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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • iriyan@lemmygrad.mltoGenZedong@lemmygrad.ml*Permanently Deleted*
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    1 year ago

    Who are the non-westerners and why are we against westerners?

    What does this title have to do with the image?

    If 40 countries in Asia, Africa, even S.America would form a treaty against NATO, would that be automatically something to support?

    Shouldn’t we be a bit more critical against false binaries and polarization?

    Comrade Manning Marable said on the last US elections “the choice is between a neoliberal nightmare and a neofascist disaster”. It is such binaries we are becoming used worldwide in the last 2-3 decades, trying to choose what will cause the least amount of damage, the least of all evils, and can’t see a ray of light in the dark era capitalism has sentenced humanity and the planet.

    Anti-Trump, anti NATO, anti-EU, anti-coal, anti-oil, anti-electricity (why not?), anti global-warming, all those fronts that are all so manageable within capitalism, without much else changing, even if the fronts were victorious and won their battle. The warriors of those fronts at the end, tired and in ecstasy due to their victories, go home back to good all capitalism as usual.

    The thugs that took over and sucked Russia dry after 91 were cornered, isolated, and forced into a situation that the west forced them to. Still with enormous personal gains unlike the millions of Russians and Ukranians wasting their lives and their land, so BP can sell oil and gas out of Azerbaijan for a multiple of the profit predicted before war. And the US military machine can sell protectionism to puppets of their game such as the insignificant and dismantled capital of social-democracy. The Swedes are handing over communists to the Turkish butchers to execute or burry in a dirty prison. This is what is left of “socialist Sweden”. The glass-front of European anti-communism of post-ww2 Europe.


  • ACAB without further political content is empty and useless. Whether it is an army of repression in the hands of the rich and powerful, a tool to enforce and maintain social/economic inequalities by force and threat of violence towards the underclass is a reason for ACAB. Whether in every class/social mobilization cops are always on the side of the rich and powerful to maintain inequality and injustice (even though they are legal) is a reasone to state ACAB. Not because they are a different breed of humans with a biological determinant to be unjust and cruel.

    So be ware of content free ACAB and Antifa rhetoric that can be misleading towards a meaningless cop-hate. It is very much a class issue that cops are hated for a very good reason and for a long lasting history of grounds to be hated.

    Both money and power can corrupt people to do great injustice for personal/individual gains and for providing the service as a role to the bosses. Whether it is a state sponsored official force to repress or an unofficial repression group of fascists, they both ultimately serve their masters well.

    Apolitical ACAB/antifa is as dangerous as political apathy.


  • I just realized you are also Spanish and I have a funny old story for you. Some decades ago the woman I was with had a mother who was Spanish, father was from a Caribbean island and they lived in the US. The mother was born in Tangir Morocco from Spanish parents, I knew of this for a while but didn’t think much more of it. At some period elections were coming up and between joke and casual discussion the mother said she was and will always vote republican (the more conservative of the two conservative parties dominating US elections). I dared asked why and she said my father was republican so I am a republican too. Republico in Spain in her father’s time meant he was against fascism and Franco. To confirm how much of a republico he was she explained that his friends (fishermen) called him Rojo. So I returned and I said that not only was he an anti-fascist he must have been a communist. She went crazy and didn’t want to hear about it, but she said the entire family and many relatives were exiled from Spain because they were “republican”.

    The youngest son in early teen age, somehow paid extra attention and found this discussion interesting, so I offered to bring him books or what to ask for in library. I guess because he never met his grandfather but had his name became overly interested on what all this really meant. A few years later he has a music group playing songs about class war, filling up his school and neighborhood walls with graffiti about class war, and dedicated his life to radical anti-capitalism.

    I had a cat named rojo for a while and many times I thought of this story when I used his name.

    Rojo Vive no struggle is ever waste … it travels through time and generations, it is a seed that grows and replants itself and will never be uprooted.


