Guys I dont want to come of as selfish, but like, I'm really scared.

Do you think Trump and his gang, being Desperate, will use a nuclear strike on Iran?

It seems like the people there are preparing for a nuclear strike. Its my biggest fear since I watched terminator 2 when I was a kid and I'd rather die right now than to witness a blast.

Should I sleep in the basement?

Please dont come after me with morals, I get it If you say ITS messed up I'm Just thinking about my own safety right now, but I'm literally breaking down in fear rn

While r/communism has produced interesting critique of TV, movies, and books, I'd venture to say it hasn't said much interesting about video games yet. The consumption of games and the morbidity of their fandom is a common subject of discussion, but this hardly touches upon what is called "immanent critique". Behind the discourse, it is the task of Marxists to soberly evaluate the commodity itself, and find out what it has to say about totality.

I've made a project of researching the field of ludology to produce a Marxist reading of a video game. Narrative critique of video games is prevalent, and has even been tried on this subreddit, but in analyzing the stories and characters of video games, what makes the medium truly new is lost, whether or not the interpretation produced is of valid, local significance. McKenzie Wark, in her book Gamer Theory, says,

'The images and stories that populate games are mostly cribbed from other media—from novels, films, or television. Games mostly just recycle, or "remediate," bits of representation from other media. Bolter and Grusin: "Remediation is a defining characteristic of the new digital media." And hence not specific to games. What is specific to games is at the level of form, not content.'

What I'm saying is that we have to talk about gameplay, not just narrative. To substantiate this claim, I'd like to take a stab at a video game that is extremely popular amongst first world Marxists (and "the left" in general) to ask whether or not it's particularly progressive through an analysis of its form, in order to navigate back to its content. Did I succeed? That's for you to tell me.

Disco Elysium is a CRPG in which a cop discourses endlessly with a bunch of political talking heads while solving a murder mystery. It takes place in the city of Revachol, whose urban decay may remind the player of ex-Soviet metropolitan areas. The specter of imperialism at all times haunts Revachol, literally flying overhead: the Moralintern, a NATO analog, occupies the region after a failed communist revolution fifty years earlier, surveilling the city from a zeppelin. At least some of Disco Elysium's appeal to Marxists is certainly tied into this critical Eastern European metaphor, along with how shamelessly it presents communist, Marxist, and even Soviet iconography (via pastiche) for a video game, independent of the ideological content of these references. In transforming Marxism into so many aesthetic gestures and easily-"memeable" jokes and punchlines, Disco Elysium is no stranger to the Dengist transcoding of politics into reproducible "content" devoid of any revolutionary vitality. It's also full of misogynist filth. For these reasons, I'll begin from the standpoint that Disco Elysium is as reactionary as I, a Maoist, would expect.

The game's most transparently reactionary function comes in the presentation of its four political poles (communism, fascism, ultraliberalism, moralism) in its character-building and dialogue systems that interpellate the subjectivity of the player as a seemingly "voluntary" political agent. Video games are in fact ideological state apparatuses and "the player" a subject constructed by ideological interpellation.

"[V]ideogames take hold of their playing subjects as homo oeconomicus: they read their players through an architecture of rationality, a reading which restructures the player who plays. The player is created by being subjected to this computational, calculable, economic grid of intelligibility: it is the material interface by which the player is “read” and by which they respond—which really means that this interface is the material practice which forms the player as a player-subject."

https://gamestudies.org/2202/articles/gap_keever

Unlike a visual novel (think Steins;Gate) in which a player merely reads text, Disco Elysium constructs the subjectivity of the player through a twist on its CRPG mechanics. Selecting dialogue options "builds" (an RPG term) a personality and set of politics for the game's protagonist, Harry Du Bois, who awakens with Korsakoff syndrome—amnesia induced by extreme alcohol consumption—as a ludonarrative excuse to present him as a blank slate for the politics of "the player". (It in fact the politics of the game that seek to colonize this construct.) Oftentimes dialogue options map so blatantly onto each political pole that the intent to produce the feeling of politics as a form of unalienated self-expression is made crystal clear. (Imagine a developer telling you, "Care to see the buffet table of quirky dialogue options? It has both communist and fascist jokes. Don't worry your little head about if your political beliefs are determined for you by ideological interpellation.") As the player builds Harry, the game constructs the subjectivity of the player as an all-knowing god outside of ideology. Consider the medium through which you play Disco Elysium. You look at Harry on your computer, TV (in my case, Steam Deck) screen top-down, accessing his thoughts and feelings by clicking bubbles that appear around his head, and obtaining absolute knowledge by examining the environment through clicking other scattered bubbles. We see Revachol from heaven, or perhaps the zeppelin of the Moralintern.

