Ba'athists are not chauvinists they are Arab nationalists, wanting to unite the Arabic speaking peoples against colonialism. However, they live in diverse countries with significant numbers of non-Arabic cultures. Previous iterations of the Arab Nationlist movement like the Nasserists wanted to immediately unite Arab majority countries while the Ba'athists realized they need to first unite the cultures within their countries and then building a greater indigenous state in the region to fight European (and Turk) colonialism. So the Ba'ath in Iraq started a popular front with the Kurdish communities, but the tensions with Kurds, Arabs, and Persians in the Levant was already strained by Imperialist strategy before the Ba'ath seized power. The popular front was in the right direction of peace and unity until the war with a Iran, who's new government hated the Arab socialists.
Now, on the gas attacks, we have to know a few things. The US only blamed Iraq for the attacks retroactively, and in fact initially blamed Iran. The only witnesses of the attacks from the outside were Iranian journalists, working alongside British "journalists". When the US switched to blame Iraq, in preparation for the sanctions they would lay on Iraq in the 90s to choke out the Ba'ath, they claimed that they knew it was Iraq the whole time and only blamed Iran because Iraq was their "ally". Neither Iraq nor Iran ever claimed the US to be an ally. Iraq had been fighting Kurdish insurgents who were being organized by US/UK and Iranian intelligence, Iraq had real reasons to be fighting in Kurdish territory in the north. The Iranians had been occupying the village up until the day of the attack, where they quietly retreated in the morning before the attack. Now we also have the false flag accusations against Syria and Libya, where British intelligence worked with the so-called White Helmets to fabricate a chemical attack to justify the American occupation in the Kurdish region of Syria as well as NATO funding for ISIS, I mean the "moderate rebels".
A lot of these attacks towards the Ba'aths come retroactively. To me, an obvious attempt to discredit the Ba'ath based on inflating the "relationship" between the US and Iraq. By pretending to be an ally of Iraq, and acknowledging some of the US's bad history of intervention, they were able to divide the left on Iraq and later Libya and Syria. "We were bad but now we are good and we gotta get rid of the monsters we've accidentally created while doing realpolitik". I think even people like Parenti fell for this. Meanwhile the only real theme in these events is that the US and British supported rebels against anti-Imperialists governments wherever they could.
Ba'athists were originally Marxists and scientific socialists (they have since grown into "big tents"). They split with the Comintern communists in West Asia due to those parties being weak on French and British Imperialism as well as the early Comintern lines on Israel. They are primarily focused on building socialist states in the region to eventually merge into an Arab Socialist nation. It's a decolonization movement. However, Bashar's father was a revisionist who caused MLs to leave the Ba'ath in Syria. The Iraqi Ba'athists held the original lines up until they were ousted in 2003. Overall they are very watered down on the ML side and more-so focused on the NatLib side of things.
One more thing that made them keep a distance from other Socialist movements was the religion question. Iraq and Syria are very diverse countries and have communities practicing some of the oldest religions in the world. They were secular but did not have an anti-religious line and in fact believed religions in the region could play a revolutionary role against colonialism.
He writes on the role of fascist escapees and their role in the Ukrainian diaspora in the US, CA, and AU. As well as the US contacts with the far right in Ukraine.
There is also the Plast scouting organization. They have existed since before WW1 and created Bandera and he would later recruit from the scouts to the OUN-B which would field the members of the SS Galicia Division with the sponsorship of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, which also funded Plast and continues to do so in Ukraine, the US, CA, and AU. Canada's Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland went through the Plast program as her grandfather helped found the Canadian chapters. She also helped her uncle [iirc] write her grandfather's memoirs, he ran a pro-Nazi rag in Nazi occupied Poland.
Low key you can even search my profile for Ukraine, I've written some summaries about the situation generally.
Quality of materials only matters when taken broadly in the economy. When Capitalists find cheaper materials, they can sell the commodity for more than it's worth for a short time before others find cheaper sources and undercut the price. Eventually the prices will balance and so will the sourcing of materials.
