Check it out. Also:

“George Bush doesn’t care about Black people.” These were the words of famed rapper Kanye West during the 2005 nationally televised telethon benefit for victims of Hurricane Katrina. In this notorious quote, Kanye expressed a popular conception of the Bush administration for a whole generation of people. How is it then, that less than 15 years later the same Kanye West — son of a Black Panther who had previously made commentary on racism in the U.S. — would go on a national tour professing his love for Hitler? Even more recently, beloved star in the Black community, Nicki Minaj, cozied up to Ben Shapiro after rapper Megan Thee Stallion blasted her for misogynoir. Both of these instances illustrate the right’s newfound investment in popular culture in response to young people, people of color and the LGBTQ community’s increasing acceptance of socialism.

Kanye was the son of a Black Panther?! Holy shit...

Anyway:

It's only a few paragraphs long and is for a pre-convention discussion (since CPUSA is in discussion period for our democratic process).

Simply put, I feel that this comm as lost all purpose.

There is no longer discussions on Marxist theory because of the establishment of c/theory.

There is no longer discussions on Marxist history because of the establishment of c/history.

This is not a critique of those comms as they are well enjoyed comms but a critique of this comm and myself as it has over the past two years steadily stagnated into irrelevance.

With that in mind, I want to hear from anyone on how to revitalize this comm, whether they wish to join the mod team to change its structure, or outright close the comm to put it out of its misery.

(This is one of my various-thoughts-no-particular conclusion posts)

• Firstly, don't think that by 'paganism' I mean some Tumblr thing: I mean the dominant religion of classical antiquity. And Marx does quote thinkers from Greece & Rome a lot, and talks about its productive system a bit.

• Different productive systems differ in the way surplus value is extracted

• Marxist theory thinks of religion as something that justifies and protects the productive system. e.g. Catholicism was the religious superstructure on the feudal base. Feudalism extracts surplus value by duty to your lord.

• Quote from Capital Ch.3 Section 3 'Money': "The class struggle in the ancient world, for instance, took the form mainly of a contest between debtors and creditors" (The Marxist economist Michael Hudson writes about this.)

• Religions tell us what is sacred.

Now, it makes sense that some things would be held sacred in the economy of the classical world:

• Depend on conquest: glorify Mars

• Depend on the harvest: glorify the harvest-goddess, have harvest festivals

• Depend on fertility of livestock: glorify fertility goddess

• Depend on the tribe: glorify your ancestors (Latin: maiores). We mock social rebellion as being a "fuck you dad" attitude; the flipside of that is that ancestor-worship implies social conservatism.

Tribe

To emphasise the last point a bit more: in capitalism we have the nuclear family at best. Lots of people have no family at all. In ancienter economic systems, the family/tribe was everything, was your economic support. It makes sense to revere fertility and having lots of kids, as that's the strength of your family.

Polytheism

Chapter 1 of 'Capital' talks about how use-values are myriad, exchange-value is singular....

...and about how people used to produce for use-value (catch fish to eat), but the commodity-form made them produce for exchange-value (which, I repeat, is singular).

Do you see how in the first case it would make sense to have many gods, and in the second case one god?

But none of that quite gets to the heart of surplus-value-extraction. (Well, Mars being an important god does: that's extraction-through-conquest.) But how does paganism justify extraction of surplus value by creditors? This is where my theory is incomplete.

I've been enjoying reading Krupskaya's works on education and how to study (e.g. How Lenin Studied Marx). I'm wondering if there's anything similar in the Marxist canon (or just worth reading for Marxists in general) on the subject of study and self-education. I'll try to compile the Krupskaya I've been reading in an edit.

edit:

The Organization of Self Education

General Rules for Independent Study

How Lenin Studied Marx

Unfortunately that's all I could find online

How to Be a Good Communist

Written/Published: July 1939

Source: Selected Works of Liu Shaoqi, Volume I

First Published: Foreign Languages Press

I'm reading this for the first time, btw, based on something I heard online. Someone also recommended it to me and said Liu Shaoqi was underrated.

Definitely giving this a go.

Good stuff.

Love Henry Winston.

You can read the book for yourself here.

Check it out. I highly recommend this book.

Oh yeah, and there's a sequel to it as well. Maybe I'll do a book club on both later on.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/1795146

Video is about 50 minutes long.

You can listen to it while you're doing other things.

Glad they touched on the AFL-CIO and the recent developments in the labor movement, especially vis a vis the South.