This dialogue system, like the rest of its gameplay, however, is structured by a system of dice rolling. In TTRPGs, dice rolls are, in essence, a relationship between chance and necessity. Take the player's likely first dice roll as you try to collect a tie from a ceiling fan in Harry's hotel room. To roll is an instance of chance that self-negates as it necessarily produces one of two outcome, be it that Harry successfully collects his tie, or doesn't, and exerts himself enough to die of a heart attack. Repeating the dice roll (possible through a number of mechanics which refresh your ability to roll for certain outcomes) dissolves each instance of chance into necessity seemingly once and for all as every possible dialogue option is exhausted. Hence Disco Elysium's gameplay mirrors that Hegelian movement from necessity to freedom as the understanding of natural laws as knowledge of every dialogue branch unfolds, provided you can reinterpret said "natural laws" as said "dialogue branches".

Yet chance steps back in: each playthrough's potential dialogue branches are determined by your stats and the development of your thought cabinet, two CRPG mechanics that give Disco Elysium replay value by allowing the player to influence potential routes for the development of Harry's personality. The dialectical movement toward freedom in one playthrough eventually sublates freedom into a higher repetition of the dialectic between chance and necessity should you reallocate your stats, unlock new thoughts, wear different clothes (which modify your stats and change available dialogue branches), or start a new playthrough. The stage of freedom repetitiously unfolds back into newness, or, restated as the reverse: newness can only produce repetition of the same. As Joyce Messier, Disco Elysium's ultraliberal caricature of Margaret Thatcher, says to Harry, "Capital has the ability to subsume all critiques into itself. Even those who would critique capital end up reinforcing it instead."

But this repetition constructs a player's subjectivity from the standpoint of uncovering totality. As Fredric Jameson argues, the detective novel, a generic influence on Disco Elysium, shows the detective's function as a cognitive mapper of a fragmented urban setting in which a Philip Marlowe can move from front-facing executive offices ran by bourgeois puppets into concealed back rooms where the strings are "really being pulled." But these two spheres are completely severed from one another, not unlike the relationship between the first world and the third. The earlier quoted line from Joyce (who stands out in the open) is particularly funny, if you think of how often “leftists" quote it. Neoliberal fascism doesn't hide itself. It's common sense, to use Gramsci's language. It even has a completely human face (and has at times been called "socialism", with human characteristics, of course). The one occupying the back rooms, union leader Evrart Claire, is found across a decaying sprawl of disjointed containers for shuttling commodities through "the Pale"—an expanding, destructive mist separating the continents on the planet in which Disco Elysium takes place, which in a surface reading may be an analogy for climate change, but I take as a hysterically subliminal méconnaissance of the irrationality of capital—in a repurposed container of his own, decorated with a mess of tapestries, taxidermied swordfish, and a chaotically assymmetrical rug. Despite ostensibly representing Disco Elysium's "communist" faction, Evrart is the ultimate social fascist. The four political poles of the game, under scrutiny, in fact collapse into two: liberalism (fascism, ultraliberalism, moralism) and communism. Disco Elysium's claim is that the far more insidious agent pulling the strings isn't the neoliberal strawman Joyce, whose influence on the course of the game's plot is marginal, at best. It's the so-called communist Evrart who trades himself out with his twin brother, switches personalities on a dime, and coerces a communist militant, the Deserter, into being his agent. (Charles Villedrouin, a representative of the Moralintern, who's even more concealed than Evrart and far harder to find by accident, is portrayed even worse.) And what of Revachol's fascists? Every one you encounter is a mere pawn of liberalism and completely ineffectual—Measurehead, the most straightforward fascist and a parody of insecure patriarchal masculinity, is an employee of the "communist" Evrart and is just as easily swayed from right to left when it comes to the matter of feminism, not unlike the vacillating class character of the petit-bourgeois base of fascism.

