Communist Manifesto - Chapter 1, Bourgeois and Proletarians (RP Book Club) (Youtube ~1 hour)

I have been promoting Real Progressives content lately. As I have mentioned before, it is a MMT (Modern Monetary Theory) education channel run by a small group of Marxist-Leninists who have good takes on the USSR/Stalin, Russia/China, imperialism in the Global South (unlike many Western leftists these days) and also generally good on social progressive issues.

It’s funny because when I came across the channel while learning about MMT years ago, I already could feel that they are Marxists who are hiding their power level (a lot of interviews on the channel are with lib-brained professional economists etc.) but it’s good to see them openly discussing Marxism, communism, anti-imperialism on the channel these days, because I had been somewhat reluctant in linking their programs here before.

This episode is mostly just the communist grandma educating an American “boomerish” audience about Marxism and capitalism, while relating the work to contemporary issues in the US and the world today e.g. climate change, privatization vs nationalization, imperialism in the Global South etc. It’s basic discussion for lay audience but you can feel that more and more people are interested in learning about Marxism in America.

Lenin lived, Lenin lives, and Lenin will live forever!

Ленин жив - Lenin lives. Only two people in history have ever been bestowed with this honor. The other person is Viktor Tsoi of KINO.

Too afraid or too ashamed to call Putin directly?

I think Russia has the pull here. Just say, Iran, no air defense systems for you if you attack. And Iran will need Russian air defense systems to defend against American and Israeli air strikes.

An Event can only happen when Hexbears are not observing it.

The very act of observation from Hexbears prevents the Event from occurring, but rest assured, that merely delays the inevitable, for there will eventually come a moment when the grand total of observer on Hexbear drops to zero. Even just for a second. It is only then, that the Event will physically manifest itself in our universe.

The podcast was at least interesting in between 2016-2020 between the two Bernie runs (it exploded in popularity after Clinton lost to Trump) but these days it can’t seem to find a direction that works, other than serving as a parasocial substitution for a few friends who joke around politics and read new articles for you to get angry with together.

Trueanon’s model, on the other hand, has a much more sustainable trajectory. Most episodes, you feel like you’re learning something new, even though while the hosts may not be the most knowledgeable, they at least put in the effort to research a topic. It’s like someone already did the research for you and presenting the topic in an entertaining fashion.

that’s all stuff that anyone with half a functioning brain should be able to predict (so, not liberals).

I beg to differ. I remember a few of us spending a lot of time during the first 6-9 months of the war reassuring people that no, Russia isn’t going collapse, no, Russia’s economy is not failing, no, Russia isn’t losing just because they are retreating from Kharkiv etc. just so people can see the outcome today as we were predicting then, all based on materialist analysis.

I think Hexbear in general really came around to the current position that most are holding today, after about 9 months or so when it became clear that Russia wasn’t failing, just as people have been predicting on the news mega.

My lesson from all of this is that propaganda works on all of us (no matter how resilient you think you are to it), and when you find your faith shaken (which happened to me numerous times), only with theory and methodically applying them can one start to have a clearer understanding of what the heck is actually going on, and through that, see a path forward without falling for the propaganda like many others. It is a scientific approach to seeing the world.

He’s gunning for the Republican donors.

In American electoralism, it’s all about how much campaign contributions you receive.

Even if you lose the election, so what? It’s better to lose the election but with a few dozens of rich donors giving you a steady stream of income because they like what you have to offer.

Interest rate is too high. But hey, at least some people are making a lot of money out of that.

And don’t you worry, the government will 100% bail out the banks if anything happens to them.

Navalny has the same reputation as Dugin. Very popular in the Western world, but few people in Russia even knew about them.

This kind of takes pretends as though the USSR existed in a vacuum.

The revolutions that the Bolsheviks had attempted to inspire across Europe had failed. The Spartacus uprising in Germany ended with the KPD leaders brutally murdered by Freikorps hired by the social democrats.

A new form of violent counterrevolution specifically designed to defeat Leninism, known as fascism, had succeeded in Italy, and was gaining momentum throughout Europe especially in Germany.

