Vertical farming is more energy intensive because it requires artificial light and vertical water transport. There is also the question of acquiring sufficient fertile soil and nutrients. Fertilizer takes energy to produce. Ultimately this becomes not a question of surface area but of sustainable and large scale energy production. If you have sufficient energy and enough raw materials you can expand farming by many orders of magnitude. Without those things you need to keep clearing more and more land and rely on sunlight which is not as dependable at higher latitudes.
I have always liked the idea of communal child rearing from a rational perspective, but even in the early USSR at a time when the revolutionary enthusiasm was at its strongest that was seen as kind of a radical proposal. A lot of people, even many who are otherwise solid communists and devoted to the socialist project will have a visceral resistance to the idea of replacing the traditional family with a fully communal model.
You need to think about how such a transition would be achieved and how to convince people to adopt it. I’m not saying it can’t be done or that it shouldn’t be done, but that it’s something that probably only a very stable communist society can achieve where the people have a great degree of trust in the communal way of doing things are are prepared to make a radical break with the traditional concept of the family.
Historically this was seen as an ultra-left idea and eventually fell out of favor entirely in all socialist states. It would have been too destabilizing politically as trying to make it happen would have provoked much resistance at a time when the situation was precarious enough already. Sometimes revolutionary enthusiasm gets ahead of what is possible given current conditions, and that is counterproductive and dangerous.
That is true but since there is no way to turn back the historical clock on this we may as well just call it all capitalism, albeit having went through different phases of development, each one being the logical and inevitable outcome of the social and material conditions and contradictions created by the previous one. Barring some kind of catastrophic global societal collapse the general trend of development in the world can only be forward towards higher forms of social and economic organization. And the only step forward from capitalism is socialism.
All this does is further discredit the ICC and make it even more irrelevant than it already was. Neither the US nor Russia recognize its authority. And neither do China, India, Turkey, Saudi Arabia or even Ukraine itself. This is a joke. Nobody who matters takes it seriously and nobody will enforce this ruling. The ICC exists solely for the imperialist west to bully weak global south nations, especially the African ones.
Aren’t there already suggestions of Saudi investment in Iran? Whatever else you may think of the Saudi regime (i for one absolutely despise them) this represents yet another defeat for the imperialist attempt to isolate Iran, and another instance of South-South co-operation and mutually beneficial economic activity of the type BRICS exists to foster.
Like Turkey, Saudi Arabia has now been drawn into the BRICS orbit and whether they actually ever join it or not there are solid economic and diplomatic ties being built that will be very detrimental for the imperialist hegemony.
The crashes Russia had were pretty bad, especially the one in the late 90s that led to Putin coming to power and starting to clean up some of the worst excesses. That crash was catastrophic and pretty much wiped out the currency and a lot of people’s savings, and it was a result of the decade of brutal shock therapy applied to post-Soviet Russia. A lot of people committed suicide and there was a real fear in the west of another revolution in Russia.
And yes there were subsequent ones too, but as a result of Russia’s general recovery over these past decades, these crashes have been getting less severe as time goes on: the 2008 crash was unavoidable since it was global but it was not as bad as the one in the late 90s; and the 2014 one which was triggered by western sanctions in response to the Crimean referendum led to Russia adopting policies which have made it much more autarkic and resilient to sanctions. You could also call the economic contraction they experienced last year as a result of the war and the new western sanctions a mini-crash but a rapid recovery is already happening thanks to good economic relations with China and the global south.
However the rules of capitalism still apply to Russia and no matter how well things are going now there will be more and worse crashes in the future. The only way to mitigate these unavoidable crises is to adopt policies resembling those of China, increase the role of the state sector and state control over the banks and the general direction of the economy, and Russia has been doing a bit of this in response to the economic pressures of the sanctions and the war, but not nearly enough.
The only way to completely eliminate this cycle is to adopt an actual socialist economic model but the current Russian ruling class is not interested in doing that.
The North was economically far stronger than the South right up until the 80s when the US started to pour immense amounts of investment into their puppet state just as the USSR was starting to decline. Then the DPRK was effectively left totally alone in the 90s without any outside trade except for a small amount - much smaller than they had with the USSR - with China. And yet even to this day the North is arguably the more industrialized half because it has its own heavy industries including a very impressive military industry, whereas the South just buys American hand me downs. The North is self-sufficient in virtually every way including agriculturally and industrially. Which is really the weaker economy here, the one that produces for itself everything it needs or the one that has to rely on other countries’ industrial output while itself only really specializing in the automobile industry and a few other high tech sectors?
