US politics: there isn’t any hidden agenda, it’s all just as stupid and corrupt as it looks.

YANG BUTTIGIEG 2024

On what day is Joe Biden not experiencing “mild symptoms?”

Also, work.

It’s an off-brand, knock-off version of Juche necromancy. Restores life, but leaves you looking like a dried prune.

Also, first-world feminism was quickly diverted into fashionable causes that did no particular harm to the ruling class, and often alienated working-class men and women. For example, insisting that prostitution is “empowering,” or that wanting to bring industrial jobs back is somehow a dogwhistle for 1950s-era sexism. (I’ve seen both these views expressed in mainstream publications like Vox).

With the abortion issue in particular, first-world feminists shot themselves in the foot. While upholding a woman’s right to bodily autonomy, they also supported neoliberal economics; which of course meant that they supported a system which forces many poor and working-class women to terminate a pregnancy solely for economic reasons. Most Americans support abortion rights. But the “dirty secret” nobody likes to talk about is that, statistically, people with lower incomes are more likely to oppose abortion. Why? Because while working-class women have the most abortions, they are also (paradoxically) the ones with least choice in the matter. Many of them would have liked to carry the pregnancy to term, but were forced to terminate for economic reasons; in other words, the abortion was no more “free” than wage-slavery is. Nearly every poor American has either been in this situation, or knows someone who has been in it. Thus there is an inchoate sense among certain sectors of the working class that abortion amounts to deliberate violence against them by the ruling class; and this view is growing.

What first-world feminists should have done is insist on proper care for mothers, and wages high enough to support a family on, so that abortion would never become coerced in this manner. But they did not; instead, they talked about the necessity of abortion, not to give women full reproductive autonomy, but to “ensure a child will never grow up in poverty.” Now a wealthy country like the US certainly has the resources to deal with poverty in other ways, or even to eliminate it entirely, so this argument rings very hollow. What it comes down to is that only wealthy white women have a right to choose, while working-class and minority women had better get in line and make an appointment, stat. Of course, this creates a lot of resentment and anger among working class women and men.

In short: working-class feminism is the only real feminism.

I need to look at my copy of Das Kapital again, but:

1. Doesn’t labor measure commodities, and isn’t it an average taking into account all labor in society – not just the value of this particular productive act, i.e., cutting hair? I seem to remember that labor is necessary as a standard of value because without it, the various commodities are essentially incommensurable, making comparison (and thus exchange) impossible. That is, if I exchange x amount of grain for y amount of coal, I am presuming that there exists some third medium to which they can both be compared. This cannot be demand solely, because “keeps me warm in the winter” and “keeps me fed” are themselves incommensurable categories; how much “fed” is a “warm” worth?

2. Marx does consider demand, in the form of social use-value. Something cannot be a commodity if does not have social use-value; that is, a commodity is a complex of labor value and social use-value. For instance, I can spend five hours making the most beautiful mud pie you have ever seen, but it will not be a commodity, because mud pies have no social use-value. As a consequence, the labor spent making it will not produce value.

3. The water-in-the-desert example relates to productivity, which describes the the amount of labor which must be expended to extract or produce a commodity. Since water is hard to get in the desert – one must either dig deep for it, or have tankers bring it in – the bucket of water has a high labor-value. Note, again, that its labor-value has to do with comparison to other commodities within the total structure of an economy, and is not the sole creator of value in the bucket of water; if there were no economy, the water would still have use-value, because humans need water to live. Labor-value is thus more abstract than use-value, and is to some extent added over and above it.

4. Converse to #2, above; something can have use-value and yet not be a commodity. The example Marx uses is food grown to support oneself. The work involved in raising a family falls under a similar head, because a family is not a commodity; it belongs in the purely human sphere, which predates and exists outside of commodities. A parent’s labor only becomes measurable as labor-value when the family itself becomes commodified, made abstract rather than concrete. For Marx, the way in which purely human things – love, sex, family, etc., – are commodified and made abstract is a prime example of the inherent anti-human nature of capital.

Protecting the people

Exactly. We are communists, not leftists.

Korean anti-homelessness program: government builds houses for workers

bRiTiSh anti-homelessness program: pedo king sells some dumb fucking newspapers

Maybe he, too, can be a gardener at the old royal palace one day

“Yeah, no, we don’t relish the thought of becoming a target in a war between the US and the PRC.”

Generally, no. All the data suggests that false rape accusations are extremely rare, and they usually happen when the accuser (or people behind the accuser) have something significant to gain. Most individuals are not going to put themselves through the trauma of court hearings just to get revenge on a romantic partner who jilted them.