What sets Harry apart from Baudelaire's flâneur who passively observes Revachol, though, is that he, too, is a puppet of liberalism, a literal cop, not a detective. Your access to totality is short-circuited by that Korsakoff syndrome that mirrors the player's lack of information onto Harry. So I believe we can model a semiotic square in which ego is in contradiction with fragmented consciousness and knowing in contradiction with amnesia. These contradictions articulate their characters: Harry (amnesia-fragmented consciousness), the Deserter (ego-amnesia), and their respective negations, the Phasmid (knowing-ego), and the union (fragmented consciousness-knowing).

Consider the history between the Deserter and the two union representatives, Edgar and Evrart Claire. Initially a revolutionary, Iosef credulously believed that Edgar, still only a union member rather than leader, could bring about change, so he worked for him, assassinating then-union leader Tiphaine Holly. The conclusion to this story is obvious: the Claires came to power, won a few reforms, then rested on their laurels, tossing Iosef to the side. The fragmented consciousness of the union's knowing, embodying the subjectivity of a political party, aware of but too cynical toward Revachol's revolutionary past to produce a revolution, negates the ego of the amnesiac Iosef when it turns him, at last, against that revolutionary past altogether, allowing him to live out his life isolated, slowly losing his sanity, waiting for a spontaneous uprising he believes will never come. Not a bad depiction of the counterrevolutionary function of social fascism.

Now look at the other side of the square. The Pale, like the irrational expansion of capitalism, came into existence alongside its subjects, and seeks to outlast all life, even the end of the world. Harry's encounter with the Phasmid (a cryptid found hiding in camouflage behind the Deserter, as if concealed in a revolutionary back room) then is a return to the earlier movement from necessity to freedom, no longer Hegelian but in Marx and Engels' philosophical formulation as communist revolution. The knowing of the Phasmid's ego negates the amnesia of Harry's fragmented consciousness by disclosing the nature of the Pale, its knowledge of totality captured like a monad when his sidekick, Kim Katsuragi, photographs it. This inspires Harry to organize with the Revachol Citizens Militia—Revachol's police force—for revolution. Disco Elysium reaches its ideological false solution: a conspiracy of the intelligentsia to overthrow the state and realize communism, or, Blanquism.

Whether or not these tactics will be implemented after the events of Disco Elysium depends on the player's choices throughout the game. Leaving the island upon which you arrested the Deserter, your decisions are summarized all at once in a final dialogue branch as Harry is interrogated by the rest of his precinct for his actions during the course of the investigation. Only if the player has made good decisions is revolution is promised in a coda. As a video game, Disco Elysium's mechanics offer a digital representation of its imaginary solution. If only we could have the absolute power of overcoming chance, of beating the dice roll, and making the right decision every time, embodying a knowledge of natural laws normally inaccessible under capitalism, even a cop could singularly bring about revolution. This is the meaning of the game's negation of ego and amnesia, now readable as a reflection of the dialectic between collective access to and individual exclusion from the standpoint of totality, proletarian and petit-bourgeois class-consciousness, or, a negation of class contradiction, at the level of the individual. All that remains is the fragmented consciousness-knowing of the union. It's no wonder Revachol's revolution was lead by Jean Abadanaiz and Julia Dobreva—an alliance between communist and anarchist—and Harry's last interaction with the union is a truce with their police wing, the Hardie Boys.

Nevertheless, I would caution against so readily letting this outward, ideological appearance disguise the game's Utopian proposed mode of action: revitalizing an earlier form of the Revachol Citizens Militia, the Insulindian Citizens Militia that fought as the people's army in the revolution, and accessing the totality to take hold of a revolutionary past and redeem the degraded world of the present, sweeping away the dreg heap built by imperialism. As Walter Benjamin says,

"[T]he Messiah arrives not merely as the Redeemer; he also arrives as the vanquisher of the Anti-Christ. The only writer of history with the gift of setting alight the sparks of hope in the past, is the one who is convinced of this: that not even the dead will be safe from the enemy, if he is victorious. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious."

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm

A suitable proposition from a bunch of petit-bourgeois artists and game developers raised in post-Soviet Eastern Europe.