  • You make it sound as coming out of the closet :)

    Realities vary so much from different parts of the world, in some social situations it would be a shame not to be one due to the history of the family, the community. Although in many such realities many people were communist without really deeply knowing what this meant, and had many contradicting practices between what they claimed and what they really were. There were religious communists, communists who did nothing else in their life than enterprise and devise ways to make more money (and exploiting everyone around them), some were family abusers, cheaters, cons, etc. To make things worse some were even racist and ethnocentric, while defending their communist identity. But there are such places, social situations.

    I had even witnessed an entire village of communists calling the cops to do a massive blockade of a beach and arresting and fining young people for free camping, because they owned campgrounds and rented rooms to tourists and this was bad competition, to be camping free near “their beach”.

    Hopefully, since it is by choice and not by birth or origin, you will take your new public identity with more respect and live accordingly.


  • iriyan@lemmygrad.mltoGenZedong@lemmygrad.mlAn Address to Anarchists
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    1 year ago

    Hard to believe? Wait til you hear about Capitalism.

    You are a cheap provocator who thinks winning an argument by either insulting or tiring the opposite party is what makes you a WINNER. Just for stating this IN HERE you should have been banned and thrown out. You are nothing but a populist with zero substance and content to participate in any discussion.

    Go back to capitalist facebook with your smart-ass commenting style,


  • iriyan@lemmygrad.mltoGenZedong@lemmygrad.mlAn Address to Anarchists
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    1 year ago

    Who is characterising anything “by some neo-con trends of youth lifestylism.”. What for that matter even is a neo-con trend of youth lifestylism?

    I am speaking of this post 70s-80s trend of this “black-block” tendency to utilize workers and other social movement demonstrations to form a front to battle the police without any expectation to ever gain anything from the clash other than the dispersion of demonstrators and the reluctance of ever reappearing. This is youth-lifestylism. Youth because it takes age and physical ability to run in front of demonstrators, surprise cops with an attack then run behind demonstrators for cover. None of these people ever handed out a leaflet or published their position, except for some really dumb blogs without signatures, on why they do what they do.

    Neo-com, because this is the effect this activity has on the public and the food it provides on mass media to describe wider parts of the worker/social movement. Media and others like to portray this as anarchy, but anarchists (libertarian communists) would have nothing to do with such practice. The bibliography that exists on anarchy is very heavily anarcho-communist, not “insurectional individualist/black block” non-sense.

    Pretending not to know this because you can bag as one thing the same that is prescribed by state-agencies and media because it serves your rhetoric should have nothing to do with critical theory or Marxism-Leninism. Focus on the true content of the object you are criticizing, not the capitalist definition of it.


  • iriyan@lemmygrad.mltoGenZedong@lemmygrad.mlAn Address to Anarchists
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    1 year ago

    I’ve never been even for curiosity’s sake in chatGPT, infowars, or any of that stuff because I sense that people there argue and debate for the sake of the individualistic interest to display they are better debaters. They have no interest in forming any vehicle towards change or even revolution. This is the problem with anything that is considered public domain and people without commone values and principles, or a minimal philosophical/ideological agreement. Just by identifying as different they display no intention of ever altering their initial positions, so it is fruitless whatever they talk about in there.

    It is funny you accuse me of being a bot or doing copy paste, and to reveal a maybe poor personal trait, if I write something and try to copy it, or place it within another document, I can never do it. I change it so much that at the end it comes out very different or just doesn’t fit. With someone here we exchanged some personal messages and one day I hit the wrong button for submitting it and it was lost. I tried to rewrite what I had just written and it came up so different that after the fact I remeber writing something that just wouldn’t fit in what I wrote as a second time.

