Welcome again to everybody! Make yourself at home. Read Lenin. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is our weekly discussion thread!

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Short reading list for new MLs here. To find theory, try https://marxists.org, z-lib, libgen, or Sci-Hub (for scientific articles). If an article is unavailable, try the Wayback Machine.

  • Anarcho-Bolshevik@lemmygrad.ml
    1·
    1 year ago

    Currently I am planning on making a thread about how the Empire of Japan suppressed homosexuality, a subject about which not even Wikipedia has much to say. There is (unsurprisingly) little literature on this topic.

    I did find a book titled Queer Japan from the Pacific War to the Internet Age which has a chapter on this, but it deviates a lot… sometimes in sickening directions:

    [Disturbing excerpt]

    The reference to the public toilet is significant, it being a common metaphor for brothels, which were understood as places where men could evacuate their excess desire. Indeed, the term “hygienic public bathroom” was a euphemism sometimes used to describe comfort women by Japanese soldiers (Shin and Cho 1996: 53)—“hygienic” because, unlike unsupervised prostitutes, the military enforced a strict health code on brothel workers so as to prevent the spread of venereal disease. Soldiers were thus encouraged to think of the bodies of prostitutes as little more than “semen toilets”.

    I don’t mean to compare atrocities, but this is the same kind of feeling that I suffered when I saw a preview of the film The Grey Zone, which reenacted an Axis vehicle dumping a literal truckload of human ash on the ground.

    I need another break from studying; this is fucking sick.

  • DankZedong @lemmygrad.ml
    1·
    1 year ago

    To get some positive but very local news: Antwerp’s chapter of our party had two good victories this week!

    We managed, through action, to keep a bus line in the city running.

    We also, after two years of action, managed to ban a new, elite Maritime Campus high rise from being build in one of the city’s green areas.

    This was all done through campaigning, petitions, visits to people living in the area etc.

    • Shrike502@lemmygrad.ml
      0·
      1 year ago

      Excellent work! Gotta ask about the bus line - were the authorities planning on closing it? Removing the buses?

      • DankZedong @lemmygrad.ml
        0·
        1 year ago

        Yes the government is planning to cancel 5000 stops in the country. This line was part of the plan as well, but through local action the plan for this line got cancelled. So while this one line is saved, many others are still facing problems. The fight continues.

        • Shrike502@lemmygrad.ml
          0·
          1 year ago

          5000 is a pretty dang large number. What are the given reasons for this? The usual “it’s not economically valid” (aka unprofitable in short term)?

    • ImOnADiet [he/him]@lemmygrad.ml
      1·
      1 year ago

      That person is such a fucking loser man

      “Sweaty, please dont use that open source software because the devs dont agree that russians are subhuman orcs who should be elimanated 🥺🥺🥺”

  • Alunya𝕏ers (she/her)@lemmygrad.ml
    0·
    1 year ago

    did a bit of praxis today and wrote a lot of stuff for socialism and writing pro-socialist sounding statements (and some anti-capitalist sounding statements) on my sociology exam today (when one of the questions asked me to describe about the 5 stages of society described by marx).

    i’ll probably get shit marks for it, accused of memorizing from chatgpt (when i don’t even have a fucking chatgpt account + i hate memorizing) and i’ll probably even be called out by my sociology teach to “explain wtf i wrote” but lmfao i regret not. a. single. thing. 💅💅💅

    especially when she said absolute nonsense such as “marx was ultimately incorrect” and that “there’ll always be some people better than others and therefore it’d be unfair to give them the same thing as someone who puts the less amount of work does” (this part i’m 100% sure is bullshit nonsense about socialism but i’m too uneducated on this to make a refutation; but i just know this doesn’t make any fucking sense).