Making War Over a Worm

a rhizzone community article by — published
Something that I've noticed over the years somewhat following the Korea conflict is framing.

We all know that the citizens of the DPRK are regarded as infantile puppets, scared of being exterminated by ever-present secret police, who put on a show for us Westerners, blinking in morse code "help me."

And it is a known fact that North Koreans flee to the south. The fact that it is done for very large sums of money is never relayed, of course. I don't think I could stay in my country if I were offered $800,000 to move to a place where they speak the same language and I'd get my fifteen minutes of fame. I think the fact that people stay in the DPRK shows that some are not as easily influenced, but that's a different topic.

No, I'm wanting to talk about framing. Specifically, how humanitarian crises in the DPRK are used to condemn the DPRK.

There's a specific story I have in mind. I don't have the specific quote, but it was relayed to me as an anecdote. I think this is a very important way to analyze North Korea because anecdotes (more specifically, FUD) are how you can easily shape opinion. Anecdotes are journalism without scholarship, and anecdotes make policy.

The specific story/anecdote is that North Korea in the 1990s was experiencing a severe famine. Malnourished children. Absolute crisis. One child was in such bad shape, caused by the DPRK unable to feed her, that she eventually contracted worms. She had so many worms inside her that when she went to the hospital she had them crawling out of her nose.

Your mind reacts with horrific thoughts of African children with bloated bellies, concentration camps, dust bowls. And then you're hit with images of a fat dude with a bad haircut, smiling and grinning as he's lobbing plutonium darts into the Pacific, his people starving.

Then your mind is filled with gross images. Maggot-filled animal carcasses on the side of the road. This child you just heard about is in great pain. Your sympathetic nervous system kicks into overdrive.

This is absolutely horrifying. How could the DPRK do this? Why doesn't she have medical treatment? It's worse than Africa! We need to intervene. I am a good person, this needs to stop. Oh my god, worms! Worms worms worms!

But let's step back a bit. Let's take a deep breath.

Someone presenting with a vague parasitosis of "worms coming out of your nose and mouth" is actually a classical sign of ascariasis. This is a parasitic infection caused by the large roundworm Ascaris lumbricoides. A. lumbricoides lives in your small intestines and is notorious for infecting people in great numbers. Since most people don't typically suffer from the infection, there's no impetus to treat it. So they grow and multiply. Before you know, through re-infection and ignoring symptoms, A. lumbricoides runs out of room in the intestines, its preferred habitat. And, yes, even if it seems dramatic, the first sign that you have an extreme case of ascariasis is when one pops out of your mouth or your nose because A. lumbricoides is seeking a better place to live.

A. lumbricoides is a neglected tropical disease. It's spread by people using human feces as fertilizer. Treatment is easy. It's only something that happens in poor countries lacking in infrastructure.

Like North Korea.

In the 1990s, during the famine, during the height of sanctions, I can easily imagine desperate farmers turning to their own waste to grow crops with.

Get the kids involved, try and survive.

We also know during the sanctions that the Clinton administration prevented medical supplies from entering North Korea. Albendazole, an antihelminthic, would almost surely not have been allowed within the country along with other more specific life-saving drugs.

If the DPRK needed to prioritize getting drugs in, antihelminthics would be lower on the list. Other things are more important.

So, from the top:

-Ascariasis is caused by poor sanitation and use of human feces as fertilizer.
-Ascariasis was endemic in Korea, eventually brought under control by changes in agricultural practice.
-During the 1990s North Korea was being sanctioned during a famine.
-They used human feces as fertilizer to try and grow crops. Something we've done as a species for millenia, and something being done here out of desperation.
-People, naturally, got infected with the parasite. Easily treated. But North Korea's sanctions also included medical supplies, antihelminthics being on the list.
-So ascariasis would worsen, and worsen, until a child goes to a hospital with a worm crawling out of her nose. Again, a typical presentation of a severe ascariasis infection.
-This gets reported and, like lots of gross things, gets dramatized and relayed in ways to freak you out.
-Combine that with the typical response to DPRK and you get this idea that the DPRK are literally letting people rot from the inside so they can keep launching nuclear missiles instead of feeding their people.

None of this includes a reference to sanctions, starvation caused by imperialism, lack of access to preventative medicine, or anything leading up to it! Even the context of what kind of worm it was is lost, replaced by your imagination dreaming up even more lurid and horrendous things.