    There is much confusion of what people mean by freedom and most of all this confusion has riddled the anarchist movement speaking about it in generic non-defines terms. There is personal/individual freedom and collective freedom. When Marxists speak of worker freedom they refer to the specific freedom of the class from the owners of the means of production. In this respect this is a collective freedom. In a community, a commune if you like, the maximum freedom anyone can have would be the freedom that doesn’t overstep others’ freedoms. So this collective freedom is the maximum freedom that can be attained by a regulated and organized equality of all the freedoms. So really freedom either has to be the product of social organization that aims for equality or it would be a chaotic condition where each and everyone in the community would abuse their freedom against others. Whether the commune is centrally organized and there is hierarchical authority on who regulates this equality or whether this power is spread among equals to hold this power is the true difference between a Marxist or an Anarchist commune. Same goes for the workplace/means-of-production, either centrally directed or by assembly of equals.

    Individual freedom, for those who pursue it, is ultimate inequality and it best pursued by neoliberal capitalism. The more wealth you have the more freedom you have to do anything, order others to do what you wish, even governments to legitimize your freedom and inequality by passing laws to protect this inequality.

    The freedom to get on a plane and travel to the other side of the world, have room and board and slaves to clean up after you, to visit and do things, you have in capitalism because of this inequality of wealth. If the commune doesn’t have the resources to pay for such experience for everyone you don’t have this freedom. It is either a freedom for all or for nobody. The propaganda about the SU and China was that certain freedoms were restricted by central government. The untold propaganda in capitalism is that many people can’t ever afford such luxuries as freedoms, but some can. There are people even in the US or western Europe who never flew with a plane, simply because they could never afford it. There are people in the US who haven’t even crossed state lines due to financial hardship. Nobody prohibited them from walking away but Biden forbid if they are caught in private or “state” land to be camping without paying a campground.

    So again, freedom is useless without documenting equality. It doesn’t matter what your gospel is, Marxist or Anarchist.

    PS If you have proof I copied this or anything else from somewhere provide it, if not plain and simply STF UP, because it is a baseless insult and I don’t have to take it from you or anyone else. Simply it shouldn’t have been tolerated by anyone here, mods or users, to be attacking and accusing somebody of anything without any evidence. I am surprised that charlatans like you, who provide ZERO rational arguments in a debate/discussion are allowed to accuse anyone of anything. And, let’s say I did copy a rational argument from a public forum here, this non-originality doesn’t constitute the rational argument as wrong. Where is your rational argument that invalidates it should have been the goal of discussing, not the origin of the argument.

    So kindly, if you have nothing to offer in the discussion exercise your “freedom” and remain silent, and not try to silence someone else because you don’t agree with what is said.


  • iriyan@lemmygrad.mltoGenZedong@lemmygrad.mlAn Address to Anarchists
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    1 year ago

    I believe that in a public forum once you present an idea the idea becomes public, it is not private property, whether others agree, disagree, or will modify the original it is up to them. So once published it is not yours or anyone else’s to delete.

    Maybe irrelevant but a good opportunity to bring it up.



  • iriyan@lemmygrad.mltoGenZedong@lemmygrad.mlAn Address to Anarchists
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    1 year ago

    Are you saying I’m not allowed to want things? Fuck you, I can have dreams and passion. My dreams are for a high-tech future society that can provide for everyone. That necessitates highly efficient transportation, like bullet trains, as illustrated by current successful Socialist projects.

    What the fuck is your point?

    Society, the proletariat, is expected to work hard to make your dreams and passions (personal/individual) become reality, or available to you. And this is communist but my criticism is “anarchistic”? If your dream was to make an ultra-fast bicycle just for you to run around with, I’d probably help you. To make a motorcycle do 210mph 330kph, it would take you probably more than a lifetime to create, without tremendous resources and machines you couldn’t possibly know how to use them all. But tolerable. Efficient train is the one carrying the most cargo with less energy, not the fastest on earth. This fast thing only serves capitalism and consuming resources for all the wrong reasons. The reason we have all these companies doing quick deliveries of small projects, entire warehouses, trains, trucks, even planes carrying small packages, is so the capitalist can sell and outcompete any local merchant from the other side of earth. It serves no real purpose and tremendous waste of energy and other resources are wasted because of this.