Factionalism, plotting and “court intrigue” happens in every organization that involves humans, it happens in corporate offices, it happens in unions, it happens in liberal bourgeois governments, it happens in academic institutions, and it happens in socialist governments.
However i agree with you, it is unwise for us to dwell too much on this particular conspiracy theory.
Unclear. I have read some plausible versions of how Khrushchev and his revisionist faction may have been involved. If not outright poisoning at least making sure that the medical response would come too late. I can understand why people are suspicious. But at the moment this falls for me under the conspiracy theory category. We may never know for sure, and in either case i don’t think it matters. We all know that Khrushchev was a snake regardless.
For a “progressive” outlet this is a surprisingly good article with remarkably little of the “progressives’” typical liberal delusions. It’s what we communists have been saying about the current global situation since this time last year, and even earlier for the part about the BRI.
It’s amusing and kinda satisfying to see the realization slowly dawn on the broader left.
Putin is an anti-communist and a reactionary for sure, but so far i have not seen any convincing evidence of him being “hyper-wealthy” as the liberal media always claim. He governs in the interest of oligarchs to a considerable extent, that’s indisputable, but i am not sure we can say that he is one himself. At the same time the Russian government is not controlled by oligarchs, it is in a sort of weird position where it is in partnership with many of them but also frequently makes demonstrations of its power over them by disciplining those whose greed endangers the stability of the state. It is not the same kind of oligarchy that the West has where corporate interests basically directly control the government, and the state itself is relatively weak and little more than their puppet.
Russia is in a weird in-between state at the moment where the transition to a mature capitalism like the West’s never quite finished and instead you have a precarious balance of state and private interests brought about by the need to put an end to the total devastation and chaos of the kleptocratic 90s lest the new bourgeois state face the danger of another revolution. This is probably not sustainable in the long run, it will have to tip one way or the other. Either Russian capitalism matures and it transitions fully to a Western-like liberal system, or the communists will grow stronger and stronger until they return to power.
The problem for the Russian bourgeoisie is that the imperialist core has made it virtually impossible for them to integrate into the West’s neoliberal system as equals, the West demands Russia’s total subjugation. Without integration into that global system the completion of the transition is impossible and they will remain in this limbo. Putin is a keystone of this precarious balance and i am not sure what will happen when he retires.
I think that’s partly a matter of taste and partly a question of local climate. In warmer parts of the world you want to have homes that are less open to direct sunlight, in which case a deep balcony that provides shade, and a lack of extra windows make sense. You see this kind of stuff taken in to account when you look at traditional architecture in a lot of countries in the middle east and Africa. It’s all part of constructing houses with natural forms of temperature control rather than wasting energy on air conditioning (or on the other side of the spectrum heating in colder climates). Admittedly Korea has a temperate climate so that might not have been the reason in this case.
Zizek is an irrelevant clown. Only thing I have to add to this, on the question of how can a Slavic person from a peripheral country like Slovenia adopt such rabid European chauvinism…sadly the cliché, well known in former Yugoslavia, of the two northernmost republics, Slovenia and Croatia, thinking themselves superior to their Slavic brothers and identifying more with the same Western Europeans who look down on them with contempt seems to hold true in his case as well…
It’s not so much a “peace plan” as a set of general principles. Not really something actionable since some of the points directly conflict with each other particularly where the Ukraine conflict is concerned. Russia cannot ensure its national security without violating Ukraine’s sovereignty so long as Ukraine remains a Nazi puppet state of an aggressive NATO hell-bent on destabilizing and destroying Russia. Also restoring Ukraine’s territory at this point will violate Russia’s sovereignty and the self-determination of all the people who voted in referendums to join Russia.
Also there is the small matter of the US and the rabid russophobes in Eastern Europe simply having no interest in peace or taking Russia’s security concerns seriously… They are still clinging to their dream of defeating Russia and the only way to get them to see that that is not happening is a Russian victory.
So yeah, this all sounds nice and is exactly what China should be saying at this moment to show the world that they are the rational and responsible adults in a situation where the West have turned into unhinged warmongers, but they know and really everyone else knows too that nothing will come of this.
