Chapotraphouse

Lamar answered Drake with "Not Like Us"

That's incorrect, he actually answered with his verse on First Person Shooter. He later put out Euphoria as a response to Drake's Push Ups and Taylor Made Freestyle, Meet The Grahams after Drake's Family Matters, and finished it off with Not Like Us. IMO Euphoria is the best song of the beef so it's a shame to erase it.

I'm willing to hear them out, and I'm still reading, but jesus christ:

"Unfortunately for the (New) Communist Party of Canada, their recently published “(N)CPC-CC Reply to the OCR’s ‘Red Salute’” lacks the substance and swagger of those battle rap classics. Politically, it somehow manages to combine the pathetic posturing heard on J. Cole’s Might Delete Later with the unearned arrogance of Drake’s “Family Matters” in a sad attempt to attack the Organization of Communist Revolutionaries and the politics of the journal kites."

Edit: Oh god the whole article has rap quotes whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy

I'm not your comrade, buddy

Anyone who has made a political cartoon ever should be permanently banned from Communism. Even after the revolution anyone who was made a political cartoon must continue to live under neoliberalism

😠

I don't understand this political cartoon. The train is travelling to the "70s" and then to the "30s" with the passengers all looking back at the end of the train, horrified at something that the train is travelling away from (the...present maybe?) But having Doc Brown and Marty McFly there implies they are going to time travel? And the South Park Canadian guys implies...farts? And Trotsky is there because they are headed towards "Trotskyism" I guess, and the other guy I'm guessing is a party member or representative or something.

My thoughts and first impressions reading the article: Wait, that other guy is supposed to be Drake? I guess I can see it, but...why? Why the whole intro of that article? It is used as a lead in to a critique written by the party they are examining, and they take a paragraph and a half to say "this critique is like a bad diss track."

(Side note, I am not a Maoist, I am a ML, but I have actively tried (and failed) to understand the appeal of Maoism in the past. This is my bias going into this.)

There's a lot "This is so terrible it should be beneath our attention, but we'll attack it anyways." going on here. Big energy of "I'm not mad, don't put in the newspaper I got mad" here. Even if I end up agreeing with this article, this just comes across as petty inter-party bullshit that I should have no reason to care about.

The next paragraph they call out newly formed communist parties for quickly turning into little more than empty rhetoric and ego-stroking of their members. I don't...disagree, but also, based on these first few paragraphs (and the age of this magazine, which seems to have gotten its start in 2020 based on a quick search of their website) this feels a little bit like a pot meeting a kettle, and having some choice words to say.

Next we have a bit of text in bold: “Blame Canada! Blame Canada!”: How the (N)CPC dragged kites to the ground|

Followed by a quote from Ice Cube's song "No Vaseline" above this next paragraph. I do not understand fully why this is here, maybe the mention of artists and their music at the start will wrap around to being relevant to the overall piece? Maybe I'll feel like an idiot for not making the connection at the end. That said, this quote seems to be implying in this context that "going solo" is preferable to working with people who have gone "wet and soft" which...I can't tell if this is the authors view, or a view they are attributing to the (N)CPC. Hopefully further reading will make this clear. I also don't know the song, so maybe there's some deeper context there for people who are fans of it.

Taking a step back and shaking off the petty infighting vibes I got initially, this article claims to be a dissection of how this org (N)CPC, destroyed or otherwise made useless "Kites" magazine (which this journal appears to be an offshoot of. Also it started in 2019, not 2020.) Apparently it played a crucial role in "...delineating communist principles from the Left and postmodernism, attracted a few young aspiring revolutionaries who have gone on to become communist cadre, and charted a strategic path for those cadre to take up." In the US at least. It hasn't done the same in Canada, which is the issue this article is apparently trying to answer. Why it took until the 4th paragraph to give a clear(ish) thesis statement is anyone's guess.

