Thin Jong Un

Same! And for me, "when did you start to transition" is a difficult question to answer. Because I started and then repressed it again, a few times before it finally stuck.

Holy shit same though

As a poli sci major, there are two broad camps of people in the field, when it comes to Marxism.

First are the people who do shit you're complaining about, where they "refute" Marxism without understanding a Damn thing about it.

And then there are the people actually doing Marxist analysis. The people actually doing Marxist analysis are mostly comparativists in the subfield of political-economy (Yes, it still exists, just as a sub-field of a sub-field of poli sci).

And the way these groups interact is the first group nods their heads in agreement with the Marxists. But only so long as it's called "political economy" and not Marxism. The minute you call it Marxism, they start trying to tear it down, even when they were just agreeing with it, five minutes ago.

Rev Left Radio being called "Misleading" is so fucking bonkers to me.

Breht is such a thoughtful and genuine guy. And the show has so many guests on with differing perspectives. Like, yeah ok, some of those guests might say things one disagrees with, are debated within a given field, or are otherwise occasionally incorrect. But the ethos of that show is about getting the listener to know how to think, and thoughtfully approach things, from a broad left perspective. It's not just feeding you normative claims and calling it a day.

Anyway, go listen to RevLeft, Breht is such a gift

That "one issue disagreement" is concealing a fucking genocide. How can people post this, and genuinely think that bombing Gaza to dust is just an UwU Smol Bean disagreement?!

"Primarily targeted cultural landmarks"

churches are all still standing

Bro, wtf is it with trots? I bought a book recently about trans history and politics, and it's written by trots.

90% of the book is fine. Good, even! But there's a chapter going over a brief history of transness, and there's a subsection called "Totalitarian transphobia" and it talks about Paragraph 175 under the Nazis, rollbacks on queer rights under Stalin, and the continuation of paragraph 175 in West Germany. So far, nothing objectionable.

But then it gets to East Germany, which repealed Paragraph 175 decades before the west, and made great strides in queer rights for the time. East Germany is such an interesting, complex, nuanced, and fascinating part of socialist and queer history. And how does this book handle it?

One paragraph that says "East Germany repealed Paragraph 175 much sooner than the west. But gay men were still arbitrarily imprisoned under stalinist rule".

BABE, WHAT? I get it, Trots have to label any ML socialist project as "Stalinist". It's a thought terminating cliche of theirs. But there's such an interesting contradiction in that sentence, and there's zero attempt to explore it's ramifications.

On the one hand, I respect my Trot comrades for their commitment to genuine labor militancy. But holy shit do they such a deep disinterest in grappling with any leftist tendency outside of their own, in good faith.

Fidel Castro, give him your strength! 🙏🙏🙏

Social democracy in the imperial core, premised on global south super profits, is different from a country historically exploited by the imperial core doing social democracy by taking advantage of its own resources.

I'm gonna put on my political scientist hat, and point out that almost every political party on this planet enforces internal discipline in a multitilude of ways, a handful of which have been mentioned in this discussion thread already.

The idea that parties are these big tents where you can't possibly enforce any kind of internal discipline is both a uniquely America-brained take, and also not entirely true.

Like, there are literally people called "Party Whips" who's job it is to pressure the party members vote along party lines.

"imperial core" isn't a phrase we made up. It refers to World Systems Theory, a theory of international relations invented by a guy named Immanuel Wallerstein which argues that imperial "Core" countries (think the traditional "developed" or "first world" countries. Mainly the US and Europe) have a particular extractive, colonial relationship with "Periphery" countries (think poor, raw material exporting, rentier states like Kyrgyzstan or Nigeria).

Then there are semi-periphery countries which are still tied into the imperial core in some way, but have enough sway economically and geopolitically to kind of stand on their own. They have a different kind of relationship to the imperial core, compared to the periphery (these would be the BRICS countries, largely).

That's a gross over simplification, but hopefully that answers your question.

Edit: Here's a really good explanation of World Systems Theory that goes into more depth