"In everything we do we must begin by creating an image of what society must one day make a reality."

— Piet Mondrian

“Stalin’s logic was the same as that of any capitalist who faces competitive pressure from a bigger rival – to tell his workers to make every conceivable ‘sacrifice’ in order to compete. For Stalin the way to ‘catch up with the West’ was to copy all the methods of ‘primitive accumulation’ employed elsewhere.

The British industrial revolution had been based on driving the peasants from the land through enclosures and clearances; Stalin smashed peasant control of the land through ‘collectivisation’ which forced millions to migrate to the cities. British capitalism had accumulated wealth through slavery in the Caribbean and North America; Stalin herded millions of people into the slave camps of the gulag.

Britain had pillaged Ireland, India and Africa; Stalin took away the rights of the non-Russian republics of the USSR and deported entire peoples thousands of miles.

The British industrial revolution had involved denying workers the most elementary rights and making men, women and children work 14 or 16 hours a day; Stalin followed suit, abolishing the independence of the unions and shooting down strikers.”

— Chris Harman, A People’s History of the World

area ML gets interviewed

'According to their absurd programs, the statist socialists and communists have decided to "allow" man to emancipate himself socially, without its thereby being feasible for him to manifest that freedom in his social life.'

— Nestor Makhno

'Though ethnic Russians comprise the majority of deaths in absolute terms, Russia’s non-Slavic minorities and indigenous peoples are greatly overrepresented among the casualties relative to their share in the country’s population, ongoing research shows.

“The most dire situation is … with indigenous small-numbered peoples of the north who should be [legally] exempt from military service altogether,” U.S.-based Buryat scientist Maria Vyushkova, who is leading the research, told The Moscow Times.

“This is a terrible tragedy that no one is talking about. … In one generation, these nations will simply disappear.”

Russian indigenous and minority activists have long warned that the Kremlin is banking on using the country’s non-Slavic population as cannon fodder in its protracted quest for capturing Ukrainian territories.'

https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2024/02/24/2-years-into-ukraine-war-russias-ethnic-minorities-disproportionately-killed-in-battle-a84170

actual idealism is when you don't think a capitalist dictatorship is going to build socialism especially considering that every state in the last 100 years that claimed it was doing that collapsed or devolved into regular liberalism but falling for this clear lie in 2024 is hard realism 🙃🙃🙃

"Chinese capital participates in the imperialist division of the world—sometimes in tension with the US, and at other times, in collusion with it. Its economic rise is fueled by its support and investment in exploitative and repressive regimes around the world, including but not limited to Myanmar, Israel, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Indonesia, the United Arab Emirates, and Kenya.

To genuinely build an effective democratic opposition against the authoritarian Chinese state requires us to strengthen our ties with movements from below worldwide fighting these interconnected enemies, not taking sides in an inter-imperialist conflict."

https://lausancollective.com/2024/mass-jailing-of-hong-kongs-pro-democracy-candidates-shows-beijings-fear-of-mass-militancy/

"After eleven years the incessant mistakes of the Communist leaders, the brutality of the State Security Police, the widespread bureaucracy and mismanagement, the bungling, the arbitrary methods and the lies have led to total collapse. This was no counter-revolution, organised by fascists and reactionaries. It was the upsurge of a whole people, in which rank-and-file Communists took part, against a police dictatorship dressed up as a Socialist society-a police dictatorship backed up by Soviet armed might.

And I have no hesitation in placing the blame for these terrible events squarely on the shoulders of those who led the Hungarian Communist Party for eleven years... They turned what could have been the outstanding example of people’s democracy in Europe into a grisly caricature of Socialism. They reared and trained a secret police which tortured all-Communists as well as non-Communists-who dared to open their mouths against injustices. It was a secret police which in these last few dreadful days turned its guns on the people whose defenders it was supposed to be."

– Peter Fryer, 1956

The Hungarian Revolution of 1956