The capitalist class and the bourgeois state are always waging class war against the workers. Every time they increase your hours, cut your wages, cut your benefits, increase your rent, increase your cost of living, gut your social safety nets, fire you, evict you, outsource your job…that’s class war. What they want is for you to not fight back; they want you to just silently take it like an obedient wage slave.

They want you to remain atomized, alienated and asleep, fighting over scraps against your fellow worker, not congnizant of your shared class interest and disengaged from any form of collective struggle. Blame yourself, blame the poor, blame the immigrant, blame “the other” who is different, just don’t look up to see the real architects of your misery above you. Never question the system and never ask why so many have so little while so few have so much - “the rich are just like you, don’t you know?”.

Yet workers have no choice but to fight the class war because they are always under attack. There will always be class war as long as there is class society, because the interests of the exploited and exploiter classes are irreconcilable and diametrically opposed. There is only one way that the class war can end, and that’s when one class eliminates the other. And since capitalists cannot exist without workers whereas workers can exist just fine without capitalists, there is no question who will be left standing and who will go into the dustbin of history.

Have you seen the one where they think Putin taught Trump how to poison Biden before the debate?

My name is Inigo Montoya

I usually try to keep file sizes of uploads under 1MB and then i have no issues.

Hopefully not Germany. Ideally we get kicked out in the group stage because that would mean a lot more peace and quiet for me.

Also fuck the whole competition. I’m not watching a “European” tournament that excludes Russia but includes Nazi Ukraine.

I don’t like this framing. I feel like it absolves the West too much of its knowing complicity.

It’s not “the West” as a collective entity that’s being spoonfed Zionist propaganda, it’s the regular, everyday people living in the West. And the ones feeding it to them are not just the Zionist entity but also - and i would even say primarily - the West’s own media and own institutions. And many people in the West willingly go along with it, they find it comfortable being put on this diet of pure propaganda because it validates their prejudices and their chauvinistic beliefs about themselves. It gives them permission to be racist.

When reality turns into a Black Mirror episode…

Must be nice where you live. I can’t step foot outside my door without seeing billboards.

bought the rights to a painting and then added a product he was selling to the painting

Straight to the gulag. No discussion, no trial, just gulag. Goodbye.

At some point i may have to go live in the forest for the sake of my own sanity.

YouTube ads have gotten so intrusive and so frequent that it has become virtually impossible to use that platform without adblockers. You’d have to be a masochist to watch YouTube without them. And even when you adblock you still have sponsored segments in the videos themselves. Shit is inescapable.

Thank you for your service! o7

If i had an opportunity like yours and didn’t have family ties keeping me where i am, i would certainly look at getting out. If only to experience another culture and another part of the world that is very different from my own, to broaden my horizons. A PhD program is not that long and should you decide that living abroad is not for you, you can still go back afterwards with some valuable experiences, connections and life skills that others who stayed in their own country did not acquire. But i would suggest that before making a decision you think about exactly what it is that you want to get out of this. Is it just about better job prospects or do you have a deeper drive that motivates you? Would you be prepared to put in the extra work needed to learn how to navigate another country’s academic system and how to get by in day to day life there?

Sorry if this isn’t really much of a “commie perspective”. I’m not sure how to give a “communist” answer to this.

I feel the same way. I noped out of reddit in 2022 when half the communist subs lost their minds and went all lib over Ukraine, and the other half got banned or muzzled. Best thing that could have happened for us imo. It freed us of having to constantly look over our shoulder for reddit’s fed mods, and from having to put up with and constantly argue with liberals and their dumbass takes.

I tend to make a distinction between Christianity in Latin America and Christianity in Africa or East Asia. In the case of Latin America it could be argued that it is not quite as foreign of an element since it was brought over with the settler population. Of course it was still imposed by force on the indigenous peoples, but as the settler and indigenous populations became intermixed to the point that the majority demographic in many of these countries is now what used to be called “mestizo” (i don’t know if that term is still used, please excuse me if it’s outdated), there was sort of a more natural adoption.

In Africa and East Asia on the other hand it was almost exclusively imported through missionaries who were a vanguard of colonialism, and it was done so relatively later than in the Americas.

I’m not talking so much about whether it serves a reactionary or a progressive role in these countries, i think religion has the potential to do both (though in the case of Catholicism arguably tending more to the reactionary side due to institutional links to the Vatican). I’m looking at it from the point of view of colonized peoples reclaiming their original cultural identities. Why should a person living in South East Asia for example feel any connection to a religion that originated in Palestine and which grew into what it is today in the cultural and historical context of Europe and the broader Mediterranean area?

Why should they worship another people’s god? They have an entirely different cultural history that has no connection to this imported religion. The same goes for subsaharan Africa (minus Ethiopia which has a rich history of its own specific branch of Christianity). Why should they pray to the white man’s deity and recite the white man’s scriptures? Why not make an effort to bring back their own traditional religions instead?

I mean, okay, i’m not seriously proposing this as any sort of political programme. There are probably a thousand and one reasons why it would be politically a terrible idea and anyway very low on the list of priorities…but it’s just something i think about every once in a while and so i needed to get this rant off my chest.

I guess one alternative instead of a return to the cumbersome system of modified Chinese characters would be to look at which South East Asian language is closest phonologically to Vietnamese (Khmer maybe?), then adopt and adapt its script to Vietnamese. If Vietnam were ever to embark on a comprehensive campaign of cultural decolonization i would at least look at such options.

And while we’re on the topic of decolonization, this may be a controversial take but another problematic remnant of colonialism in my opinion is Christianity. Historically Christianity, particularly Catholicism, has been used by the European colonial powers as a subversive element to culturally undermine countries prior to colonization, create traitorous fifth columns (or at least internal strife), and then use the reaction/backlash against missionaries as a pretext for intervention and eventual military takeover.

I still don’t fully understand why formerly colonized countries have not made an effort to expel this alien element from their cultures. If i were East Asian or African i would certainly not want to keep practicing the religion of my former colonial masters.

But wasn’t Korea in the same situation at one point? Didn’t they also originally use a modified version of the Chinese script but eventually decided to develop their own alphabet?

And isn’t the argument that the Chinese script is just too difficult to learn and therefore Latin alphabet is better for literacy campaigns a bit eurocentric/orientalist? After all, China had its own literacy campaigns and they were very successful. Their non-phonetic script didn’t seem to be that much of an obstacle to literacy.

At the moment they appear somewhat of an obstacle to full takeover of Thailand by western backed liberals, at least judging from how much propaganda and political agitation is coming from the NGO ecosystem in Thailand against the monarchy.

But as we all know monarchies are fickle and opportunist, and if the West courts or bribes them enough the US may well get all they want anyway from Thailand, monarchy or no. So short term they are at best a stumbling block for the imperialists.

Long term it’s up to the Thai people to decide what should happen to the monarchy. We don’t get a say. But as a communist i firmly believe that monarchies belong in the dustbin of history.

By the way, you don’t have to vote for the socdem KPÖ. You have the PdA (Partei der Arbeit) in Austria, which, judging by their publication at least, seems a much more serious and principled ML party. There’s also the ISA (Internationale Sozialistische Alternative), though as the name gives away they are Trotskyists and as such have a lot of bad takes on Russia and China.

I’m just saying, there’s not just the one “communist” party in most European countries. Usually if you look into it you will find that other smaller ones exist too and they may be more principled and more in line with your values.

Now i don’t know whether these two which i mentioned are on the ballot in this EU election given that both of these parties are much smaller than the KPÖ, but you should be aware that usually there are alternatives.