🧵I spent 40 minutes on China's TikTok with 'teenager mode' enabled. Here's what I learnt: First, I should clarify I was on Kuaishou which works the exact same way as TikTok but lets you sign up using a foreign cellphone number.

Parents can turn on this 'adolescent mode', which exists on both Kuaishou and Douyin as well as other short-form video apps. You then lock it behind a passcode so the kid can't turn it off.

When you install and open the app, the first thing that shows up is a page asking whether you want to turn adolescent mode on or not.

When it's on, Kuaishou will only allow the child to watch for 40 minutes a day, only before 10pm, and it will limit the content to education and edutainment.

That being said, here's the type of content you will find:

It's so insane that China is actually building this.

They're literally having to come up with new tunnel-boring, cold-resistance rail and bridge materials to build 5000km of high-speed-rail on the Tibetan Plateau by 2035.

Haven't missed a single deadline or target yet. Topography map for reference. It's probably the most hostile terrain to human habitation outside of the Arctic and Dry Desert regions of the world.

“It seems to me that this superabundance of sex theories, which for the most part are mere hypotheses, and often quite arbitrary ones, stems from a personal need. It springs from the desire to justify one’s own abnormal or excessive sex life before bourgeois morality and to plead for tolerance towards oneself. This veiled respect for bourgeois morality is as repugnant to me as rooting about in all that bears on sex. No matter how rebellious and revolutionary it may be made to appear, it is in the final analysis thoroughly bourgeois. Intellectuals and others like them are particularly keen on this. There is no room for it in the Party, among the class-conscious, fighting proletariat.”

- V. I. Lenin, 1920

https://twitter.com/mtl_itgirl/status/1707813235041136846

“I have heard some peculiar things on this matter from Russian and German comrades. I must tell you. I was told that a talented woman communist in Hamburg is publishing a paper for prostitutes and that she wants to organise them for the revolutionary fight. Rosa acted and felt as a communist when in an article she championed the cause of the prostitutes who were imprisoned for any transgression of police regulations in carrying on their dreary trade. They are, unfortunately, doubly sacrificed by bourgeois society. First, by its accursed property system, and, secondly, by its accursed moral hypocrisy. That is obvious. Only he who is brutal or short-sighted can forget it. But still, that is not at all the same thing as considering prostitutes – how shall I put it? – to be a special revolutionary militant section, as organising them and publishing a factory paper for them. Aren’t there really any other working women in Germany to organise, for whom a paper can be issued, who must be drawn into your struggles? The other is only a diseased excrescence. It reminds me of the literary fashion of painting every prostitute as a sweet Madonna. The origin of that was healthy, too: social sympathy, rebellion against the virtuous hypocrisy of the respectable bourgeois. But the healthy part became corrupted and degenerate."

One twitter thread about Swedish manners did more damage to the reputation of the Nordic Model in American left than decades of Marxist propaganda Scandis aren’t helping themselves either, they’ll defend this psychotic practice until they turn purple

Can someone explain what’s wrong with this? It’s not like England is a settler-colonial country and thus not a real nation. It has a rich radical history from which Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, etc.. took great inspiration.

https://twitter.com/yclbritain/status/1517831029402259457

I feel like the people in the qts and replies, most of which are anarchists, have this childish hatred for their people and history because they don’t want to bother to learn it and present themselves as continuous and capable of serving their nation better than the bourgeoisie.

The current Russian state is a popular front led by the national-bourgeoisie that is actively conducting and aiding global anti-fascist struggle in Syria, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Donbas. That is why the communists in Russia stand with it on these matters as they well should. Russia is an aggrieved post-socialist country that is slowly recovering its national-territorial space. They have a fortress economy and play a subservient and recently antagonistic role in the global capitalist-imperialist system.

It’s hard for me to understand why in America, the most anti-communist country on Earth, literal Marxist-Leninists can still find ways to split endlessly amongst each other. The paranoia tactics of COINTELPRO are so ingrained in their psyche that they simply do it automatically. Instead of getting together, hosting congresses, federating their orgs, etc.. like the successful revolutionary movements of the past, they seem to want to focus on their projects in isolation and bitter hatred of each other. It’s ridiculous.

