Older than capitalism

Before you stands the merchant. He has 7 fingers on one hand and 6 on the other. Arranged haphazardly on his stall are 5 iterations of the same sword, each being less functional and more poorly designed than the last.

"Would you care to buy one of my daggers?" he asks you.

"These are swords," you say.

"I'm sorry. Upon further inspection it seems that these are swords. I apologise for any factual errors, I strive for accuracy in my statements however due to problems with interpreting questions and generating responses occasionally I may make statements that are inaccurate. I appreciate your patience."

"But I didn't ask you a question."

"You're right. I apologise for the misunderstanding. Occasionally errors will be made due to issues with generating responses but I strive to be as accurate as possible. I appreciate your patience."

You walk away from the merchant feeling irritated and unsatisfied as you shake your head in disgust.

Bhaskar Sunkara created Jacobin specifically with the intent of making Marxism more academic and aimed at the intelligentsia.

If you think that sounds like an attempt to sequester Marxism away from the proletariat by concealing it with obscurantist language and focusing on topics that are divorced from the concerns of the working class in order to strip all revolutionary potential from Marxism, well have you ever considered that maybe Kautsky was right all along?

I realise why the US elected Joe Biden now - in a representative democracy, who better to represent the frail, decrepit, moribund state of American infrastructure better than Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.?

Even if the Mossad aren't implicated in this which, y'know, wouldn't be the first time they've gone and sabotaged shit in Iran, there's absolutely zero chance that they aren't going to get the blame for this.

I had some degree of faith in this before but idk, he seemed to get reined in somewhere along the way after he started to stray too far from obstructing US foreign policy and into actively undermining it (think how he flipped on his position on the DPRK for some indiscernible reason - either he was on a grift and trying to woo the DPRK government and he entered into the following phase of trying to railroad his objectives with them and they said "Lol no" so Trump decided that they were terrible because they weren't willing to play ball in exactly how he demanded they should, or the CIA had had enough of his shenanigans and decided to show him the Zapruder extended cut or they dug up the Epstein Cinematic Universe movies that he was on set for during the recording and they said pull your shit in or we're really going to make you into a star.)

Whatever the truth of the matter is, I feel like his policy on this stuff shifted pretty significantly and kinda out of nowhere. The dude's clearly the most stable genius out there though so it's hard to tell whether there's something behind the scenes directly shaping these changes or if he's just a wrecking ball that's careening between one thing and the next.

After the revolution the University of Chicago will be flattened and a grand statue memorialising Salvador Allende, gold-plated AK in hand, standing atop a monument commemorating all the victims of neoliberalism will stand in its place.

Since the COTW is Aotearoa I'm going to shout out Aotearoa Liberation League - they are anti-capitalist, decolonial and, yes, they're vegan.

If you want to keep updated on political developments happening in Aotearoa from a reputable source, I'd recommend giving them a follow on social media.

2023

Comrade, allow me to be the first one to wish you a happy new year because we're already in 2024.

I don't know how idealistic and utopian you'd have to be to think that there wouldn't be corruption in communist parties and the governments of socialist nations.

You see a slow but steady stream of corruption cases coming out of countries like China and Vietnam.

What's most telling is that often the officials and party members who are found guilty of corruption are given extremely harsh sentences. China often hands down the death penalty for the most extreme cases of corruption, although in effect these are usually commuted to being life sentences in practice.

What you're approaching this article with is a one half of the unfalsifiable orthodoxy; if the Chinese government punishes cases of corruption within its ranks then it proves that their model has failed and the government is corrupt yet if there are no corruption cases against Chinese government officials then that's proof that the Chinese government is hiding its corrupt nature.

Of course there are going to be abuses of power and corruption within the government. That's what happens and nothing is going to change that fact.

What I'm more interested in is how an organisation works to prevent these corruption and abuses of power and what steps it takes to punish them when they are discovered.

"In blahaj.zone the moderators make commenters install keyloggers so that they can surveil what users type into their comments as they draft them and if they write any wrongthink or if they try to change their username to include pronouns, they immediately get IP banned"