I like the example of a clay ball and car/bicycle wheel/rim, as it’s easy to understand. For instance, a clay ball has little value on its own. But by removing some clay from the centre to turn it into a bowl or cup, it becomes more valuable, even though there is less clay. Same with a wheel rim. A solid block of steel doesn’t have much value beyond its raw material. But by shaping it into a circle and removing material from the centre to create spokes, it now becomes light enough to be a wheel, and is more valuable, despite there being less steel. The formal laws of logic would state that the more of something you have, the more valuable it is. But here the opposite is true, by having less of something, we have made it more valuable. How can this be, it’s a contradiction! However, the contradiction is synthesised by understanding that the labour to remove material from the object in a specific way, so that the object can be used to complete specific tasks, has drastically increased the use value of the object, to the point that is is much more valuable than the raw material it is made out of. The lack of material in certain locations actually makes it very valuable. That is dialectics.

This is paraphrased from an explanation of Zhongyong Dialectics that I saw a few years ago. I hope I didn’t screw it up too much.

What does “winning the war” look like to you?

Can’t join NATO with an existing territorial dispute. “Agreeing and joining NATO anyways” would be an official admission by the Ukrainian government that the territories currently held by Russia are not part of Ukraine anymore.

I hate them too. If the VR/AR headsets like the Apple vision pro ever become a popular thing, I hope someone creates a real world Adblock that blocks out billboard advertising using the AR capabilities. It would be the only good thing to come out of such a scenario.

While I agree that the ANC has deserved to lose an election for a while, one must be very careful here. Without any viable opposition party ( the DA is not considered a viable opposition party by the majority of South Africans, as seen by them failing to grow their voter base this election), the “big tent” ANC is splitting along racial, ethnic, cultural, and religious lines, in a reactionary manner. Jacob Zuma’s MK party is the most obvious example of this, their manifesto calls for scrapping the constitution.

They will lose their majority. Votes are 99% counted and the ANC is barely above 40% of the vote. The ANC have screwed themselves with rampant corruption and a failure to deliver government services reliably, the most obvious example being the rolling electricity blackouts (loadshedding) that South Africans regularly experience. Having no electricity for 8+ hours a day at worst due to government incompetence, corruption, and austerity is not workable.

Yeah that’s what the entire last paragraph of what I posted states. It’s very convenient

The counter point to that would be analysis on “sub-imperislist” countries and regional blocs, of which many Marxists, including Amin, have covered over the last 50 years. But I don’t think that they will be able to understand it if they can’t understand imperialism first. Because, well, most sub imperialist blocs tend to align themselves with Western interests in the bigger picture at some point or another, as the global capitalist imperialist system led by the triad of the United States, Western Europe and Japan is the dominant imperialist force in the world.

This guy needs to read works by Marxists, his analysis sucks and is conceding massive ground to bourgeois ideology.

In order to truly understand this contradiction, the most explosive contradiction capitalism has engendered, the centers/peripheries polarization must be placed at the heart of the analysis and not at its margin.

"But after a whole series of concessions, the forces of the Left and of socialism in the West have finally given up on giving the imperialist dimension of capitalist expansion the central place that it must occupy both in critical analysis and in the development of progressive strategies. In so doing, they have been won over to bourgeois ideology in its most essential aspects: Eurocentrism and economism."

The very term imperialism has been placed under prohibition, having been judged to be unscientific. Considerable contortions are required to replace it with a more “objective” term like “international capital” or “transnational capital.” As if the world were fashioned purely by economic laws, expressions of the technical demands of the reproduction of capital. As if the state and politics, diplomacy and armies had disappeared from the scene! Imperialism is precisely an amalgamation of the requirements and laws for the reproduction of capital; the social, national, and international alliances that underlie them; and the political strategies employed by these alliances.

It is therefore indispensable to center the analysis of the contemporary world on unequal development and imperialism. Then, and only then, does it become possible to devise a strategy for a transition beyond capitalism. The obstacle is disengaging oneself from the world system as it is in reality. This obstacle is even greater for the societies of the developed center than it is for those of the periphery. And therein lies the definitive implication of imperialism. The developed central societies, because both their social composition and the advantages they enjoy from access to the natural resources of the globe are based on imperialist surpluses, have difficulty seeing the need for an overall reorganization of the world. A popular, anti-imperialist alliance capable of reversing majority opinion is as a result more difficult to construct in the developed areas of the world. In the societies of the periphery, on the other hand, disengagement from the capitalist world system is the condition for a development of the forces of production sufficient to meet the needs and demands of the majority. This fundamental difference explains why all the breaches in the capitalist system have been made from the periphery of the system. The societies of the periphery, which are entering the period of “post-capitalism” through strategies that I prefer to qualify as popular and national rather than socialist, are constrained to tackle all of the difficulties that delinking implies.

• Samir Amin, Eurocentrism, For a Truly Universal Culture

This guy is a personification of the defeatist Eurocentric Western left. Just sad. If he actually read works by Marxists, he would have had all his questions answered.

The reconstruction of social theory along truly universalist lines must have as its base a theory of actually existing capitalism, centered on the principal contradiction generated by the worldwide expansion of this system.

This contradiction could be defined in the following way: the integration of all of the societies of our planet into the world capitalist system has created the objective conditions for universalization. However, the tendency toward homogenization, produced by the universalizing force of the ideology of commodities, that underlies capitalist development is hindered by the very conditions of unequal accumulation. The material base of the tendency toward homogenization is the continuous extension of markets, in breadth as well as in depth. The commodity and capital markets gradually extend to the entire world and progressively take hold of all aspects of social life. The labor force, at first limited in its migrations by different social, linguistic, and legal handicaps, tends to acquire international mobility. […]

The principal contradiction of capitalism has, thus, placed an anticapitalist revolution on the agenda–a revolution that is anti-capitalist because it is necessarily directed against capitalism as it is lived by those who endure its tragic consequences. But before that revolution can occur, it is necessary to finish the task that capitalism could not, and cannot, complete.

