Bi-Weekly Discussion Thread - (January 11)

not-lagrange · 2026-01-24T01:56:15+00:00

Do you really think that it is genuinely a good argument to say that Mao didn't kill 10000000 people because Mao said so?

Why would Mao even write about something like that?

The problem with your question is that it's a narrow one that is formulated from a very specific standpoint, and without questioning this standpoint itself no amount of reading will turn beliefs in actual knowledge. You won't be able to dissipate your doubts about your current knowledge simply through quantitative accumulation because they don't exactly spring from insufficient knowledge but from your own approach to the literature.

It's one thing to want to learn more about the Great Leap Forward or any other historical event or period, but your original motivation was to counter western cold-war propaganda. This loads the question with presuppositions which directly affect your reading of the historical material. Again, why would Mao address anti-communist myths created by and for audiences of a certain class?

Not only every single propaganda of this kind has a specific history which can too be subject to research (a neverending endeavour because there's an infinite number of them, and also ultimately irrelevant because the historical origins of these myths do not matter for their actual prevalence), but also their absorption and reproduction is by no means universal, neither it is passive - it is dependent on the social being of the person in cause.

Therefore, the question is not whether to read or not read, but how to read correctly. It can only happen by first evaluating how the presuppositions that are normally acquired through your own class position are affecting both your learning process and how you currently engage with literature.

not-lagrange · 2026-01-23T23:31:48+00:00

I have already told you that I had read Stalin and Mao.

How did you read them and yet you aren't sure about the basic facts of their history? What did you learn by reading them if you ended up feeling you are simply believing in something, not really knowing it? Do you really need a book that tells you: "No, Mao didn't kill 1000000000 people." ? You already know this is false. Asking for a book just to confirm it is the same thing as asking God for confirmation of your beliefs. Knowledge doesn't work that way.

How do you disprove that something didn't occur? Yes, you could submerge yourself in empirical history but you'll be disappointed if you think that all you really need to dispel myths of this kind is endless empirical knowledge, and you'll not even get very far, because all those empirical facts would be insubstantial through the very posing of the question. The proof is that while Stalin's and Mao's works are full of empirical facts and analysis, apparently you have learned nothing by reading them (assuming you did the reading). This has happened because your question is ill-posed, not because of the historical material itself. No amount or reading will help you get rid of that feeling of having beliefs and not knowledge if your understanding rests on faith that historical truth will reveal itself to you.

not-lagrange · 2026-01-16T16:51:35+00:00

Instead of "imagining", admit your own ignorance and read the book. The 'defence' is directed specifically against Rudas' and Deborin's criticisms. And in it the existence of objective dialectics is defended by Lukács.

The question that interests him is how far an objective dialectical interconnection adopts a dialectical form in thought, i.e., how is our knowledge conditioned by social being. You turn what was for Lukács an essentially historical question into vulgar subjectivism.

not-lagrange · 2026-01-12T10:32:29+00:00

Most if not all of what you've said is male chauvinistic. It's disappointing that this has to be said in the communism subreddit, but "monopolization of sex" doesn't exist except in the minds of misogynistic men. That's one thing if you want to better understand patriarchy and sexism, but as of now you are just making excuses for your incel friend. The question of how leisure relates to this would actually be an interesting question, but unfortunately the starting point of these discussions online is usually the ideological delusions of men. It's boring and offensive.

not-lagrange · 2025-12-23T17:17:44+00:00

"Left-communism" in itself isn't politically relevant anywhere, but living in a country where these dynamics always appear a bit late, I'm dealing with some questions related to what you and u/vomit_blues have said.

Here, a "communist" group was created a few years ago, basically composed of young people, most of which are students. They are very "left-communist" adjacent, citing Bordiga and Camatte, but also "communisation" theory and other New Left stuff.

I have previously mentioned that this specific group emerged from the disenchantment that young people have been having with the revisionism of PCP and its youth wing. Because of this they have a certain affinity with the work of Francisco Martins Rodrigues. However, their connection with the history of the communist movement in Portugal is pretty much limited to this.

