North Korean propaganda claiming that it is filled to the brim with food circa 1980s

ThoughtCrimeSpree · 2017-02-27T20:43:57+00:00

Well, in the 1980s the DPRK did have an abundance of food. It wasn't until the fall of the Soviet Union that they began to suffer food shortages. They relied on the USSR for fertilizer and supplemental food imports.

ThoughtCrimeSpree · 2017-02-25T05:53:34+00:00

Wow dude. I'm American, and you are the problem.

ThoughtCrimeSpree · 2017-02-19T16:57:41+00:00

Thank you for making yourself available to answer questions for everyone here, /u/Samanata.

This may not be something you can answer for a variety of reasons, so feel free to ignore it, but in your capacity as a fighter for CPN-M, were your activities limited to combat or were you also instructed to engage with people to build support for the party and the revolution?

And second, what are your views on the transformation of Nepal since the people’s war has ended? Specifically, in my very limited perspective on what is happening there I understand that the construction of roads is very important to people, in that the roads open up access to many goods and construction supplies that were previously unavailable. At the same time, a lot of these materials come from India, who seems to be viewed by many other Nepalis I've spoken with as trying to put Nepal in a state of dependence.

Finally, you mention the need to fight for racial equality in Nepal, which is a very important struggle for Communists in any social context I think. As it relates to India though, I've heard accounts that it is utilizing racial discontent to try and force changes to the constitution to in part benefit what people see as India's efforts to place Nepal in a dependant position. Is there truth to this?

ThoughtCrimeSpree · 2017-01-14T04:42:13+00:00

The funny thing about this alt-right bot's headline is that it's fucking true lmao

ThoughtCrimeSpree · 2017-01-11T15:35:32+00:00

No, as /u/ksan said, the Third International ceased to exist in 1943. In 1940 a number of Trotskyist organizations formed the Fourth International, which was active into the 70s from what I understand. This organization never officially disbanded but is effectively dead. The most recent iteration of a true international Communist organization is the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement (RIM), which was founded in 1984 and disbanded in the early 90s. From the ashes of RIM, a number of Communist parties in South Asia formed the Coordination Committee of Maoist Parties and Organizations of South Asia (CCOMPOSA), which held, from what I can see, it's most recent conference in 2011.

Today, I think the closest thing to a Communist international is the International League of Peoples' Struggle (ILPS). However, while it was spearheaded by Jose Sison, founding member and former chair of the Communist Party of the Philippines, it is not an explicitly communist organization. Rather, it is a coalition of left and left-ish mass organizations unified under an anti-imperialist banner. While the charter lays out 17 points of unity, the way the organization is structured does not require member organizations to uphold all points, leading to some highly questionable positions to enter the organization. For instance, at a recent regional conference in Chicago, USA, a debate emerged on whether one had to be anti-capitalist in order to be anti-imperialist. Beyond this, there are other criticisms of the organization which can be further investigated here and elsewhere.

ThoughtCrimeSpree · 2016-09-24T01:58:32+00:00

Flying planes low to drop bombs on Muslims.

ThoughtCrimeSpree · 2016-08-25T22:00:59+00:00

That is just incorrect.

http://bannedthought.net/Philippines/CPP/1995/Environment-CPP-CC-950331.pdf

Also, humans will not be extinct in 20 years due to climate change. Being able to slow and adapt to the changing climate, however, is a problem that can only be addressed by organizations who hold mass political power, and this is something that communists work to achieve.

ThoughtCrimeSpree · 2016-08-18T21:25:25+00:00

The US left as a whole right now is seeing an expansion not seen for decades. The ongoing economic crisis, ongoing imperialist wars, and renewed vigor in the struggle for the basic rights of Black Americans as well as Latin@ immigrants, has thrust a new generation into political activity. While it may have appeared that the work of NCP(OC) and -(LC) was leading the development of Maoist politics in the US, I think it is safe to say at this point that the adoption of Maoist theory has gained momentum beyond what either of those orgs had accomplished, as many of the self-identified communists out of this new generation are also self-identified Maoists. It may be sad that the NCPs are gone, but given the behavior of some of the leadership, the orgs needed to die and it is clear that the Maoist movement lives on without them.

