sovecon

I think you would very much enjoy the book "Classical Econophysics"!

It will be a while before denuvo is cracked :(
I'm right there with you.

You are correct. This source, and many others from first world "third worldists" ignore this basic fact.
The term "unequal exchange" is misused by people. To say that profits come from unequal exchange is proudhonist, not marxist.
And this research paper assumes that all labor is of equal intensity.
Both are incorrect. This paper means nothing.

Labor in the third world of all skill levels produces less value per hour because of the lack of development of the means of production. Third world labor of equal skill produces less value in a global marketplace per hour when compared to that same labor applied to means of production in the developed first world. This is why the main task of every socialist government is to rapidly increase the stock of means of production and implement labor saving advances. i.e. a rapid industrialization.

You bring up a good point. We can not assume the state will not act to repress us.
But I think you may be a bit too defeatist on this point (or maybe i'm misreading).

The oppression of worker leadership is par for the course. As I mention, legalism is just a secular clergy and material reality is the more important factor. But to think the legal system does not matter is incorrect (and also not what you are arguing).

Gun control is also pretty much worthless in the United States. What little of it was passed in response to the Panthers was only after they did immense work and it was very inconsequential at large. The US has a huge stock of guns and most gun control laws that get passed (and indeed the entire debate around gun control) is over the flow of new guns.

While it is true that the Federal Government would fight any armed worker group, that does not mean that the legal framework is unimportant or not a point of difference. Imagine trying to form a worker militia in Canada or the UK where no such protections exist at all. Wins are made for the working class even within liberal democracies and bourgeois republics and rights are often protected. These are, afterall, exactly the thing fascism aims to remove.

I hope you don't treat this as a polemic. Maybe I read your post in a doomer mindset because I'm often in one.
Thanks for the comment!

That's such a good way to put it!
Legalist traditions adapt to the wishes of the ruling class.
It's like how in that one fallout game they couldn't get the train working so they made the model a hat for an NPC walking around as the train.

As a bonus bit of lore, Alabama (until 2022) had the largest constitution of any government on earth. The federal government mandated a not-entirely-racist state supreme court so to get around it the legislature would simply pass laws by having them be ammendments. It often has amendments that apply to single counties and there are specific local offices with salaries in the alabama state constitution. It was almolst 400,000 words with 977 ammendments.

Sure! It's a bit long but I hope I can answer all your questions.

There are 2 levels of elections in the US: local and state.
The states handle elections to federal offices like Congress and the President.

There are two elections for each office: the primary elections and the election. The primary election is done usually in March and determines which candidates will be on the ballot for the offices up for election in November. This is basically the same across all states.

The primary elections are elections that technically happen only for the parties. To register as a member of a political party in the US you simply state that you want to when you register to vote. There is not special requirement.

Voting in the primaries is similar for basically every office at the local, state, and federal level. The only one where it is different is for President.

When you go to vote in the primaries you go to your local polling booth and they give you a ballot specific to the party that you are registered with. Some states let you pick which party's ballot you want to vote with but not all. These states have "open primaries".

Some offices like local judges are often not allowed to have party affiliation listed in many states. For these offices sometimes the candidates running are listed on both the Republican and Democrat ballots for the primary. So you sometimes get a situation where the same candidate wins the primary for the Republican Party and the Democratic Party so their name appears twice on the general election (but without any party listed next to them).

Normally though you go in to vote in the primaries and there are between 1 and 5 candidates (usually around 1 or 2) for each of the offices. Many parties only have one person running for an office and sometimes they don't have anyone running at all. The winners of the primaries are the ones listed on the ballot for the actual election in November.

But how do you get listed on the ballot in the primaries?
The requirements are different in each state but they all work the same way. You go to the government offices of whatever county you live in (that's the level between local and state) and they give you a petition form. You need to get enough signatures from people within your voting district of people registered in your party to get on the ballot. Once you get enough signatures, you go to the office again and they put you on the ballot.

Some states have a requirement that for a party to have their candidate on the ballot in the regular election in November, they need to have enough people registered for that party.

When the election in November happens, the winners of each of the parties that had primary elections and who qualified to be on the ballot each appear with the party next to their name. The ballot is usually very long with some local, state, county, and federal offices all being elected at the same time. Oftentimes there will be only 1 option for an office as only 1 party nominated any candidates. Also for local offices or county offices there are sometimes no candidates listed. Almost every state lets you "write in" a candidate. You write the name of a person on a blank spot and fill in the little circle next to their name to vote for them.