However, materials are also commodities, and their price is tied to the price of labor. What Capitalists can do in the real world is find a place or a people where labor is cheaper. They can pay nationally oppressed workers cheaper (i.e. Black American pay gap) and lower their cost of living which translates to wage. They can pay workers from another country much cheaper wages as their cost of living is lower from underdevelopment, i.e. Imperialism. They can even import workers but maintain a state machine that allows imported workers to be paid less than the national standard (i.e. undocumented and slave work).
The employee actually puts in 3 LH to build the chair but is only paid by the Capitalist for 1 of them leaving a 2 LH profit for the Capitalist. The sale price of the commodity when supply matches demand is the real value of the commodity.
The "trick" the Capitalist does is to negotiate a wage smaller per unit of time than the value a worker can produce in that time, but it must be at least equal to the cost of reproducing the worker.
Frankly if we're talking about the western continents, it's because nobody has seriously studied the history and conditions of the land underneath their feet. PatSocs are superficially "close" to the Communists here because they do zero investigation of the internal structures of the continent, and view outward facing Imperialism from the Americans as an obstacle to "American Socialism". So like many of the other parties in the US, they focus on protesting foreign intervention.
Hot take, the other parties are pretty much the same. Where they differ is that PatSocs dream of a great assimilation into American so-called culture, so subjugation of Black and Indigenous peoples is a focal point, and it's why they are willing to work with the right opportunistically. The other parties expect to take full control of the leftovers of America, but with "respecting treaties" and giving "self-determination" and the ability to "secede", secede from what tho? If the PatSocs are settler-chauvinists then this is settler-blindness. PatSocs succeed in grifting because the other parties have yet to put out real theories on how to destroy the empire from within, so they just appeal to the American (or Canadian, Mexican) chauvinist extremes.
In ML terms the settlers are not the subject of revolution. National Liberation for the prisons of nations beneath the Empire is primary. Policing, enclosure, ecological exploitation. Spontaneity from the colonized masses and even Anarchists is focused at the symptoms of settler-colonialism, and until Communists study their conditions and give direction to these people we can only alienate and frustrate them when telling them to vote or show up to a protest at city hall. It's extremely frustrating for Natives when they ask for solidarity from settlers against megacorps looting their lands only for the unions to back the corps for jobs and then for Communists to only talk about unionization and maybe a "land acknowledgement".
Communists need to connect with the workers being gentrified out of their homes, connect with the Natives of their locales, unite these struggles, that's the unity. What we think about China is a discussion to be had in a party that comes together to liberate the colonized nations. Settler-chauvinism, and setter-blindness (I also like "Left-PatSoc") are the deal-breakers for unity.
EFF is basically setting up for a collapse of the ANC government and either taking power electorally as the failing ANC capitulates to their popular front or by guiding the next crisis into a revolution.
The KPRF has no crisis to leverage for themselves as both URP and the KPRF are looking good for their support of the SMO. If the URP starts fucking up the SMO you can expect the KPRF to gain more traction especially in the new republics and the borderlands. I'm not kidding when I say that Russia could electorally come back into Socialism since it has such a weak bourgeoisie that's totally reliant on state intervention and the international trade system. Having already been a workers' state the nation has the muscle memory for it. They just need a vanguard to awaken it.
Hello comrades, it looks like the Chunka Luta Network (Red Road) lemmyverse account has been created. Chunka Luta is working from the Pine Ridge Reservation to build dual power in an ML direction. If you can spare some cash, there's a fundraiser for a construction drive that's 4k away from the goal, spread the word. They are building a meeting hall for the traditional government (as opposed to the Neo-Colonial IRA council) and a home. The fundraiser has already gathered 16k and with that they're buying 140 acres of Rez land that's currently growing hemp. For some history, hemp was a major component of the Lakotas' booming economy until it was targeted by the hemp and cannabis outlaw by the Federal government. Further funds beyond the 4k left in the construction goal are going to a member's wheelchair fund.