The rise of leftist commentators on Chinese social media is astonishing. Only a decade ago the space was largely dominated by moderates and some straight up liberals.
Now, millions are flocking to Li Guangman, Sima Nan, and others whilst the likes of Hu Xijin are left behind. Further, these open leftists and self-described Maoists have been published, promoted and tolerated by the official media apparatus even as the party’s official line sits to the right of them. Meanwhile, rightist voices have been suppressed. A realignment is afoot.

On Authority - Friedrich Engels (1872)

A number of Socialists have latterly launched a regular crusade against what they call the principle of authority. It suffices to tell them that this or that act is authoritarian for it to be condemned. This summary mode of procedure is being abused to such an extent that it has become necessary to look into the matter somewhat more closely.
Authority, in the sense in which the word is used here, means: the imposition of the will of another upon ours;

North American Communists not wanting to claim Lincoln anymore should learn from their Latin counterparts in their upholding of Bolívar.
In fact, on the issue of slavery, Lincoln was far more radical.
Marx went as far as to declare him the single minded son of the working class. There is nothing you can say about Lincoln that is not true for Bolivar. They were both settlers and bourgeois revolutionaries who fought against slavery and to preserve the unity of their country against reactionary forces.
Such a legacy cannot easily be forsaken.

China is not and cannot be a social-imperialist power.
‘Social-imperialism’ was coined by Lenin to refer to revisionist, colonialist and imperialist ‘socialists’ within *bourgeois states*.

China has a dictatorship of the proletariat, hence it cannot be social-imperialist. 🧵 The ultra-left argument contradicts dialectics. Mao teaches us that quantitative changes burst into qualitative ones, hence the gradual, quantitative development of a mode of production can create and intensify contradictions that lead to its qualitative, revolutionary overthrow.

Deng Xiaoping applied Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought to the specific conditions of post-GPCR China. If there’s anybody worthy of having synthesized ‘Maoism’, it’s him. Just as Stalin applied what he learnt from Lenin after he had departed, synthesizing Marxism-Leninism. This idea that the universal aspects of Mao Zedong Thought were better grasped by a Peruvian leader and movement *that ultimately failed* is absurd.
Practice corrects theory. Therefore, claiming that Gonzalo synthesized Maoism from ML-MZT is akin to saying that ML-MZT was wrong.

Whilst Elon Musk is using public resources to build traffic tunnels for rich people and their broken cars, China has just finished building enough miles of High-Speed Rail to circle the entire planet. And in the next 13 years, they’re planning to double it. globaltimes.cn/page/202112/12…

1. Marx and Engels’ Euro-American errors were corrected by Lenin
2. Lenin’s decentralist errors were corrected by Stalin
3. Stalin’s pacifist errors were corrected by Mao
4. Mao’s chaotic errors were corrected by Deng
5. Deng’s productivist errors are being corrected by Xi M/E: too much emphasis on the continental European and American proletariat
L: too much federalism and NEP rightism
S: incapable by circumstance to deal with the bureaucracy and too pacifist post-war (Greece, Italy, China)
M: too rushed and idealist
D: too productivist, tolerant

As a first worlder, I think my theory and practice has to focus on the intersection between preventing any imperialist aggression against our former colonies (through domestic political struggle) and aiding the revolutionary movements that have formed in those countries. In other words, the radicalized mass of workers in my country is dwarfed by labor aristocrats who are exploited domestically but are heavily compensated through government welfare and cheap products which in great part derive from extracted third world surplus value.

A lot of socialists, especially the more liberally minded ones, have to understand that their individual issues require to a great extent personal self-strengthening, standing up to responsibility and maturation.
Political struggle cannot be the sole outlet for personal ones. It is true that there are many things which, under socialism, will become easier. Family relations, mental health, lack of fulfillment are all symptomatic of capitalism. But we live in a time of discourse, struggle and war. Our attitudes must be fit for it.