I think that IMF loans and capital export are ultimately good. As a Marxist, I want to sharpen the contradictions and I want the town-country contradiction to drive the imperial periphery into massive debt.

Maybe I'm overthinking the town-country contradiction www.canada.ca/en/departmen... Just handing out currency to other countries doesn't work though on the world market.

www.marxists.org/subject/econ... It's something like that through the forming of an average rate of profit on the world-market the imperial core sells commodities at a price above their value and the periphery sells commodities at a price below their value.

idk I think the town-country contradiction might be rooted in part in the rural isolation of the country.

thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2019/11/14/h... I think this sort of stuff is the right idea but it doesn't seem quite right to me. The town-country contradiction boils down to the more handwavey division of mental and physical labor as much as the more mathy organic composition of capital.

I think people overthink transphobia which is largely just a consequence of misogyny and which is still highly pervasive for complicated reasons. IMO fighting misogyny and the town-country contradiction is required before the real fight for socialism is possible.

idk just in a bad mood because I read through a bunch of the Epstein files.

🙄 I hate people who over-simplify pomo bullshit and Gramsci. It really boils down to very practical stuff. Politics is war by other means. The oppressors are actively engaging in counter-insurgency against the oppressed. It's war of position and hybrid warfare stuff.

IDK one of the things about the Jeffrey Epstein stuff that disturbs me is the juxtaposition of the normal and the terrible. Epstein is rich but a lot of stuff is just ordinary.

ig applying Marxism to Canada what's the limitation on exporting more oil and cars? A large limitation on the development of the petroleum industry is the oppression of competitors like Venezuela and the suppression of alternative energy sources. oec.world/en/profile/c...

No way is this not parody

I need to research more into this metabolic rift crap. I think I am critical of Indigenous stewardship of the land from this POV. Indigenous stewardship does not solve the systemic transfer of value away from the colonized nations to colonisers.

It was 28° when workers were pruning grapevines in Sunnyside WA last week. "Larisa" shares, "We need to be careful not to let the branches snap back at us because they really hurt when it is this cold." #WeFeedYou

tbh solidarity is bullshit. In practice, "solidarity" is just a means of manipulation and for the oppressor to speak over the oppressed. Solidarity isn't materialist. Solidarity is idealistic unionism.

Okay so it's counterintuitive but I think the problem with imperialism is that the rate of profit is far too high in the imperial periphery. This suggests heavy taxes and state-led investment. Internal colonies and marginalized groups have a similar but more confusing issue.

Inter-imperialist war and finance capital is confusing but I think I get it. It boils down to that finance capital profits from the anarchy of production, the ultimate expression of the anarchy of production being war. It's not that finance capital is "bad" exactly.

I suppose there is an argument that worker cooperatives are generally historically progressive in the semi-feudal nations and not so useful in the imperial core.

The thing people don't get is that class struggle and anti-imperialism are directly tied to the falling rate of profit. Imperialism is the stage of capitalism where monopoly and competition extend to whole countries. Two countries duking it out over resources is competition furthering the TRPF.

I think a lot of the environmental unsustainability of the imperial core is due to the town-country contradiction. Therefore, I am not so worried about urbanization in the global South in that sense.

idk I think that for evil shit it's better to focus on the money than the depravity. That some criminals engage in CSAM and other evil shit as well as less evil shit like drug trafficking is really unremarkable. Narratives of serial killers and pimps focus on the supervillain aspect too much.

I feel bitter I wasn't able to do well in college due to all my problems and injustices even though I have a real talent for computer stuff. And I feel bitter that as a trans woman going further would be pretty difficult.

do you understand how stupid it feels that maybe the pederasts who tried to groom you in y2k could be in these files? the internet was not big. did i hurt jeffrey epstein’s feelings? only Allah knows the reality of it.

I guess I think that this is going to be the last great anti-imperialist war. The social division of mental and physical labor between town and country no longer makes sense with remote work. I do need to think more about the conditions of Africa.