This project started last winter with a fundraiser for firewood and coat drive. Note that a significant portion of the population on Pine Ridge lives without electricity; warm clothing and wood are extremely important in the Dakotas.
In the future Chunka Luta wants to build a reverse osmosis water filtration system and buyback nearby farmland from American settlers to clean up a creek that runs through the Reservation. They also want to build a buffalo pasture for conservation.
Lots of promise coming from Chunka Luta, if you can spread the word it can go a long way. We are traveling the Red Road, we hope you can join us!
The Donbas is actually the least agriculture intensive region of Ukraine, iirc about 10% of production. Ukraine is using DU because they know they are going to lose and wish to simply punish the Donbas for an eternity.
The infected soils won't just stay in Donbas, but the Westerly wind will generally take these soils further EAST into Russia and the steppe.
Whoever downvotes this is a colonizer
When I met my former coworker for the first time, she said material conditions and that's when I knew.
Iraqi Ba'athists self crit of their first 5 years in power: https://www.marxists.org/history/iraq/baath/index.htm
It's a good outline of their views and their description of the region and country's role.
Ba'athists are not chauvinists they are Arab nationalists, wanting to unite the Arabic speaking peoples against colonialism. However, they live in diverse countries with significant numbers of non-Arabic cultures. Previous iterations of the Arab Nationlist movement like the Nasserists wanted to immediately unite Arab majority countries while the Ba'athists realized they need to first unite the cultures within their countries and then building a greater indigenous state in the region to fight European (and Turk) colonialism. So the Ba'ath in Iraq started a popular front with the Kurdish communities, but the tensions with Kurds, Arabs, and Persians in the Levant was already strained by Imperialist strategy before the Ba'ath seized power. The popular front was in the right direction of peace and unity until the war with a Iran, who's new government hated the Arab socialists.
Now, on the gas attacks, we have to know a few things. The US only blamed Iraq for the attacks retroactively, and in fact initially blamed Iran. The only witnesses of the attacks from the outside were Iranian journalists, working alongside British "journalists". When the US switched to blame Iraq, in preparation for the sanctions they would lay on Iraq in the 90s to choke out the Ba'ath, they claimed that they knew it was Iraq the whole time and only blamed Iran because Iraq was their "ally". Neither Iraq nor Iran ever claimed the US to be an ally. Iraq had been fighting Kurdish insurgents who were being organized by US/UK and Iranian intelligence, Iraq had real reasons to be fighting in Kurdish territory in the north. The Iranians had been occupying the village up until the day of the attack, where they quietly retreated in the morning before the attack. Now we also have the false flag accusations against Syria and Libya, where British intelligence worked with the so-called White Helmets to fabricate a chemical attack to justify the American occupation in the Kurdish region of Syria as well as NATO funding for ISIS, I mean the "moderate rebels".
A lot of these attacks towards the Ba'aths come retroactively. To me, an obvious attempt to discredit the Ba'ath based on inflating the "relationship" between the US and Iraq. By pretending to be an ally of Iraq, and acknowledging some of the US's bad history of intervention, they were able to divide the left on Iraq and later Libya and Syria. "We were bad but now we are good and we gotta get rid of the monsters we've accidentally created while doing realpolitik". I think even people like Parenti fell for this. Meanwhile the only real theme in these events is that the US and British supported rebels against anti-Imperialists governments wherever they could.
Ba'athists were originally Marxists and scientific socialists (they have since grown into "big tents"). They split with the Comintern communists in West Asia due to those parties being weak on French and British Imperialism as well as the early Comintern lines on Israel. They are primarily focused on building socialist states in the region to eventually merge into an Arab Socialist nation. It's a decolonization movement. However, Bashar's father was a revisionist who caused MLs to leave the Ba'ath in Syria. The Iraqi Ba'athists held the original lines up until they were ousted in 2003. Overall they are very watered down on the ML side and more-so focused on the NatLib side of things.
