Those are absolutely beautiful. What a great gift.

The Vietnam essay exists already 😄 https://criticalresist.substack.com/p/how-vietnam-decolonized-and-what

Nice!

And patsocs don’t deserve an essay of their own lol

I disagree. You quite clearly have some very developed thoughts on them that I’d like to read more about and comprehend better, and I believe right-opportunists should be mercilessly opposed from the cradle to the grave.

This is well meaning critique, but I think you mashed two really good essays into something lesser than they could’ve been. I’d be way more interested in either a thorough dissection of the organisation principles of Ho Chi Minh and specifically about General Giáp and another essay carefully tearing down whatever passes for Marxism in the US with clearer evidence and more neatly tied together.

As somebody who knows very little about both the CPV and the Yankee pseudoleft I look forward to more of your writing on these topics.

I absolutely hate how hardware is made to be impossibly hard to repair nowadays while also incredibly expensive to replace in the Global South. Your month’s worth of minimum wage cellphone broke a button? Your options are either paying half the phone price to replace a piece half the size of the phone, or getting a new one.

The Fifth Republic predates the 1968 strikes by 10 years. Maybe you’re mistaking that for May 1958 in which De Gaulle led a coup that actually toppled the Fourth Republic to “prevent communists” after crises caused by the Algerian War of Independence led by the FLN. That one was a successful counter revolution, though I’m open to the idea that it was a close one if evidence of that is presented. Besides all that, there’s nothing to celebrate about the Fifth Republic still existing as a “victory”.

But on the 1968 strikes and election, Pompidou went from Prime Minister to president, and was from the same party as Dr Gaulle, as was the new Prime Minister de Murville. The conservative UDR also gained seats. I may not be very knowledgeable about cold war French history, but you’re really not helping your arguments with such easily debunked claims.

The government wasn’t toppled, they just did a snap election. That’s like saying the UK government was toppled when Theresa May called one back when she couldn’t Brexit.

Also, on that same election the communists lost chairs. This is nowhere close to a successful revolution.

I may have been too harsh and knee-jerky on you on my first reply, but it’s seriously very important to acknowledge our past failures and self-crit in order to find the correct path to revolution. In Brazil the Communist Party split specifically because the party was ossified and the faction that left/was expelled wanted to seek better paths. There’s no shame in admitting that what has been tried did not work.

Pretty cool, thanks comrade!

Name one successful socialist revolution in the West.

Often my issues with therapy is how much there’s little to be done, specially when they decide that “actually you should consult a psychiatrist”. There are sorts of problems that are too common, specially for disabled people, that could easily be solved by some intervention. But oftentimes the only solutions are individual, not because of therapy itself but rather because the social services for those are rather scarce or nonexistent.

The very concept of “healthcare insurance” is capitalist. Medical care is reduced to a commodity that can be valued monetarily and “bought” from hospitals or clinics. There’s nothing inherently commodifiable about individual healthcare services to the point that they get a price tag that later has to be covered by insurance, public or private. Contrast that with medicine which has a very specific and calculable labour value required to create it, though it’s actually quite low as patents and trademarks inflate prices.

Rather it’s much more in line with the development of an efficient healthcare system to have it be national and funded through tax or other state revenue-collection methods, and available to all citizens (and possibly non-citizens) without any sort of attached price tag. That also solves this problem of old people, chronically ill, disabled people or whichever sorts of people statistically require more medical help without negative impact.

And this is not some idealistic notion off the top of my head. In Brazil we have a national healthcare system that functions on an availablity and queue basis, without any “insurance” or price tag, funded through federal and state budget allocations from taxes. Sadly it’s underfunded due to the private insurance lobby and our horrible political situation, but it’s still leagues more accessible and egalitarian than whatever insurance system. I think Cuba works that way too.

One of the oldest and most recurrent communist demands is reduction of work shifts, you’d have time to play alright. Though lots of big budget video games nowadays are only possible due to massive exploitation of game workers, so games would be different due to different development cycles under socialism.

