AFAIK China’s opening up didn’t occur until the 80s or hit its stride until the 90s.

It depends on what kind of mask. If you’re wearing an N95/KN94 mask then you’re protecting yourself (and if it doesn’t have a valve also others if you happen to have it) by filtering 95/94% of viral particles.

Though I agree it could attract unwanted attention and hassle in some areas. Even in a place like California I’ve been followed around stores for a minute or so for still masking by employees who I guess thought I was there to shoplift but I’ve never been seriously confronted about it. I’ve had a cowardly guy shout from a dozen feet away how I should take it off and some rambling nonsense but I just stared at him and he stormed off, I’ve had a handful of guys tell me it’s a shame I’m wearing it because they’d like to see my “pretty face” (ugh), but most people don’t say anything. I’m sure many anti-maskers resent me but given most of the public has joined them in giving up I think they’re content to just feel smugly superior and say shit behind my back which I can live with.

This community might be of interest as they still talk about it a lot there: [email protected]

I still wear a mask. I wouldn’t necessarily wear one or keep one on if I was walking around a lightly populated park or down the sidewalk but I would before going into a store or a crowd (even outdoors) or any enclosed space with people like a train or station.

I’m not sure how mask wearing compares by country. In most of Asia it seems like it’s been normalized for decades for people who are feeling ill or have certain conditions to wear the blue cloth medical masks so I doubt in most of Asia it’s a big deal in most situations compared to the west where you have anti-mask reactionary sentiment and ideology that favors individual recklessness rather than responsibility.

Ukrainian military keeps Russian civilians in ‘concentration camps’

The cruelty is the point. Nazi-loving bastards like these think if they torment and abuse and terrorize and do human rights atrocities on enough civilians that Russia will submit to more favorable terms or that it will somehow benefit them militarily by making them divert more to defense. Besides that from the US point of view it’s about punishing the civilian population for not submitting to them, no different than bombing the Vietnamese or Korean people or using depleted uranium in Iraq.

Elite US unit training against China / US war plans over Taiwan and area denial problems

To be honest I think we may be a bit overly optimistic about how a conflict here would go. Meaning that the US may have area denial weapons including advanced naval mines, hunter-seeker semi-autonomous or swarm-directed naval (undersea) and air drones, etc which they may be able to use with other capabilities (I wouldn’t put it past them doing something like deploying chemical or radiological weapons to be honest among other things) to stop the PLA from being able to take Taiwan right away and buy enough time to change the course of things.

Given the US will likely instigate the actual war over it and know the time and place so be prepared when they tell their pawn to declare independence or do something else unacceptable they will have that advantage.

Then for the US it’s simply a matter of more area denial, sending in their own troops via air and fighting a vicious and bitter fight to inflict casualties on any attempted landings or air-drops all while pounding and destroying China’s navy to the best of their abilities with beyond the horizon weapons leaving China only the option of hitting US land bases in Japan, occupied Korea or using very long range weapons to hit further afield but certainly denying China any kind of conventional naval battle. People like to imagine and I myself am guilty of this the US just kind of steaming in while whistling and doing an attack run on a Chinese naval blockade, where-after the Chinese use dongfeng missiles to send their carriers to the bottom. Sadly the US knows this possibility which is likely why they’ll keep most of their ships away or at shallow port in Taiwan itself and use their island chains plus mines and drone warfare launched from beyond the horizon and their puppets in Japan to do continuous area denial.

As with Ukraine the point isn’t to win, it’s to kill Chinese, attempt to humiliate them, cause friction internally by killing large numbers of people to prompt anti-militarist/anti-government/anti-party sentiment they can work with. I would expect other humiliations like blowing up the chip foundries and destroying all the data while killing or forcibly evacuating all their chip scientists. Other humiliations and offenses include seeing to the removal of most of the valuable historical objects from Taiwan’s museum that the nationalists looted on their way out of the mainland to be taken to US museums as plunder and prizes.

Western firms pulling back from China

Basically it looks like decoupling is going full steam ahead and we are heading back to a cold war situation with two camps and some groups trying to straddle between them. Many, many people doubted this could happen. I hoped it wouldn’t happen but they’re going to do it and no having to rely on some raw materials type inputs from China doesn’t mean much, the US relied on Soviet titanium it bought up through shell companies and that didn’t change the nature of the blockade and embargo the US effectively had on the entire Soviet bloc.

The US’s task is not easy here given how many countries want to get involved with BRICS but even if they lose most of the global south they still have enough plundered wealth, technological head-start, and momentum to continue on fighting bitterly for some decades I think.

One must remember the situation for the US at the end of WW2 and the start of the last cold war was hardly ideal either. Europe was full of communist resistance fighters and the left was genuinely popular, anti-imperialist movements were sprouting across the globe, many of them sympathetic to the USSR or helped by them. Yet over the decades that followed they did Gladio, they did a variety of coups, of fostering instability, of color revolution type activities, of installing dictators and so on and managed to stop the pink/red tide and claw back wins. They only really lost in direct confrontations with Vietnam and China by proxy in Korea (DPRK would have lost were it not for China’s help) and even in those cases they severely punished and set an example for any who would resist them by bombing their peoples viciously, subjecting them to biological and chemical warfare, and of course destroying their industry, homes, crops, etc and setting their development back decades.

