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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • The CCP acts like just because the state owns major enterprises then the workers - through the state - own the means of production. That doesn’t hold up when the state does not adequately represent the will of the workers. Never is this contradiction more clear than when the Chinese state suppresses workers’ attempts to organize on their own terms.

    China is communist in the same way that the US is democratic, which is to say that it’s a sham to keep up appearances that is suspended when convenient for the few who hold real power.




  • Campism is Trotskyist criticism and not a term we use.

    That’s not a response to the criticism, just a dismissal of it based on who it originated from. I personally think it’s a valid criticism of many who consider themselves marxist-leninists, and I am not a trotskyist. People I’ve spoken with in the past have had a tendency to dogmatically subscribe to a campist mindset in total disregard for the particulars of any given situation, and for how much shit MLs give liberals for practicing lesser-evilism, many sure seem to love their own version of it.

    Accelerationism is an edgelord meme that some baby leftists might subscribe to, but is generally a very dumb concept.

    It’s far more prevalent than you’re giving it credit for, and in my experience many MLs’ understanding of revolutionary defeatism tends to boil down to accelerationism when questioned.

    However, I’ll give props for knowing about revolutionary defeatism, which is a factor in our analysis. It was, pretty indisputably, the correct position to take in WWI, when it was developed.

    Indisputable suggests it’s largely undisputed now, which you must know is absolutely not the case. I am currently disputing it. There is no significant historical pattern of countries that faced a military defeat becoming socialist or even having better revolutionary conditions afterwards.

    Only in Russia did the socialists stay true to their promise and used the opportunity to turn the imperialist war into a civil war, and eventually managed to nope out of the meat grinder everyone else was stuck in.

    Starting a civil war while the country is in the middle of an imperialist war is not an example of revolutionary defeatism working. If Russia had been defeated in their imperialist war and then had a socialist revolution that would be an example, but even then one example is not a pattern.

    Furthermore, history cautions us to be skeptical when our country tells us a war is justified, as we see many examples throughout history where people fell in line behind narratives that did not hold up, whether it was WWI or Vietnam or Iraq - whenever any country goes to war, there is a strong pressure and lots of propaganda that is able to convince the vast majority of people to support it, everyone always thinks, “but this time, it’s different,” and more often than not, they’re wrong.

    I agree completely, but this is just an argument for being anti-imperialist and anti-war, not an argument for revolutionary defeatism.

    Generally speaking, arguments that are grounded on things like territorial integrity or national sovereignty don’t really have traction with us. Revolution involves aggressively violating national sovereignty, after all.

    Those sorts of arguments don’t have any traction with me either, I’m an anarchist. I don’t believe I have made any such arguments, unless you conflate collective self-determination with national sovereignty.



  • You forgot to mention that it’s watered down. That’s what the emulsifier is for, to make the oils in the cheese mix well with the added water. The concept is fine - for some applications - if it were only that, but this is hyper-processed American food we’re talking about here. Gotta pad out that ingredient list:

    CHEDDAR CHEESE (CULTURED MILK, SALT, ENZYMES), SKIM MILK, MILKFAT, MILK PROTEIN CONCENTRATE, WHEY, CALCIUM PHOSPHATE, SODIUM PHOSPHATE, CONTAINS LESS THAN 2% OF MODIFIED FOOD STARCH, SALT, LACTIC ACID, MILK, SORBIC ACID AS A PRESERVATIVE, OLEORESIN PAPRIKA (COLOR), ENZYMES, CHEESE CULTURE, ANNATTO (COLOR).

    The above is the standard Kraft singles ingredient list, and at a glance is the shortest one I saw on their website.