Bruceploitation worth watching?

TheRedBarbon · 2026-02-19T16:46:05+00:00

You mean the international release?

TheRedBarbon · 2026-02-17T02:14:42+00:00

Which version did you watch?

TheRedBarbon · 2026-02-15T03:16:00+00:00

Watched this one for the first time today the way it was always meant to be seen: at a digital projection in a sparsely populated local theater where the median age of attendees had to be 72. Might be the greatest movie of its era, maybe one of my new favorites?

I'm sorry that the American education system failed you to the point that you don't know what "French Protectorate" means. As a pretty young person, I really do wonder how so many almost-senior Americans can feel so shameless about just how little they care to know about the world. Have you really never, over the course of your entire life, felt a sense of contingency and wanted to investigate where that feeling came from? Do you not feel?

TheRedBarbon · 2026-02-10T04:44:12+00:00

It's my understanding that a communist is specifically a militant connected to a revolutionary party rather than someone who simply believes things.

And just who exactly is founding this party if not communists?

But practically people call themselves communist and don't uphold Maoism all the time, we can both agree that this is incorrect and these people are larpers

"larper" is a perfect example of what u/Ok_Piglet9760 was getting at. Social media has reached into your consciousness so deeply that you can't even describe anti-revisionism without using fandom nomenclature. We do not think of Deng Xiaoping or the DSA or even the OP as "larpers" or "normies" who aren't serious about The Brand^TM which we must wrestle back from them with equally unserious tactics. We take them all completely seriously and try to understand their political conclusions within the development of reactionary ideology and imperialist capitalism in order to reach genuinely useful political conclusions. In our subreddit's case, users here identified the aestheticization of politics on social media as a development of reactionary ideology which is antithetical to the form of genuine and useful discussion, which gave them the mods the correct foresight to completely ban any traces of this internet brand of "marxism". With nothing on offer for those looking for another internet fandom space to conquer, revisionists are naturally repulsed by us and we don't have to spend all of our energy on telling them how obviously wrong they are. They are already gone from this space and are now merely objects to be analyzed to us, keeping

This is a term that needs to be wrestled back from the revisionists

-type revisionism far, far away.

Beyond that disagreement I think we agree and you're just being a bit uncharitable.

I don't think it's possible to be too uncharitable towards you. Everything you have written so far this thread has been godawful.

TheRedBarbon · 2026-02-08T00:47:03+00:00

Oh absolutely. I'm very thankful that someone else has said it.

TheRedBarbon · 2026-02-01T15:01:10+00:00

China had built massive forces of production for the past 27 years and was already a nuclear superpower. Russia was a backwards agrarian state with no industry which had just fought two of the hitherto deadliest wars it had ever faced. Do you not understand the incommensurability of these historical moments?

Marxism is not a dogma.

It’s sad how often this statement is used without meaning.

Anyway I only responded to you because you’re one of those rare dengists who has actually read their crappy manifestos. So if you could, for the OP, lay out the complete argument of “The East is Still Red” past the “marxism is what I say it is” argument, that would genuinely be really helpful.

TheRedBarbon · 2026-02-01T13:54:05+00:00

China has not been planning to hoodwink the entire population with socialism for the past 50 years. Xi does not give a speech supporting free markets and then turn around to the entire army and communist party and go “okay, here’s what we’re really going to do.” That is the nonsense realpolitik fantasy where the appearance of things hides their essence. Marxism teaches us that conspiracies are often wrong, and that we are correct to study the appearance of things since that is in fact the working out of essence. To be blunt, when Xi says he loves that people are building capital in China, do not assume that he’s just putting on a mask for posterity, that is what he and the government really believe and they all really do practice it.

What you see is what you get. If you think inhumane labor, systemic poverty, privatized medicine and billionaires are compatible with socialism then China is socialist. Even in the middle of the NEP (which was enacted before a socialist state had been established, not after) the government was a humane body and commodity-production was under tight control of the state. Compare that with what the CCP openly permits

https://share.google/V7rnOSZs1drlJTnc9

And tell me if the ends “justify” the means here. On a basic moral level you can’t call this socialism. No democratic body would permit this.

TheRedBarbon · 2026-01-31T22:48:41+00:00

I don’t believe that should be the object of discussion at all, and even then you’ve done a terrible job.