    We still live on an earth where more than a billion people are malnurished, hungry, or ill due to poor nutrition and living conditions. Bullet trains are a luxury that serve much less than a billion people who benefit from capitalism tremendously.

    Get your act together and begin to think as US instead of as YOU. Have you heard the slogan “everything for everyone, for ourselves nothing” ?? Para todos todo!


  • Think of a biologis, working at a lab, wearing a white robe and being in a nearly sterile environment, alalyzing sample after sample. They are not managing anyone, neither is their opinion on other workers weigh in firing, demoting or promoting anyone. A teacher or professor on the other hand is managing students, and can be abusive due to the power she/he holds on them (pass/fail them).

    A plumber, or an electrician can work alone, they are self employed (meaning they work for a different boss in every site they go to work at) but are they above workers, maybe industrial plumbers working for a large manufacturer/constuction co. In some repair work due to the nature of the work one may need an assistant because 2 hands are not enough, or are not long enough, … (AC installations).

    So what boils down as the difference among them is the authority they exercise within the workplace. The higher in hierarchy the more their interests are closely resembling the owners’, the lower they are the more likely they are to be in alliance at least with workers struggles.


  • I think through your argument and question you provide a false definition or perceived difference and others here respond based on the false premise of this difference.

    The difference between “blue collar” “white collar” is not whether the one is working inisde an office/lab/building or outside in the field/machine room/dock etc. The difference has to do with the hierarchy of work/production itself. Whether you are doing the actual work that is part of production or overseeing the work done by others. Whether you are a secretary, a truck driver, a lab analysis technician, or a stock room clerk is not what makes you white collar. To oversee and direct the work of others doing work is what makes you white collar, even if you are in the field, whether you wear a suit or blue overalls doesn’t matter. I even had worked in a machine shop many ages ago where the owners themselves (2) would wear blue overalls and come to the shop and actually work the machines and tell new comers how to do something right, or how they wanted it done. Meanwhile there were people who wrote code/programmed machines to do mass-production (3d printing they call it 40y later) and never wore blue uniforms, they sat on a desk, read blueprints and typed in codes.

    In some work settings those who are “managers” and oversee others’ work can terrorize them to do it right or do more or face unemployment, they do evaluations and if they don’t like your face or think threatened by you as knowing more than they do, especially when you prove them wrong, and will burry your future of raise or promotion. Those are problematic when they are in union as they act as snitches of the bosses and are really never on the side of the worker.

    There can be engineers, material scientists, expert machinery technicians in the field, with construction boots whose only office may be a trailer parked in the mud. The bosses (owners) can not live without them, but their actual role of getting work done correctly or snitching on who is lurking and who is not, is a different issue.

    Who tells you what to do and what to not do, who threatens you with having work tomorrow or not having any, or how necessary it is to put in overtime (sometimes for free) or don’t expect to work too long or at a higher pay, or in a better position, are they in the union?


    Work for home is some bullshit notion that never did and never will work. The pathology of the capitalist is to actually see the army of the exploited and their managers on their means of production, not invisibly having work done off-site. There is “out-sourcing” for those things that can be done off-site. It is almost as a test to see who and when are essential and with the production can do without. So if your boss says take this task and do it home and bring the results in (or mail them in), it is a trap for being able to do without you. Those that physically must be at work are always more secure than those that work from home. Say people working on IT who must have access to the systems that need to be available for those lurking at home on their pijamas. If the servers are down and don’t respond there is not much you can do remotely to reset them or solve the problem.