One more thing that made them keep a distance from other Socialist movements was the religion question. Iraq and Syria are very diverse countries and have communities practicing some of the oldest religions in the world. They were secular but did not have an anti-religious line and in fact believed religions in the region could play a revolutionary role against colonialism.
Also check out journalist Moss Robeson: https://linktr.ee/mossrobeson
He writes on the role of fascist escapees and their role in the Ukrainian diaspora in the US, CA, and AU. As well as the US contacts with the far right in Ukraine.
There is also the Plast scouting organization. They have existed since before WW1 and created Bandera and he would later recruit from the scouts to the OUN-B which would field the members of the SS Galicia Division with the sponsorship of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, which also funded Plast and continues to do so in Ukraine, the US, CA, and AU. Canada's Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland went through the Plast program as her grandfather helped found the Canadian chapters. She also helped her uncle [iirc] write her grandfather's memoirs, he ran a pro-Nazi rag in Nazi occupied Poland.
Low key you can even search my profile for Ukraine, I've written some summaries about the situation generally.
https://consortiumnews.com/2022/12/29/on-the-influence-of-neo-nazism-in-ukraine/
Roses Have Thorns documentary: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPXDAOv6gXa3Xsx-rKLYd0W1LvhjlwCTk&si=pu8SL7VITE__sZH9
Interview with Right Sector Leader (later leader of the Ukrainian Volunteer Army and now a leader of national defense): https://archive.ph/XeOKH
Explaining the UVA/Right Sector and why it hasn't been absorbed into the state and "denazified" like Azov Battalion: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1057610X.2021.2009633
Far right violence keeps getting away with it: https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2018/7/26/after-series-of-attacks-why-is-the-far-right-granted-impunity
British journal investigates "Neo-Nazi Hooligan culture" in Ukraine: https://web.archive.org/web/20120428054011/http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/4284461/The-Sun-investigates-anarchy-in-Ukraine-Euro-2012-hate-camps.html
History of Fascism in Ukraine: https://mronline.org/2022/10/21/ukrainian-nationalists-have-long-history-of-anti-semitism-which-the-soviet-union-tried-to-combat/
Far Right MP beats up news station head for broadcasting news of the Crimean referendum: https://youtu.be/JYEneaA9nLA
For bugs and pretty rocks
Quality of materials only matters when taken broadly in the economy. When Capitalists find cheaper materials, they can sell the commodity for more than it's worth for a short time before others find cheaper sources and undercut the price. Eventually the prices will balance and so will the sourcing of materials.
However, materials are also commodities, and their price is tied to the price of labor. What Capitalists can do in the real world is find a place or a people where labor is cheaper. They can pay nationally oppressed workers cheaper (i.e. Black American pay gap) and lower their cost of living which translates to wage. They can pay workers from another country much cheaper wages as their cost of living is lower from underdevelopment, i.e. Imperialism. They can even import workers but maintain a state machine that allows imported workers to be paid less than the national standard (i.e. undocumented and slave work).
The employee actually puts in 3 LH to build the chair but is only paid by the Capitalist for 1 of them leaving a 2 LH profit for the Capitalist. The sale price of the commodity when supply matches demand is the real value of the commodity.
The "trick" the Capitalist does is to negotiate a wage smaller per unit of time than the value a worker can produce in that time, but it must be at least equal to the cost of reproducing the worker.
The man he shot is in the hospital and has a recovery fund: https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-jacob-johns-recover-from-terrorist-shooting
POV: you're protesting against the 4 resource corps in a trench coat pretending to be a nation
Frankly if we're talking about the western continents, it's because nobody has seriously studied the history and conditions of the land underneath their feet. PatSocs are superficially "close" to the Communists here because they do zero investigation of the internal structures of the continent, and view outward facing Imperialism from the Americans as an obstacle to "American Socialism". So like many of the other parties in the US, they focus on protesting foreign intervention.
