It was an ultraleft deviation to be sure, but it also destroyed all sorts of such horrific, backward cultural institutions as foot binding. It was a social movement emerging from the particular contradictions of revolutionary China - which was recognised as going too far, and was ultimately reined in by other communists within the same society. And if your bar is low enough to call it "evil" then you must run out of adjectives to describe literally anything the US has ever done.

"How can the same thing happen to the same mode of production twice?"

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One of my top images of all time. Every detail perfect. The extended hand, Kim's wtf-face, the guy in the background's smile.

All that effort blowing up those two Malaysia Airlines planes and they still side with the world island, smdh

Wow, flamingos are way bigger than I thought

Wonder who they're voting for (prolly shrimp)

After viewing thousands of possible futures, the only timelines where Kamala wins are ones where she hands Dick Cheney an Infinity Cabinet Post and lets him turn half the Democrats into dust.

Killing God with the power of friendship

Bringing God to trial and sentencing him to death with the power of friendship

• Hungry Killinger
• Visceria Ghouland
• Robber Kage-em
• Mad-man Allblight
• Soylan Greenspan

Thank you, that means a lot to me!

I've never really written anything before, so it's a strange feeling to know someone out there is thinking about something I wrote, even just a snippet!

You've actually just inspired me to go back and make one small change I'd been thinking about, so if you take a look at that post again, I hope you'll enjoy the slightly different ending...

I think it's cool: a country that grew from nothing into a vast empire

Huh?????

It looked to me like America 200 years ago

Fucking what????!!

I wrote papers about China when I was still in primary school

Papers?? I assume he means something like 'essays', but from the rest of the interview I can easily imagine this person being arrogant enough to call a three-paragraph writing exercise he did when he was nine a "paper".

Either way, his understanding clearly has not advanced since then. I've never seen someone (who wasn't a paid propagandist) be so wrong, so succinctly about a country, especially one they supposedly lived in. This guy is a fucking idiot.

I can't see any way out except third world maoism, and that's a longshot

The ice cube melts from the outside in. Currently you're a single water molecule trapped in the center of the ice cube. You can't jiggle enough to melt the ice cube by yourself, all you can do is try to stay warm and slightly warm up your nearest neighbours.

As the contradictions sharpen in the periphery of the empire, the 'front line' will begin to retreat towards the core. Then the jiggling you've kept alive within yourself and maybe even spread to those around you might have a chance at forming the tiniest pocket of liquid. If enough other people are doing that, the pockets can eventually run together and start breaking the ice apart from the inside. If the water within and without can meet, work together and synchronize their movements, then the ice cube can finally be melted away into nothing.

Less metaphorically, there aren't enough people in the west who are in desperate enough conditions to be looking for an answer. Enough people are comfortable enough materially to be comfortable ideologically with the system's lies, so that a rigorously Marxist party cannot be built with broad support. This isn't going to change until the empire decays further and is handed some defeats by its external enemies. If you can do nothing else, keep reading theory and try to convince a handful of people around you. If you really want to prepare properly, you also need to become as strong and fit as you can. I'm offering this advice knowing I'm in the same situation as you and having just as much difficulty deciding on a course of action, but in the absence of a clear path forward all you can do is 1. improve yourself mentally and physically and 2. try to make more people communist.

This image should explain (my understanding of) the difference between surplus value and profit.

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Surplus value is the value of commodities produced beyond the equivalent value of commodities needed to produce a day of labor.

You can imagine a worker who could somehow teleport between jobs, spending exactly long enough in a bread factory to make their daily ration of bread, exactly long enough at a treatment plant to make their day's water, exactly long enough at a clothes factory to make up the "fraction" of wear and tear on their clothing for the day, exactly long enough at a power plant to produce their day's usage of electricity, etc...

If you add up all the time required to produce each of the commodites they need each day, then you would find the labor time required to produce one day of labor - the value of a day of labor. The special characteristic of labor as a commodity is that it produces value, so that while it takes X amount of value to produce a day of labor, that day of labor then produces X+Y amount of value. The extra value produced, Y, is called the surplus value.

Appropriation of surplus value is the basis of capitalism, but not all the surplus value is necessarily appropriated - unless the worker is being paid an absolute minimum subsistence wage (which, to be sure, the capitalists are always trying to force them down to) then they will also receive some portion of their own surplus value that they were forced to produce.

But the bulk of the surplus value goes to the capitalist, in the form of the commodities produced over the course of the day of labor. This is then eaten away at by the cost of materials and upkeep for the tools and machinery (as required for production of the specific commodity turned out by their factory) and then modulated by the price of their specific commodity on the market as affected by supply and demand at the particular moment they try to sell it, to result in the final profit.

The capitalists are thus always trying to increase both their share of the surplus value relative to the worker's share, and the absolute amount of surplus value produced in a working day - the simplest tools of which are, respectively, paying workers less per hour, and making them work more hours - in order to make an even greater quantity of products while paying out the same wages.

However, this runs into the problem that for every additional unit of commodity produced without paying additional wages, there is relatively less money in the market to buy your additional commodity. So, with every capitalist trying to create more surplus value without paying more wages, the laws of supply and demand force the price of their commodities to decrease further and further until they can no longer sell them for a profit. This creates a crisis of overproduction, which happened continuously in every industrial economy throughout the 19th century (until the discovery that you can send your gunboats around the world to force open new markets and dispose of your excess commodities there) and even after that point recurred frequently, as described for instance in The Grapes of Wrath.

So the crucial thing to take away is, while surplus value is necessary for profit, at any time there is a particular ratio between them that the capitalists are working their absolute hardest to erode away until the whole system is so choked with commodities that they can no longer be sold - until the surplus value can no longer be realized as profit. The obvious inefficiency of this is why communist nations can post such staggering rates of industrial growth, as manufactured goods can be allocated based on rational central planning instead of having to go through the anarchy of the market - surplus value can be realized directly into increased industrial production.

It's free protest votes

It's specific, but Quorn nuggets are objectively superior to chicken nuggets in every way.

Better taste, better texture, no gristle, easier to cook all the way through, zero (well okay, much less) chance of food poisoning.

Even if you're not a vegetarian there's simply no reason to eat chicken nuggets any more, they're fully obsolete.

Absent Without Organic Life

They get allocated, reallocated, and spent elsewhere

They don't. You can't tag a particular dollar and follow it as it leaves a taxpayer's account, goes into a government account, gets allocated to a particular item of the budget, and then gets spent out again into the economy. When a dollar is taxed, it basically goes into a furnace and disappears. Separately, dollars are conjured out of thin air and sent into the economy by the government.

The amount of dollars thrown in the furnace in a given day are tallied, sure. But that doesn't determine the amount of dollars the government can create, it only informs it. The government can create as many dollars as it likes at will.

Millennium Challenge, the perfect dessert after a good meal