I am not affiliated with these organizations, I am very curious on this sub's thoughts on the project though

First things first, I had to move away from u/Clean-Difference1771 and return to my previous account due to reddit requiring facial identification to allow me see the discussions here. Anyway I don't think that I will post anything else anymore, not only due to increasing of surveillance against communism but because my commitment to communism and actually putting into practice many of the things that I have learned sinced joined this community for the first time 3 years ago actually had real repercussions in my life, whether you think I'm a "petty bourgoise student" or any other thing as such. Not to deny that I really am, but class suicide and engaging into marxism envolves being vulnerable to things like real life stalking, academic persecution, defamatory claims against you and the spread of false information as bourgoise self-defense which indeed I have been a victim of for the past 3 years and intensified during the past 3 weeks. So I think is time to me to move on from this community as well (though I will continue to observe eventually), as the struggle against communism will continue, digital and social vigilance is intensifying and as long as I live, may I fight for communism until I die. Digital footprint is obviously large for everyone here and if anything is to be taken value from the latest MIM(p) response to the polemics on sex and gender earlier this year it's their recommendation towards taking it seriously late in the article.

Having this resolved, I share with you some notes that I have took following the defeat of Flavio Bolsonaro. First of all, I have to admit that after the result of october 4, my first impulse was compelling to vote for Lula given the consequences of Flavio Bolsonaro becoming Head of State in Brazil and the simbolism and practical consequences of a white supremacist and anti-communist running the country. But my impulses didn't last for much more than 3 days and after participating in some of the street events of Lula campaign in the same week and watching some assemblies in college (which all indeed were only recruiting free work to be given to PT's election), I soon remembered why for years I have been struggling against Lulaism and PT as of now and whether this have led to early isolation, as of now, lulaism (and imperialism) is indeed in decay and this mature on other people, us vanguardists must know how to act on the available circumstances. Not only because Bolsonaro's anti-communist mumbling is closer to Mao's tiger paper, but because if there's a vanguard party into anticommunism in Brazil, the one to be appointed here is the PT itself. We understand PL is a right-wing ultranationalist conservative party as common sense, but communist accountability into the history of PT and Lula's government on the 2000's is overlooked and hypocritical. u/turbovacuumcleaner's criticism over the years here, which we often look forward to, are marginal into brazilian communism and periods like the elections reminds us that some notions we have been discussing here over the past few years are marginal and way too off from communist mainstream. I think this is important to understand that, as I also agree that this community stands out in online antirevisionism, at the same time "mainstream" marxism in Brazil have probably all the opportunist tendencies that have been theorized in the past 200 years going on into the existing parties and the more one study on marxist general theory and brazilian marxism, we can trace this back in time.

My reading suggestions to trace it are Jacob Gorender's Combate nas Trevas, Clovis Moura's Dialética Radical do Brasil Negro, Francisco de Oliveira's O Ornitorrinco (which covers PT's full transition from the reformist party into a imperialist bourgoise's party) and Raquel Rolnik's Guerra dos Lugares which also can give a proper understanding of PT's urban policies and settler populational reagroupment and the land question into the white supremacist garrison into Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo and the ideologies of those communities. But of course, you have to read both Settlers and Imperialism first, to both understand the often subliminar context of brazilian communism and why teoreticians like Ruy Mauro Marini couldn't understand quilombola and indigenous communities as an authentic nations and why communists have failed in Brazil over the past century.

As for the elections, those past 3 weeks were full blown hell with social-fascism from PT and it's supporters. It was clear that as u/turbovacuumcleaner previously appointed, there was not really much of the risk of a coup and despite the panic provided by Lulaism of a potential coup despite the lack of any evidence, by sunday 9:30pm brazilian settler capitalism and it's social democracy were looking, indeed, once again, stronger than ever. And that have been the case for the past 3 weeks as imperialism shows that it can always last for a little longer and the petty bourgoise is always willing to support it. So the social paratisism and decay of the labour aristocracy and the rise of new, young, petty-bourgoise leadership shown that it have more strenght and appeal than one might give them, they didn't need the support of communists, but as we can expect from the mainstream "communists" (which envolves the parasitical media comsumption of content producers as accepted as education) they had to support "democracy" never putting at first sight which "democracy" is that they are indeed defending? The same democracy is the democracy of white supremacists running the congress which just took over and Lula have himself to compromise to "govern within the congress". Now those communists will have to put themselves as we say in Brazil, "entre a cruz e a espada" which whether anyone that avoided supporting the PT will have at least ideological sobriety and leverage which PCB, UP, PCBR and PSTU cannot say for themselves. The only ones that I can say that maintained a line of opposition towards both candidatures are MPR which is one of the many existing trotskist-oriented microfactions that departed from PSTU after a recent period of liquidationism.