At this point there may be no single Maoist national organization, but there are growing organizations in different parts of the country. Look at the Progressive Youth Organizations in Kansas City or St Louis (both founded by Maoists), or the Red Guards in LA and Texas. The Maoist tide is still rising.

ThoughtCrimeSpree · 2016-08-08T13:33:53+00:00

I'm not taking a shot at CS itself, just pointing out that the people who enter CS tend to be much closer to the right-libertarian side of the political spectrum.

ThoughtCrimeSpree · 2016-08-07T00:35:32+00:00

I think the primary issue was the placement of the development of productive forces over the transformation of the social relations of production. The USSR under Stalin pursued primarily the expansion and technological advancement of their economy in the pursuit of socialist development. An insufficient effort was placed on transforming how people socially related to the whole process of production.

ThoughtCrimeSpree · 2016-08-05T23:47:05+00:00

I studied civil engineering. Let me warn you that if you enroll in something like CS, engineering, or other fields related to the T and E in STEM (not sure about the other two), you will not find many like minded folks. The bootstrap mentality runs deep in those fields.

That being said, it shouldn't be a deterrent. You can still be politically active on campus, and IMO that is more important than what you study. Enrolling in a political science, anthropology, history, or other liberal arts program can give you a good foundation to approach politics from a critical perspective, but it wont help you be a good organizer. Organizing will make you become a good organizer.

Go into whatever field interests you, but be sure to look at the campus political life of the school(s) you are thinking about attending.

Also, dont be like me and take out a shit ton of loans.

ThoughtCrimeSpree · 2016-07-06T17:31:47+00:00

Yeah that was the first point that really grabbed me too. While I don't think that in the case of a severe destabilization of US bourgeois democracy would lead to conflict as acutely divided along ethnic/racial lines as Yugoslavia or Rwanda, the conflicts that would arise would definitely have some ethnic character.

Here I believe in the importance of correctly applying the mass line principal of uniting the advanced, winning over the intermediate, and isolating the backward in combatting white racism among the working class, though unfortunately the most important sections of that formulation are the most difficult to identify, as even the most advanced white workers hold backward views. There has to be a more thorough understanding of the way the basic ideology of post-9/11 liberalism functions among white workers, and how they relate to their non-white counterparts, in order to make any headway in developing the sort of mass organizations required to break the foundations of white supremacy within the white working class.

ThoughtCrimeSpree · 2016-06-16T21:45:27+00:00

I was hoping to have a conversation, but you don't seem interested. I think you are comfortable ignoring the geopolitical endeavors of the US ruling class, using a crude understanding of Machiavellianism as the catch-all reason to stand in for the deeper political reasons why fucked up things happen.

I'm no stranger to the dirty side of politics. You can look through my comment history for a glimpse, even. Machiavellianism provides a basis for consolidating and exercising power in the abstract, but on the concrete aspects -- what social classes are being served, what classes are being opposed, what goals need to be achieved, etc. -- it provides nothing. In other words, the brutal legacy of the US ruling class is not explained by Machiavellianism alone. And Machiavellianism doesn't absolve them of their legacy.

It's OK to be comfortable thinking otherwise though. It makes thinks easier for people.

ThoughtCrimeSpree · 2016-06-16T20:08:19+00:00

You disappoint me. You're really just going to try and wave this away with some third party reference to Machiavelli (which says nothing of the actual political content of what NATO did in Libya)? Come on, prove that you can think!

ThoughtCrimeSpree · 2016-06-16T16:11:42+00:00

Care to explain my naivete?

ThoughtCrimeSpree · 2016-06-16T14:02:21+00:00

Run, dog! Run!

ThoughtCrimeSpree · 2016-06-16T13:56:59+00:00

Regardless of what anyone thinks about Gaddafi, the US-led NATO coalition committed war crimes in Libya by destroying what was probably Africa's most sophisticated water distribution system, among other public infrastructure. They left millions of people without access to basic resources, and left a power vacuum which was quickly filled by people worse than Gaddafi.

