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I’m thinking of joining SA after doing some volunteering on the Sawant campaign (she’s in my district). I spent two years with DSA but went to ISO (lol) meetings and demonstrations more often, and I’ve come to appreciate the focused efforts of SA. I dont agree with everything and Sawant has some odd positions but I’m not sure they matter enough to me over being part of a somewhat effective organization that does good work where I live and ~raises awareness~what’s the worst that could happen?
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# ¿ Nov 12, 2019 22:05 |
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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 14:28 |
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22 Eargesplitten posted:Are you not from the US or did you somehow miss that every man in the US is required to register for the draft, and at this point most states automatically register you when you get an ID of any kind? lol if you did. mawarannahr fucked around with this message at 05:37 on Jan 4, 2020 |
# ¿ Jan 4, 2020 01:56 |
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Atrocious Joe posted:I'm an accelerationist when it comes to the draft. Fredric Jameson thinks this may be a good idea. has anyone read this ? An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army
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# ¿ Jan 4, 2020 01:59 |
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apropos to nothing posted:at some point you can either get organized, or continue to be a party of one. the people that can only poo poo talk every currently existing organization of the working class arent really interested in fighting capitalism, just sitting on the sidelines. people looking for some perfect movement or organization are going to be looking forever. look around you and see whos active and join them. or if your willing to do it, and its a lot of hard work that might not pay off for a long time, find an organization you see doing work whose methods you agree with who isnt around you and join and commit to learning their methods so you can build a presence where youre at. a lot of people are looking for someone or some party to come along and give the answer or show the way. ultimately if you want capitalism to end its up to you to do it. same with me and everyone else/ theres plenty of people out there who will help you every step of the way but they cant do it for you only with you. this is correct. It’s exciting to make a difference locally. in an internationalist organization you can extend your horizon toward a planetary revolution that really, really needs to happen. mawarannahr fucked around with this message at 08:09 on Feb 28, 2020 |
# ¿ Feb 28, 2020 07:41 |
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indigi posted:are there any good leftist podcasts (don’t say chapo please) i like swampside chats quote:Swampside Chats is a weekly podcast where communists sit down to shoot the poo poo about current events, history, political economy and theory. We're also all high and/or gay. plough and stars quote:History, theory, and current critical analysis of the world utilizing the science of dialectical materialism the nostalgia trap (not really a "communist pod" like swampside chats or plough and stars) quote:The Nostalgia Trap podcast features weekly conversations about history and politics with some of the left’s most incisive thinkers, writers, and extremely online personalities, exploring how individual lives intersect with the big events and debates of our era.
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# ¿ Jul 1, 2020 21:01 |
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there hasn’t really been a thing of denial in Turkey. there have been strict lockdowns applied to people over 65 and under 20 and if you left your house you start getting text messages to knock it off. they’re allowing over 65s out now, for a while it was a few hours one day a week. also for teens it was like that. I don’t think Turkey is comparable to USA or Brazil in that respect.
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# ¿ Jul 6, 2020 06:05 |
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I’ve thought of moving back
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# ¿ Jul 6, 2020 06:12 |
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# ¿ Nov 8, 2020 04:37 |
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# ¿ Nov 14, 2020 07:39 |
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why is “big” so common an adjective in left-wing writing? is it out if translation or a conscious effort to simplify language and try to increase its emotional impact? I generally see this in writing by Trotskyist and Maoists. Like, “big bourgeois compradors and big landlords” in that letter from the Maoists in the Phillipines posted above. I don’t really care to go to the effort to compute this but I’d say Trot writers use the word “big” possibly an order of magnitude times more than other leftist writers or mainstream media. Is this a real thing, a linguistic idiosyncrasy or is there an underlying logic to Big Writing? If I hadn’t seen the Maoists doing it, it would be ripe for a joke.
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# ¿ Nov 28, 2020 22:00 |
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ToxicAcne posted:What mainstream news sites do you guys recommend reading? I'm really trying to get off twitter as reading leftist twitter leaves me both angry and astounded at the stupidity of it all.
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# ¿ Jan 8, 2021 02:29 |
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indigi posted:wow you love supply chains huh A little over a year ago I was unemployed and enthusiastically trying to imagine ways for industrial action to succeed, and the just-in-time supply chain seemed like an obvious weak point. Then the pandemic came and I kept following this news because it turns out it's relevant to basically everything.