Now the complicated bit: the president.
The political parties pick people who work or volunteer for them and have done a lot of work for them to be delegates.
They pick a number of delegates for each state but there is no reason for them to ensure a proportional number. They can pick whoever they want and however many people they want.

Sometime during the summer, each of the parties holds a "national convention" where all the delegates get together and actually vote to nominate someone for president from their party. Before this, the delegates declare publicly who they would vote for if they were picked to go to the convention. So when the primary elections happen for president, the voters actually are picking a delegate, not the president. The way ballots looked in my state had the name of the delegate and then who they said they would vote for if they went to the convention. The delegate who gets the most votes goes to the convention.

So the convention happens and the delegates all cast their votes. But remember that they don't have to vote for who they said they would. They are free to vote however they want. The parties also have something called "super delegates". These are people who the party says have the same voting power as a delegate and so can vote however they want and are never elected. For the Democrats these are usually party donors, current state governors, the Clintons, etc.

In the actual election for president in November, the party nominees are listed on the ballot. But for president it is not an election but an opinion poll. Each state is given a set number of electors by the Constitution and the actual people are chosen by each state legislatue in different ways. Usually they are career politicians but their names are basically never known.

After the election in November, the votes from the people are totalled. Then in December the electors of each state meet in their state's capital for a fancy dinner and they decide how they are going to vote. It is customary for all of the electors to cast their vote for whoever came in first in their state. But they do not have to. They each can vote for whoever they want (altho some states impose a fine of like $500 for doing this). The results of how the electors voted are then written down, certified, and send to Congress.

On January 6th, Congress meets and opens the results from each of the states and counts the votes of the electors. Back in the 1800s before the telegraph this would actually be when people found out who the president was, but nowadays we know on election night in November because each political party has someone at each polling place asking the volunteers counting the votes what the results are. They then text the next person higher up and then they text and then the results are known almost immediately.

The main lesson here is that no matter what the religious texts (the laws) say, if the ruling class want a material outcome (like armed men with military training always at the ready) they can often get it. Do not be fooled by legal fictions but also do not underestimate the power of having the secular clergy justify your actions can be on the masses. All is a tool.

i think it's important to read other things that go with it.
sakai wrote it as a polemic against a specific narrative common in the american left at the time. the context is important to sakai's workas many people nowadays misinterpret his work because they come to it in our new context.

some of its economic content is lacking but it is worth reading.
also do respect to sakai and don't become a keyboard warrior over his text, treating it like a religious doctrine to be prosletyzed. the way some people simply throw his text around like received wisdom is so irksome. they treat it like a speech from a videogame character instead of a polemic by an actual human being written in an important context.

i wish you an empowering read comrade. don't let it stay as words in your head but let it become actions.

There's also the "Kraut Space Magic" gun aka the G11.


The most overengineered gun perhaps ever in mass production. It literally picks up the bullet, rotates it, and then inserts it into the chamber to fire. And it uses caseless ammo for reasons far beyond human comprehension. It is magic because of how infrequently it jams.

It is also used by the UN troops sent by SEELE to invade Central Dogma in End of Evangelion.

the CIA's Deer Gun and FP-45 Liberator Pistols are American imperialism in the form of a gun but goddamnit if they are not prole as fuck.

The Liberator looks like it was made out of a soda can and the instructions inform you that after each shot you have to find a stick to eject the casing.

There isn't really a reason to do an "either or" here but a "yes and".
Both have happened in every successful socailist revolution.
I think that for many regular people, "tax the rich" is not as tainted with anti-communist propaganda as "seize the means of production". Taxing the rich does weaken them. Revolutions aren't built in a day comrades.

I also wanted to add that not Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, nor Mao came up with dialectical materialism. It was actually a guy called Dietzgen. No one reads him anymore but you can if you want. Lenin and Stalin quote him heavily since he's the first one to actually use the term.

You may also see similar things outside of Marxism which look quite a bit like dialectics. Structuralism does something really similar with it's "inverses" concept. I'm not a fan of dialectics since it feels a bit too idealist for me. Mechanical Materialism is more my style but it's nothing worth fighting over.