Damn I feel like I’m nitpicking, but

Trump, no matter how hard he tries, will not be able to fully kill the Proletarian movement, as the reindustrialization of the US required to wage a world war will necessarily provide a catalyst for the regeneration of the industrial Proletariat; the most revolutionary segment of the Proletariat.

Is this implying that the US’ lack of proletarian movement is due to a lack of an industrial base? And is the industrial proletariat the most revolutionary segment as a general rule, or is this particular to the US, or some other option? The most revolutionary segment of the proletariat has been service workers

Hence, the more Trump embraces Bonapartism, the more fully realized American Bonapartism becomes, the more Trump creates the conditions for a viable American Bolshevism

By American Bolshevism, we aren’t referring to something like an Israeli ‘Marxism’ or an ‘Israeli left’ - correct?

People do not simply passively experience history; history is made by people, but not in conditions of their choosing.

I’ve read the above quote in full context, in reference to Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte - this statement would be meant for Mr. Trump and his ilk, not for ourselves

While the Democratic Party deserves credit where it is due for passing such historic legislation, this does not ultimately change the fact that these progressive policies are an exception to the rule. The New Deal had explicit carve-outs designed to keep racialized peoples in poverty. The Democratic Party fought hard to maintain racial segregation until it was essentially forced to pass the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts by mass movements.

Thank God we are able to discuss this more openly as Marxists, I cannot stand pretending that presidents like FDR or Kennedy or Carter were good people or even ‘progressive’

All these “progressive” Democrats really do is help the larger party launder its image.

But why would we even want a “return to normal”? The “old normal” is precisely what produced Trump. The “old normal” wasn’t good for most people. The “old normal” was never sustainable. The conditions we currently find ourselves in are the results of that “old normal.” There is no salvation to be found in the old status quo, nor in the current one. What we require is a real movement which seeks to abolish the current state of things.

Agree and agree

The story of Trump’s 2024 election victory is not so much a story of growth, so much as it’s a story of consolidation. Even though Trump lost the 2020 election, the high vote counts of both he and Biden were, at the time, speculated to be an anomaly, as the necessity of mail-in voting created by the pandemic allowed both candidates to reach more voters than during a regular election. With the passage of the 2024 election however, we can see that Trump’s 2020 vote total was not a fluke, but, in actuality, was the emergence of a political formation which Trump began constructing in 2016. The 2024 election served as an affirmation of the vitality of the formation Trump has built.

Along with the best analysis of the increase in American Latino vote I’ve seen thus far, I would like to point to the emphasized sentences above as extremely relevant

Russia can go wherever they want and the problem won’t be resolved. It’s not about what countries are involved in Ukraine, it’s about why countries feel the need to go there in the first place. Ukraine, like Haiti, Syria, and Sudan - to name a few more - is a site of inter-capitalist rivalry

You can get peace - sure - but the Ukrainian economy will be subjugated to whoever the ‘victor’ is. You can argue that economic integration reduces conflict and wars, but what will remain is a sort of neo-colonial relationship; or a dependency of sorts. That’s what I have an issue with.

But that is the only realistic outcome - that exact economic dependency on one power or another (whether that be the US, the EU, or even Russia, or even a mixture, say, for instance, the EU+US or EU+Russia)

There are no liberationary movements in Ukraine to my knowledge, just a reactionary military regime where political rights have been greatly reduced, even by liberal standards for governance. It is exceptionally rare that a country caught between two capitalist rivals gets the ability to form their own sovereign and independent liberation

Philosophy should not be used to justify regular human actions, and non-scientists should not expect their crank-adjacent theories to be taken seriously in the respective science communities. We don’t need awful people running around calling themselves ‘solipsists’ to ‘explain’ their behavior, and we do not need Marxist-Leninists and Trotskyists popping their heads into debates about the Big Bang Theory or whether electrons exist

this is definitely controversial, you got that down

you’re arguing for something extremely non-conventional among philosophers themselves - without sufficient arguments to make anyone believe you. That doesn’t mean you’re wrong, it just means people won’t take you as seriously

one thing i would say, where you would likely agree, is that most people calling themselves Marxist are not well-versed enough to argue for their Marxist or Marx-influenced philosophy - if Lenin wasn’t confident in his Marxism without starting to understand Hegel’s Greater Logic… I think we all know what I’m implying here

What you’re arguing for here sounds like something that requires several months of studying philosophers from their own works. You can go even further and argue something like Derrida, that maybe we’ve all been reading philosophers who misread their contemporaries who misread their contemporaries and so on and so forth.

This isn’t something I myself am well-versed enough to do, so all I can do is wish you luck on this one

i recall C. Derick Varn making a similar point and it’s mostly true. that’s why i’m personally annoyed when people still do the “right-wingers are stupid” bit

diamonds, so i can disprove the labor theory of value like a boss, epic style

i personally thought the most common form of idealism was summed up as this: “humans cannot perceive reality perfectly, they perceive things to their human limit and see appearances of things”

or, alternatively: “humans have experiences that trascend humanity itself and can’t be fully understood by humans”

For Marx in particular, he saw any theory divorced from practical experience as a slipperly slope towards idealism - I’m still working through this argument myself, though, and I believe I misunderstood his point. I’m not very strong on my Young Hegelian critiques, truthfully

The bird flu? yeah they tend to do that

Rosa Luxembourg would probably disagree with me here and claim capitalism has a tendency towards its own collapse under the weight of its contradictions. For the moment, I do not share this viewpoint; I believe capitalism can only end by workers’ self-conscious activity towards that aim and towards their own abolition.

There is no limit to accumulation itself (=> profit), but there is a law of diminishing returns, so to speak

Profit itself can trend towards infinity, but the rate at which it is extracted has a tendency to fall; in theory, a low rate of profit can continue for several centuries towards that $$$

In practice, however, we have to consider that war (and other means) can contribute to a destruction of capital; that unequal trade relations exist; that climate catastrophe is on the horizon; that humans cannot live forever; and so on.

tl;dr - assuming humans live forever, there is nothing setting a limit on profit itself

i think bordiga would be cool with it

read hegel, play disco elysium. play disco elysium, read marx

hegel’s revolutionary plasm

\\

“In the dark times, should the stars also go out?”

damn so im not the only one who read some Camus recently? i’m not even an existentialist, i just find the work comforting

UnitedHealthcare is so awful I have to defend ABA

but don’t they already have perfectly functioning drones for surveillance anyways? i thought it was a mix of that and ‘Stingray’-type devices. Google and cell providers for triangulation and geolocation, or that thing where they find all devices/users in a given area and uncover identities for possible ‘suspects’

you’re not paranoid at all (well, i sure hope i’m not encouraging any sort of delusion in the event you are), this is fairly common, esp. given all the protests and the recent high-profile case

i say the odds are 40:60 you like it

Question. Do you use, or have you ever used tumblr? This will help answer your question and I cannot tell you why. Your honesty is important.

Secular leader who turned from a social-democratic stance into a more gradually pro-privatization stance as she gained more power; alleged chemical attacks; has said something about Russia; thought of as disproportionately wealthy compared to constituents without solid proof; silly photos leaked

I don’t think there’s anything more unifying for veterans than shit talking the VA, honestly. Great intentions, awful execution.

That aside, I don’t have the time to check rn, but is that speech from the guy from that one documentary “National Bird”?

Also, dark humor from a bygone era:

• Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4taggCYDGUE
• Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMq2uLPZe5s