TODAY I'LL DRINK TO THAT!

"Oh, beware the Moscow Gold!"

Yes, it's also the guy who takes advice from the spirit of his dead dog. I'm not kidding.

You know... That's actually not a crazy thought. I'm not a professional Bible scholar but I'm super interested in the topic and read my share of books and research articles on critical biblical studies.

Some of the craziest prophetic writings in the bible are actually super anti-elite, criticizing kings and priestly leaders for extorting the poor and not caring for their people, decrying foreign and domestic opressors, etc, etc.

If you read Amos, Baruch, Ezekiel, Isaiah and so on it's not rare to find stuff like "what is the value the sacrifices in the temple have if you're starving your people?" directed at kings and other elites.

Not all of it, but some of the later stuff (exilic and post-exilic) is surrounded by crazy visions like "... the angel of lord showed me the throne of YHWH and it was awesome and terrifying and full of eyes and wheels within wheels and 200 heads", etc.

So... part of it might be a way of saying "BTW, here's the mothefucking terrifying being that's going to fuck you up if you don't stop oppressing the people...".

Of course, all that was later coopted by an institutional priestly class who couldn't give a fuck about the actual social message. But there was a lot of social preoccupation by some of the original authors.

It's Portuguese :)

The capybara is the national mascot of the Brazilian Revolution.

Hahaha, não sou. Mas curto o camarada.

You can have a taste of DALLE•3 on Bing for free (with some restrictions).

It's not as impressive but it's pretty interesting.

https://www.bing.com/images/create .

Yeah, unfortunately. But I think it's temporary. The open source models are evolving VERY fast. Eventually they'll catch-up.

🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 That's DELICIOUS

I know a couple of liberals who L.O.V.E. to cite Du Bois around that would be pretty shocked by this quote.

If liberals knew how fucking "tankie" some of their idols really were they would completely melt.

Well, I'm Brazilian so I can tell you: they'll do it as many times as we allow them.

Since the 90s we had at least three neoliberal waves in Brazil with mass privatization and austerity measures, punctuated by center-left periods of "it's ok to enrich banks but let's at least guarantee that people can eat" periods.

Dude, I'm going to show you how to get rich with this simple trick:

step 1: find a dependent capitalist country and destabilize its government

step 2: find a way to destroy it's public infrastructure. Just coopt a local comprador class and defund everything, but if all else fails just start a war.

And so on.

It's ripe for some good old neoliberal shock therapy and mass privatization.

In Brazil we call that "lapada seca". I don't think I know how to translate the spirit of it, but literally it's something like "dry slap".

You say that when someone got slapped so hard you can feel the pain from afar.

Dê a ordem, camarada! <3

I used to be a left leaning socdem during my early years until early adulthood. My parents had been militant in communist orgs against the military dictatorship in Brazil in the 70s so I was very proud of the that story, which helped build this left leaning tendency. But most former communists had gone socdem in Brazil after the 90s.

I took a firm liberal dive during post-grad studies and after I began working, influenced by economic literature and also by work environment ideology. That was exacerbated by the failures our socdem government. I was still kind of "left liberal" and respectful of my family's history, but I tended to be the "progressive on social issues, conservative on economics" kind of liberal.

Until we elected an actual fascist here in Brazil.

That started unraveling a mental process that started questioning everything. My belief in liberal institutions took a hit, than electoral bourgeois democracy, than all the bullshit in economics started unraveling. I finally realized that what bugged me about liberal economics was the complete disregard for political processes. Fetishizing the technical aspects without taking into account the political processes behind them, which completely turn the theory upside down.

I went back to reading Marx ann Lenin again and... here I am.

100% agreed, comrade.

That's where we can converge. Thank you.

That's a fair point, but... Well, that's what the Leninist party organization is for. To forge this revolutionary spirit on the advanced members of the working classes and then spreading this through the class.

It will not come naturally. Class consciousness doesn't come from nowhere. We can't complain that there isn't class consciousness without actually building organizations to foment it. We need more Lenin in this conversation.

Edit:

Sorry for editing but this is an important point. As Marxists we shouldn't rely on idealism but on the material conditions for something to happen, right?

