Yep. It’s so weird to me that Americans don’t seem to have electric kettles all that often, since they’re quite common in a lot of places, including my country.

Actually, there’s probably some interesting commentary to be made on modern workplace coffee culture being created and encouraged by the bourgeoisie to squeeze more productivity out of the proletariat…

But I’d rather bash the Trots for how they make their coffee, than do actual Marxist analysis of the ways the working class uses caffeine.

exactly 10 paragraphs of theory reading

I’d probably have to up that to properly time a cup of coffee… my mum says I read too fast.

You should see how Americans make tea. It’s even worse.

You should read the Communist Coffee Maker story on NotAlwaysRight. I also seem to remember another story I saw online where clueless Americans accused the CPC of spying on them through cheap coffee machines made in China… like a good 90% of cheap consumer crap on Turtle Island. It’s not just coffee machines! It’s all bloody made in China! But they’re not worried about any other consumer goods spying on them…

You’re specifically the British or English local party of whatever your tendency is, then. Tendency probably depends on whether you use individual mugs or a teapot, how you heat the water, and whether you use teabags or looseleaf, and if looseleaf, the exact way that you put it into the water and remove it from the steeped tea.

(Or, you’re a modern Chinese commie, see the pics of Xi with two teacups in front of him. But I like the British party branch joke better. Took me longer to write.)

Feel free to invent a new tendency

Like the Trots keep doing? (Party splits)

Or… Trot pretending to be a proper ML… I’ve run into a few of those. Most Trots are proud of being Trots (they shouldn’t be, but at least it makes 'em easy to spot and ignore), but there’s a few weirdos out there…

Ok, but I absolutely love this bit and have come up with something similar - “Big Sister Katya” - her whole thing is that she’s a 1950s/60s Soviet sympathiser, who thinks McCarthy’s a complete idiot, but her personality is otherwise every bit a sheltered middle class teenage girl of the era, she’s often in the kitchen with her mum or helping with some domestic task in her videos, the mum is always a voice offscreen, or partially on screen for short periods but her face isn’t seen, she’s seen taking care of children sometimes - her little siblings - her whole vibe is “It’s the beginning of souring relations with the USSR post war, and your big sister explains why the Cold War is bullshit and neither the guys on the TV news nor Mum and Dad know what they’re yapping about”. It’s never made clear to what extent the character she’s playing genuinely believes it’s the beginning of the Cold War and the peak of McCarthyism, and how much of it is “it needs to be that soon after the Great Patriotic War for some of her points about fascism and defense and good allies to land properly”. Every video follows a formula of “Today we’re doing [insert domestic task] with Mum/for Mum while she’s out today, and discussing [insert Marxist-Leninist theory concept]”.

I don’t know in what context Bugs Bunny would dress up as Stalin, but hot DAMN, even a bunny looks good stealing Stalin’s look.

Yeah… on the one hand, the dragons are a little more creative than drawing China as a panda bear. On the other hand, the panda bear always looks cuddly and detracts from the meaning of the propaganda and I think that’s an incredibly funny juxtaposition.

They’re trying to counteract previous mistakes of drawing China as a panda bear, which… the Soviet Bear thing worked because you can draw a grizzly bear that looks scary (although I find most Soviet Bear junk to look hug shaped anyway), the panda allowed for good Sino-Soviet jokes, but they eventually figured out that it’s very difficult to draw a panda bear that doesn’t look hug shaped and adorable, so they started drawing China as a dragon instead… which only serves to make China look badass. Though I do miss the cuddly panda bears.

That would be amazing and I’d love it.

Except that it’d never exist, because it could only be real workplace nightmares and real union organising under capitalism, but it would never be filmed or aired in a capitalist country. The USSR absolutely would have been willing to make something like that back in the day, but the necessary class contradictions, and unionising as the only means of recourse, simply weren’t present.

I mean, I catch myself falling for Soviet nostalgia crap that ends up in the West a lot, despite having been born long after the dissolution, but like, the Western left as a whole has a Soviet obsession and Eastern Bloc nostalgia problem. Lot of Western communists who didn’t live through the Cold War but miss it anyway, along with those who did live through it and miss when just being a communist was in and of itself revolutionary and dangerous and Doing Something. People who love Soviet aesthetics and still want Red Dawn to actually happen, instead of having to lead a local revolution and take local culture and material conditions into account.

So, this might not work that well in the actual former Warsaw Pact… but it sure as hell works in countries that were on the other side of the Cold War.

That is… Very strange. But also not that surprising. Lot of Russian “past power and glory” nostalgia relies on the Orthodox church and tsarism just as much as it relies on Stalin era USSR or post Great Patriotic War Soviet nationalism.

Thanks for the rec!

Ooh, looks good, can’t wait to sink my teeth into some of this, thanks comrade!

Ooh, neat. I might have an old device lying around that’d be possible to set something like that up on, using that specifically for theory is the most leftist thing ever. Will have to look into that.

The delightful Soviet aesthetics of the Cold War are gone, and every modern commie thing looks exactly the same as capitalist design styles, with hammers and sickles badly bolted on and maybe a coat of red paint… and the powerful united front that was the Warsaw Pact is gone, leaving scattered small AES states that are far from achieving anything close to communism and not really able to rebuild such an organisation. Yeah, being a socialist nowadays sucks. Everything looks and feels terrible, as the legacy of the Soviet Union slowly crumbles and dies.

This, for sure. At least the commie posters aren’t blatantly sexist, and often advocate for the equality of the systematically oppressed.

Stalinism doesn’t exist.