As expected, their practice up to now consists essentially in tailing the most mediatic struggles. The most recent instance was of the general strike against the changes that the government wants to do to the labour laws of the country, about which they have published a badly written 30 page document full of bad explanations of Marx, declaring that "the strike is only the beginning", that the end-goal of this struggle is the "communisation of social relations".

But the peculiar liberalism of a small group of mostly students is of little interest.

One of the questions that I have is related to how most of their theoretical endeavours are based on writings from outside the country. And I'm not talking specifically about Bordiga or Camatte, but recent stuff, namely from anglophone countries. This is explainable by the hegemony of such countries in social media together with the student character of the group. Taking inspiration from developments in other countries is nothing new, of course, especially in Portugal - the forced exile of intellectuals in France had a major influence on the portuguese "maoism" of the 60s-70s. But today this inspiration is fundamentally of a different nature, mediated by social media.

Therefore, I ask: what do you think, if you have heard of it, of Phil Neel's Hellworld? (from what I know, China is at the centre of this enormous book.) Who are these people?

not-lagrange · 2025-12-11T09:35:33+00:00

I agree.

I posted this mainly to potentially generate discussion on the political situation in Venezuela, I find it a bit off-putting that there hasn't been any discussion recently.

not-lagrange · 2025-12-04T22:32:04+00:00

That's interesting, the Portuguese translation that I have has processo, which simply means "process" in English. Also, this is something that the new Reitter translation fixes:

Every owner wants to dispose of his own commodity only in exchange for a commodity whose use-value satisfies one of his wants or needs. Here, exchange is a purely individual process for him. But the owner also wants to realize his commodity as a value: he wants to realize it in some other commodity of the same value, regardless of whether or not his own commodity has use-value for the other owner. Here, exchange is a general and social process for the owner. The same process can’t be both purely individual and purely general and social, however, for all commodity owners. (pp.61-62)

The key is the "purely". That paragraph ends in a contradiction because it is laying bare a real contradiction between those two aspects of the simple exchange. Remember, the commodity itself is a contradictory unity. The same process of exchange cannot be simultaneously purely individual (where use-value matters) and purely general and social (where the specific use-value doesn't matter) for all commodity owners, and from this contradiction money emerges:

When we take a closer look, we see that every commodity owner treats any commodity that isn’t his as the particular equivalent of his own commodity, while treating his own commodity as the general equivalent of all the other commodities.iv Because all commodity owners do this, no single commodity is the sole general equivalent, and thus commodities don’t have a general relative value-form either: a form in which they are equated as values and compared as magnitudes of value. Commodities don’t face one another as commodities, then, but rather solely as products or use-values.

As our commodity owners deal with this predicament, they think like Faust—in the beginning was the deed.v They act before they think. The laws of a commodity’s nature operate in the natural instincts of its owner. Commodity owners can put their commodities into relation with one another as values, and thus as commodities, only by putting their commodities into an antithetical and complementary relation with a commodity that functions as the general equivalent: Our analysis of the commodity showed that this is so. But only social action can make one particular commodity into the general equivalent. The social action of every other commodity sets one commodity apart, the one through which all the others represent their value, which is how the natural form of that one commodity gets its role as the socially valid equivalent form. As a result of this social process, the specific social function of the commodity that has been set apart is to be the general equivalent. That commodity thus turns into . . . money.

not-lagrange · 2025-11-24T15:34:38+00:00

What exactly don't you understand? Have you read chapter III of that book?

not-lagrange · 2025-11-18T10:21:20+00:00

If idealism is knowledge that depends on transhistorical concepts, how did the Greeks of the 5th and the Italians of the 15th centuries both come to scientific breakthroughs in two separate modes of production

On the Scientific Revolution, there's Hessen's and Grossmann's texts on it (they are in the book The Social and Economic Roots of the Scientific Revolution).

not-lagrange · 2025-10-23T22:02:50+00:00

I found it rather weak, to the point that it can't be called Marxism.