This is just one anecdote! A very powerful one, mind you. But you can set popular response to Korean policy with just one anecdote. You don't even need a humanitarian concert with Bono to get people mad enough to destroy North Korea.

You just need to tell them about a worm.


(mod note: This report from Amnesty International relies exclusively on interviews with North Koreans who had moved from the DPRK's poorest region to South Korea in the years after the famine of 1994-1998. The report only mentions the Korean War once, in the bibliography. The words "sanction," "blockade," and "USA" do not appear in the report. On page 12 is an anecdote about an ascariasis infection.)

Discussion of Making War Over a Worm on tHE r H i z z o n E:

#1
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I posted this on leddit in response to this article:

http://www.pcr-rcp.ca/en/archives/1596

and figured it was good enough to repost here.

I think this thread shows how confused anti-revisionists are. They know revisionism is wrong and they know what it looks like but they don't know what it actually is (as in, what its material basis is). That PCP-RCP article in particular is revealing:

Those for whom socialism is essentially defined by legal form of ownership—by the fact that private ownership of means of production has been replaced by collective (state) ownership—can certainly see the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea as a “socialist country” (although the economic reforms implemented over the past ten years have seriously undermined the state model). However, this does not render service to the world proletariat, who need the greatest clarity on these issues, nor to the legitimate struggle of the Korean people against US imperialism—which has never abandoned its goal to control the Korean peninsula.



They are wise enough to acknowledge that this definition exists. Rather than explain why collective ownership is not socialism however, they give two absurd qualifications: North Korea doesn't "render service to the world proletariat" and they don't properly struggle against U.S. imperialism (this second is vague and could also be interpreted as saying they do struggle against imperialism but don't properly justify it to western communists). You can imagine the amount of arrogance to think that North Korea has any obligation to justify itself to tiny communist sects in the west and that this task is part of the fundamental definition of socialism itself. And this is the charitable reading because read straight both accusations are simply lies: North Korea in fact has an outstanding record of helping third world liberation movements and even today maintains great respect in Africa and it's hard to find a better example of resistance to US imperialism than North Korea. This is an odd point to hit on as well since Maoist China and the Western Maoist movement had a very mixed record on imperialism, something you can't get around by proclaiming it "pre-maoist" and therefore not relevant.

The next paragraph is even more interesting:

The bureaucratic bourgeoisie around the army and in the state apparatus is the real ruling class in North Korea. It oppresses the proletarian and peasant masses as it maintains a lead weight on them and collectively benefits from the exploitation of their labour, without even giving them any possibility of autonomous organization. Only the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat of the whole peninsula will allow for the establishment of a free Korea stripped from any form of imperialist domination whatsoever—whether US, Russian, or Chinese.



Where did the army come into the analysis suddenly? If you're familiar, this is actually identical to Tony Cliff's theory of the "permanent arms economy." The call for "autonomous organization" is also Trotskyist (at best), either calling for independent factions to openly resist the state ala the Worker's Opposition, a multiparty system ala non-Communist socialists who considered Solidarity in Poland and similar organizations to be "progressive," or a full blown resistance attempting to overthrow the state ala former trots turned neoconservatives, an ideology which has gotten second wind with ideological support of the "revolutionaries" in Libya and Syria by certain communist groups. The reference to Chinese and Russian imperialism is also odd, after a whole article pointing out the literal genocide America committed in Korea, Russia and China are brought up out of nowhere and made equivalent to the United States. No previous evidence was provided that Russia and China have any influence on North Korea at all, the actual analysis has been of the words of Kim Jong-il and Kim Jong-un as well as the unusual place "intellectuals" serve in Juche ideology (though if you read carefully it's already clear that this comes from the legitimacy of the March 1st movement in Korean history and intellectuals have no real influence on North Korea or even exist as a class of intelligentsia).

In general, the only difference between the Trotskyist definition of state capitalism and the 'Maoist' one, going beyond superficial analysis of words, is that North Korea never had a cultural revolution ala China. This leads to some unfortunate consequences though since by the same definition China was not socialist until the cultural revolution, and giving it a little time to develop into more than big character posters and assuming it ended in 1971, China was only socialist for at most 3 years. This is necessarily so since unlike the USSR, which Mao gave a blessing to as being divided by the death of Stalin into socialist and state capitalist, North Korea had no such moment to divide between 'revisionism' and 'socialism' (unless you want to claim North Korea was socialist until 1994), therefore:

For Maoists, the regime established on the territory known as North Korea has never been socialist.



