China was one of the poorest countries in the world at the time and had just lost 20 million people fighting Japanese fascism. It's remarkable that they were able to help Korea, another impoverished and war torn country, fight the richest empire in the world to a stalemate.

https://twitter.com/TaskandPurpose/status/1662280412129894402

Colonizers have always portrayed a superiority in weapons and technology, which they have due to superexploitation of other people's labor, as a superiority of the soldiers themselves. It's like praising a mass shooter because a bunch of unarmed civilians couldn't kill him.

Socialists shouldn't antagonize religion like some atheists do, but religious thinking and dialectical materialism are different outlooks on the world. If we're trying to build a revolution, we have to deal with the objective reality that exists independent of our thoughts.

https://twitter.com/ztsamudzi/status/1660376208289443841

There are thousands of different and mutually exclusive "metaphysical realities" in the heads of different people, but the accumulation of capital through labor exploitation is objective. Sometimes religion can clarify lines of class & national oppression. Often it muddles them.

Billionaires don't wake up at 5am. Bus drivers, teachers, nurses, service workers, etc wake up at 5am. Billionaires wake up whenever they want because their wealth doesn't come from their own labor. It comes from the labor of people who will never be billionaires. "But surely billionaires work harder/smarter/better than the rest of us?"
No they don't. The only reason vampires like jeff bezos, howard schultz or apartheid Edison are billionaires is they have masses of people getting up early to work shifts at amazon, tesla, starbucks etc.

White people can be revolutionaries when they practice revolutionary organizing and study revolutionary theory. Moving vast amounts of oppressed and exploited people to overthrow their oppressors requires constantly fighting racism and other chauvinisms, but it's not impossible.

https://twitter.com/leftistexe/status/1563636543406874624

In fact it's necessary. The people's movements are very weak right now because of the unending repression that comes from living in the belly of the beast. We need to focus on growing the fight against capitalism, not thinking about who won't join it.

Anticommunist leftism has never and will never help anyone but the capitalists. Criticizing the CPC will never make them respect you. Calling Stalin a monster won't make them give you free healthcare. Saying Cuba isn't "really socialist" won't win anyone over to your "socialism" There are genocidal, unjust, oppressive, and exploitative conditions in the world that have to be changed, and you can't change them without a revolution. The bourgeoisie understands this, which is why they teach you in school, pop culture, and news media to hate revolutionaries.

American hegemony is bad but Chinese hegemony will be worse
Source(s): racism There's literally nothing in recent Chinese history that suggests they're trying to be the next America. If anything the left criticism of Chinese foreign policy is that they'll work with anyone regardless of the country's politics.

People living in so called "authoritarian" countries are neither stupid nor docile. Most of them have had revolutions only a few decades ago and maintain high levels of political engagement among workers. They can overthrow regimes they don't like without the help of the US. If there's peace and stability in Cuba, China, Vietnam, Laos, DPRK, etc it's not because the government has stamped out any dissent, it's because the people are satisfied enough that they don't feel the need to rebel. We can't say the same about the US, which just had a rebellion

A few people have pointed out that I use the words "socialists" and "communists" interchangeably. I understand that socialism and communism are not *exactly* the same thing, but it's a distinction without a difference because any good socialist should also be a communist. Communism is a classless system in which property is collectively owned, everyone gets what they need and does what they can for each other, and no one is in a position of power over anyone else. This hasn't been actualized yet since you can't get rid of classes overnight.

My haters keep telling me to go visit Cuba if I like socialism so much, but when I do eventually go to Cuba and come back as an even more committed communist they'll be mad. And I'm not joking. At some point in the next few years (although I have nothing planned yet) I'm gonna go to Cuba, meet people working in the towns and villages, and write some articles, and I know for a fact these same people will move the goalposts to keep talking shit.

The nice thing about learning history is you become immune to bullshit like this.

https://twitter.com/Rothmus/status/1545092670133092352

Capitalist countries miseducate their populations to hate communism so they don't try to overthrow the system that exploits them. Blackshirts and Reds by Michael Parenti is a good primer on the actual history of communism and undoing the bourgeois propaganda we're raised in.

