Red Hollows

Mostly retweets, occasional tweets | Trying to learn something new every day | M-L📕

[Alice Malone @alicirce]

Capital Volume 2 includes several reflections by Marx of what production under socialism would entail.

This book has unsurprisingly been studied closely by Chinese and Soviet economists, as I examine in the article below.

[scientism @mr_scientism]

The specter of ‘totalitarianism’ and the idea that the greatest political sin is ‘lack of pluralism’ is what’s behind Western failure. These are 20th century ideas. The US can’t respond to China because it abandoned its capacity to think in the name of ‘freedom’.

[scientism @mr_scientism]

America’s image of China is a result of America severing the tie between freedom and reason. You’re not allowed to rationally assess China’s government or its rhetoric. The lack of ‘pluralism‘ is taken to be the mark of unfreedom. There’s not enough hostility, disagreement, etc.

[Roderic Day @RodericDay]

By the way, that account is a "Luxemburgist".

You don't see them much aymore, but Gramsci described Luxemburg (and Trotsky) as "theorists of frontal assault" at a time communism was fighting a "war of position" (Stalin, now Deng).

Luxemburg was 100% a prophet-style communist.

[Roderic Day @RodericDay]

The Scientific vs. Religious worldview debate generalizes this.

"Testing" is why Marxism sought the term "Scientific" to distinguish itself from (popular!) religious-flavored currents of communist activity.

Marx and Engels wanted to make clear they weren't Dühring, or Weitling.

[Mexico Solidarity Media @MexSolidarity]

Mexico Has Allocated More Than 55 Billion Pesos to Indigenous Peoples

The funds back 21 regional justice plans, 432 handcrafted roads, direct infrastructure transfers to 19,718 communities, and a 125-million-peso push to rescue 64 indigenous languages.

https://t.co/xb4WndlKPQ

[Jules @analytichegel]

Here’s the full quote. In my view this is an example of Lenin at his best. I wish this view was more common today

[Roderic Day @RodericDay]

I always come back to this Hegel.

I think it captures something universal about the experience of reacting to horrific events: the getting passionately outraged, then worn out and disillusioned, then cynically resigned.

But instead of simple mockery, it achieves understanding.

[Lei Gong @gonglei89]

Pushing house prices down 40% to what they were 10 years ago while incomes doubled in a country that still needs to urbanize ~200 million people and could still improve housing for another ~300 million will one day be remembered as one of the greatest wealth transfers in history.

[chimera @chimeraxmachina]

"Late stage capitalism" and "neo-feudalism" serve the same purpose. They displace Marxist-Leninist analysis and obfuscate the current economic system: imperialism. It's particularly obvious with Varoufakis, who pushes restrictions on tech monopolies (reforms) as revolution.

[Roderic Day @RodericDay]

Small thread on what I consider **the** most underrated aspect of Marxist theory:

__The obsolescence of "individual exchange".__

By underrated I mean: not featured enough in discussions compared to alienation, rate of profit, crisis, primitive accumulation, class struggle, etc.

[Para @ParacelsusII]

nobody ever asks how lenin had the 'power' to just do this xdd

he just did, somehow

could it be that in 1917 the real 'power' in the as-yet unnamed russian "soviet" republic to 'do stuff' was actually somewhere else other than the constituent assembly?

maybe idk the "soviets"?

[Roderic Day @RodericDay]

Modern academia treats interconnected systemic analysis with suspicion because Marx demonstrated how politically explosive it can become.

[The Kobeissi Letter @KobeissiLetter]

The global yield crisis is accelerating:

10+ year government bond yields of G7 countries are up to ~4.7%, the highest since 2004.

This is now ~0.5 percentage points above the 2008 Financial Crisis peak.

G7 bond yields are also 8 TIMES above the 2020 pandemic low of ~0.5%.

The surge comes amid renewed inflationary pressures from rising energy prices, persistently large government deficits, and the end of central bank QE programs.

As a result, investors are demanding higher compensation for holding long-term government debt.

The global government debt crisis is becoming even more expensive.

[Amal Saad @amalsaad_lb]

The most dangerous outcome of today's Israel-Lebanon negotiations in Washington is not simply normalisation with Israel, or even the normalisation of its occupation and aggression, but the official forging of a soon-to-be-announced threat-based alliance between the Zionist enemy and the US on one hand, and the Lebanese authorities on the other with Lebanon positioned as the junior co-belligerent in a counter-insurgency/counter-"terrorism" mandate against the resistance. And because Hizbullah is not an external militia but the organic political-military expression of an entire resistance community, this counter-insurgency mandate is also a war on the Shia community as a political community.

This is not an overstatement when the reported formula ties any actual ceasefire to two parallel tracks: a gradual Israeli withdrawal that could take up to two years, and a comprehensive Lebanese-Israeli-US enforcement “mechanism” to disarm the resistance. In this manner, the end of Israeli occupation and aggression becomes the reward for dismantling Hizbullah, rather than the starting point of diplomacy.

This reverses the entire logic of the conflict, treating resistance not as the effect of occupation, but as its cause, and effectively relocating the enemy from without to within.
The occupation is thus transformed from aggression into an invited disciplinary presence, preserving Lebanon as a US protectorate organised around a political, economic and security order whose central purpose is the suppression of resistance to its own territorial dismemberment.

What this framework cannot account for is that Hizbullah is not an organisation imposed on a community, but a community that organised itself. Mechanisms can seize facilities and weapons, but they cannot seize the will of a people who have spent more than four decades resisting and sacrificing, in different ways, for their land, lives and dignity. That community will fight, not despite this arrangement but because of it, and because it understands, better than any party in Washington or Beirut, that what is being demanded of it is not disarmament but political annihilation. And it won’t just be Israel they will be fighting, but Lebanon’s internal Israelis, i.e. the right-wing authorities and their allies who have made themselves the domestic arm of the enemy’s war.

[Pepe Escobar @RealPepeEscobar]

Spot on. Hormuz the Sassanid King had a tollbooth on the Strait - and even the Roman Empire had to pay.

[Omar Montoya Suárez @OmarMontoyaSua1]

La idea de que Karl Marx "pensaba que el cálculo era falso" porque "había refutado las derivadas" es una caricatura vulgar y antiintelectual, común en círculos liberales y neoliberes. Marx no rechazó el cálculo. Lo usó, lo historicizó y buscó desmitificarlo. 1/4

[Jostein Hauge @haugejostein]

Ted Cruz should read this paper, which highlights that no country has benefited more from the current global intellectual property regime than the United States.

The authors find a tremendous increase in international income generated by intellectual property rights from the 1980s to the 2010s, going almost entirely to high-income countries — dominated by the United States.

In 1980, the income generated from international payments related to the use of intellectual property was fairly evenly distributed across the world. By 2016, this income was a hundred times higher in high-income countries than in low- and middle-income countries (US$323 billion versus US$3 billion).

Indeed, to use Cruz’s words, it is one of the largest wealth transfers in human history: wealth taken by the United States from developing countries.

[˖᯽ ݁ @m_undine]

everyone is numb to the word fascism not because of its overuse but because they are numb to fascism and are fascized themselves. The hatred of losers, of "weak" actors, of society and the "uneducated" as unfit, are all evidence of an internalized eugenic affect.

[Venezuelanalysis @venanalysis]

Neocolonial plundered. Following the January 3 strikes and kidnapping of President Maduro, the Trump administration has moved in to impose control over Venezuelan resources, w/ Western conglomerates moving in under favorable conditions. Follow our thread/infographic