One of the things I really have begun appreciating about kids media (and older fairy tales) is how willing it is to just have a villain be a Bad Guy who does Bad Things because it Benefits Them without trying to both sides or shades of grey it. Media aimed at more "mature" audiences keep trying to create "depth" by giving Dr. Kill-the-Kids a reason for building the Death Machine so "both sides have a valid point."
ComradeRat
joined 6 years ago
Dont siege ~~moscow~~ tehran, just take it immediately
The CPC ~~local in my area~~ moves at a glacial pace
It suffers a lot from being mostly old people. The YCL is doing better, and the younger CPCers are often great, but yeah its tedious
The two main ML groups in Canada are the Communist Party of Canada and the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist). There's also the Young Communist League which is associated with the CPC but organisationally independent.
The CPC dates back to 1921 and always stuck to the USSR line, including becoming anti-Stalin in 1956 etc. Over the decades since USSR collapsed, the party has drifted more towards stalin good, but some older members still have khurshchev brainworms.
The latter started as student Maoists in the 60s, then they sided with Hoxha in the Sino-Albanian split. Over last while, they have drifted more towards standard Marxism-Leninism, and at their last congress they renounced Maoism for Marxism-Leninism but still uphold Mao.
The main thing keeping the cpcml and cpc seperate where I am (idk about montreal) is old peoples petty personal drama ime.
There's also the (New) Communist Party of Canada, but i'm unsure if they are MLs or Maoists.
Not sure if cpcml has presence in quebec, but the cpc/pcc and ycl/ljc should have clubs in montreal at least
If Marx were plucked from Cologne in 1848, many supposed marxist would call him a third worldist imo
The idea that Lenin innovated new ideas about imperialism etc is an interesting one to me. On the one hand, the more I read Marx the more I see everything people say Lenin "innovated" already objectively present in 1848-9 writings of Marx and Engels, and Lenin seems more to uphold those views against revisionists like post 1914 Kaustsky. But on the other hand from the perspective of communists in the early 20th century, without access to anywhere near as many of Marx's writings, these things may have been seen as innovations ig.
like a big example of something framed as an innovation is the idea of the proletarian revolution immediately succeeding a bourgeois revolution instead of coming after decades of bourgeois rule. This was hugely contentious in 1917, and Lenin was called "non-marxist" for saying it, but that was basically the view marx espoused back in 1848 wrt Germany's bourgeois revolution when germany was less industrially developed than 1917 russia
I agree, but I wanna point out Marx also agrees with you! Marx is slandered as thinking the revolution will start in the developed core. This is incorrect. The reality is Marx (and Engels) consistently (from the leadup to 1848 onwards) pointed to the revolution starting outside the core (at the time britain).
In 1848 (i can dig up quotes if u want but on my phone atm), Marx and Engels consistently pointed to the revolution starting at the peripheries (e.g. Poland, Hungary, Italy) and spreading closer to but still not in the core (e.g. France, Germany), leading to a military confrontation between the revolutionary bloc and the english-russian alliance. Marx and Engels view was that only such a "world war" (they used this phrase) could give the proletariat in the core the opportunity to rise up without being instantly squished by the british-russian military alliance.
This is the sequence of events they predicted in their newspaper: national bourgeois liberation revolutions at the periphery (e.g. poland, hungary); bourgeois revolutions closer to the core in germany-france-italy; war between revolutionary bourgeois germany-france-italy-hungary-poland and reactionary feudal-bourgeois england-russia; proletarian revolution in both these bourgeois blocs.
Later on, in December 1869 letter to Engels iirc, Marx explicitly revised this further, saying that because the English proletariat benefitted from the colonial oppression of the colonies (he talks about ireland in the letter, but its applicable to e.g. india as well) theyd never accomplish anything until they were rid of ireland (i.e.. that ireland rebelled and threw the english out)
What gets to me is the archaeological artefacts that get looted and then never seen again. Its low down on the list of things to hate the US's interventions for, but their wars in the middle east for example obliterated a lot of archaeological artifacts and infrastructure (like universities, native archaeologists, etc), and moved a lot of what wasnt destroyed into private owners collections
Elbows up! We gotta cut climate policies like america so america doesnt take us over and turn us into america!!
When the bears time comes they will make no excuse for the terror
Not Trashcanofideology, but these papers about Richard Levins' work in the transition is interesting. One of thems paywalled tho, i think you can get it on scihub
https://revista.drclas.harvard.edu/an-ecologist-in-cuba/
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10455750500208706
Anyone who lived in Jasper Park in the period preceding the 1960's sure knew about bears as they lived with them and their troublesome habits all throughout the summer. Bears wandered through the town like dogs. Although they were most active in town at night there was always one or two active on the edge of town and often down-town in mid-day...
You could not walk down a back alley after dark without running into a bear every couple of blocks...scavenging in the garbage cans. They frightened the tourists by strolling across the lawns and sometimes coming up behind them...
