There is absolutely nothing inherently corrupt about Chinese or Russian civilization, only the material conditions that make them up. These of course include various folklore myths and fantasies that have no connection with the real world, which should be taken care of. As much as society acts upon us, we can also act upon it, so change is most certainly possible. In fact it’s inevitable, from the standpoint of our ideology.

I would argue the best way is to simply use dialectical materialism. For example, how would you eradicate religion in a future communist society? I’d start by investing into propaganda against the church. I’m sure there’s a lot of corrupt priests, pedophiles and so on, so you should use all these public scandals and make them as publicized as possible. Have culture and art that generally align against the existence of god. At the end, I’m sure the church as an institution is knee-deep in corruption, so after all that it wouldn’t be hard to convince the public to be passive while all their assets are seized.

But you cannot simply discredit your opponent, you also have to present your own case as to why your philosophy is the superior one, so reform the education system and start teaching children this stuff from day 1, whilst they’re still a tabula rasa. Develop a coherent, materialist framework where they can simply do the work themselves and come to a logical conclusion around the foundations of religious belief. Make them realize that the materialist reality of our world is the only thing that is actually tangible and what they should obviously focus their attention on, instead of some imaginary man in the sky who as some incredible spirit pulled matter out of his ass.

At the end of the day you probably know much more about the Cultural revolution that I do, but as far as I understand Mao and the revolutionaries were pretty idealistic, to the point of being pretty ultraleftist in some beliefs. But this is not uncommon, aside from the revolutionary republican movements in Europe even before socialism, the Bolsheviks were pretty idealistic as well. Proclaiming that the foreign ministry would soon becomes superflous and that it would soon be dissolved because of an international revolution, making soldiers elect their officers and so on. Nothing can be done overnight, and radical change must not only have a concrete strategy, but must inevitably be based in the material conditions of the times.

Have none of the liberal fucks asked themselves at least once in their lives what could Putin possibly fucking have that would effect Trump whatsoever? The guy has committed every crime under the sun that a president can commit, something that his supporters fully acknowledge, yet Putin has some magic wand that will bring Trump down and make MAGA hate him if he casts his magic? It’s insane that these people who in a lot of cases have college level education just turn off their critical thinking skills whenever the empire propaganda machine wants them to believe something.

I think ex-Yugoslavia is pretty peculiar since the collapse of it’s communist party resembled the USSR more than any other. The party got hollowed out via opportunism and revisionism, which you could argue started out under Tito himself via the whole split with the Soviets, although the conflict was more strategical rather than ideological, even though it wasn’t presented as such. Although I don’t think the memory of Yugoslavia is as precious as it of the USSR, plenty of boomers still admire it, with only the younger generations being more right-wing and believing in this silly orthodox church shit.

But a lot of the bad rap tends to be because of Milosevic, and his complete break from any discernible communist ideology, towards a reinvigoration of these stupid national myths which might not have been the underlying cause, but was the alibi used to break up Yugoslavia. If he had pursued a policy of centralization, which was even favored by the poorer republics such as Montenegro, Bosnia and Macedonia, maybe he could have averted the crisis and brought back Croatia and Slovenia back into the fold. Instead, we got the aforementioned young generation celebrating Mladic and Karadzic and painting murals in their name.

Thank you for this write-up, I honestly mostly refrain from trying to understand what is happening in Bosnia since everyone, including Bosnians, just rightfully assume it’s a shitshow not worth wasting your braincells over. There is certainly no love for any politicians here, not either from the conservative of liberal camps, although you will see plenty of boomers falling for the endless fearmongering of new wars with old combatants. But it’s not too difficult to convince most people of the west’s failing in every aspect.

What is very difficult is to get them to a proper materialist understanding of the world, since plenty of people here love to be “autochauvinists” as we call them and just assume the reason why all of our countries are shitty is because of some great intellectual and/or moral failing compared to the west. That the west is apparently not subservient to the laws of the same system as we, and that this generalized mass of people is just shitty because we are lazy, stupid, capricious, jealous or all of those things at once.

Or there are people on the other side who just give up and say that it’s all some western “globohomo” conspiracy that aims to destroy the cradle of an ancient balkan civilization lmao. Some of these people do realize the general system of imperialism, but are often caught up in these moronic reactionary conspiracy theories that instead divert them from the real cause of the problem.

For example, as I said in another comment, lithium is a very important critical resource that we posses, and so as a natural monopoly can be exploited to our benefit to give us some breathing room in terms of our status of servitude with the likes of Germany. But discourse around here has either devolved into a minuscule group around Vucic who support Rio Tinto digging that shit up, or the majority of people that oppose the digging not only because it’s a private company doing it, but on the principle as a whole. So if you actually want to exploit it, you are basically as good as a Vucic supporter. Nevermind you could use the profits to maybe alleviate some of the consequences of pollution in Belgrade, where smog is a regular visitor. Or fix the filtration system in that same city as to not just fucking dump shit in the Danube. Or invest into solar panels, nuclear power plants and other green tech from China. As if all of that wouldn’t benefit the environment of this country tenfold as compared to saving a little land of a village inhabited by like 10 people.