Yes, please tell me the USSR - that just came out of a bloody civil war - could somehow magically defeat these reactionary forces that were fully intended to smash the world’s first socialist state without taking precautionary and the necessary steps, however brutal that might be. It’s pure, undistilled idealism.

Most divorced man in history

That should be Putin, no? Dude invading a country because he couldn’t get over his wife leaving him. Can Musk even compete with that?

I have said many times: the war in Ukraine has completely changed the immigration policy of the US.

By destroying Europe, Biden has achieved the white supremacist dream of a Fourth Reich that the Republicans could never do in decades.

The US is a country of immigrants and it will always be so. They are now setting the country up to receive an influx of (mostly) white Europeans over the next couple decades as people flee from rise of far right regimes and economic devastation, much like the early 20th century.

You know the right wing conspiracy about the “Great Replacement”? That might as well be real with what’s going on in the world right now, except it’s Europeans fleeing from a destabilizing region.

It’s not for everyone and I can understand why some won’t like it.

On its own, it’s quite an interesting sci-fi though it has some of your typical Chinese boomer nationalist brainworms.

But it helps to understand why it has gained such a cult status in China (even among the highest bureaucratic circles). The book was written in the early 2000s when China was much weaker both militarily and technologically and it reflected the anxiety of a rising country/civilization that is surrounded by much stronger imperialist powers with hostile intentions, and the various attitudes of the Chinese society toward it (some people think we should just open up and embrace the Western world, some think we should be cautious about it. Very common views about Americans and the West up until Trump).

In fact, in Ball Lightning

Honestly, American imperialism is not just war machines killing people and I think we’re not doing ourselves favors by just sticking to talking about the military destruction aspect of US imperialism. If anything, the military is the least scary part of US imperialism in the 21st century.

Economic devastation, engineered famine, control of global capital flows are affecting hundreds of millions, if not billions of lives all the across the world right now. It is nearly impossible to out-compete the Americans on this front.

Just raising the Fed rate by a few % is enough to send dozens of African countries to the brink of default. That’s what’s so scary about the US imperialism, and this is just the monetary aspect of its imperialistic arms.

Yes, that’s true, but by forgoing this detail in the show, there are consequences in how to explain some of the later events.

The Netflix series have altered a lot of the book’s plot.

You remembered correctly about the books, the Trisolarians did not care about humans surpassing themselves as you mentioned the Sophons were already locking out their basic sciences. They were only worried about humans discovering the deterrent.

The show changed a few characteristics about the Trisolarians to make it seem much weaker than they should be. They are traveling at 1% light speed in the show! In the books, they were already reaching 10% light speed at that point.

Book spoilers.

That is not the reason why they had to leave their home planet. In fact, their calculations could go pretty far, but it also predicted that the planet will eventually become engulfed by one of the stars.

They further corroborated this with the observations that there used to be multiple planets in their star system (which have all since been engulfed by the stars) and the one that they are living on has been cracked into two by the last great cataclysm which further deteriorated whatever conditions it was on the original planet.

I’ve been thinking, does a leader come before a movement, or do you need to develop a movement first and a leader will naturally appear out of the movement?

Like, if you were to establish a vanguard party in the UK, how would that work? If you have a small group of revolutionaries fomenting a movement, will a leader emerge out of the movement as it grows larger? Or you need a strong charismatic leader to propel the movement in the first place?

It’s kind of a chicken and egg question and I can’t seem to figure out how does one begin. In Russia and China, those were chaotic times and there were already a bunch of politically aware people involved in all kinds of movements interweaving with all kinds of historic events, and it’s hard to identify the origin of such vanguard revolutionary movement.

Nord Stream bombing was a message.

Honestly you gotta hand it to Biden on this one. Trump would never be able to achieve anything like this. I still cringe at that clip of Trump in front of EU leaders, thinking he’s some kind of the Art of the Deal master, asking the European leaders to spend 2% of their GDP on NATO defense, and the whole room couldn’t stop laughing at him. Biden wiped that smirk off their face pretty fast I suppose.

Completely understandable. Sitting at the table together sharing skewers and jokes has been the cultural staple of pandas for thousands of years. Do not judge them based on your pathetic human culture.