axont [comrade/them, they/them]

Yeah I speak two languages and my brain is still filled with irrelevant information about trains

I prefer gender neutral terms, please. I’m nonbinary

Was it not already working? I’ve been using a PS5 controller on Steam for a year now and it’s been fine.

Greatest day of my life

If I had a jack off hand motion emoji I would post it but you’ll have to settle for me simply saying you sound up your own ass

Do you live somewhere where voting for Democrats even matters?

The reality is the Taiwan isn’t broadly recognized as a sovereign country, so it doesn’t wield the same authority as an independent nation in terms of international agreements, trade, etc. It doesn’t have allies who would defend potential sovereignty, and it doesn’t have enough guns or money to leverage itself as independent. That’s way more important than some abstract discontent some people feel. At best you could say Taiwan is a Chinese client state.

Countries don’t exist because some people feel like they should be one. I could ask you to talk to a Texan secessionist and tell them their cause is hopeless.

I will tell a person living in Taiwan they live in a province of China, sure. I don’t care. Their government is the remnant of the defeated nationalist faction and I have no sympathy for it. I have way more sympathy for the Gaoshan and other indigenous Taiwanese people who aren’t represented well. Taiwan will hopefully get reabsorbed into the mainland within my lifetime.

Of course it’s purely diplomatic, acknowledging countries is diplomacy. The end result is the same.

Uncritical support to the DPRK in its heroic struggle to rid occupied Korea of the genocidal US Empire. Uncritical support to the Juche ideology and its implementation.

Every single country on Earth except like seven (I only remember the Vatican and Paraguay) acknowledges that Taiwan is a dependent province of the PRC, including the USA and just about all of Europe.

Pretty bad drought and floods over the past 20 years, and the country is too mountainous to support most effective reforestation strategies. So it’s mostly climate change, economic isolation, and only 17% of the land can support forests in the first place. It’s not a good time right now.

There are some socialists elected to regional positions, like city councils, school boards, etc. The most prominent is probably Seattle councilwoman Kshama Sawant

“Then–Defense Minister of Israel Yitzhak Rabin criticized Soviet authorities for providing the hijackers with an aircraft and flying them to Israel in exchange for the release of the hostages.”

Christ how evil can Israel get? “how dare you save an airplane full of children”

Do you think the only options are allow Israel to do a genocide or do a genocide on Israelis? Cutting off diplomacy with a settler colony client state is not genocide.

Yeah the world still operates on a capitalist framework and China buys and sells things on a global market. Unless China is carving borders, installing puppet leaders, making aggressive demands for how another nation’s government should operate, forcibly moving people in other nations, using agencies like the IMF or World Bank to squeeze money out of national funds, demanding austerity, or creating a vassal state, unless China is doing a single one of those things it’s entirely dramatic to say they’re colonizing. Buying and selling things for cheap is what commerce is. Is it unfair China has a lot of money to use for trade? Is having more money in a trade agreement itself an act of colonization or what?

It’s especially dramatic compared to the CIA, which has done multiple coups in Bolivia in the name of oil. You’re comparing a country buying lithium on terms set by Bolivia to a country funding a military revolt directed by Gulf Oil.

Yes destruction of natural resources is regrettable and hopefully we can reach a position where there’s no longer a need to get involved in a destructive global market. Honestly the market I’d criticize China the most for is how they never boycotted Israel, and in fact have sold guns/artillery to the IDF. They also sell guns to both sides of the Kashmir conflict. You’d have a much better case to claim China is colonizing Palestine than anywhere in Latin America.

Pretending to be communists for 3 years and thousands of comments as high concept performance art

In fact we’re so dedicated to this joke we read Marx and Engels and joined socialist organizations

China doing commerce in your country isn’t colonization, don’t be dramatic. I have no idea where you’re from, but I know a Bolivian person who also complains that China is conquering their country, which is absolutely ludicrous compared to what the CIA did to Bolivia.

fuck you. How much collateral damage are you supposed to excuse in a fight against Hamas? Thousands of dead civilians?

Israel is an apartheid state and you're an apologist for war crimes

Marx talks about most of what you just mentioned in the first chapter of Capital. Socially productive labor transforming nature is the source of value in any society. He also mentions rarity as a source of value, like I remember him specifically mentioning pearls as an example a few times.

He included machinery and technology as what he called "constant capital," and the labor is the variable capital. To say Marx didn't consider technology would suggest he was unaware of what a factory was and that he didn't observe the industrial revolution as it was happening. He was born in 1818. He watched Germany in his childhood go from empty fields full of peasants to factories, railroads, and telegraph lines in his adulthood. You know what made that technology possible? Labor? And who operates that technology? Laborers. This is all cooked into his work.

I'd also like to point you over to the Grundrisse, the chapter called Fragment on Machines, where Marx even speculates on if machinery were all fully automated, saying laborers could move aside from production and just become just "watchmen." This part is good:

"Capital itself is the moving contradiction, in that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as the sole measure and source of wealth […] On the one side […] it calls to life all the powers of science and of nature […] to make the creation of wealth independent (relatively) of the labour time employed on it […] On the other side, it wants to use labour time as the measuring rod for the giant social forces thereby created"

He's saying capitalism would have a hard tike reducing labor time to zero through technological advancement, since it would defeat the concept of value itself. In simple terms, how would you even price anything if there was no labor cost involved? How would a capitalist sell their product or assign value to it? Who would they sell it to?

Sometimes yeah it's frustrating reading it because some parts assume cultural familiarity with very ancient names or places. I think I remember in the book of Genesis an ancient military leader is named and it's said he did some kind of trick to capture a town, but it doesn't explain what he did or why.

Storytelling has gone through a lot of development over the centuries