And some pictures of the pages! I’m willing to share any out of my vegan cookbooks of course. This is a good idea for like a mega thread lol. Just share a recipe you like with the site.

Running like 5 days a week instead of anything else because my shoulder still hurts. Excited to get back to strength training but damn it takes a while to heal

I have a version printed in Moscow in 1982. Pretty neat and it was cheap to find 2nd hand. I’d just look on your country’s second-hand shops for it. Like eBay or Facebook marketplace or whatever. Any version is pretty good. First read it’s not gonna matter much which translation! You can read about the translation fights after hahaha

Well if you limit your scope to the west, the anti-bellum imperialism+social democracy push made the K less prominent. But if you expand the scope to all of global capitalism, it’s been a K since our boy Marx at least

Fully agreed. I will once again admit to appreciating videogamedunkey, whose Bad Graphics video’s prescience lives on.

Damn I appreciate this so much! At the end, you should try to put this somewhere? Tankietube or something so we can share with comrades!

I sympathize with this, though I have a ‘philosphy of science’ critique of these sorts of critiques–the forest missed for the trees sort of thing. Holistically considering quotes and portions of huge things as evidence of something while actions and a holistic look may still show its opposite. That is all to say, this doesn’t convince me, but I get that it can be convincing.

I didn’t read this all–I won’t lie by saying I did. But I took an example:

"The main factor in this change is alleged to be the fact that it is now not objective conditions, but man that plays the decisive role in history:

“It is not objective conditions but man that plays the decisive role in the development of history”. (Kim Song Il: ‘On Some Problems of Education in the Juche Idea’, in: ‘On Carrying Forward the Juche Idea’; Pyongyang; 1995: p. 144). "

This seems very easy to me to clarify as the combination of the idea that objective conditions are also created by humans, or at least the most dominating ones. It is just highlighting the opposite in a dialectic which Marx, Lenin, and Stalin were needing to push the other pole of in their times. When Kim Song Il was writing, it was much more important for the movement to recognize the human aspect.

It reminds me of what I read recently (will have to look it up) where Ho Chi Minh talked about Lenin ‘bending the stick’ the other way by saying a more extreme argument to bring the opinions towards a better understanding of the dialectical motion

As Losurdo puts it, Marx sometimes didn’t imply an end to the state saying “the falling away of the state AS SUCH” and other times clearly implied it would go away entirely saying “the falling away of the state” and then discussing the ways that no state power would be needed. It seems Marx just slipped sometimes into that line of thought, but I don’t judge the main body of his work for that slip (the historical materialism and analysis of capitalism)

But what do you consider ways that the DPRK rails against historical materialism? I’ve never heard this claim, genuinely!

Cesare said it first and better, fuck Foucault (nonsexually)

Agreed though I like the wording of:

Fascism is the expropriation at the periphery ever present in Capitalism. Sometimes the periphery is within Geographic borders and defined by race, class, or any myriad of classifications.

But that rolls off the tongue a bit worse lol

Thanks! I enjoyed putting my thoughts down too, glad you liked it. I do think hating MA for his faults is still fine, for sure, including all the horrible shit he used his power for, like every other leader of of Rome. But separating that from the very useful pondering and tactics for avoiding the emotional downsides of failures is useful and allows us to utilize it despite his failures as a person and leader

Also important to note that much of his writing was just journaling, so he may have been simultaneously been a chud outwardly talking about “strength and power and decisiveness” and all that when not contemplating his own troubles alone with his journal

Also, just to have it stated: I am a losurdoist about statelessness. It seems like a major utopian mistake of Marx to really believe this. The state as its current function can be aufgehoben through new functions, but it has more functions than just class struggle for the ruling class that won’t go away. Defense of the revolution might never end, though it will change in form to something much less violent and negative. So I don’t think the DPRK is anti-marxist but it also is not attempting to throw away the state. I was just speaking in hypotheticals that most leftists understand to explain the rationalization you made and how it could be otherwise.

Honestly though, in terms of slop-machine art, this one is top tier. Except for the weird scales approaching the arms, it’s like really well proportioned and pretty. I’d bet someone edited a bit of it to make it better

I’ve found this site a helpful little picture to use in discussions! Site with flow

It seems to me that the democratic process, if done well, can be achieved in steps 1-11, and from there it be a more ceremonial role (which could be abused, I understand). There’s no reason for a logical system to still have disagreements and rejections at stages 12 onwards if the rest is functional and the parties are working together for the betterment. This plus the instant recall mechanism through the 50,000 people represented per representative, seems to me very democratic.

Is this the total reality there? Likely not, there’s always added cultural aspects that shift how something is done and interpreted, and it’s hard to know about the DPRK. But I will always push back when someone fills the gaps with assumptions based on how bourgeois politics wastes all previous steps by still doing bullshit fake politics within the assemblies. Any move away from that is positive

Why would it be if all disagreement is worked out before this vote ever takes place? Then it’s just like signing an already hashed out contract.

You are also just rationalizing, that’s what I was responding to. I could’ve shifted to ways that we know their system works that could explain it, but I wanted you to just realize that you were doing it. You are rationalizing with an assumption that I reversed: namely, that constant agreement within a political is a sign of undemocratic principles. I think this is a bad assumption

Your evidence of their “rubber stamp” system could also be evidence of a system which is more efficiently oriented where proposals only come to that level once they are already so well thought out and we’ll worked out that disagreement isn’t necessary. Or that the disagreement first is worked out at other democratic levels before the rubber stamps just check it for validity/achievability. It’s exactly what I would expect to happen as communism shifts away from elected assemblies as we know them to something more of a “check that it integrates well with the rest of the laws” towards the nebulous “statelessness”.

I don’t think DPRK is completely there, but rubber stamping usually also has some reason for existing, and your assumption that it’s a negative thing is just that: an assumption

Oh fuck is there precedence for this or did you make it up? I hope to God the latter

Yeah, these people are also highly ignorant of the history and culture in which Aurelius found himself. I read it like this: MA was living in a world and culture and position where taking action, being decisive, and such were all givens. Of course he had to be able to do all that, and why focus on something so obvious? So MA was wrestling with the, for him, harder aspects of powerlessness which, though limited, were his main enemy.

Chuds read things like it’s an evangelical reading the bible: every word is the truth regardless of any context. (This is also a western Marxist tendency regarding Marx). So MA saying he couldn’t change something is read as nothing can ever change so complain about attempts

Lol, I do sympathize with this to an extent, but I do think that this book has some good tidbits for those struggling with the ‘choose your battles’ problem. Accepting that you won’t influence everything, and letting that not impact you deeply in a negative way, can really help in focusing on what you can do. MA was definitely mixing these 2 things up quite often, where he could actually affect things but was stoic anyways, but I don’t think dismissing it outright is useful to communists.