She’s a liberal but to brush her off when she has been one of the most public, outspoken individuals regarding the genocide while also doing the job of meticulously documenting Israel’s crimes does seem a bit uncharitable.

I spend so much time thinking about this. I don’t feel I have much to add, so many good answers. But something I’ve been thinking about recently… I know it’s cliche to quote Sun Tzu and this advice does seem trite, but I think it’s also deep:

Do not do what your opponent wants you to do.

What is it that the bourgeoisie do not want us to do? I’m trying to answer that myself. I try to think of our world like a board game, and I’m the capitalist player. What don’t I want those commies to be do doing? Well I wouldn’t be afraid of armed insurrection. But I would be afraid of a slowly building and growing class consciousness. So I think developing that is what we should be doing with our time. I know that’s a vague answer, but again I think the comrades in this thread have already filled in the details well.

This comrade gets it.

Bündis Sahra Wagenknecht

Wait a minute, she just named a whole ass political party after herself? Like Bernie Sanders creating a “The Bernie Sanders Party” political party? Is this like a normal thing for Germans?

I was raised in (and was devout about until age 27 or so) white evangelical Christianity in the US. From that, I struggled to view “religion” in a broad sense other than through that lens. I held on to a lot of anger and in some ways was an edgy internet atheist. Marxism helped me understand base and superstructure. It helped me understand how the religion I was raised in grew out of settler colonialism, white supremacy, and as a way to maintain the meager privileges that the bourgeoisie grant upon the reactionary, white working class. And it was those things that I was really angry at (well, for the most part. Beliefs around eternal torment still bother me to this day). Also seeing how faith and religion has brought encouragement and hope to the people of Gaza also helped me approach the concept of religion with nuance.

Ultimately religion can be a force for good or bad, it just depends on the material elements that underlie it in a specific context.

As a US-based commie, I think we have such a long row to hoe in terms of developing class consciousness here. Decades of propaganda plus comfortable living conditions based on exploitation of people and the environment make even suggesting a socialist alternative to people makes them look at you like you have a horn growing out of your head. Hasan does good work in normalizing these ideas among young people, thus making positive contributions to developing class consciousness. Someone who isn’t as “pipeline-friendly” but more ideologically pure probably wouldn’t have a fraction of the viewers Hasan has.

Also, while I think the “crisis of masculinity” in young men is overblown, the reality is that the right wing has an entire ecosystem of people like Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson who can sell young men on a false idea of a very unhealthy masculinity, and it’s been incredibly effective at pushing them to reactionary politics. Hasan is a great antidote to that as I think he (and others - I think Mamdani embodies this as well) provides a more positive version of masculinity that in itself I see pushing men leftward.

Thank you for sharing this, I have no doubt you are correct. Admittedly though, as someone who is not technically inclined I don’t quite know what to do with this information. Should I limit the apps on my phone to only what is essential? Use iOS with ADP and Lockdown Mode? Go with GrapheneOS? Just chuck out my phone entirely?

If you “leave it to the free market”, you will just get further sprawl of single family homes; Los Angeles-ifying the rest of the country. Maybe at best sprinkle in some paper mache five-over-ones in there. The US does need more, denser housing, but will never be provided by the free market.

The actual “Chinese” solution would be to take genuinely blighted areas of a place like Detroit, build very dense, affordable public housing, provide tons of services and public transportation, and ensure local residents get priority. It would be a solution everyone would love, better than Americans could possibly imagine, but the idea that this could be done by the free market strains credulity.

To many of us, socialism is simply the opposite of capitalism rather than its negation, therefore socialism must be the absence of the most hated features of capitalism in our experiences and opinions.

I have been thinking about this since I read it a couple hours ago. Brilliant insight, thank you for sharing.

I really enjoyed reading Socialism Betrayed. But I did take note of the page or two when they talked about contemporary China. They did kinda say “this sure seems like what the USSR did wrong under Khrushchev only on a much larger scale”. But that book was written in 2004, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable for western Marxists to come to that conclusion, albeit incorrectly, at that time. Not to mention the authors did approach it with some humility, not outright saying China was doomed but still pointing out it sure seemed the same as revisionism the USSR in 2004.

This is a very reasonable take.

The US government did not remove Nelson Mandela from their terrorist list until 2008.

I hate how everyone buys into the myth of “the government budget should operate how a household budget operates”. It’s not the fact that it’s wrong that bothers me the most, what really bothers me is how it’s nearly impossible to explain why that analogy is bad. I read a whole book about MMT in part so I could explain why that analogy is wrong, and I still basically can’t do it well. When I try people just think I’m full of shit because the analogy is so easy to understand and the real explanation is not intuitive if you don’t have a solid grasp of economics (which is maybe 5% of the population at best, and most of those people, even liberals understand why the government isn’t like a company or a household).

(FWIW I’ve fallen back on the Keynesian “deficit in a recession and surplus in a boom” even though I don’t actually believe it. That seems to be something people can grasp better)

Literally Trotsky’s godson, but yeah Hudson is great regardless.