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ComradeRat [he/him, they/them]

@ ComradeRat @hexbear.net

Posts
5
Comments
169
Joined
6 yr. ago

  • The sheer historical revisionism that the anti-communist left does whenever the Black Panthers are mentioned!

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  • In Vietnam, we (western Allies) helped put the French back in power after the Vietnamese had almost kicked the Japanese out

    In China, we backed anti-communists (and to a less extent the communists) while we took Japan (and helped quash communist resistance to the emperor there!), its island colonies and half of Korea (where we also crushed revolution and installed a puppet government). After the war, we continued backing the anti-communists in China, and we continue backing them to this day from our island bases in Japan and Taiwan.

    The Soviet Union did repeatedly request western support or alliance against fascism. The directives from Moscow—in the 20s early 30s "social democrats are the left wing of fascism"; from around 33 to Molotov-Ribbentrop "unite with the social democrats and left liberals against fascism"; from 39 to Barbarossa again "social democrats are the left wing of fascism"; and from Barbarossa to the end of the war again "unite with the liberals"—are a large part of why the cpusa took their positions.

    The Soviet leadership thought these diplomatic maneuverings were necessary to preserve soviet power. I dont think they were "wrong" in the sense that "if i were in their position without the benefit of like 80 years' hindsight i'd do better." But viewed from the present with the benefit of hindsight, imo the molotovribbentrop pact and the calls to unite behind bourgeois governments were bad decisions that ultimately strengthened imperialisms chains. I think the ussr shoulda kept the "fash and socdems and liberals are all bourgeois enemies" stance throughout the whole period instead of zigzagging.

    Like to start with, the Nazis were a paper tiger at first, that only grew big because people (French and Brits 1933-38, Soviets 1938-41) got scared and gave it fangs and claws. If the soviets hadnt made the pact with the nazis, they wouldnt have been able to wage their war across europe nearly as well, much less Barbarossa (Barbarossa was largely supplied by stockpiled soviet fuel). They would have sputtered out and fallen on their own, because their economy (like Italy and Japan's) were in crisis and only held together by plunder, or tried to invade with far, far less resources from no soviet trade.

    It also becomes very obvious, viewing western diplomatic records, that they had no real intention of intervening unless it looked like the soviets were winning and they needed to step in to prevent the spread of communism. Thats why they kept to Africa and Italy at first, despite Stalin's repeated requests for them to open a second front against the Germans.

    As Stalin stops making those requests as much or as desperately, is when they actually sent boots on the ground, bc if they didnt, the soviets would have occupied all of Germany and at minimum Greece, Italy and France would have communist revolutions. Stalin, for his part, honouring his alliance with the bourgeois states, called for the french, greek and italian communists to abandon their revolution and join with the liberal government. The greeks refused; and British soldiers shot them.

    My view is that neither of these alliances (except the lendlease) benefited the USSR or the world in the long run, and they were fully unnecessary for the USSR (or other communist movements) to win the war (again, except possibly the lendlease, but even that is debated by the people that study it). The soviets would have been better served to take a strong "revolution" stance from like 1935 and support domestic armed resistance to fascism from 1939 onwards than to sell oil and other raw materials to the nazis.

    But again, if I were there in Moscow in august 1939 or June 1941 or whenever with limited information idk what i'd think

    Wrt CPUSA they should have at minimum absolutely opposed any annexationist goals and pushed for greater economic and military support for both the ussr and to armed resistance to fascism (and should have pushed this support to be entirely rather than only partially free), including anticolonial resistance to the vichy french government in their colonies. They should have used strikes, protests, etc, to push the USA to do more, or expose the gaps between their rhetoric of liberation and policy of domination to agitate and pull more into the movement. Instead they wholeheartedly ate up and supported the governments propaganda about the US being a force for good and actively opposed workers' job actions in favour of supporting the war effort and kickstarting the modern military industrial complex and giving the US global hegemony and a fig leaf of democracy.

  • The sheer historical revisionism that the anti-communist left does whenever the Black Panthers are mentioned!

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  • The cp organisers in the cio sold out the proletariat to support the US's war for hegemony over the capitalist bloc in exchange for some table scraps for (primarily white) american workers. And then they got macarthy'd for their troubles. Less successful at building a communist revolution than the panthers imo; they fumbled a potentially revolutionary moment, whereas the panthers did probably the best anyone could hope for in a non-revolutionary period

  • What's everyone's opinions on letting minors above a certain age do some part-time labor?