However, if you get seriously involved in revolutionary politics: do use a little care, because if you are prominent enough – as in, “next Huey Newton” prominent – and the ruling class starts viewing you as a threat, the government will try to smear you in whatever way it can. Basically, just use common sense. A “clean” image is your friend here: don’t post on NSFW forums, don’t get blackout drunk and hook up with ten people, don’t make sexual comments in everyday speech, etc. Of course, these are just good guidelines generally. But for the most part, nobody is going to make a false rape accusation against you just because you hold communist beliefs.

Maxim Gorki’s short stories. My favorites are “Birth of a Man” and “Lullaby.”

Harry Potter

Nepal

What exactly happened in Nepal? I remember, about ten years ago, groups like the RCP, LLCO, etc., spamming headlines like “Nepalese communists uphold Dengist path, pluck defeat from the jaws of victory.” Other than that I know nothing about it.

This is a long essay, so right now I’ll just respond to a few points.

(1) Cultural Revolution. This is a very complicated topic, with much more nuance than either ultras or ML’s give it. But to speak very broadly, the problem isn’t that it mobilized the people to do nasty things to the bourgeoisie; the problem is that it was voluntarist and anarchistic. Hurting and shaming the bourgeoisie is a worthy goal, but it accomplishes nothing if it isn’t accompanied by a real increase in people’s living standards. The tendency of late Mao, and even more, of the Gang of Four, was to think that communism could be built simply by instilling in people the right ideology; which is idealist rather than materialist, for ideology is a function of material conditions. Thus Deng’s corrective, “socialism is not poverty,” was desperately needed. One can argue that Deng went to far, and ultimately fell into right deviation. But we should not allow this to obscure the fact that Gang of Four were massively left-deviant, and that Deng’s occasional rightism was simply the inevitable reaction. Thus, if China during the 1990s came dangerously close to neoliberalism, it was ultimately the fault, not of Deng, but of the Gang of Four.

The DPRK, by the way, does uphold a cultural revolution – it is an integral part of the Three Fronts theory, so the writer of this article is wrong again. The difference is that here the cultural revolution is ongoing process, proceeding alongside economic development and gradually transforming the whole of society. It is planned, rather than voluntaristic. And this brings us to the central problem with “Maoism” and all forms of ultraleftism. Processes need to be guided; you cannot simply hand people guns and assume good things will happen.

(2) On “Vladimir-Fucking-Putin.” The author finds it odd that MLs give critical support to the Russian Federation in its fight against Ukrainian Nazis, but not to the Shining Path in its struggle against the Fujimori and his goons. The difference is this: Putin, by stomping the Ukro-Nazis, is actually performing a useful service. What Gonzalo did was the reverse of useful: it alienated the masses, and drove people who otherwise might have sympathized with socialism straight into the arms of the Fujimori regime. There is a reason that many Peruvian leftists today believe (in the face of any real evidence) that the Shining Path was a CIA op. Which brings us to –

(3) Gonzalo was violent, but so were the Bolsheviks. The implied “goodness” of violence smacks of anarchism, or of Georges Sorel. As Marxists, we are not for violence; we merely recognize its occasional necessity. We don’t do the fascist thing of walking around and advocating violence for its own sake; that is adolescent. We would all prefer a peaceful transition to socialism; the problem is that the bourgeoisie never lets it happen. We advocate, not violence as such, but the right of people to defend themselves by any means necessary. If some Gonzaloite can explain to me how killing pregnant women and scalding peasants to death constitutes necessary and appropriate revolutionary violence, I’ll gladly become an ultra; but until then, I’ll keep thinking of the Shining Path as basically Azov with a red flag.

(4) Why don’t AES states export revolution anymore? The DPRK does, in a limited way; obviously it can’t do much given present circumstances, but they do give what aid they can to revolutionary movements around the world. The question really comes down to: Why doesn’t China export revolution?

The flippant answer is that we should be grateful China doesn’t; after all, their attempts to export revolution during the 1970s led to some of the strangest foreign policy the world has ever seen. The serious answer is this. Global capitalism is in its last, decadent stage: accumulation through destruction. No longer able to produce real wealth, the bourgeoisie create wealth in the imperial core by destroying it elsewhere. Thus, it is imperialism that now must export revolution in order to survive. To uphold stability, and global trade, in the face of never-ending destruction is now, ironically, the revolutionary position.