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# ¿ Jan 8, 2021 02:35 |
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on the other hand, isn't it so tied up with labor arbitrage that it allows many companies to employ fewer workers with reduced organizing ability?
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# ¿ Jan 8, 2021 16:12 |
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jimmy d*re is CIA
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# ¿ Feb 14, 2021 02:26 |
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ToxicAcne posted:According to Harvey and the intro to Capital itself, Capital was always intended to be read by working class people (more specifically skilled labourers). Takes like these just make me think that people like the author have the greatest contempt for the working class. It reminds me of Catholic Clergy who discouraged their laity from reading the Bible (might be getting my history wrong here, not Catholic). I don’t think Danny Bessner is whomever you think he is.Why would you say he is married to electoralism? Is that what you take away from this article, for instance, or anything else he’s written or said? https://jacobinmag.com/2021/01/trump-capitol-riot-fascist-coup-attempt
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# ¿ Feb 27, 2021 01:30 |
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ToxicAcne posted:Honestly it was just a knee jerk reaction to seeing the Jacobin thing which isn't really charitable. He gave some more detail upon David Harvey’s response: https://twitter.com/dbessner/status/1365026025839550465?s=20 I think that’s a defensible position, and he was speaking as it applies to teaching undergraduates. I am interested in the question of whom reading Capital helps in 2020, though. Marx may have intended the text to be accessible to workers 150 years ago (but even then each of the revised prefaces apologize for the complexity of the earthly chapters in some way or another) in book form. He welcomed turned it into a serial format for easier consumption by workers. How crucial is fidelity to Marx’s words as expressed 150 years ago to actually achieving the goals he lays out? E: Tired and poorly expressed. What’s been bugging me is that besides the obvious truth of language changing over such time, there are also the facts that book readership is in massive decline everywhere, that our working hours are going up, that any remaining spare attention is consumed by media, etc., so a book is not the same sort of socio-technical object that it was then and being really attached to the literal words of the book “because Marx intended it to be accessible” seems like essentialist nonsense. mawarannahr fucked around with this message at 03:05 on Feb 27, 2021 |
# ¿ Feb 27, 2021 02:49 |
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THS posted:i feel like a piece of poo poo that in a world where people were working like 12 hour days and were way more oppressed, they were able to really kick off socialist revolutions, and i'm the alienated peon of a 9 hour work day, 10 hours with the commute, and i can't really read Capital because my brain is too hosed up from all of the insane everyday poo poo. i should try harder but drat i hate my job and hate everything around it. i just want to sleep when i get home. politics is very marginal to surviving and i feel like if i stopped caring about politics i'd be happier, but i know i will never stop caring about politics it's not your fault and the conditions on the ground -- i.e., the insane everyday poo poo that happens these days, which is actually much more totally oppressive in a world-encompassing way -- have changed sufficiently since then that you are in no position that you should feel bad about it nor is it politically meaningful to compare your personal conduct poorly against people who are (a) no longer living and (b) would accept you fine as a leftist.
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# ¿ Feb 27, 2021 09:35 |
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QUEER FRASIER posted:I love when people like that jacobin fail idiot make a big performance of giving people permission not read marx, as though they're doing something subversive. Hopefully him and his social democrat buddies can succeed in turning Jacobin into Vox.com for leftism so everyone can read some twitter sexpest's 500 word 'explainer' of Capital and nobody ever has to suffer through the real text again you’re a fail idiot who can’t read so i would hesitate to recommend Marx to you, specifically
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# ¿ Feb 27, 2021 21:16 |
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So, Kshama Sawant joined DSA, but is still in SA. What should we expect?https://www.socialistalternative.org/2021/02/26/why-im-joining-democratic-socialists-of-america posted:The reemergence of a socialist movement in the United States, and rapid growth of organizations like Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and Socialist Alternative (SA), is of enormous historical importance. This is not only because Marxism is beginning to take root again on the hard soil of U.S. capitalism, but also because of the enormous challenges facing the working class in this period.
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# ¿ Mar 1, 2021 23:31 |
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SA is still a democratic centralist organization. I don't think DSA has changed its policies but they might have worked something out with Seattle DSA. Things used to be a little more acrimonious: a few years ago, a couple of SA members were booted from Seattle DSA in the past when they joined. Things have changed a lot in the past year, though, with some of the most active members of SA leaving it and joining DSA as the "Reform and Revolution" caucus. I'm a little wary -- DSA in Seattle kind of sucks.
