In a broad sense, yes this is same shit different day, but it’s unique in that the Imperial Boomerang is coming back around and impacting your average gringo lib.

Obviously not stated out loud

Idk they get awfully close sometimes with the “tankie triad” conspiracies.

Ok, but did anyone else really dislike this frosted glass thing that Windows did with Vista and 7?

I remember going from XP to Vista, and feeling the customization drop off considerably, and the whole glass thing made the OS feel cold and unwelcoming.

Now windows doesn’t even have any real customization. Hell, Linux distros don’t really even come with whimsical options out of the box anymore either.

Where are my fun cursors?!

Thought this was the island from Pokémon Snap, at first

And here I thought Gooning was just Edging, but for terminally online NEETs

…but the people who coined the word Tankie were also MLs

Lemmy is by far mostly actual leftists and fake leftists like tankies.

I know I have a scary .ml handle, but please bear with me, because I genuinely want to understand.

Marxism-Leninism, whatever you think of the vicissitudes of its theoretical claims, has been the form of socialism which has seized power, more than any other.

Otherwise there are maoist insurgencies that dot south Asia, some anarchist projects throughout the world, and Trotskyists haven’t made Revolution anywhere.

If you ask me, those other tendencies are still my comrades, I support their struggles, and their histories are mine as well. But I don’t see them proliferating themselves much further than they already have.

What Socialist experiments would you consider “real”, and how are they more real than ML?

I can’t believe you lick the boots of the Paw Patrol

had to escape Venezuela after Maduro took power

they’d become rich under the old system

… They didn’t flee from Chavez? What’s the timeline here?

Venezuelan communes and participatory democracy is flourishing. In addition, massive social programs have been implemented, focusing on housing, food security, and poverty eradication

I think this really needs to be stressed. Venezuela is a country building Socialism. Maduro and the PSUV is in power because of a genuinely incredible mass movement of communes, neighborhood committees, and other organs of grassroots democracy. This is qualitatively different from say, any of the Gulf oil monarchies

I highly recommend the books Building The Commune: Radical Democracy in Venezuela, and Commune or Nothing: Venezuela’s Communal Movement and Its Socialist Project, for a look at these aspects of Venezuelan politics, because it’s often papered over in discussions about the country.

Marxist does not get to exclusively define what imperialism is

Marxism isn’t the only analytical lens out there, no. But the people you’re arguing with are working with that definition, which is why I took the time to clarify. Thank you for appreciating my effort post though lol

The Marxist definition of imperialism is more specific than just “big country invade small country”.

In, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism Lenin lays out five aspects of what makes Imperialism:

1. the concentration of production and capital has developed to such a high stage that it has created monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life;

2. the merging of bank capital with industrial capital, and the creation, on the basis of this “finance capital”, of a financial oligarchy;

3. the export of capital as distinguished from the export of commodities acquires exceptional importance;

4. the formation of international monopolist capitalist associations which share the world among themselves, and

5. the territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist powers is completed. Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.

The question of “Is Russia Imperialist” isn’t a moral one, it’s a technical one. So if Russia were do to something that we all agree is morally reprehensible, that’s a separate concern from whether Russia is imperialist.

The technicality revolves around whether Russia has developed an oligarchy of Financial Capital, such that its invasion of Ukraine or other flexes of its influence, perpetuates the export of Russian finance capital around the world.

As it stands now, I don’t think that’s currently the case, but with Marxism being a dialectal philosophy, I do wonder if this war will accelerate that merging of Bank and industrial capital that Lenin discusses. It’s a Bourgeois states, and there’s financial capital in there somewhere that absolutely has an interest in forming a Russian imperialism.

So when people say “Russia isn’t Imperialist”, this is what’s being referred to. You can take it or leave it, but it’s worth getting into the weeds a bit, so we aren’t all talking passed each other

As an ML, I’m quite fond of other leftists, thank you very much.

While we might have our disagreements, some of them quite stark, I still get along with my Trotskyist or Anarchist friends, and their struggles are also my struggle. I might disagree with how they’re going about it, but that’s what critical support is for.

Trotsky’s take on the peasantry was wrong af though

This is good UI design, and the fact that Steam hardware is making Linux more common and usable is also very cool.

But Idk, people were rightfully dragging Gabe Newell over his insane fucking yacht.

Appreciating some neat tech stuff, and hating capitalism aren’t mutually exclusive

All leftists are my comrades!

Except for those damn Trostskyists!

Who am I?

Wouldn’t a better joke be Tito? Nationalism was explicitly banned in Yugoslavia, whereas various left-wing nationalisms were cultivated in the USSR. Differing positions on the national question were part of what led to the Yugo-Soviet split

Except he immediately started mocking Platner, and talking about how ass backwards his story is the minute the tatto thing came out, and rightfully so because that shit’s crazy.

You don’t have to like the guy, but if this is “glazing” then words just don’t mean anything anymore.

don’t make me tap the sign

All my apes, Juche