Overall I am feeling less hopeful than I was a year ago or three years ago. Anyone have any push-back (ideally with sources) to make me feel a bit better? Because it looks like we’re settling in for a long and very hard battle with the strong possibility of many more proxy wars like in the first cold war and China facing some serious headwinds of their own with the US and Europe potentially being able to decouple before China can have alternatives in Africa able to cushion the impact.

There are rumors about lemmygrad as well,

Rumors from the people who were on a website that was an op? That doesn’t seem credible. Anyways there’s always that risk. If you live in the west and post here you shouldn’t post anything that breaks the law under the assumption the admins are literally CIA agents and actively hostile. Now there’s no evidence of this. Dessalines has a long history of being an ML with correct lines on the anti-imperialist struggle on reddit for years before they developed Lemmy and launched this website.

Frankly though there will always be an air of distrust given the history of infiltration and subversion in the west. However, the fact that Dessalines has not tried to ever push reactionary social thought or imperialist positions, the fact they don’t instigate struggle sessions and try and split people up or cause strife and in-fighting are all strong indicators that those who run this website are likely not feds or anti-communist activists (like feds but not paid and no badge or security clearance). That doesn’t mean this website isn’t under surveillance.

The surest way to out glowies is they serve the interests of empire. They were usually find it acceptable to push anti-capitalist positions so long as they also can push at least some pro-empire positions. Things that appeal to liberals, things like the Hong Kong color revolution or Ukraine which they can try and approach from a faux left position of claiming Russia is imperialist. They can bend on things like Gaza where it’s just not possible to do otherwise as even liberals would shame them. If someone consistently takes a correct anti-imperialist line 100% of the time and takes an anti-capitalist line 100% of the time and understands the US is the main issue and espouses this then they are working against the US 100% and the only way to be of utility as an asset in that situation is to engineer splits via struggles over some minor point that they enlarge into a raging flame-war intentionally. Such a person would not seek peace or issue a line and put the discussion off limits but attempt to keep it raging.

Misogyny and patriarchy are so normalized and interwoven with our lives that we’re expected to take minor improvements on an abomination as progress. I feel your pain comrade.

It’s like a slave strike that results in a law for better accommodations and maximum amount of corporal violence that can be used. It’d obviously be an improvement in a vacuum but it’s just making something that shouldn’t exist slightly more comfortable while lessening the ammo those against it have. The solution of course is abolition so anything that perpetuates it, normalizes it, gives it good PR, allows people to live in denial about it or act like it’s okay is frustrating and I must say confusing.

This is just the limits of working with reformism and within capitalism I feel. It does make one want to condemn and step away from the whole thing in disgust as a farce.

And I’ve expressed before these same fears. It’s logical and will happen which is why I’m against normalization. I’m not for criminalizing victims but not for legalizing it either for these reasons.

I do think that there may be a need for re-evaluation of tactics and strategies in the present and in the imperial core but I don’t think this is it.

That is to say, if the wealth of Communist Parties in the West were a substantial percentage of total privately held wealth, Communist Parties could employ the exact same means bourgeois individuals and entities use to influence the levers of power.

This would allow Communist Parties to gradually manipulate the political system to favor their own firms, allowing further expansion of the co-op / party-owned enterprise model, with a goal of eventually just buying out some of the remaining capitalists and abolishing the rest.

This kind of reminds me of that meme of the academic standing in front of a blackboard with mathematical theorems and for step 2 it has “then a miracle happens” and the other guy standing next to him saying he should elaborate more on what happens there.

Why would the capitalists, having the high-ground, having pre-existing access to power, having built a fortress in terms of superstructure, loyal dogs in the halls of power and violence and so on just allow this to happen instead of using violence, subversive tactics, laws, etc to simply crush the communist led businesses or subvert them in some way either overtly by seizing control or value or through subversion, infiltration, use of the CIA, FBI, etc to poison the movement and turn it against itself, to turn it into a compromised asset of sorts?

They’d murder the true proponents of such thinking and replace them with dishonest businessmen who’d promise the same but keep the keys in their pocket and then pull out the rug on their workers in 10 years time and pocket the value. Which would dispirit others from trying and convince most people it was all just a scam.

They can simply ban the communist parties. Simply ban businesses affiliated with them. Simply take all their assets under a communist control or anti-foreign agents law and then sell them cheaply to competitors at government auction.

