Category:Essays

To understand why liberalism is inherently right-wing, it is necessary to discard the views which liberals hold about themselves, and look at the material basis of their ideology

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Many hear the term Dialectical Materialism (or “Diamat”) and think it means entering a world of arcane mysticism or obscure Germanic language. In reality it is simply an analytical toolkit used to analyze and comprehend how the world functions, a worldview which is largely the work of Karl Marx but whose name was coined by Joseph Dietzgen in his description of the method Marxists use for examining reality and connecting high philosophy with rigorous utility. This essay is an introduction to a way of thinking which sees the world as a dynamic interconnected system rather than as a collection of static discrete objects.

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You look at a picture of a busy street in a strange country, and your glance travels from person to person. It notices their dress, the surrounding architecture, the poses they assume. And you might ask yourself if you could live in this place. This is a natural, basic reflex we all have. Each of us has conceived some particular kind of life as worthy of desire, and this conception has been moulded by the customs and traditions of our youth. We take our individual conceptions and transfer them upon those who live by other standards and have different ideals from our own. We imagine that they must be unhappy because they lack the comforts and conveniences which we have come to regard as necessities, or that they cannot be free because their daily life is not governed by the same social understandings and traditions as where we happen to live. But in this moment of judgment, few people are reflective. They do not turn the question back upon themselves and inquire what is the source of their own moral and aesthetic standards.

To understand what is really happening, it is necessary to strip away all ornament and look at the facts of human life without any preconceptions. Every civilization begins with the basic fact that we are animals living on a rock in space, with certain needs which are very much the same in all times and places. A certain amount of food is required for our bodies to work properly, and this is measured in terms of calories and protein. We need shelter from the weather so as not to die of cold at night. We need physical and psychological safety as we go about our lives. Above all, we need some means of production so that we can meet our fundamental needs. A society must produce food and goods that its citizens need, which, in turn, require agriculture, manufacture, mining, and all the other industries our modern world depends on. This is the material basis upon which everything else is built up. It must be secured first because nothing else can exist without it. Everything else, such as our laws, our art, and our religion, is an ornament which we have built upon this foundation.

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The ultimate guide to emulating consoles and games on your devices, updated often. No-fuss, no bs, straight to the point. How to start emulating consoles, how to get games on the internet, how to flash your consoles, etc.

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Yes, there are many privacy guides. But this one is mine. Meant to be quick and give you the cognitive tools to understand privacy.

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It is often the case that liberal feminists take as a point of pride the perceived womanliness of the ability to give birth, and use it as a defining factor for the female gender.

Author: LGC

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This essay exists to clarify the nature of crisis and to demystify them away from idealist conceptions of "natural radicalization".

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Short analysis of a visitor to ProleWiki following a viral post, and how people who start off wanting to mock the 'tankies' may very well eventually become Marxists themselves.

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For people who struggle with not belonging, Communism has an answer.

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Prizes, grants and OSINT are all part of a carefully crafted network of regime change

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Debate culture is a waste of revolutionary energy.

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For people who struggle to read the original work.

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Tearing apart ultraleft arguments about the UN and Russian and Chinese imperialism.

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What is the morality of the communist? What are our ethics? On what basis? The morality adequate to our struggle is not the morality of the ruling class dressed as universal ethics but the morality born from the recognition that our liberation requires their expropriation, that our humanity requires the negation of their inhumanity, that our flourishing requires the transformation of the system that produces our immiseration.

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What's gonna happen to Mexican workers when there's no more dollar?

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Regardless of one's feelings on the matter, we can clearly say that AI has been transformative because it never fails to provoke heated arguments. And not only that, but the arrival of commercial models, that is, models that can be run either in your browser (on a cloud service) or on your own machine (local) seems to have shifted perspectives entirely. What becomes bothersome is that self-proclaimed communists seem to have done a complete 180 on intellectual property, and this is what we want to focus on.

