Kaffe (cough-uh)

I’m a cup of coffee

Read Walter Rodney!

  • 6 Posts
  • 25 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: March 23rd, 2022
  • Kaffe@lemmygrad.mltoGenZedong@lemmygrad.ml•Line on people like Johnstone?
    21·
    1 year ago

    Critical support to Roderic from Red Sails while he tries to convince Johnstone to engage with scientific theories surrounding propaganda and political behavior (Marxism).

    Brainwashing theory doesn’t hold up to reality so treating it as a model of why Americans and other European diaspora are passive to supportive of Imperialism is a misdiagnosis and leads to unreliable treatment. Counter propaganda is only so effective and is never going to threaten Empire and class society in general.

    So tbh, if she doesn’t want to accept criticism from Marxists then we should really just ignore her and others like her. We need to put our own theories out to people we are organizing around and for.

  • Kaffe@lemmygrad.mltoAsk Lemmygrad@lemmygrad.ml•How do we feel about Assad?
    171·
    1 year ago

    Ba’athists are not chauvinists they are Arab nationalists, wanting to unite the Arabic speaking peoples against colonialism. However, they live in diverse countries with significant numbers of non-Arabic cultures. Previous iterations of the Arab Nationlist movement like the Nasserists wanted to immediately unite Arab majority countries while the Ba’athists realized they need to first unite the cultures within their countries and then building a greater indigenous state in the region to fight European (and Turk) colonialism. So the Ba’ath in Iraq started a popular front with the Kurdish communities, but the tensions with Kurds, Arabs, and Persians in the Levant was already strained by Imperialist strategy before the Ba’ath seized power. The popular front was in the right direction of peace and unity until the war with a Iran, who’s new government hated the Arab socialists.

    Now, on the gas attacks, we have to know a few things. The US only blamed Iraq for the attacks retroactively, and in fact initially blamed Iran. The only witnesses of the attacks from the outside were Iranian journalists, working alongside British “journalists”. When the US switched to blame Iraq, in preparation for the sanctions they would lay on Iraq in the 90s to choke out the Ba’ath, they claimed that they knew it was Iraq the whole time and only blamed Iran because Iraq was their “ally”. Neither Iraq nor Iran ever claimed the US to be an ally. Iraq had been fighting Kurdish insurgents who were being organized by US/UK and Iranian intelligence, Iraq had real reasons to be fighting in Kurdish territory in the north. The Iranians had been occupying the village up until the day of the attack, where they quietly retreated in the morning before the attack. Now we also have the false flag accusations against Syria and Libya, where British intelligence worked with the so-called White Helmets to fabricate a chemical attack to justify the American occupation in the Kurdish region of Syria as well as NATO funding for ISIS, I mean the “moderate rebels”.

    A lot of these attacks towards the Ba’aths come retroactively. To me, an obvious attempt to discredit the Ba’ath based on inflating the “relationship” between the US and Iraq. By pretending to be an ally of Iraq, and acknowledging some of the US’s bad history of intervention, they were able to divide the left on Iraq and later Libya and Syria. “We were bad but now we are good and we gotta get rid of the monsters we’ve accidentally created while doing realpolitik”. I think even people like Parenti fell for this. Meanwhile the only real theme in these events is that the US and British supported rebels against anti-Imperialists governments wherever they could.

  • Kaffe@lemmygrad.mltoAsk Lemmygrad@lemmygrad.ml•How do we feel about Assad?
    292·
    1 year ago

    Ba’athists were originally Marxists and scientific socialists (they have since grown into “big tents”). They split with the Comintern communists in West Asia due to those parties being weak on French and British Imperialism as well as the early Comintern lines on Israel. They are primarily focused on building socialist states in the region to eventually merge into an Arab Socialist nation. It’s a decolonization movement. However, Bashar’s father was a revisionist who caused MLs to leave the Ba’ath in Syria. The Iraqi Ba’athists held the original lines up until they were ousted in 2003. Overall they are very watered down on the ML side and more-so focused on the NatLib side of things.

    One more thing that made them keep a distance from other Socialist movements was the religion question. Iraq and Syria are very diverse countries and have communities practicing some of the oldest religions in the world. They were secular but did not have an anti-religious line and in fact believed religions in the region could play a revolutionary role against colonialism.

  • Kaffe@lemmygrad.mltoAsk Lemmygrad@lemmygrad.ml•Resources on Ukrainian neo-nazis.
    4·
    1 year ago

    Also check out journalist Moss Robeson: https://linktr.ee/mossrobeson

    He writes on the role of fascist escapees and their role in the Ukrainian diaspora in the US, CA, and AU. As well as the US contacts with the far right in Ukraine.

    There is also the Plast scouting organization. They have existed since before WW1 and created Bandera and he would later recruit from the scouts to the OUN-B which would field the members of the SS Galicia Division with the sponsorship of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, which also funded Plast and continues to do so in Ukraine, the US, CA, and AU. Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland went through the Plast program as her grandfather helped found the Canadian chapters. She also helped her uncle [iirc] write her grandfather’s memoirs, he ran a pro-Nazi rag in Nazi occupied Poland.

    Low key you can even search my profile for Ukraine, I’ve written some summaries about the situation generally.