Even if you believe this, if China was only socialist for 3 years then the USSR was probably never socialist and was surely not socialist when Lenin was alive. Obviously every other country is immediately excluded. Go deep enough and it's even difficult to justify the cultural revolution as socialist since Mao specifically defended the party as mostly good and opposed any claim that China was social-imperialist or state-capitalist. This is what has actually happened and leads to the absurd claim by Gonzalo that maoism only began after Mao was dead and has never actually gained state power or replicated the cultural revolution (Nepal, the one what won, was immediately abandoned as revisionist), leading the utterly generic parts of Mao's thoughts like 'people's war' and the 'mass line' as 'universally significant'.

Also if you're familiar, this is nothing new. Althusser faced the same problem attempting to reread Marx through Maoism, discarding more and more of Marx as 'non-Marxist' until only Critique of the Gotha Programme was the only work left that was Marxist (until Marxism was entirely abandoned by Althusser and his followers for variations of the "undercurrent of the materialism of the encounter" which ironically in the hands of Badiou and others has no relation to materialism at all). In general, I think Badiou's description of maoism in France applies to the United States (or Canada) as well:

I believe there have been three different interpretations of Maoism in France. The first, and the oldest, was that, contrary to the USSR under Khrushchev, China held on to an original hardline Stalinism—and that the abandonment of Stalinism would lead sooner or later to a general dissolution (in which regard they weren’t mistaken). These people started the PCMLF believing they would rebuild a genuine Communist party of class struggle, against the revisionism of the official PCF and the USSR. It was both a dogmatic and a nostalgic interpretation. But it was also the only place where you found old working-class activists—there were young people in all the Maoist groups, but not older ones, nostalgic for the great era of Thorez, the 1950s, when the Party ruled in the factories and housing estates. It was really a conservative interpretation. At the other extreme there was the ultra-left interpretation of the GP, which was almost anarchist: you launched bold attacks, set up stunts, made ‘revolution in the head’, ‘melted into the masses’, always with a very keen eye to the media. The organization was highly centralized—in secret; in public it dissolved itself every five minutes in order to ‘liberate’ the energy of the masses.
As for us, the UCFML, I would say that we were a centre-left organization, in the sense always advocated by Mao, who described himself as a ‘centrist’.

There were three essential points of Maoist provenance that we practised: the first was that you always had to link up with the people, that politics for intellectuals was a journey into society and not a discussion in a closed room. Political work was defined as work in factories, housing estates, hostels. It was always a matter of setting up political organizations in the midst of people’s actual life. The second was that you should not take part in the institutions of the bourgeois state: we were against the traditional trade unions and the electoral mechanism. No infiltration of the so-called workers’ bureaucracies, no participation in elections; that distinguished us radically from the Trotskyists. The third point was that we should be in no hurry to call ourselves a party, to take up old forms of organization; we had to remain very close to actual political processes. As a result of all this, we found ourselves sharply opposed to the two other main currents. Our founding pamphlet attacked both the PCMLF on the right and the GP ‘on the left’. A struggle on two fronts...

Alain Badiou: Yes, and me too, if I hadn’t been put off early on by the element of flagrant posturing—boasting of things that didn’t really exist—and a kind of hystericization of activism, which I sensed very quickly would not stay the course. For my part, I made a permanent commitment, it wasn’t a youthful prank. Theirs was an adventurist and fallacious style of action, but one that was exciting at the same time, a politics that was also a fashion, its personal roots in actual fact not very deep—all this, in the GP, made possible those spectacular reversals that we have now seen.



https://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/2008/12/03/badiou-on-different-streams-within-french-maoism/

That last paragraph sounds exactly like the PCP-RCP and the Red Guards Austin. Obviously you need to read that article with the understanding that Badiou is going to portray himself in the best possible light and that I am happy to be called a "conservative" by him for defending Stalin in 2017 (though in 1968 the charge probably did describe a serious flaw).