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The positivists have thus far only interpreted nature as data; the task, however, is to dissolve the observer into the process, to make science itself a moment of praxis.

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This was not individual tragedy but structural violence made visible, the routine operation of capitalist patriarchy proceeding through its normal channels toward its normal outcome. She is dead. The structure that killed her remains. It is producing others like her at this moment, subjecting them to the same conditions, offering them the same impossible choices, preparing them for the same destruction. Our task is to identify with precision what must be abolished and to organize the collective force necessary to abolish it.

This requires dialectical materialist analysis capable of grasping totality without losing sight of individuals, structural determination without eliminating agency, historical necessity without accepting the inevitability of any particular outcome. It requires rage disciplined by theory and compassion disciplined by materialism.

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This essay discusses the nature of gender libertarianism, expanding on the ideas of comrade Sanserifseraphim.

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In the history of the transgender question there are primarily two perspectives which have emerged and developed since the late 19th century. Those two views are: Social Pathology or Social Revolution. The social pathology view emerges in its modern form with the development of capitalism and science (specifically sociology, psychology, and eugenics) is it fundamentally rooted in sophistry, the continual questioning of trans existence. The second perspective is social revolution, while prefigured by scientific developments especially in Germany and the early Soviet Unions. It emerges alongside the second wave feminist, civil rights, and gay rights movements of the 20th century. It is generally the view held by the most politically organized members of the trans community, and was developed by organizations like Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries1 and the Worker’s World Party2, events like the Stone Wall Riots, and people like Sylvia Rivera and Leslie Feinberg. The social revolutionary perspective is rooted in science and an understanding of the class and patriarchal roots of trans oppression.

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Is prostitution just another job? Or is it fundamentally coercive i.e. commodified intimacy extracted through economic desperation that cannot be reformed, only abolished? Can consent exist under threat of destitution? Does calling it "sex work" liberate anyone, or does it naturalize existing structures and social relations? If revolutionary violence against structures is justified, what becomes of systems built on gendered commodification? These aren't moral questions but material ones, demanding answers grounded in class struggle rather than liberal platitudes about "choice" and "empowerment". This text attempts to rigorously face the various questions directly.

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This paper discusses gender and it’s interactions, internal mechanisms and development through a dialectical-materialist lens, and is to be treated as a piece denoting a framework which must be developed upon collectively to further our understanding of gender and it’s interplay with society.

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Something that bothers me is the label of "anti-capitalist" as if it's a real, concrete belief, and not just a rule of thumb. it's been used for marxists, anarchists, social-democrats, etc. But the truth is, most ideologies are anti-capitalist by this definition, even if, materially, they serve only to reinforce capitalism and strike against proletarian organization.

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In which I explain how we survived and why we are now under threat of cultural extinction.

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This paper addresses two interconnected questions concerning the dynamics of a classless communist society. First, with the abolition of class antagonisms, what drives historical development and growth, and is progress even possible without class contradictions as the engine of history? Second, if growth continues and non-antagonistic contradictions persist between humanity and nature, who or what enforces necessary limits and restraints to prevent humanity from exhausting nature and thereby destroying itself, given that humanity exists not separate from or above nature but as an integral part of it?

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Furthermore, every individual is originally native to some place based on historical relationship to a Community, and their membership to a Community is defined by a complex and nuanced interaction of lineage from that Community and their actual productive activity, their work. (...) We thus conclude that the indigenous question is the national question, and the national question is the indigenous question. The national question is a question of unity and of community and of people and of collectivism. The national question is a question of love, and Communism is all about the practical expression of the highest form of non-egoic, selfless love directed towards all humanity and all life: through service to the people a Communist demonstrates the principle: we want everyone to be well fed, to thrive, to be happy. In fact, the national struggle is also the class struggle, so the indigenous struggle is too a class struggle. For after all, every national and class struggle is a struggle for control and ownership of a state. If indigenous people are to liberate themselves, they must control the state. Yet at any given time, a state is controlled only by a specific class. Therefore, it is always a dictatorship of the proletariat representing the interests of the indigenous population that Communists should be struggling for and nothing less.