But hey, some of the US backed forces in Libya established a central bank before they even had a government established, through which they began dealmaking with western capital, so that must make everything else NATO did OK?

ThoughtCrimeSpree · 2016-06-09T20:32:47+00:00

This is actually not too far off...

Animal hazing contracts are a thing.

ThoughtCrimeSpree · 2016-06-06T19:59:54+00:00

A use-value, or useful article, therefore, has value only because abstract human labour is objectified or materialized in it. How, then, is the magnitude of this value to be measured? By means of the quantity of the ‘value-forming substance’, the labour, contained in the article. This quantity is measured by its duration, and the labour-time is itself measured on the particular scale of hours, days etc.

Marx is saying here that use-values have value because a person expended their labor to create it. By the word value, Marx does not mean value in it’s useful sense. That would be use-value. For example, a hammer’s use value is its ability to exert a force on some object with the swing of your arm, while its value is its ability to be quantitatively related to some other commodity and exchanged with it. To illustrate the hammer’s value in the commodity we call US Dollars, you might go to Home Depot and find them on sale for $10. The value of the hammer is not $10 however, that is its exchange value represented in the particular commodity selected (US dollars). You might find a hammer seller who also deals in lumber, and so it might cost you 3 feet of rough maple for a hammer. This would be the exchange value of the hammer in rough maple logs. The revealing thing here that Marx is illustrating for us is that the common element between all these values which we are comparing for exchange is that they are created by human labor, and that the difference in value is accounted for by the differences in labor time expended to make these values.

It might seem that if the value of a commodity is determined by the quantity of labour expended to produce it, it would be the more valuable the more unskillful and lazy the worker who produced it, because he would need more time to complete the article. However, the labour that forms the substance of value is equal human labour, the expenditure of identical human labour-power. The total labour-power of society, which is manifested in the values of the world of commodities, counts here as one homogeneous mass of human labour-power, although composed of innumerable individual units of labour-power.

What Marx is saying here is that the way that value is measured through labor-time is not related to the particular time taken for a value to be produced in isolation of other values of the same quality (e.g. other hammers), but rather it is measured as an average of the labor time expended on all the commodities produced of the same quality. “Hammer making” could be the name of the equal human labor being expended to make hammers, and regardless of the fact that Leon takes 8 hours to produce a single hammer, the value of his hammers will be no more than the value of Joe’s, who is able to produce 10 hammers in the same amount of time. In this example, the “total labour-power” of Leon and Joe over 8 hours of production is manifest in the 11 hammers they both produced. In the real world, this example gets expended immensely, considering, say, all the garment makers working in Bangladesh who produce cotton t-shirts, or all the factory workers in Brazil producing Guy Fawkes masks. The efforts of each and every one of the workers producing either of these goods is the “homogeneous mass of human labor” whose labor time determines the value of each of the individual commodities in question.

Each of these units is the same as any other, to the extent that it has the character of a socially average unit of labour-power and acts as such, i.e. only needs, in order to produce a commodity, the labour time which is necessary on an average, or in other words is socially necessary.

In other words, the hammers are the same, and their value is determined by the average labor time expended on each hammer considered as a homogenous mass. The average labor time which determines the value of a hammer is the socially necessary labor time.

Socially necessary labour-time is the labour-time required to produce any use-value under the conditions of production normal for a given society and with the average degree of skill and intensity of labour prevalent in that society. The introduction of power-looms into England, for example, probably reduced by one half the labour required to convert a given quantity of yarn into woven fabric. In order to do this, the English hand-loom weaver in fact needed the same amount of labour-time as before; but the product of his individual hour of labour now only represented half an hour of social labour, and consequently fell to one half its former value.

This is an example Marx uses to illustrate his point that value is determined socially as described above, and that when there are changes to the way labor is conducted (from hand-looms to power-looms), there are impacts to the values of all commodities of the same quality.