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  • A general prohibition of child labor is incompatible with the existence of large-scale industry and hence an empty, pious wish. Its realization -- if it were possible -- would be reactionary, since, with a strict regulation of the working time according to the different age groups and other safety measures for the protection of children, an early combination of productive labor with education is one of the most potent means for the transformation of present-day society. [Marx - Critique of the Gotha Programme]

    In Capital Marx explains at length:

    As meager as the education clauses in the Factory Acts generally seem, they did make elementary schooling into a condition of child labor. Their success showed for the first time that it is possible to combine education and gymnastics with manual labor, and thus that is possible to combine manual labor with education and gymnastics. The factory inspectors soon learned (while interviewing schoolmasters) that even though the factory children spent half as much time in the classroom as the regular students, they were learning just as much—often even more. “This can be accounted for by the simple fact that, with only being at school for one half the day, they are always fresh, and nearly always ready and willing to receive instruction. The system on which they work, half manual labour and half school, renders each employment a rest and a relief to the other; and consequently, both are far more congenial to the child, than would be the case were he kept constantly at one. It is quite clear that, a boy who has been at school all morning cannot (in hot weather particularly), cope with one who comes fresh and bright from his work.” We find further supporting evidence in Senior’s 1863 speech at the Social Science Congress in Edinburgh. Among other things, he demonstrates here that the monotonous, unproductive, overlong school day of children in the middle and more advanced classes adds to the teacher’s workload for no good reason: “We are employing labour on the part of our masters, and time, health, and energy on the part of our children, not only fruitlessly, but absolutely mischievously.” From the factory system, as Robert Owen shows in detail, sprouts the bud of the education of the future. Productive labor will be combined with education and gymnastics for all children over a certain age, not only because this is a way to increase social production, but also because it is the only way to produce fully developed human beings.

    The polytechnic and agronomical schools that arose spontaneously on the foundation of large-scale industry were one moment in this process of transformation. Another was the “ecole d’enseignement professionnel,” where workers’ children have received some instruction in technology and also learned how to use different instruments of production. If the Factory Act, that minimal first concession extracted from capital, managed only to combine elementary education with factory labor, there can be no doubt that when the working class seizes political power, as it inevitably will, technological instruction of both the practical and theoretical kind will win a place in workers’ schools.

  • Mushoku Tensei author:“the institution of slavery itself doesn’t seem like it can be outright called evil”

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  • The episode of pokemon where the lead construction worker cancels the dam project bc it would kill the digletts is one of my favourite episodes of anime ever. In addition to post-scarcity ecological scifi, pokemon is a world where a construction worker can choose to veto a dam

    Toriyama definitely doesnt seem to like real estate guys or militaries (and he loves nature), but lacks the theoretical basis to be more consistent or imagine a non-capitalist world, hence why Bulma is a billionaire's daughter. He reminds me sort of Tolkien in this way.

  • So WW3 is definitely going to happen in our lifetimes right? CW: vent

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  • Three wars in one: (1) the Second Great Interimperialist War between the British, French, and Americans on one side and the Axis on the other; (2) the defence of Soviet power from fascist invasion; (3) popular (often communist led) opposition to fascism

    Western ally boots on the ground is a large part of what kept the Greek, Italian and French communusts from winning and is what allowed them to prevent the red army from marching to the atlantic. The western allies were never the "good guys".

  • So WW3 is definitely going to happen in our lifetimes right? CW: vent

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  • Atomic war is inevitable. It will destroy half of humanity: it is going to destroy immense human riches. It is very possible. The atomic war is going to provoke a true inferno on Earth. But it will not impede Communism.

  • Bringing civilisation to the savage continent of Europe

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  • I HATE THE LINEARBANDKERAMIKS I HATE THE TREEKILLERS AND THEIR MESOPOTAMIAN BACKERS I MISS THE MESOLITHIC FORESTS AND HUNTERGATHERERS

    But yeah, the wikipedia page is missing a few so and its actually around 10-15 cradles of agriculture, none in Europe

    Closest would be the proto-indoeuropeans domestication of horses and proto-uralic's domestication of reindeers, but those were both the results of copying and adapting agricultural methods of their neighbours, so really truly independent cradles of the invention of agriculture

    Though, to play devils advocate, its plausible that the early Europeans had developed fishfarming of some kind; pre-~4,000 Europe has a lotta question marks around it bc of the sea level changes (southern Sumeria by the Gulf has the same issue facing archaeological investigations)

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    Bulletins and International News Discussion from January 19th to January 25th, 2026 - Squaring the Arctic Circle

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  • Canada preparing for posible USA invasion

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  • Lotsa bolsheviks said the same about Germany. Thankfully lenin set them straight, or the ussr never woulda existed.