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Over the past few years, there’s been a few trends emerging in online groups, and even in socialist parties, that I’ve noticed growing like a malignant tumor. For lack of any pre-existing terms, I've named these trends Ideologism and Aestheticism. Although these trends have existed for decades, they’ve taken on a unique, and quite annoying, new form with the growth of the internet and, more specifically, the growth of the internet’s intersection with politics.

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For release: ProleWiki has rolled out a custom sepia mode for reading comfort

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Dialectical thinking appears in fragments across cultures. Humans observe phenomena in the universe, which leads to knowledge of dialectics, and dialectical knowledge empowers humans to exert influence over the universe. ... The question is to what degree is the knowledge of dialectics developed. The question is to evolve a system or cosmology into something fully dialectical.

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Quick summary of our large reader survey responses and answers to some of the feedback received in there

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There have been many attempts at creating international auxiliary languages to unite the peoples of the world. The most famous of them all by far is Esperanto. But how does one even create such a language? And how can you tell whether or not it is any good?

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This essay aims to examine some misguided assertions that I have seen quite often over the years. Some of these views are not only held by liberals but also by communists, and not only by people who know little about language and linguistics but also by people who have dipped their toes in it and think of themselves as knowing quite a bit.

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Recommended socialist films from ProleWiki's editors

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ProleWiki announces its brand new homepage. Read more to find out what's new and what you can do with it.

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What are the material conditions of the United States? Understanding this question is central to grasping how far away the United States is from a revolutionary situation. Wang Huning's insights will help illustrate the current material conditions.

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I've been noticing a trend with certain comrades, where said comrades (particularly whom are cisgender) are supportive of transgender people, yet their analysis of the woman question didn't change much from the 1960s.

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Read inside to learn how you can edit ProleWiki without an account.

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There is a narrative common in the West that claims that West Asia (often incorrectly referred to as the “Middle East”) is somehow inherently violent. That its people have been at war for thousands of years and just cannot be peaceful. It also promotes an Orientalist view of West Asia, claiming that the root of instability in the region is religious differences going back thousands of years. This is then contrasted with the “modern” and “civilized” Europe, which has been at peace for a long time and presumably would remain at peace forever if only those Muslims would leave them alone!

All of these claims are false.

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Disclaimer: This essay contains transphobia and quotes from transphobic authors. If you are sensitive to this, please take caution while reading this essay.

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I've lived in China for over a year now. I moved here at the beginning of last year. Send me questions! You can hit the button marked 'Discussion' up at the top of the page to do so. I like writing so feel free to ask me anything about life here China!

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A guide to writing SEO content on ProleWiki or other wikis

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An essay explaining ProleWiki's relationship to Marxism-Leninism, its principles, and criticism. ProleWiki has evolved to accept only Marxist-Leninists in its membership, and this essay explains the reasoning and context that lead to this decision.

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A casual-toned critique of KKE along with a short history of the party.

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More and more people are saying the situation in Palestine is "complicated". That we have to deplore the amount of deaths on "both sides". That Hamas is "illegitimate" or "terrorists". Even worse, they are now compared to ISIS! What an insult.

Starting from the origins of Zionism through the colonisation of Palestine to the recent Flood of Al-Aqsa operation in October 2023, we aim to set the record straight and debunk Zionist propaganda that aims to retain its cushy privilege in Palestine by any means necessary -- including psychological warfare against the world population.

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On a day like any other of July 2023, ProleWiki archived its old library to make way for a new one, redesigned from the ground up.

In this essay, I want to go into the considerations and challenges surrounding the redesign of our library, and compare it to a very well-known library in marxist circles, the Marxists Internet Archive.

