I decided on whim to watch Iranian TV for a few minutes. I found a station IRINN and they were highlighting some drawings regarding Gaza. I missed screenshotting some of the better ones (because it’s live and I can’t go back) but I did manage to get this one, I quite like it:
He described speaking Russian as a major offense for Ukrainians.
Remember, folks, Ukraine did nothing to provoke Russia in the years leading up to the SMO. They certainly didn’t persecute Russian language speakers or kill over 14,000 people (primarily Russian speakers) in the years between Euromaidan and the SMO. No sir, Ukraine was just a smol bean minding its own business, yep…
If the Grenfell Tower disaster happened in China, this man would have been executed by the state within a year of it happening.
(And the clarify to any lemmy libs wandering in here… I 100%, unironically think Lord Pickles should have been executed by the state for all this)
for the Democratic Party, enabling the genocide of Palestinians is nonnegotiatable.
Yes, Jacobin, the Democratic Party has indeed stated very clearly that enabling the genocide of the Palestinians is indeed non-negotiable.
an Israeli investment and real estate fair being held in Paris this weekend.
I assume this is one of those events where they talk about potentially buying stolen land in Gaza and the West Bank, no?
It’s important to first understand how the west lends to Africa:
Michael Hudson discusses the IMF and World Bank: Partners in Backwardness
Then understand that Chinese loans are nothing like that. Lower interest rates relative to the west. Invested in activities that develop the productive forces. And Chinese don’t make demands about increasing taxes, cutting social spending, or forcing public assets to be privatized.
Top content right here.
Has anyone done a breakdown of the US DOJ indictment of Hamas leadership? The headlines talk about how sexual violence was prevalent on Oct 7th, but last I heard the UN looked into those claims and found no evidence whatsoever. So I assume the basis of the indictment is just taking everything “Israel” has said at face value and calling it evidence; but I also don’t feel like subjecting myself to reading dozens of pages of hasbara.
PSL is not an electoral party. They participate in the presidential election in order to get the party at its ideas some broader attention, it doesn’t run any other candidates nor does it plan to is my understanding.
Another great post! Some quick-hit thoughts:
It would actually contradict Marxism to nationalize all enterprises immediately
I was surprised when I read Engels’ Principles of Communism, to see him essentially advocate for this when he talks about what a socialist society would look like in the aftermath of the revolution.
A lot of communists become communist not solely because of economic arguments but also moral ones.
I’m in this picture and I don’t like it. It’s hard to see all the suffering in the world and not think immediately switching to an idealized socialist system where everything is centrally planned immediately and everyone earns the same for each hour worked would be better. But eventually read enough about all the challenges AES states have had to building towards an ideal. And from there, you can either become a bit disillusioned OR you can try and understand what mistakes may have been made and consider what other options may be out there, even if it doesn’t align with what you think socialism should be.
This culminated in the Gang of Four declaring that they didn’t even care about development, they it was “better to be poor under socialism than to be rich under capitalism”!
I’m currently reading Carlos Martinez’s The East is Still Red. In that book, Martinez takes a moment to point out that in the developed west, because our conditions are so relatively comfortable it’s natural for us to focus on the “socialism is the collective ownership of the means of production” aspect (socialism as a noun). But in the places where socialism has taken root - Tsarist Russia, pre-Revolutionary China, colonized Vietnam - the aspect of “developing the productive forces” has been more prevalent (socialism as a verb). That is understandable given the desperate poverty in those contexts.
If you nationalize, let’s say, a bouncy ball factory, this will give you less influence in the economy than if you nationalize, let’s say, a rubber factory. Why? Because the bouncy ball factory, as well as millions of other factories, depend on the rubber factory, but almost nothing depends on the bouncy ball factory.
This is a very helpful example, I have always wanted to read more Hilferding. IIRC 100% of the mining sector - where most “stuff” has to come from - is state-owned in China.
Harris, Trump, Biden, W, and honestly even Hillary and Obama would never get beyond local town administration in China. They’re all too incompetent.