    There is much of capitalism producing and reproducing psycho-pathology that results from the insecurity of the bosses, which of course is caused by class struggle. They have no illusion there position in wealth and power is never secure, everyone around them can benefit from their demise. In this respect they want to see faces, they want to employee people who are actually useless in production but assure them their ownership and operation is secure. So they pay extra for some white collar thugs to maintain a buffer zone between the exploiter and the exploited. They want someone else to be mean and nasty to workers so they don’t have the emotional weight of doing it themselves.


  • iriyan@lemmygrad.mltoGenZedong@lemmygrad.mlAn Address to Anarchists
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    1 year ago

    I am arguing that criticism must be directed at something objectively, for what it really is, and not paint a subjective picture of what it is to be convenient to you as to serve a display of superiority. I was raised in a country where this myth went around that communists were bad people with rusty cans and came at night and slit your throat, then took your house. This was myth passed as terrorism by the pro-English security forces that were reconstituted after ww2 to terrorize people to stay away or even think of assisting the communist guerilla (previously the resistance to German occupation).

    The myth went around long enough that people associated being a communist with vicious killers with rusty cans. It is hard to debate with people in support of cold-blooded killers. The reality was pretty much the other way around but there weren’t many people left behind to write an alternative to this “history”, either dead, prisoned, or exiled.

    Lenin himself spoke about the ethics of criticism and the avoidance of populism, myth fabrication, and convenient propaganda. It serves nobody here to criticize anarchists on false premises, Criticize them for the lack of theoretical framework to support this class struggle they speak about but fail to define within a theoretical framework of their own, the inability to organize massively enough or long enough to matter, the weakness of allowing “others” among them who are in reality anti-communists (the very essence of fascism), the refusal of describing a transition process between capitalist state and classless society, as if it would materialize on its own by destruction of state and economy (social organization which keeps people fed, housed, and protected from social cannibalism).

    Lack of social organization results in massive death and misery, whether it is an economy or the state overseeing the structure of this economy, or some other form of power structure as militarily organized societies of the distant past. Especially with the population we now have and 50% of it being urbanized it takes organization to get food available to prevent famine or malnutrition. The anarchists fail to propose a specific social organization to replace the economy and the state. They avoid it as if it is the very privilege of parties and centralized power structures. In any case, leading society to an irriversible chaos and deterioration of material conditions is what prevents anarchists from providing an adequate proposal to convince a significant part of the struggling working poor.


  • NATO expansion to any ex-East-block countries is a violation of a treaty signed back in 91 (?) and Ukraine and Belarus were the last two on the list to blockade Russia from Europe.

    Other than oil and gas that Ukraine has to pass to western oil companies to exploit (BP and Shell were already exploiting E.Ukraine deposits, and Biden’s son was an executive to the largest Ukrainian oil company, Ukraine is also a significant grains exporter. Russia among others depend on this export, which under NATO command it would be weaponized and sentencing Russia to famine under the blockade.

    Ukraine also would pas its water rights of Black Sea to western oil companies effectively minimizing Russian presence in the Black Sea economic zone. A global attempt to convert international/public waters to privately owned and managed territories.

    BP has been pumping nat.gas from Azerbaijan to Europe outside Russian control and benefit. The war pretty much guaranteed maximum flow and profit through this new pipeline (TAP)

    Then there was an issue of inability to defend its own water ways outside the black sea. With the black sea becoming practically a NATO lake, it would be non-sensical to expect the UN or other international organization to defend Russia’s merchant fleet access to the Med.

    Was Russian oligarchy and tycoons willing to lose Ukraine to their western adversaries? I don’t think they had much of a choice and it was too late to revert the damage done 10-15 years ago with EU/NATO proposed induction, through political means and influence. So this war had become inevitable and unavoidable for the Russian oligarchy to maintain control of Russia. Russia would have lost any sense of sustainability when this last move in the chessboard would have been made. To avoid check mate, Russia should have invaded as it was the only real option and hope to revert the damage while maintaining some dignity.

