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Cowbee [he/they]

@ Cowbee @lemmy.ml

Posts
1
Comments
1172
Joined
3 yr. ago

Actually, this town has more than enough room for the two of us

He/him or they/them, doesn't matter too much

Marxist-Leninist ☭

Interested in Marxism-Leninism, but don't know where to start? Check out my Marxist-Leninist study guides, both basic and advanced!

  • Is it me or does Lemmy have a propaganda problem?

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  • Nobody touts China as a utopia, but China does follow classical Marxist economics. I think you see Marx as predicting a far-future society as being fully collectivized and planned globally as also believing any socialist state must immediately become that far-future society, which is ironically the very Utopianism Marx and Engels spent so much effort debunking in their lifetimes.

  • Is it me or does Lemmy have a propaganda problem?

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  • Actually, it was because r/GenZedong was banned. r/communism is more extreme than the devs, because they (along with r/communism101) support Gonzalo and the Shining Path of Peru, which Marxist-Leninists do not.

  • Is it me or does Lemmy have a propaganda problem?

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  • You weren't flamed for mentioning established facts, but for dogmatically repeating easily disproven claims. People brought receipts and explained how your views were not actually based on evidence but instead propaganda, and now you've deleted those comments, making it hard for others to verify that they were indeed wrong. You weren't using internationally-recognized consensus, but purely western consensus, portraying that western consensus as the totality of international thought.

    Either way, no, no paid trolls nor bots, just a bunch of communists. Lemmy was made and developed by communists, so there are lots of communists here.

  • Locked

    How does Banned work?

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  • I can't really answer for blorp or PieFed, as I use lemmy and the browser. Lemmy and PieFed deliberately handle banning in different ways due to different design philosophy.

  • What's one giant LIE that's frequently taught in schools as a lesson?

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  • Communism and socialism are bad and never worked, as well as the lie that the settlers in the Americas were merely escaping religous prosecution, rather than wanting to kill people for land as already privledged Yeomanry. Also that the slave trade existed in Africa, in reality slavery was not an industry in the African continent and instead Europeans leveraged a small technological gap to trade slightly more advanced technology purely for slaves, which created the slave industry.

  • Locked

    How does Banned work?

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  • This is for Lemmy, not PieFed. Banned users can be completely wiped, removing all content (including from the modlog). This is helpful for CSAM accounts. They can also just be banned from an instance, or a community, with all content remaining up thus far. Users that are instance-banned are invisible to users from that instance, but often can actually comment on that instance from the perspective of their home instance.

    As an example, if someone permabanned me from Lemmy.world, Lemmy.world users could not ever see my comments, even the ones only on Lemmy.ml. However, Lemmy.ml users would be able to see my comments on Lemmy.world posts, and I would still be able to comment. I'd effectively be user-defederated.

    There's more to it than that, it's actually kinda complicated. PieFed works differently too.

  • Removed

    Why doesn't the US as an country have bullet trains?

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  • Essentially because of the focus on petty bourgeois lifestyles, large houses, cars, and atomizing society. Big car manufacturers lobbied the state into pressuring against more communal infrastructure at scale, which protects the auto industry from competing with public transit. It has roots in both late-stage capitalism and settler-colonialism.

  • What's the most interesting fringe group you've learned about?

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  • Yea, they were an example of early anti-capitalist organization. Their biggest weakness was identifying the means of production as their enemy, not the owners of capital themselves, which became a valuable lesson for future organizers.

  • What's something that gives you hope about the future?

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  • Imperialism and neocolonialism are gradually dying, while the global south and socialist countries are rising. The old world is dying and the new is struggling to be born, but the process is moving forward.

  • What country do you live in and where would you choose to live if you could?

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  • I'd probably live in China if I could. With how they are constantly improving while the west is constantly in decay, I don't forsee this process changing. I only still live in the country where I do due to lack of resources to move, and for the friends and family I'd be leaving behind.

  • Which national flags would you change?

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  • I don't see how. Marxist analysis of imperialism is based on a material process of capital export that happens when bank and industrial capital merge into finance capital. We don't call state power "imperialism" because states serve a given ruling class depending on the mode of production, and imperialism is an international system.

  • What books are your favourite and what are you reading now?

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  • Right now I'm reading Neocolonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism by Kwame Nkrumah. It's a really good expansion of Lenin's work on Imperialism as a stage in capitalism. Nkrumah was coup'd one year after its publishing with support from the US.

    As for favorites, I really love both Piranesi and Roadside Picnic! The former is just a really fun mystery with a good deal of whimsy, the latter is excellent sci-fi.

  • Do you think you are dogmatic?

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  • I wouldn't have the beliefs I do today if I was incapable of being persuaded by logic, facts, and statistics.

  • Which national flags would you change?

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  • You're butchering the word "imperialism" to make a subjectivist argument. Calling the Sahel States "imperialist" for simply having states is extremely confusing when used in modern lingo, especially when imperialism is understood to be an international phenomenon. This is why using subjectivism is horribly unscientific, if you just label anything with a state as "imperialist," all you're doing is just saying you don't like states and therefore want to pile all the negative descriptors you can onto it.

  • What is the greatest sentence ever written in human history?

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  • Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.

    Perhaps the best, most succinct explanation of historical materialism.

    Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.

  • Which music player do you use on android?

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  • Auxio.

  • How do you keep track of articles/web pages/etc. you want to refer back to?

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  • Either open tabs, or storing the links in text files I use with Markor.

  • Which national flags would you change?

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  • I'm going to disagree with you stating that the Alliance Sahel States banding together in the beginnings of a Pan-African coalition is imperialism, pretty firmly. This is, frankly, an absurd position that demonizes what is uncontestably an anti-imperialist coalition for seemingly no other reason than to satisfy a vague moral code you have. In practical terms, there is no way to resist neocolonialism without collective sovereignty. This is not done at the expense of others.

    As for sovereignty being a "necessary evil," I don't agree, nor do I define it as "internal domination." States should be temporary, but only in the context of internationalism, ie as a joining of national states in one big international union until state lines are abolished and classes disappear, making states themselves redundant. I'm not going to finger wag Burkina Faso, Niger, Mali, etc. for creating a powerful regional resistance coalition against France and the US.

    The next comment is just an odd tangent describing why you don't think culture is important or relevant. I'm not sure how to respond other than to tell you to speak with indigenous resistance groups, assuming you live in a settler-colony like many of us unfortuantrly do.

    As for calling states "little empires," this is again myopic. States are the means by which one class monopolizes its power. The national revolution creates a weak national bourgeoisie that can generally only be overtaken by the peasantry and urban proletariat. The anatomy of the national revolution is documented extremely well by Frantz Fanon in the work I mentioned earlier. Nkrumah deals with the Neocolonial phase, where external powers continue colonialism via financial means and balkanization.

    States can be governed by the proletariat, in which case the majority is organized and are working together for the betterment of the whole. This is how socialism works. By defining a state as a "little empire," you are making a subjectivist argument, not a materialist one. Same as calling the Alliance of Sahel States "imperialist" for kicking out France and the US. You use buzz words and emotionally charged diction in place of an actual argument, hoping it carries the conversation. This doesn't hold up to scrutiny though.

  • Which national flags would you change?

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  • No problem!