Some of these problems are not new, but rather have confronted the Russian and Chinese revolutions from the beginning. But these problems must be discussed in the light of the lessons of history, which implies something quite different from the sweeping Eurocentric judgment that socialism is bankrupt and the only alternative is a return to capitalism. The same may be said, mutatis mutandis, for any discussion of the lessons to be drawn from the radical movement of national liberation, which reached its apogee during the Bandung Era from 1955 until 1975.

Without a doubt, the so-called socialist societies (which are better qualified as “popular national” societies) have not solved the problem. This is quite simply because the popular national transition will necessarily be considerably longer than anyone had imagined, since it is faced with the task of developing the forces of production in a permanent struggle with the logic of world capitalist expansion and on the basis of conflicting internal social relationships (what I have called the dialectic of three tendencies: socialist, local capitalist, and statist). In societies that have successflilly made a popular national revolution (usually termed a “socialist revolution”), the dialectic of internal factors once again takes on a decisive role. Unquestionably, because the complexity of post-capitalist society had not been fully grasped, the Soviet experiment–such as it is–exercised a strong attraction over the peoples of the periphery for some forty years. The Maoist critique of this experiment also had considerable influence for approximately fifteen years.

Today, a better awareness of the real dimension of the challenge has already brought less naive enthusiasm and more circumspection concerning definitive prescriptions for development. There has been, in fact, progress in both practice and in thought, a crisis in the positive sense of the term and not a failure that would prefigure capitulation and a return to normalcy, that is, a reinsertion into the logic of worldwide capitalist expansion. The discouragement that has overtaken the forces of socialism in the West, who find in the situation of the “socialist” countries an alibi for their own weaknesses, has its source elsewhere, in the depths of the Western societies themselves. As long as it does not have a lucid understanding of the ravages of Eurocentrism, Western socialism will remain at a standstill.

For the peoples of the periphery, there is no other choice than that which has been the key to these so-called socialist revolutions. Certainly, things have changed gready since 1917 or 1949. The conditions for new popular national advances in the contemporary Third World do not allow the simple reproduction of earlier approaches, sketched out in advance by a few prescriptions. In this sense, the thought and practice inspired by Marxism retain their universal vocation and their Afro-Asiatic vocation even more. In this sense, the so-called socialist counter-model, despite its current limits, retains a growing force of attraction for the countries of the periphery.

• Samir Amin, Eurocentrism, For a Truly Universal Culture

Someone that lives a comfortable life in a first world country got offended and removed the post, that’s all there is to it. There’s nothing “tankie” about the meme

So cute, you want to join an adult conversation. Come on pal, let’s see your work. Gotta back up your claims with evidence if you want to continue sitting at the adult table.

This was you two hours ago. I thought you wanted an “adult conversation” with “evidence”? I provided that.

Okay then, why is the solution of making sleeping outdoors illegal bring debated by the highest court in the land? Why is the supreme court of the US even entertaining such an unethical proposition? Doing so is just the US abdicating responsibility for it’s people, and intensifying and welcoming inequality. Why not debate starting housing programmes for people instead, so that people do not have to sleep outside in the first place?

Okay then. What solution do even the most egalitarian or radical progressives/liberals, who you call the “adults”, have to solve capitalism’s contradictions and crises, with capitalism’s inherent unequal division of private property, leading to rising inequality and homelessness, being one of them? Because everything I’ve heard from just sounds like they are talking around the problem and avoiding the elephant in the room, the capitalistic system. In fact, many progressives when talking about issues such as homelessness, do not challenge the notion of private property and accept the inequality inherent to such a system, and then explain it away through bogus reasoning. I do not think that this way of avoiding about talking about how the modern capitalistic system works is adult behaviour. In fact, I’d say that it is childish behaviour, and does not deserve to be called progressive. The right wing being more brazen with it’s lack of ethics does not excuse the failure of liberals to address current issues.

The contemporary version of bourgeois emancipating reason, egalitarian liberalism, made fashionable by an insistent media popularization, provides nothing new because it remains prisoner of the liberty, equality, and property triplet. Challenged by the conflict between liberty and equality, which the unequal division of property necessarily implies, so-called egalitarian liberalism is only very moderately egalitarian. Inequality is accepted and legitimized by a feat of acrobatics, which borrows its pseudo concept of “endowments” from popular economics. Egalitarian liberalism offers a highly platitudinous observation: individuals (society being the sum of individuals) are endowed with diverse standings in life (some are powerful heads of enterprise, others have nothing). These unequal endowments, nevertheless, remain legitimate as long as they are the product, inherited obviously, of the work and the savings of ancestors. So one is asked to go back in history to the mythical day of the original social contract made between equals, who later became unequal because they really desired it, as evidenced by the inequality of the sacrifices to which they consented. I do not think that this way of avoiding the questions of the specificity of capitalism even deserves to be considered elegant.

• Samir Amin, Eurocentrism

Gotta praise the honesty here.

Going to be honest back when I was in high school we drew penises on the fields in the dew/frost. It was an all boys school so yeah.

Will Ukraine ever actually get the F-16s? Russian air defences have been preparing for their arrival. Would be ironic if all that work was done for nothing.

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The .opus audio format. People need to stop ripping everything to MP3, it’s inefficient and a flawed compression format. Opus is better than it and AAC.

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