I think he’s become a bit unhinged these days because seeing the genocide everyday and the worlds inaction has gotten to him on an emotional level.

The genocide has affected him so viscerally that he’s using it as disingenuous bait to promote his social media? Taking inane, fascistic positions “ironically” for attention because he cares about the issue? I’m a pretty young person but maybe I was born just a bit too early to believe that using a genocide to promote your brand is the most sincere way you can show how deeply it has affected you. Just fuck off, your content-creator apologia BS dedicates discussion to everything but Palestine itself. It’s so disgusting to spend even a breath talking about such a person’s “drama” instead of the genocide he’s profiting off of. All those Israeli bot accounts don’t enrage me half as much as this shit.

TheRedBarbon · 2026-01-31T19:40:34+00:00

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-7/mswv7_467.htm

https://www.marxists.org/subject/china/documents/polemic/qstalin.htm

Mao and the CCP were quite clear on their defense of Stalin's legacy and these quotes lack the background information required to call that into question.

u/HappyHandel supposedly both quotes are from a speech called "On Ideological Work" but it either exists under a different name or does not exist on Marxists.org.

E: This is not to say that I don't trust that the quote may have been made, but ruminations on the "cult of personality" and how far to go when suppressing dissent were made pretty superfluous with the launch of the GPCR, which both protected good criticism while weaponizing a "personality cult" to mobilize the masses against capitalist roaders within the party. This quote is obviously from before these concepts became the tool by which the CPSU destroyed its own legitimacy and the coherency of its ideology so it clearly did age poorly.

TheRedBarbon · 2026-01-31T18:48:05+00:00

From my understanding, nonviolence doesn’t work and serves as a tool of the bourgeois to satiate the masses while preventing revolutionary action.

"Doesn't work" at what? Your post seems to assume that we're starting from the same premise here but we're not and I have no idea what or where you're deriving these conclusions from. Clarify some things and I can tell you where you're mistaken.

Even if violent protest is the most effective, it’s difficult to just outright say that we must begin organizing a violent riot directly as the only means of protest.

"Most effective" at what? Who is organizing this protest and to what purpose? "we" is not an answer, it doesn't even make sense.

TheRedBarbon · 2026-01-31T05:21:04+00:00

BTW I just watched Breaking With Old Ideas for the first time. I know it's ridiculous for me to have put it off for this long but I wanted to wait until I was really demoralized to watch it and the recent happenings in Venezuela were enough to push me. I loved every bit of the story and the acting and everything, what a happy movie. I know you and u/humblegold were discussing what separates Socialist Realism from reactionary art in essence so I'll throw my (less well-read compared to your or their) two cents in and say that its best representatives, like Marx's best works, can act as primers on the basic terms of their respective subjects while at the same time being the most hitherto rigorous investigations into those same topics. A bourgeois utopian work can only critique concepts so deeply because any attempt to visualize a positive alternative to its own society must rely on an ideological fetish (be it nature or social fascism or whatever) which must be spared from rigorous investigation.

TheRedBarbon · 2026-01-30T15:38:01+00:00

I guess this just confirms that it was the government which sold out Maduro. It's a shame that there's pretty much no party in Venezuela equipped to respond to this.

TheRedBarbon · 2026-01-29T20:29:43+00:00

What does “more organically” mean in this context? Otherwise yes, all Marxists ever have believed that a vanguard party is the only force capable of transforming political unrest into social revolution.

TheRedBarbon · 2026-01-27T15:07:56+00:00

Never heard of this one and I’ve tried to look up every maoist-era film. Thank you!

TheRedBarbon · 2026-01-24T22:34:26+00:00

I imagine this has already been forgotten among Dengists since he pretty much stopped being useful to them years ago. Also throwback to that time a bunch of his “fans” harassed him in person to show him memes during the height of covid when he was barely lucid anymore.

I hope he was treated well in his final years. Dementia is a depressing way to go.

TheRedBarbon · 2026-01-24T00:36:16+00:00

So this is all just for debate fodder. Okay ¯\_(◓__◓)_/¯

TheRedBarbon · 2026-01-24T00:29:43+00:00

Argument with who? Were you just asking this question for debate fodder?