You can purchase the book (from the original publisher rather than Amazon, hopefully, if you want) over here:

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-19-5414-6

Full title is:

Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance by Roland Boer

Please:

Subscribe

comment

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etc.

the video (to help out with this Marxist-Leninist YouTube channel, which is very underrated).

Thank you!

Jose Maria Canlas Sison (born February 8, 1939), also known by his nickname Joma, was a Filipino writer and activist who founded the Communist Party of the Philippines and added elements of Maoism to its philosophy — which would be known as national democracy. He applied the theory of Marxism–Leninism-Maoism on Philippine history and current circumstances.

Born of a landed family in Cabugao, Ilocos Sur, Philippines, on February 8, 1939. He finished with honors the degree of Bachelor of Arts in English Literature in the University of the Philippines in 1959 and took masteral studies in comparative literature in 1959-61. He taught English grammar and literature in the University of the Philippines in 1959-61. He became press relations officer of the Araneta University in 1962-63 and professorial lecturer in political science in the Lyceum of the Philippines, 1964-67. He became an associate professor in political science in the Center of Asian Studies of the University of the Philippines in 1986-87. He was research consultant on development and socialization in the University of Utrecht, 1987-89.

Fearless of the Cold War and the Anti-Subversion Law of 1957 which penalized with death political dissent and revolutionary activity, Prof. Sison initiated Marxist study circles and the formation of mass organizations of youth, workers and peasants in order to revive the national democratic movement against US imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism in the Philippines in the 1960s. He started as a student political activist in the University of the Philippines, where he formed study circles in Marxism and the Philippine revolution from 1958 onwards. He was the founding chairman of the Student Cultural Association of the University of the Philippines, 1959-62. He used this as a base for forming similar organizations in other universities and promoting student mass protests.

He joined the old merger party of the Communist and Socialist parties and became a member of its Central Executive Committee, 1962-67. He edited the Progressive Review, a Marxist journal of ideas and opinions on Philippine society, economy, politics, culture and foreign policy, from 1963 to 1968. He was in charge of research and education in the legal Workers’ Party (Lapiang Manggagawa) and carried out study courses among the leaders and activists of the trade union, peasant and youth movements from 1962 onwards. He was founding chairman of Kabataang Makabayan (Patriotic Youth) in 1964. He became general secretary and then vice chairman of Socialist Party of the Philippines (formerly Worker’s Party) in 1965. He promoted the national united front and became general secretary of the anti-imperialist united front, Movement for the Advancement of Nationalism in 1966-68.

Prof. Sison led the First Great Rectification Movement among the Filipino communists from 1966 to 1968 in order to criticize, repudiate and rectify the major ideological, political and organizational errors and weaknesses of the leadership of the old communist party from 1930 onwards and thereby lay the basis for the reestablishment of the communist party under the guidance of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought. He advocated the general line of new democratic revolution under working class leadership through protracted people’s war and with socialist perspective. He became the founding Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Philippines, which was reestablished on December 26, 1968.

He was chairman of the CPP Military Commission that founded the New People’s Army on March 29, 1969. In representation of the CPP, he co-founded the National Democratic Front of the Philippines on April 24, 1973 as an undergound united front organization against the Marcos fascist dictatorship. He was responsible for the mobile office of the central leadership and marched with the revolutionary cadres, Red fighters and masses in various regions of the Philippines. He shared the fighting tasks, the difficulties, the risks and the victories of the armed revolution during its foundational period. He was captured by the Marcos fascist dictatorship on November 10, 1977, subjected to various forms of torture (including punching, water cure, in shackles and fetters for more nearly two years and solitary confinement for than five years) and detained until the fall of Marcos in February 1986.

Philippine authorities were angered by the lectures of Prof. Sison, canceled his passport and subjected him to false charge of subversion and threats of arbitrary arrest and torture. He applied for political asylum in The Netherlands in 1988. As a result of lobbying by the US and Philippine governments, he has been blacklisted as a Terrorist by the Dutch government and then by the Council of European Union since 2002. He was released on September 13, 2007 due to lack of evidence and due to worldwide public outrage over the false charge. . The US, Philippine and Dutch governments continue to oppress him with threats of prosecution and imprisonment with the use of false charges in a brazen bid to pressure the NDFP to capitulate to the Philippine government.