Large demonstration against ICE and its corporate partners at Hootsuite offices in Vancouver today. #ACAB #AbolishICE

The trouble with pacifism is that the means do not justify the ends.

I think it's not even really an opiate, it just makes sense as long as you don't think about it too much bsky.app/profile/real...

at this rate theyll phrenologize about the irish and italian americans before end of year

idk I feel like the most ideologically consistent variant of fascism is the Ayn Rand/Nietsche social Darwinist shit. The trouble is that there is no mysticism there. But Christo-Fascism and neopaganism are too contradictory.

idk you can go in circles arguing philosophy Politics and war are more about organizing the workers and the oppressed than abstract nonsense.

despite the current bullshit I don't think Trump is going to go full Nazi Germany. Trump's current backers are big tech, agri-business and the fossil-fuel industry. Trump needs to shore up the price of oil so he will destabilize competitors like Iran, Venezuela and Canada.

"The greatest division of material and mental labour is the separation of town and country." www.marxists.org/archive/marx... I think that the anti-intellectualism of the country is a major problem.

4 Black journalists have been kidnapped by the federal government

The Burkina Faso homophobia stuff is annoying mostly because nobody has a materialist analysis. IMO homophobia and misogyny is simply a consequence of polygamy under a semi-feudal society.

I think worker credit must be seen as something like lending credit to the employers of the workers. Not super different from a company credit card. So it's a small line of credit to every corporation that employs workers.

www.bis.org/publ/qtrpdf/... I think this panic over zombie firms is silly. What matters is the rate of profit across the capitalist class as a whole, not the rate of profit for any individual firm.

I think there's an argument to date wars by pandemics which are associated with large amounts of primitive accumulation and mass migration. It's kind of weird to think about stuff like HIV in terms of imperialism and the setting free of workers from the land.

www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2024/06... Christ

IMO you need to judge a country by the actual kind of labor that workers do. Resource extraction colonies are shit for other reasons but I'm not sure they should be called semi-feudal. I need to think about the actual form that labor takes. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...

The whole connection behind transmisogyny and fascism is simply that the rural petite-bourgeoisie rely heavily on child labor. Due to the town-country contradiction, rural communities simply can't survive without exploiting children, women and migrant workers.

IMO rural poverty in the imperial core is largely a myth. www.census.gov/newsroom/blo... I suppose part of the problem is that poverty is heavily racialized.

idk the incredibly reactionary nature of the Statesian countryside is really something youtu.be/6YS2d0eJzNA I think a lot of it really just boils down to differences between the imperial core and the periphery.

natural-resources.canada.ca/minerals-min... IMO remote administration of resource extraction will just become less and less profitable and more and more artificial due to the advancement of communications.

I think at the root of Marxist political and military theory is that you have to see how the system organizes workers into armies. The factory is a kind of military of workers. The prison is a kind of military of lumpenproles. The same goes for old folks homes, universities, etc...

I think from a Marxist POV that networked imperialism does not abolish the town-country contradiction but sharpens the contradiction to its most absurd. We have the communications and shipping technology to abolish the social division of mental and physical labor between town and country.

I think that Communists tend to go on about "individualism" far too much when the imperial core is extremely oppressive towards the individual freedoms of the disabled, queer people and other non-conformists.

noticed a trend this week where both the right and some liberals have been like "just realized the left actually means what they say about stuff"

It's all so asinine. The fossil fuel industry is stirring up fascism just because people are doing remote work now and not driving cars so much anymore. Also the threat of green energy.

IMO imperialism relies on the town-country contradiction and the centralization of mental labor which the development of global communications networks renders increasingly obsolete. I am not sure how to think about the final death-spiral of imperialism though.

Anyhow the whole model of networked company-towns is a depressing final conclusion of imperialism.

I think you could describe the network state stuff as "networked imperialism".