I suppose I should say “radlib”, but as this post shows he’s clearly against an actual organized revolution.

Pointing out the problems of the system is still well within the bounds of the leftward edge of liberalism, as long as the solution given shepherds people back into the fold of nonresistance. Electoralists who insist that Bernie or AOC or whoever could fix the problems of the US, if only they could get some kind of New Deal through that danged Congress, are playing the same game. As are environmentalists who cry about climate change but but don’t connect it to the fundamental mechanics of capitalism and never go beyond individual acts of defiance. And they don’t even have to be doing it cynically, they just have to be unable or unwilling to see beyond the limits of their current understanding, as imposed on them by the material conditions of their life. Such as, the life of a millionaire rockstar.

Charitably, one could go so far as to call him a utopian socialist, but that still doesn’t mean anything if he doesn’t investigate any further into the real conditions of the world. All he can do is idly daydream and “imagine” a better world without suggesting any kind of next step or concrete plan to create a better world - indeed, the people who are actually trying to do something are the subject of ridicule. And more than that, someone can listen to Imagine, daydream about a better world, be satisfied with how good they are for wishing the world was a better place, and then go straight back out into capitalist society with an untroubled conscience. Like, Imagine came out 53 year ago, the official youtube upload from 2016 alone has 306 million views - how many of those people did it set off on the path of communist revolution?

I don’t want this to feel like I’m bashing you for liking the song, if it’s meaningful to you then cool, it has a good sound and the lyrics do conjure an objectively good world, plus by being here you’re already reached a far more radical level than the vast majority of westerners. But it actually has no content beyond what can be recuperated into the system that created it, especially in the context of the rest of his work and his cultivated hippie persona.

“Imagine” is the most perfect distillation of liberal philosophical idealism, i.e. the notion that the world’s problems are caused by people just having wrong ideas and if everyone could simply ‘imagine’ a peaceful world it would happen, rather than problems being the inevitable outcomes of current material conditions as determined by the dominant economic system.

Would you say Ukraine was “preparing for a possibly (sic)” when its Nazi special forces were creating Hitlerjugend-style child soldier training camps?

Damn, if the Ukrainians had your tactical insight they might’ve won by now!

This is what happens when you get your shells from strange women lying in ponds

Should’ve taken a left turn

Reminder that for all the propaganda about communists ‘not valuing human lives’, the death toll of the Soviet space program vs the US is 4 to 15.

If you include accidents in training, the ratio is 6 to 24.

The US was always the one engaged in the ‘human waves’ style of space exploration.

Huh, neat

Yes. China is controlled by the Communist Party of China, who maintain an unbreakable grip on the commanding heights of the economy - energy, utilities, infrastructure, steel, finance etc. State-owned enterprises are some of the largest companies in the country, and hence also some of the largest in the world.

Foreign capitalists were invited to invest in China starting in the 80s, in order to bring in the technology and capital (tools, machines and money) that China was sorely lacking. This unfortunately led to several of the problems typical to capitalist economies - uneven development between the cities and countryside, increases in wealth inequality, the strengthening of the national capitalist class and the spread of liberal (pro-capitalist) ideas - but through the whole process, and unlike in the USSR, the CPC maintained total political control and didn’t allow the capitalists to dictate policy.

It’s true that China appeared to go quite far in a liberal direction, including by joining the WTO; around the turn of the millennium, the US and the rest of the capitalist world assumed that China would soon liberalize completely, both economically and politically, and they’d be able to break it open and feast on the insides like they did with the USSR. Instead, since then, and especially since the appointment of Xi Jinping as President, China has been moving, more or less rapidly but seemingly inexorably, towards more outright socialist policies. The result of the swing to the right and now back to the left is that China has had one of the longest and fastest sustained periods of economic development in human history.

In short, no capitalist economy run by and for the capitalist class could ever have made these achievements. Only an ideologically committed and politically dominant communist party would be able to manage an economy this way, wielding the capitalists as tools to improve the productive forces and raise their people out of poverty while setting the stage for the transition to socialism.

Edit: here is a long essay, China Has Billionaires, on the same subject, which is well worth the read

In a weird twist of etymological fate, they both come from the same root.

‘Burger’ obviously comes from ‘Hamburger’, which is named that not because it has ham in it but because it was the regional dish of Hamburg, imported to the US by German settlers along with such USian cultural icons as beer and pretzels and the Protestant Work Ethic. Hamburg uses the German suffix ‘burg’, originally meaning castle or fort but later just meaning ‘town’; that word has the same Proto-Indo-European root as the English words ‘borough’ and ‘burgh’ (e.g. Pittsburgh, Edinburgh) and the French ‘bourg’, as in Luxembourg.

So ‘bourgeoisie’ is French for, basically, ‘townies’, because as they were merchants and workshop owners, the towns were where the bourgeoisie lived. And the English equivalent word would be ‘burgher’, thus burgers the food (and ‘burgers’ the slang for USians) could be directly translated as ‘bourgeoisie’. And therefore the US was simply always doomed to be the strongest bastion of world capitalism!

So this will stop fascists who like fascists shit from facing the slightest repercussion to their public image, but I assume the back end will still be open for scraping by feds who want to compile lists of dissidents.

Holy fuck, just crouching there in the open! What was going through the third guy’s head? (Besides the bullet of course)

If his response to two guys getting owned right in front of him is to just sit there fully exposed in every direction, I’m surprised he even a brain in there to hit.

Physicists:

Yeah same, the first time I saw it I obviously had no clue but when I rewatched it later I was like YOU!!

Six month lawn mowers

Six months leaf blowers

No I have never heard bird song, why do you ask?

This was one of the first things I saw on the path to becoming an actual communist that supports AES and understands how completely I was lied to as a westerner, so it’s a subject close to my heart.

Unlimited genocide on imperial propagandists

MARRY 👏 YOUR 👏 TRANS 👏 VIZIER

Mr. Boatarelli!

Nothing productive to contribute, just a meme