This discourse "people aren't ready for the hardships of revolution" is idealist. It pressuposes that metaphysical conditions and ideas ("being ready for the revolution") are the movers of history. As Marxists that's not what we believe. We believe that material conditions are the movers of history.

So we ask ourselves: what material conditions make people apt for revolutionary action? And we work to bring about those conditions.

That's the Leninism in "Marxism-Leninism"!!!! That's one of the great contribution of Lenin (not the only one, of course): the first steps on the theory of revolutionary organization.

That's what frustrates me about the phrase in the title. We have a lot of past theory and practice to apply for that problem. Granted: I didn't listen to the podcast. Maybe that's what he talks about later. But I think the phrase as it's written is a disservice.

That's a weird question. Of course it would be inherited by their successors. I don't know if I understand the question.

Their assets would be inherited and production would continue, simply business as usual. Nothing would change in the big scheme of things for two reasons:

1. Billionaires are not needed for production. They're literally useless. They are leeches that steal the value workers produce. They are not needed for production to go on.

2. If the mechanisms of wealth accumulation aren't disrupted, new billionaires will appear.

The problem is not the individual billionaires. The problem is the existence of bourgeoisie as a class and their private ownership of the means of production, through which they capture and accumulate the value that we produce through our work.

Even if their wealth is not inherited you'd still have capitalism. Suppose a crazy government killed all billionaires and redistributed all their assets. Even in that case, if private ownership of the means of production continues, surplus value accumulation will eventually produce new billionaires.

You'll never see serious Marxists advocating for polítical assassinations as a strategy. Because it's pointless. They know that the problem isn't specific individuals and their morals, but the mechanisms. Those mechanisms produce a class of individuals who can accumulate power and wealth by controlling other people's work. The only solution is eliminating this mechanism and turning those people into regular workers.

In the late 19th century oppressed Russian workers managed to assassinate multiple magnates, ministers of state, and even managed to assassinate Czar Alexander II in 1881. You know what this accomplished? Absolutely nothing but increased oppression and vigilance. Because the problem isn't individuals. It's how we collectively organize around production.

Absolutely not. This is boomer talk. Idealistic rant without basis in reality.

Who is he talking about? Extremely privileged white upper middle class in core capitalist countries?

Because everyone else is living fucked up lives everyday and dealing with it. The working class deal with "discomforts and inconveniences" daily. What the fuck is this guy talking about?

Those people need to get out of their bubble and talk to working class people every now and then.

By looking at the objective reality, there's two possibilities: global socialism or the break down of modern society as we know it (and I'm trying to avoid being overly pessimistic and talking about extinction).

If the capitalist production continues in the direction it's going, climate change will get so extreme in the next couple of centuries that the very existence large scale human organization will become less and less probable.

That much I think even left liberals will admit.

Now, we as Marxists know that the forces within capitalism prevents reforming it. So we know that only revolutionary change will prevent this collapse of contemporary capitalism. So either way capitalism will eventually collapse under the weights of its own contractions, either by revolutionary change or by extinguishing itself.

As climate change fucks up the lives of more and more people, revolutionary change gets more and more likely. So I do believe we'll have a revolution in most parts of the world before the final collapse of everything. I'm actually very optimistic and I think the contradictions of capitalism are rapidly marching towards another cycle of intensification of class struggle that might kick off a revolutionary cycle.

If this is true and we really witness revolutions starting to pop in the next 10-20 years, remains to be seen though. And honestly, I think futurology exercises of this type are kind of meaningless. As Marxists we should adhere strictly to materialism and avoid idealistic speculation. We can and should evaluate the material reality, its contradictions and movements. But we should avoid idealistic projections. A revolution will happen when the material conditions for it are satisfied: a revolutionary class exist, it's conscious of its class and organized, and the levels of class struggle are getting to a point of inflection where the cost of enduring oppression are bigger than the risks of revolution, and so on.

We can only talk in those terms: is it likely that those conditions materialize in the USA in the next decades? In my opinion it isn't impossible, but I don't think it will start there. But this is a futile exercise.

Trying to predict if or when is kind of meaningless. What we can and must do is organize ourselves, and bring about the conditions we can control: class consciousness, worker organization and intensify the struggle in a way that makes the working classes ready and able to recognize the moment, seize it and fight for it when it comes.