All revolutionary Marxist (and specifically Marxist-Leninist) parties should prepare themselves to operate in conditions of illegality eventually, which follows from seeking to seize power.

So, with that in mind, all parties should have at the very least an internal group focused on security, as in physical security in protests and such. Depending on the legal conditions this can include firearm security. There should also be militants in charge of understanding warfare, not only because of its analogues to militant politics but also because of the possibility of needing to put that understanding into practice.

But other than that, martial arts training and self defense courses are a great idea, but they shouldn’t only be for militants. One of the many social failures of capitalism is the seclusion and lack of hobbies or leisure for youth, particularly poor youth. If it’s possible with the party resources, having public gyms for training some sort of martial art would both materially and mentally help that audience while also enabling some combat experience for militants. And it can be relatively cheap too.

We should never be “above” any tactic, including combat training. Though training mobs of hooligans is not the wisest idea, rather it’d be more along the line of “defense personnel” for protecting civilians in protests and such. And always keep in mind that no amount of training will make anybody bulletproof.

Obviously if we start to consider this idea too seriously we hit a wall of trying to conjecture how such a hypothetical culture and society external to the stimulation would even work, given the extreme amount of cultural and worldview diversity in our own world.

But in my Earthly perspective of torture, I don’t believe not having lasting effects or trauma would be enough of a disqualifier. My own existence is quite a painful and unpleasant affair, primarily from things outside my control, and I don’t even have it anywhere near as bad as I could have. And I believe that to willingly put somebody in these worldly conditions without informed consent (as our worldly mind would have no worldly knowledge of the simulation) or means of stopping the experiment would count as torture.

I suppose that’s why “what if’s” like this and Last Thursdayism get such aggressive reactions from a lot of people. It’s either seen as invalidating (“what you went through didn’t actually happen”) or attributing a greater cause to suffering.

You might find It’s Hard to be a God or its adaptations interesting. I haven’t gotten around to reading or watching it yet, but it’s about an observer from advanced socialist society on a medieval backwards world.

Would be very poetic to read so many horrifying texts on torture from both perpetrators and victims only to come out of the simulation and try to argue that it is also, in fact, torture.

Hopefully I wouldn’t come out sounding like this git.

What should we do?

Jokes aside, it’s no coincidence that the main point of that book (obfuscated as it is through a lot of dialogue with organisations now on the dustbin of history), specially its final Chapter is about centering the party apparatus around a newspaper, then Iskra. “Where to begin” is a good place to, well, begin.

Regarding this specific situation, there’s not much a bunch of nerds on an internet forum can do, given most here can’t even read Filipino. But I find myself often wishing there was something like the “World News” community here but for interesting and insightful articles rather than necessarily being new stuff. Everything moves so fast and I tend to find a lot of articles about old but very relevant events that deserve to be shared and compiled. I also try my best to keep up to date with the English-language party newspapers I know to post them here.

Regarding the lack of Filipino backlash to that campaign, the leading communist party is in Protracted People’s War, so I doubt being an open communist or moderately critical of imperialism publicly is a safe endeavour.

Fantastic reply, thank you very much. I’ll see if I can get them a USB Mint for a test drive. Thanks!

El bloqueo ha llegado a lemmy. Great contribution lol.

What a spez move. Pre-emptively de-federating is just a bad move, no other way to look at it. They’re a very diverse group and generally much kinder than most lemmy users. At the very least you should’ve tested federation for a day or two to see how the interactions play out. But anybody here can go over there and see for themself how nice they can be even when disagreeing, which they do a lot among themselves.

Also where in the Code of Conduct does it say the only ideology allowed is liberalism? Going the way of Reddit with vague justifications and arbitrary decisions will make the administration a lot of profit some day, but there’s a reason people left that one.

communism good; capitalism bad; is that iffy?