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# ¿ Mar 2, 2021 01:30 |
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Trabisnikof posted:is there a name for people who claim to be marxists but also think capitalism has won and any worker/socialist/communist revolution is impossible to occur ever in the future? I think it’s possible to conclude that without diverging from Marxism. Why do you need a special name for them? If an asteroid was certain to hit next week and someone expresses doubts over a worker’s revolution in that timeframe, it doesn’t make their claims to being Marxist any less or more valid. It’s hard to blame someone looking at the situation today and guessing that nothing we want will happen in time, and they might be right. I don’t think there’s anything better to fill up the remaining time but I’m also pretty sure we will fail.
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# ¿ Mar 3, 2021 17:54 |
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Trabisnikof posted:I guess I'm more meaning the people who think that under any situation capitalism was inevitable and would always destroy all workers before they're able to do anything about it. A step beyond the asteroid scenario. Sounds like Herbert Marcuse tbh, but New Left (?) is a little outdated
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# ¿ Mar 3, 2021 18:26 |
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a lot of people don’t know this but robots are just machines that can’t decide anything at all, let alone make judgments on whom to establish solidarity with. you might as well speak of Marxist photocopiers.
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# ¿ Mar 3, 2021 22:20 |
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a sentient ai is out of reach and not especially useful to anyone who might make and reproduce it on a scale that would matter. a bigger threat is other people who will believe in "AI" lies and ascribe intelligence to the actions of a walking security camera, the people who believe that it can read your thoughts and assess situations objectively.
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# ¿ Mar 3, 2021 22:53 |
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Ferrinus posted:i read a little althusser recently, he seems pretty sharp his work on overdetermination was a big early influence on Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff, whose conceptualization of class as a process I found useful. supposedly Wolff’s more recent work on SDEs is an application of the lessons taken from this but I haven’t been interested enough to see what he’s up to. Knowledge and Class is a good book.
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# ¿ Mar 5, 2021 01:04 |
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Phone posted:they didn't ban it I didn’t even use the term and got probed for the first time in my 18 years on this stupid website thanks to Biden’s concentration camps. You’re straight up not allowed to disagree with the posters there or call them out on any kind of bad behavior they accuse everyone but themselves of.
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# ¿ Mar 17, 2021 16:57 |
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Comrade Koba posted:there's a corollary to this where in every (western) news piece on china they absolutely have to refer to it as "the communist dictatorship" or "the authoritarian one-party state" at least once, even if it's just a one-paragraph notice about some tech company opening a new branch in Shenzhen also “saving face” and “draconian”
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# ¿ Mar 19, 2021 08:36 |
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the logical endpoint of social democracy quote:Denmark: Non-whites shouldn’t exceed 30% of any neighbourhood also quote:Currently, the only European Union country with more pigs than people is Denmark, with Eurostat figures from 2016 putting its pig-to-human population at 215 pigs for every 100 people. Denmark's human population is 5.7m, meaning that there are approximately 12.3m pigs. mawarannahr fucked around with this message at 18:29 on Mar 19, 2021 |
# ¿ Mar 19, 2021 18:24 |
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namesake posted:That whole line of thought is undone by simply observing that industrialisation or industrial development does not inherently mean capitalism. The USSR refuted the idea its economy was predominantly state capitalist, plenty of Trotskist and other anti-USSR tendencies analysed it and called it other things, having read some of the arguments about the IS traditions use of the term I find it lacking, it's just bonkers to take some pre-revolutionary term and declare that's what actually happened. Dreddout posted:Trots and ultras like to pull the state capitalist card as a gotcha, but in reality the only alternative to this strategy was a socialist revolution suceeding in an advanced industrialized country. Which up until this point has yet to happen. I'm not as familiar with Trotskyist arguments, but how can Trotsky use that as a "gotcha" when he rejected state capitalism? there's interesting reading in chapters 3 and 4 of resnick and wolff's "class theory and the history of capitalism and communism in the USSR" -- a class theory of state capitalism & debates over state capitalism, where they basically restate their decades-old thesis that builds on overdetermination and differentiates between class-, power-, and ownership-based conceptions of capitialism. i have to get back to work but check it out. quote:Since day one of the Russian Revolution, friends, foes, and others have disputed the actual class structure of the USSR. On one point, most admirers and many detractors agreed: in terms of class, the USSR was socialism en route to communism. Among critics, some saw it as a "degenerated" or "deformed" socialism or collectivism, while others judged it to be a bureaucratic or state capitalism. Some even construed the USSR's class structure to be a merger of private and state capitalist enterprises akin to European fascisms. The groping for appropriate names to identify the USSR's class structure-and