Ah yes, the vast fields of tea plants that grow in Yorkshire...

Probably just the number of retirees who took their own lives out of desperation because of Pinochet's destruction of social security already exceeds the deaths in the WTC attacks.

Legitimately, the number of elderly suicides in Chile is huge. You have elderly people who have NO INCOME AT ALL and would rather die than to be a weight on their already impoverished families.

And this doesn't even scratch the surface of the level of evil that Pinochet caused.

¡Allende Vive!

I always had a difficulty to choose those things. Favorite genre of music, favorite movie, favorite artists...

I like music. That's it. I'd listen to and learn to like mostly anything. The secret is trying to understand each musical tradition's language, values, aesthetic aims and how they achieve them. If you do, you end up liking it.

neo-bonapartiste

People really go out of their way to call themselves fascists without calling themselves fascists.

I tried to write that in 200 paragraphs and the comrade above said it beautifully in a single one. Listen to them.

I honestly think those kinds of debates are useless. They tire you, make you sad and despondent, and accomplish nothing. We don't bring people over with angry arguments with liberals about how Marx felt about jews. We don't make progress on the revolution by dunking on liberals online on minutia about the history of the USSR.

Let's take a look at how it played out in the past we could have some pointers on what is an useful controversy.

When Lenin debates Kautsky in writing, does that resemble what we do in online debates? When Marx debates Proudhon, is it the same thing we are doing? I would argue that it isn't at all.

First of all, Marx and Lenin are engaging with people they perceive to be in the same camp as they are. They are not debating hostile outsiders. They are addressing what they perceive to be errors within the same movement. They also do, of course, address theoretically and practically the actual enemies of their camp. But they rarely do so nominally and point by point. They do so more generally, when building their own theory.

Second of all, they are doing so in long form writing. Not point by point argument with immediate response. This is important. It allows you to build an actual argument, enriched with data, enriched with a thorough reading of the thesis of the person you're addressing. It also doesn't have the same dynamics where the other person can move goal posts freely.

Third, were them hoping to convince their opponents? Was mit directly addressed to the other side in hopes of bringing them over? They weren't.They were writing to an audience that will read both texts and hope to make that audience see the problems with the thesis the other side is defending and propose alternatives. The audience is the target to be convinced, not the opponent. If they see the error of their thinking, good! But that's not likely to happen by the very nature of debate.

I think we should emulate this. And this is what I see, for example, online agitators doing (for example on YouTube). They don't engage directly with the liberals. They collect the liberal thought they see online and respond in long form, with a thorough take down, well supported by data and theory, aimed at the audience, not at the people they're responding to.

Also, we need to remember that liberals are not on our camp. Addressing them is not a weeding out of errors by our comrades that we hope to prevent from spreading. They are our enemies. Remember they are the ones that will side with the bourgeois state to kill us, like they did with Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.

I understand that it's difficult to resist when you see people saying shit online and not respond. I do it all the time myself. It's also not without value to not allow the shit to stand there to be read by people without response. But I would advise you to only do so if you have the time and fortitude to engage non-emotionally with it, without any hopes of convincing the other person, but only of not allowing the record to go on without correction. Remember: you're not talking with that person. You're talking to someone reading that thread. Disconnect emotionally from the process because this will take a toll on you.

Repeating: online angry debate have never and will never bring anyone over to our side. Nobody ever became a socialist after being "convinced with facts and logic" in an angry online debate. As I said, if it has a function, it's only function is to not allow the other side to have full control of the online record.

But where and how do we actually convince people? I'd argue that it is one-on-one conversations and with a lot of love and patience. Spend your energy talking one-on-one with people. Listen to them, understand their problems, and discuss the problems they bring to you. Stick to topics they care about. Don't dump a bunch of theory and history of the USSR on their head. Patiently listen and use theory to guide you on how to address the things they complain about and show them that there's an alternative world that is possible. Point their anger towards the real problems that prevents this world from existing. Do this and this person will naturally come towards socialism. And do it out of love and care. With a patient attitude. It's not a debate anymore. You're talking to a fellow worker about making their life better. You're not trying to win a debate. You're trying to win a person.