As for myself, as I just implied, I think that form of Maoist adventurism, whether in China or in the West, was absolutely necessary. Despite Althusser's ultimate degeneration, I sympathize with his ideological project more than any other Marxist current and still see the GPCR as something significant which is not the case in North Korea. However, I think that form of adventurism has not changed since 1968 and has degenerated into a pure disavowal of reality. What is there to be gained by claiming that Cuba and North Korea are revisionist when the 'anti-revisionist' states not only don't exist, but became even more capitalistic than the states they were criticizing? It's possible it's theoretically correct and will appear as such over the long arc of history but I highly doubt it, the actual 'innovations' of the cultural revolution have almost no place in this discourse compared to the symbolic function of a very short period of time. Despite calling for North Korea to have independent political forms, they are careful to not say 'mass organizations' because those particularly had both the army and the party as part of the '3-in-1' combination, the so-called foundation of revisionism in North Korea.

Pinpointing the material cause of North Korean revisionism is difficult (and I consider revisionism to still be socialism), I would imagine it is related to the particular history of Korean communism (remember that while Kim Il-sung's guerrillas were communists, the had basically no connection the the communist party which was purged from power in 1956 after uneasy coexistence with other factions that emerged from the war) and the broader history of anti-Japanese nationalism (hence the unusual multi-party system in North Korea and the particular reverence for individual acts of heroism such as An Jung-gung, Kim Gu, Yu un-hyong and in the South Jeon Tae-il). That's a historical argument but not a materialist one, and ultimately I would imagine the 'revisionism' of North Korea is related to their extreme economic isolationism which set a ceiling on development. Though this has some relation to Trotsky's claim that degeneration came from a scarcity of resources and leads to some odd paths, such as considering Albanian 'self-reliance' and North Korea 'juche' nearly identical despite normally being seen as opposite ends of the revisionism spectrum. Ultimately I'm not so concerned with understanding North Korean revisionism, which seems pretty stable, as I am with the 'flagrant posturing' I see among Maoists and anti-revisionists which will not survive the 'youthful pranks' that the internet only amplifies since Badiou's day.

#2
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babyhueypnewton posted:

This is what has actually happened and leads to the absurd claim by Gonzalo that maoism only began after Mao was dead and has never actually gained state power or replicated the cultural revolution



This is not an "absurd claim," it's a completely uncontroversial one held by practically every single existing maoist party. no marxist-leninist party called themselves maoists or advocated for maoism until 1980 or so. it is true that the discontinuity of mao tse-tung thought and maoism is exaggerated by adherents in the west but gonzalo is not guilty of this. it's simply an evident truth that mao tse-tung thought was developed into maoism by the international communist movement in the years following mao's death. these were identical in content but maoism was advanced as a more sophisticated formalisation of such to allow more precise theoretical understanding

it's fine colloquially or for the purposes of shorthand to refer to movements prior to this shift "maoist" but it's still anachronous. the usage you are decrying as absurd is the historically correct one

#3
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blinkandwheeze posted:

babyhueypnewton posted:

This is what has actually happened and leads to the absurd claim by Gonzalo that maoism only began after Mao was dead and has never actually gained state power or replicated the cultural revolution

This is not an "absurd claim," it's a completely uncontroversial one held by practically every single existing maoist party. no marxist-leninist party called themselves maoists or advocated for maoism until 1980 or so. it is true that the discontinuity of mao tse-tung thought and maoism is exaggerated by adherents in the west but gonzalo is not guilty of this. it's simply an evident truth that mao tse-tung thought was developed into maoism by the international communist movement in the years following mao's death. these were identical in content but maoism was advanced as a more sophisticated formalisation of such to allow more precise theoretical understanding

it's fine colloquially or for the purposes of shorthand to refer to movements prior to this shift "maoist" but it's still anachronous. the usage you are decrying as absurd is the historically correct one



there's a difference between claiming that 'maoism' is something which synthesized the Chinese experience and the life and thought of Mao (similar to Stalin codifying 'Marxism-Leninism') and claiming that maoism is something entirely separate from China and Mao himself. you may not think that but to me it's the same thing since the theoretical 'advance' of maoism is the cultural revolution. if that's the case then what exactly makes any 'maoism' past that moment new at all? the other things that are upheld are either incorrect: the theories of social-imperialism and state capitalism or already existed in the Marxist-Leninist tradition: the mass line, people's war, class struggle continues under socialism. to me it seems like these groups are maoist because it was a significant policy at the time to uphold the cultural revolution while it was occuring. but I have no idea what the ideology is supposed to mean today and further many of the ideas about revisionism which could at least be justified at the time are downright reactionary today (such as that RCP article).