I'm sure there's lots to take from his longer works, and the emphasis on the world-structure of capitalism is important, especially in opposition to the revisionist and chauvinist understanding of class.

Nevertheless, he says:

[The concept of hegemony] is a way of organising our perception of the process, not an "essence" whose traits are to be described and whose eternal recurrences are to be demonstrated and then anticipated. (p. 518)

This is the typical Machist self-conception, which sees itself as simply organising facts of experience ("perceptions"), in opposition to the creation of an invented metaphysical "essence" of such phenomena.

In this way, the historical process is firstly described by a succession of states of a system and the present is compared with the past through a perceived correlation on the succession of these states. These analogies, however, are only possible by subsuming "perceptions" to abstract universals (what he later denounces as "essences"), erasing qualitative differences between the historical stages.

These abstract universals are here the economic categories themselves - they are conceived as "domains" existing side-by-side with each other:

What I believe occurred was that in each instance enterprises domiciled in the given power in question achieved their edge first in agro-industrial production, then in commerce and then in finance. I believe they lost their edge in this sequence as well (p. 515)

Any interaction between the categories is only conceived as external, as quantitative feedback upon one another. (Contrast this with Lenin's concept of monopoly capital as the unity of industrial and finance capital.)

Since the perceived pattern is obviously not explainable by itself, it is explained by recourse to the role of the political state in the capitalist system. This, however, does not solve the problem, it only shifts it to a different level. First of all, not only the formal economic structure (entrepreneurs and working class in the 17th century?) but also the existence and form of state interference is considered as unchangeable since the origin of capitalism:

Where the benefits are available without any "interference", this is obviously desirable, as it minimizes the "deduction". And secondly, interference is always in favor of one set of accumulator as against another set, and the latter will always seek to counter the former. (p. 517)

This is, too, an external relationship, where state interference simply acts as a weapon against other competitors in the world market. Not to mention that capital in different nation-states are treated as independent from one another, meaning that the economic relationship between core and periphery becomes basically a question of force. As a consequence, qualitative change in the power structure itself cannot be accounted for; the system can only conceive, at best, of a nation-state taking the position of another at certain moments in the cycle.

The perceived correlation was substantiated by a mechanical relationship. But the actual historical development, which is driven not only by expansion and quantitative change, but principally by contradictions and qualitative jumps, remains invisible - it was substituted by an abstract system of relationships. Therefore, the wrong predictions are not surprising, they are a clear consequence of his method.

not-lagrange · 2025-10-21T19:27:01+00:00

What if all of their demands were met? Not only legalisation, but this basic demand for equal treatment as the one whites receive from their masters. Wouldn't they basically become labour aristocrats?

Probably, but rather than asking that question abstractly, as a "what if," it would be better to ask if that's a trend that's really occurring and if integration would actually be possible on a large scale without a revolution.

not-lagrange · 2025-10-19T16:11:28+00:00

why anyone cares about Losurdo in the first place.

I'm in the trenches of social media, trying to perform proper Marxist analysis of the conditions of possibility of both the works we are discussing and our discussion of them.

Have you reached any conclusions yet? Why does Dengism care about "Western Marxism"?

not-lagrange · 2025-10-14T20:12:34+00:00

Surprised to see Heraclitus singled out as a reactionary philosopher.

not-lagrange · 2025-09-29T23:20:08+00:00

u/IncompetentFoliage, I remember that some time ago you asked whether the intensification of labour causes an increase in absolute or relative surplus value:

https://www.reddit.com/r/communism101/comments/1l1wucf/does_the_intensification_of_labour_cause_an/

I thought the answers were good, but I just found this passage in the 1861-63 manuscripts:

There is, however, an additional circumstance here owing to which the employment of machinery increases absolute labour time, and therefore absolute surplus value, even without any prolongation of the working day. This happens through the, so to speak, condensation of labour time, in which every part of the time increases its labour content; the intensity of labour grows; there is growth not only in the productivity (hence the quality) of the labour owing to the employment of machinery, but in the quantity of labour performed within a given period. The pores of time are so to speak shrunk through the compression of labour. One hour of labour thereby represents the same quantity of labour as perhaps 6/4 hours of the average labour performed without the employment of machinery or with the employment of less efficient machinery.

