We know, as our readers know, that the people are the resistance and vice versa: it is the relationship between the sword and shield, the heart and arm. Every Palestinian struggles under the occupation. As this historic battle rages on, we know that the tactics of the occupation will evolve. They will continue to target homes regardless of the presence of resistance activity in an attempt to demoralize the Palestinian people, draw blood, and accelerate their genocide.
As this happens, it is our obligation to our principles that dictates we must not fall into the trap of distinguishing between armed resistance fighters and non-combatants, as every Palestinian has a role in the current state of affairs. Every martyr must be mourned, and every zionist strike must be seen for the crime that it is. We will not allow the occupier or Western media to dehumanize us by creating distinctions between a colonized people whose remained existence on their lands is "militant."
Every Palestinian is a civilian even if they hold arms. A settler is an aggressor, a soldier, and an occupier even if they are lounging on our occupied beaches. As the IOF calls up thousands of reserves, it is clear that all settlers are soldiers. There exists a colonizer and the colonized, an oppressed and the oppressor. The people cannot be dissociated from resistance, because we are in a constant state of resistance.
Certainly, an explosive response is coming.
This struggle has been imposed on us. To resist is to survive, and to resist is a right.
yet another entry in a long series of gaffes by the Biden regime
David "CIA mouthpiece" Ignatius
not a high bar to clear, term limits favor capital
Consider term limits. The US Constitution was amended to enforce term limits in direct response to FDR’s popular 12-year presidency (he died in office, going on for 16). As a policy, it is self-evidently quite anti-democratic (robbing the people of a choice), but nevertheless it has been conceptually naturalized to the extent that the 2019 coup against Evo Morales was premised explicitly on the idea that repeated popular electoral victories constituted a form of dictatorship. If rotation was important to avoid corruption or complacency, corporations and supreme courts would institute term limits too. Term limits ensure that in the miraculous scenario that a scrupulous, charismatic, and intelligent individual becomes a rebellious political executive, they won’t be in power long enough to meaningfully challenge the entrenched power of corporate vehicles manned by CEOs with decades of experience. Wolfgang Schäuble, a powerful advocate of austerity policy in Europe, succinctly summarized the extent to which electoral democracy is subordinate: “Elections cannot be allowed to change economic policy.” One Party States and Democratic Centralism are not the result of lack of sophistication or cronyism, they are a proven bulwark that acknowledges that political power will often need to be exerted against the will of Capital, and so the wielders of said power must necessarily undergo a much more serious vetting process than a popularity contest.
So there ARE Nazis in Ukraine...
the CIA's Operation Aerodynamic made sure of that
tiennamen
not even close, really demolishing your own credibility and claims to have read anything
天安门工厂 is a place, not an event. btw in China it's called "June 4th Incident" and common knowledge, easily findable on Baidu.
The Tiananmen Square ‘Massacre’: The West’s Most Persuasive, Most Pervasive Lie.
yeah this gallup graph shows it even more starkly
The effort, which began in 2019, has not previously been reported.
EDIT: I guess this article is about propaganda aimed at Chinese nationals, but you know they're doing it to Americans too so [shrugs]
did your post manage to quiet the little voice in your head that whispers about how capitalism is turning the planet into a charcoal briquette?
NATOPedia claims that cellulose is used now, not cotton
Guncotton was originally made from cotton (as the source of cellulose) but contemporary methods use highly processed cellulose from wood pulp.