The fact is that development always has costs. There was a cost that had to be paid for developing agriculture in Central Asia to be able to firstly feed the growing population there and secondly to establish an economic base to support further industrialization in a region that has always been environmentally precarious. What is often ignored in this discussion is a comparison of the living standards of the local populations before and after the Soviet agricultural, industrialization and urbanization projects. Was it worth the cost to lift millions of people out of a miserable existence at the edge of the subsistence minimum? It depends on who you ask - those who were lifted out of poverty would say yes.
In the same vein we can ask if the environmental cost of China’s rapid development has been worth it. And remember that the environmental cost of Europe and North America’s industrial development was far higher historically, it just happened a century prior. The difference is that socialist states are the only ones that have the ability to then, once the rapid development has been achieved, mobilize the vast resources necessary to repair said damage, and the only ones with the will to adopt more sustainable future policies like China which is now leading the world in green energy and combatting desertification.
Westerners believe that it is worth letting people in the global south continue to suffer from poverty and underdevelopment just so long as their favorite tourism destinations remain pristine and untouched by industrialization, meanwhile their own comfortable first world lifestyles are maintained at huge cost to the global environment.
If the USSR was still around it would have found a way to deal with the Aral Sea problem, after all it was under Stalin that some of the first ever environmental protection policies in the world were put in place such as the protection of soil from erosion by the planting of thousands and thousands of kilometers of forest belts. In fact it is precisely because of the dismantling of socialism and the re-emergence of corrupt bourgeois capitalist regimes in Central Asia in the 90s that the plans that had been developed during Soviet times to address the issue - which had already been recognized - were abandoned.
If you look up the satellite photos of the region and pay attention to when the shrinking started to really accelerate you see that most of the Aral Sea did not start to disappear until after the breakup of the USSR. The policies of post-Soviet republics were disastrous, they sacrificed everything for the sake of short term profits, living standards, industry, infrastructure, and yes the environment too. Everything was cannibalized for private profit and Western financial interests got extremely wealthy off of this looting. So it is the height of hypocrisy to blame socialism and the USSR when the capitalists have done and do far worse.
Putin may not be genuine in wanting to denazify Ukraine but the Russian people definitely are. At the end of the day he is a politician and if he wants to keep his popularity he needs to deliver on the promise. Russians are very serious about not tolerating a militarized Nazi regime on their border that is killing Russians. There is a deep and genuine historical disgust with Nazism in Russia for obvious reasons.
Obviously he is not an “ally”, he is an anti-communist, he pretty much openly says it. He despises Lenin.
Yet he is doing something that is useful for our cause, which is defeating the US empire in a proxy war and ushering in multipolarity. But, unlike for him, for us that multipolarity is not the end goal, it’s just a stepping stone on the path to a new wave of revolutions and the renewed spread of socialism. That however requires the weakening of the “West” and the breaking of the imperialist stranglehold on the global south.
This. Let the Russian communists reckon with Putin and other conservatives like him when the time comes to sweep away Russia’s bourgeois regime. For now the priority of communists in the imperial core is to throw as many wrenches in the gears of the imperial hegemony and its war machine as possible. It is in the interest of the communist cause for Russia to prevail over NATO and its Nazi puppets in Ukraine. Us non-Russians criticizing Putin achieves absolutely nothing, it is not going to make Russia restore the Soviet Union and return to socialism any faster. It is empty virtue signaling, the lowest hanging fruit of all time, an insignificant drop in the bucket of demonization and hatred that the imperialists and the libs already hurl at him, not because they are against his reactionary social views but because they despise the anti-imperialist position that he has been forced by geopolitical circumstance (remember that Putin tried very hard to be integrated into the liberal western system and even NATO) into adopting. They recognize the existential threat that a Russia whose leaders are not Washington puppets and that protects its own interests poses to the imperial hegemony. That is why they have such a hate boner for Putin - almost as much as they do for Xi Jinping - despite Putin being otherwise a run of the mill economic liberal with reactionary positions on gender and sexuality not too different than your average right winger in the West (just way less racist).
