Atrocious Joe posted:

the 1990s were known as the special period in Cuba because without the soviets squeezing them, they could afford a bunch more stuff

tokin opposition posted:

the soviet union never fell, it just learned how to play the western media so well they thought it did. comrade putin has not forgotten stalinist thought

Raskolnikov38 posted:

the soviets were doomed to lose the cold war, and had already long before the collapse anyway, but i dont believe a collapse of the warsaw pact and satellite states necessarily meant the end of the USSR

tokin opposition posted:

the soviet union never fell, it just learned how to play the western media so well they thought it did. comrade putin has not forgotten stalinist thought

Blisster posted:

so cultural Marxism is real? I’m saluting right now.

Mr. Lobe posted:

Oh yeah, modern Russia is a great place to be a minority, especially a gender/sexual orientation one

AnimeIsTrash posted:

Halloween Jack posted:

Wouldn't it be awesome to relearn that your political enemies are dead every day? I hope my golden years are full of people bursting into my room to announce that Kissinger died for the thousandth time.

AnimeIsTrash posted:

https://twitter.com/alp1111112/status/1544802553405358080?cxt=HHwWgIC-vZrvnvAqAAAA

AnimeIsTrash posted:

https://twitter.com/alp1111112/status/1544802553405358080?cxt=HHwWgIC-vZrvnvAqAAAA

Danann posted:

https://twitter.com/LunaOi_VN/status/1545064271490326529

https://twitter.com/LunaOi_VN/status/1545067909168259072

quote:

George Kent is Professor Emeritus with the University of Hawai’i. He was a professor in the Department of Political Science from 1970 until his retirement at the end of 2010.

He currently teaches online as a part-time faculty member with the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Sydney in Australia and also with the Transformative Social Change concentration at Saybrook University in San Francisco.

Professor Kent’s approach centers on finding remedies for social problems, especially finding ways to strengthen the weak in the face of the strong. He works on human rights, international relations, peace, development, and environmental issues, with a special focus on nutrition and children. His books include

The Political Economy of Hunger: The Silent Holocaust. New York: Praeger, 1984;
The Politics of Children’s Survival. New York: Praeger, 1991;
Children in the International Political Economy. New York: Macmillan/St. Martin’s, 1995;
Freedom from Want:The Human Right to Adequate Food. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2005;
(editor) Global Obligations for the Right to Food. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008;
Ending Hunger Worldwide. Boulder, Colorado: Paradigm Publishers, 2011.
Regulating Infant Formula. Amarillo, Texas: Hale Publishing, 2011.

Professor Kent is Co-Convener of the Commission on International Human Rights of the International Peace Research Association. He has worked as a consultant with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the United Nations Children’s Fund, and several civil society organizations. He is part of the Working Group on Nutrition, Ethics, and Human Rights of the United Nations System Standing Committee on Nutrition. He is on the Governing Board of the Hawai’i Food Policy Council, which he helped to start in November 2010 (http://www.hawaiifoodpolicycouncil.org/).

mawarannahr posted:

this came up the other day in the Epstein thread. i haven’t read his work but just based on his bio and book titles I think he was being a bit sarcastic, but this might have been lost on his UN handlers who approved the piece.

animist posted:

thats actually kinda amazing
imagine being the guy who rubber stamped that

mawarannahr posted:

this came up the other day in the Epstein thread. i haven’t read his work but just based on his bio and book titles I think he was being a bit sarcastic, but this might have been lost on his UN handlers who approved the piece.

MSDOS KAPITAL posted:

So do we consider any DotP to be capitalist, here? Like I said, this sounds like capitalist realism: everything is capitalism.

I think there is a fundamental difference between the CPC having a controlling interest in 60% of the Chinese economy, and lords of capital poo poo in the West. Namely, that the CPC is acting to remove the profit incentive from those industries while capitalists are exploiting those monopolies to wring as much out of the rest of the economy as they can with them. It's an important distinction, isn't it?

Like sure they are socializing production and using profit incentives to do that, and building up productive capital, but once profit incentive becomes totally dysfunctional (i.e. at the point of monopoly, or some time before) they cut that poo poo out. A system run by capitalists wouldn't do that because the interest of the capitalist is to use that monopoly position to enrich themselves. So the Chinese system has capitalist elements and there are capitalists in China, but the Chinese system is not capital-C Capitalist because capitalists aren't in control of the state. So the reasoning goes, anyway - you can argue that they are secretly capitalist or whatever but pointing to the existence of state-run enterprises in support of that argument is to me at least.

Like the whole point of the turn to socialism, as I understand it, is to appropriate those monopolies and use the advanced productive capacity of them for the benefit of all. That is, to remove the profit incentive from them. Not to break them up or whatever - that's what liberal regimes sometimes do to keep the gravy train rolling a little longer. So the existence of state-controlled monopolies isn't evidence of capitalist elements - precisely the opposite, in fact.