your honor we have video of the suspect at an Automatic Terrorism Machine
you might like this essay
What we see during COVID-19 is stark operational differences between nations where politicians are the top authorities, and nations where Capital is the top authority. We are endlessly told that nations with activist governments are unfree, and that any support for these governments must come from either a pathological culture of obedience or the threat of state violence. And yet socialist nations plainly outperformed capitalist ones in terms of fighting the virus. [12]
This analysis does not imply there were simply two modes of response: capitalist and socialist. Market domination is not a binary affair, and Capital doesn’t rule by decree. As Roberts puts it, the market doesn’t tell capitalists what to do — rather, they have to guess and prognosticate and forecast and hope. Capitalists don’t find out whether they did what the market wanted until after the fact. [13] People around the world defended themselves from the virus, repressing the political will of Capital, in proportion to what they could get away with politically and economically. In socialist states, resources were deployed as deemed necessary to meet the challenge. In capitalist states in the sphere of influence of socialist China, such as South Korea, capitalists offered a decent response, perhaps because catastrophic handling would create a domestic political shift in favour of socialism. In the imperial core, where white supremacy reigns and there is no political will whatsoever to look to China for a good example, self-assured capitalists simply allowed the plague to spread essentially unopposed. In fact, imperialists succeeded to a great extent in turning the ensuing resentment into a foreign policy weapon. [14] This isn’t isolated to the most proudly capitalist nations; the kind of political power, infrastructure, and resources needed to enforce a tolerable quarantine has been completely eroded in social democratic havens like Canada and Sweden. No notable political force in the West referred to socialist successes in their efforts to affect domestic COVID-19 response policy, and I attribute this mistake to chauvinism.
from https://redsails.org/why-marxism/
also recommended:
[aimixin responds to: What makes a country "socialist"?]
A society where public ownership of the means of production, a state controlled by a politically organized proletariat, and production for societal use rather than for profit is the principal aspect (main body) of the economy.
Key term here is principal aspect. There is a weird phenomenon from both anti-communists as well as a lot of ultraleft and leftcom communists themselves of applying a "one drop rule" to socialism, where socialism is only socialism if it's absolutely pure without a single internal contradiction. But no society in the history of humankind has been pure, they all contain internal contradictions and internal contradictions are necessary for one form of society to develop into the next.
If you applied that same logic to capitalism, then if there was any economic planning or public ownership, then capitalism would cease to be "true capitalism" and become "actually socialism", which is an argument a lot of right-wing libertarians unironically make. The whole "not true capitalism" and "not true socialism" arguments are two sides of the same coin, that is, people weirdly applying an absolute purity standard to a particular economic system which is fundamentally impossible to exist in reality, so they then can declare their preferred system "has never truly been tried". But it will never be tried ever because it's an idealized form which cannot exist in concrete reality, actually-existing capitalism and socialism will always have internal contradictions within itself.
If no idealized form exists and all things contain internal contradictions within themselves, then the only way to define them in a consistent way is not to define them in terms of perfectly and purely matching up to that idealized form, but that description merely becoming the principal aspect in a society filled with other forms and internal contradictions within itself.
A capitalist society introducing some economic planning and public ownership doesn't make it socialist because the principal aspect is still bourgeois rule and production for profit. This would mean the state and institutions carrying out the economic planning would be most influenced by the bourgeoisie and not by the working class, i.e. they would still behave somewhat privately, the "public ownership" would really be bourgeois ownership and the economic planning would be for the benefit of the bourgeoisie first and foremost.
A similar story in a socialist society with markets and private ownership. If you have a society dominated by public ownership and someone decides to open a shop, where do they get the land, the raw materials, permission for that shop, etc? If they get everything from the public sector, then they exist purely by the explicit approval by the public sector, they don't have real autonomy. The business may be internally run privately but would be forced to fit into the public plan due to everything around them demanding it for their survival.
Whatever is the dominant aspect of society will shape the subordinated forms. You have to understand societies as all containing internal contradictions and seeking for what is the dominant form in that society that shapes subordinated forms, rather than through an abstract and impossible to realize idealized version of "true socialism".
Countries like Norway may have things that seemingly contradict capitalism like large social safety nets for workers funded by large amounts of public ownership, but these came as concessions due to the proximity of Nordic countries to the USSR which pressured the bourgeoisie to make concessions with the working class. However, the working class and public ownership and economic planning never became the principal aspect of Norway. The bourgeoisie still remains in control, arguably with a weaker position, but they are still by principal aspect, and in many Nordic countries ever since the dissolution of the USSR, the bourgeoisie has been using that dominant position to roll back concessions.
The argument for China being socialist is not that China has fully achieved some pure, idealized form of socialism, but that China is a DOTP where public ownership alongside the CPC's Five-Year plans remain the principal aspect of the economy and other economic organization is a subordinated form.