...When a bear saw a nice white [golf] ball rolling over the grass near him, he sometimes got up and strolled over for a look and more often than not picked it up in his teeth and wandered away. The dilemma was then to try and recover the ball from the bear — not wise — and if not, how to score that stroke...
I delivered groceries after school for Jasper Hardware and Grocery...and you had to watch the back door very closely or a bear would wander into the store attracted by the smells. One day I was loading the truck for deliveries and...I noticed that a loaf of bread was missing...I looked around ans saw a big black bear strolling away toward the C[anadian].N[ational].R[ailway]. station with the bread in his mouth. He crossed the station platform, which was crowded with people off the train, and never looked right nor left...
There was no hollering or shouting, no fuss, no muss, and nobody trying to shoot him or immobilize him with a drugged dart as they do now. It was just a bear.
Our house was just off the edge of the townsite at the foot of Pyramid Hill and I have seen as many as eight bears go through our yard in the interval between supper-time and dark...
If you strolled along the banks of the Miette River in the daytime you could see bears of all colours and sizes, big bears, little bears, black bears, brown bears, cinnamon bears and shades in between, sleeping in the trees or at the foot of the big trees, or swimming in the Pond or Dead Man's Hole to cool off...
The kids used the Pond to swim in and sometimes there would be a bear enjoying the deep end and a few kids splashing around at the shallow other end...
Even with all those bears around nobody got hurt from bears. One or two tourists got bit or scratched on the arm while trying to feed the bears by hand in spite of being warned not to — but nothing serious...
In the 1960's the Park Authorities destroyed [just say killed ffs] a lot of bears when they persisted in coming into town or to the campgrounds and also "bear-proofed" the garbage cans and buried and burned the garbage so that the food source was generally eliminated. The result of those actions was to slowly erode the bear population down to a very small portion of their former numbers, and a tourist is very lucky if he sees a bear in the park today, although there are still a few coming to the campgrounds at night. I think they learned that if they came around in daylight they would probably get a bullet in the head or an immobilising dart in the arse.
–Bruce Neighbour, Memories of a Mountain Man
My grandmother lived in jasper around the same time and has said the same thing: the locals were fine with the bears, the tourists did foolish shit like trying to take closeup pictures
21
[Chapman - Empire of Normality] has some neat ideas about capitalism.and neurodivergence and disability
(hexbear.net)
finished reading this book last night, was pretty interesting. Tries to create an "autistic marxism". Imo it lacks engagement with 1)bipoc, 2) global south and 3) exploitation (though Chapman at least acknowledges the gaps), but otherwise great analysis of the connections between disability and capitalism particularly in the global north over the last 80ish yearz. I also do like how he draws on the connections between disability and surplus population
Rly shit takes from Engels here [Engels - The Magyar Struggle] Apparently there's worse yet to come in "Democratic Pan-Slavism"
Its also a total reversal from his position in septemberish 1848, when he was castigating germans for their chauvanism being the cause of slavs opposing revolution
Reading this like "nope, sorry bud all ur hopes and dreams are gonna be crushed next year"
Poor marx
Marx has been maintaining this nonviolent resistance stance since the first article in Neue Rheinische Zeitung back in June, in part bc he believed the reactionaries would definitely lose
However, counterrevolution rallies and two days later Marx admits he was wrong:
[Marx - Confessions of a Noble Soul]
And two days after that, Marx is explicitly advocating violent resistence:
[Marx - A Decree of Eichmann's]
Source is Marx Engels Collected Works vol8. Its very interesting to see Marx and Engels operating as agitators/organisers rather than theorists
From Marx Engels Collected Works vol7
Overall the Neue Rheinische Zeitung articles have been very interesting both theoretically and to see Marx and Engels engaged in organisational work during what they hoped would be THE revolution
been reading Barbara Allen's biography of Shlyapnikov. Very well written and sourced almost entirely by archival stuff. But depressing because the workers' opposition gets run roughshod over by basically everyone in power (Lenin, Bukharin, Stalin, Trotsky, Molotov, etcetc). Been wondering what others' have read on the workers' opposition and what your takes are.
The 1930s have been by far the most depressing
But even the late 10s and early 20s have some "dude wtf" moments from leadership imo
Somewhat relatedly, what do folks think of the Democratic Centralists? I've actually never heard of that faction in the 1919-21 debates before
3
Some excerpts from The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939
(hexbear.net)
Very good book on soviet nationalities policy using archival research
This one does a good job of showing how rapidly the (centre) of the party shifted lines on nationalism
Russian opposition to affirmative action programmes was pretty strong
Nationality could be shockingly arbitrary and sudden (and often informed by politics)
Stalin begins to turn towards supporting Russians
collectivisation interacted badly with the nationalities policy
The degree of internal conflicts within the party and soviet bureaucracy was also a huge part of the book.
Ethnic cleansings going on, and there's still tons of affirmative culture programmes running. Weird contradictions
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Oblivion refers to the realms of oblivion and "Arena" is was retroactively turned into the way some describe tamriel