toyotathon posted:

toyotathon posted:

cars posted:

Tetris, by The Soviet Union.

filler posted:

I might have broken this thing wide open

guys i think that image is edited

Zoe posted:

you don't really have to ask if chinese socialism has worked for them, but if you do their response will be a resounding "yes." which, ok, maybe that's the success of a cynical campaign to maintain the allegiance of the peasant base which won the revolution. but if you're viewing things that way you're no better than the china-watcher types who claim the government is minimizing unemployment for the sake of "social stability" rather than keeping people employed. sometimes things are as simple as they seem.



This touches on the classic propagandizing we saw with the Soviets, Parenti has a really good paragraph on it from Blackshirts & Reds.

"During the Cold War, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime’s atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn’t go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them. If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum."

I met Michael Parenti recently and didn't even ask him what he thought about China...what the fuck.

dimashq posted:

Ooo how’d that go

trakfactri posted:

So this "right-wing populism" is really a compulsive freakout attempt to lock everything down "before it's too late." In other words, there's a goose and the golden eggs are the rents paid out to the yokels maintaining their dominant, superstructural position in the imperial core, but the goose is laying fewer golden eggs these days so the urge is to strangle the goose to death and ration what's left of the eggs. The goose is the base (also imperialism).

But there's nowhere to go. Brexit threatens to unravel the United Kingdom as a political entity, sparking a campaign of reactionary violence toward social groups that provoke these dominant groups' resentment (migrants), renewing hostilities in Northern Ireland and reinvigorating a secessionist movement in Scotland. The Hong Kong protesters for their part are making impossible demands, which if they could hope to achieve, would result -- in dialectical fashion -- in the People's Liberation Army rolling in the tanks, putting a decisive end to the subject, which may be a bonus depending on your perspective in a similar manner to the implosion of the United Kingdom being a net bonus for anti-imperialist forces everywhere.

There is no political crisis for capitalism at the moment, however, which means the usual Trotskyist dunderheads hoping to turn the Hong Kong labor aristocracy toward the Chinese working classes will result in an epic failure, per usual. The one thing that I haven't figured out -- if I've got a nugget of an argument here -- is why the liberal press, public opinion and now the Ted Cruz / Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez team-up duo in the U.S. have all swung so heavily in favor of the Hong Kong protests while it was divided over Brexit.