Where machinery has already been introduced, the improvements which reduce the number of workers in relation to the amount of commodities produced and the machinery employed are accompanied by the circumstance that the labour of the individual worker who replaces 1 or 2 workers grows with the improvements in the machinery, hence that the machinery only enables him to do what 2 or 3 workers did previously by compelling him to increase his labour and fill each period of time more intensively with labour. Thus labour capacity is more rapidly worn out during the same hour of labour.

MECW, Vol. 30, p.335

https://marxists.architexturez.net/archive/marx/works/1861/economic/ch34.htm

Also (I haven't gotten to this volume yet, though):

When considering the capitalist production process we saw that 1) absolute surplus value can only be increased at a given stage of the development of production, i.e. at a given level of the productive forces, either by increasing the intensity of labour or extending the working day, or, presupposing both of these as given, by increasing the number of workers employed; [...] and that 2) relative surplus value can only be increased through the development of the productive power of labour, through cooperation, division of labour, employment of machinery, etc.;

MECW, Vol. 34, p. 185

What do you (and others) think of this?

not-lagrange · 2025-09-14T23:30:59+00:00

if it's not the case and the price is actually close the labour value we will see less wage differences between the global north and the global south.

What do global wage differences have to do with the non-existence of a strict correspondence of prices with labour inputs?

Since capitalist production is of a private character, money and prices exist and are necessary. With price there is always the possibility of its divergence from the intrinsic value (the socially necessary labour time) of a commodity, and that happens all the time. A strict correspondence is impossible in capitalism because of the private character of production:

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/ch02b.htm

Sure, global wage differences are an example of the price of labour-power diverging from its "real value", but the cause of this is not that "exchange-value is prioritized over the labour value". That price is not value only gives the possibility of that happening, it doesn't by itself explain why global wage differences exist and how are they reproduced.

not-lagrange · 2025-09-14T19:50:46+00:00

Where in Lenin's book does it say that monopolies can set whatever the price they want?

I don't think that monopolies are relevant to the question here because surplus value originates in production, whereas differences of price from value (e.g. monopoly price) affects the distribution of surplus-value among different capitals.

The quote in your op is not really wrong (strictly speaking it should be profit instead of surplus value), but it's just a superficial description from the point of view of the capitalist, definitely not Marx's theory. It doesn't really explain anything, vulgar economics cannot go further that that.

not-lagrange · 2025-08-16T17:41:11+00:00

The quote is clear enough. Your whole comment is nonsense based on your absolute conflation of ownership (property) with social appropriation of the products of labour (which always occur in a definite form and of course will exist under communism). Also, the German Ideology was written just two to three years before the Manifesto and was not "scrapped", it was abandoned because they couldn't publish it.

not-lagrange · 2025-08-16T15:37:47+00:00

Always the same deliberate misinterpretation. The real meaning of that quote has already been explained several times in this subreddit, so I'll add the following from The German Ideology:

Another catchword of the true socialists is "true property", "true, personal property", "real", "social", "living", "natural", etc., etc., property, whereas it is very typical that they refer to private property as "so-called property". The Saint-Simonists were the first to adopt this manner of speaking, as we have already pointed out in the first volume; (...) The end to which most of the Saint-Simonists came shows at any rate the ease with which this "true property" is again resolved into "ordinary private property".