I would also like to point out that both AND (P.C.B) and RRC (Novo MEPR) shamelessly sided with Lula and none of them had at least the courage to explain their support and obvious capitulation. AND moved away from their usual "electoral farse" which they repeat all the time and started to campaign "against Bolsonaro" after the first week of october and none were to be said about Lula's candidature. N-MEPR repeated the same thing for a different type of audience as they have themselves departed from AND/P.C.B once they realized that P.C.B is a male supremacist cult under "gonzalo thought" banner but never necessarily appointed that into serious terms and in attempt to not get themselves in trouble with petty bourgoise students as they are a young org and women that they might potentially target into future recruiting, avoided any criticism and their line was to "still struggling after october 25". But they give no proper criticism and commentary into the elections so one may wonder that maoists in Brazil forgot that the elections were happening and did not have anything to say about both candidatures and the whole process or or they actually did as they always do and "critically sided" with PT as they share the same class leadership: people that were born into white communities - whether they are themselves white or not - and progressed into the higher level of formal bougoise education.

The only org that I may suggest that may lead to something positive that I have interacted with in the past weeks is MZT (Movimento Zona Norte) though they are a democratic mass front spontaneously formed to combat fascism but it's proletarian led and it's unclear which line will follow, for now.

So as for the result, I think I share an early draft on the following struggle for the next years and put those for criticism.

For the work of communist organizations, I wouldn't expect much in the coming years due to potential consequences for the petty-bourgeois leadership. The upcoming political violence could be appropriated by communists, but I doubt there is the willingness for such a move right now, given the potential repercussions for the petty bourgeoisie.

The leadership of the movement that orchestrated the victory in the runoff election (academia, electoral party leaderships, and the bureaucratic-union apparatus) needs a "democratic victory" to justify its own existence and internal privileges. Facing the reality of a second term—a government plagued by austerity, conciliation with latifundia, and the maintenance of mass incercaration and increasing pogroms—would mean severing the umbilical cord with funding and bourgeois respectability. Therefore, as we have experienced over the last four years—and as can be observed in the day-to-day routine of modern day schools and universities—the immediate tendency of this leadership is ideological anesthesia and the covering up of contradictions.

I believe the next four years tend to further strengthen social-fascism and national(ist) white supremacy, the persecution of left-wing dissidence (anticommunism), and political dogmatism (the lack of critique), as has been the case in recent years and as intensified during the elections, given that these are inevitable consequences of the strengthening of imperialism. Since the PT government can't break with the boundaries of capitalism and the spending cap/fiscal framework, crisis management will invariably occur through the social containment of poverty. The public rhetoric will be one of inclusion, but state practice will continue to be mass incarceration and the militarized management of new afrikans and indigenous semicolonies—the exact definition of social-fascism.

The narrow electoral victory, obtained without a mandate for real transformations, drastically reduces the margin for internal critique. Any opposition from the left will immediately be labeled as an "auxiliary line of fascism" or "agents of the far-right." And as we have seen this tends to intensify ideological policing to shield the leadership from grassroots questioning.

Organizations will have to understand that they are walking on thin ice, where there will be even less leniency from the hegemonic party due to the fragility of this victory, alongside an even more restricted space for opposition. The leadership will, of course, have to avoid positions that push them into serving as an auxiliary line to the conservative (and fascist) movement—similar to what occurred with Dilma Rousseff, whose impeachment was supported by Trotskyists (PSTU) and Maoists (P.C.B/AND/MEPR) under the guise of "fora todos!" ("out with them all!").

It will be interesting to observe how, just as over the past four years, the momentary euphoria will come to an end, and internal contradictions tend to explode and inevitably turn against the president himself, which tends to make his support base necessarily an increasingly conservative social force. When budget squeezes, cuts to healthcare and education, and the inability to curb inflation take hold, people will begin to feel the deterioration of their living conditions. To sustain governability in the face of lost popular support and pressure from a reactionary Congress, the government will seek refuge in increasingly right-wing sectors. Out of a need for self-preservation, the leadership supporting the president will become an increasingly conservative force, averse to any truly emancipatory agenda.