the above are but a sample-reflected both its uniqueness and disagreements over how to understand it. Intense passions, ideological commitments, and high practical stakes attached to these terms in a debate that has flared up recurringly from 1917 through the present. A small but significant part of that debate has focused on the term "state capitalism." However, neither supporters nor opponents of using this term for the USSR's class structure ever defined it as we did in chapter 3 above. Instead, they deployed the word "capitalist" to refer to a particular distribution of ownership of means of production or, most often, to a particular distribution of political power or to combinations of both. Thus, the long-standing disagreements over the definition of class resurface again. Where we use a surplus labor concept of class to build an analysis of the USSR's class structure as largely capitalist, other references to state capitalism have marginalized or, more often, altogether ignored surplus labor. This chapter aims to demonstrate how both their analyses and conclusions consequently differ fundamentally from ours. quote:On the other side, early defenders of the Soviet Union's development path, including Lenin, also used the term state capitalism, but positively. Reminiscent of Engels's remark, they saw Soviet state capitalism as a necessary stage between the overthrow of capitalism and the achievement of socialism (not to speak of communism). In Lenin's view, the unforeseeable twists and turns of social conditions forced the Soviet leadership periodically (and always conditionally) to rely on a controlled "state capitalism" as the means to their socialist ends: The workers ... are advancing towards socialism precisely through the capitalist management of trusts, through gigantic machine industry, through enterprises which have a turnover of several millions per year-only through such a system of production and such enterprises. The workers are not petty bourgeois. They are not afraid oflarge-scale 'state capitalism', they prize it as their proletarian weapon which their Soviet power will use.9 In effect, Lenin was arguing that state capitalism, if under the control of workers committed to the transition to socialism (i.e., Communists), was an acceptable as well as necessary stage for the USSR to pass through. The transition was ongoing so long as Soviet power was secure. Not the organization of surplus labor, but rather power relationships stood at the core of such qualified endorsements of state capitalism in the USSR. In the years after Lenin's death in 1923, the term state capitalism was less frequently used by defenders of the USSR as a descriptive or analytic term for state industry. After Stalin's ascendancy in the late 1920s, it vanished (Bettelheim 1978, 371-372). Instead, those who admired or defended the USSR's actual class structure labeled it socialism. Having abolished private property in the means of production, replaced markets with state planning, and subordinated the state to the workers' power via the Communist Party, they reasoned, the USSR had thereby eliminated capitalist exploitation and classes altogether. With socialism secure and communism ahead, there was no possible object for and hence no need to undertake class analyses of Soviet society.10 Ironically, most Marxian defenses of the USSR thus came to share with most anti-Marxian defenses of Western capitalism a strong disinclination to use any class qua surplus analysis. The defenders' reasons for banishing class analysis in this way included the undesirable and uncomfortable connotations of phrases like state capitalism or class structure. Having achieved the USSR's survival at stupendous social costs, its defenders could not tolerate phrases that seemed to them to denigrate the achievement and render those costs in vain. They also sought to distance themselves from and to counterattack the critics who denounced state capitalism in the USSR. The defenders thus rejected the notion of state capitalism as hostile propaganda. State capitalism evolved then as a concept used chiefly by critics to attack Soviet leaders and social development for betraying the 1917 revolution's goals. quote:The history of discussion of state capitalism-like the history of so many other aspects of the Soviet experience-reveals the conceptual blinders of its time. The passions of the 1917 revolutionaries and their czarist and liberal enemies, of the Stalinists and Trotskyists, and of the cold warriors endlessly juxtaposing state and private property and planning and markets: most were obsessed with power. They struggled, albeit in different ways and toward different ends, to understand and transform the distribution of power in society as the key lever by which to shape history. They presumed, rarely stopping to wonder why, that power was the object that must be the focus of theoretical attention and political action. Marxian class analyses thus became analyses of the distribution of power, whereas Marx had prioritized surplus labor for revolutionary attention. Marxists defined classes literally and almost exclusively in terms of who wielded power over objects and other people: capitalists or the propertyless masses. Anti-Marxian analyses likewise focused on power, equating Marxism with centralized, economically inefficient, dictatorial statism and contrasting private capitalism as equivalent to individualism, democracy, and economic efficiency. Because power was the essence on all sides, no one felt the need to pay much attention to surplus labor. Theorists did not do so, nor did the Soviet authorities in the planning or execution of state policy. Nor did the workers and managers in enterprises. One result was theoretical and practical blindness to the enduringly capitalist form of the production, appropriation, and distribution of surplus labor insid the USSR. Another result was the inability to see, let alone address, the ways in which the maintenance of a state capitalist class structure-conceived as socialism by most supporters and enemies alike-contributed to many of the USSR's deepening nonclass problems, including those which finally provoked its collapsee.