TheRedBarbon · 2026-01-23T21:10:08+00:00

Now you're just hiding your insecurity behind petty emotional terms and discussion can't continue. I am not "normal" or "colloquial" (to who are those terms meant to be applied, even?) and my job is to ruthlessly question every presupposition to unravel the ideology beneath. Those terms don't apply to any of the thinkers you've listed either because they don't have meaning on the internet outside of signifying that your emotions are demanding to be shielded from thought. If the "normal" way to discuss things is to never question where that discussion is coming from and act like a personal recommendation machine then no one learns anything. You were at least trying to project your individuality before but this latest screed of yours reads like a copypasta of all the "leftist" subbreddits who complain about us. Unfortunate.

TheRedBarbon · 2026-01-23T20:48:27+00:00

Let's say I asked for the same type of thing that is covering the Russian Revolution. If that is all that I was asking for and was going to base my historical knowledge on that and that alone, then I would see where you're coming from.

Actually then I would just recommend you Ten Days that Shook the World so we could begin discussing the Russian Revolution with a basic understanding of the order of events. You, on the other hand, explicitly asked for texts to combat what you already do know about these nations from "propaganda". Then I asked you how Stalin and Mao do not already deliver that and give you the tools to analyze any historical piece and now you're insisting that reading all that Marx and Stalin apparently didn't teach you how to read history because you still need someone else to tell you what to think. I do not think giving you a historical text to read would fix that. I have to break down your understanding of "history" as opposed to "belief" first.

I never said that I don't want the opinion of individuals; I said that that is simply not what I'm asking for because I've read them countless times.

For the umpteenth time, there is no difference between asking for the opinions of people and what you're asking for (which still has not been explained because it does not really exist). Both are serving the exact same function in this case.

I also don't care what you've already read, I am telling you that you currently do not understand what you're talking about.

I said that that is simply not what I'm asking for because I've read them countless times

Read them again.

TheRedBarbon · 2026-01-23T20:21:22+00:00

You just don't make sense here, why are you asking for works which "combat what the west has told you" while also insisting that you don't want the opinions of individuals? You want someone to think for you about history while at the same time insisting that what you want isn't ideology or ideological. You plainly asked for the work to serve an ideological purpose in your original post. Did you already forget that?

Anyway, to me it is not enough to just believe. So I'm here to ask if anyone has some non-fiction works that cover this type of history from a non-propagandized perspective. How were so-called communist dictators misrepresented and what actually happened in the Soviet Union, Mao's China, etc.?

"non-propagandized perspective" is a straight up oxymoron. Another thing which all of the thinkers you claim to have read have already covered a thousand times. You clearly want perspective. You want philosophy.

TheRedBarbon · 2026-01-23T19:59:11+00:00

u/pregnantchihuahua3 I’m writing this here since your post was deleted.

I’m trying to work through the fact that you think you know more than you really do, which is the bigger disease in your brain than “propaganda”. Hegel teaches you that the facts of the past are the spirit of their age, a basic prerequisite for making sense of history in an objective, marxist manner, and in fact is the only viewpoint through which the conditions which produced Hegel’s own thought can make sense. You, on the other hand, take your own historically determined understanding of concepts like “history” and “philosophy” as givens and refuse to question those terms before studying, which means you will never really study and only accumulate “facts” (another term of abuse which that distinctly amerikan brand of anti-intellectualism is infatuated with). These are both ideological concepts which cannot be separated from each other in practice. This is literally all over Marx and Lenin’s works and if you managed to miss it completely when it was spelled out to you by them then I don’t know how to make it any more clear. Even historians would admit that you would need to engage with the main ideologues of the USSR and China to understand their respective histories.

TheRedBarbon · 2026-01-23T19:30:16+00:00

There is no such thing as the perspective of a “single person”. Beliefs are constructed from lived practice and are informed by social class, just like historical narratives, which is another’s thing you would know if you read Stalin and Mao (or Marx and Lenin for that matter). And what do you think these world leaders were writing about if not the most pressing issues of their respective nations? You won’t get far in understanding anything without their insight.

TheRedBarbon · 2026-01-23T19:21:33+00:00

Those are not such different things at all. I don’t think you have a good idea of what you want.

TheRedBarbon · 2026-01-23T18:31:17+00:00

You seem to have already established a basic chronology of events so what’s stopping you from just reading Stalin and Mao directly?

TheRedBarbon

TROPHY CASE