We need to learn to pick our battles and identify primary and secondary contradictions. It is absolutely not a priority at the moment to pile on to the already ubiquitous anti-Putin rhetoric. If he were to be ousted tomorrow he would not be replaced by a communist, nor, as the imperialists hope, by a complacent liberal puppet. Rather another more hardline conservative would follow who would be no less socially reactionary and even more hostile toward the West and its “values”. For us this would just be a pointless destabilization of Russia at a time when it is engaged in an anti-fascist, anti-imperialist struggle.
When we start doing agitprop against a political figure it needs to serve a purpose, it needs to advance the revolutionary cause in some way or another, otherwise we are at best wasting our time. The correct people to be putting out polemics against Putin are the Russian communists who, imo, would be best advised to attack his liberalism and his economic policies, demanding better conditions for workers and that Russia adopt more economic planning and a more heavily nationalized economy, especially in light of the ongoing military conflict and the economic sanctions.
For once i agree partially with the liberal, though obviously not for the nonsensical idealist argument that they try to make here. The role of police is to protect the state, enforce the existing order and safeguard the interests of the ruling class. Thus the blanket phrase ACAB can only be adopted as a universal slogan by anarchists who are simply opposed to the existence of the state.
For a communist the essential point is the class character of the state in question. In a capitalist society the state is the class instrument of the bourgeoisie, the role of the police as a whole is categorically reactionary and hostile toward the masses, thus ACAB applies regardless of the personal character of the individual cop. Whereas under socialism, which is the dictatorship of the proletariat, the state represents and serves the interests of the working class, thus the function of the police becomes the preservation of socialism, the suppression of the reaction, and defense against all counter-revolutionary forces.
And this is not just an academic, theoretical distinction by the way, it is very clearly evident in practice. Just compare the way the Chinese police behave and are viewed by the average Chinese citizen with how American or even European police treat and are perceived by most people there. It is clear there is a qualitative difference there in their relationship toward the masses, where in the capitalist case there is a fundamental hostility and mutual mistrust as police behave more like prison guards or an occupying army toward all but the class whose wealth they are tasked with protecting.
Ukraine literally checks every single one of these. Also, they openly worship Nazi collaborators, proudly wear Nazi symbols and name their military units after SS units…that stuff should have been the first hint.
The fact that there is a fascist state in Europe again and all of the “West” is supporting it is really fucked.
And the Baltics are close to becoming just like Ukraine.
All fiat money is “conjured out of thin air”. It’s just that this is usually the purview of governments via central banks. However with the IMF being essentially a tool of Washington to be wielded as they please this is just that - a government creating money - but with extra steps. Fundamentally money is debt, which is why it can be created at will, it is not an actual commodity despite what dumbass libertarians believe who think the glaring contradictions in modern monetary policy can be solved by something as infantile as bringing back the gold standard or with cryptocurrency. Problem is that the government of a sovereign country can never actually be forced to pay its debts, especially if they issue a globally used reserve currency like the dollar. This is the infamous “free lunch” that Michael Hudson always talks about, so long as the petrodollar stands the US can create money out of nothing at the expense of the rest of the world and never actually paying that debt back.
No, the actual indigenous Taiwanese people probably see the flag of the ROC about the same as indigenous people in North America see the US or Canada flags. When the nationalists fled the mainland and established themselves on Taiwan they proceeded to conduct a massive campaign of repression against the indigenous population. Don’t forget that Taiwan was under decades of military dictatorship. That flag does not represent Taiwan, it represents a former government of China that was rejected by the Chinese people. The flag was imposed on Taiwan by the butthurt losers of a civil war that never ended because the US has been meddling and preventing a resolution of the issue for over seventy years now.
They will not be convinced by us but by the material realities facing them, namely the realization that a return to the past is impossible and that the decline is irreversible. There will be no serious revolutionary movements in the West until the conditions deteriorate to such a point that a plurality of people face the same destitution and misery that have forced other parts of the world to revolt. As for the question of decolonization i am hopeful for South America due to the example of the plurinational model of Bolivia and other such experiments in indigenous self-determination, but for North America i sometimes fear it may be too late. I look at the numbers of indigenous people left compared to the many orders of magnitude bigger settler population and don’t see how they can ever mount a successful resistance.