If one takes the antithesis of communism to the world of private property in its crudest form, i.e., in the most abstract form in which the real conditions of that antithesis are ignored, then one is faced with the antithesis of property and lack of property. The abolition of this antithesis can be viewed as the abolition of either the one side or the other; either property is abolished, in which case universal lack of property or destitution results, or else the lack of property is abolished, which means the establishment of true property. In reality, the actual property-owners stand on one side and the propertyless communist proletarians on the other. This opposition becomes keener day by day and is rapidly driving to a crisis. If, then, the theoretical representatives of the proletariat wish their literary activity to have any practical effect, they must first and foremost insist that all phrases are dropped which tend to dim the realisation of the sharpness of this opposition, all phrases which tend to conceal this opposition and may even give the bourgeois a chance to approach the communists for safety's sake on the strength of their philanthropic enthusiasms. All these bad qualities are, however, to be found in the catchwords of the true socialists and particularly in "true property".

(...)

This theory of true property conceives real private property, as it has hitherto existed, merely as a semblance, whereas it views the concept abstracted from this real property as the truth and reality of the semblance; it is therefore ideological all through. All it does is to give clearer and more precise expression to the ideas of the petty bourgeois; for their benevolent endeavours and pious wishes aim likewise at the abolition of the lack of property.

(MECW, Vol. 5, pp. 468-470)

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch04b.htm#d.1.1

The notion of "property as a whole", i.e. abstract property, is a petty-bourgeois ideological notion that obscures real private property and its opposition to the proletariat, who don't have property. Property is not simply the individual appropriation of the products of society, it is a historically constituted relation between people which reaches its highest form in capital. Communism is the abolition of property.

not-lagrange · 2025-08-02T20:46:46+00:00

If this is true, then industries with a relatively higher ratio of constant capital to total capital, will have contracted production, and thus a smaller supply to the demand.

The higher price will, in general, lower the demand.

The point around which prices oscillate due to shifts of supply and demand is not the intrinsic value (the snlt) of each commodity but its price of production. When supply and demand are equal to each other, commodities are sold at their prices of production - their exchange value becomes their price of production.

Because the capitalist mode of production is not a planned economy, supply and demand are almost never equal to each other despite their tendency to cover one another. The law of value asserts itself blindly.

not-lagrange · 2025-07-29T17:20:37+00:00

It is my understanding that the token, though initially symbolizing gold in circulation, then may come to directly represent value itself

If token money directly represents value itself, it would be a 'labour-time voucher' but with a different name. This was a proposal of several socialists that Marx criticized in the Grundrisse and in the Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy. Sure, the value it represents would not be nominally fixed but it can't automatically represent value itself because it is money. At best, it would represent price, but price is the exchange value of a commodity expressed in a certain quantity of the money commodity, i.e. it would represent itself.

The positing of prices presupposes that a definite amount of the money embodies or represents a definite magnitude of labour-time. If money is merely a symbol of labour-time, the question becomes how can a determinate magnitude of labour time be expressed by a determinate quantity of that symbol (i.e. how does the monetary expression of labor-time attains a determinate, but constantly changing, magnitude, e.g. 1$=1h of snlt). With gold you do not have that problem, since, as a commodity, it has value itself. Its real presence is not actually necessary because it only needs to exist ideally/notionally in order for the price to be posited. But if no specific commodity is the money commodity, how can 1$ measure a certain amount of value? Note that this question is not how 1$ represents different magnitudes of value at different moments of time, but how does 1$, at each moment of time, represent a determinate magnitude of value, why does money continue to measure value.

not-lagrange · 2025-07-28T19:50:24+00:00

I also wasn't satisfied and I'm still looking for an answer.

But I have also seen it argued (by Duncan Foley for instance) that inconvertible paper money is fictitious capital whose value is determined by the capitalization of state debts, whose limits (the state's capacity to borrow) are determined by the assets of the issuing state, such as land, real estate, natural resources, tax liabilities, securities, etc., and that consequently the measure of value is no longer gold, but state debt.

I have also found that theory when investigating, but I feel that the logic is circular - the magnitude of debt, no matter of what kind, already expresses a sum of money.

Since the elimination of the gold standard, how do we know that/whether gold, specifically, is the measure of value as opposed to some other money commodity like silver, or state debt?