I hope it will provide comrades with valuable insight into how to conduct projects from a design perspective, whether for their party, agitprop work, or even their personal hobbies.

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The LGBT Question involves answering many aspects. This includes sex, sexuality, and gender. Many Marxists and so-called 'Marxists' have tried to answer this question utilising the tools of science. However the correct application to the scientific method requires a concrete understanding of Materialist Dialectics. This essay serves not only to understand LGBT people from a dialectical perspective, but also serves as a critique to the 'marxists' (in other words: revisionists, reactionaries) who claim the LGBT people are either idealist, or do not align with the dialectical framework.

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If we hold that Marxism-Leninism is a wide, all-encompassing framework, then it follows that we will see it in action in some fields (at times more in some than in others), and that there is something to be learned from these fields to apply them to Marxism.

In other words, we can further our understanding and practice of Marxism by integrating things -- which may not seem Marxist at first -- into it.

Design thinking has gone through its own dialectics and what was once a very niche term privy to only a select few has gone through its pop science phase through relatable 21st century bourgeois like Steve Jobs to finally become, in its current incarnation, a very rational process.

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ProleWiki is proud to present its brand new Essays feed!

With this new page, which is immediately replacing our legacy page, we hope to develop a more robust presence as essay/article writers and potentially even collaborate with other writers and authors!

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The government of Taiwan, entranced in some rapacious delusion of money, of capitalist grandeur, further distances itself from the masses who, now in the highest percentage yet, oppose independence.

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On B. R. Myers’ The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters (2011), a novel by a supposed "leading expert."

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Anark has no understanding of the class character of the state, does not even mean to address it, this “class” has no features other than its oppression, so that we may arrive at Bakunin’s nonsense of a “new proletariat” suppressed by the DOTP. The state is an apparatus for the suppression of one class by another, of, in orthodox, the suppression of the majority by the minority, for the reconciliation of irreconcilable contradictions, although in the national sense the proletarian state (which Lenin clarifies in this sense is no longer a state proper) may through the masses suppress the bourgeoisie whose power is supported internationally, as seen from the counterrevolutionary movement against the Bolsheviks supported by the imperialist powers.

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The vestiges of the feudalist press and suppression were replaced with free press, free speech, and free expression. These phrases obscured the real essence of capitalism; where the press became an economic institution (the bourgeoisie possessing the masses of capital), it had at once reformed itself into a direct expression of class interest to which the proletariat were excluded on the very basis of their essence as a class.

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We have heard of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s “self-imposed isolation” and the nation has been incessantly referred to as a “hermit kingdom”, but what is the root of this idea? What we have in reality is a state that has, in the course of its history, attempted to form peaceful relations, to establish travel, and to usher in the signing of a new peace treaty for the cause of reunification. On the other hand, the United States, the world’s paramount military aggressor, and its front group the “United” Nations has rebuffed these overtures, introducing limitations on travel for the purposes of producing a skewed image of a “hostile rogue state” incapable of negotiations, while at the same time escalating tensions.

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Review of Marxism: Philosophy and Economics by Thomas Sowell

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As ProleWiki evolves, it's only natural that this project slowly finds a culture of its own and cements it -- and not only that, but self-reproduces it as well.

Community culture is very important for many reasons. One of them is through that process of self-reproduction. As new editors come in, they can quickly get a feel for what is expected of them and where they can participate, with minimal delay to get them up to speed and active, as well as minimal reading required. Nobody wants to have to spend a dozen hours understanding what they just joined before they can participate on it.

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There have been many controversies around China's Socialist nature or not and the current economic system of China occured. China remains, to this day, a Marxist-Leninist nation. This article will primarily be tackling it's internal economic policy and attitude towards the markets, as well as how the nature of the state and market coincide with each other.