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# ¿ Mar 19, 2021 21:29 |
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You can hope it gets better, you can follow your dreams But hope is for presidents and dreams are for people who are sleeping
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# ¿ Mar 20, 2021 00:22 |
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I’m Turkish and while I can’t tell you what The Uyghur Mind is up to, I guarantee this is what Turkey is trying to facilitate. Free my banned brother and/or sister and gently caress US (mod) interventionism
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# ¿ Mar 21, 2021 18:53 |
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are there countries where jailed judges still jail others?
mawarannahr fucked around with this message at 22:24 on Mar 21, 2021 |
# ¿ Mar 21, 2021 20:16 |
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waiting for the mods to delete TCC and ban everyone in the weed thread
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# ¿ Mar 21, 2021 22:27 |
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Raskolnikov38 posted:how many Turkic flash mobs does DC have apparently this was organized by a DC nonprofit called national awakening: http://nationalawakening.org it is run by Salih Hudayar, the 27-year old president in exile (unelected) of east Turkestan fun facts: - The University of Oklahoma (BS in International Studies and Political Science) - Masters in National Security Studies, American Military University (ongoing) - Oklahoma Army National Guard, Private First Class, 179th Infantry Regiment - From a business family -Senior capstone: “From Central Asia to the Uyghurs: Refining the American Grand Strategy." quote:In the summer of 2017, Hudayar founded the East Turkistan National Awakening Movement and moved from Oklahoma to Washington, DC to engage in human rights and political advocacy.[13] He is widely known as the Founder and President of the East Turkistan National Awakening Movement. In early 2018, Hudayar began to meet with members of Congress and advocate for the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act and since June 4, 2018, he has led weekly demonstrations in front of the US Capitol building and the White House to protest China's policy in Xinjiang. What a go-getter!
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# ¿ Mar 22, 2021 04:43 |
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apropos to nothing posted:the bullshit organization are my chinese comrades. maybe you disagree with them/us but i trust them because ive had discussions with them, read what they put out regularly, etc. which demonstrate that we have the same I hope you don’t trust Vincent Kolo as a Chinese comrade. Is chinaworker still mostly plagiarized from the Guardian and/or quoting NED-adjacent sources exclusively? It’s not good for SA and I wish Kolo had gone off with Saunois. mawarannahr fucked around with this message at 13:17 on Mar 31, 2021 |
# ¿ Mar 31, 2021 13:13 |
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if GJB catches wind of this they’re so hosed
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# ¿ Apr 7, 2021 17:26 |
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if magic is technology sufficiently scientifically advanced that we struggle to comprehend it, we might consider Marxism as a form of advanced social technology that is so powerful it might as well be magic for taking the working class from the field to the stars in a few decades.
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# ¿ Apr 14, 2021 17:07 |
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Dreddout posted:I am begging you to go outside ah, I’m sorry to say this but there’s some bad news about the outside these days. have you been aware of the goings-on?
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# ¿ Apr 14, 2021 19:48 |
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SSJ_naruto_2003 posted:They loving spelled the hash tag uyghur then spelled it uighur in the tweet neither Turkic languages nor the other official languages of China can be represented soundly in the Roman alphabet so there are lots of ways to spell it, among them Cenk Uygur's last name. this is further compounded by the practical and symbolic relevance of Arabic orthography, which is no more suited to the task. Epstine!
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# ¿ Apr 22, 2021 21:11 |
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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 14:28 |
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are there any other electeds in the us who call themselves Marxist ?
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# ¿ Apr 27, 2021 05:05 |