Yup, which is why I don’t understand people here that post some of the shit he says, guy is literally the biggest opportunist alive. In the west, he sucks off Trump and Charlie Kirk (he even had his supporters wave a flag with his fucking face recently and paint a mural of him), whereas on the east he always stresses the “brotherly” relations with Russia and our historic friendship. Literally don’t take anything from him at face value, the guy says anything that appeals to whoever he’s talking to. The best you can do is take account of the material conditions on the ground, which indicate that Vucic has simply continued the policies of further integration with Europe from the previous government, even though you would swear based off what he says that they are sworn enemies, considering he likes to evoke them any time there is anything unpopular that he has to do.

Yeah, It’s a huge problem here in Serbia, since everything from real estate to wages is listed in euros. People just don’t have faith in the domestic economy, not after the sanction triggered hyperinflation of the 90’s, not the mention the Jezda and Dafiment bank scams during the times of Milosevic. Even saw an article yesterday that our fixed exchange rate with the euro, where the national bank is overall selling off their euro reserves to shore up the dinar, is actually great because it’s “popular” (god forbid the country has any kind of industrial strategy). People don’t have trust in the dinar, and with the way Vucic has been handling the economic front, where foreign direct investment is not only a tool, but the end goal in itself, since he’s not competent enough to run these enterprises into anything other than being the state apparatus for blackmailing people that work in there to vote for him every election cycle. It’s much easier for him to just skirt a little off their profit via income tax and VAT, whilst privatizing literally every single previously state-owned industry, which is especially troublesome when it comes to critical resources. Rio Tinto in particular being a western company with a colorful history of environmental devastation, now mining the critical lithium resource used in manufacturing batteries. Now, Vucic could actually have a state company made to mine these resources, which could in relation to Germany actually give us some leverage, especially if the US forces the EU to cut it’s dependence from China on that front. But of course, being the puppet that he is, that is simply not going to happen, and they even introduced a law recently where any public space can apparently be privatized, that being the cherry on top of his neoliberal shitcake.

Montenegro just accepted the reality of the situation with the euro being the only currency, despite them not being in the EU. They didn’t even pretend to make a move for any kind of monetary sovereignty, although with the kind of mountainous terrain there, they don’t have much prospects for developing into anything other than a tourist resort independently.

You said it yourself, the war didn’t alter anything, but It did at least the give the Afghan people a chance not to be in that cycle if the Soviet Union won. I’m not making the argument that every single thing that happened during the intervention was right, the same way I don’t argue that everything that Stalin did was 100% correct. But I don’t have to argue that to say I support Stalin, nor do I have to argue it to say that the intervention itself wasn’t a bad thing, especially when your argument equates Soviet and American interventionism, which is just wrong.

When it comes to the collapse, again, Stalin didn’t do everything correctly, and the situation after the end of his leadership proves that. Then came revision, which led to the Sino-Soviet split, but also the failure of the Soviet leadership to adapt to new material conditions, which is especially stupid since the philosophy of Dialectical Materialism which they nominally espoused is literally based on changing material conditions.

It’s because you are using liberal idealist universal principles and not seeing that war, intervention and violence in general is simply a tool for the advancement of class interests. I don’t think anyone can say that the Soviet intervention and counterattack on Poland that aimed to conquer it would be a bad thing, especially in retrospect where that border with Germany could be used to intervene on the side of the communists, altering the future of humanity where Germany becomes Red instead of Nazi. Materialism doesn’t recognize these arguments outside of their material background. The Soviets invading Afghanistan was in support of a progressive regime, the american one is purely out of the class interest of the bourgeoisie.

Metro: Last Light

I’ll definitely have to check this one out. I already slogged through Exodus on the shittiest settings some time ago, so I’m expecting tighter gameplay on this one considering it’s linear. As for all the others, I’m not sure I jive with their settings, or I’m already spoiled (Spec Ops) or I played it like Black Flag, although I’m not sure I’d replay black flag just because I know it would now bore me to death with the non-pirate gameplay. I literally tried playing AC2 not too long ago and deleted out of pure boredom and the fact that they literally don’t have any kind of significant stealth system in a fucking game called Assassin’s Creed and you wouldn’t even be able to crouch until Unity. Truly incredible design by ubisoft.

Athanasy, a really cool biopunk VN. I just love the setting, and the story and writing is also great. Definitely worth a try.

I tried getting into MGSV, but couldn’t really bear the silly story which is supposed to be in this realistic setting, taking out basically all immersion from it IMO. Also, having to sabotage and potentially kill Soviet soldiers just leaves a bad taste in my mouth, despite it all being virtual.

Also tried getting into Shadows of Mordor, but Idk about the whole medieval high fantasy setting honestly, don’t think I’m really in the mood. I also found the nemesis system to be rather annoying, even though it is a neat concept. I mean it’s pretty good up until you run into the same guy for the millionth time, who can also pursue you whilst you’re on a mission.