Also how would we working within the system be able to out-compete them who have value extracted from the global south via imperialism/neo-colonialism as well as generationally hoarded wealth? By working harder? Exploiting ourselves harder than they can exploit their workers? Than they can exploit desperate climate migrants? I don’t think this is a good plan for privileged westerners under the thumb of a capitalist government. For peoples who’ve lived in absolute poverty, starvation, knowing want and suffering and backwardness for generations sure it’s an easy sell as it was in China when they began industrializing but people tend to want better conditions, not to voluntarily subject themselves to conditions much worse than those of their parents all in the hopes that in some decades not that they’ll be financially secure within capitalism because of work but that they’ll maybe buy it out or overthrow it if they’re not crushed and sabotaged in the meantime. (Hence why they will be sabotaged early and often to dispirit and discourage people)

I mean they could simply levy new huge, punishing taxes across the board then give tax breaks, special exemptions, bail-outs etc to the capitalist controlled enterprises while siphoning the value from the collective enterprises straight to the imperialist machine and handing some of it back to the capitalists while using the rest to continue to fund the global and domestic oppression.

I mean where is the capital for starting to do all this supposed to come from? To start up companies, means of production you need money. People lending a bit of labor and free-time on their weekends isn’t going to create machinery or produce the capital for buildings, staff, etc. When the people who actually have this capital are either PMC type workers who benefit from the continuation of capitalism and would rather not work harder to beat others for an ideological project or the capitalists themselves who’d only fund such a thing to subvert it, pull the rug out and take the profit from all the hard work I just don’t understand how this gets off the ground without foreign interference like China funding it which would get it instantly shut down for foreign communist subversion that’s a threat to national security. Will the liberal compromised unions give us the funds? I think not. The communist parties in the US are either compromised and full of liberals (CPUSA) or still struggling to grow and hardly have the capital and funds for such.

Also I’m pretty sure there’s a law on the books about communist parties owning businesses in the US or at least newspapers but it could be expanded.

Your examples:

Examples to learn from would be the Japanese Communist Party’s influential newspaper, which earns the JCP 110 million USD a year, Mondragon, a European industrial cooperative with more than 60,000 workers, Haier, a Chinese SOE known for its radical organizational structure and exceptional growth, and Huawei, technically a worker’s cooperative but generally so successful that the United States levied sanctions on it.

The JCP is awful, communist in name only. They follow the imperialist line, attack China, are revisionist, liberal, etc. They’re harmless and a false path which is why they’re allowed. They also as you note are powerless and losing steam. Let’s not say being trots is good, your idea is out-competing capitalists but they’re not competing in the communist newspaper market, trots have had that cornered for decades but have gone nowhere.

Mondragon is simply an exception not a rule, it’s allowed to exist and isn’t in any way working towards buying out and overthrowing capitalism and if it was it would probably have been crushed. Contradictions exist under capitalism and they exist under socialism, they are not proof of anything but that fact itself.

Haier and Huawei exist under the coat and wings of an in-power revolutionary communist party in a nation that’s been ideologically communist for over half a century now. And as you note one of them is being blockaded from the west essentially as part of a push to contain China.

We’re Marxists. We’re against liberalism. Liberalism is the ideology of capitalism as another user already told you.

You’ve been taught a false binary. This is intentional to limit your ability to think critically about capitalism. All of us were. There is no binary.

There is liberalism (subset of which include conservatism, US Republicans), Marxism, and technically you could have non-liberal reactionaries like say sincere Monarchists who prefer a return to feudalism or some other older system and reject the enlightenment. However, largely speaking there are two groups as the amount of reactionaries who genuinely reject liberalism and assert a desire to return to and an embrace of a pre-liberal philosophy is shockingly small and they have no real traction anywhere among anyone, especially among Republican voters seething and crying about liberalism as to a one those people like most parts of liberalism (many of them espousing a return to “classical liberalism” or "liberalism before all these uppity women and minorities got rights and did things I didn’t like) and embrace for example the liberal idea of free enterprise, free markets, etc.

We reject the notion that we are at the end of history, that liberalism represents some final, perfect stage of humanity as opposed to previous societal stages such as the feudal, the monarchistic, the slave-society, the tribal, hunter-gatherer primativism, etc. As Marxists we say of liberalism what many liberals said of feudalism, namely that it was a historical stage, that it may have in certain ways represented advancements over previous ways of organizing society, but that it never-the-less is inferior to our proposed successor.

Just as liberalism did not represent some sort of wacko total year-zero rejection of the societies and systems that came before it but rather proposed a radical furthering of certain rights and ideas, so too Marxism while rejecting liberalism as out-modded, out-dated, and at this point backwards and bad, does not wholly reject and want to turn all of society upside down. We are a progressive force. We are for progress. We are for emancipation. But we are against capitalism. We are against privately held means of production. We are for the people, the workers being the rulers, the dictatorship over the current owning class to impose our will, our ends, our goals, our goods over their greed. With force. To create a new society, to gradually erode away the old as liberalism eroded away previous societies before it. This is our project, this is our calling. So yes we reject liberalism.

We embrace a scientific approach, we reject many things liberals take as immutable, as unchallengable, as laws unable or unwise to be challenged by humans.