Ok, so the "Kites" magazine apparently filled in important gaps in Maoist theory since the 60s and 70s, instead of just "offering dogmatic regurgitations of Maoist verbiage." Props to them if so. I tend to find most Maoist newsletters and articles are heavily longwinded, using whole paragraphs to say nothing, and ultimately offering nothing new other than an insistence that "their way" is the only way, and repeating basic Maoist ideas, just phrased slightly differently. The rest of this paragraph is talking about how great a series of articles in that magazine were for doing this, as well as a few other articles. They talk of "2020 Rebellions" and how it lead to young people seeking out their magazine. I guess they are just providing reinforcement or proof (there are links here) of their earlier statement that their magazine led a lot of youth to becoming members of the communist cadre.

As a side note, the language used in this article is frustrating to me. My eyes are glazing over at the constant use of socialisty sounding words, but removed from context(Describing what other articles are about and such). It isn't quite on a "buzzword" level, but it makes it hard for me to read. I can't imagine a layperson reading this. Based on what I've read so far, this could practically be an internal memo for the org that published it.

Next paragraph begins talking about how Kites was mostly contributed to by American Comrades, but not as much by Canadian ones, but they still pushed for important contributions to the magazine. Makes sense, America's hat has a much smaller population, so by sheer volume, I would imagine Americans would contribute more to a joint project. I'm getting a "defensive" vibe from this, like a "we did work too!" sort of thing, but that could easily just be me reading into things that aren't there. The latter half of this paragraph talks about a major difficulty they faced shortly after their magazine's founding, that "Revolutionary Initiative collapsed as an organizational form" which was a major setback to the development of revolutionary forces in Canada. (Ok, so this does seem to be more internal than external, not intended for a general audience.) The final part of the paragraph talks about how this put stress on the Canadian side of the Kites editorial committee and to quote "which stuck with kites and continued to make important contributions to it even after losing their organization." (I don't know the context of this, but if this is intended for more internal circulation, I'm assuming the target audience would). I hope they clarify this in the next paragraph.

The next paragraph is about a group of Maoists formerly from the PCR-RCP, who were unrelated to the Kites stuff from the previous paragraph, who were trying to build a new vanguard party. The Canadian side of the Kites Editorial Committee (Or since they love their acronyms, the CSKEC) were both skeptical of the PCR-RCP's dogmatism and also enthusiastic that there were comrades in Canada ~~filled with~~ moving with Determination. They make a note of how principled it is to bring up concerns of dogmatism with the people they are looking to work with. Personally I'd call that "transparency" rather than "principles" but teach gives me very few One True Marxist stickers. ALL OF THIS TO SAY that new contributors helped with the issues 5-7 of their magazine, one of which was "the best piece of social investigation published in the journal." They talk about it expanding upon the class analysis in issues 1-4. My attention kind of lapsed here and I threw in some bad jokes, sorry. They take 182 words to say "We were wary about working with people from a dogmatic organisation, but they produced some excellent contributions to our magazine." This is the problem I am having with this article. It is exceedingly verbose and throws around socialist language not to clarify, but to obfuscate, to imply a level of intelligence and complexity to their argument that so far, hasn't really manifested. We're still in the intro to what actually happened.

I think I'll stop there for now, and come back to this later in replies. I've been reading for over an hour. I still don't fully understand why Drake(?) is on the train, or why Trotsky is involved, why the farty south park guys are there, or why Doc and Marty are giants, struggling to fit in what I presume is a normal sized train. My attempt to understand this mystery has just been met with what seems to be a bog standard inter-party slap fight. If I to hazard a guess how the next 20000 words will go, it will be that the newcomers tried to make the magazine they were contributing to their own, The old blood of the mag disagreed with their changes, there was an argument, leading to the newcomers leaving and telling people that the magazine is shit, and this is why Canada will never have True Communism, because of those revisionist rats.

Incidentally, this article is almost as long as Volume 1 of Capital. I think re-reading that would be a far far better use of my time. Or I could actually do my work that I need to get done today. That's probably a good idea too.

Damn I was hoping it would be a scathing rebuke of Fightback/RCP

"The OCR has decided that in the contemporary US context, derogatory slurs against Italians and other “white ethnics” are okay given their prevalence in the police force, the worst of the well-paid working class, Jersey Shore (the television show and the place), and Staten Island (with apologies to the Wu-Tang Clan)."

A BMF post in the wild?

We on Drake's side btw ✊