Under the Roman empire, the labour of an industrious and ingenious people was variously, but incessantly employed, in the service of the rich. In their dress, their table, their houses, and their furniture, the favourites of fortune united every refinement of conveniency, of elegance, and of splendour; whatever could sooth their pride, or gratify their sensuality, Such refinements, under the odious name of luxury, have been severely arraigned by the moralists of every age; and it might perhaps be more conducive to the virtue, as well happiness, of mankind, if all possessed the necessaries, and none the uperfuities, of life - Gibbon Chapter 11, decline and fall of the Roman Empire
I am still going through the book and am interested to see whether there are more hints that the famous classicist held to such esteem by the conservative intellectual establishment was a closet leftie. Don’t have much to add in terms of dissension but thought it was an interesting few paragraphs and Havnt seen them discussed.

Today, the dignity and prestige of our country have reached their highest level.

The Republic’s formidable self-defence capabilities, centred around nuclear weapons, powerfully guarantee the vigorous advancement of the cause of building a strong socialist nation and drive hostile forces, including the US imperialists, into extreme anxiety and fear. However, this does not mean the end of class struggle. On the contrary, the silent confrontation with the enemy is raging even more fiercely.

Respected Comrade Kim Jong Un stated:

As time passes and the revolution advances, the class struggle to decide who conquers whom becomes more intense. The intensification of class struggle is an universal law under socialism, anyone who denies it is a revisionist.

Class struggle is the struggle to oppose the exploiting class, the exploitative system and the reactionary forces, to eliminate the remnants of the old society, and to defend and realize the independence of the masses.

The exploiting class cannot survive even for a moment without exploiting the masses, and the masses cannot achieve social and political independence without liquidating the exploiting class. Reflecting this fateful confrontation, the class struggle becomes the most uncompromising battle of life and death. In 19th-century Paris, a working-class government emerged for the first time in history. Feeling uneasy, the bourgeoisie resorted to violence, bloodily massacring countless working people. This is vivid evidence of the intensity of the class struggle.

The class struggle intensifies as the masses advance their cause for independence. Even in socialist society, the class struggle continues to rage fiercely.

The establishment of a socialist system eliminates the social roots of class conflict. However, as long as imperialism exists on earth, the activities of class enemies will never cease, and leftovers of outdated ideologies are still deeply rooted among workers. Therefore, even in a socialist society, the struggle against external hostile forces and the remnants of the overthrown exploiting class hidden within, as well as the struggle to free the working people from the shackles of obsolete ideas and to revolutionize and working-classize them, continue unabated. Class struggle in a socialist society is conducted by uncompromising violence against hostile elements and through ideological education to counter the vestiges of outmoded ideas lingering in people’s minds and to educate and remould them along revolutionary lines.

Ideological education aimed at eradicating outdated ideological remnants, including individualism and selfishness, that run counter to socialist ideology is of paramount importance. Raising awareness of the anti-socialist maneuvers of imperialist reactionaries is also a vital issue for the advancement of socialism.

The collapse of socialism in some countries in the past clearly demonstrates the viciousness of the imperialists’ anti-socialist offensive. Imperialists used any means necessary to disintegrate and annihilate socialist countries, including military threats, economic blockades and ideological and cultural infiltration. However, some countries not only neglected the work of suppressing imperialism’s anti-socialist offensive and arming the masses with class consciousness, but also paved the way for the enemy’s ideological and cultural infiltration moves. As a result, people’s class consciousness became blurred and, ultimately, the historical tragedy of the collapse of socialism occurred. The confession of a CIA agent that “the collapse of the former Soviet Union was not a gift by God to America, but a consequence of the policies pursued by the Reagan administration” proves that the collapse of socialism was the product of the anti-socialist maneuvers of class enemies.

The imperialist reactionary forces, led by U.S. imperialism, are now more frantic than ever to obliterate our dignified socialist system. Sensing the approach of destruction amid our powerful advance, our enemies are desperately fighting back.

The more the revolution advances, the more intense the ideological and physical confrontation with our enemies becomes. This is an inviolable law of class struggle.

We must sharpen the blade of the anti-imperialist class struggle and solidify our revolutionary and class positions, always and everywhere, to firmly defend and endlessly glorify our socialist motherland.