Is there any triple A or at least double A game from like 2012-2017 someone can recommend? I wanna play something that’s solid in terms of gameplay, but also something that looks pretty good for the time, since my graphics card can really only run games from that period on a high setting. Been thinking something list Splinter Cell: Blacklist, I’ll see if I can find an appropriate version for linux.

If you’ve played Deus Ex (and live in the west):

“The luminous path is closed to gwailos”

Yeah, I was on db0 before I moved to hexbear. Aside from actually just coming to conclusions that conform to historical materialism in regards to the position of the USSR, one of the reasons was that muh “tankies” weren’t actually that bad to hang around with on Hexbear when I lurked there. Also, it was ironic that Hexbear was the only instance where there was actual voting about issues pertaining to the site, whereas the other “anarchist” instances basically just boiled down to whatever the mods felt like.

Something I will truly never understand with burgerlanders. It’s never former president, always president obama, bush, clinton etc. That, and colonel being said the same as kernel.

XQC should do a word by word analysis on himself first.

bump amber whataboutism volcel police

I absolutely agree that the biggest bane of contemporary Marxism has been the utter negligence of the political economy, even though Marx wrote almost exclusively on it. Now, with the west co-opting discourse on Marxism and moving it solely to the softest of social sciences, they’ve been able to silence the opposition and even proclaim unscientific trite such as the STV the orthodox position. You will scarcely find even contemporary Marxists accept the LTV, even though the theory of exploitation literally rests fundamentally on it!

Despite all that however, it’s not impossible to agree with Keynes and the MMT crowd on macroeconomic issues especially. And I somewhat agree that what China is doing can hardly be called socialism. It’s more like just the NEP, capitalist economy with a socialist state overseeing it. Still however, we don’t have a better option that China right now. They’ve been pretty clear in at least dealing with however wants to do trade, which is certainly a good thing for future movements of ours that will hopefully take over.

I don’t disagree at all. We simply don’t know how it will end. When I was writing about the “next stage of capitalism”, I was thinking about Varoufakis’s “cloud capitalism” as a form of technofeudalism.

Whilst I haven’t read his book, I’m simply not convinced on his arguments from what I’ve seen so far. Also, naming it “technofeudalism”, feudalism had the peasant as the direct producer, later giving his labour to the landed aristocrat that ruled over him. Cloud capital doesn’t produce anything concrete, let alone the means of sustenance for this “cloud serf”. At best, it serves as an augmented version of merchant capital. I just think you might as well call neoliberalism a whole new economic system at that point.

I’m sure Bessent is competent at being a hedge fund manager and gaming the market. But running the most powerful economy in the world, with the particular goal of re-industrialization, is an entirely different beast. Just skimming through his wikipedia, he doesn’t seem to have had too much success following that lucky break. He also clearly supports measures that act against state intervention, so good luck with any concentrated effort to bring back industrial work to the US.

I don’t fully agree that the US gets to remain hegemon, rather I think the world could very well go without a concrete global hegemon, more multipolar, but at the same time more chaotic. With that, a lot of countries being left to fend for themselves, for good and bad.

@xiaohongshu@hexbear.net Just to reply to your comment on the previous mega about american capitalism adapting

Whilst it indeed might continue existing under it’s neoliberal form, especially given China’s current ideological inclinations, I don’t think that they’ll be able to transition and survive this next phase, especially with Trump in power. They have rather jumped the gun, and that has endangered their position as global hegemon.

Trump and re-industrialization are rather at odds on an ideological basis. Whereas they would need cheap labor from the third world to get things started, they have forsaken that for their stupid, fascist tendencies to blame minorities and deport them, being exemplified in the Hyundai worker scandal. He would also need significant state involvement, which Biden in a certain way paved the way for with the CHIPS act, but has now abandoned that and in fact gone in the opposite direction, with acts such as the disbandment of the department of education. I guess you could say that the Intel investment is a thing, but that’s really more of a bailout than an investment considering their success lately. Heck, Trump doesn’t even control the Fed, meaning he cannot just change the interest rate at his whim. So fundamentally, I just don’t believe in Trump’s ability to do this, considering all we’ve seen so far. Of course, when you don’t have a coherent plan or program (or rather have a “concept of a plan” to quote the man himself) in terms of industrialization, then the tariffs just don’t make any sense at all, being mere tools for some trade concessions. I guess his advantage is that he’s a pretty big wildcard, and rather malleable if the right people get a hold of him, but going all the way through is really what matters, and his convictions are simply not strong enough for something like that. Maybe a democrat aware of all these variable might be able to change the outlook overall, but we’re not even sure how future elections will look like anyways, and whether the republicans will simply seize all levers of power and make the dems as a lightning rod of leftist rage superfluous.

Ultimately, I believe it will be up to China to step into the spotlight and take the burden upon itself, or succumb to neoliberal ideology. Don’t think the US with it’s current structure will have that much importance to itself be the overwhelmingly deciding factor.

Edit: Another thing, “Nixon was a madman”, yes, a madman with competent ghouls like Kissinger and Volcker at his side. Trump has a bunch of yes men who gawk at everything he says.