Deng Xiaoping Theory is not a rejection of the economic system the Soviets were trying to build but a criticism of the Soviet understanding socialist development. After the Soviets deemed they had sufficient productive forces to transition into socialism, they attempted to transition into a nearly pure socialist society within a very short amount of time, and then declared socialist construction was completed and the next step was to transition towards communism.
Deng Xiaoping Theory instead argues that socialism itself has to be broken up into development stages a bit like how capitalism also has a "lower" and "higher" phase, so does socialism. The initial stage is to the "primary stage" of underdeveloped socialism, and then the main goal of the communist party is to build towards the developed stage of socialism. The CPC disagreed that the Soviets had actually completed their socialist construction and trying to then build towards communism was rushing things far faster than what the level of productive forces of the country could sustain and inevitably would lead to such great internal contradictions in the economic system to halt economic development.
The argument was not a rejection of the Marxist or Marxist-Leninist understanding of what socialism is, but a disagreement over the development stages, viewing socialism's development as much more gradual and a country may remain in the primary stage like China is currently in for a long, long time, Deng Xiaoping speculated even 100 years.
I recall reading somethings from Mao where he criticized the Marxian understanding of communism, but not from the basis of it being wrong, but it being speculative. He made the argument that Marx's detailed analysis of capitalism was only possible because Marx lived in a capitalist society and could see and research its development in real time, therefore Mao was skeptical the current understanding of communism would remain forever, because when you actually try to construct it you would inevitably learn far more than you could speculate about in the future, have a much more detailed understanding of what it is in concrete reality and what its development stages look like.
In a sense, that's the same position the modern CPC takes towards socialism, that the Soviets and Mao rushed into socialism due to geopolitical circumstances and did not have time to actually fully grasp what socialist development would look like in practice, and Deng Xiaoping Theory introduces the concept of the primary stage of socialism based on their experience actually trying to implement it under Mao.
Despite common misconception, the CPC's position is indeed that China is currently socialist, not "will be socialist in 2049" or whatever. The argument is that China is in the primary stage of socialism, a system where socialist aspects of the political and economic system have become the main body but in a very underdeveloped form.
Judith Miller's New York Times
Two economists are walking in the park. The first economist sees a pile of dog shit and says to the other, "I'll pay you $50 to eat that dog shit." So he does and gets paid $50. Later on, the second economist sees a pile of dog shit and says to the first, "I'll pay you $50 to eat that pile of dog shit." So he does and gets paid $50.
The first economist says, "I can't help but feel we just ate dog shit for nothing." "Nonsense," says the second economist, "We just contributed $100 to the economy."
individual consumer choices are not politics. boycotts are a useful tool in concert with an organized political movement (like BDS or a union of striking workers) but can be ultimately counterproductive on their own:
In short, a strong belief that ethical consumption will lead to ethical practices is not warranted – purchasing as voting is a weak feedback mechanism at best and there are other actors who are able to influence the system. The danger, however, comes in believing that this mechanism can make substantial political change. Ethical consumption gives the individual the illusion of contributing to progress; of “doing their part” by making purchasing decisions. This illusion can detract, and probably has detracted, from trying to put forward an avowedly political agenda that seeks to mobilise people collectively to make the changes they support. Instead, it individualises ethics, it individualises politics and it reaffirms us as consumers rather than citizens – it is a part of the profit-maximising, pathologically-externalising neoliberal market system that has caused many of the problems ethical consumerism seeks to alleviate, rather than being an alternative.
the digitization of business
maybe but as of a few years ago many business processes still involve the fax machine
read "Brainwashing" also, Day wrote it a year prior to Masses, Elites, and Rebels which sort of builds on and revises it
uncritical support for the 🇰🇵DPRK🇰🇵 in its heroic struggle to liberate occupied Korea from the genocidal American empire
Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
New evidence points to Israeli security forces, not Hamas, for causing the most fatalities at the music festival - civilian deaths that were then utilized to justify Tel Aviv's Gaza genocide.