Hot take, the other parties are pretty much the same. Where they differ is that PatSocs dream of a great assimilation into American so-called culture, so subjugation of Black and Indigenous peoples is a focal point, and it's why they are willing to work with the right opportunistically. The other parties expect to take full control of the leftovers of America, but with "respecting treaties" and giving "self-determination" and the ability to "secede", secede from what tho? If the PatSocs are settler-chauvinists then this is settler-blindness. PatSocs succeed in grifting because the other parties have yet to put out real theories on how to destroy the empire from within, so they just appeal to the American (or Canadian, Mexican) chauvinist extremes.
In ML terms the settlers are not the subject of revolution. National Liberation for the prisons of nations beneath the Empire is primary. Policing, enclosure, ecological exploitation. Spontaneity from the colonized masses and even Anarchists is focused at the symptoms of settler-colonialism, and until Communists study their conditions and give direction to these people we can only alienate and frustrate them when telling them to vote or show up to a protest at city hall. It's extremely frustrating for Natives when they ask for solidarity from settlers against megacorps looting their lands only for the unions to back the corps for jobs and then for Communists to only talk about unionization and maybe a "land acknowledgement".
Communists need to connect with the workers being gentrified out of their homes, connect with the Natives of their locales, unite these struggles, that's the unity. What we think about China is a discussion to be had in a party that comes together to liberate the colonized nations. Settler-chauvinism, and setter-blindness (I also like "Left-PatSoc") are the deal-breakers for unity.
Also free Ezo (so-called Hokkaido)
EFF is basically setting up for a collapse of the ANC government and either taking power electorally as the failing ANC capitulates to their popular front or by guiding the next crisis into a revolution.
The KPRF has no crisis to leverage for themselves as both URP and the KPRF are looking good for their support of the SMO. If the URP starts fucking up the SMO you can expect the KPRF to gain more traction especially in the new republics and the borderlands. I'm not kidding when I say that Russia could electorally come back into Socialism since it has such a weak bourgeoisie that's totally reliant on state intervention and the international trade system. Having already been a workers' state the nation has the muscle memory for it. They just need a vanguard to awaken it.
Actually Existing Cultural Genocide
Hello comrades, it looks like the Chunka Luta Network (Red Road) lemmyverse account has been created. Chunka Luta is working from the Pine Ridge Reservation to build dual power in an ML direction. If you can spare some cash, there's a fundraiser for a construction drive that's 4k away from the goal, spread the word. They are building a meeting hall for the traditional government (as opposed to the Neo-Colonial IRA council) and a home. The fundraiser has already gathered 16k and with that they're buying 140 acres of Rez land that's currently growing hemp. For some history, hemp was a major component of the Lakotas' booming economy until it was targeted by the hemp and cannabis outlaw by the Federal government. Further funds beyond the 4k left in the construction goal are going to a member's wheelchair fund.
This project started last winter with a fundraiser for firewood and coat drive. Note that a significant portion of the population on Pine Ridge lives without electricity; warm clothing and wood are extremely important in the Dakotas.
In the future Chunka Luta wants to build a reverse osmosis water filtration system and buyback nearby farmland from American settlers to clean up a creek that runs through the Reservation. They also want to build a buffalo pasture for conservation.
Lots of promise coming from Chunka Luta, if you can spread the word it can go a long way. We are traveling the Red Road, we hope you can join us!
cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/56629 https://lemmygrad.ml/post/1744683
The Donbas is actually the least agriculture intensive region of Ukraine, iirc about 10% of production. Ukraine is using DU because they know they are going to lose and wish to simply punish the Donbas for an eternity.
The infected soils won't just stay in Donbas, but the Westerly wind will generally take these soils further EAST into Russia and the steppe.
You'll have to be more specific, all revolutionary theory is "books on how to destroy capitalism".
These land protectors are objectively doing more for anti-Imperialism than RAWM