U and its subsequent role in Colonialism and Anti-Communism. Stanford's campus land houses all of the big weapon makers and it produced Herbert Hoover, the man responsible for mining gold during Australia's genocide, modernizing the March on Africa, and the modern semi-state food cartels and housing policy.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

The supply and demand angle is only half-right. There's an intent to raise the costs to control the amount of people entering college as wages rise, it's supposed to be a class barrier. Combined with admissions tests (which literally started as "IQ" tests) having the scores to gain funding opportunities for education is a eugenic test. It's class-eugenicist poll-tests and poll-taxes performed nationally.

Also much of these schools are funded directly by land thefts in the US: https://www.hcn.org/issues/52-4/indigenous-affairs-education-land-grab-universities/

The University of Minnesota founders started a war to create the school (and the state): https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/great-university-land-grab

This was during the US Civil War. The Dakota uprising was punished by Lincoln with the largest mass execution in US history, of 38 Dakotas, down from the original 200 captured for execution.

The endowments many of these schools have are predominantly funded from these land cessions. Washington State University's land cessions of PNW nations funded enough to fill its entire endowment with royalties from logging leases. Texas A&M and Arizona are funded by active subterranean oil drilling rights.

The other reason is because the jobs college degrees provide are getting higher wages and the schools can charge that much and someone will take it, and the banks have the surplus funds from Imperialism and the housing racket.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Weaken an economy until it's cheap and easy to purchase labor-power and mining/farming rights

 

Article is written in Chinese so the auto translate is kinda wonky. This website belongs to Eric Li. The author is Yin Zhiguang of Fudan University.

 

One aspect of the Reservation system within the United States skipped over by common Marxists (and the American public in general) is that of the Neo-Colonial relationships between the US and Indigenous nations. In the 1970s on the Pine Ridge Reservation, the poorest community in the United States and home of the Oglala Lakota people, ruled a dictator by the name of Dick Wilson. Wilson funneled federal funds into his own wealth and to pay for a paramilitary to hunt down members of the American Indian Movement (AIM), a party of Indigenous radicals keen on fighting American encroachment and occupation of their lands and communities. The struggle between AIM and Wilson and his Fed backers, peaked in tension in the Wounded Knee Occupation. The occupation by AIM was called off after Wilson's army with the US special forces (disputed by the US government) and AIM reached a gun battle. Wilson remained in power even having been caught rigging an election, but a Federal judge interfered on his behalf, and many of his Lakota opponents died violently over the following years until his defeat in another election. Since Wilson's departure, the Pine Ridge Indian Reorganization Act (forced American governance) leadership has been centrist/liberal as the main radicals of the Reservation had been killed violently and many more imprisoned. Pine Ridge remains the poorest community in the country.

 

Link is downloadable for free, but lmk if you can't get a copy through this portal.

I thought this paper was a fascinating read on the colonial ignorance and euro-centrism found in not only Liberal theories of Gentrification, but Marxist Geography as well. This paper seeks to expose the gap between Marxist Geography and struggles against gentrification from the perspective of Indigenous communities while using a Toronto neighborhood as a case study. I'll try to post some good blurbs out of this but I read and post it on the go so I'll have to come back.

While approaching from the perspective of dissecting Gentrification, this paper ends up attacking the heart of Settler Colonialism through criticizing the Bourgeois/Settler production of space.

 

Video covering the (very recent) colonization and enclosure of the waterways of the PNW, specifically Washington. The Indigenous struggle over fishing rights and environmentalism culminated into "The Fish Wars" of the 60s-70s. It also covers the settler State governments seeking to redefine indigenous such that none to very few indigenous people were "actually indigenous" and therefore unprotected by treaties. This comes after decades of boarding schools and institutions like the Child Protective Services and fostering (modern boarding schools) seeking to force assimilate the indigenous population.

 

The anti-nuclear movement must be a big oil operation.

 

bruh 😂

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