#4
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for me the problem which has come up a bunch of times is that you see maoists in the west who hold silly beliefs and do silly things as different from the third world maoist movements. that's fine and in this specific instance is particularly relevant since I doubt the CPI-M spends much of its time condemning North Korea (and even if it did it's fundamentally different than Americans and Canadians repeating bourgeois lies). and objectively there are probably 1000 maoists in total in the west so who really cares what they think?

but the problem is that's every maoist party in the west. We're not talking about a fringe party calling itself maoist, that's every party. you may object that at least maoist parties exist until Marxist-Leninist parties but it's better to not exist than push forward objectively reactionary ideology. You have to think about any ideology that ends up in the service of imperialism with talk of social-imperialism, russian/chinese imperialism, and state capitalism and advocates for color revolutions in states that resist imperialism. or more importantly, since who cares what 1000 people think about Syria, is that their politics in reality are indistinguishable from anarchist politics in action and trotskyist politics in theory. Red Guard Austin keeps getting people arrested and begging for money and cause huge problems for other leftists. Everything Badiou says in that interview is describes them perfectly except instead of living in a time when being a maoist is fashionable we're living in a time when it is not, leaving only the completely deluded adventurists. though Badiou is only respectable based on the extremely low standards we hold 60s radicals to, his 'lifelong' commitment to Marxism is so far from the Marxist tradition it is literally using the word communism to mean 'good thing.' even if we granted that maoism in practice has led to movements that are significant, the transition of that into a western context has only led to adventurism and reactionary third-campism. and this is particularly relevant since maoism, at least for a time, had pretensions of an international movement and actually listened to what the RCP-USA had to say to the CP-Nepal.
#5
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babyhueypnewton posted:

there's a difference between claiming that 'maoism' is something which synthesized the Chinese experience and the life and thought of Mao (similar to Stalin codifying 'Marxism-Leninism') and claiming that maoism is something entirely separate from China and Mao himself.


what do you mean by "entirely seperate"? it is of course not the case that the chinese experience is entirely seperate from maoism because the latter was developed through the study of mao and his revolution. but it is true that the development of mao tse-tung though within china itself was relatively minor - this never happened beyond a brief period of left political outlets in a few years of the cultural revolution. most of the codification of these principles occurred outside china.

there was no "chinese stalin" to codify mao tse-tung thought within china itself and such attempts were only embryonic

babyhueypnewton posted:

you may not think that but to me it's the same thing since the theoretical 'advance' of maoism is the cultural revolution. if that's the case then what exactly makes any 'maoism' past that moment new at all?


you are reading the western, or your own, ultraleft line on the gpcr into that of maoists. while the gpcr is recognised as a higher and necessary development of socialism this has never been insisted as a uniquely determinate concept in delineating maoism. national democracy, protracted people's war and analysis of semi-colonialism and the peasantry are generally granted more attention because they are more relevant to the immediate concerns of revolutionary movements in the developing world

babyhueypnewton posted:

the other things that are upheld are either incorrect: the theories of social-imperialism and state capitalism


maoists do not use the concept of "state capitalism" and social-imperialism is and was correct

babyhueypnewton posted:

or already existed in the Marxist-Leninist tradition: the mass line, people's war, class struggle continues under socialism.


the equivalent to this is suggesting that marxism-leninism is redundant because its principles were already existent in the marxist tradition. yes, these concepts were elaborated in the practical experiences of marxist revolutionary politics - mao tse-tung thought and maoism constituted their codification and systematisation

you are being inconsistent here because you already acknowledge the important contribution of stalin in codifying marxism-leninism but believe this does not hold for maoism, for some reason

babyhueypnewton posted:

to me it seems like these groups are maoist because it was a significant policy at the time to uphold the cultural revolution while it was occuring. but I have no idea what the ideology is supposed to mean today and further many of the ideas about revisionism which could at least be justified at the time are downright reactionary today (such as that RCP article).


this is again the issue i have raised repeatedly on these forums to the point that it's getting tired. you are understanding maoism based on making deductions from reading minor western sects instead of taking the time to research what maoists actually forwarded or forward

#6
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I don't know what I'm supposed to read since what I do read tells me what I already thought:

In our understanding, there has never been a Chinese wall between Marxism-Leninism-Mao Thought and MLM. Yet the term Maoism is a more precise and scientific explanation for Mao’s contribution. In addition since modern revisionism is belittling Mao Thought and negating or denying the historical and international significance of Mao Thought, it will be more correct and appropriate to use the terminology Maoism in lieu of Mao Thought in order to draw a clear line of demarcation with them.



http://www.signalfire.org/2013/01/13/hold-high-the-bright-red-banner-of-marxism-leninism-maoism-2004/

and the rest of the article is basically explaining what Mao did:

This truth is revolution in colonial, semi-colonial and semi-feudal countries can be victorious generally by following the path and the principles underlying the strategy and tactics of the Chinese Revolution.



etc. I guess you're right though since this separation between MLM and Mao is not an issue except when western maoists use this concept to justify purging Marxism of Stalin and supporting reactionary trotskyist understandings of imperialism and socialism, something I have never seen third world maoists do. but it's not clear to me why western maoist 'sects' are so awful. I admit the problem of Nepal is an entirely separate issue and needs to be seriously investigated instead of conveniently forgotten and I have not done either.

#7
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babyhueypnewton posted:

and objectively there are probably 1000 maoists in total in the west so who really cares what they think?


you say a lot of things after this but i don't think any of them answer this question substantially. maoism in the developed world has been repeatedly the purview of petit-bourgeois adventurists attracted to it primarily because of aesthetic concerns. even if i believe maoism is ultimately correct being humble, listening to and building links with the masses are far more important than engaging with these debates for most parties in the developed world

babyhueypnewton posted:

and this is particularly relevant since maoism, at least for a time, had pretensions of an international movement and actually listened to what the RCP-USA had to say to the CP-Nepal.


the rcp-usa only had any significant influence in the international communist movement to the extent that held the same political line as maoists internationally. their alienation from maoism was likely the most significant factor in the dissolution of the rim and the rise of more focused international groups such as the ccomposa. avakianite revisionism had been dismissed long before prachanda

#8
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babyhueypnewton posted:

I don't know what I'm supposed to read since what I do read tells me what I already thought:


this is consistent with what i have been suggesting to you. there is no clear break (no "chinese wall") between mao tse-tung thought and maoism yet they are not alleged to be the same thing. maoism is identical in content but a more precise formulation of such which arose in 1980 or so following mao's death.

your argument was that "maoism" existed prior to this point. you are interpreting the suggestion that there is no chinese wall between these developments as a suggestion that these are identical in form, but the point is rather that they are a continuum.

http://www.signalfire.org/2015/06/16/marxism-leninism-maoism-and-marxism-leninism-mao-tse-tung-thought-are-not-the-same/

this distinction might seem incredibly small but it does mean that the use of "maoism" prior to this point is anachronous.

#9
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#10
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put the limp bizkit post on the front page
#11
take a shit on the floor
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blinkandwheeze posted:

social-imperialism is and was correct



actually it's revisionist complete nonsense that mao made up to try and justify allying china with the united states. that's why maoist foreign policy is all extremely CIA shit like helping women-hating religious extremists perform a counterrevolution in Afghanistan

#12
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Horselord posted:

actually it's revisionist complete nonsense that mao made up to try and justify allying china with the united states. that's why maoist foreign policy is all extremely CIA shit like helping women-hating religious extremists perform a counterrevolution in Afghanistan


the social imperialist thesis was forwarded years before any diplomatic rapprochement with the united states. it was also forwarded by albania who at no point pursued diplomatic ties with the u.s. and criticised chinese efforts to do so.

in any case, the revisionist ussr exported loan capital in the millions to developing nations at market interest rates in the guise of foreign aid. such loans were also double bound and contractually could only be spent on the acquisition of soviet industrial capital which were provided at significantly higher rates than market competitors.

the revisionist ussr held no illusion about the motivation behind such export, as khruschev in 1958 stated that the financing of the aswan high dam was determined by whether it was a "profitable business transaction," whether they could be sure "the Egyptians could repay us in regular deliveries of their best long-fibre cotton, rice and other goods"

this is entirely consistent with lenin's understanding of imperialism. the export of loan capital is the export of capital in an imperialist sense. as in the "usury imperialism" lenin identified in france. this is the accumulation of surplus value from developing nations procured through the export of financial capital

here's an article i uploaded that i recommend people read

Edited by blinkandwheeze ()