Chris Hani swatted bad faith questions from bourgeois white journalists like flies.
I've been sharing Mandela's response to the question of why South Africa was friends with Castro and Gaddafi (which is a very good response) but Hani's (around 38 minutes) is a lot more satisfying.

The USSR doesn't get enough credit today for snapping the spine of the nazi empire. They lost 26 million people to the largest invading army in history and still managed to march them back to Berlin. Once you get past the anticommunist propaganda you can see how amazing that is.

https://twitter.com/freedomroadorg/status/1520372412960886787

The propaganda is so severe there's people who believe the USSR was actually allied with the nazis despite the majority of nazi casualties coming from the Soviets. There's people who think the nazis only lost because they invaded in the winter when in reality they invaded in June

The accusation that a world leader kills "their own people" is mindlessly repeated by liberals who don't understand the history and function of the phrase in portraying fascists as better than communists and imperialists as better than the targets of imperialism. One of the justifications for colonial genocide has always been "they kill each other, so it's cool for us to kill them"
Saddam was evil for killing "his own people" so the US has been justified in killing millions of Iraqis since the 90s.

Theory Thursday: Money
Today we’re reading chapter 3 of Marx’s Capital, which is about the root of all evil.
Full text: marxists.org/archive/marx/w…
Chapter 2:

https://twitter.com/killerguerilla/status/1469099156052627457?t=-jiGHQKRg4eRZmhLs-25DA&s=19

Chapter 3 is broken up into 3 sections, and Section 1 is about money as a tool for measuring value. The value of a commodity expressed in terms of money is its price, which is an ideal expression of the amount of labor put into creating the commodity.

"China is colonizing Africa" - someone who is quiet about AFRICOM and the IMF "You can oppose two things at once"
Cool but why not focus on the one that's objectively worse?
Even if all the exaggerations and fabrications about China in Africa were true, it's not even close to what the US and europe have been doing in broad daylight for centuries.

Idk how you could look at US politics and think a two party system is democratic.

https://twitter.com/dainserk/status/1464220967614521345

Liberals have this list of things they think constitute a democracy (term limits, two or more ruling parties, etc) and they act like this idea of democracy came down from heaven. In reality it's the system of rule built over time by slave owners, capitalists & imperialists.

Theory ThSaturday: Commodities

First published in 1867, Marx’s Capital (Das Kapital) is still required reading for anyone who wants an in depth understanding of capitalism. This is a primer thread on Chapter 1 to help anyone who’s struggling or nervous about getting started. Here's a link to the text. I encourage everyone to read it if, when, and however you can. Take notes and discuss with some comrades. This thread is to help your understanding, not to be your only source of understanding.
marxists.org/archive/marx/w…

"Why do you care what people think of Stalin?"
Because capitalists care what people think of Stalin. That's why they put so much time and money into demonizing him. They don't care about freedom & democracy or historical accuracy. They just wanna make you afraid of revolution. So when we push back and say Stalin wasn't a monster, it's not because we think he was a perfect individual. It's because he gets used as a scapegoat for the fabricated and exaggerated problems of socialism by the same people who have a vested interest in maintaining capitalism.

"What did Stalin do for his own people?" (I know Stalin wasn't Russian but I couldn't find a graph like that for Georgia)

"wow how could you say something good about STALIN???" is a pavlovian response after growing up in a society saturated with anticommunist propaganda. At a certain point if you wanna grow politically you have to get past the indoctrinated discomfort and actually learn history. Don't let the ruling class choose your enemies for you. They want you misinformed and contemptuous of any successful revolution so you don't become a threat to imperialism.

The worst thing about the concept of "whataboutism" is how there's so many bamboozled americans who know all the accusations against enemies of the US but have no idea what their own government has done and is doing. Like there's so called journalists who can list Russian political prisoners but have never said a word about Mumia Abu-Jamal or Leonard Peltier. It's embarrassing and it's obviously a result of a lot of work done by the CIA, FBI, etc.