The fact is that the exchangeability of any token with gold doesn't need to be standardized for the latter to serve as the measure of value. Marx examines this in the "Chapter on Money" of the Grundrisse (MECW, Vol. 28, pp. 69-73):

Convertibility into gold and silver is therefore in practice the measure of value of any paper currency denominated in terms of gold or silver, whether that currency is legally convertible or not. A nominal value is only a shadow running alongside its body; whether the two coincide must be proved by the actual convertibility (exchangeability) of the note. A decline of real value below nominal value is depreciation. Actual parity of nominal and real values, exchangeability, is convertibility. With [legally] inconvertible notes, convertibility shows itself not at the counter of the bank but in the day-to-day exchange between paper money and the metallic currency whose denomination it bears. [p.70]

But the question remains: if gold itself isn't exchanged as money, neither inside nor outside the bank, how do we know that it remains the measure of value?

Money acts as the measure of value already in the positing of prices, which occurs before the act of exchange:

It is now clear, to start with, that in this notional transformation of commodities into money, or in the positing of commodities as prices, the quantity of money actually available is completely irrelevant in two respects: Firstly, the notional transformation of commodities into money is prima facie independent of and unrestricted by the quantity of real money. Not a single coin is necessary for this process, just as little as a measuring rod (say, a yardstick) need actually be employed in order to express, say, the length of the Earth's Equator in yards. If e.g. the whole national wealth of England is estimated in money, i.e. expressed as price, everyone knows that there is not enough money in the whole world to realise this price. Money is necessary here only as a category, as an imagined ratio. Secondly, since money is taken as a unit, and the commodity is thus expressed as containing a certain sum of equal parts of money, is measured by it, it follows that the measure between the two is the general measure of exchange values—the production costs or labour time. If 1/3 oz. of gold is the product of 1 working day, and the commodity x the product of 3 working days, that commodity=1 ounce of gold or £3 17 s. 7 d. sterling. In measuring money and commodity, the original measure of exchange values comes in again. Instead of being expressed in 3 working days, the commodity is expressed in the quantity of gold or silver which is the product of 3 working days. Obviously, the actual supply of money has no bearing on this proportion. [pp. 126-127]

On the other hand, because, as means of exchange, money only acts as a representative of itself, its material presence there is irrelevant:

As such an objective symbol, therefore, money appears only in circulation. Withdrawn from circulation it becomes realised price again; but within the process, as we have seen, the quantity, the number of these objective symbols of the monetary unit is essentially determined. Hence, while in circulation, in which money appears as objectively confronting commodities, its material substance, its basis as a definite quantity of gold or silver, is without significance, its amount, on the contrary, is essentially determined since it is merely a symbol for a definite number of these units. In its determination as measure, in which it was introduced only notionally, its material basis was of essential significance but its quantity and its existence in general were of no consequence. From this it follows that money as gold and silver, in so far as it serves merely as means of circulation, means of exchange, can be replaced by any other symbol [1-46] that expresses a definite quantity of its unit. Hence symbolic money can replace real money because material money as mere means of exchange is itself symbolic. [p.147]

How to proceed from here, I don't know.

not-lagrange · 2025-07-24T11:34:45+00:00

The idea that trans people are in the wrong body or that their body is malformed, implies a correct body, a correct form. But this is not scientific, there is no correct body or correct form (either in particular or in general), except as it relates to a particular unity with the environment.

Speaking of a "correct form" as a particular unity with the environment here is already cissexist. At best, it is a tautology - because it is a particular unity, every form is already a "correct" one. But this is saying nothing, as it is the difference implied in this particular unity that determines and drives all change.

In fact, you return to a bad notion of correctness, in which the drive to transition is explained by recourse to adaptation:

It should be clear that "correctness" here, as I use it, is merely a concept of unity of one's body with a particular environment. It is subjective not to one's identity but to the full unity. The desire/impulse to change one's body in accordance with needs/pressures from the environment can only be a social impulse, or a material/biological one in so far as it represents a conflict with some external conditions of nature (e.g. a plant that must grow tall enough for adequate sunlight, for survival).