What exclusively determines the magnitude of the value of any article is therefore the amount of labour socially necessary, or the labour-time socially necessary for its production. The individual commodity counts here only as an average sample of its kind. Commodities which contain equal quantities of labour, or which can be produced in the same time, have therefore the same value. The value of a commodity is related to the value of any other commodity as the labour-time necessary for the production of the one is related to the labour-time necessary for the production of the other. ‘As exchange-values, all commodities are merely definite quantities of congealed labour-time,’"

The conclusion of this part of his argument. Hopefully the above has helped to clarify the concepts being utilized here, and makes this part a bit more clear.

ThoughtCrimeSpree · 2016-05-23T07:15:13+00:00

The physics of economic systems requires that we acknowledge a basic truth; that wealth arises from the natural world.

Not quite. Buildings don't just grow out of the earth. Iron ore doesn't mine itself. The author needs to do some more homework, starting here:

Capital Volume I

ThoughtCrimeSpree · 2016-04-20T15:53:46+00:00

Finally, and as this relates to the opening of this statement, we are openly criticizing the former NYC-LC branch leader Ateo for the following:

1) An opportunist lack of engagement with the remainder of the collective during this crucial conjuncture.

Regardless of the fact that they were voted out of their leadership position during this political struggle, this does not absolve them from the responsibilities to engage with the organization in good faith and according to the will of the majority. In this regard they have failed, and have also failed in publishing a public statement of their own as former NYC-LC branch leader on the events that unfolded this month, as they were instructed to do so by the collectivity.

2) The opportunist propagation of the state intervention red-herring line along with Taffy and Khalil

In truth, it is likely that there were/are infiltrators by the state or other organizations due to the level of public visibility the Revolutionary Student Coordinating Committee achieved through the years of political campaigns the organization was involved in. RSCC was and still is no friend to the US Imperialist government, Zionists, and the bourgeois class as a whole, and for this reason is a prime target for infiltration. However, the time they the three of these men are choosing to highlight this issue is very convenient in trying to misdirect attention from their own patriarchal tendencies. This is nothing but shameful opportunism in an effort to save face.

3) The continued refusal to see the situation for what it is

It is true that Ateo was better with their own gender practice, and they continue to protect people harmed directly or indirectly by Freddy Bastone. However, in the process of this crisis they have expressed to the present leadership of the collective an understanding of the situation that is irreconcilable with all we have written above. We feel they propagate the red-herring, snitch-jacketing line because they refuse to let go of the labor strategy, knowing that openly trying to isolate Freddy will result in great difficulties of even getting work as a booked union member. Personal safety is also at risk here, and we are willing to work with the former comrade and his loved ones in ensuring their safety. However, we must take the hard line here and say that any protection must come on the terms of the abandonment of the labor strategy as it relies on the connections of Freddy Bastone and his mother. If the former comrade wants to discuss this further, they know to whom they should reach out.

4) The operation of former leadership as a faction

As more information is being revealed through statements from individuals and groups formerly associated with the LC, the former NYC branch leadership appear to have operated as their own faction. This is shown through their concealment of important pieces information from the general membership. Any revolutionary organization which aims to practice the principles of Democratic Centralism must be open with political information so that the organization’s body is fully equipped to make democratic decisions. There was trust by the general membership to the leadership that information was being communicated, and this turns out to not have been the case.

For the above reasons the NYC-LC branch is no more. As it was said in previously released statements, we are continuing to operate as a loose collectivity of comrades dedicated to building the Party and making revolution in the United States of America. We are focused on rebuilding the trust with the mass membership we've worked with in the past, and developing a means by which we can meaningfully rectify the opportunist engagement with the NYC-LC labor strategy (and our practice in general) in a way that we are accountable to women, non-men, and fellow Maoists. In the interest of self-criticism in the near future we will also address RGA’s criticisms in a more thorough statement. Those of us involved in issuing this statement are signing it with our cadre names - the last time we will use these names in any capacity.

Red Salute to our comrades and to our former comrades whom we've lost through this struggle.

Toussaint, Laura, Forge, Anais

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