#13
[account deactivated]
#14
Dont Mess With Sucess
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i can do that if i am sent an image to be put across the top of article
#15
mt.real
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was going to do that too. trying to pick one is difficult. i don't want to use any pictures of parasites or anything too horrifically gross
#16
take a shit on the floor
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ah yes, Khrushchev, an extremely normal soviet leader
#17
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Horselord posted:

ah yes, Khrushchev, an extremely normal soviet leader


Ok so mao's accusations of soviet social-imperialism were wrong, except when regarding the person he accused of social-imperialism

#18
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gimme a little bit to clean it up just a tad and find an appropriate image that isnt' gross.
#19
take a shit on the floor
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blinkandwheeze posted:

Ok so mao's accusations of soviet social-imperialism were wrong, except when regarding the person he accused of social-imperialism



if maoist conception of social imperialism was strictly that you'd have a point. but it could rain and maoists would call it social-imperialism, which is why maoists and the cia were such good friends with the mujahideen and Khmer rouge

#20
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your_not_aleksandr posted:

gimme a little bit to clean it up just a tad and find an appropriate image that isnt' gross.



i can do so w/bizkit too, will bump that thread in a bit

#21
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blinkandwheeze posted:

in any case, the revisionist ussr exported loan capital in the millions to developing nations at market interest rates in the guise of foreign aid. such loans were also double bound and contractually could only be spent on the acquisition of soviet industrial capital which were provided at significantly higher rates than market competitors.

the revisionist ussr held no illusion about the motivation behind such export, as khruschev in 1958 stated that the financing of the aswan high dam was determined by whether it was a "profitable business transaction," whether they could be sure "the Egyptians could repay us in regular deliveries of their best long-fibre cotton, rice and other goods"

this is entirely consistent with lenin's understanding of imperialism. the export of loan capital is the export of capital in an imperialist sense. as in the "usury imperialism" lenin identified in france. this is the accumulation of surplus value from developing nations procured through the export of financial capital

here's an article i uploaded that i recommend people read


this is an interesting post but i want to tease out a couple of points that bother me.

the first is that i think your interpretation of USSR motives for these loans is harsher than the article supports. the khrushchev quote, for instance - you've plucked out the bits that admittedly sound damning and pretended the rest isn't there. and i say that as someone who is not exactly his biggest fan. in short, i think the situation was more nuanced than you interpret it to have been.

the second is that i am not sure lenin's idea of 'usury capitalism' was really developed enough to be relied upon as a kind of formula (export of loan capital = imperialism). this is too theoretically crude.

to be clear i am not arguing that the USSR in this period was not 'social imperialist' as i don't feel i know enough about the argument, i'm just raising issues i have with the post because i find the topic interesting, and i think it deserves more careful analysis

#22
Post rating: +

Petrol posted:

the first is that i think your interpretation of USSR motives for these loans is harsher than the article supports. the khrushchev quote, for instance - you've plucked out the bits that admittedly sound damning and pretended the rest isn't there. and i say that as someone who is not exactly his biggest fan. in short, i think the situation was more nuanced than you interpret it to have been.


to be honest i was mostly throwing in the khrushchev lines because i thought it was funny. the revisionist ussr clearly were presenting the outward impression that their exploitation of developing economies were legitimate instances of developmental aid, but i think this was idiocy at best and outright dishonesty at worst. instruments of finance capital in the west frequently frame their interventions in similar ways

Petrol posted:

the second is that i am not sure lenin's idea of 'usury capitalism' was really developed enough to be relied upon as a kind of formula (export of loan capital = imperialism). this is too theoretically crude.


i'm not using "usury imperialism" here to demonstrate anything beyond the fact that lenin considered loan capital and government loans as being in the same class as export capital generally. i think it's sufficient to justify that. once we have established this premise, we can use the rest of lenin's argument and don't have to focus on this particular point further

#23
Post rating: ~
I've edited my post, but there's no button to flag for "Front Page" so however you wanna do it.