On December 16 2022, the Communist Party of the Philippines, alongside its news organ Ang Bayan, announced the death of Sison after having been confined in a hospital in Utrecht, Netherlands, for two weeks. NDFP executive Luis Jalandoni disclosed that Sison died due to heart failure, after almost three weeks of hospital treatment, although he did not provide more details about Sison's death.

• Interview with Com. Jose Maria Sison

• Communist Party of the Philippines–New People's Army

• Comrade Joma sings My Funny Valentine :anti-valentine-action:

• Jose Maria Sison (“Amado Guerrero”, “Armando Liwanag”) Writings

• Jose Maria Sison site

• CPP official site

hello everyone - happy Black history month 🌌 here's a massive archive list of Black and Marxist writing and film (with downloads!) to check out xoxo

• @777

Megathreads and spaces to hang out:

• 📀 Come listen to music and Watch movies with your fellow Hexbears nerd, in Cy.tube
• 💖 Come talk in the New Weekly Queer thread
• 🔥 Read and talk about a current topics in the News Megathread
• ⚔ Come talk in the New Weekly PoC thread
• ✨ Talk with fellow Trans comrades in the New Weekly Trans thread

reminders:

• 💚 You nerds can join specific comms to see posts about all sorts of topics
• 💙 Hexbear’s algorithm prioritizes comments over upbears
• 💜 Sorting by new you nerd
• 🌈 If you ever want to make your own megathread, you can reserve a spot here nerd
• 🐶 Join the unofficial Hexbear-adjacent Mastodon instance toots.matapacos.dog

Links To Resources (Aid and Theory):

Aid:

• 🌈 LGBTQ+ Resource Post
• 🍉 Resources for Palestine
• 🐌☕ Zapatista Coffee

Theory:

• ❤️Foundations of Leninism
• ❤️Anarchism and Other Essays

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/1735872

That's just the title; the video has more to do with other stuff than just Taylor Swift LMAO

But yeah, enjoy, comrades.

You can read this masterpiece here.

People swear by this work by Liu Shaoqi and I have yet to read it myself, but plan to start soon.

How to effectively counter imperialist lies on Xinjiang on the internet: A Guide

Any tactical changes or improvements to be made?

Quote from Radhika Desai in a lecture on YouTube (timestamped link)

Already posted the lecture, but I want to highlight one thing that I have been thinking about since watching.

Radhika argues that what she calls Western Marxism has placed all the emphasis on class (read: domestic exploitation of labor) at the expense of imperialism (international exploitation).

This rings true for me since much of what I have read by contemporary, firmly Western Marxists, has centered around the value production and exploitation only within the workplace, or on a national scale, but rarely on an international scale. Hence the undying arguments over the "transformation problem" (which I agree with Radhika is Ricardo's problem, not Marx's) and other such topics.

But when looking at the actual history of the major socialist revolutions in China, the Soviet Union, Vietnam, Cuba, etc. etc. the biggest commonality between these countries is precisely that their revolutions were anti-imperialist and not actually the result of a dialectical implosion of commodity production, or late-stage capitalism, or whatever you'd like to call it.

Western Marxists do not think about imperialism because they live in countries which benefit from imperialism. If you live in a non-imperial core country, the primary source of your exploitation is imperialism, with exploitation by your employer being only secondary and smaller. Thus imperialism becomes the object of revolutionary struggle. It might not even have a distinctly proletarian character since even the business owners are being exploited hard by imperialism.

I want to focus even more on the Marxist study of imperialism and the special attention that non-Western revolutionaries have given to it. If anyone has good things to read, I'd appreciate suggestions!

ofc they got infiltrated by the feds, imagine my surprise.

I have some probably dumb questions to ask about marxism and wasn't sure where to go. Is there like a ask marxists or debate marxists forum? Anyway

What and how many branches of marxism want state socialism during the socialist transition period before Communism? I was under the impression that all (or most) leninists wanted state socialism during this period. I have since been told that Trotskyists don't want this. Is this correct if so what do they want instead? How does this all relate to vanguardism?

Furthermore how does marxism define a state? Is this different from how other groups define statehood?

I still don't fully grasp the difference between marxists and anarchists. I thought the difference was mainly that anarchists don't want a state, and encourage mutual aid. Now that I hear not all marxists want a state I am pretty confused.

Title: Lenin holding the Soviet flag while walking through a field of grain, in the style of van gogh

cross-posted from an old post: https://hexbear.net/post/218850

I read Capital, and the whole thing just went over my head. I really couldn't understand what he was getting at. Could any comrades help explain the LTV? Thanks!

worth the short read