Are there any examples of successful decolonization taking place where the colonized are a minority? From my point of view their best hope is to enter into an alliance with the other internal colonies of the US settler state, particularly the systemically oppressed black and brown people who have already shown in recent years that they have revolutionary potential, especially when conditions of extreme police violence push them to mount uprisings. This demographic question plays a large role also for the liberation of Palestine, it is clear that the goal of the Zionist occupation is to expand the settler population and decimate the Palestinian to such a point that the Palestinians become a minority in their own land, as then the colonization will be all but irreversible. This is something that Palestine still fiercely fights against and has a chance of beating.
Palestinians still have the numbers on their side. They also have allies and potential allies all around the region with whom they share a religion and a language and who could join them in an armed conflict to expel the occupier. How, in practical terms, is the indigenous population of the US and Canada supposed to defeat the settler state’s military and the white settler majority in order to take back their land?
How well-off foreigners experience life in a semi-peripheral country like Russia is not exactly the most representative of the experiences of the average Russian. They tend to stay within in a certain milieu, usually the wealthier and more cosmopolitan cities, and mostly only interact with people from there.
That being said Russia has indeed experienced an enormous rebound over the past 20 years and this is not something anecdotal, it is shown by virtually all social and economic indicators. But it must always be remembered that this is only relative to the absolute rock bottom post-apocalyptic conditions of the 1990s.
Compared to the conditions before 1990 and especially before Gorbachev’s disastrous reforms that destroyed the socialist economy, there is still a long way to go, and it is probably not something that capitalism, even an industrial capitalism like Russia’s with a large state sector can achieve.
I still am unsure of the direction in which Russia will go, it may be that the current conflict with the West pushes them in the direction of a more state led economy and a rejection of neoliberalism out of necessity, in which case they would eventually be better off than the rapidly declining Europeans.
Or it may be that their ruling class has learned nothing and they will still stubbornly cling to liberalism in which case Russia will begin to resemble the West more and more and the benefits of the recovery will not reach the working class and the rural regions.
It remains to be seen whether the Russian ruling class are as short sighted as the Western bourgeoisie. They must know that if they do not continue to improve conditions this will lead to increased social unrest and a political strengthening of the communists.
Any tank is better than no tank. But at the end of the day war is a numbers game. Ukraine started with over a thousand tanks and lost most of them. Russia still has many thousands and can make many more. A few hundred western tanks will be annoying and prolong the fighting for a few more months but will not change the balance of power or the trajectory of the war.
And here we see the difference. A genuine Marxist-Leninist will always have revolutionary optimism in their heart because they understand the objective material and historical forces that compel the capitalist-imperialist system into ever worsening crises, with each one having greater and greater potential to lead to the collapse of the whole rotten system under the weight of its contradictions. It is the duty of the revolutionary cadre to ensure that when the inevitable revolutionary moment comes there exists a revolutionary vanguard with a mass base that is sufficiently organized, militant, educated and class conscious to seize power and build a workers’ state.
We will struggle, we will fight and we will win. But in order to win we have to first believe that we can. Anarchism, doomerism, defeatism, all of these are tools that the ruling class uses to try and suppress and neuter our revolutionary potential. But all of these psyops cannot change the objective realities.
The climate crisis will only accelerate the collapse of capitalism, while attempts to violently re-assert imperial control and double down on the exploitation of the global south in compensation for falling rates of profits in the core will only create more resistance and lead to the quicker loss of imperial hegemony.
Socialism will win. And when it does it will build a world that can coexist in harmony with the natural environment. China is showing us every day with its achievements that it can be done and it will be done.
They elected a moderate socdem who immediately turned on all leftist groups that supported him and went all neoliberal austerity. His electoral opponent whom he marginally defeated was the son of a literal Nazi from the Hitler era and big fan of the Pinochet dictatorship who basically made it his campaign promise to undo women’s rights and commit indigenous genocide. Chile is politically quite fucked…
We are going to see more disparaging accusations and mudslinging leveled at anyone who dares challenge the war propaganda as the imperial decline progresses and the desperation sets in. They will try to discredit anti-imperialists with whatever spurious claims they can cook up. They will try to divide the anti-war left and have us turn against each other, taking out first and foremost those who are the most effective at advocating for the anti-imperialist position, those who pose the biggest danger to the mainstream propaganda narrative’s mission of getting the people on board for a world war with China and/or Russia.
And yes they will use ostensibly “leftist” even “Marxist” groups or individuals to do this. Cointelpro has never stopped operating, and now it is ramping up again.