cucumovirus

Wait till they find out about this: https://redsails.org/on-stalin/

I just recently finished Caliban and the Witch and found it very good! It's an amazing account of the emergence of capitalism with a lot of further recommended reading in the notes. It really breaks down what primitive accumulation and the enclosures entailed, and it made me aware of pre-socialist liberation movements, both during feudalism and capitalism, and both in Europe and in its colonies. Throughout all this it also describes the social position of women and the construction of the modern patriarchy. I definitely highly recommend it.

Just started reading Assata. I'm only on chapter 2, but it's a really good read so far.

This is the point Marx makes when he's making the distinction between labour and labour-power.

The worker sells his labour-power - his ability to work for a certain period of time - to the capitalist for a wage. That wage is determined by the value of the necessities needed to reproduce the labour-power of the worker (food, rent, etc.) - and it can also fulctuate due to supply and demand.

Labour-power is a special commodity because it creates additional value while it's used up (while a person is working). The additional (surplus) value created is greater than the value necessary for the reproduction of the used up labour-power, and the capitalist owns the produced surplus value.

Engels explains this distinction, and the reasons why it's necessary in the introduction to Marx's Wage Labour and Capital.

But then again:

Deinocheirus - even though it's a herbivore, I'm still pretty fucked.

Reminds me of Philomena Cunk

Popper is often celebrated by libs, but he is just a racist western chauvinist (like most of the libs themselves).

Here's a quote from Domenico Losurdo's book, War and Revolution:

An explicit rehabilitation of colonialism is ventured by the theoretician of the 'open society' himself. Popper seems to offer an unequivocally positive assessment of the centuries-long domination of the rest of humanity by the great European and Western powers: 'We freed these states too quickly and too simplistically.'

Yes, to reach people we need to be where the people are, and nowadays a lot of people are online. Of course, this shouldn't and can't replace real life organizing, but it should supplement it.

From Roderic Day's 'The Virtual Factory':

this doesn’t mean that the amount of time we spend online should be treated as something shameful, silly, or superficial. It absolutely deserves to be handled with greater seriousness and discipline.

(...)

There is no way to retreat into a pre-internet era. Instead of self-flagellating and guilt-tripping, pretending we can escape our wired future by unplugging, we need to take our participation in the medium seriously and in a way that integrates well with our offline organization.

Thank you for the kind words, comrade!

Not to mention that the blackshirts and brownshirts of Europe were inspired by the KKK and similar groups in the Southern US.

Maybe a combination of something like the importance placed on forms while neglecting substance, and something like this:

The problem here, in short, is elitism. Unchecked, presumed to have been neutralized in some way by the adoption of a counter-cultural ethos, it festers. The way to solve it, however, is not to shy away from studying or exposing bourgeois propaganda, but to delve even deeper and radicalize our understanding of it.

I think an important distinction to make here is that between the directly oppressed who might just in the earlier stages of class consciousness and class struggle sort of replicate the form through which they are oppressed, and those who are part of the privileged groups but claim to support anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, etc.

I would also say that due to their often more privileged position, these types, due to their remaining idealism tend to think they have all the answers, and that they know better than others. A sort of western chauvinism which takes its own answers to be the absolutely correct everywhere else. Just because they proclaim, or maybe even truly believe in these causes, they cannot look past their own chauvinism and continue to absolutize their point of view.

Losurdo describes chauvinism, in regards to nationalism and internationalism, but I think his formulation can be extrapolated onto other forms of chauvinism as well:

The repression of national particularities in the name of an abstract ‘internationalism’ facilitates things for a nation intent presenting itself as the embodiment of the universal; and this is precisely what chauvinism—in fact, the most fanatical chauvinism—consists in.

Losurdo also ventures into an analysis of similar phenomena to what you describe and characterizes them as populism which stems from a reductive reading of the theory of class struggle (among other things) which limits it to just oppressed vs oppressor, and tends to lead to putting the oppressed identity on a pedestal without much analysis. He deals with it in chapter 13 of Class Struggle if you want to read it all, which I definitely recommend.

This is a further expression of populism: moral excellence lies with the oppressed who rebel and those who offer help to the oppressed and rebels. But once they have won power, the latter cease to be oppressed and rebels and forfeit their moral excellence. And the one who, by virtue of aiding them, basks in their moral excellence also finds himself in serious difficulties. This is a dialectic already analysed by Hegel in connection with the Christian commandment to aid the poor, which manifestly assumes the permanence of poverty.