  • Kaffe@lemmygrad.mltoAsk Lemmygrad@lemmygrad.ml•trouble understanding surplus-value extraction
    41·
    1 year ago

    Quality of materials only matters when taken broadly in the economy. When Capitalists find cheaper materials, they can sell the commodity for more than it’s worth for a short time before others find cheaper sources and undercut the price. Eventually the prices will balance and so will the sourcing of materials.

    However, materials are also commodities, and their price is tied to the price of labor. What Capitalists can do in the real world is find a place or a people where labor is cheaper. They can pay nationally oppressed workers cheaper (i.e. Black American pay gap) and lower their cost of living which translates to wage. They can pay workers from another country much cheaper wages as their cost of living is lower from underdevelopment, i.e. Imperialism. They can even import workers but maintain a state machine that allows imported workers to be paid less than the national standard (i.e. undocumented and slave work).

  • Kaffe@lemmygrad.mltoAsk Lemmygrad@lemmygrad.ml•trouble understanding surplus-value extraction
    51·
    1 year ago

    The employee actually puts in 3 LH to build the chair but is only paid by the Capitalist for 1 of them leaving a 2 LH profit for the Capitalist. The sale price of the commodity when supply matches demand is the real value of the commodity.

    The “trick” the Capitalist does is to negotiate a wage smaller per unit of time than the value a worker can produce in that time, but it must be at least equal to the cost of reproducing the worker.

  • Kaffe@lemmygrad.mltoGenZedong@lemmygrad.ml•How can we find more left unity?
    13·
    1 year ago

    Frankly if we’re talking about the western continents, it’s because nobody has seriously studied the history and conditions of the land underneath their feet. PatSocs are superficially “close” to the Communists here because they do zero investigation of the internal structures of the continent, and view outward facing Imperialism from the Americans as an obstacle to “American Socialism”. So like many of the other parties in the US, they focus on protesting foreign intervention.

    Hot take, the other parties are pretty much the same. Where they differ is that PatSocs dream of a great assimilation into American so-called culture, so subjugation of Black and Indigenous peoples is a focal point, and it’s why they are willing to work with the right opportunistically. The other parties expect to take full control of the leftovers of America, but with “respecting treaties” and giving “self-determination” and the ability to “secede”, secede from what tho? If the PatSocs are settler-chauvinists then this is settler-blindness. PatSocs succeed in grifting because the other parties have yet to put out real theories on how to destroy the empire from within, so they just appeal to the American (or Canadian, Mexican) chauvinist extremes.

    In ML terms the settlers are not the subject of revolution. National Liberation for the prisons of nations beneath the Empire is primary. Policing, enclosure, ecological exploitation. Spontaneity from the colonized masses and even Anarchists is focused at the symptoms of settler-colonialism, and until Communists study their conditions and give direction to these people we can only alienate and frustrate them when telling them to vote or show up to a protest at city hall. It’s extremely frustrating for Natives when they ask for solidarity from settlers against megacorps looting their lands only for the unions to back the corps for jobs and then for Communists to agitate about unionization and maybe a “land acknowledgement”.

    Communists need to connect with the workers being gentrified out of their homes, connect with the Natives of their locales, unite these struggles, that’s the unity. What we think about China is a discussion to be had in a party that comes together to liberate the colonized nations. Settler-chauvinism, and setter-blindness (I also like “Left-PatSoc”) are the deal-breakers for unity.

    National Chauvinism, Capitalism, and Patriarchy make up Colonialism. Gender based oppression in most places is directly rooted in Colonialism. Decolonization means attacking all fronts meaning we cannot negotiate with chauvinists, opportunists, and sexists (whether male chauvinist, TERF, NB-phobic, homophobic, etc.).

  • Kaffe@lemmygrad.mltoMemes@lemmygrad.ml•Colonizers be like
    3·
    1 year ago

    Existing indigenous nations govern the land. Even the neo-Colonial IRA governments are at the forefront of fighting climate change, habitat destruction, and mass extinctions (almost all biodiversity is on indigenous managed land). There are Communists in these nations trying to build them into radical socialist projects. Some nations are very radical.

    The settlers will be governed by a joint dictatorship of the oppressed nations, but will have political rights within revolutionary institutions for women, LGBTQ2S+, youth, workers, etc. Much the same as how the CPC rules China, the dictatorship will be selective in who it elevates into the state machine but will stay in touch with the masses through mass organizations like those listed above.

  • Kaffe@lemmygrad.mltoAsk Lemmygrad@lemmygrad.ml•What are the chances that the EFF and the KPRF winning their respective national elections?
    7·
    1 year ago

    EFF is basically setting up for a collapse of the ANC government and either taking power electorally as the failing ANC capitulates to their popular front or by guiding the next crisis into a revolution.

    The KPRF has no crisis to leverage for themselves as both URP and the KPRF are looking good for their support of the SMO. If the URP starts fucking up the SMO you can expect the KPRF to gain more traction especially in the new republics and the borderlands. I’m not kidding when I say that Russia could electorally come back into Socialism since it has such a weak bourgeoisie that’s totally reliant on state intervention and the international trade system. Having already been a workers’ state the nation has the muscle memory for it. They just need a vanguard to awaken it.