And most important of all: don't sacrifice your mental health in the process. Burning yourself down trying to debate liberals online will not accelerate the revolution. It serves no purpose but wearing a motivated comrade down. And that's to their advantage.

Well, well, well, isn't that just the thing that we say all the time? That in capitalism the primary division is class and all the other ones are contingent on that.

Wow. A transgender person that has a public career and adopted 3 kids. This person's life would absolutely hell in the so called "democratic west".

I'm at a current point in my life were I can derive musical satisfaction from mostly anything if I pay enough attention to it.

It's very telling that in the host of reasons this person gives for the so called "shortage of labor" (which is actually a shortage of an industrial reserve army), not one of the is stagnant salaries.

No one is willing to admit that in most areas salaries are stagnant when compared to the enormous growth in labor productivity and cost of essential goods and services (food, housing, education, etc) and that's the root cause of a resistance or workers to enter the "reserve army" in those areas. Simple like that.

Increase pay, and people will join. If you can't increase pay enough to find employees, then your business isn't viable and you need to do something.

It depends on which right wing.

I'm Brazilian. Although I'm of mixed European and African ancestry, I phenotypically pass as what Brazilians consider white (which is a bit more elastic than whiteness in the US). Perhaps I could pass in the US as well if they don't know where I'm from and I avoid the sun for a few months.

I also work at a very well respected industry. One of the very bad ones.

So, here in Brazil if I just trim my hair and beard and put on a suit and walk through the financial core of the city I can easily pass for one of them. That's not how I usually present though. I'm usually wearing a shaggy hair, and shorts with visible tattoos. And I'm pretty annoyingly political all the time. So they usually treat me as a "one of those dumb, drug addict leftists who don't bathe" (even though I actually never took drugs and bathe at least twice a day because this place is hot as fuck).

If I step a foot in the US I'm immediately branded as "Hispanic" or "Latino" with all the connotations that will imply, with a pinch of Brazilian stereotypes on top:

So, they'll probably think I'm:

• lazy (yeah, I am kind of lazy... can't deny that one. But who isn't?),
• a womanizer who just hits on all women all the time (I'm super shy and respectful when talking to women, only had two long term relationships my whole life),
• ultra machoman, misogynistic and homophobic (I'm bisexual, dude...)
• a super incredibly amazing lover (well, I'm not going to comment that, curious people would have to find by themselves)
• amazing soccer player (lol... no...)
• amazing dancer (lol, double no)
• a jungle dwelling savage (I live in a 25 million people metropolis),
• uneducated and dumb (I have a PhD, I speak two languages more than you, and I know where China is on a map, you racist)
• violent and prone to raging and fist fighting (I never got into a physical fight in my life, I'm kind of a nerd, you know?)
• a suffering little guy who knew abject poverty and needs help (although we aren't rich and there were some periods of relative scarcity when I was a kid, I'm mostly ok, don't worry),

Also, "oh wow, Brazil, Pelé, Samba!!" is not a nice thing to say to a Brazilian when you first meet them. First of all, you sound condescending and stupid. I speak English. You don't need to shout random words at me. Second... This ain't the 70s, folks. Learn some updated stereotypes. Pelé retired before I was born.

Also don't do a little faux-samba dance. Please. You don't know how to, and the music playing here is not samba (it's salsa, maybe rumba — totally different rhythm, completely different country, not even the same language).

And speaking of that... Latin America is a huge place, you know? Full of different cultures. The global north seems to treat Brazilians, Mexicans, Colombians, Bolivians, Chileans, Argentinians, etc, as pretty much the same thing and that is infuriating for us.

And like... It's already super insensitive and offensive to deny individuality to the different countries of Spanish-speaking Latin America and treating them as a blob of indistinct "Hispanic" culture. But... Do you realize how clueless it is to bundle Brazil together in that blob? It's so fucking dumb!!!

Like, yeah we have some of things in common culturally, sure. And I fucking love my Latin American brothers and feel a shared sense of belonging to a bigger thing. I'd easily pick the side of another Latin American most of the time... Like... there's a sense of camaraderie difficult to explain.