This essay demonstrates the historical context, ideological origins and justifiactions of China's economic model, known as the "Socialist Market Economy." I will also go into the specific mechanisms of the Socialist Market Economy itself, and how it contradicts "Capitalist logic", while simultaneously maintaining the dominant position of Public Ownership. And how the Socialist Market Economy/People's Republic of China continues to provide and improve the material quality of the life of the average Chinese person.

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If we are to understand the role that capitalism plays in the settler-colonialism that Canada is founded on, and how that relation perpetrates the racism which allows this extreme form of police brutality to exist relatively unhindered in our society, we must first understand why a state forms and who it serves. As Lenin wrote in The State and Revolution, “The state is a product and a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms. The state arises where, when and insofar as class antagonism objectively cannot be reconciled”, from this we can understand that as long as we have capitalism as our dominate mode of production, the interests of those who the state protects will always be at odds with the interests of the vast majority of the population in that state. Since these class antagonisms cannot be rectified as the interests of the class are opposed to one another, the state creates “bodies of armed men” in order to enforce the will of the ruling class through force onto the oppressed class; it is from this reality where police brutality takes root. With this definition in mind, we can begin to explore police brutality against Indigenous peoples in both a modern and historical context.

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An essay designed to find the qualitative and quantitative differences in the structure of both China's and Russia's economic reforms. Described as Reform and Opening Up in China and Shock Therapy for Russia. The argument of this essay is simple, the nature of China's economic reforms is not tantamount to simply "restoring capitalism" unlike what Russia did. We will measure the reforms from 1978 to around 1996, when the Russian reforms and Chinese reforms were both well under way. We will look at the effects on quality of life, structure of economic reorganization, public and private sectors under Deng's reforms and Shock Therapy.

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ProleWiki has a plain-text Library of books, and to feed it, we need digitized books that we can copy from.

Digitizing books is something very few of us have ever had to do, yet it's not especially complicated.

In this guide, we'll cover various ways you can scan and digitize your own books, which will fit all budgets and technical capabilities.

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This guide is not aimed towards communists specifically -- the principles apply to everyone similarly. However, arguments can be made as to why a guide on a communist encyclopedia is important and interesting:

Many comrades want this information, but do not know where to get it. In this way we are bringing it to them if they happen to read ProleWiki. The fitness industry is dominated by reactionary content and personalities. With this guide, you are sure it was written by a communist and will not contain unwelcome anecdotes. And of course, fitness is important to all communists for a variety of reasons.

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To get the most out of this guide, practice Mandarin everyday. Even if you only have 15 minutes of spare time. Doing 15 minutes of practice everyday will give better results than a half-hour every other day.

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I'm serious. How is 'dengism' even defined to begin with? Maoists (and other Anti-revisionists) seem to love this word, as this is a catch-all phrase for any 'revisionists' who appears to support the People's Republic of China. We could define 'dengism' to be this way, however, it also can apply to 'revisionists' who support the 4 other claimed socialist nations as well. This leads to a question. What even is 'dengism'?

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Marxism-Leninism-Maoism is a controversial ideology, to say the least. I wrote the Maoism article initially with a more 'neutral' standpoint whilst still critiquing its theory under the 'Criticism' section. This will be a more biased viewpoint of Maoism, as it describes the problems with it. Despite my bias, I will attempt to remain neutral. I will consider not only its theory, but its praxis, and seeing how it Maoism applies to the real world.

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This essay is outdated, see Dogmatism, Cults, and Religion.

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In the current context of the class struggle in the United States of America, it seems that with each passing day, a strand of theory known as patriotic socialism is becoming more and more popular with the masses.

At least, that is what its proponents would have us believe. Unable to create their own movement, self-proclaimed "patriotic socialists" in the States would rather focus on destroying other established communist parties and projects. This is how we were flooded with the "CPUSA 2036" slogan on Twitter: an attempt to infiltrate the Communist Party of the USA, hijack its power structures, and redirect its energy to "patriotic socialism".