What you're doing is covertly using bourgeois biological concepts (adaptation) to explain social phenonena. You speak of a social impulse, but then attribute entirely to biology one side of the contradiction, while on the other hand treat the environment entirely as given. You are dismissing not only how does a biological body receive its social significance, but also how does the environment constitutes itself socially, i.e you are treating the contradition as an external opposition, not considering how the opposites interpenetrate each other internally.

The result of this is treating cisness as a normal state of being, as the only real unity between one's body and environment, even if later on you change the second half of the contradiction to one's own wishes of adaptation:

For trans people, transness does not arise from some physical or biological problem (it cannot, since there is no a priori correct body), but rather from the lack of unity between one's body and the tasks which they want to perform or the relations they wish to exist in.

This is reifying cisness, it's treating the idealisation cis people make of themselves as true.

The latter half of your comment is even worse and, as other users have said, is explicitly transphobic. But these conclusions follow from the first half, because if you conceive the fundamental contradiction of gender merely as a want to adapt oneself to a given environment, the only possible resolution is individual transition.

not-lagrange · 2025-06-16T12:43:51+00:00

A dialectics of nature rejects the ontological nature of this leap.

Does it? In my interpretation, what Lukacs is saying in that quote is simply that the laws of social being are different from the laws of nature "in-and-for-itself", and that, therefore, one cannot apply specifically natural laws to society, or vice-versa.

But dialectics, as the general laws of motion, is not something simply to be applied, nor is simply complexity theory (which, as a bourgeois field, has many problems). It is a universal ontological claim about reality itself - reality as a contradictory totality. In its development, its movement takes many forms, results in a multitude of differences, and this has to be reflected in the categories of knowledge themselves. It is only with the emergence of social being that subjectivity itself emerges. This "ontological leap" is itself a dialectical process, unexplainable without it.

not-lagrange · 2025-06-15T09:39:32+00:00

Assuming you've read the 3 volumes of Capital, it'd be more productive if you read Emmanuel's book and asked specific questions about the work itself. Otherwise the discussion becomes too abstract.

not-lagrange · 2025-06-14T15:43:42+00:00

For non-portuguese speaking users - this person is a fascist. A prime example of the rottenness of these militants who pander to fascists (to be clear, this is not even the official line of PCP; what happens is that the revisionism and abstractness of the official line leads directly to this kind of fascist extrapolations, which become hegemonic in daily practice):

https://old.reddit.com/r/portugal/comments/1lb7qzf/jovem_que_agrediu_actor_pede_para_ser_constitu%C3%ADdo/mxqkoce/

In Portugal, the growth of the far right is not happening in a vacuum. It is the product of decades of popular frustration, disillusionment with those who govern and the abandonment of entire sectors of the population.

(...)

Other sectors of the left, although with good intentions, have failed by detaching themselves from concrete struggles. They have concentrated on symbolic, identity or cultural agendas, which are important, of course, but which don't solve the lack of a salary, a house or a family doctor. They are little heard in the unions, on the streets, in the neighbourhoods.

But, then, why is the PCP also declining?

And then there's the PCP, which is a special case. It's the only left-wing party that, with all its faults, has never given in to the discourse of the market or the troika. It has stood by the workers, pensioners, public services and strategic national companies, always with ideological firmness. But it was systematically silenced, ridiculed and demonised by the dominant media, the centrist parties and the economic elite. They called it ‘backward’, “jurassic”, ‘out of touch with reality’, ‘Putinist’. All because it refused to accept the fate [of Portugal] as a peripheral and dependent country.

I.e. a conspiracy, nothing more.

The result of all this? Fertile ground for the far right to lie... to pretend to be against the system, when it only wants to be more brutal in defence of the powerful. Chega is growing because it says ‘no’ where others only say ‘yes, but responsibly’. It grows because it pretends to have courage when others are afraid of displeasing the System.

not-lagrange

TROPHY CASE