Mao ZeDong x Nikita Khrushchev Friends to Enemies to Lovers Erotic Fan Fiction
What were actual Chinese tariffs on US imports like, prior to this?
Because Trump’s little chart said they were almost 70%. A number that feels spiritually true, given how China is actively developing its domestic industrial capacity, but is probably false because they apparently made that chart with an AI slop machine.
I love this poster, because it features:
Things that happen under capitalism all the fucking time
Do we know what article or book this table came from?
Given his awful diet, I’m half expecting him to keel over within the next 4 years
Their relationship with the US is really tentative. The US is far more invested in Iraqi Kurdistan than anything, because the US actually supports the project of Iraqi Kurdistan, whereas they don’t with Rojava. Instead, Its a weird alliance of convenience that, given other machinations in the region, I just don’t see lasting.
The thing I keep coming back to though, and a thing I see my fellow MLs completely gloss over in discussions of Rojava, is their relationship with Turkey, and Turkish/Kurdish relations more broadly.
Turkey is in many respects an ethno-nationalist political project, founded on the forced assimilation, and ethnic cleansing of, Most famously Armenians, but also Greeks, Kurds, and other ethnic minorities.
Given the splitting of Kurdish homelands across 4 separate countries, the Turkish communist movement has had to grapple very extensively with the Kurdish national question. For instance, On The National Question by Ibrahim Kaypakkaya is all about the National Question as it relates to the Kurds.
One such actor in this had been the PKK, who’s decades-long insurgency has the Turkish state very much on edge, to the point that any Kurdish actor, even the most milquetoast lib ones, get smeared as PKK sympathizers. This extends to Turkey’s continual and ongoing violations of its neighbors sovereignty, going into both northern Syria, and Iraq, to “address PKK terrorism” whether the PKK is actually present or not.
Rojava has repeatedly asserted that it desires to be an autonomous region within a sovereign Syria, and not be an independent state. With its constitution stating: “Syria is a free, sovereign and democratic state”. An independent Rojava would be unable to defend against Turkish invasion.
Speaking of invasions, Turkish backed jihadis are currently taking more Rojava territory in the North west, and have been ethnically cleansing parts of that region for a handful of years now.
If we care about a sovereign, independent, Syria, I think opposing Turkish and Israeli violations of sovereignty is currently key. And if we care about weakening the west, we should consider critical support for a Kurdish polity on the border of NATOs second largest power, I think that deserves our critical support.
And if the US wants to strain relations with a key ally, by continuing to support Rojava to the dismay of Turkey (something I don’t think will happen long term, but hypothetically if that does happen), I say let NATO weaken itself further.
LGBT rights weren’t on the radar of the average marxist
Plenty of German leftists, Marxist or otherwise signed a petition, in the 1890s, opposing Paragraph 175 of the German Legal code that criminalized homosexuality, including Albert Einstein, August Bebel, and Karl Kautsky.
Queer activists, like Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and Magnus Hirschfeld, actively sought out far left politicians in their attempt to repeal the law.
Bebel, who was the one to sponsor the bill to repeal paragraph 175, continued to be an advocate of women’s and queer rights throughout his life and career.
Alexandra Kollontai was Bisexual and opposed the criminalization of homosexuality under Stalin’s administration.
Harry Hay, who would found The Mattachine Society, one of the first gay rights groups in the US, was organizing farm workers for the Communist Party as far back as the 1930s.
Queer issues were definitely on the radar of plenty of Socialists in the early 20th century.
This argument gives the same vibes as “but everyone was racist back then!” arguments that American liberals give to hand wave away past injustices.
If we’re to be thoughtful dialectical materialists about this: while queerness has always existed, and cultures throughout history have had queer subcultures, such as the Kathoey in Thailand or Molly Houses in England, the development of Capitalism brought with it a trend towards a more systematized, wider reaching regimentation of reproductive labor, then what had been seen under previous forms of class society.
On the one hand, this brought about the categorization and subsequent oppression of queer people. But on the other hand, industrialization brought people into urban areas, socialized labor, and allowed queer people to form larger communities, who could start organizing politically on a large scale.
Since the Soviet Union had not industrialized, that pressure on queer people in the Soviet Union, to organize at a large scale, didn’t exist. And the prevalence of queer organizing in the more industrialized west, brought Stalin’s administration to make the idealist error that queerness was an outgrowth of “bourgeois decadence”, rather than material conditions.
His writing is clearer than almost any other Marxist, which imo is another factor
Hot take: I think Stalin is an incredibly mid writer, and Mao is far more clear and easy to understand.
You mean PugJesus.
I can only assume that PegJesus is a guy who’s really into femdom, and is somehow a lib about it.