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The advent of the high-tech era, marked by the proliferation of personal computing devices in the 90s, has brought about a social transformation whose effects are still not entirely understood. Communication has been thrust into instantaneity: real-time chat and mobile devices have rendered "snail mail" and more static forms of voice communication to a bygone era, and thoughtful long-form writing has to fight its way across a caustic sea of attention-seeking headlines and quips written in record time.

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Gus Hall (1910-2000) was leader of the CPUSA from 1959 until his death in 2000. Hall was known for frequently taking a staunch Marxist-Leninist stance and led the CPUSA through a number of difficult times. In late 1991, a group of reformist members of the CPUSA known as the Committees of Correspondence led a push to move the party away from Marxism-Leninism. This faction was defeated and as a result left the party. This, along with the dissolution of the USSR and fall of the Eastern Bloc socialist countries all in quick succession, resulted in a weakened communist party. The party remained under the leadership of Hall through this period, but as his health deteriorated he stepped down from the position in late 2000 and was replaced by Sam Webb, who was 55 at the time.

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There are no two ways about it. When you started this path you probably had your mind blown at all the cool new things you learned. The class struggle, dialectical materialism, historical materialism… you probably started questioning everything around you; how come we live in neoliberal hellholes? How come the rest of the world is poor and we are not? How come this, how come that?

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All communists should know how to handle police when they come knocking. Not only do we understand the reasons to be wary of the police (systemic racism, their role as an enforcer of bourgeois rules...), we must be doubly cautious because our activism and ideological leanings put us at risk.

This guide will first give some general pointers to handle police no matter where you live and then delve into the laws of, hopefully, each country in the world.

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It comes up again and again in the various socialist groups, and the issue never seems to be really settled. Is China communist? Should we support China?

We are surrounded by accusations, criticism, respect and deference to and for the Middle Kingdom. Let's try to understand the country for once. Whether actions or lack of actions are good or bad is complicated to discern, as it often depends on one's perspective. Based on this, I offer the following reasoning.

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We are in an age where communication has reached a speed never before possible. Anyone who is active on the Internet experiences a sheer wave of information every day that floods the inexperienced user. One's own bilingualism even acts as a multiplier for the mass of information that the increased appearance of contrarians, slogan parroters and misguided people should surprise no one. Where, however, does the communist stand in this situation?

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Imperialism is perhaps the most prolific reactionary force in the world, regularly finding its downfall within revolutionary programs. The masses clearly find themselves no longer under the oppressive boot of a single capitalist yolk, but strangled by a double yolk: capitalism and imperialism. All communists who genuinely wish to free the global masses must probe deeply into the universal essence of imperialism, it is only by thoroughly studying and properly analysing imperialism that the modern situation can be accurately understood: how to approach it, and more importantly, how to change it. It is only through studying imperialism that the targets for our guns will make themselves clear.

To negate and dismiss an adequate analysis of imperialism, is to join the camp of global reactionaries, and abandon the world Proletariat.

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it is Stalin’s Birthday today, and as this piece relates to him, I decided to post it on this day

Recently, a disturbing trend has come to my attention, the unrelenting defamation of comrade Stalin by certain Gonzaloist circles. These Gonzaloists , desperately trying to deepen the theoretical rift between Stalin and Mao even where there is no split to be found. They try to artificially expand a miniscule crack into an all-encompassing rupture. They unsuccessfully attempt to make Stalin look like a stupid idiotic reactionary who was [theoretically] completely destroyed by the absolute genius and humanity’s saviour, Mao: any credit to another of the 5 heads is an attack on Mao himself. They are obsessed. They are a cult.

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The use of substances that alter the quality of the consciousness is not something intrinsic to exploitation.

The primitive communists used consciousness-transforming substances collectively, following their hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Mushrooms, plants and other substances were all experimented collectively.

Our perspectives on drug abuse today are metaphysical, backward and reactionary: we treat addiction as phenomena directly caused by substances, not by the material conditions human beings find themselves in.

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