Also no clue for a header image. Something like the worm from Richard Scarry??
#24
[account deactivated]
#25
Dont Mess With Sucess
Post rating: +++++

your_not_aleksandr posted:

Something like the worm from Richard Scarry??


let me know if this is ok. fyi i am reaching the outer limits of my abilities with mspaint

#26
Post rating: ~
omg yes.
#27
Dont Mess With Sucess
Post rating: ~
I can't publish it to the front page until a box is checked that reads "give permission to the moderators to publish..." etc. that appears on the screen when you edit the post. If this box is absent from your edit screen as it is from mine, we'll have to get drwhat to re implement it.
#28
Post rating: +
North Korea: Who would dare to piggyback on Kim Jong-un?
Wily North Korean takes advantage of a rare moment of openness from his dictator to try to trick the people of the west into thinking he supports the regime. What a transparent ruse!
#29
mt.real
Post rating: +

swampman posted:

I can't publish it to the front page until a box is checked that reads "give permission to the moderators to publish..." etc. that appears on the screen when you edit the post. If this box is absent from your edit screen as it is from mine, we'll have to get drwhat to re implement it.


yeah it's gone because i have Plans but unfortunately they are Not Done. i have to manually do a thing. i am doing it now

e: it's frontpage-ok now. (post #342854)

Edited by drwhat ()

#30
Post rating: ~
ok. i don't know what to do lol.
#31
mt.real
Post rating: ~
don't have to do anything, looks like swampman got it. i didn't do it because i wasn't sure if that pic was the real one he wanted to use, i wasn't sure if text in the image would work out. looks like it did though
#32
Post rating: +
http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/defense/326094-how-north-korea-could-kill-up-to-90-percent-of-americans-at-any

According to the Congressional EMP Commission, a single warhead delivered by North Korean satellite could blackout the national electric grid and other life-sustaining critical infrastructures for over a year—killing 9 of 10 Americans by starvation and societal collapse.



lets turn this one up to 11

#33
Post rating: +
now thats somethign north korea could do for us
#34
Post rating: ~
also i don't know if it's really a question anymore but i was listening to one of the podcasts in my feed (the poison review, episode here) and they discussed the poisoning of Kim JOng-Nam and it seems quite obvious that it was specifically VX that was used.

key point is that VX can be applied dermally with low risk to the attacker. this delays the onset, sometimes significantly. an expert they mention said that dermal VX can last up to 18 hours before actually starting.

I honestly have no clue about the talk of a "binary agent" because i'm very much not a chemist, and it seems complicated. but there's really no other plausible scneario ic an consider that would allow the attack to unfold as it did.

food for thouhgt!
#35
Post rating: +
actually VX is a gas stored in small green balls that if broken will melt your face off, like in that film

Edited by tears ()

#36
Post rating: ~

tears posted:

actually VX is a gas stored in small green balls that if broken will melt your face off, like in that film

do you like elton john?

#37
mt.real
Post rating: ~

your_not_aleksandr posted:

also i don't know if it's really a question anymore but i was listening to one of the podcasts in my feed (the poison review, episode here) and they discussed the poisoning of Kim JOng-Nam and it seems quite obvious that it was specifically VX that was used.

key point is that VX can be applied dermally with low risk to the attacker. this delays the onset, sometimes significantly. an expert they mention said that dermal VX can last up to 18 hours before actually starting.

I honestly have no clue about the talk of a "binary agent" because i'm very much not a chemist, and it seems complicated. but there's really no other plausible scneario ic an consider that would allow the attack to unfold as it did.

food for thouhgt!



i'm not googling because i'm lazy but i think a binary agent involves two seemingly benign chemicals which combine in/on the target's body and only become lethal there. super pro spook shit

#38
Post rating: ~
That's two part epoxy
#39
mt.real
Post rating: +

Themselves posted:

That's two part epoxy


north korean diplomat inexplicably murdered by eating both parts of two part epoxy

#40
Post rating: ~
you know you can google all you wan't but you cant google enough, i missed this on the wiki page.

wikipedia posted:

VX can also be delivered in binary chemical weapons which mix in-flight to form the agent prior to release. Binary VX is referred to as VX2, and is created by mixing O-(2-diisopropylaminoethyl) O′-ethyl methylphosphonite (Agent QL) with elemental sulfur (Agent NE) as is done in the Bigeye aerial chemical bomb. It may also be produced by mixing with sulfur compounds, as with the liquid dimethyl polysulfide mixture (Agent NM) in the canceled XM736 8-inch projectile program.

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