  • Canada preparing for posible USA invasion

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  • Canada preparing for posible USA invasion

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  • You should still be fragging officers. The marxist position in an interimperialist war is revolutionary defeatism, not rallying behind our imperialists

  • Canadian military models response to hypothetical American invasion

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  • Albertans dont think some liberals are good, they believe them all to be ontologically evil daemons bent on destroying their freedom to bear arms and guzzle oil.

    Especially if theyre named trudeau.

    Imo if carney keeps tearing up enough of trudeaus policies (and the tories keep failing provincially and federally) we'll see the tories split into "progressive conservatives" who support the liberal party federally and the new progressive conservative party in alberta, and "outright fash" who will support the tories and ucp

  • Mark Carney essentially said that the liberal rules based world order was a convenient lie everyone went along with because American hegemony opened up markets and sea lanes for them.

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  • Basically "we europeans and canadians should abandon the american hegemony and make pals with china (but not russia they are evil) bc america is aiming a gun at our heads"

    Fuck we are in interesting times

  • Canadian military models response to hypothetical American invasion

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  • If carney govt did this, at least a third of the albertan seperatists would become lifelong carney stans and their movement would deflate overnight

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    Bulletins and International News Discussion from January 19th to January 25th, 2026 - Squaring the Arctic Circle

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  • Its a very interesting speech, though I'm now even more sure the US will invade us lmao

    This part in particular is huge imo In 1978, the Czech dissident Václav Havel, later president, wrote an essay called The Power of the Powerless. And in it, he asked a simple question: How did the communist system sustain itself?

    And his answer began with a greengrocer. Every morning, this shopkeeper places a sign in his window: "Workers of the world, unite!" He doesn't believe it. No one does. But he places the sign anyway to avoid trouble, to signal compliance, to get along. And because every shopkeeper on every street does the same, the system persists.

    Not through violence alone, but through the participation of ordinary people in rituals they privately know to be false.

    Havel called this "living within a lie." The system's power comes not from its truth but from everyone's willingness to perform as if it were true. And its fragility comes from the same source: when even one person stops performing — when the greengrocer removes his sign — the illusion begins to crack.

    Friends, it is time for companies and countries to take their signs down.

    For decades, countries like Canada prospered under what we called the rules-based international order. We joined its institutions, we praised its principles, we benefited from its predictability. And because of that we could pursue values-based foreign policies under its protection.

    We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false. That the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient. That trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.

    This fiction was useful. And American hegemony, in particular, helped provide public goods: open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security and support for frameworks for resolving disputes.

    So, we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals. And we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality.

    This bargain no longer works.

    The anticommunism is annoying and expected, and the reason its there is obvious (porky is more scared of fascism than communism as always). But outright calling the whole rules based international order a fiction to serve american hegemony that canada supported bc it benefitted us is pretty new i think?

    Like others who follow the news more closely can correct me, but has any canadian head of state called the US a global hegemon before? Is hegemon even a word politicians in the west usually use? I associate it more with global south and especially chinese politicians.

    My impression is very much that carneys trying to hitch canada onto the winning horse (china). If europe and canada had any geopolitical sense theyd stop backing ukraine immediately imo, if only to stockpile weapons to fight the yanks (and ideally to restore ties with russia) But the speech is like "we epically supported ukraine" so it sounds like he wont try that

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    Bulletins and International News Discussion from January 12th to January 18th, 2026 - Abolish ICE - "C"OTW: USA

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  • It is a canadian pasttime to betray our hegemon for the newly rising hegemon

  • bourgeois-enforced social reproduction of proletarian anti-intellectualism lowkey got me feeling hopeless

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  • The random people ive talked to leafletting on one of the big avenues have been far, far more receptive than the supposedly literate, intellectual students at my university tbh

    The guy most supportive of leaving nato ive talked to was this homeless guy who had some weird ideas about the population of china (and the world) and effects of nuclear war, but also told me and the comrade i was with that NATO was an aggressive alliance trying to start ww3. He was very receptive to the party's position of "leave nato, cut military spending, build houses"

    At university is where we get all the "communism = 1984 no food free stuff is against human nature" takes and demands to debate abc historical event or xyz theoretical issue

  • Fearing Midterm Loss, Trump Once Again Says 'We Shouldn't Even Have an Election'

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  • Yes please destroy all the release valves on the class struggles tension

  • remember the "how many times do you think of the roman empire thing"

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  • I am always thinking about how much i hate Rome. Unless i'm thinking about my hatred for Uruk instead. Or my hatred of the linearbandkeramik treekillers.