    Having said all this, Putin just represents a 19th century type of elite through an pseudo-democracy , an isolated Russian capitalism, Russia’s prevention of accessing global markets for as long as Putin is alive at least has drawn a very ugly picture for its future.



  • iriyan@lemmygrad.mltoGenZedong@lemmygrad.mlAn Address to Anarchists
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    1 year ago

    No there is a code of conduct among true proletarians and then there is lumpen proletariat that behave like punks and thugs, anti-social and a disgrace among proletarians.

    It has nothing to do with idealism, it has to do with the ability of hiding behind a terminal and anonymity to act as a bully and some tough guy. Not the proletarian way, definitely the petty bourgeois way.


  • iriyan@lemmygrad.mltoGenZedong@lemmygrad.mlAn Address to Anarchists
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    1 year ago

    @Blursty> That maximalist freedom they want includes the freedom to exploit and take away the freedom of others.

    You do know that this is by far false, and you must be referring to neo-liberals. The anarchist tradition is of anarcho-communism/syndicalism and libertarian-communism and the perversion some fools describe as anarcho-capitalism (us libertarianism) is not accepted as anarchist by anarchists themselves. In some areas they would even fear of having a physical presence among the rest. So what good is it to base some conclusion on a false premise?

    Do you think when Marx was spending time with Kropotkin discussing, playing chess, it was because Kropotkin was defending the freedom to exploit? Go read the consititutions of CNT, of FAI, the Italian Federation, and see whether there is a clear position against ANY exploitation of humans by humans.

    Where the weakness of the libertarian proposal lies is that “society” on its own will not find a way to organize against capitalism, or be organized adequately to survive without a state. Society can and will not do such things without a revolutionary vanguard leading it to that direction. Anarchist organization has had to deal with this contradiction where itself becomes the vanguard “over” society or the working class, deciding for the class things like tactics, methods, goals, etc. The relationship between a political organization and society or the working class therefore becomes hierarchical and allows little “freedom” for those outside the organization to decide or even affect the decisions made. So, a revolutionary process becomes one where the vanguard imposes conditions and rules on the working class. The more anarchists try to organize the fewer stay with it as they feel uncomfortable with the contradiction.

    In m-l tradition the vanguard is an acceptable and conscious decision to maintain this hierarchy, use the class struggle as a movement to overthrow the government and take over the state. Unfortunately those two branches of radical anti-capitalism can’t seem to synthesize any form of collaboration and possibility of coexistence. For historic reasons there is little trust or hope for such cooperation or agreement.

    There is a trend (specially after 1950s cointelpro activities) of individualism that can extent all the way to anti-communism, otherwise called insurrectional individualist anarchists, who are also very much against any formal organization as being the source of oppression. Those fools write and write as individuals, appealing to individuals, and formulating individual beliefs that can never escape their lack of organization. Lack of a collective organ to promote their ideas keeps them well in the bottom of movement significance. They have never been able to achieve anything. But you can’t characterize 150y+ traditions by some neo-con trends of youth lifestylism.

    How would you classify and explain the presence of IWW for two centuries? The presence of CNT in the 1930s Spain’s uprising against the invasion of Franco with US and German support?

    If there is superiority of m-l over anarchism/libertarian-communism, there must be presented and analyzed on true premises not lies and characterizations empty of content. For the anarchist freedom can not exist without equality, but equality is as political as it is economic. It would be hard to believe that people of “equal” presence in decision making would produce a system of exploitation or oppression, or any other form of inequality. Systems of inequality exist because minorities serving individual interests form organizations to maintain inequality.

    @Blursty



  • iriyan@lemmygrad.mltoGenZedong@lemmygrad.mlAn Address to Anarchists
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    1 year ago

    This is a very sad picture you are painting. It is like saying that if someone doesn’t know about cars and this is the first time buying you can convince them to buy a Chevy, but if they already know about cars and have had a few they will never buy one. Alternatively if they have a BMW why trade it for a Daewoo?