Federation has been great for me developing better internet habits. Since every other post is directly or indirectly about federation, I spend less time scrolling though this site. Which is good, I’m still here quite a bit I really needed to cut back.

I think you’re overthinking this. Literally just say “I’m a communist”, that’s gonna weed out pretty much everyone you wouldn’t want to get with anyway.

(Just a clarification comrade - and I could be wrong, I’m doing this from memory - but I think the 100 million number is genocide across all of the western hemisphere from 1492. The figure I’ve seen for just what was contained the present USA is around 10 million. Doesn’t make it any less evil of course, death to America, but just wanted to clarify that for posterity)

Exactly. We should not take this at face value.

I attended a Christian university in the early 00s. Obviously not a representative sample size but guys around me used the f-word slur like it was going out of style. And while a bunch of white Christian college guys are gonna use that word a lot more, it’s use was still fairly common among other people I knew.

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If you are actually interested in learning about the event and you are skeptical if this book, then you should look at Qiao Collective’s reading list: https://www.qiaocollective.com/education/tiananmenreadinglist

One more, because I don’t think anyone else posted it, is Qiao Collective’s reading list on the e event. It’s a lot of reading but the sources are pretty good: https://www.qiaocollective.com/education/tiananmenreadinglist

His interview with Steve Grumbine on the Macro & Cheese podcast is excellent. I think his own podcast is unfocused and meandering as other people have said but I do think he understands theory pretty well. I think he would do a lot better with a different format i.e. a podcast with 1 or 2 other hosts he has good chemistry with.

Mostly correct but I want to point that China does depend on the US for food. I mean I’m sure it’s something the CPC thinks about a lot and I assume they have a plan to reduce dependency but at the moment they import quite a bit of food from the US.

I’m not used to the federation thing yet, I saw this comment and assumed sarcasm, forgot there were dipshits out there that actually think this and that Adrian Zenz is a “reliable source”.

I am on a quest to find the best Marx biography myself. Haven’t found it yet, seems like there isn’t one definitive one out there. Michael Heinrich has apparently written a great one but he’s only done one of three volumes (or the others haven’t been translated into English yet, I don’t remember).

As an aside, I’m sitting with my dad right now. He has CNBC on and they’re talking about the new unemployment numbers and their expectations for the economy. I have a background in finance so I understand what they’re talking about. But since I’m a Marxist, it’s a bit like being an atheist and walking into a Pentecostal Sunday service where they’re talking about some literal interpretation of the Book of Revelation and then they start speaking in tongues. It’s all just so ridiculous.

Glad you’re here! And fuck those sinophobic reddit nerds.

This is tough to hear, but fair.

I don’t get why everyone here’s shitting on Apple specifically. When’s the last time a major Android phone company made replaceable batteries? A decade?

Marx never sat in a self-driving car

Marx, like every other person alive when he was, probably never thought about a self-driving car because regular-ass cars hadn’t been invented yet.

But you know what Marx thought (and wrote) about a lot? Technology. In the first volume of Capital, he outlines how the very technologies we develop are part of the superstructure and reflect the needs of the current mode of production. In his excellent podcast series Reading Capital With Comrades, Derek Ford uses the white noise machine as an example. The capitalist economy doesn’t really care about noise pollution any more than it cares about air and water pollution so workers are forced to just deal with it. We also have a premium on sleep because we all get worked to death and capitalism loves to take ever increasing amounts of our waking hours. So along comes the white noise machine. Something that, instead of solving the problems of noise and letting workers get more sleep, just allows them to cope with the situation and get to work.

So in that sense, the self-driving car is absolutely an innovation of capitalism. It doesn’t solve the problem of us destroying ever more land so everyone above a certain income level can have a quarter-acre of land and a “house” made of particle board and oil-based products. It doesn’t put automation to uses that allow for more productivity in the service of human flourishing. Nope. In fact, I guarantee you once self-driving cars become ubiquitous white collar workers will be expected to work the same number of hours in the office AND in the car to and from the office on top of that; and blue collar workers will have to watch ads or something. They’re not actually going to improve the quality of life, they will actually make things worse but more profitable for capital as they will be able to take over even more of our waking hours.

Marx saw that under socialism (and only under socialism), technology and automation could be unleashed to enhance our lives by making us more productive and thus allowing us to work less. Hell, even Keynes figured we’d have 20 hour work weeks by now. But what Keynes didn’t understand and Marx did is that only if the workers control the advancement of tech, can it be used to make our lives better.

If you gave people the choice of either working 5 hours and taking a bus, or working 10 hours but getting a heckin’ cool Muskmobile death trap, who would choose the latter other than the most bazinga-brained labor aristocrats who would rather die than sit next to a worker on public transportation?

I’m vegan, and things are still a million times better here (and in IRL leftist space) than it is in the real world.

I think another factor is these people have spent most of their leftist lives mostly isolated from actual “real world” leftists. If you’re a Marxist professor or writer in the 70s, who are you gonna be interacting with other than maybe other Marxist academics. When you let your views percolate in your brain (or only interacting with other egghead leftists), you end up being unable to grow and change.

Like, I really don’t think myself or most leftists who grow up in the internet will get like this when we’re in our 80s. We joke about touching grass, but the truth is being able to interact with other regular leftists from across the world on a place like Hexbear really does keep the brain worms in check, I believe.

It’s like if Tom Bombadil had a pegging fetish.

That has to be a new sentence that no one has ever typed before.