If you're willing to give the us government even a shred of forgiveness despite constantly proving they're completely undemocratic, you should look into how Chinese governance actually works and see why the CPC has such high approval ratings from the population.
zedcell
Me when my government bans a historically popular app: those Chinese ain't democratic like us!
If your material conditions aren't basically forcing you to always try and find a way out (when you've already gained the beginnings of communist consciousness), you might just be struggling with the fact that your own life isn't really that bad, and slipping into old habits.
Keep reading Marxist theory and developing your class consciousness and killing the little bourgeois-self in your head trying to commandeer your brain.
Starmer and the rest of Labour besides a few good eggs deserve no respect.
Obviously this doesn't mean the press don't have a distorted way of presenting Labour relative to how they presented the Tory govs failings.
I'd rather the British public lose all hope in a future with any of the current political offerings than hold out hope for a neoliberal Labour party that are out of their depth. The sooner the farce and sham bourgeois democracy is realised for what it is by the masses the better. No more managed decline.
I think it's recognition as an equal being on equal footing worthy of equal respect, not as an object of domination. In that equality the master can recognise themselves unalienated, and see themselves as a person worthy of respect in their own right. What worth is the respect gained from a slave who you dominate mentally and physically? It's an incomplete recognition in its own right that doesn't see the master as the full human they are as well.
Losurdo's "Class Struggle" talks a lot about the multiplicity of class struggles through this lense.
Happy to be corrected on the above by any Hegel pros.
One thing to note is that machinery does not impart value onto the things they produce because they can produce so many things for a relatively low fixed cost. Marx equates the infinitesimal value imparted by machinery to that of the forces of nature. This is an important part of why the exchange value of goods produced by machinery drops dramatically.
Zero possibility that this friend lied?
Some people love to lie especially if it gets a rise out of people. "Defectors" including the likes of Yeonmi Park from the DPRK also are financially incentivised to lie. I know people that lie about shit in the UK to make things sound worse than it is, and they will swear up and down it's true after being called out on it.