But!!!! Dude... we don't even speak the same language. Brazil is a really odd puppy in the Latin American litter. Colombia has a lot more shared culture with far away Mexico than with neighboring Brazil. They share music on the radio, they share TV shows by Televisa, they share literature in Spanish, etc. And imagine this: if Colombia and Mexico, with all that cultural dialogue are so different and distinct, imagine how much more distinct they are from Brazil, who participates a lot less in this shared Spanish-speaking Latin American identity.

(Although we all share the most important cultural product of all times, which is El Chavo del Ocho, and no imperialist will ever take that away from us)

That's so fucking annoying dude. It looks like the world look at us with fucking inverted binoculars, you know? Like... 3000 different music genres? It's all Latin music. Just play some stock salsa from the 50s, give some maracas to a scantily clad oversexualized tanned girl to shake while she dances and that's it, a whole fucking continent summarized. FUCK YOU.

Hahahhahaj, you were victim of my bad English. I meant a bag of beans! Hahahaha.

I was just giving an example of how you could have an intuitive idea of metric units by the using objects around you if you eventually need it.

Brazilian here. You're just used to it because objects around you are imperial sizes. I live in a metric country so objects around me are metric sized. So I can easily eyeball metric units.

• 0.5 cm is the width of a pencil
• 2 cm is the size of a small coin (the American penny is roughly 2cm wide, BTW)
• 1 meter is roughly a long step
• 1 km is the distance you walk in roughly 20 minutes
• 1 liter is easy because in any metric country it's the volume of a standard soda bottle
• 1 kg is the weight of a small bean, rice or sugar bag, or the weight of a soda bottle, or the weight of a good sized cabbage.

The main reason is because we use natural cycles that are important for civic and agricultural reasons as the basis of our measurements. And those cycles are unrelated phenomena that don't match with each other well.

Day and year are based (duh) on two solar cycles (Earth's rotation and translation), while the month and week are based on the lunar cycle of translation around the earth in roughly 28 days. When people tried to force lunar and solar calendars to fit, we ended up with the inconsistent months we have.

The 12/60 base divisions of the day were chosen before we had good calculators. Numbers with many divisors like 12 and 60 help a lot with mental math when you don't have calculators.

There have been proposals of better calendars. The French tried something during the revolution and other people as well. The French republican calendar was:

• 1 hour = 100 minutes
• 1 day = 10 hours
• 1 week = 10 days
• 1 month = 3 weeks
• 1 year = 12 months + 5 monthless holiday

Another idea is the Cotsworth Plan:

• 1 minute = 100 seconds
• 1 hour = 100 minutes
• 1 day = 10 hours
• 1 week = 7 days
• 1 month = 4 weeks
• 1 year = 13 months + 1 special monthless holiday

I like the French Republican Calendar, but I would change it to months with 6 weeks of 5 days instead. And divide the week into 3 work days, 2 weekends. But the Cotsworth Plan is a better compromise between lunar and solar cycles.

Neither are good decimal systems. But in the end, if we want to use both the year and the day we're fucked. There's no way of having a fully decimal system. The year is approximately 365.25 days, and 365 is an awkward number. It's only divisible by 5 and 73, so it's not possible to have good divisions of it that match adequately a 10 based grid. You could abolish months and just have 73 weeks of 5 days, but I see no advantage.

We could do away with the year and just keep the day. We could do something like

• 1 miliday= 1000 microdays (1 microday ≈ 0.086 seconds)
• 1 deciday = 100 milidays (1 miliday ≈ 1.4 minutes)
• 1 day = 10 decidays (1 deciday = 2.4 hours)
• 1 decaday = 10 days (1 decaday ≈ 1.4 weeks)
• 1 hectoday = 10 decadays (1 hectoday ≈ 3.3 months)
• 1 kiloday = 10 hectodays (1 kiloday ≈ 2.74 years)

But this system would be totally misaligned with seasons, moon phases, solar cycles, etc. One could argue that those things are not as important for everyday life as they used to be, and that's true. But they're still economically important and you'd have to implement special calendars to keep track of them. It seems something like the Cotsworth or French systems make more economic sense.

Funny thing is that they're low key admitting that capitalism (I would call being compelled to sell my working force for survival and having the fruits of my labor stolen a "hostile working environment") is less productive than socialism (of which a big point is making the work environment less hostile by eliminating class struggle).

Bonus