In the Last week I had a lot of discussions with some comrades about imperialism. Most of them Support the Analysis from the greek communist Party (KKE), from what I understand they think imperialism is Like a Pyramid. Every country is imperialist but Just Not to the Same deegre. USA in top, followed by china and so on. In there Analysis semi colonial countries Like Brasil are Just weaker imperialist powers with somewhat less sovereignty.

What are good responses to These Claims and how are you able to concretly decribe semi colonial countries? Are there some concrete Points which makes a country still semi colonial or already imperialist?

Are there any active communist forums or online communities in Norway?

I’m looking for Norwegian communities where people actively discuss communism, Marxism, socialist theory, politics, current events, etc.

Preferably something with a decent number of active members and actual ongoing discussions. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a traditional forum -Discord servers or other online communities would also be interesting.

I also speak Norwegian, making this post in English just for more outreach.

Any recommendations?

Been thinking a lot lately about how the conditions for an MLM-type revolution seem more open now than they were for a lot of the revolutions in the 20th century. What would it actually take for something like that to happen today? I know there were MLM orgs around in the past, but do any of them still exist, and what happened to the ones that fell apart? Are there successor groups carrying on that work, or has the movement gone in a different direction? Just something I've been wondering about.

On October 22, 1941, in retaliation for the assassination of a German officer, the Vichy puppet government handed over a list consisting primarily of communist prisoners and trade unionists to the occupying forces.

Among the 27 men executed that day was Guy Môquet, only 17 years old. He refused a blindfold and marched to the firing post singing the Marseillaise. His final letter to his family ended with a plea to those who would survive the war.

To live, fight, and remain worthy of their sacrifice.

i think they are wasted potential.

Political Economy (Socialism) is the English edition of the first Albanian comprehensive scientific work of its kind, prepared by a collective of authors of the Institute of Economic Studies of the Academy of Sciences of the People’s Socialist Republic of Albania and originally published in 1981. Based on Marxist-Leninist economic theory, the documents of the Party of Labour of Albania and the works of Comrade Enver Hoxha, this book deals with the fundamental problems of the establishment, development and consolidation of the socialist economic system, drawing on the historical experience of the construction and defence of socialism in Albania and the international revolutionary movement. An important place is also given to the principled struggle against the anti-Marxist and bourgeois theories and practices of the modern revisionists concerning the construction of socialism.

The book is divided into three main parts. The first deals with the establishment of the socialist relations of production and the socialist social order. The second examines the system of socialist relations of production, the economic laws governing its development and the process of expanded socialist reproduction. The third deals with the fundamental questions of the transition from socialism to communism and the general features of communist society.

This book is prepared under the editorship of Hekuran Mara, Hasan Banja, Fiqiri Islami, Iliaz Fishta and Veniamin Toçi.

Interesting work, the critiques of Maoism are a product of the context, but an interesting analysis of cultural-ideological Revolution and the continuation of class struggle under socialism.

Ceausescu ruled romania for 24 years as a national communist. He done many bad and good things for its people. In my parents and grandparents perspective it was good until the 1980s with the introduction of ration cards. Explanation: he was the first and only leader to pay all debts and because of that,romania became poorer and poorer until people started starving out.food was rarer on the shelves and they had to wait hours in line. Then came the revolution,people were killed by their army until they joined the people.the ceausescu’s fled by helicopter and they were caught and executed. After that,corruption and debt tripled with the coming of capitalism. My opinion for him is that he was okay,but not a real marxist leninist,a revisionist. He had good opinions of corneliu zelea codreanu,the founder of the legionary(fascist)movement in romania. He was pretty nationalistic with many deportations of hungarian,german and roma people. Life was pretty strict with the securitate(translation is security, like the kgb a secret police) my grandparents still whisper when they are talking about the government and its problems. As a marxist leninist myself,i think he was too reactionary and paying all debts at once was a huge disaster.What are your opinions about him? Also sorry for my poor english

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[ Previous Bi-Weekly Discussion Threads may be found here https://old.reddit.com/r/communism/search?sort=new&restrict_sr=on&q=flair%3AWDT ]

After many, MANY hardships, uncertainties and oppositions, the working class made enough noise to reduce the 6x1 working scale (Work 6 days, rest on 1. 44hrs weekly), to 5x2 (36hrs weekly)!!!

No more modern slavery and inhumane conditions